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
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →I hadn’t planned on doing more about agents, but all this talk got me thinking. See, there’s a big difference between how the publishing industry (or anything, really, but I’m talking about publishing today) looks from the outside, compared to what it looks like from the inside.
Read more →So you have your FINISHED novel-length manuscript, and you’ve done some thinking about what you’d like your agent to do for you in addition to submissions, negotiations, and collecting from your publishers. Now it’s time to actually start looking for an agent. And the first thing you
Read more →So Julie D. asked: Could I put in a request for a post about finding the right agent as a first time author, and/or whether self-publishing electronically is a bad idea? It’s actually two questions, but I’m going to start with the question about agents. Actually, let’s
Read more →One of the things 4th Street Fantasy Con did this year was a workshop on writers’ support systems, which I participated in. I did a lot of thinking about the topic, and it occurred to me that most of my blog readers probably weren’t there and could
Read more →Writing is a profession with a very long lead time. For the majority of writers, writing a novel takes somewhere between six months and two years (there are, of course, folks who can do it faster or who require even more time, but they’re outliers). Then you
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