Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

I’ve been getting questions about a brand-new writers’ contest: the 2011 Indie Publishing Contest, sponsored by (among others) the San Francisco Writers Conference.
Write, Win AND Publish!

New ‘Indie Pub…

Amazon.com is now offering BookScan information to authors enrolled in their Author Central program. For authors, previously one had to subscribe to BookScan or to get their sales numbers through their agents or publishers. Amazon says: We’re happy to announce that – for the first time ever – authors can see weekly sales trends of […]

Every book on how to be your own boss has instructions about when to give up your day job. Each one of these books has a particular rule of thumb. Some say you cannot quit your day job until you have three months’ salary in the bank.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

I semi-frequently get questions from people who want to know how to break into the publishing industry–not as writers, but as agents, editors, copy editors, publicists, designers, and so on. There are a nu…

Gruber was living on dreams and precious else during those lean, dangerous years. He played hide and seek with his landlord until he could scrounge his rent, reduced his food budget by eating “automat” soup (a meal made of the free ketchup and crackers available at the automat, stirred in a bowl, with the hot water for tea to taste), and dropping off manuscripts on foot to avoid any postal costs.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

As I’ve discussed before on this blog, one of the many changes currently rocking the publishing industry is a general blurring of lines, a mixing and melding of formerly sharply separate categories and func…

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

Many of the writers who contact me with Writer Beware-type questions seem to be convinced that the process of getting published is equivalent to a crap shoot. There are enormous numbers of people trying to …

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

Publishers Weekly reports that a New York Supreme Court judge has dismissed most claims in The Peter Lampack Agency’s suit against a former client, best selling mystery author Martha Grimes.

At the heart …

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

Writer Beware gets a ton of email. Reports of schemes, scams, and fee-charging, of course, but also questions about agents’ and publishers’ reputations, questions about the researching/querying/submitting and requests to deny reality.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

I hear often from writers worried that their work will be stolen. Especially among new writers, it’s a major fear. However, theft in the book and short fiction world is extremely rare. (Really. Reputable ag…