Publishers of all genres now expect, even require, writers to help market their work. When Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman of Verse Wisconsin posed the question, “How do you find an audience?” to the small-press panelists at the Wisconsin Book Festival, Charles Nevsimal of Centennial Press kicked off a round of answers specifically directed at [...]
Invariably, this question comes up at author events, and it came up Saturday at Doug W. Jacobson’s reading and talk about Night of Flames: A Novel of World War II. Doug’s presentation at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum was part of the Wisconsin Book Festival.
I spent the day in Madison, attending several presentations and readings, and [...]
In every recession, magazines we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on the newsstand close their doors forever, victims of the slump in advertising dollars that invariably comes during tough economic times. So with last week’s news of Blender’s demise, just the most recent in a string of magazines that have folded since the economic crisis began, [...]
I’ve been giving some thought to genre since I started work on a new novel in February. And as I looked at Elaura Niles’ Some Writers Deserve to Starve (Writer’s Digest Books, 2005), I wondered what genre some of my favorite novels are in, at least in the minds of booksellers, librarians and reviewers. I’ve [...]
The book isn’t new, but it’s a useful, easy read for anyone who wants to get their writing into print: Some Writers Deserve to Starve: 31 Brutal Truths About the Publishing Industry (by Elaura Niles, Writers Digest Books, 2005).
Some of the information, especially about the ever-changing electronic world, is already a little bit out of [...]
My friend Ingrid sent me a link to this wonderfully strange meditation on writers’ anxiety by Catherynne M. Valente from the November 2008 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine. She talks about the anxiety of not yet being published and, once published, the anxiety over whether you’ll be published ever again. Valente is the author of several [...]
One of the useful articles on Publishers Lunch recently included a link to a really thought-provoking article on the future of publishing by Lev Grossman in the online edition of Time magazine. Grossman predicts that self-publishing will become the respectable route to “real” publication, and that what we currently consider real publication (by a publishing [...]
Anyone interested in understanding publishing can learn a lot, for free, by subscribing to the daily e-mail Publishers Lunch. And if you’re at all interested in being published, you should be interested in understanding publishing, according to Marcela Landres, a former editor at Simon & Schuster who now coaches writers through her website, workshops and [...]
The Internet is old enough now that I expect to find a writer’s website when I google his or her name. Some writers have nothing (I’m talking to you, Ethan Canin, Leif Enger, Jeffrey Eugenides and Meg Wolitzer). Others have worse than nothing–a completely unusable site. And a few (like Neil Gaiman, pictured above) have [...]
You sent the query and now you’re checking your inbox every 20 minutes–if you can wait that long. So what should you do now?
Take a Deep Breath. Walk away from the computer. But don’t go too far. Editors are usually prompt in responding to queries. They realize that your idea has a shelf life, and [...]