Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware I’ve gotten a number of questions recently about the Nurmal Resources PUBLISH ME! contest, from authors who’ve been solicited via email to enter it. (What’s Nurmal Resources, you may ask? A new publisher. According to its website, “Nurmal is passionate about developing resources that inspire a new normal […]
Being paid for writing is the ultimate author’s dream. Today, guest blogger C. Hope Clark sheds light on an area of support that many writers don’t think of: Grants. There are plenty of them out there, if you know where to look–though, as Hope points out, you must be sure you meet their eligibility requirements, and are willing to conform to their conditions.
What’s the average advance for a first novel? How long does it take the typical first novel to sell? Do most first novelists sell their books on their own, or through an agent? Will publishers and agents consider first novelists who don’t have any short fiction publication credits?
Here are several publishing-related items that caught Victoria Strauss’s eye over the past week.
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Because I don’t already have enough to do (ha!), I’ve just set up a Facebook page for Writer Beware. It’ll aggregate the content I’m posting around the Web–the blog posts here, my Twitterfeed, and info from various writers’ groups and discussion boards. Your comments, responses, and thoughts are […]
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Today: the second of two guest posts on content mills. In this article originally published at The WM Freelance Writers Connection, writer Angela Atkinson takes a more positive view of content mills, arguing that they can be a good way for new writers to sharpen skills and build […]
A content mill, if you aren’t familiar with the term, is a website that aggregates huge numbers of articles on a constantly-updated basis, written by freelancers who are paid by page views or ad clicks rather than wages or fees.
Today, Smashwords founder Mark Coker guest blogs about “private label rights” services, which make it possible for anyone to “author” their own ebooks or to populate blogs by putting together chunks of content from the service’s database. The result: scads of badly-formatted, poor-quality ebooks and blogs, which are often used by SEO scammers to confuse Google Search results.
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Today, by unanimous decision, the US Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that tossed out a settlement reached in a landmark case involving electronic rights and copyright. In 1999, the National Writers’ Union filed suit against the New York Times and LexisNexis, among others, alleging copyright infringement […]
Is it irony or coincidence that, only a few days after blogging about vanity awards, I should be spammed by one?
Perhaps you have, too. It’s an outfit calling itself the 2010 Creative Spirit Awards.
In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays.
Myna Chang (she/her) is the host of Electric Sheep SF. Her work has been selected for Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Small Wonders, and Daily Science Fiction.
