So most of us DIYers out here are trying to brand ourselves. We spend our time on Twitter and Facebook and message boards and whatnot trying to build an audience and a fanbase. Then the midlist authors come along and digitize their backlists, and everybody’s happy because they already have …
Get a professional editor. Period. No excuse. I don’t care how good your beta readers and critique partners are. I don’t care if you’re a traditionally published midlist author going out on your own. Get a professional editor. You want to self-publish? Put in the time and the effort and …
“Self-publishing is the kiss of death. (And you’ll go to hell, too. God HATES self-publishers.)” So come see me at the Writer’s Digest conference, on the Do-It-Yourself Publishing panel, which is chock-full of super-awesome self-publishing types who are also going to hell. When: January 22, 2011, 10:30 – 11:45 a.m. …
Mormon publishing is a small world, but since I only hover on the outskirts of the community as a fiction writer who is Mormon and not as a writer of Mormon fiction (albeit I have Mormon characters), I don’t have much invested in the state of the Mormon art. Currently …
1. Make a concerted effort to contact the authors of books I enjoy and tell them that, and why. I only know how wonderful it makes me feel when someone took the time to email me and tell me that they enjoyed one or both of my books and why. …
Publishing is changing, the latest clue being Torstar’s vanity publishing line, DellArte (clever me, I said Torstar instead of Harlequin)*. But we all agree on this one point, right? I mean, publishing can be DOOMED, or it can be METAMORPHOSING, or it can be LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR …
I’m camping out at KatieBabs’s blog today, spilling my guts.
…in self-publishing. Self-publishers do not “earn royalties.” Stop thinking in terms of royalties. It’s called “profit.” There is overhead. There are COGS. There is revenue. Why? Self-publishers manufacture a product*; they have not licensed a product. Sales – COGS = gross profit. Gross profit – overhead = net profit (aka ka-ching) …
Harlequin, I see you’ve set up a, um, POD?/vanity?/subsidy?/self-pub? (no definitely not self-pub) arm of your company. Congratulations. I think that’s brilliant. However, you have negated that brilliance by the simple fact that you have obviously not gone about researching the industry any more than anybody you hope to make …
I am constantly struck by the idea that writers “give up.” What does that mean, exactly? They stop writing? They stop submitting? Or they stop writing because they’re so disheartened by the submitting? My bet’s on that. Keep on submitting and you will get published. By “writer,” I mean good, …
I didn’t say it. Someone who shall remain nameless said that to me, and it started me thinking about The Lone Artist. I’ve been to New Orleans, Paris, Venice Beach, New York, London, Amsterdam, and other places where The Lone Artist sets about attempting to earn a living or at …
I have nothing to say and too much to do. I meant to get my edits on Stay finished this weekend, but the widespread WordPress attack hit The Proviso‘s site and I spent my weekend, instead, cleaning up after that mess. And I still have a bunch to do before …
He really likes me! Scroll down to #64. 064) Stay by Moriah Jovan (MS POLICY), finished July 15. My faith that I put in Moriah after reading The Proviso was justified. This book is good. Parts of it are excellent. And it’s still only a draft. It still has explicit …
Keep your day job. Accept that you will not be able to quit your day job. Regardless how much weeping and wailing and gnashing of the teeth goes on around the web about monetizing art, if you’re a writer not already pulling income that allows writing to be your day …
June 23, 2009 My blog’s been around long enough now, with enough posts, that nobody wants to go digging through what I had to say a buncha long time ago (centuries in blog time). I’m coming up short on content lately (heh, didja notice?), so I’m going to recycle some …