For those of you who don't follow me on Twitter, my user-name there is @hprw and I use this tiny picture of a peacock as my avatar. Remember the picture: it will be important later. A few days ago I encountered a self-published writer on Twitter who had some rather strange views ...
Last Friday, Twitter was awash with links to this story in the Mirror, which described how six-year-old Leo Hunter had landed an amazing twenty-three book deal. I was immediately suspicious, as was Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, Lynn Price of Behler Publications, and many other writers and bloggers. No one gets twenty-three book ...
This is the final part of the talk I gave at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. You can read part I here, and part II here. The Writing Business 44) So, once you’re sure your writing is as good as it can be, you have to work out where to submit it. How can ...
This is part two of the talk I gave at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this week. You can read the first part here, and the final part will appear tomorrow. The Writing Business 25) How hard is it to get an agent? Let’s look at some statistics. 26) At her talk at the Romantic ...
Two days ago I spoke at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (get me!), on the subject of The Writing Business. I'd never done anything like this before, so I was very lucky to share the stage with Keith Charters of Strident Publishing and to have the event chaired by the writer Eric ...
Last Friday Jeremy Vine discussed self-publishing on his BBC Radio 2 midday show (you can listen to that show here for a further four days: it begins about half-way through the recording). His studio guest was Kim Cross, co-founder and managing director of Grosvenor House Publishing (which according to the definition is ...
Run a writing competition, and attract as many entries as you can: the internet makes it easy to find writers' groups and message boards where you can advertise your competitions for free. You don't even have to charge an entry fee: just get as many entries in, as quickly as you can. You don't need to ...
Good literary agents earn their living through commissions on the sales that they make to legitimate publishers, while less scrupulous agents earn by charging fees to the writers that they “represent”. So, if an agency doesn’t charge its writers up-front fees, you’d expect them to be legitimate. Sadly that’s not always the case: the notorious ...
A few weeks ago I corresponded with a frustrated writer who was considering vanity publication. When I advised her against it she replied with words to this effect: “I can see why you don’t like it. But I can’t get my book published any other way. There are millions of writers out there, and only ...
In the relatively short life of this blog (I began blogging in June 2008), I've told just three people that they are not welcome here.One was a writer who argued with me about YouWriteOn's vanity-publishing scheme. I didn't object to his arguing: we are all entitled to express our own opinions. But ...
Harlequin’s venture into “self-publishing” (I use the inverted commas because although that’s what they’re calling it it’s not self-publishing, it’s vanity publishing) has gathered a huge amount of criticism since I blogged about it earlier this week. Jackie Kessler has written a very good overview of the situation here (my thanks to Janet Reid ...
The news that Harlequin has teamed up with Author Solutions (owner of Author House, and several other pay-to-publish services) to create a new "self publishing" imprint called Harlequin Horizons is perhaps not surprising. A few weeks ago, Thomas Nelson transformed its existing West Bow Press imprint into a similar "self publishing" scheme alongside Author Solutions; ...
Over the years I’ve read lot of publishing-related horror stories. I’ve read about writers who cheated and were cheated, publishers who ran away with wives as well as money and rights, and literary agents who ended up in prison for their sins. But the one story which stands out for me is the one about ...
How can vanity publishers and self-publishers be distinguished from one another? And why is it important that we make this distinction?When an author self-publishes then the copyright page of his book bears the name of his imprint; his publishing company—even if it publishes just one title—owns his ISBN and the publication rights to ...
The infamous vanity publisher PublishAmerica has joined Twitter! This delights me because while PublishAmerica can (and apparently does) delete all critical comments or difficult questions from its own message board, it doesn't have the same power on Twitter; and while it can block people from following it there (and yes, it's already blocked me: ...