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My books are published with a small press with three imprints under their umbrella. They are recognized by the major writers’ organizations as a very credible press, with the one most important to me being the Mystery Writers of America. And before you ask who, just know that they are not taking on new authors at the moment. So many people are writing these days, and publishers are inundated with submissions. As a result, over the last ten years, the number of small presses has risen. There’s even a sub-category of small press called a micro-press, and there are a zillion of those.  But the Department of Justice/Penguin-Random House anti-trust case is showing us that big traditional publishing has problems, and frankly, is out of touch. A smaller press, however, is closer to grassroots level. In other words, the author and the publisher can actually talk to each other. I could talk about specific New York publishers and how they’ve treated friends of mine, but I won’t. Said authors aren’t much more than a number, and editors rarely return their calls. If a book doesn’t sell well, it’s finished, with reversion rights held up for a good long time. Don’t More

Literary agents have an important role to play, but the agent route is not for every writer. As I look back on over a decade of work as a lone writer and journalist, there’s a fair amount of advice about how I’ve managed without one. Here’s how to steer your literary career forward (without an agent). First, What You’ll Miss Without an Agent Forget about agented only submissions if this is your chosen route. Publishers and other literary markets will specify in their guidelines, and they do not negotiate their stance. The good news is that most publishers are no longer agent exclusive. If you’re not after a movie deal or international rights negotiations right now, you’ll get by just fine. I, Author Agents represent authors, but authors without agents represent themselves. Where literary agents would negotiate rates or press appearances, individual authors fulfill the same role. Writers become business people, not to be taken lightly. Biographical information, from LinkedIn to About the Author, is yours to update. Relationships with publishers (and editors) are yours to seek and strengthen. Agents do market research, meaning you’ll have to do that, too. Monitor your market niche from the business side of things. More

I know, I know. How many times do we see this in blog posts? I usually delete them as if they carried COVID, but between Jane Friedman’s post in The Hot Sheet (subscription only ) and Penny Sansevieri’s in A Marketing Expert, I figured it time to say something about the direction the publishing industry is leaning. I do not predict anything in stone. In some ways this industry seems like a dinosaur, hung up in ancient ways, then in other it shoots out with innovation (i.e., Spotify is jumping with both feet into audiobooks). If anything, the recent DOJ – Penguin Random House antitrust trial has opened our eyes to the self-absorbed mentality of the Big 5 publishers versus that of the smaller press, and that doesn’t even mention self-publishing. First, the words that resonated around the world from those hearings involved advances and sales. The loudest words remembered of late are “90 percent of titles sell fewer than 2,000 units.” That’s traditional books, people. Not self-published. The other quote was “about 98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.” Before we faint from gasping at that reality, face the music. With traditional, hybrid, and self-publishing More

Most writers want to know if there is a magic formula to getting published in any capacity, and most published writers will tell you that there isn’t one. The only way to get published is to continuously send your work out there. The trick is to figure out the “continuous” part. As a working writer, I have discovered one kind of formula for success. The best part is that it is free! This formula comes in three easy steps, and if you stick to them, you can improve your chances of seeing more of your work published. All you need to do are these three things: keep writing, keep submitting and keep earning! Keep Writing You know the advice to “write every day.” Try taking this credo one step further by writing everything you get ideas for. Besides articles, I also write short fiction. One day, I was inspired by an idea for a short story. I didn’t know where to send it, but I wrote that story anyway. I later found somewhere to submit it. How This Can Work For You Writing variety can help you sell more work. How cool is it to be paid to write something More

Most authors and writers, we’re talking both in this piece, think that pitching is a 12-month, year-round activity when it is not. Whether talking contests, book publishers, or magazines, there is a bit of a science in the process, and if you want to improve your odds in this profession known for its high odds, it would behoove you to take note. BOOKS – Of course this advice is not 100 percent because the world is full of big, small, and mid-list publishers, each setting its own rules, but, general rules of thumb are these: 1) Pitch when you see a call for submissions. These are not common, but they happen, especially with small presses. If you are wishing to seek an agent to do this for you, then follow the same advice. Watch them on social media (they love Twitter) for when they say, “Hey, would love to read something involving……” That means they have markets in mind, and they feel the genre/topic is hot enough to quickly sell. You also want to feed them something they are in love with at that moment. That’s assuming what you have to offer fills their void. But this is why you shop for More

While a journalistic interview seems like a chummy experience at first glance, it can often be a complicated dance. The interviewer has to build rapport and keep the subject engaged in conversation while also keeping in mind that the person you are talking to isn’t your customer or boss. As someone who has worked most of the past dozen years freelance, I often liken it to that of a substitute teacher (a job I have also suffered) in that you have to maintain boundary lines with your subjects or you’ll get walked all over. As you start to talk with the source, there’s usually a sussing out on both sides. It self-consciously happens in every conversation but this is a heightened experience since the stakes are higher. From your end, you’re trying to figure out what kind of a source they are. Nearly all sources have something they want out of it: They could have something to promote (often more the case in soft journalism), they could have a message they want to get out, or they need to look good (especially in the case of a publicity representative). If not, why are they participating? To what degree do they More

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’m in my sixth decade, and as I sit here at the computer wondering how to define this point in my life, I realize I’m okay with it all. First of all, I have family. My heart goes out to those missing theirs, and I see on Facebook several of my fans who have lost spouses in the last two years. A day doesn’t go by that I do not silently wish them well. That’s an adaptation I do not look forward to. Maybe I won’t have to. I am not blind, however, to the fact that sometimes folks look at me as an older woman first before they see what I’m about. Especially in person. Everyone does it to a certain degree, making preliminary assumptions about someone due to their years, hair color, and lines around their eyes. I fight hard not to do that, and I work hard to avoid judging others. I can control me. I cannot control them. I avoid saying the word retirement. I retired from another profession that served me well, and few people realize that. But that’s okay. I am the sum total of my past, and what you More

We aren’t at the point—and I don’t want to reach it—where “miracle” AI software writes our stories for us, and we passively absorb them. Sure, AI can output all sorts of text from prompts and prodding, but the human touch remains essential in story shaping. But some writing software performs brawny labors to structure book-length works: like Scrivener. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction books, Scrivener can take tangled masses of information—character portraits, three-sentence notes, research URLs, images, chapter outlines, chapter drafts, chapters to come—into a coherent layout that not only lets you see what you’ve got, but lets you move everything into ordered arrangements. I recently published a memoir of my crazed years of teenage shoplifting, and Scrivener was the cop with his hand on my shoulder saying, “Wait a minute, son, let’s put everything back on the right shelf.” Because the memoir is made of moments from (gulp) 50 years ago, I couldn’t brush aside my brain cobwebs by myself. I needed to question pals and siblings who were around to witness my crimes about certain details. Many, many details rose to the surface, with detail follow-ups. Many, many emails needed re-confirmation, chopping and crafting. Twelve people in More

Call them bad guys or villains or antagonists, you need them in just about every genre that exists if you want an interesting story. Even nonfiction merits an opposition. For a story to capture readers, it needs adversity. And the bad side has to be every bit as devoted to winning as the good side, or the challenge doesn’t pique interest. Bad guys think they are right in their mission. They believe they are every bit as noble in their quest as the protagonist. To bring out the teeth of a story, whether short or long, historical or contemporary, fiction or nonfiction, the two sides have to balance the scale. Why? If the good guy isn’t being challenged by someone equally as strong, the tale carries no weight. The good guy doesn’t even have to flex all of their muscles or use their brain. The odds are too easy. The good guy has to feel defeated at various stages. The good guy has to fight to think like the bad guy, just like the bad guy is attempting to outthink the good. The good guy has to grow in their efforts, using tools they never used before in order to More

At some point, every writer loses an important file. If you’re lucky, it will be only one file. However, if your computer dies, gets hacked, or falls from a great height, you want to make sure you don’t lose your life’s work. The first time I had a computer die on me, the computer repair shop was able to rescue a majority of my creative writing documents. There would have been no way for me to re-write dozens of poems and story ideas. For the creative works that were not rescued from my computer, I was able to retrieve most of them from literary magazine submission portals, which involved logging on to the platforms and right-click-saving any documents I had uploaded. I am sure there are some ideas of mine that are lost to time. After that experience, I made sure to work smarter through the use of a few simple but important document-saving methods. Cloud-Based Templates You can store templates of important files on a cloud-based drive such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive. If you are a creative writer with a limited number of pieces that you are actively pitching to journals, you can keep those documents More