Features

By Scott Nicholson

Dean Koontz has made the observation that novels are like annuities, earning income for writers over a lifetime. Well, that’s true for Koontz and a handful of writers who manage to keep books in print and on the shelves.

Given the constraints of shelf space, the product pipeline that requires a 30-day flushing of “out with the old, in with the new,” and the vagaries of sales numbers and warehousing, the publishing-industry model almost guarantees a writer will have NO books on the shelf in their old age, precisely the time when they need income the most […]

This post about self-publishing is from February, but new to me.  It makes a persuasive case against self-publishing.

Professional editors of the level I work with now make money. Grown-up money that I cannot pay them, because I am not a rich person and never will be. Let alone copyediting, typsetting, and cover art (which is vastly important, don’t be fooled). I have zero interest in paying out $7000-$15000 before the book gets published, and almost certainly seeing minimal profit (especially since that 70% Amazon deal everyone’s so sweet on has a whole lot of strings attached). I like it

I’ve spent the day reading a self-published sci-fi potboiler–first in a trilogy–that I bought in the Amazon Kindle store after reading the entire sample. The grammatical and writing errors in the sample were few enough for me to go ahead and spend $3.99. As the book progressed, however, I became increasingly distracted by mounting disregard for my investment in time.

This writer has little use for commas, except for what I suppose is garnish. And he fails at every opportunity to trim superfluous words: “The boots she wore on her feet” is a mild example. Crashing several sentences together is […]

There’s an interesting post at the Nation called The Trouble with Amazon that’s a few shades too negative about Amazon’s influence on publishing.  Though Amazon has done some seriously shady things regarding pricing and strong-arming publishers, it also has advantages.  The main issue I have with the piece is this:

Take the issue of choice: when it comes to the books it stocks, Amazon makes no pretense of selectivity. Provided it carries an ISBN and isn’t offensive, Amazon is happy to sell any book Joe Schmo cares to publish. “We want to make every book available—the good, the bad and

FIRST lines are a book’s greeting to the reader and therefore a vital element in the whole. If it strikes the wrong note, a weak opening can nullify a great cover or an enticing jacket blurb. On the other hand, a good initial hook captures the reader from the start.

Yet does it signal a bestseller? Consider some of these.

One of my favourite openings is from 1984 by George Orwell, and reads thus: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Now here’s another teaser, simple but grabbing, from The Invisible Man by […]

Some people fear the new era of indie publishing will lead to a tide of bad books, with readers swamped by millions of titles.

This fear is fed in part by fearful gatekeepers like Laura Miller of Salon, whose recent article warned of readers faced with unlimited choices and how terrible this is going to be (because Laura Miller will no longer have to tell them what they need to read from among the limited number of major titles of which she approves).

It took about 15 years for Amazon to reach five million paper titles. Last year, three-fourths of […]