On the Light Side

Getting in sync with February’s Nonfiction Fest was slow, but I thoroughly enjoyed the daily entries once I did. All the encouragement one could use was in Doreen Rappaport’s piece on Finding Your Voice. Her suggestion to tackle an unfinished manuscript was on my to-do list last year – and still is. Melissa Stewart’s original video on Revision Decisions made me think about learning to do presentations like hers.

Lights, Camera, Action (verbs) by Beth Anderson gave a refreshing take on spotlight, focus and punch. Although I enjoyed all of them, my favorite was Lionel Bender’s Which Category of Children’s NF is Best for Me? He gave an excellent overview of the differences among the trade, school and library, and magazine markets. His view of what the SCBWI focused on and did not; what certain publishers wanted from authors and didn’t, was eye-opening.

Carol Kim’s piece, Writing for the Educational Market: A Research Junkie’s Dream held up a sobering mirror to what it takes, and what it doesn’t. Hmm. Yes, I am a research junkie.

Catching up on emails, I read in Association of Independent Author’s newsletter (ALLi) about 2021 trends, that readers in India, Thailand, and China spent the most hours reading per week; romances were most popular with U.S. readers; Millennials read the most books; Finland, Poland, and Estonia were Europe’s biggest bookworms, and audiobooks were popular in China.

ALLi had colorful charts on statistics about readers in the U.S. and around the world. No surprise, romance and erotica had U.S sales over $1 B. ALLi has more podcasts than I could ever keep up with.

A recent editorial in The Writer mentioned not toughing it through a book if the first 50 pages didn’t work. I made it to p. 97 in The 1619 Project created by Nikole Hanna-Jones (2021) and got stalled on the chapter, Fear by Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander. After waiting two weeks, I skimmed through it, and then moved on to the painfully ironic fact from November 1775; the tragic essay, Freedom Is Not For Myself Alone, by Robert Jones Jr.; another ironic tidbit from August 1791, and the painful Other Persons by Reginald Dwayne Betts. Wow.

My latest blog post. https://rokeefehistory.com/blog

#amreading; #RochesterNY; #RACWI; #SCBWI; #DoreenRappaport; #MelissaStewart; #BethAnderson; #LionelBender; # Carol Kim; #ALLi; #Writermag; #1619project; #NikoleHannaJones; #RobertJonesJr; #ReginaldDwayneBetts; #LeslieAlexander; #MichelleAlexander;