Friday Find: AWP’s 2009-2010 Survey Results, MFA in Creative Writing Programs in the United States

From the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP):

This past year, AWP asked Program Directors dozens of questions pertaining to their creative writing programs. Thanks to the Program Directors, AWP was able to assemble information on issues ranging from financial aid to class size, tuition, and budget and salary figures. With the downturn in the national economy, many programs and departments are competing for resources likely to become more constrained. Our hope is that the information gathered here will help faculty, students, and administrators make the best possible case for continued investment in their programs.

This information can help programs advocate for more administrative support, course reductions, and additional teaching assistantships or scholarships for students. In addition, the expenditure information in our survey can help programs advocate for adjunct and faculty salary adjustments as well as additional resources towards an affiliated reading series or literary magazine.

For many students and faculty, it is helpful to know how their school’s size and acceptance rates compare to the average program. Statistics on admission, class size, and program size will help you understand where your program stands among its peers. AWP thanks all the schools that participated in our most recent survey. Individual survey responses are confidential, but we hope that the aggregate totals listed here are helpful to your program and your creative writing community.

You can download the full report at the website. NB: Information was solicited this year from 145 full-residency MFA programs. The report may be even more interesting when we’re able to compare some of the data with corresponding results from low-residency programs.

Have a great weekend, all. See you back here on Monday!

Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post: Read an Excerpt from Quiet Americans!

So, as I continue preparing the new website for its debut, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to present there an excerpt from my forthcoming story collection, Quiet Americans. To that end, this week, I’ve been experimenting with some free services provided by BookBuzzr.com.

www.bookbuzzr.com

It was easy enough to paste code into a blog post to share the above “widget” with you, and as the book begins to appear on more distribution channels, I can embed relevant purchase info. (Right now, pre-orders are available only via BN.com.)

What’s most exciting, though, is that this techno-gizmo gives you a glimpse into the actual book. Including the entire opening story.

At least, it provides the entire opening story for now. I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps the excerpt should be more limited. Like maybe…to the story’s opening page?

What do you think? Would (much) less be more? Or in this case, would it be far too little?

Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post: E-books, Or When Seeing Your Work In Print Is Only Part of the Story

For a long time, the dream was relatively simple. And focused. It involved seeing my story collection, Quiet Americans, in print. As in: a book. With pages one could turn.

But, as you may have heard, there’s a new kid on the publishing block: the e-book. Actually, he’s not just one kid. He’s got multiple platforms.

If I haven’t been linking here on Practicing Writing to lots of articles about e-books–how to publish them, how to read them, how popular they’re becoming–maybe a little bit of that is due to my not-so-subconscious desire not to have to deal with them insofar as my own work is concerned.

You see, I already have a full-time job, and getting my story collection into print has quickly become almost equally consuming. Getting the collection ready for e-publication that is far more sophisticated than the simple downloadable pdfs used for my old market directories seems to be one layer of responsibility too many.

But it will happen. My publisher seems to be pretty comfortable with the Kindle platform, so that may well be the first vehicle we turn to for Quiet Americans once the print version is complete. (In fact, literally just yesterday, my publisher blogged about the recent royalty-related developments affecting books published via Amazon/Kindle.)

But how many of you rely on the Kindle? How many use other systems?

And for those of you with experience transforming your words from docs on your screen to paid-for content on others’: How did you do it? Let’s leave aside those of you working with big publishers who can easily handle the task for you. Have you used Smashwords? Have you required the services of a freelancer to format and prepare your text? What do you wish you’d known then that you can share now? I’d love to learn from your experiences.