I self-publish, and I publish traditionally. My work may be read by one editor or a half dozen. I’ve read it myself 5 or 25 times before it goes to press. And still somehow a typo can occasionally slip through.
It doesn’t happen a lot; I work hard to put out clean manuscripts. But I recently found an error in a story I’d sold (published elsewhere), and then this week a glitch ate some layout code and spat up paragraph break errors among hundreds of pages, all of which must be found and fixed manually.
Sometimes it’s human error. Sometimes it’s software. It’s always frustrating, even if they’re generally uncommon. But one advantage of independent publishing over traditional is the ability to correct that stray typo sooner rather than later (or not at all).
Announcing the Typo Bounty Program! /perky kazoo music/
Continue readingCheck your machine learning licenses. Even if you didn’t know you had granted one. Especially if you didn’t know you had granted one.
I have just been alerted by my narrator to a clause tucked into my Findaway Voices distribution agreement. It was the last bit of attached Schedule D, distribution policies about things like poor recording quality, hate speech, and [highly inappropriate behavior with animals and minors], and other categories I never expected to apply to our work, so I hadn’t seen it.
Continue readingI see a lot of writers stressing about talking with other writers at events. The stereotype, of course, is that writers are writers because they would rather sit in a dark room by themselves than interact with other people. And yes, it’s true, I spend a lot of time with my imaginary friends.
But writers are not only capable of socializing like normal functional humans, it’s essential that they do. Publishing is too big to go alone; you’re going to need to take along some colleagues, for everything from critique partners to comparable marketing to moral support.
I’ve been attending 2-5 conferences a year (except in 2020) for writing and my day job for the last couple of decades. I’ve done a lot of conferences. Here are some things to keep in mind and to try!
Continue readingIf you love writing fantasy, this is the event for you. Join thousands of other fantasy writers to learn from the experts, find your community, and write your fantasy novel.
I (Laura) will be speaking on Magic Systems as Science in Fantasy:
Put a dozen fantasists in a room and lines will quickly be drawn between proponents of Sanderson’s Laws of Magic, writers with encyclopedias full of crafting data, and some who turn up their hands and say, “I just make it up as I go.” But magic is both character and setting in fantasy, and as soon as you have someone deliberately using it, you have a science, too.
Just as there are many ways to use character and setting, so must a writer know how to choose the best technique in this instance for magic and scientific magic. We’ll cover broad theories, advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, and some tips for informing the reader how this magic is different than in the previous book she read.
March 1, 2022, 4pm Eastern
Let’s talk about query letters, why they’re not so scary, and how to do them well!
Come again for this convention at home!
I’ll be speaking on “What Happens After You Publish a Book?” on Friday at 3 pm Eastern along with RL Merrill and Angela Shanté.
Hey, there are a few more videos on my channel which I haven’t given their own posts over here, because they weren’t really “featured episodes” on my show or because they were part of a conference. But in case you’re interested:
Continue readingPodcast: Play in new window
There’s a lot of advice out there on using rewards to motivate your writing (especially during stretch events like NaNoWriMo). While keeping your motivation strong is a good idea, a lot of this advice is not terribly scientific, and it can be modified to be more effective.
Let’s talk about the difference between rewards and reinforcement, why we need to be proud of reaching a goal, and what to do when you tend to cheat and get your prize early.
Continue readingOkay, I didn’t realize the full extent of how hilarious that title was until I came back to it. But it’s accurate.
In August of 2004, I checked into a tiny motel in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Each of the dozen rooms was decorated with a different theme, and mine was Coca-Cola.
I was in Hot Springs for three weeks of Bailey & Bailey chicken training workshops. (This is a sort of litmus test — if you work in modern animal training, you probably responded with, “Oh! Wow, cool, what an opportunity!” If you don’t, you probably responded with, “…Wut?” Because this is the author blog and not the training blog, I’ll keep it short and say that Bob Bailey and his late wife Marian were, with Keller Breland and B.F. Skinner, some of the most important researchers and practical administrators of modern behavior science. The chicken training workshops were legendary, and I owe a huge debt of training success to their teaching.)
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