Join SFWA at BookExpo America
For the first time ever, SFWA will be attending the largest publishing event in North America: BookExpo America (BEA).
For the first time ever, SFWA will be attending the largest publishing event in North America: BookExpo America (BEA).
What are the secrets to Clarion West’s success? How did it get to be one of the world’s premiere training grounds for authors of speculative fiction? Most likely that’s happened because of you. Here’s how.
You don’t have to be a fanatic to use Twitter; it doesn’t have to take over your life. Just get an account, use your real name, start following some people, and post some things. You don’t have to do it all at once, but you should do it. If you follow a publisher, a lot of times the publisher will follow you back.
I’m going to touch on something that I’ve discussed briefly before but which I think is worth reheating into its own post. Here are the best selling books in the US from 1912, which is (for those of you for whom math is not a strong suit) 100 years ago.
Buying into a personal mythology of hierarchical status can harm your career. It’s one thing to expect respect for your work and experience. It’s quite another to expect demonstrations of your status or to make pronouncements like “I will not attend any conventions at which I am not a guest of honor.”
With the rapid rise of eBooks, the membrane between the printed word and the digital world is getting thinner every day.
If you do set up an event at a store, it may sound obvious, but an author promoting their event on their own Facebook and twitter helps out a lot. We have our own ways to publicize an event to our customers, and we have our events listed in the newspaper weekly, but the more an author can say, “I’m going to be in this city, on this day,” the better our event turnout is going to be.
Let’s talk about self-promotion and how it feels icky.
Yes, self-promotion is awkward to do the first time. Yes, it is very easy to do badly. But–it is incredibly important to your career. Someone asked, “Isn’t it enough to write a good story?”
No.
When I told people at ConCarolinas that I’d gone from writing 2k to 10k per day, I got a huge response. Everyone wanted to know how I’d done it, and I finally got so sick of telling the same story over and over again that I decided to write it down here.
Today, when the dominant form of communication is email, it’s easy to go through your publicity campaign without ever hearing your publicist’s voice. This would be a mistake.