Features

When I set out to write “The Bull and The Ban” I realized that there was going to be an issue. Although my book is the account of my journey through Spain and Catalonia to discover the controversy behind bullfighting and I am English, there were going to be Spanish speakers interested in the book as well, which is the book of interviews I filmed for the documentary I made, coming out this month.

It seemed logical and with over 300 fans on my social network looking forward to the release I also decided to look into the […]

A good post and discussion at Rachelle Gardner’s blog: 5 Surprises About Self-Publishing. This leaps out:

4. I overestimated my ability to sell books. I have lists of bookstores at which I’ve done appearances, book clubs who have hosted me, readers who have loved my work and bloggers who have reviewed my books. I didn’t think I had to build a platform. I thought that with a few flicks of the mouse, I’d quickly sell thousands of books and build a buzz that would carry me to even greater sales. It didn’t happen, so now I’m out doing what

In the past few years I’ve been reading and editing a lot of self-published books. Two things I’ve noticed:

1) How good many of them are.

2) How poorly edited most of them are.

The ones I’ve read have more often than not been MUCH better than most people probably expect self-published books to be. The writers have some great ideas, and many really know how to tell a story. But alas, most self-published books are desperately in need of the loving attention of a good editor.

Mistakes I often see:

* Recurring grammatical problems. It seems that very few […]

Jane Friedman has a provocative post about self-publishing  that has the potential to rekindle age-old genre wars: whether or not genre is “serious” fiction. But that’s not really what she’s getting at. Her point is that there’s a different process for how much genre fiction is consumed, and this is how the self-publishing industry is evolving. She writes:

This model relies on a readership that consumes books like candy, or readers mostly interested in finding a next read as quickly and cheaply as possible. (We’re starting to see the impact of this cheap-read behavior: agents asking publishers to reduce

One of my jobs is to help other writers write well. But often, in order to do that, I first have to teach them to write badly.

Few things are more frightening than an empty sheet of paper (an empty refrigerator and an empty bank account are two that spring to mind, but let’s stick with the topic here, okay?). Many people totally choke when facing that pale monster. And that’s a completely rational response. Though not all are willing to admit it, even pros have this problem. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that the majority of […]