I don’t have any new writing to share, or any knitting projects to share. Although, I am currently writing a short story about fairies that is set in a yarn shop, and this is giving me a strong urge to go to Yarn Harbor and shop for yarn for a new project. Nevermind that I have lots of unfinished projects sitting around. Chris would undoubtedly say, “Finish my sweater!” (After two years of off and on working on it, all I have to do is weave in the ends and block it, and he’s forgotten that bit about it, so I won’t go out of my way to get him to read this blog post.)
What I’m going to do today is share some of the websites and blogs that I’ve been reading for the past year or so that have encouraged me to keep writing, finish what I write, and put it out into the world.
It all started on Friday when I happened upon this post, Indie Authors Quitting Their Day Jobs on The Passive Voice, a blog I recently added to my feed reader. Reading the comments on that post, I was not only encouraged, but actually astounded by some of the numbers reported. I wanted to post it to Facebook, but didn’t feel that I could give it the proper context. Thus, this blog post is born.
My Favorite Blogs about Writing and Publishing
The Business Rusch by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Description: Kris is a long time writer who has been in the writing and publishing business for years. She has made the transition from being traditionally published to indie publishing, and blogs about the business of being a writer. For the last five years, she posted “The Business Rusch” blog posts every Thursday, and I anxiously awaited them. Sadly, she has stopped doing her Thursday posts, but they are all archived for you to read.
My favorite posts: Some of my favorite posts are the “Dealbreakers” posts, which outline some of the horrible contract terms that traditional publishers have started exploiting authors with. I was shocked to learn that some publishers include a “non-compete” clause, meaning that if I were to sign a contract for a book, I would be unable to write anything else anywhere else, even on my own blog, if the publisher considered it to be competing with the book I’d sold to them. I also learned about reversion clauses, meaning that at some point the rights to a book should revert to an author, and not stay with the publisher forever.
My takeaway: Learn about copyright and don’t sign your rights away forever in a publishing contract! The best thing you can do to get your work discovered is to have more of your work available: i.e. keep writing above all else. Don’t waste time on “marketing” if it cuts too much into your writing time.
Dean Wesley Smith’s blog
Description: Dean is another longtime writer with experience in the publishing world who offers his experience to us. He is also Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s husband, so that’s how I found his blog too.
My favorite posts: Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. My favorite post this series is Myth #8: You Can’t Make a Living With Your Fiction. Also Myth #3: Rewriting.
My takeaway: Keep writing!
Actually, those two blogs are probably my most favorite and longest-read. I don’t even remember how I originally discovered them. Here are two more that I’ve recently begun following. I had seen them linked to and mentioned enough times by people who I follow on Twitter that I finally added the blogs to my reader.
A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing by Joe Konrath
The Passive Voice
Not as much to say about those except that they offer lots of information about indie publishing. I’m still browsing through archived blog entries and following new ones as they come up.
So, after sharing all of that, I’ll just add that my current goal is to write as much as possible and to publish it steadily. Stories published on this blog are part of that goal, as well as my novel that I released early this month. You have to start somewhere, right? Even though the novel is a big accomplishment and I am proud, I am only looking at it as the beginning of a much larger and longer goal. So if anyone’s been wondering why I’m not doing a lot of pushy marketing stuff with it, you can read the blogs above and learn why. Writing more things so people can discover my work through them is going to be the best use of my time right now. Plus I don’t like pushy marketing things anyway.
And here is a picture of a cat. I was sitting cross-legged in bed on my iPad, and just as I was about to switch to the laptop to start writing, the cat came and curled up. He doesn’t always like to cuddle, so it was especially important that I not disturb him.
