No Thin Line

Jennifer Armentrout has secured a sizable advance/book deal thingie after a combination of small press and "self-publishing". In a recent interview, she remarks:

Jeremy Greenfield: You’ve seen a lot of success very quickly. How long have you been writing?




Jennifer L. Armentrout: I started writing seriously in 2007 with my first book, a young adult paranormal romance, and I got a contract on that in 2010 through a small press, Spencer Hill Press. They published it in October 2011.



I started out like most authors do looking for an agent but I couldn’t get one. Once my book came out I was able to get one.



Since 2011, I’ve had 13 books come out. All the books that have come out are with Entangled Publishing and Spencer Hill. My Harlequin Teen book doesn’t come out until the end of this year and my Disney Hyperion books are scheduled to come out in 2014.







JG: What made you decide to self-publish in the first place?



JLA: Came up with the idea in the shower and wrote the book in 20 days in January. I can write pretty fast. I sent a partial to my agent and she loved it. She said, “we can definitely sell this.” We targeted about four-to-five publishers and it was really well-received and all the editors loved it but it got turned down at every publisher because the new adult market is very risky. It’s hard to get it into bookstores. And the market is getting flooded. So, we had this book we thought would sell it but couldn’t.



When we found out we couldn’t sell it Kevan and I had a serious conversation – neither of us had done anything with self-publishing before but I knew some authors who had done it and had some help getting copy editors and cover designers and other people to help. We formed a marketing plan that we thought would work. I have a platform but we wanted to reach beyond my readership so that’s when we decided to do the three-day $0.99 deal and it worked.



It has all happened so quickly. I wrote the book in January, we published it in February. It’s been an insane couple of months.



source:
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/best-selling-self-published-author-jennifer-l-armentrout-signs-six-figure-three-book-deal-with-harpercollins-for-wait-for-you/



So it seems if I understand the background to this correctly that in reality she collaborated with her agent, brought her manuscripts out via Kindle, sold many copies, then signed a deal with Avon. All this begs a couple of questions: is it really self-publishing when one collaborates with a publishing professional? Or is it simply that agents are becoming publishers themselves? (The Wylie Agency threatened to do this some time ago with its backlist, then, I believe, for whatever set of reasons, backed off.)

East Coast

This was taken at the home where my mother grew up. It's in New Brunswick on a tributary of the St. John River. My maternal grandparents were potters, and next to this house (very large and ramshackle is how I remember it) was a studio that we actually slept in -- it was a rectangular, bungalow style building -- sort of like a giant bachelor apartment -- and it was not as musty or damp as the big house seemed to be. (There was another house up the road that was deserted and positively spooky; no one wanted to stay there.) Actually, I thought the big house (in photo) was kind of cool. I remember trying to convince my dad we should sleep there.

At that time, the entire area was overgrown and kind of mysterious. There was a pathway to the river. It wasn't long, but by the time you got to the shore, the house was lost in foliage. There was another route -- a dirt road -- to the main road (maybe also dirt at that point). When we drove down it, the saplings on either side would brush against the car windows as vigorously as if we were in a car wash.

The beach

This is Richard and me at the beach -- we tended to go to the lakes in Gatineau Park pretty much every weekend when we were still at Rideau Terrace. Later, when my folks broke up and Richard and I were living with Mom in Manor Park, Dad would take us to the Gatineaus on a fairly regular basis, though not as frequently as before.

Lake-wise, we had favourites, and these were susceptible to fashion: when we were very small it was Lac Philippe. Later, Lac Lapeche. There were others, too, for example Pink's Lake (sort of a noisy party-place where the fragile eco-system finally got so stressed that park authorities closed the lake to swimming). But the two former are the ones I remember most.

Oscarsborg

This is from the family reunion at Oscarsborg in 2006. It took place just after Suki and I were married. Richard and his then-wife Teena are in the foreground.

Oscarsborg is a fortress on a small island in Oslo Fjord. It proved important during the German invasion of Norway in 1940, when, armed with World War One vintage big guns and torpedoes (the guns, I believe, manufactured in Germany), the Norwegians manage to seriously cripple a German naval vessel. This delayed the German invasion for several hours, though in the end it did little to deter it.

The fortress is a castle, really. I'm not sure when it dates back to. Nowadays, it is used for events like weddings and large get-togethers -- and that's what we came to Norway for: our cousins on my paternal grandmother's side of the family are in the habit of organizing reunions every five years (or so), and this one was organized by our cousins Hege and Tone Bratsberg, along with help from many other cousins.

The weather was perfect. It was a bright and sunny summer in Norway. Again, like Canada, the summers are unpredictable, so we were lucky. I remembered all the cousins my age from earlier visits that Richard, my dad and I had made to Norway in the 1970s. But now a lot of them had kids. At times, keeping everyone straight was a little confusing.

Because of Norway's latitude, the evenings were extraordinarily long. One night Suki, Richard, Teena and I were out on the shore watching a cruise ship sail slowly past. By the time it was out of view, the sky was still light, but it was then past 10 o'clock.

Everyone got along, and that good cheer was like a long day, too. But the day faded, ultimately. Suki got to meet Richard and Teena. Suki and Teena would meet one more time -- at Richard's memorial. Richard and Suki never met in person again.

Noteworthy

Kevin from Canada on Solomon Gursky Was Here.

Stan Persky on the reading explosion.

The Greens

This was taken the same time as the earlier photo of Richard and me playing, with Richard holding a stick in his mouth. My mom, dad, Richard ("Dickie" then) and I went to Rockcliffe Park. It's an actual park, as you can see, and also a swanky neighborhood filled with the homes of the rich and the ambassadorial class. We lived on Rideau Terrace, east of Springfield, which was a dividing line between it and our neighborhood -- New Edinburgh. The layout of the neighborhoods was such that within short walking distance you could be in a working class area, for example Vanier, or the area around Crichton Street (where Richard and I went to school) or up in the enclaves of Rockcliffe, with its grand homes and trees everywhere.

Rockcliffe Park actually seemed to be several parks, all kind of interconnected: there was the Governor General's ground, some bush, Rockliffe Park itself, a tree-lined driveway that led to another park, the Rockeries, and then Mile Circle and Manor Park (the last not being a park at all but a neighborhood where Richard, Mom and I lived after my parents split).

It had a nice but slightly weird effect on me being surrounded by so much greenery while still in a city. When I learned how to bike I was pretty much everywhere, and expanded my stomping (pedaling) grounds until I knew the whole area well. I thought every city was more or less like this -- swank neighborhoods, middle-class neighborhoods, tough neighborhoods, but all of it linked up by long stretches of green.

This section of Ottawa still has the same essential lay-out -- but a lot of that green has been developed. For example, directly across from our house on Rideau Terrace, there was an acre or so of land we called "the bush". It wasn't a park -- it wasn't anything. It was just what it sounded like: a wild outgrowth of trees and brush. This is where we usually played. It stayed that way for so many years that I assumed it always would. I had no concept of zoning. But it wasn't zoned as parkland, it wasn't zoned as anything, I guess. It's all townhouses now.

Truth Marathon - homemade vid

This is a homemade video of the opening sequence of my screenplay-novel TRUTH MARATHON -- in turn now a module of my mega-novel PLASTIC MILLENNIUM. It is languishing at YouTube. Maybe I'm, ah, "pitching" it the wrong way. Other vids that YouTube considers thematically linked are:

• Wings of the Red Star: SU-25 Frogfoot!by BitnikGrRecommended for you
• 10:42Soul 1/3 zero battle, remarkable flight of Japanby jajamaru333Recommended for you
• 7:34Truth Marathon - Twoby Finn Harvor8 views
• 11:59Tripping With My Wife: Ohara/Kyotoby Finn Harvor37 views
• 7:03Truth Marathon - Threeby Finn Harvor3 views
• 4:35The Business Army: John Spivak at McCormack's Officeby Finn Harvor13 views
• 31:48INSIDE 9/11 : ZERO HOUR (PART 1 of 4)by daviddangermen
  
  

Truth Marathon - Korean version

From my first screenplay-novel, Truth Marathon:

밖. 세계 2차대전 직전 동경의 거리. 오후

 

제목 : 동경, 1941년 1월 26일

 

차 한대가 뉴욕 내셔널 시티은행(National City Bank)의 일본 지점 앞에 멈춰선다. 잘 차려 입은 서양 남자 한 명이 등장한다. 그는 은행 안으로 들어간다.

 

안. 잠시후. 은행.

 

잘 차려입은 서양남자가 줄을 서고 있다. 잠시 후 그는 은행 창구에 다다른다.

 

 

 More here....

.

 [sincere thanks to Arts Won for this]

Norway

This was probably taken during our first trip to Norway, in the park in Oslo next to where my paternal grandmother lived.

Norway has considerable advantages and disadvantages for a Canadian visitor: it's kind of like flying over the ocean to experience the same kind of weather: cold winters (natch) and dry, hot summers (that is, in years which are dry and hot) that are also short. But of course, one isn't in Canada, one's in Europe. Everything else, from the scale of the downtown to the cultural sense of self, is different.

The latter point is important. Living now in Seoul, I'm again in a society in which the cultural sense of self is strong. Being in Canada, on the other hand, is to always be a little bit hyphenated. Asia, then, is more "European" in this regard -- though of course the cities, in their scale, put both Norway and Canada into a rather pale spot.

We were in Norway for a month. We drove around though the mountains (not hot), but generally stayed in Oslo. Our grandmother made us start diaries -- an imposition for a teenager in the 1970s, even more nowadays ... though (as I tell my students before giving them yet another writing assignment) keeping a blog is just like having a diary! I had mine somewhere. Wish I could dig it up. Wish I could find Richard's, too.

Ottawa

This is a picture of Richard and me just after he was born. I'm not sure what park we're in. Another photo, probably taken the same day, suggests to me it was Rockcliffe Park. One of the real pluses of living in Ottawa is the sheer amount of nature one finds in the city itself; this seemed to be particularly true in the area where we ended up living -- New Edinburgh, on the corner of Rideau Terrace and Noel Street. (When this photo was take,we would have been on Hastey Avenue, close to the U of O library.) It was -- the 1960s -- a good time to be a city dweller in the sense that urban spaces hadn't been rationalized the way they are now: you could find lots of nature that were just sitting there, like parks that had happened by accident. All that is gone now -- developed to the umpteenth degree.

Enabler

Levi Asher on militarism: "War is also, according to this theory, a thing that blinds us. It's a camouflage curtain that affects our perceptions and makes us see enemies that may not exist. The most common direct cause of war is the belief in an imminent enemy attack, the fear of being caught weak against an unknown greater force. The more we militarize our societies, then, the more we perceive threats in the motives of our neighbors."