Super excited to see The New Voices Award competition go live. Amazon Publishing has partnered with OWN IT! to bring this competition into being with a goal of addressing issues around inclusion and representation in commercial fiction.
There is still time for folks to get their works into the competiton by going here and submitting.
Good luck.
Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter has cruised past $20M in pledges and it has weeks left to run.
It’s gotten some attention:
NYT: Fantasy Author Raises $15.4 Million in 24 Hours to Self-Publish
The Bookseller: Sanderson raises more than $18.5m on Kickstarter to publish four new novels
To say this is impressive is to understate the case.
In the piece below, Weldon is on the money and authors should keep that in mind:
He thinks publishing a new book is a bit like running a startup company, or – in an analogy closer to this horse-racing enthusiast – a flutter at the track, where “relentless optimism” is blended with controlled risk-taking.
via Tom Weldon: ‘Some say publishing is in trouble. They are completely wrong’ | Books | The Observer.
Wise words from Marco, worth holding in mind all the time, especially in the sections below and when he admonishes us to have “a domain name you control and are able to easily take your content and traffic with you to another tool or host at any time*”:
Treat places like Medium the way you’d treat writing for someone else’s magazine, for free. It serves the same purpose: your writing gets to appear in a semi-upscale setting and you might temporarily get more readers than you would elsewhere, but you’re giving up ownership and a lot of control to get that.
Whether it’s worthwhile to you should depend on whether you want to establish yourself as a writer, whether you want to get paid for it in some form, and whether you can get an audience elsewhere on your own. Plenty of people can answer “no” to all three, especially if they do something else extremely time-consuming for a living and want an occasional place to write, but don’t have the time or inclination to try building regular audiences or become known for their writing. People who sometimes want to write, but never want to become even part-time writers.
via Medium and Being Your Own Platform – Marco.org.
* I use WordPress.com to run my site here, but I own the domain name and several others on which I can run the content which I export and back-up regularly.
I can’t say I agree with this argument
But there’s another downside, which is the negative impact on thousands of writers the public has never heard of or, more importantly, had the opportunity to read. In that sense, it could even be argued that Rowling’s well-intended hoax has backfired, turning into yet another story about fame in the modern world.
For one thing, readers always have the opportunity to read debut authors, though they may never consider them and they may choose not to read them, given that readers’ time is limited and the chances of getting a bad book are high, it’s understandable that they often pick authors they already know and like.
Secondly the publishing industry has always been hit driven, there’s some argument that it is becoming even more so with the bandwagoning effect of the internet, but that’s a question of scale rather than kind. New writers always struggle to get exposure in this environment. But even the hits start small until something or someone pushes them over an edge, that can be advertising spend, celebrity endorsement, top line publicity, word of mouth or just dumb luck, but even JK Rowling started at the bottom with Harry Potter, the initial print run for The Philosopher’s Stone was around 1,00 copies!
Finally no writer is entitled to success, just as no publisher or bookseller is entitled to it. We all have to work to reach readers and entice them to read book (hopefully our books). Sometimes that means publishing a few books before gaining a readership, sometimes it may mean a writer never gains that readership despite being talented. There’s no foolproof way to guarantee success, you just have to keep plugging away at it and finding good partners to work with and hoping you can do everything right so that if success comes, you’re ready.
Eoin Purcell's Blog 