The Post-Writing Prepublication stage

First, the announcements: The Dark Lord’s Daughter has an official release date of September 5! I got my ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies) last week, and it looks very nice. The cover looks like this: This phase of the publication process was particularly mysterious to me the first

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Deadlines

So MaKayla asked about deadlines, specifically whether they’re good or bad, interfere with the process or enrich it, etc. The answer is “It depends on the writer.” I know writers who freeze up at the mere thought of a deadline, and writers who can’t seem to write

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Query letter bad examples

A quick recap from last time: the primary principles to apply when writing a query letter are that you keep it short and specific; that the story synopsis matches the book; and that you are not coy in the manner of back-blurbs. Just in case somebody isn’t

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Query letter principles

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of queries about, well, queries. So I figure that it’s probably time to do a post on them, even though I feel like I’ve been talking about the “boring business stuff” an awful lot lately. Anyway, the first thing I’m going

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Estimated taxes

It’s June 13 and in the U.S., the first set of estimated tax payments for 2012 are due at the end of the week. And if you’re making money from your writing, and you have to pay U.S. income taxes, you need to be aware of this.

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The Business of Writing: Pulling it all Together

So there you have it: all seven areas of business – operations, sales and marketing, quality control, finance, administration, public relations, and executive – laid out for writers. Looking at them all at once like this is rather daunting, but not looking at them at all is

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The Business of Writing: Executive

7. Executive – This has to do with strategic planning and overseeing everything else.  For writers, the Executive area means keeping an eye on all the other categories to make sure nothing is left out and everything stays in balance (which can be quite a trick for

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The Business of Writing: Public Relations

Before we get to today’s post, I wanted to mention two things: first, some time in the next month I’m going to be changing servers. In an ideal world, this will be completely unnoticeable to all the readers of my blog and web page, but how often

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