I am not said writer. Said writer, Tim of This Machine Kills Purists wrote a rebuttal set of Top Ten Rules for Writers (the real “rules” posted most recently by the Guardian, but blogged and Twittered everywhere). My favorite of them all is: Never open a book with the weather. Use your fingers instead. Brilliant. [...]
Digital Book World tweeted this review of You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier. It is worth reading, if you are a writer, or if you’re a reader. I know I’ve let my blog get hijacked by this Amazon-Macmillan blowup. I promise this is my last post on the subject for a while. But [...]
Rupert Murdoch says $9.99 for an e-book devalues a book. As do others. [Picture me scratching my head, wondering, "If a paperback can go full price for $6.99 (as my Getting to Third Date goes for on Amazon, though it is discounted to $6.29 at B&N; and the respective e-version is $5.59 at both online [...]
When we last saw Nina, she was staring white-knuckled at a blank ledger sheet, and her best friend was going to show her how to track her expenditures as she begins the start-up phase of her novelist business. “All that red ink is going to make me puke,” Nina finally admitted to her BFF. “That’s [...]
Tobias Buckell has a great recap of the business aspects of the dispute between Amazon and Macmillan that made Amazon remove Macmillan books from the site. Cory Doctorow discusses it well at Boing Boing, too. The problem, for me, is that writers seem to be on Macmillan’s side of the brouhaha (perhaps a small part [...]
As promised, I would like to introduce you to Nina New Novelist. Nina recently turned 30 and realized that she had neglected her dream to be a career novelist. Instead, to feed herself, she has been working in a bank, doing customer service work, being promoted to management and using her writing talents to create [...]
I’ve been working on a non-writing business plan since the end of last year. As I’ve been crunching numbers, making projections, envisioning the mature business and how to plant the seeds of the startup business, I began to realize that my writing business may have benefited from the same kind of careful consideration. I put [...]
Dean Wesley Smith has an interesting blog busting myths about agents that can damage a writer’s career. [Please note, if you read this blog, but not the comments, that Dean actually thinks it is advisable to have an agent to handle negotiations (he says this in earlier posts on writer-agent relationships). He just doesn't think [...]
Moonrat, over at Editorial Ass, has a post about editing an author who is tooooo attached to AAA writing (adverbs, adjectives, and alliteration). Note this is an author who is sold and has a story so wonderful that Moonrat would rather lose hair editing out the overwriting than to have passed on the project. I [...]
Full disclosure: I stole this question from Supernatural, the TV show that won my heart when it jumped the shark — and never came down (so far). Joss Whedon’s TV show Dollhouse just did this (despite already being cancelled, waahh). Breathtaking. Maybe I should back up and define jumping the shark for those of you [...]
