How threatened do publishers feel by agencies’ aggressive moves into publishing? Well, according to a report today in The Bookseller, Random House UK has done an end run around prestigious literary agency Sheil Land, directly approaching author Tom Sharpe to secure digital rights to his backlist.
Last week, prestigious UK agency Ed Victor Ltd. announced that it was going into publishing, with an ebook/print-on-demand division called Bedford Square Books.
Are Facebook, Twitter and IM having any effect on the quality or volume of my work? These questions, coupled with a very long list of goals I wanted to accomplish, plagued me like a broken plot.
What you need to do is keep throwing troubles, conflicts, surprises, and obstacles at the reader. You also need to let the hero have some successes. This allows the reader to have cause to fear AND hope, and to not know for sure how it’s all going to turn out.
Forty authors will sign their books at the Nebula Awards Weekend, Friday, May 20, 2011 from 5:30 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. at the Washington Hilton at 1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C.–located four blocks from the Dupont Circle Metro Station (use the Q Street exit).
As readers of this blog know, I’m fascinated by the oddities that pop up at the fringes of the writing and publishing worlds. This qualifies as one of the odder things I’ve come across lately: T-Post.
My characters always come first. You can’t have a plot if you don’t know who is going to move through it. Onyesonwu came to me way before her story did. The first scene I wrote was the first scene of the novel. No outline, no nothing. Just Onyesonwu at her father’s burial and some madness happens.
You become a writer by writing. You learn by damaging your ego, and giving more of yourself than you take. By a thousand revelations, by millions of words you improve.
If the main character is sympathetic and interesting, the reader will root for her and want to see what happens. If some of the particularities of the character and problem are surprising to the readers, it will generate more interest than if it’s something they’ve seen many times before.
Vanity anthologies are a popular way for unscrupulous companies to make money on writers’ hunger for publication. By far the most common vanity anthology scheme is the free contest scheme, in which writers are enticed to enter poems or stories in a competition, and then pressured–though usually not required–to buy the anthologies in which their work appears.
The second volume in the Aurora Award-winning and World Fantasy Award-nominated Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction series offers readers the essential collection of
outstanding works by Canadians from the past year.
Jean Marie Ward writes about all things weird, wonderful and downright peculiar in her hometown of Washington, DC. Sometimes she writes fiction. It makes a lot more sense than the facts. Her web site is JeanMarieWard.com.
