Once upon a time, they called this “vanity” publishing. The implication, of course, was that self-publishing was for people who weren’t particularly good writers but who were willing to pay to see their words in print. Wow, have things changed! And that’s a really good thing. Amazon and the Internet have provided platforms for…
Now that you’ve worked your way through part or all of a guidebook and listed potential publishers (see my previous post “Part 1 Going it Alone”), you still have a lot more to do. In today’s markets, there are few easy routes to publication for most beginning writers. So now if you’re game, take your…
No, I’m not talking about self-publishing here. I’ll leave that for another post. Instead, I’ll describe a process that’s worked for me. Both my first novel Absolution and my upcoming second novel A Stone for Bread were submitted to their publishers without an agent. The Absolution manuscript was entered into the Novello Festival Press…
In my last post I talked about the value of an agent. Now here’s the grim reality: the odds for an unknown, unpublished novelist obtaining a literary agent is estimated to be something like 1 in 10,000. Some say 1 in 20,000. So why bother? Well, here’s what may increase a new novelist’s chances: –prior publication, such as…
The first time I submitted a novel manuscript to an agent, I received a phone call a few weeks later, and heard the thrilling words, “I would like to represent you.” Wow, I thought, I’m on my way! Except that I wasn’t. Although that manuscript received positive attention from several New York publishers, it…
I once critiqued a fictional story based on the writer’s own life experiences. When I noted that his dialogue didn’t sound authentic to me, he replied, “But that’s what we really said.” I’m sure that was correct. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that what someone actually said works effectively in fiction. Replicated everyday speech in…
“If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.” James Baldwin I…
“Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler, journalist and biographer It always comes back to the chair. Okay, you’ve done your research, created your outline or filled a notebook with ideas, detailed your main characters complete…
Writing is a tough business. Gratification (publishing) can be long in coming. If and when it does, royalties are usually insufficient to live on, sometimes even nonexistent, especially when averaged over the months or years and costs it’s taken to finish a manuscript and get it accepted for publication. Once published, we have to…
My Uncle Grattan, my father’s oldest brother, was a brilliant man. He spent a couple of years in New York City in his twenties studying art before he returned to his native South Carolina. He then lived out the remainder of his life on the coast at Murrell’s Inlet, and for many of those years…