I was a bit stunned at the response to last week’s blog, not because the response was negative—it wasn’t—but because so many of you said that you had no idea that writing was a career choice. On a gut level, many of you knew that some of us had made careers as writers, but over […]
Continue ReadingThe marvelous Tom Dupree, one of the best people I’ve ever worked with in traditional publishing, wrote a great blog last month. In it, he claims that the biggest news of the summer so far, maybe even the biggest news of the year, isn’t the fact that Apple lost the anti-trust lawsuit the Justice Department […]
Continue ReadingFor the past week, I have stared at an e-mail that I printed out nearly two years ago. I flagged the e-mail and put it in the back of my 2011 paper calendar, and moved the printout with each new calendar. The e-mail is from my former French mystery editor. We exchanged e-mails as she […]
Continue ReadingBecause of this blog, I get a lot of e-mails from writers at various stages of their careers. I also receive a lot of links to other blogs, written by publishing industry people here and out of the United States. I have noticed, over time, several patterns in the way that people respond to the […]
Continue ReadingAgain, I did a lot of Fiction River reading this month, which took up some of my fiction reading. So you’ll see my recommendations in the upcoming issues. It’s so fun to be editing again—and it’s fun to be doing it part time. I got stuck in two novels in the middle of the month. […]
Continue ReadingIt is the last day of February, 2013, and by now, traditional publishing should have mailed its holiday cards with the gleeful misquote attributed to Mark Twain on the cards’ interior: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Not that there were actual news reports of the death of traditional publishing. But if you […]
Continue ReadingWriters believe that all editors are created equal. They also seem to believe that all editors are gods. Greek or Roman gods, gods of myth, gods who are spectacular one day and horrible the next. Not Coyote, necessarily, but Athena one day and Ares a day later. One day brilliant, the next trying to start […]
Continue ReadingProbably the most popular blog post I’ve written in the Business Rusch series appeared in May, 2011. Geared toward traditionally published writers and new writers coming in, “Writing Like It’s 1999” explains how the many truths of publishing from the last century are no longer truths, but myths. The post gets reprinted often. It’s part […]
Continue ReadingI have spent weeks Googling this topic, talking with other writers, looking up case law (ouch!), and trying to jog my memory, and have come up with nothing. So I’ll ask you all: Do you know anyone who has audited their literary agent? When I put “literary agent” and “audit” into search engines from Google […]
Continue ReadingMy writing process is just plain goofy sometimes. Two weeks ago, I started what I thought would be a short blog post on why writers disappear. I had just given talk on the topic, and felt that it wouldn’t take much time to make it into a blog post. Um…never mind. Three posts later, I’m […]
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