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Posts from the ‘WRITING: PUBLISHING’ Category

Oct 13

10 Comments

Copyright Links Post

As promised, this is a link-post. I can guarantee that the links all worked, as of yesterday. However, not all of them go to equally usable sites. Some are more general IP, others are specific. I tried to avoid any that are so specific that you might not need them (i.e. things along the lines of, “How does copyright on reproductions of public-domain images differ between Poland and Lithuania?”)

www.thepassivevoice.com     If you are not reading this blog, you probably ought to at least poke around it once every-other-week or so. PG is a copyright lawyer, and posts links to original sources as well as to legal dictionaries and related sources. And quotes, and book-plugs for Mrs. P.G’s historical novels. Read more

Oct 8

13 Comments

Questions and Answers

Last week, I asked if there were any questions you had about “getting a book ready to head out the door.” You folks were awesome with the number of suggestions and questions you raised. I’m not going to try to answer all of them today. There were enough to make several posts. But I will deal with at least a few of them. Here goes. . . . Read more

Oct 1

21 Comments

New Developments at Amazon

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way first. Every indie author out there owes Amazon a thank you. The company took a risk on us when no other major platform would. It wasn’t altruism that motivated them. It was profit. The corporate gurus knew there were readers out there who would pay good money to read books that did not fit in with what the traditional gatekeepers were letting out into the wild. Those same gurus knew there were any number of writers who wanted an option to traditional publishing and who would pay a very small percentage of their earnings (much smaller than the take trad publishers demanded) to have a sales platform available to them. For all that, Amazon hasn’t always made the right move. Because of that, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts–as readers and as writers–to two of the latest announcements to come from the KDP side of the company. Read more

Sep 28

14 Comments

IP: Cover Art Licenses

As you all know, Indie authors wear a lot of hats. I have a few extra, because I’m an author and an artist. So this post is going to be me switching hats, and talking about cover art, from both sides of the page. Read more

Sep 27

17 Comments

Literature through Russian eyes – and what it says about political correctness

Today I’m not going to say much myself.  Instead, I’m going to quote several paragraphs from a very long, but very thought-provoking, analysis of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other Russian authors, and how literature came to represent a moral crusade for them, and for their fellow countrymen.  It’s in the New Criterion, titled “How the great truth dawned“, written by Gary Saul Morson.  It’s very different from our Western attitudes towards literature, but I think it offers a perspective from which we could learn.

That’s particularly important in an era when political correctness is more than ever a determinant of what’s put out by traditional publishers.  One’s work usually has to conform to “contemporary priorities” or “modern understanding” if it’s to have any chance of acceptance by a publisher.  By those standards, the Big Three of science fiction – Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein – wouldn’t stand a ghost of a chance. Neither, of course, would Henry Miller, Dorothy Parker, and a host of other greats.  Nor would Solzhenitsyn.

Read more

Sep 10

36 Comments

Keeping up with the times

Over the last few days, I’ve been part of a discussion with some other writers in my area about publishing. Specifically, about whether or not traditional publishers are keeping up with the times. One of our group still holds out hope that traditional publishing will return to its glory days, bookstores  will once again show up in major numbers and they will have their books prominently on display. Unfortunately, the latter isn’t going to happen, at least not the bookstore culture of the last several decades. Locally owned indie bookstores are popping up, but they are more speciality stores, catering to a very set customer base. Unless B&N manages to adapt, it isn’t long for the world. So what about traditional publishing? Read more

Sep 3

31 Comments

Resist! Resist!

First of all, my apologies for being late this morning. Life at Casa Verde is undergoing changes. Nothing major, just things that will require some changes to my normal schedule, at least in the short term. The good part of this is I had half an hour in the car already this morning, time to consider what I wanted to blog about.

As most everyone who follows MGC knows, the Dragon Awards were handed out this weekend. After years of being told by a certain part of fandom (or should I say Fandom?) to get our own award, they decided it was time to invade the Dragons because–duh–we finally had our own award. I’m not going to go into the gnashing of teeth and the walis of outrage that have been sounding since the awards were announced because the usual suspects didn’t win. Instead, our own Brad Torgersen, David Weber and Tim Zahn (among many other worthy recipients) won. So kudos to them and to all who voted for books because the books were good reads and not because of who they were written by or what their “message” was. Read more

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