Electronic Rights Means More Money for Authors

It sure do, honey. Check out NYT story on how upset Simon& Schuster is that one of their biggest authors (Stephen R. Covey, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) & sequelae) has sold his electronic book rights to a company that'll give him 50 percent when people buy electronic versions of his books. You think Amazon.com taking 50 percent is outrageous? Well, Simon & Schuster would have taken 75 percent.

"Ever since electronic books emerged as a major growth market, New York’s largest publishing houses have worried that big-name authors might sign deals directly with e-book retailers or other new ventures, bypassing traditional publishers entirely." (Poor publishers; now they suffer they way WE did when THEY bypassed fairness to writers!)

I specifically claimed all electronic rights to the text of Meet Me just for that reason; and when you sign book contracts -- be a highly effective person and do the same!

Parting with Students

Dear Class:

You were beginners. A seasoned writer would sputter, "That's impossible!" if assigned in 16 weeks to produce and craft a package of 3 to 5 poems, a personal essay, and a short story. But you did it. Congratulations. I am proud of you.

Each so different, age 17 to 55, you got along beautifully because you were generous and vulnerable and imperfect -- and in order to get you that way I had to be that way first, and it was a BEAR, because those are traits I don't like to display; I never planned to become a teacher. . . I think I was sent into it so I would learn humility. Thanks for teaching me.

You wrote some freaking awesome things and you know it.

I hope there's at least one helpful thing about writing that you discovered in here that you will remember, whatever that might be.

Here's my card, and let me know how you fare and how your writing goes, and if you need a reference. I've been teaching this class for 12 years and apparently am not going anywhere, so if you need to look me up you know where I am.

Go get 'em,

Catherine

If You Sign Your Book

If you sign your name in your book, you’ve “autographed” it. Putting a personalized note in your book, and then signing your name (example: “To Florence, best wishes, Catherine”) is called “inscribing” it.

In Meet Me (the book is coming soon) I mention that poet Jane O. Wayne said she’ll autograph but won’t inscribe her books – having once found for sale a used copy she’d inscribed to a very close friend. Picture sending a heartfelt Valentine e-mail to your love. Imagine that he or she forwards it as a Valentine to somebody else.

If you send books out into the world, these things happen. It is part of authorhood. It’s recycling. It’s all good.

I too sent an old dear friend a book inscribed to her. Now she’s selling that copy online at secondhand. Because of the inscription she’s charging rather more than double the cover price. Like, which of us should feel embarrassed?

Never Say Never

In 2001 I published in The Missouri Review an essay I'd worked on hard and liked a lot. Titled "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You," it was all about Elvis Presley's recording of the song by the same name. After it was published I never heard any response; not a single comment except for jokes after I mentioned I'd written about Elvis.

Later I learned that Stanley Elkin advised writers not to try describe music; it couldn't be adequately done. And I looked at what I'd written and published to no account, and thought it a noble failure.

Well, a friend found on the Missouri Review site a college instructor's comment: "As model essays I use several examples from TMR’s [The Missouri Review's online] archives. . . .“I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” by Catherine Rankovic is a lesson in how to describe the nearly impossible—Elvis’ phrasing and singing voice."

And then a paragraph from that essay appears in the Elvis entry in Wikiquote. I didn't put it there but I did correct the misquotations when I found it...

Maybe The King might have liked that some college professor gal took him serious... Moral of the story is, as musician Miles Davis put it: "Don't fear mistakes. There are none."

Meet Me: Preview the Book

My book Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis, is in production, and here's a PDF peek at what it will look like inside. I include the whole interview with poet Tess Gallagher, then in St. Louis promoting her books of poems Moon Crossing Bridge and Portable Kisses. That was in 1992, back when publishers actually sent poets on promotional tours. Tess was once my teacher, as I say in the headnote. Enjoy it -- the book has 12 more interviews: Carl Phillips, Ntozake Shange, Harper Barnes, Eddy L. Harris, Eric Pankey, more...Meet Me is now due to be published by Penultimate Press in December. Pardon me for my pride in it! You can pre-order by clicking here.

Animated Poems by TextFlows

Try poems by Yeats, Dickinson or (maximum fun) "Casey at the Bat" as animated words using Textflows. Cut into bite-size pieces, the poems materialize on your screen at a readable pace that lets the words "sink in." Opinions range from "great for teaching poetry" to "it ruins the integrity of the line," and riposte, "the line is an artificial construct anyway developed by the printing industry. . ." This link comes from poets.org. At Textflows.com you can try reading textflow of Obama's inaugural address, King's "I Have a Dream" speech, or The Bard.

"Epi-Graph," as in "Epi-Dermis"

• "Epi" means "on top of," as in "epidermis."
• "Graph" means "writing."
• An epigraph, then, is "on top of the writing."
  
• The epigraph follows the title, and, like the title, its job is informational and supportive. ("Newspaper misprint for 'mammoth'.") The epigraph and its source, if it has one, and it usually does:
  

What do women want? -Sigmund Freud

should be set off in italic type. An epigraph should never be:

• longer than the poem
• better than the poem
• unnecessary
• unintelligible
  

In your entire body of work you should not have more than three or or four works topped with epigraphs. Epigraphs include dedications. ("To my student, thrown by a horse.") Epigraphs and dedications are extraneous to the works, and therefore they are weaknesses. If you have something to say, say it in the work, not in the toppings.

An epiGRAM (meaning "on top of the MESSAGE") is a short, highly crafted, pointed statement, a "quotable quote," a summary or generalization about just one topic: "Tis with our judgements as with our watches: None go just alike, yet each believes his own." -Alexander Pope.

Pope's epigram might make a good epigraph. But it's better not to rely on somebody else's work to bolster yours.

Free Software To "Kindle" on Your PC

This just in: Now you don't need "to buy a Kindle" to read e-books. Fire up Kindle on your PC or iPhone with free software. If you have an amazon.com account already it is a breeze. The software took only 5.2 MB of space:

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE, Nov. 10)--Amazon.com, Inc. today announced the availability of "Kindle for PC," a free application that lets readers around the world enjoy Kindle books on their personal computers (PC). Kindle for PC is now available as a free download to readers in over 100 countries at www.amazon.com/KindleforPC.

The U.S. Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore) currently offers more than 360,000 books, including New Releases and 101 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers, which are typically $9.99 or less. . .

Source: amazon.com press release as appearing on BusinessWire.