Everything listed here are articles I find of value. There is plenty information to look at and these are just a few I happen across. I highly recommend that if you like any information down below, you should follow and subscribe to their websites or writers. For more of these posts, click on the tag Of Note.
5 Strange Truths Authors Know About Productivity
As I show in my Virtual Writing Group, the small erases, fixes, and stares are work. It’s exactly what “real” writers do when they craft a New York Time’s Best Seller. Congratulations, if you do it, you too are a “real” writer. Welcome to the club!
Being An Artist Even When It Makes You Feel Like Crap
The cold hard truth, this is all the time. There is an image that floats in our heads of self-fulfilled artists who accomplish great goals, and go one to accomplish even greater challenges. Each success is greeted with renewed vigor against whatever we can imagine. It’s not. Each day is tough. When we get a sale, a new follower, it’s a momentary respite from feeling like crap, and then we’re right back to it. We do great things, but it’s in perseverance. It’s done after the meltdowns, and before the future meltdowns. It’s a cycle we put ourselves through.
Top 10 Fantasy Writing Tips From ‘Game of Thrones’ Author George R. R. Martin
Fantastic advice from a fantastic author.
How To Be A Successful Self-Publishing Author in 2014
The truth is publishing, self or traditional, is to constantly write new work. A full-time author should be pushing out multiple novels a year, every year. An author can write fewer works in a year, but that’s bringing in epics (140k+) into the equation. Everything listed in the article is absolutely the normal way to view the publishing experience. In a way, there is little we can do to shape our own fate. We can market online, print flyers, beg, but the success of a book is (usually) never determined by that; it’s determined by readers who find it and like it. If there was a sure-fire path to those readers, we wouldn’t have countless articles telling us how to find them.
Should You Self-Publish or Go the Traditional Route? How Do You Decide?
Self-publishing and traditional publishing differ by degrees, not completely separate paths. Writers, new and old alike, have to stop viewing their writing by which avenue they take in publishing, because there is no real difference between the two. A self-published author and a traditionally-published author have to do 99% of the same work, and that 1% is the marginal difference, and not the secret sauce. They both have to carve out a story from the heart, both have to consult developmental and copy editors, both have to go through beta readers, etc… These are expected, and in each category there are authors who cut corners. Focus on the writing, the publishing comes last.
Let’s end this story of Who Is A Writer
Call yourself a writer on day one, and never let up. Call yourself an author right when the book is ready. These are some of the most treasured terms and feelings we can have, so don’t let them go. Not-writing is writing, and sometimes, writing is non-writing.
Audible Lowers Royalty Rates on Self-Published Audio Books
This is the partial-realization of the fear of Amazon. Authors are treated as royalty and respect with new-found self-publishing avenues, only to be taken away a few short years later. I personally was looking into an audio-book for The Dragon’s Tear for late this year/early next year, but with this change; not anymore. With this new change, my time is better spent working on a new novel, of which, I get the royalties that are expected. How long will the 70% Ebook royalties last now? Will Amazon use the excuse, “to recognize the value…raise the awareness…” another time? A stance needs to be taken, before authors lose their freedom and are relegated back to poverty.
Women’s Fantasy fiction: join the quest for a world unknown to bookstores
This is a big topic and criticism in the fantasy genre that sits comfortably beside the fascist and racist under(over)tones. Where are all the well-known female protagonists, but more importantly, where are all the female writers? It’s no secret that the fantasy genre as a whole is very conservative, we see that in it’s selection of white male heroes who have a special destiny, usually with a sword. We see it in it’s romanticized outlook on medieval culture, where a stark class system and great inequality exists, and it’s treated as rightfully in place.
What’s most striking is how our female contemporaries are overlooked by the general public. Let’s be honest for a minute, the book industry is a product industry, and if you’re not selling, you’re not writing. Now a bottleneck is occurring, less female writers’ books on bookshelves, less readers, less pay, equals to less books to be on bookshelves. Will the new self-publishing landscape alleviate this problem, where readers can judge for themselves what they want to see? Maybe. What is will be is a situation for us to handle one day at a time.
Shocks and Surprises in Fiction: All in Good Fun, or a Gimmick?
As someone who wrote a book with a shock and surprise or two, I feel I can write about this topic. My shocks are not “cheap thrills”, they’re expensive thrills. Their inclusion is to rock the reader’s expectations, and hopefully, maybe, they like it. Who doesn’t like seeing a new twist? The argument against using shocks and surprises is the exact one to writing anything. Do it, but make sure it’s a good one.
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