Bookmaking

Here's how they used to make books:


Printing a Book, Old School from Armin Vit on Vimeo.


Here's bookmaking using the latest on-demand technology:




It's interesting stuff to know.

On Writing

Lucienne Diver has a series of guest bloggers on her livejournal. They discuss the different aspects of writing epic fantasy (though the advice can apply to other genre):

Promotion by Lynn Flewelling

Narrative Arc and the Multi-Book Fantasy Series by David B. Coe

Building Worlds—Epic or Contemporary Style by Diana Pharaoh Francis

Making it Personal, Making it Real by Carol Berg

and she also had some mystery guest-bloggers:

Top 5 things to remember about mystery

Mystery Series by Tony Perona



Deanna Carlyle has some general writing articles on her website:

17 Ways to Improve Your Descriptions

35 Springboards for Creating Sympathetic Characters



And Ally Carter wrote about writing YA novels:

The wrong questions...

The questions that aren't getting asked at all

About the Publishing Industry

Shrinking Violet Promotions posted interesting articles on 12 3/4 Ways to Promote Your Novel and Writing Big.

Jessica Faust at Bookends wrote about the pros and cons of Hiring an Editor to help polish your manuscript.

Victoria Strauss at Writers Beware! wrote about A Publishing Contract Clause to Beware concerning copyright transfers.

Kristin Nelson wrote about Overnight Success Takes 2 to 10 years.

Paperback Writer wrote about questions to ask agents and editors.

Someone wrote an article about Book Publishing Accounting: Some Basic Concepts.

Author Deanna Carlyle wrote very enlightening articles on Do You Know Your Foreign Rights? and The Price of One Book: Or, How Come My Advance is So Low? and Who’s Got the Power? How a Publisher’s Sales Force Can Make or Break Your Book.

Ever More about Queries

Nathan Bransford wrote about Things I Don't Need to Know in a Query. He also wrote Query Stats by Word Count in which he said:

...I basically decided that there is a sweet spot in query word count between 250 and 350 words. Anything shorter than 250 usually (but not always) seems too short and anything longer than 350 usually (but not always) seems too long.

Jessica Faust at Bookends wrote about Submitting Collections.


On a somewhat related note, Moonrat wrote about why you should never submit unagented to publishing companies. It's the editor-side view of why an author should get an agent.

About Artists and Cover Designs

If you every wanted to see a cover artist paint a cover, here are a few video demos on the Tor.com site:

Dan Dos Santos, Painting Fast
Jon Foster Demo
Rick Berry Demos

There was also a post on SF/F Book Cover Review, Hugo Edition: Brasyl by Pablo Defendini which talks about cover design.

A Bit of Everything

Nathan Bransford wrote a post on Unagented Revisions. He explains how it works when an agent suggests revisions to an author before taking them on as a client.

Evil Editor answered an important question about how to write a good query.

Author May Vanderbilt wrote a short but useful post about writing and revising rules of thumb.

Author Anne Dayton wrote about cutting favorite but unneeded passages from your writing. To quote from it:

In The Book of Jane...we had this awesome character Yasmina who did all kinds of hilarious things. She was really hapless and she was always getting into trouble, and provided a ton of comic relief. The thing was, that was all she did. She didn’t have a plotline, and didn’t grow, and ended up feeling really flat and extraneous because of it, no matter how ridiculous her antics were. May and I worked with her and worked with her, trying to save her, but finally, she ended up on the cutting room floor. It was so hard to say goodbye, because she was a pretty major character. But in the end I’m so glad we got rid of her. She added something to the book, but she also slowed it down and made it more complicated and less focused than it needed to be. The book was better for it, and I learned a valuable lesson about holding onto things for the wrong reasons...