If you have an unpublished manuscript that you’re shopping to agents and/or publishers, or considering self-publishing, there’s no need to register your copyright prior to publication.

Why?

Writers are sometimes confused by the “registration” requirement under the US copyright laws. In this post, I hope to clear up the concept and help you decide whether copyright registration makes sense for you.

In Part 1: Definitions, the members of SFWA’s experimental MG and YA group asked industry professionals to help define the middle grade (MG) and young adult (YA) book categories. Today we’ve asked those same professionals to tackle the controversial issue of appropriate content.

For writers who are interested in writing middle grade or young adult fantasy or science fiction, the first step is puzzling out what exactly those categories mean. Science fiction and fantasy, after all, has a long tradition of featuring young protagonists — including such classics as Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, and Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey — even if those novels weren’t originally published as middle grade or young adult books.

MFA Programs and the efficacy or use thereof tend to come up in discussion periodically. For those of you interested, here is a run down of the types of programs and what to expect. I personally have an MFA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and am currently looking into applying for a second MFA, this time in Fiction. I might be addicted to school. Or it might be that MFA programs really are just that awesome.

The Baltimore Science Fiction Society, a 501(c)(3) located at 3310 East Baltimore Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21224, is proud to announce more writing workshops for 2013 run by professional writers.

You may have heard that Vantage Press, one of the USA’s oldest vanity publishers, closed its doors at the end of 2012.

As we begin the new year (Writer Beware’s fifteenth–good heavens!), here’s a look back at some of Writer Beware’s most notable posts and warnings from 2012.

In The Forever War, I had fun writing about cooking under primitive conditions. It’s easy to write about because you don’t have to explain things so much. People understand cooking over a fire. When you start to go into cuisines, you risk losing your readers because the descriptions require too much detail, or it’s too gross.

Today’s guest blog post, from journalist Mridu Khullar Relph, explores the world of writing schemes and scams from an international perspective–something that’s increasingly an issue for Western writers looking to find work overseas.