Well, it’s happened again. Another traditional publisher has added a pay-to-play “division.”
Yesterday, venerable trade publisher (and one of the Big 5) Simon & Schuster announced the launch of Archway Publishing, a self-publishing services provider.
I knew I’d found a keeper when my boyfriend-at-the-time barely flinched the first time he saw one of our fights, word-for-word, in print. “You writers,” he said. “You air your dirty laundry. That’s how it is.”
Bear, the award-winning science fiction and fantasy author and purveyor of the delicious salt caramels currently gracing my desk, knows that food and cooking are key to worldbuilding. In many of her 23 novels, you’ll find reference to, if not outright instructions for, how a particular culture feeds itself.
Treachery, deceit, assassins, and the power of seduction will face-off against steadfast courage, forgotten magic, and the power of truth.
There’s a tendency for writers to obsess over rules. If you’re reading my blog series “Chasing the First Sale,” you know I’m the chiefest of sinners; it’s packed full of rules, and there’s a good reason for that: rules are helpful. They give shape to good tendencies and bad.
Levin’s article is exactly what its title suggests: a screed on how, no matter how things might seem to the hopeful author or the uninformed observer, publishers just really despise authors. I mean, REALLY despise them. Why? Well, according to Levin, authors are flaky.
Devoted husband and faithful friend. As the author of ten published novels and over seventy published short stories and articles, Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. won literary awards and had a devoted following of readers. He chaired SFWA’s Nebula Award Committee, ran SFWA’s Bulletin, helped run SFWA’s website and for six years held SFWA’s dirtiest and most […]
I’ve seen a slew of bad publishing contracts lately, which makes this guest blog post by author Kfir Luzatto especially resonant for me. Turning down a publishing offer when you have one in hand is one of the toughest decisions you will ever have to make…but sometimes, if the publisher has a poor reputation or the contract terms are bad, it’s the wise thing to do.
As a professor of astronomy, which is considered a “hard science,” I worry that the classification “hard SF” is off-putting to many readers. It makes it sound like any story labeled as such will be hard to understand, which is not necessarily true.
The following statement was sent by the Authors Guild to its members on Sunday. The Guild labels the proposed merger between Penguin and Random House (which would create the world’s largest publisher) “unsettling,” and urges “close scrutiny from antitrust officials at the Justice Department or the FTC.”
An ancient Roman temple terraforming Mars. An android longing for his human wife. Will their epic clash bring Earth to its knees? Publishers Weekly calls it “a must-read for sci-fi fans.”
Amber Hansford is a fantasy author with a Too-Much Gene living in Atlanta, Georgia. Her debut novel, The Hand of Mashyana (Feb 2025), began her Persian-inspired Epic Fantasy series, The Emari Chronicles.
