Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Anne R. Allen Somerset Maugham famously said, “There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.” But pretty much everybody you meet in the publishing business will give you a list of them. (One is “never start a sentence with ‘there are’” —so watch yourself, Mr. Maugham.) Last year I […]
Liza Perrat contacted me a few months ago, asking for permission to quote me in a book about her author collective, Triskele Books. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of authors forming their own publishing companies, so I asked if she’d like to guest post for us. I was eager to hear more about her […]
by Anne R. Allen If you “won” at NaNo, and you’re madly editing that manuscript, you’re probably thinking about how you’re going to go about sending it into the marketplace.Or you may have spent years working on a manuscript and one of your New Year’s resolutions will be to get it published.Whether you’re going to […]
by Anne R. Allen If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably relatively tech-savvy. But now that we’re in the midst of holiday season, most of us are running into the inevitable friends and relations who are threatened by new technology and maybe even hostile to the whole idea of e-books and e-readers. Some of […]
Writer’s Toolkit #4 by Ruth Harris The old ways of publicizing books aren’t working so well in the E-Age. In 2011, editor Alan Rinzler famously said, “That $50K space ad in the New York Times? Forget it. It’s only for the author’s mother. The twenty-city bookstore tour with first class airplanes, limousines, and hotel […]
by Anne R. Allen Writers participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) may discover that friends and family aren’t entirely enthused by your decision to disappear into your computer for a month. (I have a secret suspicion that Chris Baty invented NaNo in order to escape those painful family Thanksgiving dinners.) But at any time of […]
We’ve got a V.I.P. guest on the blog this week. She’s Melodie Campbell, bestselling author and the Executive Director of Crime Writers of Canada. She’s also hilarious. She contacted me last month because she liked one of my blogposts. (See, blogging is an effective networking tool!) She saw we share a love of funny books. […]
by Anne R. Allen When my publisher asked me to remove the explicit sex scenes from my upcoming novel, The Lady of the Lakewood Diner I thought he was nuts. Sex sells, doesn’t it? Maybe not so much anymore. That screeching sound you hear is the abrupt U-turn the publishing industry is taking away from erotic […]
by Ruth Harris This is Ruth Harris’s third installment in her Writer’s Toolkit series. You can read Writer’s Toolkit #2 here and Writers Toolkit #1 here. Today she’s talking about tools for organizing your research and ideas: very timely for me this week. I’ve been working on and off for months on researching my […]
by Anne R. Allen If you’ve ever wondered why unsolicited Internet advertising is named after a perfectly innocent meat product, blame Monty Python. In a famous 1970 sketch, the customers in a café are constantly drowned out by a chorus of Vikings singing “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!” Conversation is impossible […]
by Anne R. Allen Everybody tells authors we must use social media to have successful careers in the E-age, but nobody talks much about the dangers that lurk here. Here’s the thing: the Internet is still the wild frontier. And it’s so huge nobody’s quite sure how to police it. Big, loosely regulated social […]
This week Ruth Harris gives us more must-have tools for writers in the second installment of her “Writer’s Toolkit” Series. Lots of stuff here that’s available FREE or cheaply. This is another post—like the one about global markets last week—that reminds me how much I still don’t know about this business. I have to […]
One of the biggest changes the e-reader has brought to the publishing industry doesn’t get much cyberink in the online book community. It’s the huge international market that’s opening up now that we don’t have to pay to ship physical books around the world. If, like me, you’ve ever experienced that terrible moment on vacation […]
Anne R Allen’s Blog With Ruth Harris