A single book can be sold in all sorts of different formats: the print format encompasses both hard cover and paperback, each of which can be sold separately (although this is becoming increasingly uncommon now); then there’s large print, the electronic version, serialisation rights for newspapers and magazines, and of course, audio rights. On top…
Tag Archive: money
Real Writing Jobs? I Don’t Think So
Someone called Kaley Tuitele recently left a comment on another thread on my blog in which she sang the praises of this website, which apparently pays her to leave her poorly-punctuated spammy comments full of spelling errors on blogs like mine. She claims to write “content articles” too: I do hope none of them are…
Why Good Literary Agencies Don’t Charge Reading Fees
There are some agents who feel that the time taken to work through the slush pile is disproportionate to the benefit that it brings, as they find so few good new clients there; and that if they were paid to do this work, via a reading fee or similar, they might even be able to…
Inside PublishAmerica
I don’t often blog about PublishAmerica, as the forums on AbsoluteWrite do an excellent job of informing writers of the truth behind this dubious company. But today, I shall make an exception. A couple of days ago a new member arrived at AbsoluteWrite who claimed to work for PublishAmerica. I’ve read threads like that before…
Amazon Gives Authors Access To Nielsen BookScan
Yesterday it was announced that Amazon is going to provide access to Nielsen BookScan to all authors who have signed up to its Author Central service. By the magic of the internet, writers will now be able to see their sales mapped out in Amazon-blue and white. I suspect this will only work for US…
Talli Roland Takes On Amazon!
I first met Talli Rowland on Twitter, and then at a couple of the RNA parties I’ve been to since. She’s a gorgeous woman, a fabulous writer and a lovely friend to have. Today, Talli is taking on Amazon, hoping to push her debut novel The Hating Game up the best seller lists, and here’s…
Stealing Is Not Acceptable No Matter What You Call It
On Friday, while I was in the middle of the whirl of posts that so many of you lovely people wrote about copyright, two things jumped up and waved at me. First I received a Google alert which showed that someone had copied seven posts from my blog and pasted them into his without permission…
Lost Book Sales
Here’s an interesting new blog: it asks readers to send in their stories of the books they tried to buy but couldn’t, and to explain why. It’s a sobering read, and for every lost sale which is reported to the site there must be many, many more out there in the wild. I’m not entirely…
Mainstream Publishing Is Not Scared of Self-Publishing
(Not even when it jumps out from behind the literary sofa and shouts BOO!) A couple of weeks ago on the social whirl that is Twitter, someone suggested to me that the reason that commercial publishers are so dismissive of self- and vanity-publishers is that they are either scared of them, or in denial over…
What Are Writers Worth? Part II
Yesterday I discussed why I (and the Society of Authors) think that writers should be paid for taking part in events and not treated as a free resource. That blog post attracted all sorts of attention. Writers, editors and agents linked to it on Twitter; I received a good number of emails about it, both…
What Are Writers Worth?
When I was invited to speak at the Edinburgh International Book Fair (and yes, I’m still boasting about that) I was very pleased to accept the invitation. The EIBF has an excellent reputation; it’s creative and wide-ranging and fun. It paid me a reasonable fee (£150 just in case you’re wondering) and my expenses for…
Why Sales Statistics And Quality Are Inseparable
Last year, a blog post of mine about the sales statistics of vanity-published books sparked a lot of attention (I’ll have to quote Victoria Strauss more often). First, Publishers’ Marketplace linked to the piece and a few hundred extra visitors found their way here as a result; then literary agent extraordinaire Janet Reid linked to…
Mainstream, Vanity And Self-Publishing: What Are The Differences?
There are three different ways writers can get published: but I’d only recommend two of them. Guess which ones. Mainstream or commercial publishing, which pays advances and royalties, relies on editorial selection to find the best or most appropriate books for the market, and puts a considerable amount of professional expertise into producing the best…
They Had It Coming Indeed: Part IV
This is the fourth blog post in a shortish series in which I analyse an article written by David Rozansky, publisher of Flying Pen Press (discussed here at AbsoluteWrite), regarding literary agent Andrew Wylie’s decision to set up his own publishing house, and license e-book rights to some of his clients’ works exclusively to Amazon….
Advances: Bit By Bit By Bit
When I hear of books being sold for huge amounts I go through the same old routine. First I envy the writers their success; and then I go out and buy the books which have attracted those gigantic advances, hoping that some of their magic might rub off on me! The point is, though, that…
They Had It Coming Indeed: Part II
This blog post is the second in a series in which I analyse an article written by David Rozansky, publisher of Flying Pen Press, regarding the recent decision by literary agent Andrew Wylie to set up his own publishing house and license e-book rights to some of his clients’ works exclusively to Amazon. You can…
They Had It Coming Indeed: Part I
A few weeks ago I spotted a link on Twitter to an article by David Rozansky, publisher of Flying Pen Press. He had written about literary agent Andew Wylie’s new publishing venture, Odyssey Editions. I disagreed with a lot of what he’d written, and said so; and along came Mr Rozansky to ask me exactly…
Big Advances: Are They Really All They Seem?
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…
How I Got Published (Part II): Nicola Morgan
Last week Nicola Morgan told us a little about the writerly struggles she faced in the days before she was published. This week she reveals how she found herself an excellent agent, moved from not-really-published to very-well-published-indeed, and discovered her heartsong. Ok, so there I am ridiculously pleased with my boring government documents but horribly…