Recent content by srg

I just listened to a very informative episode of Writing Excuses; this one covered off Story Bibles. The authors in the episode had some good notes about story bibles, and also about a neat-sounding application called wikidpad. Anyway, the episode is here: Writing Excuses 5.34: Story...

I never said CD self-published - I brought him up as an example of someone giving away their books and having it not hurt their sales (it actually helps). Separate discussion from self-publishing. Cory Doctorow on Giving Away Free E-Books and the Morality of “Copying” This is a few years old...

Don't quote me on this, but I think the novella market is more restricted to anthologies and magazines. Not that I know of any such markets. Self-publishing (as an ebook only) would probably be a good idea if there are no other avenues, primarily because people like short reads.

I'll agree with that. (One more note re: music though. I run a podcast/blog about creative commons music. Trust me when I say there's a lot of good stuff out there that doesn't get through to people. Again, it's not for everyone, but there is a lot of stuff with high production values that...

Gah I just lost a post I was working on because my browser crashed. Anyway all I was going to say was that if you did want to compare the music industry to the publishing industry, you'd find that there are also a lot of independant artists who are just as good, if not better, than those...

First of all I think it's unfair to compair books to music - what's going on with the switch to e-publishing is somewhat similar to what happened with music 10 years ago, sure, but music is a different beast entirely. However, when you say "bands that are famous enough to not need a label" -...

I'm fairly certain (like 99%) that Cory Doctorow has always given away his works online. Also, I don't think he is successful because he is a previously published author; in fact I don't think he even measures up too well against most "mainstream" authors. He's mainly famous online amongst the...

What do you think of Cory Doctorow's success? Granted, his books are both given away for free under a Creative Commons License AND published via traditional publishing. I don't think he suffers at all by giving his books away for free (which, actually, does often promote sales of the real...

I think the bottom line is that in order to have a successful career self-publishing, you need to be writing on Kevin J. Anderson output levels. And he writes a LOT. I think he had a blog post one day where he basically said what some writers do in a year, he does in 6 weeks or something like...

Kevin, that was an excellent post. Thanks! Ravana, I think we are going to have to agree to disagree. Obviously our thoughts on self-publishing are coloured by what we personally look for when buying books; unlike others in the thread, I *don't* look at the publishing house on the book...

I think he's referring to the scene where Gandalf shines a beam of white light toward the attacking Nazgul to allow the retreating Gondor army safe passage back to Minas Tirith (pretty sure I spelled that wrong?). I *think* that scene is at the end of TTT. Said army is beaten pretty bad in...

Here's some good reading I just found today: Publishing is not a Lottery In it he talks about both self publishing and trad publishing; and also mentions an interview by Joe Konrath (but I didn't see a link there?). ETA: Found it...

The books may not be a trilogy, but I think it would be accurate to classify the movies as a trilogy.

Alright, just re-reading some of the responses from everyone. I don't think anyone is disagreeing that self-publishing requires a lot of work to be successful; the issue at hand is whether anyone self-publishing is taken more or less serious than someone going through traditional publishing...

Thanks for all the advice! I guess what I will end up doing depends heavily on whether I decide to do a novel, or serial-type stories. I'm leaning more toward the latter, so I guess it might be more beneficial to just write down a few notes about the world and add on as I go?