Ack! I’ve been neglecting the litfarm lately–things are crazy at my day job–and I apologize for that. I’ve got over a dozen posts in the queue, but they all need some attention first. In the meantime, to hold you over, The Guardian has an article about the boom in the self-publishing industry.

While definitive figures on sales generated by self-published books are hard to come by, there are estimates that they could be well into the billions of dollars. A report, Under the Radar by the Book Industry Study Group estimated that non-calculated sales by smaller publishers and self-publish companies could be as high as $14.2bn (£7.3bn) in 2005, the last year statistics were available.

A quick look at Lulu’s list of best-selling fiction has an author who turned his self-published novel into a book deal with St Martin’s. Admittedly, he writes somewhat Christian fiction, which is a market that’s been under served by traditional publishing houses, but even so it’s encouraging.

Another interesting site mentioned in the article is Wowio.com, an online store that sells nothing but ebooks.

So go read that. When you’re done, there ought to be some more posts here.

Just in from the TWS mailing list: BC Federation of Writers is having a contest for short fiction. Any genre is acceptable, deadline is July 1, 2008, entry fee is $20, and prizes are from $150-500, plus publication in WordWorks and the chance to read at Word on the Street in September.

More submission details here.

John Irving takes another look at sentimentality in an ancient article from the NY Times that’s been kicking around the litfarm for a while (so long that I don’t remember who pointed it out to me originally). As someone who is still working out the line between drama and melodrama, emotion and sentimentality in my own work, it’s helpful to think about the subject in a generous light.

It is surprising, however, how many readers reserve Dickens–and hopefulness in general–for Christmas; it seems that what we applaud in Dickens–his kindness, his generosity, his belief in our dignity–is also what we condemn him for (under another name) in the off-Christmas season.

The other name is sentimentality–and, to the modern reader, too often when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already guilty… A short story about a four-course meal from the point of view of a fork will never be sentimental; it may never matter very much to us, either. A fear of contamination by soap opera haunts the educated writer… [although] “Madame Bovary” would have been perfect material for daytime television and a contemporary treatment of “The Brothers Karamazov” could be stuck with a campus setting.

I’d love to see Karamozov set in the OC. Genius, right?

factitious: not produced by natural forces. Ex:

brokers created a factitious demand for stocks

(Thanks Bookninja, Ian McEwan and Wordnet.)

I thought this was a mistype of facetious when I first read it. True story.

It’s very late notice, but my inbox informs me that the Writers @ Work Competition deadline has been extended to March 15th, 2008. There’s an entry fee of $20 and they’re looking for poetry, fiction and non-fiction. See the guidelines for more details. First prize in each genre is publication in Quarterly West, a literary journal associated with the University of Utah, tuition to their June conference and $1,500. Not too shabby.

They’ll accept excerpts from a novel, so there’s really no excuse not to send in something. Angela.

Some more good news in the friends of litfarm department. Jennica Harper, a poet, instructor at Vancouver Film School and someone I harassed at a house warming party not long ago, was just named a winner in the Comic Creation Nation contest. It’s put on by zeros2heros.com, a social networking site built for writers, artists and fans of comics (and other genre entertainment).

This means that Jennica’s script Abigail’s War is going to get made into a graphic novel, and possibly more. Check out the other winners and the writer’s guidelines. Be warned that if you’re from part of North America that’s not Canada, you probably can’t enter, because they’re partnered with a government sponsored arts organization.

Just one of the ways Canada keeps the rest of North America under its thumb.

A lot has been written about the long tail, and how internets is workin’ for businesses like Amazon, who make a good deal of their money off niche sales that are possible because of the large number of customers they can reach with internets. Good old internets.

But you’re probably wondering, What Can Internets Do for Me? Kevin Kelly’s recent blog post 1,000 True Fans aims to find out. The short version:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

His argument is compelling. He says that the True Fan is someone who will read everything you write, go to all your concerts, buy the t-shirt, everything. If you figure that a True Fan is going to spend $100 per year doing this, that’s $100,000 of income for you, the artist. This works especially well for musicians, who have concerts, t-shirts, mp3s and related swag, but check out the angle for an author. Say your novel is selling for $15. Whether you’re providing a print-on-demand title or have a publisher, if you can get the word out to your 1,000, that’s $15,000 in sales at the cost of keeping a blog, an email list or a forum. That’s enough to make a first-time author significantly more attractive to a potential publisher.

And one thousand is a relatively small number. If you managed to get a few hundred a year, you’d have your thousand in under five years. As I mentioned in an earlier post, word of mouth is still the number one way publishers sell books. That’s 1,000 words. Of mouths. Or just mouths.

It’s a lot, is what I’m saying.

The article also talks about Street Performer Protocol (a term I was familiar with as “ransomware”) and other alternate methods of funding creative projects, including Fundable, a site built to handle the tricky business.

Keith Thompson’s latest book, Gus Openshaw’s Whale-Killing Journal, started out as a couple of blogs (one on tripod and one on mindsay) and turned into a real-life dead-tree book. It’s a cool idea–drumming up readers for your project by releasing excerpts and supporting material and parlaying that into publisher interest (very possible, considering that your server logs record the number of unique visitors). It also mimics what’s been done for other popular media with ARGs (Cloverfield and Halo to name a couple) and similar ideas.

Loads of possibilities for self-promotion beyond the venerable chapbook.

I know, I’m showing some major geek underpants on a lit blog, but I can’t let it go unheralded. Gary Gygax, the father of Dungeons and Dragons, is dead.

Everyone take 3d6 damage, no save. Gary sits behind the big DM’s screen tonight.