Penguin Books starts online Genre Fiction community

[Bob Schroeck]

They call it http://bookcountry.com/]Book Country, and it seems to be an online writers' workshop/community/distribution channel intended to nurture starting genre writers until they get good enough to get noticed by a publishing house... like Penguin.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-t ... ction.html]Publishers Weekly article on it here.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Black Aeronaut]

Interesting... So long as intellectual property is protected, I like it.

[Thesilentjackofalltrade]

Well, this seems good on paper, but dose it actually work? Are some writers afraid that someone might steal their work (Ideas and/or the writing itself?)? It seems like a possibility, and if it is not, what legal support would back the writer up to stop plagiarism from happening?
_____________
Veni, vidi, vici. [I came, I saw, I conquered
Quote from Julius Caesar

[khagler]

With the advent of ebooks, they could play it completely straight and still be horribly exploiting naive writers. Author J.A. Konrath has a blog in which he goes on at tremendous length about the relative merits of independently publishing ebooks versus signing with a big New York publishing house--to sum up, it's generally better for a new author to skip the publishing house.

Of course, I'll freely admit to being biased against Penguin as I'm a Kindle owner and they're one of the companies that does such charming things as charge $12.99 for a Kindle edition of a book that's $7.99 in paperback. When a company does the equivalent of getting in their customers' faces screaming "fuck you, we don't want your business," I'm pretty much inclined to not want anything to do with them.

Added: Okay, to be fair to Penguin, they and the other New York publishers aren't really in the business of selling books to readers; they're in the business of selling paper to distributors. So I'm not really their customer at all.

[Rod.H]

Heh, well it's taken awhile for a publishing house to do this then. For didn't I some time/posts ago pointed/commented on B&N's version of this type of thing which basically boiled down to getting more ebooks to fill the Nook's title list. By mostly crowdsourcing the unsigned author/general public and is probably going to be filled with Twilight-clones.

[Black Aeronaut]

Ninety-percent of everything is crap.

[Ebony]

Ninety-percent of everything is crap.

Thanks, Ted.
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com

"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."

[Black Aeronaut]

There is no Ted, there is only Zuul.

[Foxboy]

Ted, Zuul, GET ME MY CAVIAR.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll