I didn’t intend to blog about ConZealand. I thought I might blog about my Hugo Awards ballot… maybe. Then I had the misfortune to wake up to Tweets about the Hugo Awards ceremony. I started watching it, began messaging a friend with a live paraphrase
Madgeniusclub has an interesting article for SF&F writers on building web presence: 1- Be you. Don’t try to sound educated, or professorial or anything of the kind, unless that is who you are, naturally. Just be you. I swear readers can smell “Phony” a mile off.
Earlier this summer I pitched my (unfinished) novel to Baen Books‘ Contributing Editor Gray Rinehart at a face-to-face critique session at LibertyCon, a three-day sci-fi and fantasy literature convention in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Unusually for a modern publisher, Baen takes unsolicited manuscripts. Gray is the Slushmaster General – a job,
Self-published eBook author? Want to convert samples into sales? Consider cutting the “front matter”: the testimonials, genealogy, pronunciation guide, foreword, epigraph and cast of characters: When you get a reader interested enough that they downloaded a sample, or are clicking “look inside” on a web page, you really don’t
Great tip for writers who plan to self-publish their books on Amazon Kindle (and similar). ‘Writing to market’ used to mean writing ‘teenage vampire stockbroker‘ erotica for publishers looking to meet the latest craze. For indie authors, ‘writing to market’ means: I’m going to look at the sub-sub genres, check the potential sales
Earlier this year I read short stories nominated for this year’s and the 2014 Hugo Awards, and some that missed out due to the Puppy kerfuffle. And I wondered: Were they the best that science fiction had to offer? And, if so, is short fiction – often seen as the core of
Traditional publishers don’t like hard SF, says an author with a creative writing MFA: Which raises a question. As writers decry the decline of hard SF, you’ve got to wonder how many traditional publishers think like her – that The Martian had no market? How many reject hard SF because they think
Amy Suiter-Clarke was on my MFA course and has just secured a literary agent for her novel. She’s blogged here about how she secured her agent – without a cold query. I participated in three Twitter pitching contests and sent out dozens of queries before I
I’ve recently discovered New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia‘s writing class ‘How to make a living as a professional fiction writer’ . The notes were blogged by David Harr over four blogposts, which you can read here, here, here, and here. The best session is definitely
Sub-Q is a new magazine that claims to be the first to pay professional rates for interactive fiction. They offer $90 for an original 1,000 interactive short story, and are looking for: F/SF, horror, mystery, and mash-up interactive fiction. We like beautiful, moving prose, but