On Self-Publishing and the Hugh Howey / Data Guy January 2015 Report
(Parts of this post originally appeared on my Google+ page and in the comments on Mike Reeves-McMillan’s post on the report.) You may be aware that Author Earnings, a data analysis site run by Hugh Howey and someone called Data Guy, recently released a report on ebook sales and the market share of those sales […]
Reader Entitlement Syndrome: Stacey Jay and the Windmill Full of Corpses
I would like to begin this post with a disclaimer: what will follow is unlikely to be pleasant; it will be filled with profanity and angry ranting. If that’s not your thing, then you can find a happy home next door where ponies dance in the moonlight and authors get shit all over for no […]
5 Annoying Author Habits on Twitter
I spend far too much time on Twitter, which means I read a lot of tweets from a lot of authors. Some authors are great at interacting, carving out their little niche and creating a kind of Twitter persona to represent them. Others, however, are kind of like social media bacterial infections who must do […]
Self-Published Books vs. Literary Awards: A Logistical Problem?
Back in August, The Guardian posted a column by Liz Bury entitled “Why is self-publishing still scorned by literary awards?” The article doesn’t exactly make an argument about the apparent snubbing of SPed books in the literary awards circuit, but Bury does essentially imply in the body of the article that the inability of these awards […]
Speculation Station: Worlds Without Gunpowder
Liz Bourke foisted this question upon me on Twitter using her profound ability of psychic suggestion and the promise of free alcohol.[1] The question is this: what would the world look like if gunpowder had never been discovered? First, a few caveats: I’m only going to consider worlds like our own in which the materials […]
Writing Question: Best Method for Introducing People of Color?
I’m currently writing a relatively far future military SF novel (or revolutionary military SF, since it involves revolution). One thing that I want to indicate about this future and its wide-reaching human empire is its relative inclusiveness. Race is not as much an issue there as it is today, which means that the cast of […]