The fact that the book industry is changing has never been driven home quite as clearly as it was in the last few days. The first epiphany was when I read a post by my publisher, Lorina Stephens of Five Rivers Publishing. She wrote about how Indigo (the 500-pound gorilla in Canada for book sales) is now pushing the small and indie presses around (post found here). Essentially, the book chain has made the decision to supplement their waning book sales by selling giftware. Fair enough. If it helps them survive, all the power to them. But, and here is where the bullying comes in, they are also basically pushing the small presses out. Lorina says it better than me by far, so I […]
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What to Write, What to Write?
I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing the past few days. Not thinking about it in terms of “Why am I bothering” or anything like that. More about “Am I going in too many different directions?” To give you some idea of what I’m talking about, I have written six books with one underway. One is an adult, traditional fantasy, one is a YA mystery adventure (coming out soon), one is a science fiction comedy and three are YA superhero (same series). Now I’m working on a collaboration project that is a YA steampunk superhero mashup (with JR Murdock). If you were counting, that is five different storylines/series. Granted, the traditional fantasy may never see the light of day, […]
Read moreGet Published Episode 54 – Lorna Suzuki – Self-Published Success
Hello Everyone and thank you for joining me. In this week’s episode of Get Published I had the pleasure of speaking with Lorna Suzuki. Lorna Suzuki is a full-time scriptwriter specializing in biographic documentaries for TV. She is also the author of both the Imago series and the new Young Adult Fantasy series, The Dream Merchant Saga. If that weren’t enough, she has over 25-years of experience in various forms of martial arts and is a 4-dan practitioner and instructor of Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu. I also did a review of Terry Pratchett’s latest release, “I Shall Wear Midnight”, another tale of Tiffany Aching and the Nac Mac Feegle. Finally, I talk a little about my own writing projects. I hope you […]
Read morePutting Yourself Out There
Whomever said “Without Risk, there can be no reward” was on to something. It is a saying that applies in spades to we writers. We can write as much as we want, but until we actually let someone see it, we have no idea if it is good, bad or indifferent. Indeed, I would argue that without making it available for critique we writers will never really grow in our craft. That sort of flies in the face of the “Practice makes perfect” mantra, but without feedback, we may get stuck writing the same stuff over and over. All that can do is solidify any mistakes we are already making. Granted, as we continue to write we probably start to […]
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