Features

To be an author is to get paid for writing. I’ve heard this often enough that I’ve become quite comfortable with not being an author. Instead, I am someone who makes up stories and gives them away for free on the internet. I have always wanted to do this, but until the past year or so, it was not a serious option. Now, thanks to the emergent convergence of e-books and e-readers and iPads and iPhones and Androids and all the other great stuff coming out, it is not only an option, but the perfect one for me.

I’ve put […]

I have a daughter.  Last night we were playing around with the site GirlSense.com.  On the site you can design different fashions and accessories, as well as buy the fashion creations of other users.  I’ve seen other avatar makers in the past, but the amount of detail you can do on these clothes, bags, shoes, etc. is pretty amazing.

And it occurred to me that this will be the future of fashion.  Visions of the future often put people in identical silver jumpsuits, as if we’ve “gotten over” our obsession with outward appearances.  But fashion is a creative pursuit.  […]

Some people blow through a book in a day or two, while others take a couple of weeks or more. Many people just inhale them like a sweet breeze, one after the other, without stopping in between. I’m worse than that — I just forget the endings of books I enjoy. (Truth is, I don’t even finish books I don’t love.) To most avid readers, books are not only an unquestionable right, but they are taken for granted as a vital component of life.

It’s like when the tourists cruise through the Sistine Chapel, look up and say, “Look honey, […]

By Scott Nicholson

Dean Koontz has made the observation that novels are like annuities, earning income for writers over a lifetime. Well, that’s true for Koontz and a handful of writers who manage to keep books in print and on the shelves.

Given the constraints of shelf space, the product pipeline that requires a 30-day flushing of “out with the old, in with the new,” and the vagaries of sales numbers and warehousing, the publishing-industry model almost guarantees a writer will have NO books on the shelf in their old age, precisely the time when they need income the most […]

This post about self-publishing is from February, but new to me.  It makes a persuasive case against self-publishing.

Professional editors of the level I work with now make money. Grown-up money that I cannot pay them, because I am not a rich person and never will be. Let alone copyediting, typsetting, and cover art (which is vastly important, don’t be fooled). I have zero interest in paying out $7000-$15000 before the book gets published, and almost certainly seeing minimal profit (especially since that 70% Amazon deal everyone’s so sweet on has a whole lot of strings attached). I like it