Company Blog
How Long Tale Press Chooses Books
by Nathan Everett on 07/19/2010 (Permalink)
I thought I would take people for a tour inside what happens at Long Tale Press in celebration of its second anniversary open to the public.
Long Tale Press was conceived based on the concept that there were a lot of good stories that would never see publication because their market was limited, they didn't make the right connections with agents and editors, or the author simply didn't have the ability to sell her work. On the other hand, technology was changing rapidly. It was apparent to us that eBooks were going to capture an increasing amount of the market, especially in niche markets where mass production was prohibitive. Our initial intent was to focus exclusively on eBooks, but we've expanded that considerably.
At Long Tale Press we decided that we would build the publishing process around what people wanted to read. So we developed a juried selection process. It works simply: Any author can submit up to the first 5,000 words of his novel at our site. Readers read and review the excerpt, rating it in four significant areas: Story concept, Writing quality, Character development, and Would you buy it? Excerpts accumulate points based on these ratings. Exceeding 100 points gains the writer an invitation to submit the entire manuscript to Long Tale Press. From the review pool, three reviewers are chosen (volunteers) to read the entire book and provide the author feedback. This will take from 30 to 90 days as the reviewers are all people who read for their enjoyment, not people whose jobs are to read through the slush pile. While the primary job of the review pool is to determine if the entire manuscript lives up to the promise of the first 5000 words, we encourage the review pool to be detailed and specific in their comments. These are passed on to the author with our publishing recommendation.
The publishing recommendation will be one of three things.
- Thank you, but we don't feel the book is ready to be published. The work needed to get it ready is more than LTP feels it can invest in.
- Thank you, let's get this book published. We're ready to invest our time in editing, design, and production.
- Thank you. Your book shows great promise and we'd like to see it through, but you'll notice the comments from the review pool suggest some revisions that need to be made. If you are willing to make the commitment to revise and rewrite as necessary, according to the comments that are enclosed, we'd like to pursue helping you get it ready for publication.
The last option is the most likely. Before you go with the "Aha! They want money," conclusion, Long Tale Press doesn't sell any services, nor do we recommend the purchase of services to edit a book or get it ready to publish. If an author is ready to make the commitment to revise, we will continue to review the work as it progresses, make comments and suggestions, and encourage the author in getting it finished. We're just not going to do the work for him.
If we determine that the author has fulfilled her agreement to rewrite and we can take the book to publication, we offer a contract to publish the work. When the book comes in "ready to publish" our real work begins. Before we release a book, we will do a line-by-line copy edit. We don't want typos, copy/paste errors, or wrong words (like then/than, sit/set, lay/lie, etc.) to slip into a book. Then we take care of cover art and design, layout, and production. Long Tale Press is neither self-publishing nor vanity press. The only time an author pays LTP anything is if the author decides to buy print copies at wholesale cost to sell at events, book-signings, speaking engagements, etc. We offer a generous royalty based on net received above cost of goods, figured on a book-by-book basis, not up front costs.
Then there is the question of whether we are going to produce a print book or an eBook or something else. When we make this decision, it is based on a number of factors regarding the specific book market as we see it, the quality of the reviews received, the cost of production, and our gut feeling in the matter. Our baseline is to publish as an eBook and if all the other factors merit it, publish a short-run print edition (100-500 copies). In nearly all cases we will do a print-quality layout and design of the book to make it available as a PDF eBook or print-on-demand book. We'll also create an industry-standard ePUB book. The book will be sold through the Long Tale Press bookstore, Amazon.com, and other channels as we can open them.
Having discovered that even avid eBook readers really like something to put on their bookshelf, we've begun publishing our eBooks on CD-ROM. The disk holds both the ePUB and PDF versions of the book and is packaged in a book-like case with the full cover art so it can be put on the bookshelf and installed on any computer or reading device the reader would like. They can even put it in their garage sale if that's what they decide to do!
Well, that's a peak inside Long Tale Press. We continue to be committed to finding and publishing quality fiction.
Another Open Letter to Amazon
by Jason on 05/29/2010 (Permalink)
Today I came across an Open Letter to Amazon in which author John Betcher proposes how Amazon could create an "indie book index" to help buyers know what's good and what isn't among independently published and self-published books.
The problem Mr. Betcher addresses is a serious one. It's not easy for independent publishers to get trusted, well-known book reviewers to review their publications. It's even harder for self-published authors. Yet, when shopping online, reviews are one of the chief sources of quality assurance customers look for.
I encourage you to read the full text of Betcher's open letter, but in short his proposal amounts to Amazon a) allowing customer reviews on indie and self-published books (note: they already do allow customer reviews on independent publishers' books; I can't personally speak to how they treat self-published books), and b) developing some kind of algorithms it can use to filter out spammy ratings for times when a self-published author rallies fifty of his closest friends and family to rate up his book.
It's a good idea, and would certainly help level the playing field for indie and self-published books versus books from the big-name publishers.
However, based on my experience running this website, I see a different solution.
I don't think Amazon should necessarily be in the business of trying to automatically filter out spam from customer reviews. People understand that those represent a certain sort of "Wild West" of information, and know to take it with a big grain of salt.
The real problem Betcher is encouraging Amazon to solve is how to give customers confidence that a book doesn't suck.
For that, a stamp of approval from a reviewer who has experience, and thus credibility, is key. So my suggestion would be that Amazon create a system whereby indie and self-published authors could earn those, rather than trying to police the Wild West of customer reviews. I mean, sure I'd love it if I could just pick up the phone and get Kirkus to review everything in Long Tale Press's catalog. That would be awesome. But it's not the only way to provide that stamp of approval.
If I were Jeff Bezos, here's how I would do it:
Data-mine the existing set of customer reviews to find customers who are already in the habit of reviewing a lot of books, and doing so in a substantive and unbiased way. To some extent Amazon already does this (and who knows what they do that we don't yet know about!)
Invite those people to join a pool of "Amazon Approved" reviewers. These people could submit reviews that would appear above the fold on Amazon's book pages, in the space where you typically see reviews from Publishers Weekly and other well-known reviewers.
Data mine the tastes and preferences of those special, blessed reviewers, so as to send books to the reviewers who are best able to judge that book's merits (e.g. don't send a Sci-fi book to someone who only reads Harlequin romances).
When indie and self-published books reach a certain threshhold of sales, send a free copy of the book to an appropriate person from the review pool. Done.
The idea here is that Amazon could use the data it already has to kick-start a community of trusted reviewers large enough to supply the reviewing needs of books that in fact deserve a review. Because not all of them will.
Amazon is still going to have to balance the workload: there will always be more self-pub and indie books out there than any reasonable pool of reviewers can give proper attention to. But, if you know the slushpile like I do (and since we put our slushpile up for all to see, you do), you'll know just as well as I do that most of those books really don't deserve any particular attention.
I think this model would work better than Betcher's proposed system for a few reasons. First, it would be a lot easier to implement. Trust me, I was a programmer in a past life, so I have a good sense for evaluating the technical feasibility of ideas like these. Betcher's idea pre-supposes that we can accurately teach computers to infer the intentions of people submitting customer reviews. That's a hard, hard problem for a computer to solve. My proposal doesn't do that, but relies on the ability to merely detect people who are good at doing reviews. These people can be vetted by hand, if necessary, by spot-checking their reviews.
Second, my proposal is an extension of an existing model that already works. The whole reason why people trust reviews from Kirkus or Publishers Weekly or whomever is precisely because not just anybody can join. It is an intentionally exclusive club. Customer reviews have their place (and I often make my final buy/no-buy decision based on them), but I don't think they're the solution to the problem Betcher is pointing out. Rather, let's have Amazon tap its vast, existing community of book lovers to create its own intentionally exclusive club, and turn them to the task of evaluating the tidal wave of indie and self-published books.
People love print
by Jason on 05/11/2010 (Permalink)
You've heard it all: Ebooks are the wave of the future. Ebooks will replace print. And on and on. We at Long Tale Press love ebooks for many reasons, and we agree that ebooks are indeed the wave of the future.
But the future isn't quite here yet.
Until it is, we have to deal with right now. Which means doing more books on good old-fashioned paper, because people still love paper. Our experience with This Side of Normal is that the paperback vastly out-sells the ebook, despite costing twice as much.
Moving forward, we will be offering print on a much more regular basis. The details are yet to be worked out, but we lean towards doing at least a small print run for any new title. No promises yet--our final decision may change--but our inclination is to offer print by default unless there's some compelling reason not to.
Along with that, we are in the process of redesigning the books in our catalog with new cover art, new interior book design (we are very fortunate to have a veteran book designer on staff!), in preparation for sending those books to print. Our entire catalog will be available in print sometime this summer.
But, we still love ebooks and ebooks are still the wave of the future, so we're also working hard to expand our distribution options for ebooks. All of our eBooks will soon be available in the industry standard ePub format that will play and reflow on most eReaders (Sony, Nook, iPad, and more). And we are expanding distribution of eBooks through existing commercial channels (Amazon and such).
And to echo something I blogged here a long time ago, our ebooks will continue to be offered with no DRM. We sell books, not licenses. We believe that when you buy a book, you should be able to read it on any device or computer you own. In whatever form, our books are cherished possessions, not licenses to content.
RSS feed: actually works now!
by Jason on 06/08/2009 (Permalink)
According to my server logs, 41 of you noticed that we quietly unveiled an RSS feed for this blog over the weekend.
Some smaller number of you will have noticed that only the RSS feed embedded in the site homepage was working. The rest were broken in one of those dumb ways that is, fortunately, easy to fix.
Oops.
Anyway, it's all fixed now. You can access the feed through the auto-discovery link in your browser or directly from your feed reader here.
Minor Change to Author Contract
by Jason on 06/05/2009 (Permalink)
Our Terms of Service says I'm obligated to explain any changes to our Standard Author Contract, so here goes.
Don't worry, it's a good thing.
We've realized that there's no reason not to make everything we publish available through Amazon. Really, we should have thought of this a long time ago. So, the standard author contract, which you can find over in the About area, now guarantees that if we publish your book, you'll see it on Amazon as well as in our store. That's it.
We have a winner!
by Jason on 06/02/2009 (Permalink)
Everyone stop by the forums and congratulate ChristineC, whose submission The Offering has reached 100 points!
Way to go Christine!
Christine's book will now go to a review panel of community members who will read the whole novel, and provide commentary she can use to produce a final draft. If the novel holds up as well as the 5000 word submission did, you'll see The Offering in our store sometime this fall!
Another Writer Blog
by Jason on 05/27/2009 (Permalink)
Recently, I read D.M. Cornish's fantasy novel Foundling. Today I found his blog. It's a good blog, with actual insights into the writing and editing process.
If you write fantasy, I recommend both the blog and the book. Cornish is a master of scene setting and world building. I haven't read a fictional setting that is as richly-textured as this probably since Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
See what getting published can do for you?
by Jason on 05/02/2009 (Permalink)
Long Tale Press's own Eric Devine author of This Side of Normal (which you can see just to your left), has had a really nice article written about him in the Times Union newspaper. This is the kind of great press that writing a great book can get you. Way to go, Eric! Be sure to check out the photo-gallery attached to that article, too...
No DRM, now and forever
by Jason on 04/22/2009 (Permalink)
The other day, Nathan found an article on DRM from Cory Doctorow. It's worth a read because he's talking about the book industry.
While we at Long Tale Press fully agree with what Doctorow is saying, there's another reason we don't DRM our eBooks:
We believe most people are good people.
Our instinct is to trust people, until they demonstrate otherwise. A few people probably will steal eBooks from us, but most won't. It's just not worth distrusting everyone to make it harder for a few people to steal copies of our books.
Storycrafting on Raiders of the Lost Ark
by Jason on 03/12/2009 (Permalink)
I just stumbled across a jewel of a web page that looks at the story crafting process that went into the blockbuster film Raiders of the Lost Ark, and gives ten great take-away lessons for your own storycrafting.
While this article looks at screenplay development, rather than novel crafting, the lessons are inherently the same: figure out who your protagonist is, figure out how to build tension, and the like. I particularly liked the insight that in many instances the plot of Indy was created backwards, from desired outcomes to the necessary setup that makes them believable.
Anyway, give it a read. It's good stuff.
Welcome, Funds for Writers subscribers!
by Jason on 02/06/2009 (Permalink)
Last October, if memory serves, the Funds for Writers newsletter included a short blurb about Long Tale Press in one of their mailings. About forty new writers joined our community in the few days that followed, many of whom submitted their work here.
One of those submissions, Eric Devine's excellent work This Side of Normal, really struck a chord with the community. His submission accumulated points in our community-based rating system faster than we ever dreamed was possible. In about three weeks Eric's book had garnered enough support for us to publish it.
The book is in the final stages of production now (it's at the printers), and will be available in early March.
No agents. No query letters. No wondering for months and months whether you're going to get lucky, or get a rejection letter.
So congratulations to Eric, and welcome to anyone finding us now for the first time. May you all have the same success here!
Minor upgrade to messaging system.
by Jason on 01/17/2009 (Permalink)
I found out the other day that the messaging feature (which you can find in the My Account -> Messages area) didn't come, as implemented by our web programmers, with the ability to let you send to multiple recipients.
Weird.
Anyway, I made it do so. To send a message to more than one user, just put their login names on the "to" line, separated by commas.
Recommendations
by Jason on 01/12/2009 (Permalink)
If you take a look in the Submissions area, you'll notice a new column in the Browse listing that shows recommended submissions. For many people, I suspect that column is empty because you haven't subscribed to anyone's recommendations. Here's how it works:
When someone reviews a submission, there's a box they can check to recommend the excerpt, and a place where they can add a sentence or two about why they think others ought to read it. That recommendation then becomes visible to anyone who has subscribed that person's recommendations through that person's profile page.
So, look through the forums, look through the "all reviews" tab on submissions you have reviewed, and when you find people who seem to have an eye for a good submission, click on their name to get to their profile page, and click the Subscribe button.
Who knows what hidden gems you might that way?
This Side of Normal Update
by Jason on 01/10/2009 (Permalink)
True to his word, Eric Devine has been keeping his personal blog updated with his experiences of producing a final, print-ready draft of his book This Side of Normal. It is interesting and informative reading for anyone who may face this process someday. Eric has also posted a number of moving short essays which are very well written and are worth reading in their own right.
Site Instability
by Jason on 01/06/2009 (Permalink)
Yesterday I discovered a bug in the Writer Zone pages; authors who have only one submission were unable to access the Writer Zone from Saturday evening through Monday evening. My bad. In doing some code-cleanup maintenance, I managed to break something. It's fixed now.
I'm truly sorry for the mistake, for blocking writers' ability to check in on their submissions, and on a broader note for having introduced both this bug and the earlier message-reply bug I fixed yesterday. While on one level a certain amount of instability is probably inevitable when introducing new features, on another level these sorts of bugs are really not acceptable to us even for short periods of time. The buggy behavior of our website over the past three days doesn't match the level of service and professionalism that myself and the other owners of Long Tale Press strive for.
My apologies to everyone. I will be evaluating the procedures I use for testing new features and bug fixes before I deploy them to the live site, in an effort to do a better job in the future. My apologies.
Author's Blog
by Jason on 01/02/2009 (Permalink)
Eric Devine, whose book This Side of Normal we are in the process of publishing, is in the middle of producing his final draft and has decided to blog about the process of editing his manuscript for publication.
The book will be in our bookstore sometime in February, for anyone who has been waiting to find out what happens to the hero of Long Tale Press's first successful submission!
New Look, New Features!
by Jason on 12/17/2008 (Permalink)
At long, long last, the new batch of site features is deployed. You'll notice immediately a wider layout that looks a little better and does a nicer job for the forums. Over in the "My Account" area, you'll notice a site-wide e-mail feature, where you can send private messages to other users. When you review new excerpts, you'll notice the ability to save an excerpt as a draft, so you can work on it in bits and pieces before finally submitting it when you're happy with it (although of course neither you nor the excerpt gets any points for doing the review until you've submitted it). In the bookstore, you'll start seeing detail pages for the items that are up for sale, as soon as we get them filled in, and the ability to rate and review stuff that's for sale too. Writers will notice that they now have the option of specifying what kind of manuscript they've written: novel, novella, or short story collection. The forums have been re-worked to support a better category structure, which will make it a lot easier for people to start conversations on all sorts of topics and find them later.
I will add detailed instructions on how to use all this stuff over in the Help area in the next day or so.
Anyway, go explore and enjoy the new features! And as always, don't hesitate to let us know over in the forums if you think of any other ways we could improve the site.
Nathan on NaNoWriMo's Podcast!
by Jason on 11/21/2008 (Permalink)
Long Tale Press's very own Nathan Everett, was interviewed for this past wednesday's episode of National Novel Writing Month's podcase, WriMo Radio.
Aside from his night-shift work as one of Long Tale Press's founders, he spends his day-shift working at Microsoft, where he has recruited a bunch of eager writers at Microsoft to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. No wonder WriMo Radio wanted to talk to him!
RIP, Michael Crichton
by Jason on 11/05/2008 (Permalink)
Yesterday, amid the hoopla of the presidential election, the writing world lost another bright light. Michael Crichton, author of several decades' worth of groundbreaking thrillers from the Andromeda Strain to Jurassic Park and the man who almost single-handedly invented the TV medical-thriller genre with his work on E.R., passed away at age 66 from a private battle with cancer.
Crichton's books number more than any of us are likely to ever write, let alone publish. Although his writing has sometimes been criticized as being too plot-driven and populated by one-dimensional characters, surely no one can deny that Crichton had a magic touch for drama that kept readers turning pages by the millions.
Arguably, nobody knew more about building suspense and layering in the complications than Michael Crichton. Reading Jurassic Park is practically a graduate level course, for anyone who's paying attention, in smoothly implementing the maxim "no matter how bad your characters' situation, it can always be made worse." First, the dinosaurs that aren't supposed to be able to breed, do. Then they get out. Then a storm comes up. Then the power goes out. Then the T-Rex escapes. The difficulties keep mounting, higher and higher, and Crichton does a flawless job of making each new trouble seem entirely plausible, entirely believable, and in fact almost inevitable. It's a thrill a minute, scary as heck, and we love every word of it.
Rest in peace, Mr. Crichton, and thanks for all the great adventures.
Go Vote!
by Jason on 11/03/2008 (Permalink)
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past two years (which I'm guessing you haven't, if you're reading this), you'll be aware that tomorrow is election day in the United States. So, to all our U.S. members, let me just say GO VOTE!
Go early, and come prepared. Lines are likely to be incredibly long at some polling stations, and this time of year inclement weather is always a possibility. Bring an umbrella, a folding chair, and some sort of snack or drink. If you feel you must wear a shirt or jacket with your candidate's name on it, be prepared to cover it up; election law restricts political speech within a certain distance of a polling station, and some states construe this to include clothing that names a specific candidate. Play it safe and protect your vote.
Happy Election Day!
Tony Hillerman dies.
by Jason on 10/27/2008 (Permalink)
Acclaimed, best-selling mystery writer Tony Hillerman has died. He was 83 years old. Hillerman was the author of a series of popular mysteries set in the Navajo Nation, following the exploits of Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.
NPR has a copy of the Associated Press's obituary up at their website.
The literary world has lost a giant today. Our thoughts go out to the Hillerman family and all of Mr. Hillerman's countless fans and admirers.
The two-page bug is squashed!
by Jason on 10/21/2008 (Permalink)
After far too long, that weird bug we had in our submission reader pages where some submissions wouldn't flip past the second page is fixed! Yay!
Or at least we think it is. If anyone sees it show up on any more excerpts, please post a bug report over in the Back Talk forum.
New features from the list posted here will be coming online over the next three to four weeks also. Stay tuned!
Congratulations to Edevine!
by Jason on 10/08/2008 (Permalink)
Edevine's first rate submission This Side of Normal is the first submission on this website to reach 100 points! Head over to the discussion thread and give Edevine a pat on the back. That's more than a great accomplishment. That's sufficient proof that this community wants that book published!
Submission guidelines & reader bug
by Jason on 10/02/2008 (Permalink)
Two bits of news: First, the question came up of whether Long Tale Press accepts short story collections. We couldn't think of a reason why not, so we have amended the submissions guidelines to explicitly permit that. Read the full guidelines if you're interested.
Second: the submission reader bug. There's a bug where for some submissions, the paging mechanism breaks and won't show anything past page two. Yes, we're looking into it. The behavior seems to be specific to IE; I haven't seen any problems in Firefox. In the meantime, you can read the entirety of such an excerpt by clicking the "scroll" button in the upper left of the submission.
Sage advice for us all
by Jason on 10/01/2008 (Permalink)
One of my favorite web comics is XKCD. Today's entry is such good advice for all of us here that I couldn't let it pass without pointing it out. Enjoy!
Welcome new users!
by Jason on 09/27/2008 (Permalink)
How wonderful to see so many new names show up in the past couple of days, and how much more wonderful that so many of you have brought great writing along with you!
Please don't forget to head to the Community area and fill in your user profile--tell us a little about yourself and what you like to read. And let me also encourage everyone to remember that this site doesn't discriminate between readers and writers. Readers are encouraged to write their own novels and submit them, and writers are encouraged to review other people's work too. If you want reviews you should give reviews, and also this is not a competition: any submission that earns enough points will get published.
Forum tweak: spoilers
by Jason on 09/24/2008 (Permalink)
Some folks have pointed out that the way our spoiler tags work when people see them and click to show the content was, well, a little weird and buggy. So I fixed it. The new way is (at least to my eye) visually cleaner and doesn't have the problems that were bothering people, so let us know what you think. Feedback, good and bad, is welcome over in the Back Talk forum.
Privacy Policy Update
by Jason on 09/14/2008 (Permalink)
I have amended our privacy policy to cover two additional cases when Long Tale Press might send you e-mail: 1) if you violate our site's terms of use or submission guidelines and we are informing you of whatever actions we've taken as a result, 2) you e-mailed us first with a question or support request of some kind.
Here is the Updated Policy if you want to read it in detail.
What would you put in our FAQ?
by Jason on 08/28/2008 (Permalink)
Now that we have 73 (and counting!) users in our community, this seems like a good time to ask what questions you all have about how our process works, how to do various things on our site, et cetera.. We'd be much obliged if you could take a moment to visit this discussion over in the forums and let us know! Thanks!
Search is nice, but...
by Jason on 08/25/2008 (Permalink)
Let's face it, you don't always want to search for stuff. Sometimes it's nice to browse in a semi-random fashion until something strikes your fancy. If you're anything like me, thinking of search terms isn't any fun when all you want is "show me something interesting." So, we've added a Browse page to the Submissions area.
Browsing will be more interesting when the site gets bigger and there are more excerpts to deal with, but for now at least you have a one-click way to see a bunch of stuff to choose from.
And whether you like it, love it, or hate it, please let us know how you think we could make it better over in the Back Talk forum.
Site Feedback Discussions
by Jason on 08/24/2008 (Permalink)
We know our site isn't perfect. To give you a place to tell us where we've got it wrong, you'll find a "Back Talk" discussion area over in the Forums. Two of the discussions there are for you to tell us about problems: "Cursable Moments" is for things that don't work like you expected, and "Why can't I" is for feature requests. We'll use the "Bug Status" discussion for news about the progress of fixing any bugs. Please create new topics in Back Talk to tell us about bugs you find.
Spoilers and Excerpt Tags
by Jason on 08/20/2008 (Permalink)
I'm pleased to announce that we've got spoiler markup working in the Forums, and that writers can now tag their excerpts to give readers a better sense for their stories' categories than you can get from just a genre label.
Spoiler markup works by surrounding text within "[spoiler]" and "[/spoiler]" marks. Especially in the "Book Talk" forum, where you can discuss excerpts and books that some people may not have read yet, please be considerate and use this feature if you feel like you have to mention something significant about the story. So for example, if we had a discussion thread about, say, Citizen Kane, you might write:
"and at the very end, you find out [spoiler]Rosebud was his SLED![/spoiler]"
When you encounter one of these while reading, just click on it to see the spoiler.
Excerpt tags work like tags on most blogging sites do; you can tag your excerpts with whatever you want, and people can search against those in the Submissions area. If you've seen so-called "tag clouds" or "folksonomies" on sites like LiveJournal and many others, this is like that. Coming soon, we'll also have tags show up in the search results to help you decide which excerpts you actually want to read.
Writers, please take a minute to edit the details for your excerpts and add tags (go to Writer Zone, click the Edit button for your excerpt, and add tags on the Details tab). Try to choose tags that are relevant to a particular genre and help differentiate your work from other works in the same genre. For example, an excerpt with a genre of thriller might have a tag of political, while another entry in the thriller category might be tagged with courtroom. You can add as many tags as you feel you need to adequately describe your work.
Bookstore and Forum News
by Jason on 08/15/2008 (Permalink)
I am truly delighted to say that after a far too long delay and more bureaucratic hurdles than I want to face for a long, long time, our book store is finally open for business.
In other news, I finally got around to implementing the "Book Talk" forum, where you'll find auto-created threads for every Excerpt in the Submissions section. Use these threads to discuss the various excerpts in the system with other users. Please be aware, however, that anyone can read these threads, even people who haven't yet read the excerpt. So please be sensitive about spoilers. The plan is eventually to have "[spoiler]" tags you can use to mark spoiler content so readers will have to explicitly click to show the text, but until then please just exercise your best judgment as to what is and isn't a spoiler.
Changes to Terms of Service and Author Contract
by Jason on 08/08/2008 (Permalink)
A helpful soul on the NaNoWriMo website pointed out that we had some language in our Terms of Service document that conflicted with what it says in our Author Contract. The change relates to intellectual property and who owns the copyright to a work, so it's fairly important, and hence this notice. Our thanks to BenPanced for pointing out the problem.
In short, the language in both documents has been clarified to mean that if we publish one of your books, the copyright will be registered in your name and we will license the rights to the work. In long, as it were, you can read the revised documents in our About section. The relevant parts are paragraph 1 in the "Intellectual Property" section of our Terms of Service document, and paragraph 5 of the Author contract.
The bookstore is (almost) open!
by Jason on 08/02/2008 (Permalink)
If you click on over to the Book Store section of the site, you'll see the makings of your typical e-commerce site: products, a shopping cart, et cetera. However, we're having some wrinkles in the payment processing part, so for the moment (I can't believe I'm saying this) please don't try to buy anything.
In the meantime, remember that nothing gets published here that isn't rated highly by readers like you, so please pop on over to the Submissions area and tell us which excerpts you think are worthy. We're eager to publish more good stuff as soon as you tell us what that is!
We're on the NaNoWriMo Blog!
by Jason on 07/30/2008 (Permalink)
As is written elsewhere on this site, it's fair to say that Long Tale Press wouldn't exist without the influence of National Novel Writing Month in our lives. Consequently, we are all terribly pleased and gratified that the blogmistress at NaNoWriMo has seen fit to publish our little story on their blog.
To our existing community, go check it out! And to any WriMos who have found us through the NaNo Blog, a hearty welcome to you! We hope you'll look around, like what you see, and join our nascent community.
Outage Alert
by Jason on 07/30/2008 (Permalink)
Update:
The IP changes seem to have taken effect, and we don't expect further outages at this time. Thank you for your patience!
In order to enable secure e-commerce on our site, we had to change some settings with our hosting provider which involved moving the server to a different IP address. As with all things related to IP addresses, this may cause some temporary outages over the next couple of days. We're terribly sorry about that, but alas, it can't be helped. No data on the site--submissions, user reviews, profiles, et cetera--will be affected.
Classic Fiction
by Jason on 07/22/2008 (Permalink)
You may have noticed some entries in our system from familiar names: Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, et cetera. Why? We're running an experiment.
Just because something is old and famous doesn't mean it's good. Maybe it is, but that's hardly a given. So to help people get used to our system, we thought we'd throw some classic works into the mix. This stuff is in the public domain, and has helpfully been keyed in by the good folks at Project Gutenberg.
The idea is for you all to rate and review them against the standards we would apply to new fiction today. Do the classics hold up? As always, we'll publish whichever ones you say are worthy--we've picked texts that don't currently have good eBook and Audio Book formats already--and will donate the authors' share of the proceeds back to Project Gutenberg.
Ok, now I'm finished.
by Jason on 07/21/2008 (Permalink)
The content clipping bug has been fixed. Readers, thank you for your patience, now please go find an interesting looking submission and start reading, rating, and reviewing!
Wait, I'm not fi...
by Jason on 07/21/2008 (Permalink)
That content clipping but that's causing excerpts to show only the first 255 characters? This is what comes of not minding one's database column types carefully enough. I've got our database guy working on it, and will let you know as soon as it's fixed.
Good Bug Hunting
by Jason on 07/19/2008 (Permalink)
The good news is that yesterday's bugs in the signup and submission systems have been fixed. Anyone who wasn't able to sign up yesterday can certainly do so today.
Those who did manage to sign up and submit excerpts yesterday--and those who submit excerpts today, too--need to make sure their excerpt has a valid rating in order for it to show up in the search results. Go to the Writer Zone, edit your excerpt, and be sure to assign Genre and Rating tags on the Details tab.
Glitches...
by Jason on 07/18/2008 (Permalink)
Murphy wins again.
As you've seen if you've tried to sign up with the site in the past couple of hours, the signup page is just a wee bit broken at the moment.
Our lead developer is working furiously on it, and I have every confidence that he'll have it all fixed as soon as possible. Thanks for understanding!
We're Open!
by Jason on 07/18/2008 (Permalink)
It has been a sprint--or maybe a marathon--to get this site into shape, but it's finally close enough to where we want it that we can't bear to wait anymore.
The Writer Zone, the Submissions area, the Community section, and the discussion Forums are open. Our bookstore will be coming online August 1st.
Until then, we decided to do something fun: find out if so-called "classic" books live up to the standards of today's readers. In the Submissions area you'll find several classics that are now in the public domain from the good folks at Project Gutenberg. Please read them, rate them, and review them just like you would any other submission to our press. If you say any of them are good enough, we'll publish them into eBook and Audio Book format, and will donate half the proceeds from any sales on those books back to Project Gutenberg!