Those of you who are following my analysis of an article written by publisher and self-proclaimed Authors' Business Manager, David Rozansky, might like to take a look at Lynn Price's interesting piece over at Behler Publications' always-useful blog. Lynn has started a lively debate on the side-issue of whether or not POD publishing ...
I'm pleased to say that a new series of Sue Cook's The Write Lines starts on BBC Radio Oxford on Sunday 5 September, with a stellar line up of publishing's best, and one or two of its worst. It goes out live from 9pm, for one hour and as soon as I find ...
Stories about big advances make good publicity, and so it’s in the publisher’s interests to make these advances sound as big as possible while keeping their actual expenditure as low as they can possibly manage in order to satisfy their accountants and shareholders. So when publishers announce these big deals to the media they’ll often ...
Think again. And read this article from Paul Carr at TechCrunch, in which he provides some pretty safe reasoning which he backs up with facts, figures and citations. It's well worth a read. Although some of the comments which follow contain assumptions and statements which are more than a little dubious.
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 ...
There's no doubt that a nice fat dose of fame will help you get your book published: but that's not the only route into publishing. You don't have to be an established author to get published either. If you follow that particular myth to its logical conclusion, the fallacy is easy to see: ...
Every year the Book Trade Charity raises funds through its action week which this year runs from 7 to 11 June. Publishing's great and good take part, and this year is no exception: cake bakes, a pub quiz, and a spelling ...
I'm pleased to welcome M G Harris, my Twitter-friend and author of The Joshua Files series, who concludes her Zero Moment blog-tour here. Ten Things That Helped Me Get Published 1 Writing Fan Fiction In the mid-1990s I took up writing as a hobby. ...
My dear friend Sally Zigmond has begun a short story writing course on her blog, The Elephant In The Writing Room, and even if the short story is a form you've never even considered, I urge you to take part. ...
I am a big smug show-off because I have lots of writer-friends. But I almost never ask my friends to discuss their own books on my blog because it gets embarrassing when I don't like their books. There's no danger of that ...
My thanks to Paul Lamb for bringing this lovely little book to my attention, and for letting me reproduce his review of it, which originally appeared on his blog last year. I’ll confess at the start of this ...
I read two very similar blog posts last week: this one from Janet Reid, and this one from The Rejectionist.Both make the point that it's important for writers to take care over their writing: to use the words they mean to and not ones which sound the same; and to check ...
Six years ago today, a discussion called Learn Writing With Uncle Jim began on the Absolute Write message board. The Uncle Jim in question is SF writer James D Macdonald, who is perhaps better known as Yog, of Yog's Law fame. ...