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Showing posts with the label advice from writers

Writing "to Market" Makes Me Shudder

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    At the urging of a fellow author, I joined a site for writers a month or so back. Though it’s interesting, I don’t feel that it fits my style—not for writing, not for publishing, and not for promoting. The idea is writing books “to market” or “for market,” which means an author writes what will sell, not what she wants to write. Early on in my career I had an agent who tried to get me to do that. Her push was that I should write Amish romances, because they were big at that moment in time. Later, I had a publisher who wanted me to continue the Loser Mysteries, though I felt they'd reached a logical conclusion. At a conference once, I heard an editor for a big publishing company say that anyone who had anything… anything with vampires in it should send it to her. The market. The market. The market. Book industry people look for books that will "sell through," meaning they earn more than it cost to make them. If you’ve read my work, you know I do pretty much the

What Are You Working on Now?

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 Many writers will agree that the Corona virus has been horrible but also helpful. Afraid to go out, unable to do what we once did, what can we do besides write? Since the virus hit big-time, I've published two books (one as Maggie Pill, one as myself) and worked on one that's been a couple of years in the works and is now with the copy editor for its final corrections. Hoping that will come out before the end of the year,  I teased you with the cover above. The downside to Corona for me is mental. With that and other national concerns, I've had trouble concentrating for any length of time, which means my work gets done in fits and starts. When I stop each day, I feel like the work is disjointed, but when I go back the next day and start reading, it's not. It's one of those, "it's not you, it's me" things. I'm writing the same as usual, but stress makes me feel like things aren't right. And what am I writing? A book called THE CUTEST LITTLE

Plain Talk for Writers: It Takes Longer than You Think

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What takes longer, you ask? Everything. It takes longer to sell a book than you'd like. It takes longer to produce a book than you estimate. It takes longer to become a familiar name to readers than you expected. It takes longer to to keep up with promotion than you ever imagined. Let's look at those one by one. Sell the book . Five years is the estimated average time it takes a writer to find a publisher. If you're hoping for a big publisher, it could be even more. Yes, I know you read about an author who hit it big with her first book. Hooray for her, but most of us don't have that experience. We just don't talk about it because the average reader thinks if a book is "good enough," it's going to get published. Yeah, right. Produce the book . Once your book is accepted by a publisher, you're on their timeline. You can tell all your friends about it, but they're likely to have to wait more than a year to see the book in print. My

Writers Are Nice People

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Newcomers to writing often comment on how nice everyone is. Writers give each other advice. We share successes and failures. We explain the piece we're presently working on (sometimes in too much detail) with little thought that someone will "steal" our ideas. (You can try, but it will still be a ton of work for you.) In a field where every new book adds to the dizzying amount of competing works, one might think that writers would hide their secrets, keep the means of success to themselves when (if) they stumble on it, and perhaps even mislead naive newbies in order to send them in the wrong direction. That doesn't happen. Maybe because of how difficult it is to get published, most writers feel an empathy with others that causes them to ignore the prospective competition and give advice that's as helpful as possible. Have a question for an author? Just ask. It's likely she will share what she knows (unless she has a deadline looming). Why are we so nice? Wh