Books are getting longer.

I wonder how much of that is down to ebooks, which weigh the same and cost the same to produce regardless of length?

I know that as I gain more experience as a writer and take on more challenging stories, it takes me longer to tell them, but there’s also the phenomenon referred to in the article: highly successful authors don’t get edited down, even when they should. Partly because their fans will keep buying the books even if they’re bloated and overwritten.

(I am not a highly successful author, for the avoidance of doubt.)

I can pontificate about fantasy in blog form. I might have a go at this.

Not sure what I would write about exactly, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

If you fancy trying your luck with the Random Penguin House…

Be aware: I have seen books from them with bad copy editing. There are probably badly promoted books, too, but by the nature of things I haven’t seen those.

Just because they’re big doesn’t mean you’ll get more help. It does mean you’ll get a smaller proportion of the money than you would from self-pub or from many small presses. But it might… might… get you more visibility.

Originally shared by Erica Verrillo

DAW Books, a division of Penguin/Random House, and the oldest publishing company devoted exclusively to science fiction and fantasy, has opened its doors to unagented manuscripts. You can submit online through Submittable. There is no charge to submit. https://publishedtodeath.blogspot.com/2018/07/daw-books-opens-its-doors-to-sci-fi-and.html

There is a problem with Amazon reviews, but it isn’t this one.

Originally shared by David Gaughran

PSA: That Washington Post article on Amazon’s fake review crisis is based on a website – ReviewMeta – which is so unbelievably flawed that its determinations are worthless.

Looks like I need to spend a bit of time polishing up that unpublished novella that’s sitting there doing nothing. It might as well sit in Tor.com’s slush instead.

As in other industries, rising profits are not being passed on to the people who are doing productive work.

Originally shared by Steve Turnbull

Some of us have been well-aware that the big five trad publishers have been screwing authors but that knowledge was perhaps based on anecdotal evidence, well the figures are in and it’s the book trade itself that’s saying it.

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2018/03/the-profits-from-publishing-authors-perspective/

Trouble is they haven’t realised they are no longer the only game in town.

(Although I can just imagine one of their execs whining: “It’s all the fault of Amazon and its self-publishing, if people didn’t self-publish we wouldn’t have to do this to our authors.”)

Amanda Rachelle Warren, here’s one for you – not just because of the poetry, but because of the “is this particular poetry good enough poetry to count?” discussion.

In order for “good books get more reviews” to be true, you have to use a very specific and (to me) non-intuitive definition of “good”. Otherwise, I largely agree with this piece, which has some useful points to make.

Originally shared by Damien Walter

Writing a regular column for The Guardian on weird books, I get asked by writers of all kinds to read their latest tome. And sometimes that question becomes “how do I get my book reviewed?”

In the age of social media and the internet the book review is a much different beast than it once was.

A tweet from Neil Gaiman can be much better publicity than a national newspaper book review today.

And a groundswell of interest from fans talking on blogs can shift more copies than old style book clubs.

So while I’m discussing this in terms of “getting reviewed”, it might just be better to think of this as some thoughts on how to get people talking about your book.

https://damiengwalter.com/2014/01/16/the-dos-and-do-nots-of-getting-your-book-reviewed

This is similar to my “genres considered as restaurants” blog post from a while back, but takes a different angle.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

A few years ago, I came across an interesting theory of how to divide up stories implied in a talk by Lois McMaster Bujold: that stories are most usefully divided not by their structural elements, or their set dressing, but by the type of emotional experience they try to create. Romances, in this model, are fantasies of love; mysteries may be fantasies of justice or of understanding, and the latter category is shared with spy thrillers and Lovecraftian horror. Literary fiction about painful divorces may have more in common with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre than with Agatha Christie.

(Member post)

From Publishers Weekly:

“Kadaxis, started by Chris Sim (formerly CTO of Bookish), uses data science to examine a book’s full text, customer reviews, and other related materials to formulate effective keywords to boost books’ discoverability in Amazon search. Its bookdiscovery.co website is a public-facing demonstration of the power of keywords in search. In July 2016, Kadaxis partnered with Firebrand to study the effectiveness of Sim’s approach, and the results for backlist titles in particular were impressive.”