If you would like an audio version of this post, click here. I did not want to write this post. In fact, I would have skipped the topic altogether if maybe a dozen different people hadn’t asked me to weigh in. I also felt that I was one of only a handful of people who could explain some of what editor Sheree Renée Thomas went […]
I’m writing this on Monday late which, here in the States, is Presidents Day, a federal holiday. I had planned to have two blog posts done by now, but I hadn’t even had a chance to start this one until a few minutes ago. Events conspired to prevent my best-laid plans. I had a severe allergic reaction to something I ate last weekend (SuperBowl weekend) […]
The observant among you will notice that there’s a new Kickstarter on the right side of this web page. Yes, we just finished one Kickstarter and we started another immediately. That’s not the best way to run a Kickstarter, but we made a few decisions along the way that made us decide this is the way to go. First, “we” are me, Dean, and everyone […]
Before I get into the rant that I know this post will become, let me state my credentials. In addition to my work as a writer, I am a multiple-award-winning editor. I have edited short fiction and novels since 1986. I have trained copy editors, not just for the magazines I edited, but also for major publishing companies. I have saved books destroyed by line […]
Most writers check their traditional book contracts for the advance, the payout, and the due dates. They don’t look at anything else. Writer after writer, and editor after editor, have told me this.
I always look toward the editing clauses first. Because if they’re ugly, the rest of the contract usually is as well.
This applies to all kinds of writing for traditional markets, especially for nonfiction and short fiction. I’ve seen terrible editing clauses in those contracts, and what’s ironic is that those clauses often seem to be the most innocuous.
What you want is complete control of the content of your work.
Writers miss opportunities all the damn time, because writers are hard to reach. I don’t know why they think they need to be hard to reach, but they are.
Recently, the Passive Voice blog pointed out a post on editing by Lynn Price of Behler Publications. Behler Publications is an independent traditional publisher which buys manuscripts and turns them into finished books, distributing them to various book outlets and sending authors royalty statements. Behler has a contractual relationship with its authors. I state all of that because some of the comments in the PV […]
What an exciting day. Today marked the end of the Fiction River Kickstarter project. We initially set a fundraising goal of $6,000. We figured we’d need that to pay for part of the first issue of Fiction River. For those of you who don’t know what that is, Dean and I are starting an anthology series called Fiction River. Six issues will appear each year, with some […]
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