I really agree with this piece. When I was 12 I decided I wanted to write historical fiction. Light, romantic, historically accurate genre fiction. The kind of fiction Laurie King has dubbed frivolous fiction. The kind of fiction I read as a break from my life. I am a professional historian, 35 year career teaching [...]

I have a different take on Joe Konrath and other writers’ willingness to tell their numbers. When I was deciding whether to go with self-publishing or give the traditional route one more try, it was Joe’s early posts comparing what he had made on his traditional books, what he was selling in ebooks through the [...]

Dear Eric, This was a great review of your experience. I uploaded to Smashwords 10 months ago, have had little sales, and as you found, most of my sales are on Kindle. What this post did is nudge me to look into uploading independent of Smashwords to B & N, and Google Partners. Thanks for [...]

Dear Lenox, I totally agree! I have friends who are still pursuing the traditional route, but they have a back log of out of print books, and I keep trying to get them to put them out as at least ebooks, so at least they will be getting that income while the query-agent-editor-contract-printed book dance [...]

Thanks to both Eric and Robert for your comments. My concern about using Gaslight or Gilded Age was primarily over the fact each term had single authors who had listed a very large number of already published books with this as the tag line, and I was concerned that at least at the beginning my [...]

Great post! I too can’t help but wonder at the anger (yes Joe Konrath is right to use that word in his newest post “With Change-comes Anger” http://bit.ly/9ogJML) because even many of those who commented on his post sounded so angry. It is a cliche to say behind anger is fear-but this seems very true [...]

I really thought we had begun to get beyond the “everything self-published is vanity publishing” stage, but guess not. What I think that most people in traditional publishing don’t think about is that a self-published work is largely going to go un-noticed unless it has some value. Without being positively reviewed by an online reviewer [...]

Wonderful post. So much of the advice out there keeps harping on the business side of publishing (whether traditional or indie), that it is easy to get fooled into thinking that following that business advice can substitute for the heart and soul that fuels creativity. I suspect most authors came to writing by way of [...]