tl;dr: write good books that will continue to sell for a long time, and be known to one and all as a guy* who is generally just around.

*generically speaking

Originally shared by Rachel Aaron

Writing Wednesday: The Long Tail — What Happens When Nothing Happens?

Hey guys, I’m sick as a dog today, so I’m turning the blog over to my incredible husband and business partner Travis Bach (aka, the one who actually does all the non-writing work in this house). As always, he came through in spades and wrote an incredible p…

Lindsay Buroker is one of those indie authors who make a steady living writing midlist books. Is there a “secret formula”? Well, not as such.

Write competently, publish consistently, build an audience, keep new readers coming in, and try things out until one of them clicks.

Orson Scott Card’s book on Characters and Viewpoint is well worthwhile even for the intermediate writer, though it would also be great for a beginner if you worked through it slowly.

He takes care throughout to relate the techniques to their effect on the reader, and explains them clearly and well, with plenty of examples.

“Fiction doesn’t deal with what happened once. Fiction deals with what happens.”

– Orson Scott Card, Characters and Viewpoint

This reminds me of the scene in Terry Pratchett’s The Truth where he talks about how people don’t want news, they want “olds”. We build out from the familiar, and give it freshness through a new perspective.

The latest Author Earnings report looks at Amazon UK, the second-biggest market for ebooks in English. 

Most of the findings are not surprising. There’s a clear difference in book pricing from large publishers, which has the effect you would expect.

The surprising finding, though, is that indies are significantly outperforming traditional publishing in selling books across both markets (US and UK) rather than just their local market.

Today, standoutbooks encourages writers to play a little and figure out what they can do without, inspired by these experimental works. 

I know I had a lot of fun, and learned a lot, from writing Gu, a novella told in second person and cast in the form of a documentary about a fictional technology.

https://www.standoutbooks.com/writing-inspiration-experimental-books/

Came across this via a post on Goodreads. May be of interest if you’re starting out freelancing, but already reasonably competent. 

I’ve always liked these.

Originally shared by Laura Gibbs

From the Twitterz. I’ve seen these rules in various blog posts, but this is the first nice graphical presentation that I’ve found!