Anything Good Takes Time.

I have read a lot of articles and advice from people about writing, and how writers should just write. Hurry up and write. Write. Write. Write. Somewhere in the article they mention, in passing, about making sure the quality is there, but the focus usually shifts back to writing fast so you can get more books out and help sell your other books.

These experts come armed with impressive data, showing that the more books you write and the more books you have available to sell, the more money you’ll make. I have […]

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s treatise on women and fiction, Mrs. Woolf lamented that, historically, women had to have both money and a room of their own in order to write – two resources that had been universally difficult, if not impossible, for women to attain back then. However, these days women (yes, yes and men, too) only need a computer and the time to write – oh, and a whole lot of confidence. But how can authors get this boost of confidence if they’re discouraged about publishing to begin with?

Easy: by publishing their short stories […]

In an ocean of self-published titles, two questions surface: How can readers find quality e-books, and how can authors of quality e-books find readers?

Before Amazon’s Kindle changed the face of electronic publishing, in 2006, 51,237 self-published titles were printed as physical books that year, according to the data company Bowker. Last year, Bowker estimated that more than 300,000 self-published titles were issued in either print or digital form.

How can readers sift through these hundreds of thousands of self-published titles to find quality e-books that will be worth their investment of money and time?

Author collectives such as the […]

Who do you talk to more on social media, your readers or other authors? Do you spend more time online than you do writing? How much of your online time is devoted to arguing about the “future of publishing”?

At Digital Book World’s Expert Publishing Blog, Bob Mayer writes in his post  The Great Publishing Wars of 2012:

I think there is a tipping point in social media for authors.  Where it begins to detract rather than attract.   Where you are turning more people off than you are being of interest to.  Especially if you are on one

Self-published authors set their own writing goals. If you fail to write according to your schedule, you answer only to yourself. There may be outside pressure from people who mock your claim to be a “real” writer, but the biggest pressure is internal. The toughest person to answer to is your own self.

Over at Cecile’s Writers, Cecile worries about not writing when she’s worried. In a post titled “Why Bother?” she confronts her lack of output:

And why not? What’s keeping me? I can find countless excuses: I need to work extra hours; I need to spend

I was going to post this as part of James Moushon’s blog Real Ebooks: Are We still in the Stone Age? But now that I’ve written it, I see it as a separate discussion. It might help, though, to read James’s blog and comments to see, in part, where this is coming from.

I want to make a larger point of my advice about ebook authors wrenching a place at the table at which further development of the ebook business will inevitably be settled.

I started out as a wannabe author more than willing–desperate, in fact–to accept The System for […]

I get really bent out of shape over word count whenever I edit any of my novel manuscripts. Is my manuscript long enough to be considered a novel?” has been one of the foremost questions haunting my mind. I worry whenever I have to delete sentences and whole paragraphs alike; this apparently decreases the word count.

I constantly check the bottom left hand corner of the Microsoft Word window for the number, then apply some math to figure out how long the published book would be. First, I take the total word count and subtract 24 from it (24 is […]