Writer’s Digest

Sep 14, 2012 by

Writer’s Digest

I subscribe to Writer’s Digest’s newsletter. Many of you do as well, most likely, but while we both read it, this is for vastly different reasons. Writer’s Digest is considered a good source of information for the general public. But in actual fact, if you read closely, you’ll notice that you never actually get said information. Each article or seminar or book is mostly designed to make sure you get just enough to have to buy the next one. Now, this isn’t to say that their information is always inaccurate. It’s not. Just recently, an article went up that I thoroughly agree with and will be writing more on next week. However, this is a bit rare and far between. For the most part, Writer’s Digest is a simply money-making machine. Hardly surprising in today’s world, but...

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Uncertainties of Life

Sep 11, 2012 by

Uncertainties of Life

On Sept 11, 2001, the world came to a crashing halt, and that included the book industry. Every book on an editor’s desk that was set to get published? Scrapped. Every manuscript that had an agent’s attention was shoved aside. Every book already at the presses was halted. For six months the industry came to a stand still. Contracts were cancelled, series were paused, sequels didn’t come out. There are no guarantees in the world, least of all in the book business. If you come to me with a manuscript and ask for a promise that after I’ve worked on it, it will be published by a major publisher, I show you the door. No matter how good the book is, there’s never any way to be certain. Today is the 11th anniversary of a deep tragedy,...

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Streaming Movies on an E-Reader...

Aug 20, 2012 by

Streaming Movies on an E-Reader

Not a new concept, but not really what we really intended those little tablets to do, right? And yet more and more people want, if not expect, their e-readers to do more than just display books. This was posted last...

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The “Self Publishing Company”...

Aug 6, 2012 by

The “Self Publishing Company”

There was a time when no ghost or editor in their right mind would tell you use a vanity press. But the world, she is a-changin’. Originally called vanity press, then subsidy press, and now “self publishing companies”, they’re all still the same: you pay them money, they publish your book. This is in stark contrast to a traditional publisher like Penuin or Harper-Collins, who pays you for the rights to publish your book. Many, many people have been scammed by vanity presses over the years, and yet these days, some people actually have good experiences. This is not a topic I’ll really be able to cover in a single article. So here’s the basics. If you self publish in the traditional way, you find a printer, you find a binder, you buy an...

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E-Book Conversions, vol 2

Jun 28, 2012 by

E-Book Conversions, vol 2

As it turns out, I can’t just convert a book to epub format and be done. No, no, no, that’d be too easy. And if I use InDesign the cover art won’t work correctly with the Nook or iPad bookshelves, though the Kindle seems to read it just fine and the cover shows up, but the pagination doesn’t work correctly and everything’s skip-lined like I’d forwarded an email eighty times and it was still 1998. This really is more of a rant than an article. The fact is, this is my own fault. If I’d been smart, I’d have simply hired someone to do this. We did in fact discuss that idea, and we rejected it for the simple reasons that we wanted to keep our hands on the project from start to finish....

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