Brand loyalty—name loyalty—is something that we writers desire, but it’s not something that we can simply will into being. And it certainly doesn’t come about by bribing your reader.
Continue ReadingAs I write this in early January, fourth quarter numbers for all big businesses are just starting to trickle in. The whining about 2016 has commenced, some of it justified, some of it not.
The numbers aren’t just in for the major publishers; the numbers are in for indie writers as well. And the writers who crunch numbers are having varied reactions, often depending on years of business expertise.
I have a hunch that when all of the numbers arrive toward the end of this month or so, we’ll find out that 2016 was truly a mixed bag….
Continue ReadingBack on schedule, more or less. I’m scheduling these recommended reading lists as I start them, so if they seem a little incomplete, it’s because they go live whether I like it or not. No more tinkering! I’m still adding recommended books from my one-year hiatus. I’m not marking which are which, but you might […]
Continue ReadingI want to support what the Authors Guild is doing here. I really do. I believe this “conversation” needs to commence. Writers—particularly writers of the Take Care of Me school—need to understand that their publishers and their agents are not their friends. Those two entities are in business for themselves and will devise contract terms to benefit them. But…
Continue ReadingI want to say nothing, but that’s not true. Traditional publishers learned a lot these past few years, and in 2014, started putting their knowledge into action. Over the next few weeks, I’ll do the traditional media thing, and provide you with my own sort of year in review. All of it will focus on […]
Continue ReadingFinished the Linda Fairstein binge. I am now caught up. Yay! The last time I did this was with Lee Child. Before that, Michael Connelly—but that was in the days before Kindle, so I had to haunt used bookstores and read out of order. (Did that with Ian Rankin as well. Hmmm, mysteries and binge […]
Continue ReadingI hit upon a theme in my reading this month, and it wasn’t deliberate. I realized that I love writers who challenge themselves. They reach for something that might just be out of their grasp. Sometimes they hit, and sometimes they miss. Mostly, I don’t recommend the misses. I sometimes bitch about them in this […]
Continue ReadingThis week, I finished reading a bad book by one of my favorite authors. Well, “finished reading” isn’t accurate. “Paged through the last half” is probably better. The book was astoundingly bad. The author decided to go 50 Shades of Grey on me when she’d never written more than a fade-to-black sex scene before. But […]
Continue ReadingI initially started this list because I was no longer editing, and I wanted to recommend what I’m reading to you. I’m editing again in a limited capacity for Fiction River, and I’m reading some marvelous stories. You’ll have to see those, especially the ones in the volumes that list me as editor (not just […]
Continue ReadingI should never read the comments on other people’s writing information blogs. The comments discourage me, generally for one of two reasons. If the blog is about traditional publishing, and the authors are traditionally published only with no desire to change, I get discouraged at the amount of misinformation. If the blog is about indie […]
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