Why so quiet...?

If you haven't noticed it yet, most of my blogging these days is happening over here.

Repeat After Me: There is no free lunch.

A Michael Jackson juror who last month announced a book deal and said he believed the pop star was guilty of child molestation has filed a lawsuit to break his publishing contract.

Ray Hultman and his wife, Darlene Hultman, filed the lawsuit in Superior
Court in Santa Maria on Wednesday, claiming they were novices suckered into
signing a book pact with publisher Larry Garrison, owner of the Lake
Sherwood-based SilverCreek Entertainment.

"Plaintiff's reliance on Garrison's representations was justified in
light of their aforementioned simplicity, naiveté, overly trusting natures, lack
of sophistication and inexperience, and Garrison's motivational skills and
ability to 'sell' and promote himself and/or his business ventures," according
to the suit.

Hultman, 62, of Santa Maria wants out of his contract and is seeking
unspecified damages for mental and emotional stress. Also named in the suit is
Hultman's agent, Bill Gladstone of Cardiff by the Sea, and Los Angeles author
Stacy Brown.

Read more here.

Can I Get An Amen....

But is anyone listening? Many book bloggers seem to be talking only to themselves, judging by the dearth of postings by outsiders on their sites.

Leave it to the Christian Science Monitor to emphasize my point. You'll notice in the cleaned-up links, we've removed most of the usual suspects. One will suffice.

Well, duh...

But here's the thing. Readers don't go to publisher's websites. And publishers are doing themselves a marketing disservice by encouraging them to. It's counterintuitive to how readers shop. Publishers have a short memory, what happened to all those hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent on their websites in the hopes they'd get readers coming to see what was new there instead of going to Amazon?

MJ Rose talks about what's wrong with how book publishers plan to use Podcasting. As usual, she's dead-on.

To sum up: Read it, loved it, got it past editorial board, made the P&L work, got it past pub board, signed it—ten days from submission to offer. Number of people who had to approve acquisition: at least a dozen.

To anyone who ever read (and believed) it's easier to get a book deal than an agent, please click here.

Welcome Readers....

If you missed my goodbye note over at Tripod, I've moved here and am rather happy about it. After two years with Tripod, we just decided it was time for us to see other people.

Business as usual over here - you'll notice the Google Adwords, and that's on purpose. Go ahead, click on 'em, why don't ya.

If you click on my profile in the next couple of days, you'll be able to see other blogs I'm cooking up, too. Who knows, you might like one.

Rehnquist, rejected...

Even Rehnquist - R.I.P. - had issues getting book deals:

A published author of history books, Rehnquist found himself behind the times when he tried to interest a literary agent in a whodunit he called ``Murder in the Paw Paw Tunnel.'' The agent wanted a high-tech element such as computer theft in the plot, he said in 1994. ``I don't know anything about computers, much less computer theft.''

For more on his life, click here .

Damn, Even the Vagabond Life Costs Money...

For all those wondering what it would be like to pack it in, this is a good one...


At one time or another, perhaps on the bus ride from that heartbreakingly perfect beach bungalow to the airport, the thought must have tempted you: What if I didn't go home?

You probably started calculating: If I sold everything, I could stay out here on the road for years, drifting from one idyllic destination to the next, from one adventure to another, following my whims around the globe. And then, when the bus got to the airport, you snapped out of your reverie and boarded the plane for home.

Elliott Hester never let go of the fantasy. In the fall of 2002 he set off on an 18-month, around-the-world adventure. But instead of coming home, as he originally planned, he cashed in the return ticket and has been on the road ever since, living as, he calls it, a "continental drifter."

Regular readers of Travel will recognize Hester's name. A flight attendant on leave from American Airlines, he's the author of the best-selling "Plane Insanity." Many of his essays have appeared in these pages. His latest book, "Adventures of a Continental Drifter: An Around-the-World Excursion into Weirdness, Danger, Lust, and the Perils of Street Food" (St. Martin's Press), arrived in bookstores this week. Curious to know whether the reality lived up to the fantasy, I recently interviewed him via e-mail.

Perhaps most disconcerting about the article is the revelation that this homeless life requires $36,000 per year. For more, click here .

One of Those, "Hey Don't Feel So Bad Stories..."

Most shocking to me is the idea that Baldacci has only been around since '96. Seems much longer....

Best-selling novelist David Baldacci did not sell a single manuscript for 15 years.

Few people knew that after a full day of work, the trial attorney rushed downstairs to his home office at about 10 every night to write for another four hours. For years, he wrote in obscurity with no feedback except rejection slips, he says.

"If you love to write, you'll keep going," says Mr. Baldacci, a Fairfax County resident.

Mr. Baldacci published his first book, "Absolute Power," in 1996 with the help of his literary agent, Aaron Priest Literary Agency in New York City. Since then, he's kept the same agent, publishing nine additional national and international best-sellers, including his latest mystery thriller, "Hour Game," in 2004.

Mr. Baldacci and area authors, writing instructors, editors and literary agents provide advice for writers who want to publish that first book.

"You have to develop a very thick skin because you will be bombarded with rejection slips. Trust me, I have a boxful," says Robert L. Giron, a published poet and the editor and publisher of Gival Press LLC, an independent publishing house of fiction, nonfiction and poetry in Arlington. He is a professor of English at the Takoma Park campus of Montgomery College, a community college with three locations in Maryland.

Read more here .