Thoughts From Around the Blogosphere

There's a lot of chatter in the blogosphere today and I don't have to time to cover it all, so here's the quick and dirty round-up.

IT'S A TRAP: The Easy Ending by Maybe Genius Steph Sinkhorn
This is an well-thought out look at endings of books, the kinds of endings, and what can go horribly wrong. Endings are almost as hard as writing Chapter 3 for me. Many of my stories *cough*EVFiL*cough* don't have endings because they are just that hard to write.

Whether your editing your final draft, or working on your first draft, give this article a look-see. You'll thank me later.


7 Ways to Create Powerful Conflict by Lynnette Labelle at Chatterbox ChitChat
This article really deserves a full post because I don't see eye to eye with Lynnette. Her opening comment is this:

The best conflict comes from your main character’s worst fear coming true at the worst possible moment.

And my first instinct was to rear go back and go, "Nuh-uh! That's not true!" I wasn't even sure why I thought that, so I finished the article and thought about it for the better part of the morning.

Lynnette has a point, conflict doesn't come from giving a character what they want, but her focus for this article is on character driven plots. There's a heavy bias towards the romance genre in her thoughts (go figure, she edits the RWA online newsletter Lovebytes). Whatever your take on this, it's a good jumping off point for a discussion on conflict and why your book needs some.


The Thing That REALLY Pisses Me Off by Zoe Winters
This is a non nonsense letter about piracy. Zoe says:

If someone says: “This is mine and I don’t want you to take it without paying” then taking it is WRONG. How hard is that? Why is there a mental disconnect here for anyone?

And I can't agree more. It's not a new topic, but since we still have idiots committing piracy we still need to discuss this.


Raymond Benson guest blogs over at A Newbie's Guide to Publishing
E-books are the pot of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow. Anybody can put out an ebook! Do you have a novella malingering in the depths of your files? Slap a cover on that sucker and sell it on Amazon! The money will just roll in!

Or not.

Benson breaks down what happened when he moved from traditional print format to selling his back list in the ebook format. Even with all the right moves and author can go wrong. Yes, more books are selling as ebooks (which is great for those of us who move every six months because print books are heavy), but there are a lot of titles out there and a majority of them aren't selling as well as they should.



Did I miss any amazing publishing news today? If so, leave me a link in the comments box!