Because even watchdogs have to rest sometimes, the Writer Beware blog will be taking a break over the holiday season. Unless there’s a really juicy publishing story, this blog will be on hiatus until the new year.

Since I so often get questions about the legitimacy of literary contests (see, for instance, my posts of December 16 and December 7), I thought it would be helpful to post some suggestions for evaluating any contests you may be thinking of entering.

Blogger JM contacted one hundred literary agents with the following question: What is the single biggest mistake writers make when querying you? More than 50 responded. Here are the problems mentioned most frequently:
Blogger JM contacted one hundred literary age…

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…

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…

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…

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

One of many reasons I enjoy Twitter is that it’s relatively free of the spam that clogs other modes of online discourse. Oh, there’s the occasional author Twitspam (writers: Twitspamming is not, I repeat, N…

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…