February 1, 2012 – 6:56 am
People go into collaborations for different reasons…and each project, and each co-author, is a different situation. Sometimes, two or more writers collaborate because they came up with a brilliant idea in the bar at three in the morning…and next day, it still looks brilliant and fun. Sometimes, the collaboration springs out of something that began [...]
December 14, 2011 – 6:01 am
In the last couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to observe a number of new writers doing things that…well, to say they don’t work is a serious understatement. I’m not talking about the writing itself, at the moment. I’m talking about the business end.
There are oodles of lists of what not to do in [...]
December 7, 2011 – 6:34 am
A while back, I did a post on electronic publishing in general, in which I stated that I didn’t know much, but nobody else does, either, yet. In the interim, I’ve learned a bit more, and I thought this would be a good time to share, because next week, the five Lyra books are being [...]
November 6, 2011 – 6:50 am
There’s another side to the whole selling-out discussion that rarely gets looked at. And that’s the folks who think that if there is any resemblance whatsoever between what they want to write and any recent bestseller, they must be selling out. Or that everyone will think they are selling out. Never mind that they’ve adored vampire [...]
November 2, 2011 – 6:37 am
For the last several weeks, I’ve been running from one convention/appearance/trade show to another, and it seems that at every one of them I’ve run into at least one would-be writer who is worried about “selling out.” More accurately, they’ve been worried about having to sell out in order to get published.
These folks look at mega-bestsellers [...]
October 19, 2011 – 6:55 am
In the comments on “being a writer,” JP asked about the afterward part - the stuff that’s not writing. And this is rather a good time to write about it, since I’ve been in the midst of doing publicity stuff for Across the Great Barrier for the past few weeks.
Much as nobody believes it from [...]
October 9, 2011 – 6:18 am
Back in the day, on Usenet, I had a little lecture that I posted periodically, whenever too many folks seemed to be bemoaning the horribleness of the submission process so much that they were losing sight of the actual job of submitting. (Make no mistake; the submission process is horrible and lengthy and depressing, but [...]
October 5, 2011 – 6:58 am
The problem with sequels is that the writing and publishing process gives readers too much time to think.
Let me unpack that a little.
It takes me one to two years to write a novel, and this is fairly typical of most of the professional writers I know. Yes, there are folks who work faster without detriment [...]
OK, I had a whole long blog post ready to go about non-traditional publishing, and then I looked at it and realized that I was just saying the same thing again: there are scams, it is a ton of work, you have to educate yourself, check Writer Beware and Editors and Preditors before you commit [...]
The book business has been changing radically every couple of years for the entire time I’ve been in it, but one thing does seem to remain constant: lots of people still want to break in and sell their novels, and a sizeable number of these folks either haven’t got a clue where to start, or [...]