Plume. EDUCATION. Rhapsodos. Poiemaeia. Τέχνη. Helping Writers Become Authors - Write your best story. Change your life. Astound the world. WRITERS' SERVICES. Links checked/Page updated: 1/22/13 Over the past decade or so, there’s been an extraordinary rise in the number of people writing and trying to publish books.
This huge increase in the number of aspiring authors has fueled an equally robust proliferation of schemes and scams aimed at writers–and has also spawned a variety of services supposedly designed to assist them. While some of these services are genuinely intended to help, many are no more than efforts to cash in on a trend (particularly the post-publication services, most of which are explicitly aimed at writers who are self- or micropress-published). They aren’t necessarily scams, but most will not help you very much. Since they can be quite expensive, it makes sense to do some careful checking before pulling out your credit card.
Pre-Publication Services Copyright Registration and Timestamp Services Many new writers think it’s necessary to register copyright for their unpublished work. An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. A reader recently wrote in asking if I could share a bit about the process of putting the book together and talk about how the project started.
Certainly. I go on two solitary walks every day. There is a small park off the Embarcadero that is tucked away in a quiet spot. It has a pleasant stream flowing through it and an unassuming bench beside that stream. I have made walking to that frail bench a ritual, and the half an hour or so spent daydreaming on it amid the cool San Francisco breeze, an article of faith. It was on a day in October of last year when, during one of those quiet moments on that bench, I recalled my college years and how outspoken I happened to be during them, an observation only made interesting by the fact that I have since turned into the quietest of beings.
A realization that coincided with that nostalgic whiff was that a sizable amount of the discourse nowadays continues to be plagued with bad reasoning. Elites or freedom fighters: How the Amazon-Hachette battle took on the rhetoric of class warfare. One side defends the ideals that this nation was founded on: Independence and freedom from tyranny.
The other side is made up of elites who keep the little people down and take the money that is rightfully theirs in an attempt to control the message and maintain the status quo. I’m talking not about the Tea Party and big government, but the worlds of self-publishing and traditional publishing. Yet the rhetoric in both debates often sounds very much the same. In 2009, the Tea Party movement took shape in the United States. At just around the same time, ebooks began gaining in popularity, and as the digital publishing revolution took off, so did the once-stigmatized practice of self-publishing.
In the summer of 2014, the battle between traditional publishing and self-publishing has hit fever pitch as Amazon and Hachette wage a fairly public battle over their contract negotiations. Don’t tread on me. Create and self-publish books, magazines & ebooks. Books are now in your hands. About Smashwords. Learn How to Publish a Book: FREE Download from Writer's Digest. 1.
Write the best manuscript that you possibly can. Don’t just come up with a great idea—spend time executing that idea by writing, editing, rewriting, editing and rewriting again. Find a group to workshop your novel with, whether it be in person or online. Book publishing starts with a great manuscript. 2. Whether you’re pitching to an agent or directly to a publisher, you can’t just write “publish my book because it’s awesome.” 3. Nearly all writers get rejected. Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing: #5… Book as Event. Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing will be out later this fall with an introduction.
And then it will be followed by a book called Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing. But first I wanted to put each myth or “Sacred Cow” up here again as I promised. The myth of Book as Event, put as clearly as I can. Myth: All books need to be events, need to be something special. Hogwash, of course. Hard and fast rule about writing: If you put that on your wall, you will always have a defense against many of the things I’m going to talk about in this chapter. Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. Think Like A Publisher. How To Get Happily Published - Finding a Publisher. Practicum. Copyright Patent. Presentation. New Practicum. More Answers Than Questions.