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Alert: America’s Next Author Contest
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware On Wednesday, I blogged about high entry fee awards schemes. Today, I'm going to discuss another potential awards trap: non-optimal entry rules. eBookMall is a veteran ebook retailer, one of the very fi...
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Character Building Counts and Wise Bear Digital: Two More High-Entry Fee Book Awards
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware It's Awards Week at Writer Beware! No, I'm not handing out prizes--I'm dispensing cautions. I've got two posts this week, both focusing on literary awards you may want to think twice about before entering. ...
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Guest Post: Dear Agent — Write the Letter That Sells Your Book
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Query letters. Except for the synopsis, there's no more dreaded task a writer has to undertake. How to boil an entire book down to a short pitch that not only provides an accurate snapshot of the work, but...
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Judge Rules Against Authors Guild in HathiTrust Lawsuit
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware On the heels of several publishers' secret settlement deal with Google in the long-running Google Books lawsuit, a judge has made a major ruling in another lawsuit over book scanning. In September 2011, ...
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Writers Slam Secrecy of Book Publishers’ Deal With Google
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA.org) National Writers Union (NWU.org) Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA.org) Contacts: Minda Zetlin, President, American Society of Jour...
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Review of EXTRAORDINARY by Nancy Werlin
Extraordinary by Nancy Werlin My rating: 4 of 5 stars A bargain between the faerie and human worlds has gone wrong, wreaking havoc among the faeries. Mallory and Ryland, a fey brother and sister, are dispatched by the faerie queen to the human world in a last-ditch effort to salvage the situation. Their mission: to masquerade as humans in order to manipulate Phoebe, a descendant of the original human bargain-maker, into fulfilling the the terms of the pact. There are familiar paranormal elements here (faeries–yeah, OK), and familiar romance elements as well: good girl falls for bad boy who treats her like dirt yet it takes her the whole book to figure out that he’s a jerk and she should kick him to the curb. Werlin does provide an internally consistent framework for this scenario, since the reader knows that Phoebe is under Ryland’s magical influence; every now and then…
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Publishers Settle With Google–But What About Authors?
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Seven years ago, the Authors Guild and several major publishers (including McGraw Hill, Penguin, and John Wiley) filed suit against Google for its unauthorized scanning of in-copyright books. The AG and p...
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Garden Notes — Summer’s Last Gasp
Though fall has been getting steadily longer and milder over the past few years here in Western Massachusetts, and we still have at least a month of fine weather to go before winter closes in, this is always a bit of a melancholy time of year for me, as I watch my garden yield to the change of seasons. So, for a look back, I’m posting photos I took toward the end of August, when things were still in vibrant bloom and torrential rainstorms hadn’t squashed the late-blooming flowers flat. Click on the image to see a larger version, plus my comments.