See it here: http://chainsawsuit.com/2013/05/22/fanfic-forever/

1. Easy to remember
2. Interesting
3. Indicates Genre
4. Is Funny
5. Tips For Brainstorming The Perfect Title

The last one is a summary of another writer’s blog post on the topic, and she rounds the article off with a list of great titles.

Bear in mind you don’t always get to choose your title in the traditional publishing industry. Commercial reality and poor timing (eg. a more famous author writing a similar titled book) can be a factor.

Link here: http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2013/05/4-things-to-keep-in-mind-when-choosing.html

I spend a lot of time at writers conferences trying to clarify the pros and cons among the different publishing paths and the growing number of services available to authors. There is no one path or service that’s right for everyone; you must understand and study the changing landscape and make a choice based on long-term career goals, as well as the unique qualities of your work—not to mention your own strengths and weaknesses.

With that in mind, I’ve developed an infographic (click to download as PDF) to describe what I see as the key 5 publishing paths, their value to authors, the potential pitfalls, and examples of each.

The five paths on Jane’s chart are:

1. Traditional publishing
2. Partnership publishing
3. Fully-assisted publishing
4. Do-it-yourself (DIY) publishing with a distributor
5. Do-it-yourself (DIY) direct publishing

For the record, my co-author Mike McRae and I followed path 2, partnership publishing, when we joined up with e-Mergent to publish The Machine Who Was Also A Boy (shameless plug!)

Have a look at Jane’s cool chart here: http://janefriedman.com/2013/05/20/infographic-5-key-book-publishing-paths/

1. Write what you love and don’t get trapped into expectations
2. Book title, marketing and theme need to resonate
3. Don’t confuse the reader

I think Joanna really nails it in that first section when she says:

Inferno might satisfy the expectations of the publisher, and some fans for another Langdon book. But in reading it, I felt like Dan Brown did not have a fun time writing it, and in fact, he would rather be writing techno-thrillers.

This reflects the experience that Kim Wilkins shared at the recent launch of her book Year of Ancient Ghosts (Ticonderoga Press). She said that she’d become stuck in the role of writing profitable romances as Kimberley Freeman, but she yearned to be able to write something that she wanted to write just for herself.

Anyway, read Joanna’s full article here for some tips on what she thinks went awry: http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2013/05/18/dan-brown-inferno/

We consider original, unpublished stories within the confines of dark fantasy and horror—mystery, suspense, supernatural, morbid humor, fantasy, etc

They accept fiction up to 5,000 words, but also flash and micro fiction, and pay a healthy 5 cents per word, up to a cap of $250. They’re also looking for poetry and will sometimes grab reprints at a reduced rate.

Non-fiction about real-world horrors up to 2,500 words is also accepted.

Shock Totem has two reading periods during the year, From February to May, and from August to November.

Check it out here: http://www.shocktotem.com/guidelines/

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

Read it here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-of-renowned-Dan-Brown.html

It’s important to remember that all of us will write terrible sentences, and occasionally it’s heartening to see that even those of us who sell many many many books are not immune.

And yes, they’re not all single sentences, and no, I haven’t confirmed these are really from the book…in truth, some of them are just too terrible to see print. Take for example the description of this watery cave:

Emerging from the darkness, a scene began to take shape … the interior of a cave … or a giant chamber of some sort. The floor of the cavern was water, like an underground lake.

Read them all here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100216857/dan-browns-eight-worst-sentences-in-inferno/

I was asked by the eminent David McDonald, winner of the 2013 Ditmar award for Best New Talent, to contribute a post to his Wednesday Writers column. I decided to compare the submit/$ ratio of a top-notch genre magazine and literary competitions.

I’m going to suggest that you write outside your comfort zone and submit to literary competitions, for fun and profit.

It’s only short, so check it out. http://www.davidmcdonaldspage.com/2013/05/wednesday-writers-tom-dullemond/

I’ll just post the headers for each section, to give you an idea. It’s really great information, and if you want to optimise your strategy for selling books you certainly can’t go wrong with some Cold, Hard Survey Result Facts.

1. Ebook Sales Conform to a Power Curve
2. Viva Long Form Reading:  Longer Books Sell Better
3. Shorter Book Titles Appear to Have Slight Sales Advantage
4. How Indie Authors are Pricing Their Books:  $2.99 (USD) is the Most Common Price Point
5. How Price Impacts Unit Sales Volume:  Lower Priced Books (usually) Sell More Copies
6. The Yield Graph: Is $3.99 the New $2.99?
7. A Closer Look at the Yield Graph Reveals Why Indie Ebook Authors Have a Competitive Advantage over Traditionally Published Authors

There really is too much for me to post without spoilering the lot (yes, spoilering is a word now*), but I found this an interesting comment from Mark:

Already, many successful indies, borrowing from the playbook of publishers, are assembling freelance teams of editors, cover designers, formatters and distributors.  Tell me again, what can a publisher do for the ebook author that the author already do for themselves faster, cheaper and more profitability?

In general I’m in the camp of ‘assemble a team of freelance professionals to produce a book’. I realise that some authors are capable of being the person who does that assembling, and that other authors are more than capable of doing all those tasks themselves, and I’m also aware that this approach is quite expensive. I think it produces the best books though. Not that I have any evidence of this.

Anyway, read the survey results and Mark analysis. It’s very interesting: http://blog.smashwords.com/2013/05/new-smashwords-survey-helps-authors.html

(*send your hate mail to Shakespeare)

This October, we will have a special themed issue and we need your submissions. The theme is “Wings.” Why wings? “Pigeons from Hell.””The Birds”. “The Raven.” These are only a few tales that have included disquieting winged entities. We want to continue the tradition.

From birds to bats, and Mi-Go to the Mothman, we are looking for short stories, flash fiction, and poetry that flaps and terrifies. Stories should adhere to the general guidelines set by Innsmouth Magazine (See here for word count max, pay rates and the like). We want Weird fiction, we want odd and disquieting tales, we want beauty and grotesqueries.

They pay 1c CAD for short stories from 1,300 to 5,000 words. This issue will also accept unsolicited poetry at $10 a poem.

More details here: http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/blog/?p=21029