Handy eBook Links for those experimenting with self-publishing

As eBooks become increasingly popular, writers curious about self-publishing will need a good collection of resources to turn to.  I was just working on a story about discoverability of Christian fiction titles for a Publishers Weekly piece that will be out in February. But I also double checked some of the formatting and iBookstore styles before I formatted and published my first book, Single and Happy.

It took a couple of hours of deep concentration to fix everything in the document, but it wasn't too painful. I wish I'd had links like the ones below to help me find everything in one place.

This GalleyCat link, Free eBook Formatting and Marketing Guide for Writers, has a lot of links to Style Guides in different formats. I've only used the Smashwords Style Guide and I perused the final link on the page but I didn't read it thoroughly.

This CNET article is a great resource for deciding how you want to self-publish, online or in print: How to self-publish an eBook.

The Root: Ayana Mathis' 8 Favorite Books

I briefly cracked The Twelve Tribes of Hattie on my way back to Texas from the East Coast and promptly had five other books to read for freelance assignments, so I haven't gone back to it yet. I know a couple of people were excited about it, and I noticed Isabel Wilkerson's review of it in the New York Times Book Review.

The Root compiled 8 of Mathis' favorite books, which includes Toni Morrison's Beloved and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, along with some great titles from black poets like Rita Dove.  

She says that Beloved is necessary to return to and, while I'm not actually a big fan of re-reading works, I can see what she means. I don't return to Toni Morrison's work often because it's dense and challenging - along with the fact that I'm reading new work and writing some at the same time. But I'm also not a big fan of re-reading books.

I wonder about the benefit of writers returning to their favorites, though. I've heard that it helps them with structure in their own work, depending on what they're working on. Because Zora Neale Hurston's birthday was this week, I was thinking of cracking open Their Eyes Were Watching God again. Maybe I'll get to that sometime in February.

Laina Dawes on the life of a black female metal fan

Check out this NPR piece about Laina Dawes. I first read about her in Bitch Magazine:

Music writer Laina Dawes is a die-hard Judas Priest fan. She's all about the band's loud and fast guitars, the piercing vocals — and she loves to see the group perform live.

Now, a fact that shouldn't matter: Dawes is a black woman. This, she says, can make things uncomfortable on the metal scene. She says she's been verbally harassed and told she's not welcome.

"There's still a lot of resistance in terms of who should be listening to what genre of music based on their gender and their ethnicity," Dawes says, "which does not make any sense to me."

Dawes writes about the issue in her new book, What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman's Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal.

So, metal's not my thing, I have to say. But I love the cover. And I know a lot of black folks who can relate to this - especially in a town like Austin that tends to attract the "alternative black" set. (I put it in quotes because I'm not sure what it means, but I bet you know what I mean when I say that.)

Clutch Magazine's 100 books every black woman should read

I'm a big Tami Winfrey Harris fan, so I was excited when she got this discussion started on Twitter & Facebook. I've read a lot of these, but not all, so I'm excited to have a few others to read. I don't do so great with book clubs or reading challenges, since they conflict with the review schedule, which continues to go well, it just means that books I'd like to read get put off indefinitely. Anyway, looks like the Clutch has a Goodreads group for its 2013 Reading Challenge if this list interests you.

1. Krik! Krak! by Edwidge Danticat (Fiction)
2. Caucasia by Danzy Senna (Fiction)
3. Sister Citizen by Melissa Harris Perry (Nonfiction)
4. Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall (Fiction)
5. The Upper Room by Mary Monroe (Fiction)
6. One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia (Children’s Books)
7. Ugly Ways by Tina McElroy Ansa (Fiction)
8. Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America by Lori Tharps and Ayana Byrd (Nonfiction)
9. Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Fiction)
10. Small Island by Andrea Levy (Fiction)

Salvage the Bones by Jesamyn Ward

Over the holidays, I was writing a profile of Vassar professor and writer Kiese Laymon, who has become better known for his wonderful essays published on his blog and at Gawker. I love his voice and honesty, and I'm looking forward to checking out his books when they're published this summer (Long Division is available for pre-order on Amazon and as of now, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America the autobiographical essay collection is scheduled to be published in August.)

Anyway, during our discussion, he mentioned Jesamyn Ward, a fellow black Southern writer, and it reminded me that her second novel, Salvage the Bones was on my list of books that I wanted to read last year but didn't get around to.

I miss her so badly I have to swallow salt, imagine it running like lemon juice into the fresh cut that is my chest, feel it sting.

There are descriptions like this throughout the book, which is the story of Esch and her family in the days before and after Hurricane Katrina. Her brothers Skeetah, Randall and Junior are always into something. Her dad is a broken widower with a fighting spirit. Ward didn't win the National Book Award for nothing - there is poetry and depth and sweetness even in her descriptions of mischief and betrayal. I hate to call it poetic, actually, because that seems so vague.

I like how Ward uses metaphors and analogies, the restraint in her details and, in places, the lavish nature of her descriptions.

She is in love with a manchild from the Pit, a part of town where they all live on the Gulf, Bois Sauvage. There are two narratives, here, almost three. Esch is becoming a woman, Skeetah is a dog fighter in love with his pit bull, China, and Hurricane Katrina is the shadow in the distance.

It is a little less than 200 pages - I read it as an ebook - and it reads like a companion to the triumphant Beasts of the Southern Wild. What you find in Salvage the Bones is the grit and heart of a black girl, her gumption and yearning of a black teenage girl and the rejection that stings and burns.

The book also contains humanizing and heartbreaking sex scenes. I wince while reading most fictional sex scenes and rarely mention them in reviews, in part because most literary sex skirts the often awkward corners of intimacy, but Ward does not.

Finally, there is the terror and shame of Katrina, a modern memory that made visible to America a racial and class wound that black Americans know all too well, is so recent that it is difficult to humanize, to believe that there is a story to be told about it that would evoke any further understanding, sympathy or insight.

Salvage the Bones is about waiting and worry, it is about fighting to live, whether storms are metaphorical or literal. It's a joy for readers because it makes beauty out of wreckage.

Obama's Presidential Library will probably be in Chicago

I find it amazing that Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize and former poet laureate of Illinois, is not named at the very top of this story, but forgive that:

Bronzeville, the historic African-American community on Chicago's South Side, is where the stories of writers and musicians through the ages -- including Richard Wright, Louis Armstrong, Lorraine Hansberry, Buddy Guy and Willie Dixon -- have been told. Now residents hope it will be home to a Barack Obama presidential library, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Here's Politico's excerpt from the Tribune story - shout out to Dahleen, who I've had the pleasure of breaking bread with during my fun trips to Chi-Town:

Getting an early read on Obama library sites: Proponents tout benefits of housing presidential archives in Chicago," by Dahleen Glanton : "[H]is library would have unique historical significance and likely would become one of the nation's most popular attractions ... It also would provide a platform from which Obama could continue or expand the work he began as president. ... The University of Hawaii, where the president's parents attended school, has made no secret of its campaign to lure the library to Honolulu. ... The [University of Chicago], where Obama was a member of the law school faculty for 12 years, is widely considered the front-runner ... A U. of C. spokesman raised the possibility that a presidential library could be built off campus. That would open the door, some South Side community leaders said, to enter into a joint venture with the university to obtain the library. ... Clinton's library cost $165 million. The George W. Bush Foundation raised more than $300 million ... The cost of Obama's library could spiral to $500 million."http://trib.in/12Cxq9j

Women of color writers on Flavorpill's Most Anticipated of 2013 list

The list is short, as it has been for a lot of anticipated 2013 books, (the Atlantic's list of the best books of 2012, though, has no women of color on it - not even the acclaimed Zadie Smith for NW) but I'm looking forward to these nonetheless:

Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then (February 5)
Isabel Allende, Maya's Notebook (April 23)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (May 14)

Other releases that are worth mentioning include Sonia Sotomayor's memoir,  My Beloved World, which will be released on January 15th and former editor Raquel Cepeda's Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, which comes out in March.