Published on March 25, 2015
Dear Ms. Hoy,
Thank you VERY much for your insight and advice! I found the information on how to send out a query for an article to be extremely helpful (I was doin’ it wrong). I got my first yes! I think I will plaster IT to my wall instead of the rejections letters!
Very Respectfully,
Dawn
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Published on March 25, 2015
writing career advice, writing scams
The recent Writers Weekly article, Great Writing Gig Or A Scam?, got me thinking about all the deadbeat editors I’ve met in my long freelancing career and how I’ve answered some of their “scams.”
Published on March 25, 2015
I am publishing an anthology book for my project, and read your article, HOW TO COMPILE AND PUBLISH AN ANTHOLOGY. I found it very insightful.
I was wondering if you might be willing to share the contract that you use. I would be willing to pay for it.
Published on March 25, 2015
The day finally arrived. My polished non-fiction book proposal needed a royalty publisher. There was more than one direction my proposed manuscript could go, and I wanted to secure a publisher before completing the book so I could adapt to that publisher’s style.
Somewhere I’d heard the idea of hunting through specialty bookstores and book catalogues for newer or unlisted publishers. The idea was to search for titles that didn’t compete, but were similar enough in topic that your own title would complement their list.
But I didn’t start out looking for a publisher that way. You might say I went around the barn…
Published on March 18, 2015
What she sent wasn’t a screenshot of a “sale” at all. It was just a picture of the ranking history on Amazon.
Published on March 11, 2015
For the past six weeks, we’ve spent every spare moment judging the hundreds of entries submitted for the WritersWeekly Winter, 2015 24-Hour Short Story Contest. In case you’re not familiar with our quarterly contest, this is how it works…
Published on February 19, 2015
An writer recently asked me to go to a website and “vote” for her. She wanted me to have our readers also click to vote for her, even asking me to post notices on Facebook and Twitter. I receive those types of requests all the time and, frankly, they’re insulting…
Published on February 11, 2015
bookstores
Losing money on your book because it is returnable? Changing it to non-returnable takes six months.
Published on February 4, 2015
book marketing, self-publishing
On occasion, we hear from authors who are accusing their distributor of theft because their Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com “ranking” moved…but their actual sales numbers did not. Several years ago, one author claimed she was owed millions because her Amazon ranking was…in the millions. As you’ve probably guessed, this is a common problem. New authors often try to use bookstore rankings to estimate their sales and that doesn’t always work…especially if those authors don’t understand how the rankings are calculated…
Published on January 28, 2015
Last weekend, I received the email below. It was, by far, the nicest email anybody has ever sent to me. It made me cry…
