The greatest thing happened today

Sorry for the interruption to the expected series of posts, but, ironically, I'm a little too off-schedule to write about scheduling.

But I had this fanastic idea! What if: a bookseller, the head of a press, a publicist, a prolific poet, a published novelist, a professor at a highly regarded MFA program and a writing student (this is starting to sound like a bad joke) all sat down and discussed how to bring their community's writers together, creating a central meeting place to bring together big-name authors, midlist authors, local authors, unpublished authors and readers with intriguing events that go beyond the passive reading? This would create a line of benefits from the casual reader through the writers up to bookstores and publishers.
Well that happened today. However, our bookseller was the owner of the local indie, the poet doubled as the MFA professor, the novelist was my author who's published through an small indie press, the press represented was non-profit, and yours truly combined publicist and student into one inexperienced observer for an hour-long meeting.
The result? Some seriously credible talk for implementing a weekly writer's program at the indie. The plan is to alternate open workshop/discussion meetings with guest author readings. The workshop meetings would open with discussion of next week's author's work, segueing into an "immersion" workshop, wherein participants would produce a completed piece--short prose or poem--by the end.
The benefits are universal. Avid readers get to add a new sense to their enjoyment of a book by hearing it read by the author. Unpublished authors have a regular time and place where they know they can come in and refine their art, either through direct workshop or by hearing from the professionals. The bookseller gets customers, of course, and the author not only has the satisfaction of knowing his/her work is being discussed, but will get free exposure to sell more books, making the publisher happy.
Definitely on the small scale, but from what my newbie but quick-learning eyes have shown over the past 6 months, it's practically a revolutionary idea. I subscribe to author blogs, writing blogs, literary journal blogs, publisher blogs, bookseller blogs, book marketing blogs, editorial blogs, agent blogs, even freelance writing blogs. Other than news blogs like galleycat, they stick to their specialties 99% of the time.
With so many great minds producing fresh, interesting content, why aren't they combining their areas with current, innovative dialogue to figure out how to surmount the rising wall of difficulties facing this industry?
I take today's meeting as a sign for the future, and have faith that similar dialogue is going on in other areas, but that it's quiet, like today's conversation. But as we keep adding voices to the crowd, the volume will only get louder and that's when change happens.

Responsibility

So Joe the Plumber's book is out any day now

I know I'm a little late on this but I've had a long day of kid's movies, Xbox, and frisbee golf to get away from the days of work I've racked up this week.

While I don't think anybody but the marketing folks at Pearl Gate Publishing are excited, neither does everyone seem as vehement as Timothy Egan, though I did pick up the article off my regular circuit of blogs. However, as usual, my environmental-science-major-biology-minor boyfriend gave me a diferent opinion. Missing the gravity of the situation, he mostly just felt that shit happens so you might as well just deal and move on.

Unfortunately, as a college student starting to plan her future in a faltering economy, this bothers me. Combine that with Joe's pay and the recent numbers from Sarah Silverman's and Jerry Seinfeld's advances, and I get a little pissed. It's like GM spending $x-millions to design a custom Hummer with nuclear moose-targeting missiles for Sarah Palin--yeah they're going to make some money off of it, but is that really the best thing to invest in right now?

And speaking of Sarah Palin, in case you don't feel like clicking on the article link above, here's my favorite quote,

“I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.”

Literary agents across the country have their hands full trying to pick a tiny percentage of fantastic submissions to bring to a publishing house for publication. But she's got $7 million set aside for her advance? Let's hope it brings enough money back in so they can publish a slightly larger percentage of those fantastic submissions by serious, dedicated writers. Let's hope.

The Outsider's Dictionary!

I just learned more about publishing in the ten minutes it took me to read this than the past semester I've spent as a literary publicist.

Oh I hope I'm exaggerating...just a little...If not, at least all my work was unpaid!