Podcast #158
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Announcements
- Corey Olsen, aka The Tolkien Professor is hosting a webcast for educators. click here to sign up for one of the two webcasts.
- Don’t forget it’s PiBoIdMo! Tara Lazar has some phenomenal guest bloggers this month helping you get ideas for your next picture books.
- It’s still Picture Book Month! I am celebrating every Wednesday right here on the show! Come back each week and join in on the fun with some amazing picture book authors. Also check out the Picture Book Month site here!
In This Week’s Episode You’ll Hear
- An update on my indie publishing experiment with Little Chicken’s Big Christmas
- Gratitude for listeners and supporters
- A new social media thing I’d never heard about – Scoop.it
- Mercer Mayer and his app exploration
- About Kristen Eckstein – the woman who did such an amazing job formatting my book for Kindle Fire
In The Interview You’ll Hear About
- Wacom and Cintiq
- A typical day for Mercer Mayer
- What his assistant does
- The two hardest things for him to do
- Invoking the cosmic mind
Sometimes I use affiliate links. if you click on them and buy what I recommend, I earn a referral fee. You do not pay any more than if you found the same thing through a search engine. It’s akin to going to a restaurant and getting a recommendation from the waitress on what’s good. You don’t pay more for the food she suggests, but you might tip her for her service.
In any case I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, recommend a product or person I don’t believe in or trust. Otherwise, how would you believe me next time?
Taurean Watkins
November 20, 2013 - 5:29 pm ·Quite an episode!
First, I want to apologize to MR. Mercer, as all this time (As a kid to now) I’ve seen your hundreds of books in bookstores and libraries I thought you were a woman. To be fair, I thought of Mercer as another form of “Mercy” or “Macy” which are commonly female names, just as the only people I kne personally whose name is “Kelly” are women, the only guy name Kelly I know of is the surfer, though I don’t know him personally, of course.
Also, men are a rare breed when you’re not the next Rick Riodan or something, and I say that not in jest, and I hope an author friend of mine (Who’s a BIG Rick Riodan fan) understands I say this not to spite him or any other author “famous” for getting boys engaged with reading.
Despite women saying they’re fighting for acceptance and chances (And I APPLAUD, respect and support that) men have our crosses to bear in publishing,from the author, to various positions in publishing, and agents and freelance editors.
Second, I have to take issue with writers not “leaving room for the illustrator.”
I agree writers who don’t illustrate have these tendencies, but I also remember when Katie mentioned in her interview with C.J. Alvarado (CEO at Snippet, a new e-reading platform) she had a different illustrator for this graphic novel project as she felt her illustration style wasn’t right for the project. Can we not open this up to non-illustrator authors? Especially when authors HAVE to do more than just write the dang book, we need input, that’s not the same is “Character G has to have a blue backpack” type of stuff.
But I’ve known highly competent, SANE, writers who’ve had bad experiences with
Also, for authors who self-publish with no help from a publisher (large or small) we need to have a certain level of say in the creation of the book BEYOND just the words, and just because writers can’t draw to save their lives doesn’t mean we have not eye
I’m not talking about superficial things like what a character might wear or what color their eyes are. Yeah, I feel some of that, but it’s not always that simple…
I’m also thinking about the “First Pages” segment from ep. #154 of Brain Burps where one of the issues (Understandably) cited is lack of character-driven pacing. But it’s HARD to find a balance between these things. I’m not whining, just saying there’s more nuance to this than I feel the last two podcast episodes have indicated.
As much as some picture book authors say text and images have to be ONE to be most effective, for authors who aren’t also illustrators this is HARD and I wish more author-illustrators, and (increasingly rare) non-author illustrators would understand and talk about.
All that said, I agree this subscription model for Adobe software is jerky, but I don’t agree it’s solely a marketing thing, people were HAPPILY paying for upgrades to use for as long as they wanted, no subscriptions.
For me, personally, the subscription model for MS office is REALLY annoying! I don’t like other office applications, plus, I still use Office 2007.
But I have to upgrade to 2010 to take advantage of easier PowerPoint conversions as I make most of my slideshows I use in various videos. Right now, finding decent PowerPoint conversion software work with .ppt files for Office 2007.
Anyway, insightful episode this week.
Sincerely,
Taurean J. Watkins
P.S: Katie, be thankful the worse people say minus an occasional four-letter word or the “P” word. That said, I appreciate when shows go on the side of safe for those of use who like to eat or cook while listening to podcasts.
How soon in these moments that people mistook your Twitter handle at times, and you even admit in your YouTube channel trailer the origins of your podcast’s name wasn’t the most savory, and I’ve heard worse, and I get it was mostly in jest, but I’m just saying what I’ve noticed.