WDCE

I will be at Writers' Digest Conference East tomorrow for the Pitch Slam. I meant to post earlier in the week, to encourage you all to register, if you were in the New York area. Whoops. Now you've already missed a day of the conference. Sorry. But it seems there is on-site pricing available. So maybe check it out.

The next time I will be taking pitch is May 11 at the Connecticut Author and Publishers Association Conference in beautiful downtown Hartford, CT*.  Click here to download the brochure and application. 

Writers Conference Tips

Since I'm thinking about writers conferences, these are my top five tips for surviving a conference. Good for newbies and oldbies alike!

1.  Keep an Open Mind. You're paying to hear other people talk, so maybe you should hear them out. Also, things might not go exactly as planned but that doesn't mean it's bad.

2. Make New Friends. Cons are a great chance to meet other writers and form support groups.

3.  Bring a Notebook. So you can take notes or jot down story ideas.

4. Wear the Right Shoes. The temptation to wear dressy shoes to "be professional" is high. Opt for something comfortable (or magical) instead.

5. Don't Give Me Things. Remember that literary agents are like Tony Stark, we don't like to be handed things. (If we took manuscripts, fliers, or doodads from everyone we'd need new luggage.) Take a card and email me later.

Write Stuff

Registration for the Write Stuff Conference has been extended until this Monday, March 18th.

I'll be there on Friday and Saturday. So if you live in the area and want to say hello, you should register. I'll also be taking pitches but I'm told those are filled up.

However there seem to be appointments with Julia Bannon, who is also at the L. Perkins Agency, still available. And Julia is lovely!

Come see us! The event takes place March 21 to 23 at the Days Hotel in Allentown, PA. No walk-ins are accepted so  register here now!

There is also a conference blog that will have an interview with me up some time in the near future. If you are interested seeing what a dork I am.

...

And speaking of conferences, if there are any conference organizers out there, I decided my new life's goal is to go to a writers' con in all 50 states but my map is currently sad looking (see it and weep), so email me if you need an agent to come to your con.

Hail HYDRA

Since SFWA announced that it would not consider books published by Random House's Hydra imprint credentials for membership, there has been a lot of discussion of the terms offered by Random House's digital imprints.

I don't think these are great terms by any means. (Do they really expect the author to pay for set up fees? Ew.)

But I've been surprised to see many people condemning RH for having a "life of copyright" contract. I'm pretty sure 90% of the contracts Random House signs authors to are for life of copyright. (The exception being licenses from other publishers, or foreign translations.)

In print publishing, life of copyright is the norm. I know it's not in the digital world--which is why this seems strange.

This doesn't (usually) mean the publisher will have the right to publish the book for the authors lifetime plus 70 years*. A publisher should have a provision--usually called "out of print termination" or "reversion of rights" which states how the author can get the publishing rights BACK.

Now, I've never done a deal with Hydra. But my issue with a lot of these print-turned-digital publishers is that they have a print mentality in these reversion of rights clauses. It will say the author can have the rights back if the book is no longer "available for sale." That was fine 20 years ago, when you would just walk into a B. Dalton and ask if the book was available and if they said no, that meant the book was out of print.

Now days, a book can be up online but not sell any copies. Is that still "in print"? Is that still "available for sale"?

So if you are about to sign one of these Hydra deals, I would check on that Out of Print clause. If they don't specify how many copies need to be sold or how much an author needs to make per royalty period for a book to be considered "in print," then we have a very big problem.

*Current US copyright law

ETA: John Scalzi got a copy of one of the RH digital imprint contracts. It is as I feared. The out of print clause is for a print publisher from before computers were invented. IF YOU ARE AN AUTHOR WITHOUT AN AGENT, PLEASE KNOW THAT YOU CAN NEGOTIATE THIS. Don't just sign the first thing they put in front of you!

Future Daze

I don't usually like book trailers, but I will share this one with you because it is kind of cool. 

One of my clients, Dale Lucas, has a story in Futuredaze called "Out of the Silent Sea", which TangentOnline called "a beautifully-written story about love and isolation – the prose is stunning and the world is rich and believable." Congrats, Dale. 

Find out more about FutureDaze here. 

Part of being a young adult is wishing you didn't have to go to school. And part of being an adult is wishing you could go to school instead of work. So sometimes I listen to the iTunes U classes online. And today I found one about young adult literature, offered by La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

I haven't finished listening to it, but I thought it might be of interest to some of my readers.

Fiction for Young Adults, From Pride and Prejudice to Twilight, Looking for Alibrandi to The Hunger Games, students in this subject will analyse factors affecting the emergence and development of fiction for young adults as a distinctive literature category over the last twenty years. Students will also focus on recent trends in this field, including the development of a range of critical perspectives for interpreting themes, issues and responses to this literature by adults and adolescents.

Conferences

I'm excited to announce that I will be attending two new (for me) conferences in upcoming months. If any of my blog readers are in the area, you should stop by!

The Write Stuff, Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group
Allentown, PA
Four Points Sheraton
March 22-23

Writers Digest East Conference, Writers Digest
New York, NY
Sheraton Hotel, NYC
April 6, 2013 

CAPA-U, Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association
Hartford, CT
Hartford Steam Boiler Convention Center
May 11, 2013

I hope to add more conferences to my schedule in coming weeks. Conferences are my only excuse to travel. :)

ETA: 

Not for Emetophobes.

I wanted to post to let you guys know that I am seriously behind on reading partial and full manuscripts. This is not a novel state of affairs. I'm almost always behind. But I recently contracted a series of illnesses. (Cold led to stomach virus, stomach virus migrated to throat infection. It's been a joy to live with me.)

I think (hope?) I'm better now. So no need to send well wishes. Just wanted to post my excuses publicly to those who might be impatiently waiting on something from me.

It's not you, it's me.

Backspace & Sandy

I've had a couple of lovely emails asking if I, and my colleagues at the L. Perkins Agency, are okay after Hurricane Sandy. Pleased to report that we're all fine. The office lost power for a bit, and I think fellow-agent Sandy Lu is in for a lot of awkward jokes in the future, but we're a lot better off than most. So thanks for your concern, now please direct it to people in need! (Red Cross website here.)

I'd also like to give public adulation to Karen Dionne, Christopher Graham and everyone who runs the Backspace Writers Conference here in New York. They worked magic and put on the conference Thursday and Friday despite a myriad of challenges. They are wizards. Not only did they arrange for conference calls so the agents who couldn't get in could still participate, they did it for all the writers too. I'm always super impressed by this conference and now I'm super duper impressed with it.

It's too bad Backspace is only in New York, because I think a lot of writers could benefit from the sessions, and not everyone can fly out. This thought prompted a mental image of Karen and Christopher taking a bunch of agents on tour in a van, like a garage band. I made myself laugh out loud.

Anyway, I was pleased to be there (in person). I got to do two panels with Jason Allen Ashlock and Madeleine Raffel. Jason has a great easy to remember theory about what needs to go in a query letter: your Hook, Book (synopsis), Look (word count, comp titles, etc) and Cook (about you). I liked it a lot.

Though I wish I would stop ending up on panels with people who are so much more eloquent and erudite than I am.

Celebrating Banned Book Week

It's Banned Book Week this week! I loved Banned Book Week because it reminds people that good books are worth fighting for.

The first time I experienced censorship was in 8th grade. Our English teacher always taught The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but the year before I entered her classroom, there was a kerfuffle about it not being appropriate. Of course, we all immediately went out to read it because obviously if parents didn't want us reading it, then it was awesome.

Eventually the parents succeeded in getting Huck Finn out of our classroom. So during my year, she taught Fahrenheit 451.

It wasn't until I was older that I realized what a deliberate and awesome choice that was!

What we can learn from this is, that if a book is banned that means it is GOOD. So go check out the list of frequently challenged books from the ALA, and try to read them all. Or maybe go see "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" in theaters now.