I came across an article on revising a completed manuscript that looks well thought out and presented by author, Holly Lisle. I have not read any of her books but after reading her autobiography, I think I will purchase one. She mainly writes fantasy novels and even though I love watching movies with a fantasy theme, it’s not my favorite genre to read. But her bio painted a picture of a unique individual with a unique perspective on life and living that it intrigued me enough to want to read one of her books.

The article, One-Pass Manuscript Revision is worth a read. I found another writer who tried Lisle’s revision process, Kathleen Bolton who wrote about doing Lisle’s method of revision and has now sent her manuscript to her agent - her first completed manuscript!

Holly Lisle’s Website, though not very pretty, is worth exploring as is Writer Unboxed. Both have a lot of information on the writing craft.

I came across a site, Writing Classes, offering online writing workshops as well as their physical workshops in New York City. This site was created by Gotham Writers’ Workshop, a privately owned creative writing school in New York City. Gotham’s instructors wrote and published a book entitled, Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide. There are excerpts of each chapter on their site. It’s well worth the time and effort to check it out.

There are detailed descriptions of the workshops with a sample of their online classes. The online workshops vary from 4 weeks to 10 weeks and are on a variety of writing genes. The price of the workshops are reasonable, though certainly not cheap but I’d guess participants get their monies worth. Even if you never plan on taking one of the workshops, check out their resource page. They have articles on writing, writing tips and character questionnaires.

I’ve looked at a lot of sites offering online writing workshops. Some looked credible and some looked iffy. This one has had a lot of good publicity from authoritative sits such as Zoetrope, Time Warner, Barnes & Noble and Draft. I read a writers blow-by-blow article on her experience of one of the online workshops. If I can find it again, I will add it here later. It was enticing enough to make me look closer at the site and what they offer. I’d take one of their workshop classes if I had the extra $. It might help in getting me out of the rut I’ve fallen into the past few years.

If anyone who has taken one of the workshops happens by, please leave a comment and tell me about your experience.

I just reviewed a new site, BookHitch.com, that was submitted to my Writing Resource Directory that allows authors and publishers to submit their books for free . There is a pay-for-premium-listing that includes an image of the book with more space for a description. The regular cost is $49.95 per year but right now it’s only $19.95 per year. Either price is reasonable for a directory type listing and cheap for any type of advertising. The only problem is that it’s a fairly new site with very little PR and book marketing is an extremely competitive market online. But, every site started out as new once upon a time.

The site is simply designed, nice and clean and easy to navigate. I’d prefer to not have to find what I’m looking for by having to wade through the drop-down list of categories but that’s probably a personal preference simply because I have worked on many directories and prefer to break up top level categories into smaller child-categories. It just make everything look cleaner and makes it easier for people to find what they are interested in.

I like the concept of this site and I’ve though about doing something similar but with more features. I guess I should get serious about adding a feature similar to this to my resource directory. Some of the features I’d like to offer will take some time to setup. I’d be curious to know what others think about the BookHitch, so please leave a comment and tell me your thoughts.

Update: After doing a little more research on BookHitch, I discovered that the only contact information on the site is an email address and that the domain record has a private whois. What that means is that the owner of this site is basically anonymous, yet you, as a customer, have to give him/her your personal information in order to get a premium listing. Now, why would anyone do that? Why would anyone hand over their hard-earned monry to an anonymous person? And why does he/she need a private whois record if they aren’t hiding something?

Nope, I can not recommend this site to anyone and will be removing it from my resource directory. If you want to read more about my opinion, along with others, read this post and the ensuing comments on Matt Cutts site, a Google employee. Also note that not everyone agrees with me but thus far I’ve only read excuses for hiding whois information behind a proxy. As a consumer, I can not risk giving my personal information to an anonymous business person.

Another Update: Because the marketing director and webmaster for Bookhitch decided to leave comments to this post, my curious nature took over and I went in search of more information. I’ve allways said that no business or person is as anonymous online as they would like to think they are. Apparently, Bookhitch is part of a print-on-demand publishing newtork, NetPublications, Inc., based in Poughkeepsie, New York. Each of the company’s business domains are registered to a Chris Thurtle, though he isn’t the actual owner. The owner is William R. Grogg and he is the founder of Bookhitch.

Now, why would Mr. Grogg want to keep ownership of Bookhitch a secret? There is complete contact details on his other sites and the whois records do have the same physical location. His other sites along with NetPublications other affiliations are on the company’s website. Why isn’t Bookhitch there and why the whois proxy? I can only speculate.

To be fair, I did not find any complaints about Mr. Gorgg or his companies. However, I didn’t really look for complaints. My focus was on discovering who owned Bookhitch and maybe get a hint as to why an online business would be using a whois proxy to hide behind. Once I discovered the main business along with his self-publishing and small press businesses, I looked even closer at Bookhitch. Doing random searches, I found every book published and printed by one of Mr. Grogg’s companies that I searched for was listed in Bookhitch as a premium listing. I don’t really see anything wrong with what they are doing unless they are recommending Bookhitch’s premium service to their self-publised authors and/or small press customers without disclosing ownership.

I found a site that’s mainly geared toward small press publishers but I believe it can help writers as well, especially if self-publishing is being considered. They have a newsletter in pdf format that any one can read and get a jucy peek into the publishing world. In their July issue there are several articles worth reading, including Titles Sell Books with criteria on an effective book title and book signing do’s and don’ts.

St. Louis Publishers Association

Mad Max Perkins is the adopted persona of a book editor for a major New York publisher. I came across this editors blog awhile back and meant to write about it then but other things got in the way and as usual, I went in a different direction and got caught up in the Virtual Thesaurus and clustering exercises as a way to tap into and cultivate the creative mind. I intend to write more about clustering in the near future but now I want to talk about Mad Max Perkins and the information skillfully presented on his blog.

First let me say, I love this blog, love the writing style and especially love Mad Max Perkins for keeping it real, even though he — the editor — is in disguise. What he writes in regards to the publishing industry and the relationship between author, agent and editor is insightful. While Mad Max did write a good-by post, which I was completely entranced and later sadden by, he has posted since then. One of his author’s book will land inside book stores sometime in Feb. 2006. He wrote about finding this author and her manuscript Here, and gives a look into the author/agent process. It’s well worth the read but be warned, you’ll probably want to buy the book!

When I first found BookAngst 101, Mad Max Perkins’ home on the net, the last post was his good-by post, Google Madness [from the secret files of N.A.*]. The N.A. stands for Narcissists Anonymous. Well, that did get my attention right away. So I started to read and the further I got into the post, the more I wanted to read. I’ve since reread that one post several times trying to figure out what was so exciting about it. Yes, I could relate to his words, to the emotion oozing through a thinly vealed disguise but it was more than that. Max has an interesting writing style (voice) and I’ve since read most of content on his blog. All fall into his unique style but none grabbed me as much as that good-by post. I have decided it’s because of the way he paced the piece, like a musical rhapsody where it builds toward a climax but pauses just short of the final cord, then drops down and and starts building again, faster, than slow, then faster , faster, then slow, slow, then faster until the final cord reverberates through every cell in your body. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration but I did feel the rushing (faster) then the slowing and then the rushing again as I was reading. I did know what the outcome would be but it didn’t stop me from reading every single word.

Hopefully Mad Max will stay around for awhile and what has already been posted will reach the eyes of those who need his encouragement and need to know more about editing, publishing, and marketing their books.

*I have added a few other agents and editors blogs in my directory under Writers Markets. More will be added as time permits.

Update: Found this information on Mad Max Perkin’s identity at MediaBistro. It just confirms what many who followed Mad Max probably figured out on their own.