I was cuddling Max, putting him down for his afternoon nap, when I noticed that he smelled like raw dirt…you know, that smell you have on your hands after you’ve been digging in the garden. It was a beautiful smell and made me glance outside, longing for the Spring sunshine. I was about to grab my laptop and skip out the backdoor when I noticed clouds had moved in and the skies were looking dark and heavy. Oh well…
When someone boasts their book is a bestseller on Amazon.com, can you trust them? When someone brags that they’ve sold 10,000 copies in a month, are they being honest? When you type in a website URL and a competitors’ pop-up ad appears on your computer screen, do you assume they’re in business together? When someone says you’re winner, are they trying to fool you into spending money?
Hey Angela,
Just thought you’d like to know that I got three writing assignments from your newsletter this week.
Your website is great. I’m recomending it to everyone.
Dave
Writers and authors seem to fall in an all or nothing category financially. Either we’re limping along between checks, or we’re basking in a new contract and royalty advance. Even those with advances often backslide when the money’s gone and the book is still at the printer. But rich or poor, famous or obscure, writers live a roller coaster existence in their choice to pen words for a living. And catastrophe affects us all.
I am looking for an agent for my mother (78 yrs). Please help me / direct me to a source that will look at my mothers writings.
Since there are thousands of publishers out there, as well as agents, we can’t recommend specific publishers and agents for specific writers. I’m sorry.
You might try looking for a reputable agent here:
https://www.aar-online.org/
We’d been married less than a month, but it didn’t take that long to realize there were a lot of things associated with being newly married that nobody bothered to tell us about. Case in point: You register for eight place settings and you only get five complete sets and a couple of miscellaneous salad plates. Guess who gets to cough up the hundreds of dollars (that you didn’t budget for) to fill out the set? Must have slipped my friends’ minds to bring that bit of information to my attention. Same thing for clueing my wife in to how many copies of our marriage certificate she would need for when she was going through the fresh hell of changing her last name. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
On Saturday night, we took our weekly jaunt down to Gifford’s, the local ice cream stand. When we returned, I carried three cups of ice cream up to Zach’s room for the video game fanatics (Zach, Steve and Matt). As I was handing out the goods, I heard a CRASH outside. It brought back haunting memories of the day that Frank’s friend, Mitchell, was hit by a car in front of our home on Max’s first birthday.
I am adamantly against donating your time and writing to companies that seek to profit from your efforts while not sharing cash with you. However, if you are managing the distribution of your free work and it’s for a good cause (and nobody’s greedily profiting from your free work), then that’s an entirely different scenario.
This Week:
It is a huge problem, though the philosophical underpinnings of why are all over the map. Educators lament it. Schools toss people out for it. Yet it continues. Jayson Blair was fired by The New York Times for it. Stephen Ambrose admitted to it. Janet Dailey was called on it by Nora Roberts. Alex Haley paid Harold Courlander a six-figure sum for having purloined Mr. Courlander
