At any Pennwriters’ conference, one of the best attended sessions is the Agents/Editors Panel Discussion. This is where we writers suck in any and all advice concerning trends, preferences, opportunities, turnoffs, and anything else those agents and editors care to share faster than light near a black hole.

Some questions were the same. “What’s the latest trend?” The answer was also always the same. “Don’t write to the trend or you’ll be behind it.” Thank goodness for panel moderator Nancy Martin who delivered a great set of questions to keep things moving. Her efforts turned a boring ‘same-ole’ into an enlightening discussion.

The most informative part of the discussion centered on upheaval in the publishing industry. Here’s some food for thought:

With over 400 editors let go by publishers over the last year, agents now have to deal with a whole new set of players. Familiar contacts aren’t there any more. Publishers have put some projects on hold. They’ve also put out the word that they’re not going to have the time or money to edit works to the extent they went to before.  

What this means to we writers is that our manuscripts have to be highly polished when they arrive at the agent’s doorstep. One agent even went so far as to suggest paying a professional freelance editor to go over your novel before submission – a fee that can run hundreds or thousands. Uhhhh.

This industry sea change forced me to look deeply into the agent’s perspective. Imagine having to go through myriad queries, looking for something promising, and polished, and able to be marketed a year or two into the future. It’s like panning for gold with the expectation that you’ll find a well-crafted 24k chain in a new style that everybody will be wearing a couple of Christmases from now. Yep, it’s almost as easy as picking winning lottery numbers.

While they agents painted a glum picture, they also shared some optimism. The industry has to produce books, or they will be twelfth in line behind Chrysler at bankruptcy court. They see the glaciating in the industry thawing soon. Publishers utterly need fresh stories to survive. So do editors. So do agents. And, it’s up to we writers to deliver.

There’s no other way to express it - LISA SCOTTOLINE ROCKS!!!

The best selling author and former lawyer delivered a dynamic keynote that set us to belly laughs, touched us, and galvanized everyone in the room with her tremendous energy. (Trust me, some speeches induce comas.) When she finished, every Pennwriter present stood up in an honest standing ovation.

During her speech, she told us of her struggle to get her voice heard - a place where many of us are. Lisa had a tough time of it, divorced, a baby, and credit cards maxed enough to qualify for federal bail out money. But she persevered and succeeded. Sounds simple, but it wasn’t the joke - it was the delivery. And what a delivery it was. 

But the essence of her speech wasn’t about struggle or yukking up the crowd - it was writing. It was the reason we were all there, but it gets lost in the frenzy to pitch, and the mad rush to be published. Lisa just plain told us to write.  

I came out of that keynote recharged and raring to go. I was so fired up that I started fleshing out a World War II novel outline yesterday and began developing a sequel of The Gospel of Matthias Kent.  I feel like a writer and not a query machine for the first time in a long while. It’s what I do. It’s who I am.

So thanks to Lisa, and to Annette, and to everybody at Pennwriters who had a hand in getting Ms. Scottoline to talk with us.  It made a good conference great!!!

Nothing helps being at a conference like having some of your fellow local writers there. The obvious benefit is having somebody you know to talk to. Since you can’t get to every session, it also gives you somebody to share knowledge with. What’s even better is somebody who has seen, or talked with, an agent you’re going to pitch. It’s all good.

What was great was seeing Don Helin, our long time critique group leader, take his place at the signing table with the rest of the published authors. It was tough to see the look in Tina’s eyes when her pitch got shot down. No matter how many times it happens to each one of us, it’s still hard to deal with. Then there was George’s perennial effervescence, especially when some of the agents wanted to see some of his work. And who can forget about Chas’s and Tina’s arguement over the amount of heat dispensed at the event horizon of a black hole. Apparently, discussions like these are expressions of the Theory of Relativity - meaning that both of these folks had relatively enough liquor in them to theorize about the amount of heat dispensed at the event horizon of a black hole during a writers’ convention. I wonder if this is how the Sci Fri Channel conceives scripts.

It’s also a wonder watching our group network with the other writers. We swapped introductions, made new friends, and got the skinny on all things writing. So, to all of the Area 5 folks that attended - thanks for being there! It made a good time great!!!

A primal call sounds every mid-May to bring our species of writer together - The Pennsyvanius writerus or Pennwriter. Think geese returning to their home marsh without begging you for bread crumbs or fouling the sidewalks.  Okay, maybe somebody fouled your particular sidewalk, but it wasn’t me. Trust me, you’d know if it was.

I have to admit to a reluctance to go this time as frustrations with the business of writing have subjagated the creativity of writing. But go I did and boy was I glad. There’s nothing like being surrounded with members of your species - all of which are either complaining as much as you or celebrating each other’s victories. There’s no other group like Pennwriters and I’m happy to be a member.

Kudos to Annette Dashofsky for pulling together a great gang of volunteers and presenters who charged up the batteries of rookies and veterans alike. Thanks to C. J. Lyons for sharing her enthusiasm, her wit, and her experience in several sessions that focused writer’s pitches. And thanks to the always-gracious Nancy Martin, a long time dedicated Pennwriter who freely shares the length and breadth of her considerable publishing experience with those (like me) who have little to none. And let’s not forget Jack Hillman who can wield a battle axe and a joke with equal effectiveness.

Rather than making one long meandering post, I’m going to break the conference into highlights - The Area 5 Gang - Lisa Scottoline - Pitching Agents - and Wisdom from the Agents Panel.  So tune on in each day for more!!!

Literally the biggest news on the eReader front is the debut of the 9.7 inch Kindle DX – a large eReader geared to periodical and textbook markets. The announcement leaves me less than excited for a lot of reasons. First is the $489 price tag. Considering that our family just purchased a decent laptop for about that amount, I doubt I’d ante up more cash for a big Kindle. Heck, I can get textbooks from other providers via a Wi-Fi connection that the Kindle doesn’t have, surf the web, see things in millions of colors, IM, and post annoying YouTube videos. I can do pretty much the same thing for $200 less on a less weighty netbook. I also consider that college kids don’t’ treat their textbooks with any more respect than the way I did back in the day. So, you’ve got a $489 piece of china in a dorm full of bulls. What gets me most, though, is that this gadget actually takes away from the appeal of Kindles I & II - small, elegant, and functional. Really, they’re the iPod of the reading world. Unless Amazon is planning on giving – yes – giving away Kindle 3’s (with costs buried in tuition or lab fees or media levies) to the college kids, I don’t see this larger version having big appeal.

A second, and much more interesting tidbit, appeared in the May 7th New York Times Technology ‘Bits’ section written by Brad Stone. The article announced the purchase of Stanza by Amazon. You may say, “Big whoopdedoo,” with all the thrill of having a cavity filled. For those of you that don’t know, Stanza is probably the most popular eReader app on Apple’s iPhone. Over 100k books are available for download and this will only grow with Amazon’s owning of Lexcyle, the company that developed the app. What’s more is that Amazon gets the jump on other companies developing eReader apps for smartphones. This purchase continues to show Amazon’s emphasis on channel-to-market across various platforms – where the real money is. They are working hard to be the unequivocal middleman of the printed word, and succeeding. This, fellow readers & writers, is where the War of the eReaders will be decided - not on the battlefront, but in the supply lines.

Once again, the Google’s Gutenberg project is drawing ire – this time from the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries. The organizations state that Google won’t safeguard reader privacy and that it would hold a virtual (sic) monopoly on a wide variety of texts.

I feel that both associations are crying sour grapes over Project Gutenberg. After all, why travel to a library when a virtual Library of Alexandria exists on the Internet? No library cards. No overdue books. No scowling librarians hushing me for cranking the volume up on my John Williams’ soundtracks. Libraries stand a lot to lose.

Not all of their considerations are mere complaints and that’s what I find troubling. A monopoly of these works funnels all kinds of monetary and informational revenue to Google. Imagine finding a list of seafood restaurants conveniently plastered across the banner while you’re reading Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, or popup ads touting New York State while reading Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. To be honest, I can’t imagine Google doing anything like that – the public backlash would be loud, long, and lush with all manner of rebuke.

Privacy is another matter. Everything on the web is measured, weighed, and watched. Your taste in books, how long you read them, and how often you read would all become the ore of data mining and that is the real gold of the Information Age.

Then there’s the whole issue of censorship. Back in the good, old days, all it took was a pair of scissors wielded by my school librarian to remove the juicier parts in the first chapter of Benchley’s Jaws. She could not, however, do the same for all the copies residing in the local Waldenbooks, which we High School seniors snapped up so that we could read what we were missing. But other things might happen. Given enough prudish public rage, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer might end up trimmed to get a PG-13 rating. And let’s not forget the Bible. Why not just rearrange some of the conflicting stuff to make it a smoother read? That is, by the way, part of the plot to my novel, The Gospel of Matthias Kent.

With all of this in mind, it’s up to us readers & writers to safeguard all things written – not just professional organizations or megacorps. Raise a ruckus if you see it happening because the books out in Project Gutenberg belong to us all.

For those of you that haven’t read my bio, I am a Star Wars fan. May 4th is the official unofficial day to celebrate. Why? Simple. May the 4th be with you…

The Wall Street Journal reports two Kindle tidbits.

The first is that the American Association of People with Disabilities and the National Federation or the Blind are raising cane (sic) over Amazon’s limiting of its text-to-speech feature. They were apparently insensed enough to show up at the Authors’ Guild Headquarters to stage a protest. The Authors’ Guild, if you recall, urged Amazon to curb the text-to-speech feature - which Amazon did. 

The second part of the report highlighted a price rebellion by Kindle users due to the upcreep in eBook prices. (Please go to the WSJ site for the full enlightening article.)

Both of these items illustrate a healthy dose of consumer wrath from those pesky unintended consequences that always appear. Curb a feature to satisfy one group and you upset another group.  Price up eBooks and you invite protest. 

The Information Technology professional in me questions why some eBooks are as pricey as they are. (Remember that publishers set the price, not Amazon.) They require no printing presses, paper, ink, shelf space, overproduction, inventory,  remaindering, or returns to deal with. Distribution is Delivery on Demand - a publisher’s golden goose. But the price creep tempts consumers to the dark side to find ways around the security and protection schemes. Keeping the price reasonable will encourage consumers to stay legal, buy more, keep the writing business a paying profession.

Hopefully, publishers will hear the will of the people and not get their golden goose made in to pate’.

All Things Digital interviewed none other than media mogul Rupert Murdock recently. The publishing giant told the reporter that his techies were mulling a 4-color eReader to enter the competitive fray led by Sony and Amazon.

Add to that a similar move by Hearst Publishing and you have some new and unlikely players in the eReader market.

The real question here is just which part of the market are they trying to reach? After all, both Murdock and Hearst sell news. Will consumers flock to eReaders built by said companies? Or, will consumers look to as-yet-unnamed tech companies offering the best bang for the buck?  The future is cloudy at best. It remains to be seen that media companies like Hearst and Murdock can lure readers onto their platforms when there are so many alternatives including low-cost netbooks and smartphones. If nothing else, their entry could spawn the same kind of lower-cost and richer feature set that other technologies have already experienced.

Officals of the renowned Non Booker Award for Fiction gave the coveted honor today to author Mike Silvestri for not publishing his first attempt at fiction titled Children of the Clouds. Margaret Atwood, (The Handmaid’s Tale) said, “The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.”  Stephen King (The Stand) was also quoted saying, ” The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” And President Barak Obama chimed in saying, “Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.”

The author could not be reached for immediate comment though it is rumored he was dusting off the twenty-five-year-old manuscript just to spite his critique partners at their next meeting.