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Guest Blog Post: In Praise of Ripening
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware When I began doing research for the Writer Beware website in 1998, Marcia Yudkin's invaluable article on recognizing writing scams was among the first resources that I discovered. In this week's guest blog ...
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Pearson Buys Author Solutions
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Last March, word went out that self-publishing giant Author Solutions Inc (owner of AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris, Trafford, WordClay, Palibrio, and several others, and contractor for the self-pub...
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Rights vs. Copyright
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware You may have noticed that there were no posts last week. Apologies! I've got a humongous workload, and have had to cut myself off from the web almost entirely in order to deal with it. I thought I...
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Publishers Weekly Moves Into Self-Publishing
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware A couple of years ago, I blogged about the launch of PW Select, an online supplement to the regular PW magazine. PW Select, which is published quarterly, allows self-published writers to buy brief listing...
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Two Surveys
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Two fascinating surveys appeared this week. They look at opposite ends of the writing business, but dovetail in interesting ways. (This is going to be a long post, so please bear with me.) The Writers' Wo...
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Editing Clauses in Publishing Contracts: How to Protect Yourself
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Over the past couple of days I've gotten several emails and Facebook posts alerting me to a blog post by writer Mandy DeGeit about her bad experience with a small publisher called Undead Press. When she r...
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Vetting an Independent Editor
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware I often receive questions from writers who are looking to hire an independent editor to polish their manuscripts, either for self-publication or for submission to agents and publishers, and want to know w...
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The Importance of Reversion Clauses in Book Contracts
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware Most book publishing contracts can be divided into two types: fixed-term, where the grant of rights extends for a defined period of time, such as five years; and life-of-copyright, where the grant of rig...
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Guest Blog Post: Why Small Publishers Fail
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware I've used up a lot of column space on this blog warning about the risks of submitting to small presses, especially brand new small presses. In my opinion, this is currently the most dangerous area for write...
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Release Day for CAST OF CHARACTERS!
Today is the release day for Cast of Characters. This fabulous anthology from Novelists Inc., edited by the eminent Lou Aronica, features brand-new short fiction from 28 established authors, including moi. Cast of Characters is available as a trade paperback (right now, Amazon is offering it at a nice discount) and as an ebook from a variety of retailers. As a bonus, you can also sign up to receive Set Pieces, an absolutely free ebook featuring “set piece” excerpts from upcoming novels by an additional fourteen NINC members. My story, “A Dream of Flight,” is set in Renaissance Italy, and imagines what might have happened if Leonardo da Vinci had really built his famous wings. What would they have meant to him? Would he have tried to fly them? Would he have soared, or fallen? Here’s the promo material for Cast of Characters. TWENTY-EIGHT LEADING VOICES IN FICTION –INCLUDING ELEVEN…