Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

Taking a cue from Janet Reid, who over the weekend posted a truly amazingly bad agent pitch letter (yes, I do know who the agent is, and no, this person does not have any sales), I thought I’d start the wee…

Since its founding in 1996, Odyssey has become one of the most respected workshops in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror writing community. Odyssey is for developing writers whose work is approaching publication quality and for published writers who want to improve their work. The six-week workshop combines advanced lectures, exercises, extensive writing, and in-depth feedback on student manuscripts.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

I’ve been getting questions about a brand-new writers’ contest: the 2011 Indie Publishing Contest, sponsored by (among others) the San Francisco Writers Conference.
Write, Win AND Publish!

New ‘Indie Pub…

Amazon.com is now offering BookScan information to authors enrolled in their Author Central program. For authors, previously one had to subscribe to BookScan or to get their sales numbers through their agents or publishers. Amazon says: We’re happy to announce that – for the first time ever – authors can see weekly sales trends of […]

Every book on how to be your own boss has instructions about when to give up your day job. Each one of these books has a particular rule of thumb. Some say you cannot quit your day job until you have three months’ salary in the bank.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

I semi-frequently get questions from people who want to know how to break into the publishing industry–not as writers, but as agents, editors, copy editors, publicists, designers, and so on. There are a nu…

Gruber was living on dreams and precious else during those lean, dangerous years. He played hide and seek with his landlord until he could scrounge his rent, reduced his food budget by eating “automat” soup (a meal made of the free ketchup and crackers available at the automat, stirred in a bowl, with the hot water for tea to taste), and dropping off manuscripts on foot to avoid any postal costs.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

As I’ve discussed before on this blog, one of the many changes currently rocking the publishing industry is a general blurring of lines, a mixing and melding of formerly sharply separate categories and func…

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

Many of the writers who contact me with Writer Beware-type questions seem to be convinced that the process of getting published is equivalent to a crap shoot. There are enormous numbers of people trying to …

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

Publishers Weekly reports that a New York Supreme Court judge has dismissed most claims in The Peter Lampack Agency’s suit against a former client, best selling mystery author Martha Grimes.

At the heart …