Features

A great post at the Tomorrow Museum about the pitfalls of crowdsourcing and how it’s not necessarily the answer to what ails publishing – namely, writers not making any money.  The gist of it is this:

The trouble I see with crowdfunding for creative projects is not that it doesn’t work, but that it couldn’t possibly work for everyone. First of all, the very act of crowdfunding requires a level of self-assuredness that does not often come naturally for artists and writers….

The least remarkable novels I read seem written as though the author knows his mother will see it

I just got back from the AWP conference – the Association of Writers and Writing Programs – in Denver.  9000 or so publishers and writers.  A lot of litmags, university presses, poets, fiction and non-fiction writers, setting up shop.  A great experience all around. I’d never actually been to a large-scale conference like this one.

50 or so panels a day.  I was on one of them – “To Publish or Self-Publish” – with Ivory Madison, CEO of Red Room, Daniel Will Harris, a book designer, and author Christopher Meeks, who put the panel together. Read his […]

Yes…it’s finally here! Inside The Writers’ Studio Episode IV, “Self-Promotion FAIL” with special guest star Caroline Leavitt. (And if you want to post it on your own blogs or Facebook accounts, or Tweet it, we will surely not complain.)

Three authors illustrate why maybe – just maybe – self-promotion doesn’t always work.

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When promoting your own book, the pain of promotion isn’t necessarily the amount of time it takes, but how it actually feels to be the salesman of your own work.  It’s what makes writing a query letter so hard – not just condensing a book into a few words, but trying to be an advocate without sounding like a used car salesman.  One of the problems you’ll see in self-published books is hyperbole on the back cover copy.  It’s important to realize that self-published books and traditionally published books aren’t equal in this regard.  So if a writer calls his/her […]

There is a lot of passionate discussion about whether self-publishing is a valid career move. I’ve learned that instead of wasting time trying to win converts, I’ll simply follow what I believe, based on the evidence I have at this point.

To wit:
1) I will make more on my backlist first novel THE RED CHURCH this year than I did from its original advance. In other words, in the year it took the book to get through “traditional production.” And I can do whatever I want with it, forever.

2) My later publishing contracts tied up my rights for […]