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The New World of Publishing: Traditional or Indie? What To Do Now?
Over and over I get the question, “Should I mail books to traditional publishers or not these days?” And honestly, over the last year my answer has varied and shifted. But now I have finally settled on an answer I feel comfortable with for the next year or so. Remember, please, this is just my opinion. And how I am moving for my career. But every writer, every career in fiction writing is different. Please keep that in mind when reading this. The Problem Right now the problem is that a former stable industry is changing at light speed. Faster, actually, which makes everything looks so warped and confused. (Sorry,…
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New World of Publishing: Speed
Truth: The slow writers in this new world of publishing are going to have trouble. Far more trouble than they had with traditional publishing only. We are in a new golden age of fiction. The first golden age was the pulp age. Speed of writing was celebrated in that time and it will be this time around as well. Okay, say it: I have no fear. Or better yet, I’m as dumb as they come for bringing up the subject of speed of writing. Speed of writing is the third rail in publishing, but in the discussion of the new world of publishing, it has to be talked about. So…
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The New World of Publishing: Agents and the Future
Okay, time to talk about agents and their future in this changing world. But first folks, read this!! http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/the-agents-role-in-todays-digital-book-world/ Mary Kole, who I do not know, and who seems fairly smart, works at Andrea Brown Literary Agency. On the Digital Book World site, she talked about her opinions of what the agent’s role will be going into the future. I read it and shuddered, to be honest. Then I went back and actually tried to figure out why I had such an adverse reaction to some very logical thoughts by this agent. Agent Mary Kole argues that agents will become packagers, doing “editorial work, marketing consultation, design, etc.” She thinks…
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The New World of Publishing: The Scams
As we ramp into 2011, I figured that besides all the goal-setting talk, it might be a good time to give a few warnings as well. And maybe set a clear work goal as well. Electronic publishing is the hot topic and traditional publishing is struggling to change to the new world. Indie publishing is becoming the term, and indie writers are vocal and all over the web. Us old-timers who are paying attention to the changes are rushing to get up our lost backlist and reverted novels at the same time as traditional publishers are moving quickly to get all their inventory into electronic form. And everywhere I look…
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The New World of Publishing: The eRace
A long time ago, in a magazine I did for fun for writers called The Report, I came up with an idea to try to add numbers and quantify the mysterious process of submissions to traditional markets. For some reason it got the name of “The Race” because it was a race against ourselves as writers. And it worked in so many ways, I was stunned. First off, it was a clear number that many of us could hang onto to show progress in a business that often doesn’t give a sense of progress. And secondly, it gave a yardstick measurement of the writers who were pushing hard and those…
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The New World of Publishing: Dare to Be Bad
Kevin J. Anderson just did a good blog on the topic of taking a chance with your work, about “Daring to be Bad” on a first draft and getting it down. Read his blog here, it’s short. Kevin credits me with coming up with the phrase, but it was a catch phrase that Nina Kiriki Hoffman and I used in our early years of our short-story-per-week challenge. I think Nina might have said it first, but it was our chant. And I have repeated it over and over during the last few decades. Both to myself and to other writers. Now in this new world of publishing, it still applies, maybe…
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The New World of Publishing: It Ain’t So Easy
So far, in a number of these chapters in this topic, I’ve talked about the differences with this new world and the old traditional publishing. And then in the last post I talked about just one of the decisions that writers publishing their own books in their own publishing company must face. Pricing decisions, and that chapter caused all kinds of fun conversations. And as many writers have learned already in this new world, being a publisher these days is easy COMPARED to what it used to be. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy in general. It’s just easier than it used to be. So for a moment I thought…
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The New World of Publishing: E-Book Pricing
On a number of different email lists over the last four or five months there have been discussions on ebook pricing. Joe Konrath is a defender of the $2.99 novel price, while traditional publishers are keeping their prices in the $7.99 to $15.99 range depending on how new the book is. And on these lists what we all read over and over is personal examples of how it worked for that person, or that person’s sister, or mother. So I thought I would try to just lay out some facts and where we stand on this subject right now in the fall of 2010. FACTS 1) We have no real…
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The New World of Publishing: The Rolling Stone is Gaining Speed.
The rolling stone of small and self-publishing is gaining speed as every day goes by. Starting on last Thursday evening and running for three days, novelist Scott William Carter and I led a discussion with a little over thirty well-published professional writers on the reasons, the art, and the promise of both electronic publishing and POD (print on demand) publishing for fiction writers. Fun doesn’t even begin to describe the three days we called “The New Tech Workshop.” Tiring would be a understatement. We worked with the writers on the ease of doing web sites, then worked on taking a story and making sure the organization and formatting were correct,…
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The New World of Publishing: The World is Not Ending
Lately the conversation among writers and editors and some publishers is very two-sided. Either the world of publishing will completely change in the next few years or everything will stay the same (and just some new stuff will get added in). For traditional publishers, my belief of what will happen is closer to the second: Not much will change except for more tightening and a few of the weaker publishers going down. But that said, I think for SOME writers the first option is coming to pass: Everything will completely change. And already has started to. Yeah, that makes sense…not. So let me see if I can, in this world…