Advice for Writing, Editing, Reading, and Life.
New posts on Mondays (for non-fiction) or Fridays (for fiction)
Publishing Pathways: Non-Traditional Publishing
At its best, non-traditional publishing fills a niche and provides a useful set of services to aspiring authors. Rather than selling the rights to your work in order to have a professional team polish and distribute your work, with non-traditional publishing, you pay a fee to have a professional team polish and distribute your work in order to keep your rights.
Publishing Pathways: Traditional Publishing
There are a lot of nitty gritty details about what different publishing deals can look like with different traditional publishing firms, but it boils down to this: the firm pays the author to purchase the rights to the work, and the author and publisher negotiate a rate of royalty that the author will be paid for each book sold.
Publishing Pathways: True Self-Publishing
With true self-publishing, if you don’t already know what you’re doing, it falls on you to figure it out. Thankfully, there are a lot of resources online you can lean on to help you cure your own ignorance, but this pathway has good and bad elements that you should be prepared for.
Back in the Saddle Again… Kind of
It’s finally fall—at least, culturally speaking. It’s important to get back to practical posts. Not to insinuate that reading fiction can’t help you get better at writing, but it seems a good time to get back to what I originally intended this blog to be: Advice on the craft. What little I know offered to you in the most appetizing way I can plate it.
A Case Study on Theme: Beauty and the Beast (1991 vs. 2017)
Obviously, any great work of fiction can have more than one theme, but there is usually one central theme that any other themes hang on; a trunk from which other themes can branch. The themes of 1991’s Beauty and the Beast deal with prejudice, freedom, love, and forgiveness. And the 2017 remake fumbles basically all of those. But none more egregiously than the “trunk” that made ‘91 so great.
Five Rookie Writing Mistakes (I Still Sometimes Make)
No matter how good you get at bowling, there’s always a cap after which, even if you are getting better, you can’t really measure it. In writing there’s no cap to how good you can be; however, because “good writing” is based almost entirely on subjective criteria, there’s no clear or obvious way to measure how good a writer you are.
All you can do is identify mistakes and avoid them in the future.
The Paradox of Platform
If you already have a built in fan-base from another venture, such as internet videos or a television show, your book will be a much easier sell than someone with no web presence, regardless of how good or bad either book actually is. As a person with virtually no platform, I know how that sounds—envious and a little bitter. To some extent it probably is, I confess, but it’s also just the reality of producing art for profit.
Five Characteristics of a Great Writing Group
Like it or not, you will never be all you can be as a writer until you open yourself up to outside feedback. Every writer needs an editor, every editor needs a reader, and every reader needs a writer. A critique group is a wonderful way to begin widening the circle of people who see and respond to your work, but I don’t recommend just thoughtlessly messaging people in hopes of finding a group. So this week, I want to discuss some things to look for in a critique group.
Nothing New Under the Sun: What To Do When Your Idea Isn’t Completely Original
Much of western fiction is some re-imagining of the Monomyth, and even when it’s not, all ideas are inspired by something that already exists. So, what should you do when you inevitably find out that the idea you’ve been nurturing… well, the Simpsons already did it?
Guidelines for Writing in Verse: One Editor's Hierarchical Preferences
Like with any form of writing, there is no right or wrong way to write in verse, but this post is designed to help you think about the elements that often go into written verse. For the sake of organization, I’ve arranged them in the order I think they benefit written verse most.