Two claims / discussions in #BookTwitter converged in my mind recently. 1. ‘Copyright has to be truncated so authors are forced to create more work, instead of resting on their past achievements.’ 2. ‘If authors (commercial or self-published) want go get ahead or even get noticed, they must write quickly and to-trend.’ First, on author-copyright.…
Read More Trends or Treadmills?Amazon finally made a move on (one) Kindle Publishing scammer. Read the Forbes article here. Why is this important? Given the difficulty of snagging a literary agent and the slow pace of commercial publishing, many authors are choosing self publishing as a side hustle or their main living. Amazon, for better or for worse, is…
Read More Amazon, KDP, and Self-Pub StuffersI’m thinking about this for a fantasy short story cover. Still revamping the previously (anthology) published 25-page story, but seriously thinking about self-publishing this and some of the more-obscure Lonhra Sequence side stories. I have a lot of them. Granted, this cover will be mostly taken up by text, but I like that it directly…
Read More Playing with cover artI had a long, involved email exchange recently with some writer friends scattered around the world: print authors, digital authors, authors working for commercial contracts, authors who’ve gone almost exclusively to self-publishing. We all came to mostly the same conclusion: We think the future, or at least the near-future to five or ten years out,…
Read More Self-publishing and Hybrid Authors, pt 1…Only I don’t really have an ending deadline date, because I know all about best-laid plans. Singer in Rhunshan will probably, at some point in the next few months, become a self-published fantasy novella. There were valid reasons to delay this step: my fears, my ego, the complexity of doing this right, my worries that…
Read More My self-publishing countdown begins…Good news, everyone: I have found a skilled cover designer to do the text that I am obviously not qualified to go anywhere near. The designer and a pack of sharp-eyed folks in an online art forum found all the places I’ve messed up, and pointed them out. It’s called a critique, and it’s a…
Read More Singer cover, round three…Okay, okay, there was the socially questionable and morally bankrupt comic book I wrote when I was maybe seven, but that didn’t last longer than fifteen minutes, a stern warning, and the ten feet to Mom’s shredder. It doesn’t count. Nor do the 130K of various fan fiction stories I’ve written over the years. What…
Read More My first real try at self-publishing“Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone,” runs the quote from poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Maybe not. The NY Times Bestseller list almost always has at least one example of ‘Misery Literature’. Misery memoirs (and their cousins family histories and autobiographies) have been made into major movies and won significant literary awards. And…
Read More Misery Memoirs and Pay-to-Play PublishingA lot has happened in the world since I last chimed in on this blog. I could talk about gun violence and mental health, in the wake of numerous high-profile and tragic shootings. But many people are already doing that, to far better effect. I can shake my head at the political gamesmanship over the…
Read More ‘My Turn’ and the end of an era