Category: On Publishing
My Road to Publication
I’ve always wanted to write, and even as a child I loved making up stories, and telling them to my younger sister. She would often ask if I could tell her one at night, to help her get off to sleep. Unfortunately, although, according to my English teacher, I had a good imagination, I was […]
Cover Story
When my publisher asked if I had any ideas in mind for the cover of my new book, I’m not sure they were prepared for the Pinterest board I’d been adding to steadily for over a year! I had eleventy-million ideas and couldn’t begin to think how they could all be distilled down to one […]
BEING AGENTED IRL – Part One
A Twenty-Five-Question Interview Published as a Five Part Series | Hosted by MM Finck | | Anonymously Answered By Agented Authors* with Varying Publishing Career Durations and Successes from Debut to Bestselling and Represented by Multiple Literary Agencies of Varying Sizes | QUESTION ONE Why did you choose the traditional publishing track? Abha: Because I […]
The Unglamorous Part Of Writing
Writing is a solitary profession and extremely unglamorous. When I write, I need zero distractions: no Twitter, dirty dishes, Rightmove, eBay, Netflix or wine. In order to finish my book, I knew I needed to remove myself from all of these things, which is how I ended up in a rudimentary cabin on the moors, […]
Republishing My Indie Book: Not Just An Ego Trip
Self-publishing my book felt like giving birth in a bar. The atmosphere was unwelcoming, the people who assisted were incompetent—so much so that I felt I was doing it alone on a cold, cement floor reeking of cigarette smoke and liquor—and the product (had I not designed the cover, hired a professional editor, and done […]
Let’s talk Book Translations!
Let’s talk… in a different language… or in my case let my books talk. I have just a smattering of French, German and Russian at my disposal so that I can order a beer in those three languages and say thank you in a few more. Impressive – it is not. However, my books have […]
Can You Think Like A Publisher?
When you’re an author-publisher, or self-published author, you face nearly all the choices a traditional publisher faces, but in a much more intimate, more personally-invested, more personally-at-risk way. This is a wonderful in some ways, and not so good in others. For about seventeen years in my callow youth I worked in publishing as an […]
Changing Publishers
I tend to abide by the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” motto. I’ve held the same job for almost twenty years, been wearing my hair in the same style (give or take the bangs) most of my adult life, and I don’t immediately purchase “the next best thing” if my current devices are […]
Promotion Is Pay, Pay, Pay as You Go
When you’re a published author, whether self-published, with a small publisher, or with one of the big boys, you find out pretty quickly that promotion, for the most part, falls on your shoulders—and stealthily slips its sticky fingers into your wallet. Business cards, bookmarks, Facebook ads, magazine ads, Website ads, Kirkus Reviews, BookBub, any number […]
My Eight Book Deal
I can honestly say that I spent the first fifteen to twenty years of my writing life constructing stories that burned inside me but using characters I thought publishers and agents would like. Over the years the majority of rejections stated ‘we liked it but we just didn’t love it’. This comment caused me to […]
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