Recently, a consortium of university libraries called HathiTrust decided to make more than one hundred digitized books available as e-books to the universities’ communities because the books were “orphans,” works for whom the rightsholders could not be located after a diligent search.
Small press publishing is inherently risky–for publishers as well as for authors–and while the situation at AMP is uglier than many, it’s also far from unusual.
A couple of days ago I covered Facebook’s new direction, including both the potential large upside for writers and the accompanying privacy concerns. But what about Google+?
Honestly, it is difficult (although not impossible) to avoid strategies that don’t incorporate Facebook in some way, either through a personal account or through Facebook Pages, at least not for writers who have at least one novel published. Once you have fans, Facebook becomes logical since it has the largest user base, therefore making it much more convenient as a way for people to find you.
Today’s guest post by multi-published author Doranna Durgin is about a publisher behaving badly.
More than that, however, it highlights something that every writer signing a publishing contract needs to be aware of: the importance of reversion clauses…
The logistics of slush piles demand ruthlessness, and stories that don’t intrigue the reader early on won’t get a second chance later. So, you’ve got your hook. It’s dramatic, it’s ingenious, and it’s free of typos. Your first two pages have been polished to near oblivion. Now what?
If I’m unsure about a story, I put it on probation, and take another look 6 months later before I either lock it up, set it free, or possibly keep it on probation.
For some time, there’ve been rumors of financial trouble at Canadian children’s publisher Lobster Press. Those rumors were recently confirmed in articles from Publishers Weekly and Quill and Quire.
It’s been a year since I first blogged about serial plagiarist “Iron” Dave Boyer (among many other names), whose prolific pilfering of other writers’ words has become something of an Internet legend, especially in the horror community, where he concentrates his efforts.
I am often fascinated by the process of bodies becoming things which they were not initially; The Honey Month is full of stories and poems where the colour of people’s skin and the scent of their hair becomes food for the bees, or where the dawn becomes bread, or where flesh becomes salt.
I’ve published about three dozen short stories, and perhaps 1/3 are SFWA-qualifying. I thought I’d open my submission history in case it would help a new writer see what the submission process looks like.
Few reference books are as fun to roam around in as thesauri. They demonstrate the marvelous connections possible with language.
