Contemporary Romance Contest

The gals at Bookends have announced the winner of the last romance contest. They are now doing a contemporary romance contest. Go to their blog to read the complete rules and enter. The deadline is tomorrow, March 4th, at 9:00 a.m. EST.

What Editors are Currently Looking For

Kristin Nelson is doing a series of posts on what various editors are actively looking for or not wanting to see more of. She talks about sci-fi/fantasy, paranormal romance, YA and women's fiction, more YA, and even more YA, and children's books. I'm sure she'll be doing more in the future.

Jonathan Lyons also wrote a blog post on Vampires Are Not Dead.

Hope this was useful.

Contests and Awards

Here are two informative links on writing contests and book awards.

Victoria Strauss at Writers Beware! wrote about Evaluating Literary Contests.

Rachel at Novel & Short Story Writer's Market blog wrote about How to win awards.

What Do They Do #2

Here are two more articles on what various people in the publishing industry do.

Madeleine Robins wrote about what various editors (copyeditors, etc.) do in Text Wranglers.

Alison Morris wrote about Managing Editors on her blog.

Another Romance Contest

The gals at Bookends have announced the winner of their fantasy romance contest. They are now doing another romance contest--see their post for the details of what type. Go to their blog to read the complete rules and enter. The deadline is tomorrow, February 26th, at 9:00 a.m. EST

Publishers on Publicity

Sure, we hear all the time about what authors can do to promote their books. But just what do the official publicity/marketing people at the publishers do for your book?

Anna, who once was an editor at Tor, wrote about the ad/promo department totally owns you. She also wrote on a related point, do large advances mean more publicity?

John Scalzi wrote on Sympathy for the Publicist.

J. A. Konrath wrote about The Truth About Publishers, David Morrell on Book Marketing and Publicity, and David Morrell Part Deux: The Publicist Speaks.

More on Promoting Your Book

Over at the Bookends blog, Stacey Kayne posted some good book promotion ideas, so I thought it's about time to list promotion posts again.

A.C. Crispin at Writer's Beware wrote About Getting Book Reviews.

Kristin Nelson on Pub Rants blog wrote about author websites in the New Rules For Promotion.

Miss Snark wrote about publicity and getting bookstores to order your book.

And, of course, J. A. Konrath's blog has many posts on self-promotion. A few are:
The Art of the Soft Sell (about handselling books)
I Talk, You Pay (being paid to speak in public)
More on Drop-Ins (dropping by bookstores as travel to ask them to carry your book)

I'll write more on promotion tomorrow, but from the publisher's viewpoint.

Free Books

More and more authors and publishers are offering free e-books as a means of advertising. [The two sci-fi/fantasy publishers I know of who are currently doing this are Baen and Tor (for a limited time only). If you know of others, feel free to mention them in the comments section.] The question is, do free e-books help sell print books? Here are two articles on the subject:

David Rothman wrote about Oprah e-freebie now Amazon's 3rd best p-seller on his blog.

Cory Doctorow wrote about Giving It Away on Forbes.com

Personally, I think its effective to make an author's debut novel and/or the first novel in each series available for free. I was hesitant to buy Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, so I was pleased that TOR was offering it for free as an e-book this last week. I wasn't impressed by the first three or so chapters, but the book really gets good after that. Guess what? I went out an immediately placed an order for all of his books, including Mistborn. (Heck, the thing is too long to read the whole thing on a computer screen.)

What do you think? Have you ever bought a print version of a book that you first got as a free e-book? Or bought other books by an author because you read a free e-book by that author?

Paranormal/Fantasy Romance Contest

The gals at Bookends are now doing a Paranormal Romance / Romance with Fantasy Elements / Fantasy with Romantic Elements contest. Go to their blog to read the complete rules and enter. The deadline is tomorrow, February 20th, at 9:00 a.m. EST.

Managing Money

John Scalzi wrote a very, very good article about how to manage your money if you wish to be a full-time writer. Heck, it even has good advice for those writers who already know they don't want to quit their day jobs.

Inspired by Scalzi's article, Jennifer Jackson wrote on writers spending their advances. As in, they shouldn't spend their advance before the money is in their hands. I'd recommend reading the whole post, but here's a part of it:

From the time the offer was received to the time the author was paid the full advance, you can see that 15 months have elapsed, and that was with very prompt editorial revisions on the part of both the editor and the author, and really nice turnarounds on the agent's part for payments.

And, finally, for those sci-fi/fantasy writers out there, how much can you reasonably expect to be paid as an advance? Tobias Buckell ran a survey on How Much Does a Science-Fiction or Fantasy Writer Make. The survey also compares the advances of agented authors versus and unagented authors. Victoria Strauss also wrote a post on how much money writers make. Interesting stuff.