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Sat, Jun. 2nd, 2012, 09:07 am
The Morgantown Poets reading with Jason Jack Miller and Michael Arnzen was the most fun event we've had in a long time. You can see the pics and report here.   Mon, May. 21st, 2012, 09:36 pm
This Friday, 7-9 pm, Morgantown Poets is hosting an RDSP book party with authors Michael Arnzen and Jason Jack Miller. The event is being held at the Monongalia Arts Center in Morgantown, WV. We've heard a lot of people are coming from out of state so we will be giving away a goody bag full of RDSP swag to the person who travels the farthest for this event! Check out this beauty: 
Back cover text is one of the most important elements for selling a book. However writing it is not easy, even for the author, or maybe, especially for the author. If they could have said everything they needed to in a couple of paragraphs then why write a book?
Since good back cover text is so tricky to do I figured I'd share the RDSP perspective and processt. This works best for edgy works that are stylistically interesting, since those are the kinds of books we publish.
The process is a little different each time. I always feel a lot of pressure to come up with something great because it's so important for selling the book but also because I want the author to be happy with it. Sometimes the author has already written a description that is perfect but that's rare. As I mentioned before the author is not necessarily the best person for the job because describing your own work is tough. I generally think that collaboration is the best way to go. Sometimes I'll start the process, write a draft and send it to the author for help. Other times it will be reversed.
For me it's a bit like composing a poem. Each word needs to be carefully chosen because they all give the potential reader cues about the book. For example if the text is humorous I try to work in some funny-sounding words. Sometimes I make a list of words that I think describe the book, or fit with the mood, and try to include them. Often, each sentence will be a complete thought about the book and I like to have one or two that can serve as a tag line of sorts. I generally like to keep it short, it's better to leave the reader with questions, pique their interest so they have to go to the source to relieve their curiosity.
Our aim is to give the potential reader as accurate an idea as possible of what the 'experience' of reading the book will be like. Since many of our books are challenging or disturbing we like to get that across in the description. Though we might be able to foist the book off on unsuspecting readers, by making it sound different than it actually is, we'd wind up with unhappy customers in the end. I like to try to target the readers that will enjoy the book most and write with them in mind. Is the book heavily descriptive and atmospheric? Then the description should be too. Is the style spare and clean or action-packed and breathless? I try to take my tone cues from the actual book. Before working on the text, I like to read some of my favorite passages. Ideally, I would write the text as soon as I finished reading the book for the first time. But I rarely actually do that.
The reason to focus on the 'experience' of reading the book is that a plot summary is usually pretty boring. Plus our books are about how the tale is told not just the tale itself. Again, why read a book if the summary can tell you everything in it? I like to include enough details so the reader knows the general subject, has an idea of some of the themes, knows a bit about the main character and the setting but not so much that they can predict where the book is headed. Sometimes I use small details to stand for a whole. For instance, if the book is full of fascinating facts I might use one of them in the description to get that idea across. Sometimes a quote from the text is useful. The more closely I can replicate the experience of reading the book, the better. I do my best not to tell the reader what, or how, to think about the book just describe it as well as I can. I also try to avoid generalizations like, "This is a great book, everyone should read it," even though that's usually exactly what I'm thinking! Tue, Apr. 24th, 2012, 06:25 am
Lately I've been thinking that publishing has become increasingly difficult. RDSP's 10-year anniversary is right around the corner and this is definitely not how I imagined things would be at this milestone. At first I thought I was just tired, burnt-out, in a rut and tried to shake it off. I figured it was not publishing but me. However, as the months have gone by it's become clear that publishing is, indeed, getting harder. There are many reasons but I read an article last week that confirmed one of my suspicions. It's become increasingly more difficult to get people's attention about a book or author and I believe that is partly due to "book spam." There are so many books published nowadays that most releases just get lost like a needle in a giant haystack of pages. The article I read concerned the problem of "knock-offs," books that are similarly named to popular titles in order to trick people into buying. You can read the complete article here: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/16/amazon-knock-off-bestsellers/ But the part that really caught my interest was this: Karen Peebles, who is the author of I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, says she has self-published around 10,000 books though CreateSpace, not all of which are in her own name. "I am a single mother who home schools her children," says Peebles, who says she sells "thousands and thousands" of books a month. "Self-publishing is a great way for me to make income. I receive a pretty nice royalty every month."
I always knew that the huge influx of new titles created by POD and self-publishing was trouble. Obviously I don't have anything against POD (that's our model) or self-publishing (as long as it's done with thought) but there is a serious problem with quality control. These two modes have flung open the gates so that literally ANYTHING can be published. Again, I want to be completely clear that I support self-publishing when the author does the work to produce a quality product and I believe POD is a good thing. However, there's no way that these 10,000 titles put out by Karen Peebles can possibly be quality, or even original, work.
Now you may be thinking: you live by the sword, you die by the sword. RDSP used these new technologies to get to where we are. We
would not have any publishing company if we'd had to go the traditional route. But one thing we've insisted on since the beginning is a
certain level of quality and we plan to continue to insist on that regardless. I'm not interested in debating the merits and pitfalls of these modern modes but just want to recognize the reality of the situation. It is my hope that customers will become more savvy about the books they buy, it really isn't that hard to spot a fake or poorly written book by reading the description. But in the meantime how many great books are being lost in the shuffle?
At 10 years I expected RDSP to be lounging on a small but sufficiently comfy bed of laurels, getting its belly rubbed and wagging its tail. Instead we're going back to the hungry dog days, planning a new attack with fresh ideas about how to bring great, but overlooked, fringe fiction to the world. Next year we'll be celebrating 10 years of publishing but mostly we'll be trying to reinvent RDSP to keep up with the changes in publishing. We think it's time for something drastic and a new approach. Hopefully this dog still has a few more wags of the tale left.
Thu, Apr. 19th, 2012, 09:26 pm
For the past two weeks RDSP has been featured on Heidi Ruby Miller's blog. Get to know our authors through some quick Pick Six interviews: Also take a look at these follow up pieces: • John Edward Lawson casts characters for The Last Burn in Hell• Jason Jack Miller casts characters for Hellbender• D. Harlan Wilson casts characters for The Kyoto ManPaths to publication: • Michael Arnzen• Preston Black• D. Harlan WilsonSpecial thanks go to Heidi Ruby Miller for her support of RDSP and our authors!  Tue, Apr. 17th, 2012, 08:15 am
The Suicide Girls blog is featuring one of Larry Fondation's short stories, "Dirty Girl." Read it for free! Sun, Apr. 15th, 2012, 12:41 pm
 D. Harlan Wilson tells it like it is in this interview with D.A. Bale. Here's an excerpt: "I'm not writing for a wide audience. Not that I'm oblivious to a readership. I simply apply a heavy intellectual onus on readers and expect a lot from them. Not a popular thing these days - has it ever been? - but I perceive my writing as art, with high and low arcs, and I'm not interested in readers who want cookie-cutter dynamics. They have a billion other books to choose from." Of course my favorite quote is: "I consider RDSP as the Grove Press of its time. Over the years they have published one after another badass, award-winning author. I'm thrilled that they let me play in their sandbox." Read the full interview. Fri, Apr. 13th, 2012, 09:15 pm
 Lance Olsen has just been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Here's an article on his work and the award. Wed, Apr. 11th, 2012, 06:55 am
Architectures of Possibility has been getting a lot of press recently. Here are links to the most recent reviews and interviews.
-HTMLGIANT interview Excerpt: "...for me, innovative writing represents a possibility space where everything can and should be attempted, challenged, thought, where every architecture should be explored. In other words, we’re talking about the ideology of form here.… One of the jobs of the innovative is unceasingly to challenge the dominant cultures’ narrativization of “reality,” to remind us that there are always other ways to construct the text of our texts, the texts of our lives, always the possibility of effecting change in both."
-Continent interview Excerpt: "I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously."
-Quarterly West review Excerpt: "This is a book that any writer could have on her shelves and pick up again and again. Architectures of Possibility doesn’t ask writers to work towards some impossibly ideal text, but to resist, question, fail, re-build, proceed, and return."
By the Book Reviews Excerpt: "I am...crowning Lance Olsen’s book as the single best advisory to writers I have ever encountered. This is an absolutely masterful text."
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