The second part of publicity, after generating reviews, is trying to get visibility, attention, and awareness for your book in other ways. The most accessible way for people to do this, these days, is on the Internet, and there are bunches of web sites full of suggestions
Read more →Having talked a bit about generalities regarding publicity and promotion, I’m going to spend this post getting a little more specific. I’d originally thought that I’d do this series of articles according to the type of book and/or publisher – ebooks vs hardcopy, traditional publishing vs. self-publishing
Read more →Publicity is a perennial problem for writers – what to do, how to do it, what works, what doesn’t. I’ve had several queries on the subject in the past few weeks, so despite the fact that publicity is NOT one of my strong suits, I’m going to
Read more →How many stories have you written? 22 novels, one nonfiction book on writing, and a bunch of short stories (I lose track of the short fiction very easily). What was your first story written? Published? The first story I tried to write was a novel I started
Read more →Every character in every book has their own story, and each character is the hero of his or her own story. This piece of writing wisdom has been around for at least as long as the novel has, but too often, writers don’t think about the implications
Read more →I’m spending the weekend at the Sirens conference in Washington state. The best part about such conferences tends to be meeting other book people – writers, editors, agents, fans, booksellers. The second best part is talking books with book people, because there are always people with a
Read more →Years ago, I heard a story about — I think it was Lester Del Rey, but it may have been somebody else of that era of SF writers. He wanted to set a story in Africa, which he had never visited. So he researched it — watched
Read more →One of the fairly common writing metaphors draws a connection between writing a novel and taking a road trip. You see a lot of comments like “You don’t need to see the entire highway that leads from Chicago to Denver in order to drive to Denver; you
Read more →So, you have a story in which you have two characters in a scene, and each of them has information that you want your reader to know, and which you think (at least initially) that you can only let the reader know by being in that character’s
Read more →This week I got an email question about switching point of view within a scene. It’s one of the hardy perennial questions, but I don’t think I’ve ever addressed it directly in this blog. First, an example: Jennifer paced the room, wondering where George was. It’s three
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