Marie Force wrote a lovely blog post this week on the five-year anniversary of her major success as an indie writer. She busts a few myths about her career in the post, and she’s very clear about her numbers, and the events that came together to launch her success. She’s written something similar before, but […]
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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.
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It used to be that everyone on the panel would give the same answer to basic questions. On the basic how-to-get published questions, there was only one answer, and it was the same for writer after writer after writer. Now, the basics differ depending on who you talk to. We all agree on craft issues. But when we move to how to get published, writing panels actually get contentious….
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This week, though, I’m focused on Author Earnings, again. The October report examines “the rest of the ebook market.” In the past, Author Earnings only examined Amazon’s numbers and only from a “slice,” usually numbers spread out over an entire day. This time, Hugh and Data Guy looked at Apple, Kobo, Nook, and Google Play in the United States only. The numerical results surprised me as did, I suppose, Hugh and Data Guy’s personal conclusions.
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A while back, I promised I would look at the new report from Author Earnings. I needed time to assess the data for the purposes of this blog. For those of you who don’t know, Author Earnings is a website started by Hugh Howey and a man known only as Data Guy. The site takes […]
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Fortunately for me, indie publishing came along. I was able to get out of the traditional publishing novel merry-go-round, which never suited me, and able to publish my novels on my own.
There are a lot of capable people working in traditional publishing, some fantastic editors, and publishers who really care about writers and books. I love working with those people. I consider it a privilege to interact with them.
But now, I’m straddling both worlds, and I find myself a bit overwhelmed by the weirdness of both pace and deadlines.
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I’ve written five openings to this blog today. I want to write a completely different blog—and I will. In fact, I’ll write five completely different blogs, but I can’t publish them for several months. If I publish them now, then the people I’m referring to will know I’m referring to them, and that would be […]
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I’m sure you’ve all seen the first. Stephen King wrote one of his every-five-years or so essays defending the prolific writer. His essays are always a little defensive, because he’s writing for the literary crowd, and always a little perplexed, as if he’s not sure why people complain when someone writes fast. (I’m perplexed about that too.)
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I cringe at times, because I came of age when the arguments were loud, particularly in sf, about what was and wasn’t appropriate for the genre. Whether I agreed or not, those arguments went in.
It took me forever to write space opera, and it took some creative traditional editors to buy it. Nowadays, we can publish what we want, indie if traditional publishing doesn’t want what we’ve done, and public opinion shouldn’t make a difference.
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Once upon a time, a writer taking on a big publisher like that remained secret, partly so that the writer could sell another book. (Even then, the large publisher would often bad-mouth the writer in private to any other publisher who would listen.)
Times have changed.
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