Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss analyzes Harlequin Horizons and the trouble it presents for authors.

This is a followup to my post on Thomas Nelson’s new self-publishing division, West Bow Press–specifically, on Nelson’s plans to pay referral fees to agents and others who refer writers to West Bow.

As reported today in the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Nelson, a major independent Christian publisher, is adding a self-publishing line to its business.

Imagine you’re a new writer. You’ve just completed your first manuscript, and are on fire to get it published. You don’t know a lot about the publishing world, or how to identify a good publisher for your book–but that’s okay. You have the Internet. So you open a search engine–Google, let’s say–and type “publishers” into […]

Page updated/links checked 12/28/23 Copyright Registration and Timestamp Services Manuscript Pitch Websites/Electronic Slush Piles Pre-Publication Publicity Query and Submission Services Publicists Marketing and Promotion Paid Book Reviews Vanity Radio and TV Book Fair Display Bookstores and Paid Shelf Space Enormous numbers of people are writing and trying to publish books. This vast universe of aspiring […]

Page updated/links checked: 11/25/23 Overview: The Evolution of Self-Publishing Issues to Consider The Challenges of Print Self-Publishing or Traditional Publishing? Bad Reasons to Choose Self-Publishing Cautions A Special Warning: Publishing/Marketing/Fake Literary Agency Scams Resources Overview: The Evolution of Self-Publishing * Until relatively recently, if you wanted to self-publish, you faced a labor-intensive and costly process. […]

by Rachel A. Rosen It’s a good time to be Weird. There’s a plethora of new titles and an explosion of microgenres targeted to specific tastes. Looking for post-capitalist solarpunk utopias? Poetic meditations on fungi? They’re out there. And the traditional publishing industry is—agonizingly slowly—platforming BIPOC, queer, and trans creators with unique lenses on our […]

By M.K. Hutchins Soft magic has been with us since humans had stories: it’s in our fairytales, our folklore, and continues to be popular today, appearing in everything from Studio Ghibli films to the writings of Terry Pratchett, to Axie Oh’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea. Soft magic usually gets defined by what […]

By Victoria Janssen Because the romance genre is based on plot structure, it can easily be merged with a speculative fiction setting. Magical secondary worlds, alien planets, and far future empires can all include romantic relationships as the primary or secondary plot. One of my favorite romantic sub-genres is beauty and the beast, a very […]

By AJ Cunder As writers, we’ve all been there: Submittable, Moksha, a proprietary submission system, or even just a submission email. The cover letter’s been written, the story uploaded, and we’re waiting to hit that mysterious Submit button, wondering what happens after our work is sent into cyberspace.  When I first started slush reading for […]