Poets and Writers Event October 1st!

New York Supreme Court Judge Edwin Torres (Ret.), author of

"Carlito's Way," as well as other books and novels, will be the Keynote

Speaker at my Poets and Writers Event next Saturday!

Boo-Yah!

Great Books for Sale

You know, this conference has a lot of my attention and getting it together and ready is taking up a lot of my time, but I love the concept so much!

I just wanted to encourage avid readers to visit the site and check out the books by some of our authors, the books are fantastic and you would, of course, also be supporting a Latino(a) author. As we get closer to the conference date, we hope to add the works of more attendees, supporters, etc.

Thank you.

Editing

EDITING

I still argue that in the brouhaha that is publishing, we
often forget about the reasons that traditional publishing
existed to begin with, and why writers didn't just publish
themselves from the outset.

Traditional publishers fund works out of their pockets,
and they beat a dead horse in terms of preparing a book
for release. This has been true since Gutenberg printed
the first Bible. So I believe traditional publishing will
continue for many years to come.

Yes, I tend to lean to the . . . traditional side. (Bet you
thought I was going to say right or left, huh?) However, I've
self-published as well. I've seen good self-publishing and bad.
I've seen good agents and bad. I've marveled at good traditional
works and bad.

Nothing in publishing is perfect.

However, two items get overlooked, in my opinion, when it
comes to do-it-yourself publication.

1. Platform
2. Editing

The Steve Laube Literary Agency has quite the informative
blog, and lately they've run a series called, "A Defense of
Traditional Publishing." The latest post of April 26 addressed
"Content Development."

http://www.stevelaube.com/in-defense-of-traditional-publishing-part-three/

A reader cursed me (yes, I'm a "biatch") for advising her to
slow down, complete her book, and edit it to death before
considering the publisher, the movie, or the television
appearances. The point I tried to make was that editing
isn't a simple proofreading job before you forward the file
to a publisher.

Steve Laube explained the multiple editing tasks under a
traditional roof.

ACQUISITIONS EDITOR - Finds, acquires, negotiates the project.

LINE EDITOR - Performs the actual content edit (also call the
"line" or "substantive" edit).

CONTENT EDITOR - Reads for accuracy, balance and fairness,
cogency of argument, adequate treatment of the subject matters,
and conformity to the original book proposal.

COPY EDITOR - Scours the manuscript for accuracy in grammar,
citations, and factual content.

PROOF READER - Fine tunes punctuation and other nit-picky details.

Yes, there's room for self-publishing, especially if you
have a platform to die for, and a following that would
purchase anything you held up in your hand. But if you
are venturing into the publishing world alone, wouldn't
you want these people in your court?

by Hope Clark - http://www.fundsforwriters.com

The Latino Authors & Writers Conference

Hi. Well, the conference is on schedule and rolling along at full steam! We have four great agents joining us, guest speakers, a wonderful Mistress-of-Ceremony... and so much more! I want to thank all of the people, organizations, agencies, and corporations that are helping to make this possible. i also want to say thank you to all of the Latino media that's promised to do a story about us. In fact, Philadelphia Spanish daily, Al Dia, is doing a story about the conference and is interviewing our guest speaker, Dr. Hector R. Ortiz!

Wow, so it's really happening and I'm really proud of all the work (and money!) that's gone into it. It's gonna be a blast!

Vote for me!

Host with the Most!

Arnaldo L.

The New Year!

Well, it's a new year and I'm really hoping for great things to happen in 2011! I'm looking forward to getting this conference up and running, I'm hoping that this Fantasy novel I've written gets published by a major publisher, I'm going to try and get more short stories published, and I'm working on an artsy coffee-table book with a friend that I hope gets published too! All in all, I'm going to be working on a lot of projects and I'm hoping they all do well! Happy New Year!

Hello one and all! Just wanted to drop a note in my blog here to let everyone that reads this (yeah, all 2 of you!) know about the writer's conference I'm hosting next year. It's slated for October 1st, 2011 (it's a Saturday) in New York City as part of the Hispanic Heritage Month celebration. There will be networking, classes, agents, goodie bags, and more! So if you're a Latino author or writer, mark this date off on your calendar and plan to join us!

The NYC Pitch Conference

What can I say except... wow. I went to the 2010 NYC Pitch & Shop writers conference and I had a great time. I met some very talented people who also happened to be very nice and a lot of fun. I wish it didn't have to end so soon, but I have to admit I was exhausted by the time it did end. I was lucky because the editors of two publishing houses indicated that they wanted to see more of my manuscript. I'm keeping my fingers crossed! Anyway, like I said, it was a wonderful time and I could feel my atrophying creative muscles come back to life. It was great!

Marketing, marketing, marketing

You know, I just LOVE beating that dead horse! I've been so busy trying to market my novel, Chickenhawk, that I haven't been able to write much of anything new. Oh, don't get me wrong, I've started plenty of things (short storys, articles, fiction and non-fiction books), but I haven't been consistant and I haven't finished anything. Three marketing things I'm doing are:

1. Participating in the L.A. Book Festival via Authorsden. They'll put three copies of my novel on their shelves at the festival, and hand out copies of my promotional bookmarks to attendees.
2. My publisher, PublishAmerica, is sending five copies of my novel to Random House. I have no illusions about the results of this, but I figure that for the opportunity to be read by someone at Random House it's worth the money I paid.
3. I'm participating in the NYC Pitch and Shop next month, in which I will have the opportunity to pitch my novel to several agents; as well as shop it around to various publishers. Again, I feel that the possibilities outweigh the costs.

Anyway, I'm going to have to cut this stuff out and get back to writing, but it's so hard...! Wish me luck!