AUGUST

Monday, August 2nd – Sunday, August 8th: I’m accepting applications for The Writer Mama Scholarship for my Writing & Publishing the Short Stuff Class (which begins September 8th, details and register here). I’ll post the application info on Sunday the 1st and announce the recipient on Monday, August 9th.

Monday, August – December 2010: I’m launching my second round of three levels of Dream Teams with former students who want to get more of their writing published. Woo-hoo! Cannot wait! (Learn more here.)

Sunday, August 8th: I’m doing a workshop at the Willamette Writers Conference called “The Prosperous Writer.” I’m also critiquing manuscripts, signing books, participating in the silent auction, and catching up with and meeting former students. Yay!

Monday, August 9th – Sunday, August 15th: I’m accepting applications for a second Writer Mama Scholarship. This time for my Discover Your Specialty & Launch Your Platform class (which begins September 8th, details and register here). I’ll post the application info on Sunday the 8th and announce the recipient on Monday, August 16th.

Monday, August 16th – Sunday, August 22nd: I will be away from my desk. When I come back I will be very tan. (At least as tan as a very pale person can get.)

SEPTEMBER

E-mail classes start on September 8th: I’m going into my fourth year of teaching Writing & Publishing the Short Stuff. I’m also teaching Discover Your Specialty & Launch Your Platform. Both of my classes are newly updated and expanded! Abigail Green will also be teaching her popular class, Personal Essays That Get Published. (All the upcoming class info is here.)

Saturday, September 11th: I’m presenting a lunch workshop for Rose City Romance Writers at PCC Sylvania Campus from 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. on Get Known Before The Book Deal, An Author Platform Checklist. Look forward to meeting everyone! (More info here.)

Sunday, September 19th: We’re launching season four of the Northwest Author Series with Nicole Rubel of Rotten Ralph fame at the Wilsonville Public Library at 3:30 p.m.. Her topic is Find Your Voice: Use It In A Children’s Book. (Details are over at the Northwest Author Series blog.)

Hope to work with you or connect with you through one of these upcoming classes or events!

Oh my goodness, I don’t particularly enjoy listening to or watching myself in interviews or giving presentations.

However, like a good little writer, I listened to this interview and did not die in the process.

Therefore, I am pleased to present this interview with the delightful and creative Doug Zanger.

Please disregard my tendency in the five few minutes to say “Ummm” a lot. That’s just something I do. It will go away after we get going.

Some day, I’m sure my friend Diana Page Jordan is going to teach me how to stop doing it. But until then, “Umm.”

Tune in if you also want to hear:

• How I got my butt kicked academically at Dartmouth
• How I live in a totally magical place (I’m not kidding, I really made it sound this way)
• How some of my biggest role models perform in Las Vegas

This and more…in this 30-minute interview from Exceptional Women Northwest.

Christina Katz Interview with Doug Zanger on Exceptional Women Northwest

Thanks, Doug!

And I’m really looking forward to it.

Here’s the description of the show: Exceptional Women NW is an exploration of achievement, led by women, in Portland, the state of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. We highlight leaders in business & social causes, entrepreneurs, writers, bloggers, artists, designers, free spirits — any woman — anywhere in our area, making a positive impact. These 30-minute conversations celebrate stories of hope, inspiration and success in all walks of life.

This Doug Zanger guy seems pretty interesting. He’s got a lot going on, and on, and on, kind of like some other people around here we know.

I’m thrilled to be in the company of women I already respect like author Jennifer Louden, Amy Wang (my former editor at The Oregonian), and entrepreneur Molly Gordon.

He’s a dad, so there you go, I like him already.

And he produces himself, which is what we all need to be doing, right folks?

I’ll keep you posted on the date and time for the show on the air and link you up to the audio when it’s posted.

This month, I am attending three conferences in three different states (and none of them are my state) and hosting my author series the only weekend I’m in town.

Of course, I don’t want to miss a single moment! But at the same time, book-ending all of this with travel is challenging. When I have to be away from home, it’s not easy on the family. And when I’m this busy, it’s not easy to keep up with my regular schedule.

But that’s okay because each week this month is like a cornucopia of great things going on! Here’s what’s coming up that you won’t want to miss:

The Writer Mama Scholarship for the May 12th Class: Come back Monday for the info you need to apply for a full scholarship to my upcoming Writing & Publishing the Short Stuff class.

The Writer Mama/Author Mama Proudest Moments Celebration: Some of your proudest moments are starting to trickle in. Don’t forget to send yours!

The ASJA Conference: I am attending the ASJA Conference in New York City and will appear on a panel on social networking hosted by Kathy Sena on Saturday, April 24th. Please say hello if you are there.

Submit Your Author Mama Feedback by April 23rd: If you have not yet had a chance to purchase and read Author Mama, How I Became A Published Author & How You Can Too, there is still time to participate in making the final version as great as it can be. Everyone who participates will receive the alpha version in PDF for free upon publication in May. Interested? Here’s the whole scoop.

Work With Me: Registration is now open for the May 12th Writing & Publishing the Short Stuff class and the August – December Dream Teams. I look forward to working with fresh groups of new and former students! Also beginning May 12th, Abigail Green is teaching Personal Essays That Get Published.

In the meantime, I’m taking the weekend off to rest, host the Northwest Author Series, and enjoy celebrating my husband’s birthday with his parents, who are here visiting from Colorado.

Happy weekend, everyone!

Hooray! April is finally here. This means I am traveling to three conferences this month. I’ll give you the 411 on each one in turn.

Up first: I am moderating two panels at the AWP 2010 in Denver, Colorado.

Thursday, April 8 at 12:00 p.m. (noon) – 1:15 p.m.

What’s Your Platform? What Agents & Editors Are Looking For in Writers.

Location: Rooms 401, 402: Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Panelists: Christina Katz, Jane Friedman, Robin Mizell, David W. Sanders

Yes, the quality of your writing still matters. But becoming visible and influential is more crucial to landing a book deal than ever, according to agents and editors in every facet of the publishing industry. Aspiring authors need to develop a platform in order to get noticed. Fortunately for emerging writers in all genres, there are more affordable, accessible tools available for platform-development and building, which make this important responsibility a pleasure and not a chore.

Saturday, April 10 at 1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.

The Prosperous Writer: Career Strategies for Staying Flush.

Location: Room 111, Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Panelists: Christina Katz, Jane Friedman, Ericka Lutz, Wendy Burt-Thomas) When you fuel your writing career with prosperous thinking, partner with like-minded others, and keep long-term success in mind, navigating a professional path becomes a pleasurable, expansive process. Four traditionally published writers/editors share strategies that pay the bills and make publication more likely. Learn how to balance enough inspiration and perspiration to get the writing done with enough career planning to create ever-expanding opportunities and achieve writing goals.

Also be sure to stop by the Writer’s Digest table in the Bookfair and you just might chance to meet Writer’s Digest magazine editor, Jessica Strawser, and Publisher, Jane Friedman. They publish pretty good books, too.

Woo-hoo, I love me some Rocky Mountain highs.  Shortness of breath, hugeness of conference, here I come!

Look forward to connecting with everyone!

• Follow me on Twitter
• Find me on Facebook
• Connect with me on LinkedIn

~Photo by RaSchi

Well, I wasn’t going to publish this because it feels fairly controversial. But then I read Mike Shatzkin’s post on Why are you for killing bookstores? And at the end he said:

The book business has always been one with very low financial barriers to entry. Ebook publishing makes getting into the game even cheaper. It is also going to bring increased competition to book publishers from content-creators outside publishing.

Pay attention to that last line. It’s future tense, right? But from what I’m seeing, it’s not in the future at all. Increased competition has already been happening and it’s been happening in spades since the New Year.

Fear of authors developing and owning their own platforms seemed to be a concern at Digital Book World and, at first, this fear struck me as paranoid and ungrounded. I have a few semi-developed thoughts for publishers on whom to partner with and whom to not partner with moving forward in this brave new world of publishing.

Publishers would be wise to choose their authors carefully because every contract signed represents a partnership. And the more we see a spike in folks whose clear intention is to use Internet publishing tools to get rich quickly to make the most of their peaking visibility, so the need also increases to talk about how much this has to do with leveraging the stamp of approval granted by traditional publishers.

Specifically, I suggest that publishers do not to partner with authors who would seemingly like to see them go out of business. The folks whose behavior concerns me most belong to certain crowds: the infopreneur crowd, the blogger crowd, and the pirate crowd. What these people have on their sides are:

• Speed
• Networks of people who have large networks of people
• And lots of jargon that they use to hypnotize people before they hard-sell them

Seems to me that there are a large number of people online, who have risen up in competition with traditional publishers…and ironically, some of them have recently become traditionally published authors.

I mentioned, who I am talking about, so I want to be clear who I’m NOT talking about:

I’m not talking about self-published authors, who are making a go of producing themselves. Those budding platform-building skills are going to come in handy once/when those authors become traditionally published. I absolutely don’t see self-published authors as a threat to traditional publishing. (Perhaps Harlequin is on to something with their new vanity press arm? Not really sure yet.)

I’m also not suggesting that because a traditional author self-publishes some of his or her own work, that he or she is a threat to traditional publishing. Far from it, I think this only expands the authors’ reach and connection with fans, which is good for future book sales of any type (assuming the author does a decent job self-publishing).

I believe that authors should retain rights to the majority of their body of work and only partner with publishers on a project-to-project basis. This keeps everybody on best behavior and prevents authors from becoming perpetual indentured servants to publishers.

I think multiple book contracts need to go away all together, so that authors can choose to partner with publishers for the right reasons–because they want to and it’s win-win–and not because they have been indentured by a multi-book contract. But this is really another topic…I digress.

Back on point, I’m also not talking about authors like Cory Doctorow. I think Cory partners with publishing professionals and the public in an open, guileless, transparent way—not at all similar to the ways that authors who I suspect would like to put publishers out of business. These are those who are using time limits, disappearing billboards, and escalating price points to divide and conquer.

Other signals of desperation include infomercial-like landing pages that scroll on and on for days, the constant hard sell in close proximity to the otherwise widely admired charismatic author, and the promise of six-figure secrets to those buy in–but only if you buy in now.

I think anybody who promised their spouse last year that they would be making six figures by now wants to save face. So off they go to chase down the next pot of gold at the end of the blog-your-brains-out rainbow. Have we had enough of these wild goose success blueprints yet?

Please. Say. Yes.

In the meantime, you can buy legitimately helpful tools in the form of books over at your local bookstore for ten to twenty bucks. Or even take them out at the library for free. But in this new marketplace such antiquated behaviors are not sexy anymore. Not to the cool kids anyway. No, no. They want the latest info-products, tele-classes, and other whatnots from whoever has recently been blessed…by your published authors.

And like Mike Shatzkin said, you don’t have to go to the bookstores for these, because, like e-books, you can’t buy them there. And when you buy them in lieu of purchasing books from traditional publishing, you aren’t just putting bookstores out of business. You are putting publishers out of business, too.

As you can probably tell, I’ve hit my limit. And I’ve lost faith in several people I formerly held in newly minted esteem. That’s pretty much over for me about as quickly as it started over the past, oh, twelve months. I don’t need your third-tribe-jargon-stuffed-cool-kids-better-buy-now-garbage-overload-hard-sell with a little insider wink to seal the sale.

I’ve never bought in and I sure don’t plan on starting now. And I’m one of the lucky ones because all I’ve lost is time spent peering into my Google Reader.

Pay attention, publishers. Watch out for authors who turn into hard-sellers. Bottom line: Some of your authors do not look to partner with you. They look elsewhere to partner, and they take your stamp of approval with them and leverage the heck out of it for their own benefit and the benefit of their cronies.

To me, these authors seem bent on taking your good name, leveraging it for their own purposes, becoming publishers themselves, and creating a brave new online world where only the swiftest and the best hard-sell copywriters survive.

That means you are out, publishers. Did they forget to send you that memo?

Wake up. Look around. Subscribe to your author’s e-mail newsletters.

Some of your authors are partnering with you…and some of your authors are seemingly not.

I guess I’m just wondering: Why ARE you partnering with them?

And how’s that working out?

Or am I the only one who is wondering?

You’re invited to hear me speak at the 2010 Digital Book World – the newest book publishing conference! I’ll be participating in a panel called, “Teaching Authors to Fish: Empowering Authors To Market Themselves” with Peter Clifton, President & CEO of FiledBy, Matt Schwartz, Director of Digital Strategy & Business Development, Random House, and Cecelia Tan, Founder of Circlet Press. The panel will be moderated by Michael Cairns, Information Media Partners.

Unlike other conferences, this one is designed specifically for commercial book publishers. The conference will address a lot of the issues we face every day and the speakers hail from across the consumer book publishing spectrum. The focus is strategies that can be implemented immediately for an impact in 2010, not 2015 or beyond.

Speakers include Dominique Raccah (PoetrySpeaks), Brian Napack (MacMillan) and digital marketing expert Shiv Singh of Razorfish.

I think you’ll get a lot out of the conference- plus I can help you out by saving you $200 when you go to www.digitalbookworld.com/register, register as an individual and use code DBWspeaker at checkout.

Digital Book World takes place January 26-27 at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers in New York City. Check out the full schedule at www.digitalbookworld.com/schedule.  And, if you want to see what companies will be there visit http://www.digitalbookworld.com/attendees.

And don’t forget, if you decide to attend — save yourself some money by using the code DBWspeaker for $200 dollars off your conference registration.

Hope to see you there!

The New Year is almost here. Can you believe it?

Happy holidays, everyone!

Here’s all the exciting stuff I have coming up in January:

I’ll be making an announcement on Monday, January 4th about the direction I’m heading in 2010. I’m going to keep you hanging until then. But I’ll give you a hint: it’s exciting!

I’m launching three Dream Teams of former students in January (more). We are going to lay out our goals for five months and then slam-dunk them. And then we’ll do it all over again in the fall? Not one of my students yet? Keep reading.

On Tuesday, January 5th, novelist Therese Walsh will come by to discuss her debut, The Last Will of Moira Leahy (Shaye Areheart Books). More here.

On January 13th, the first round of 2010 classes will begin. I’m offering Writing & Publishing the Short Stuff and Turn Your Specialty Into Course Curriculum. Abigail Green is offering Personal Essays That Get Published. You can learn more about classes here.

On 3:30 p.m. on January 24th, I’ll be hosting the Northwest Author Series in Wilsonville, Oregon featuring children’s author Amber Keyser on How to Use a Critique Group at the Wilsonville Public Library.

On  January 26th and 27th, I’m attending Digital Book World in New York City. I’ll be on a panel called: Teach Them to Fish, Empowering Authors to Market Themselves. Seems fitting, right? Learn more about Digital Book World.

And on Sunday, January 31st, I’ll be offering a live, three-hour workshop at the Wilsonville Public Library called Power Up Your Platform  for the Internet Age. I offered this workshop in Eugene in October and it went over really well. I can’t believe how much work we were able to get done in such a short time. Is your platform ready for 2010? Learn more here.

Photo by cobalt123