 Red Room Writer Profile
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Rosemary Jones's Blog
May 12, 2009
- I felt terrible, but I wrote a rejection letter last night. This nice writer sent me a wonderful query about a nonfiction book idea. Only problem: I'm not a publisher. I am the web editor for Book Publishers Northwest, a group of Washington state book publishers. The writer got my e-mail from Book Publishers Northwest's website. He saw the word "publisher" in the group's name and ...
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April 14, 2009
- I have resisted Twitter. After all, I own a cell phone that just makes phone calls. No camera, no texting, no nothing but incoming and outgoing calls (if I remember to turn it on).So Twitter lacked appeal. Until I started a theater column at Examiner.com and realized that some bits and pieces of news were really too short for a full article. But a "tweet" made perfect sense.Then ...
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April 4, 2009
- With the new gig as Seattle Theater Examiner, I'm not only worrying about words, I'm worrying about photographs. For years, I used to tell PR people who asked where to send the photos, "Please query the editor about photos. I just do the words." Actually, having also worn the PR hat for a high-faulutin' arts organization, I do know my way around a photograph and understand the ...
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March 21, 2009
- Last month I wrote about how a longtime newspaper gig went the way of many newspapers: poof!Since then, Seattle's second biggest daily, the Post-Intelligencer, morphed into a web-only publication, trimming the writing staff from 160+ to 20-something folks "doing it all." I was sitting in a press reception at a local theater and heard a longtime P-I reporter bemoan the fact that he ...
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February 24, 2009
- Sadly, my current editor at the Capitol Hill Times in Seattle just lost his job. He now joins an increasingly long line of good journalists in my hometown being shuffled into new professions by the current economic shakeup of the business. Besides a retrenching of the community newspapers, our second-largest daily shuts down this week. Not a good time to be a journalist looking for ...
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December 29, 2008
- Today I did what authors shouldn't do. I checked my ranking on Amazon.com. As usual, the overall ranking was humbling. There is literally hundreds of thousands of books more popular than mine. But I find that in the sublists, I've actually cracked the top 10 in one category: Paper Ephemera.Encyclopedia of Collectible Children's Books was sitting at the #5 spot today. Who knows how high or how low ...
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October 26, 2008
- West Coast author on an East Coast mornning radio show means the producer called at 6:20 am this morning. But it was fun appearing on "Whatcha Got?" with the knowledgable Mr. Harry Ryker. This syndicated radio show lets people chat about what they have in their houses and the collectible value of their objects. Of course, Ryker's interview touched on the hardest-to-answer ...
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September 14, 2008
- I am convinced that everyone has at least one book in their head. This comes from that usual conversation which begins "what do you do?" Once I answer that I'm a writer and, yes, I have had several books published, than I hear about the questioner's book idea.This conversation used to progress to "how do I find a publisher?" But these days, more people are ask me ...
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July 26, 2008
- My latest nonfiction title just arrived from UPS. It's 8.5" by 11" hardcover that weighs 3 lbs according to the publisher's website. All I know is that it is my first book that's actually slightly bigger than my computer (I work on a laptop!). The Encyclopedia of Collectible Children's Books was one of those projects that seemed really simple when it started and got slightly more ...
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July 12, 2008
- The most common question that other writers ask me is "Do you have an agent?" And most are surprised when I say no. I've sold seven books to publishers throughout the U.S., including one novel to Wizards of the Coast, without an agent.I love the idea of having an agent: somebody to sell my work, read contracts, and make sure royalties are paid on time. In the best of all possible ...
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June 1, 2008
- When I started out in the book business, publishing meant a serious investment of money as well as time. A small press run was several thousand dollars -- simply printing a book or two wasn't feasible without enormous cost (set-up for 1 book or for 1,000 books on a large press takes the same amount of work). Of course, today, you can experiment with a small runs via tools like Lulu. Even more ...
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April 7, 2008
- As often stated in various published bios, my first post-college writing job was working for a Chinese newspaper. Now, if you're looking at my photo, you may be thinking "She doesn't look Chinese." (You're right!) However, the very understanding editor of the Seattle Chinese Post thought if I was crazy enough to apply for the job, she was crazy enough to hire her first non-Asian ...
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March 21, 2008
- The folks at Red Room sent me a note to remind me that I could blog here. So, not wanting to repeat what is on my other blogs, I thought I'd concentrate here on how I became a published writer. In short, the secret handshake that everyone always knows that writers and publishers have but won't reveal to other people.Sadly, nobody taught the secret sign to me. Instead, I've sold six nonfiction ...
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