If you follow the publishing industry at all you will have noticed a number of trends. Everybody and their dog are talking about the trends in self-publishing via eBooks. I’m not going to talk about these: they are well covered.
What has motivated me this morning is a discussion I’ve been having with a managing editor at one of the magazines I write for. A couple of days ago she opened a discussion with me about a special project article. Special projects are stand-alone publications. They often bear the name of the parent magazine, but are published as a magazine sized book. We have been discussing this proposal via e-mail since. One of the questions I asked was the expected word count. Continue reading “Trends in Publishing”
With the possible exception of a multi-best-seller author, all writers should seek constructive criticism of their work. The bigger the work, the more important this is. This may be proofreading for typos, or it may be seeking help with plotting and character development; that depends on your experience and skill. Here are some pointers for finding and dealing with constructive criticism. 
I have received a fair number of inquiries from aspiring authors about e-mails they have received from “publishers”. I have received one or two of these myself. The messages vary, but in essence they portray the sender as a publisher, generally they use impressive names that include the word “press” to give the impression that they will print the book. Most are, at best, publication services.
There is a tendency for authors, especially new authors, to discount the value of the established and venerated publishing houses: those establishments that have for, in some cases, hundreds of years provided the readers of the world with quality materials to entertain, inform, and enlighten. But suddenly the reverent awe in which we have always held these firms is being besmirched, like graffiti on a church, by a pair of hooligans: a bratty upstart called Self Publishing and his sidekick Indie Press. Oh, sure; their cousin Vanity Press has been prostituting herself for almost as long as the Big Houses have been around, but she pretty much kept to herself and offered little threat to them.