The Noble Pen for Oct. 12, 2017

Next Noble Pen Meeting

October 12th, 2017 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Recent announcements include the Nobel Prize in literature and the National Book Awards finalist list.

Victories

Aime started another story.

Dylan participated in ICON.

Ciuin sent Petty Theft to press for a small run.  She wrote four school papers.

Stacy is blogging.

Education

The Awesome Indies site has a great list of criteria for a well-written book and has assembled enough excellent educational material on that page and its links for a full-semester course in writing.

You are competing with perhaps a million titles per year.  Self-publishing has become easy and popular.  With that comes a huge volume of material with little quality control, making it hard to sort out the good from the bad.  Awesome Indies has been so overwhelmed with submissions of dubious quality that they now require either good reviews elsewhere or a substantial submission fee.

A few years back, Chuck Wendig the Crude (language warning) posted a rambling rant about the problem, that a lot of people agree with, and the situation has not improved.

In addition to bad writing, Amazon and other ebook purveyors have been plagued for years with trash “books” that may be thrown together without even a readable story.  With a few minutes work on multiple computers, those can be given good reviews to fool a few customers into buying them.

More recently, perpetrators have stolen real book content, used programs to change some synonyms and wordings to evade plagiarism detectors, and posted to Amazon for some quick sales, using several tricks to boost their apparent popularity.

It is also possible to produce automatically generated “books” that are just an assemblage of words that pass some algorithm.  While such a system could possibly be used to gather information on a subject, most such offerings are just spam.

Upcoming Schedule

October 12
Laura
Ciuin
Eric

October 19
Dakota
Aime
Ciuin

October 26
Stacie S.
Stacy H.
Uriah

November 2
Nick
Open slots

November 9
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill