Writer's block

Diuretic said:
The website in Australia I mentioned says no upfront, they usually take about fifteen percent of the proceeds.
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Watermark: Depends on the publisher, I suppose. Even if they don't remember, just don't bother--- everyone hates unsolicited submissions. Just work on getting an agent, and then they will do all the work for you.


Remember, though, that there is about as much money in the publishing industry as there is in the music industry....not much for the actual writer.

If you wrote a book or something, you would probably only get about 10-12 percent of the actual sales, and then your agent is going to take enough of that to make it more like 8 percent.

Just be careful not to get frustrated enough to trust vanity publishers.
 
Watermark: Depends on the publisher, I suppose. Even if they don't remember, just don't bother--- everyone hates unsolicited submissions. Just work on getting an agent, and then they will do all the work for you.
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If everyone hates unsolicited submissions, well, how are they supposed to get new authors to publish and represent, and stay profitable? It seems like the industry seems a bit ungrateful and self-loathing.

Remember, though, that there is about as much money in the publishing industry as there is in the music industry....not much for the actual writer.
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That's why I'm double majoring... software engineering is my other degree. I wouldn't want to rely on writing as my sole source of income.


Just be careful not to get frustrated enough to trust vanity publishers.
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I read about all kinds of them on wikipedia. The big thing about them is that they pretty much don't market your book. You and your family will be pretty much the only buyers. There's also the author mill, which doesn't charge anything upfront and scoots you through the door with as few checks as possible, but also doesn't do anything to market your work or edit it. They try to go for quantity over quality. If you ever want to resale your book, you actually have to look in their catalog, and buy it from them, to get a copy.

It kind of made me angry looking at some 'advice' in a magazine about writing, that actually looked at vanity publishers as an option. God knows how many poor souls they ruined...
 
Watermark said:
If everyone hates unsolicited submissions, well, how are they supposed to get new authors to publish and represent, and stay profitable? It seems like the industry seems a bit ungrateful and self-loathing.
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They are very pretentious, it is true. They don't want new authors, they want authors that have proven that they are worth publishing--- that is the catch-22 of the industry.

However, agents can help to break through that initial block, you just have to be able to find an agent that will represent you. Writing short stories is also a good way to break into the industry enough to have a good chance of a published book.

You have to understand, though, that publishing houses' policies are largely a reflection of the times: with Microsoft Word and computers, everyone and his brother is an author these days, and the publishers literally receive thousands of books....to cut down on the amount of work it would take to sift through all those books, they are pretty much forced to only allow either solicited works or works that are offered by a literary agent.



That's why I'm double majoring... software engineering is my other degree. I wouldn't want to rely on writing as my sole source of income.
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Very smart, especially if you don't write commercial fiction. Really the only way of surviving as a writer of literary fiction is to have an additional job.




I read about all kinds of them on wikipedia. The big thing about them is that they pretty much don't market your book. You and your family will be pretty much the only buyers. There's also the author mill, which doesn't charge anything upfront and scoots you through the door with as few checks as possible, but also doesn't do anything to market your work or edit it. They try to go for quantity over quality. If you ever want to resale your book, you actually have to look in their catalog, and buy it from them, to get a copy.

It kind of made me angry looking at some 'advice' in a magazine about writing, that actually looked at vanity publishers as an option. God knows how many poor souls they ruined...
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Yeah. If you are looking at it as a way of supplemental income (as you should, considering the difficulty in surviving on writing alone), then your best bet is just to hang in there and laugh about how many rejection slips you got along the way.
 
Diuretic said:
I think they'd put you down as "in the genre of the late Lenny Bruce" :D
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I'm a bit of a highbrow. I don't consider myself Hemingway, but I just think it's kind of vulgar the way artists sell their souls and put out cheap formulaic spy novels to make money. I just couldn't do that. It'd make me puke. But it's an unfortunate fact that in modern society, imitation is rewarded much more richly than creativity.

We used to have fiction; now we have 20 different genre's with novels in them that are all the same. Whenever people ask me what genre I write in, I try to explain to them that I don't really write in a "genre", and they stare blankly at me and say "How can you do that? Doesn't it have to have a genre?" That's about how dead real literature is.

It's part of the larger fragmentation of music and art in American society. People don't meld together styles anymore. They don't add new things. They just have their formula for how to write their songs and how to write their novels, and they put down 10 different versions of that. We don't have and Rolling Stones anymore, but we have 100 different bands that sound like Nirvana, and do poorly at that, completely misinterpreting the bands message. Indie rock is almost completely white, having lost any semblance of the African American soul that begat rock in the first place.

We don't have creators. We have Stephen Kings, who think that the only plausible measure of artistic creativity is "How many books can I sell?"
 
Watermark said:
I'm a bit of a highbrow. I don't consider myself Hemingway, but I just think it's kind of vulgar the way artists sell their souls and put out cheap formulaic spy novels to make money. I just couldn't do that. It'd make me puke. But it's an unfortunate fact that in modern society, imitation is rewarded much more richly than creativity.

We used to have fiction; now we have 20 different genre's with novels in them that are all the same. Whenever people ask me what genre I write in, I try to explain to them that I don't really write in a "genre", and they stare blankly at me and say "How can you do that? Doesn't it have to have a genre?" That's about how dead real literature is.

It's part of the larger fragmentation of music and art in American society. People don't meld together styles anymore. They don't add new things. They just have their formula for how to write their songs and how to write their novels, and they put down 10 different versions of that. We don't have and Rolling Stones anymore, but we have 100 different bands that sound like Nirvana, and do poorly at that, completely misinterpreting the bands message. Indie rock is almost completely white, having lost any semblance of the African American soul that begat rock in the first place.

We don't have creators. We have Stephen Kings, who think that the only plausible measure of artistic creativity is "How many books can I sell?"
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yeah. so lowbrow. I bet you couldn't do one and sell as many as the biggies.
 
I've got it. Whenever I write currently, I'm always thinking I really need to write something good.

And what I need to be doing is enjoying what I'm writing.
 
To be blunt I'd gladly whore out any artistic talent I had (that's safe, I don't have any) for money. I'd write reams or formulaic pap if it made me lots of money. I would be totally unashamed. But as I said, it's all hypothetical, I don't even have sufficient talent to write reams of formulaic pap.
 
But I like reading crap. I'd much sooner read a Mack Bolan shoot-em-up than Dickens, really I would. I'm an intellectual bludger. I have never read a word of Hemingway. Sorry I did, it was "sea" that was the only word I read. But plenty of other people use the word "sea" so I thought, well there's nothing special about him is there? Why bother?

I do draw the line at comics though.

Well, some of them. I like The Green Lantern but not the latest manifestation, it looks like someone was on acid when they wrote/drew it.
 
But I like reading crap

Exactly. People like you are the scum of the Earth.

Any artist should automatically be made to live in shit and be disallowed from owning property for the rest of his life. Then maybe idiots like Mack Bolan will go work at Office Depot rather than ruin the minds of innocnet children with his predictable and boring plots.
 
Watermark said:
But I like reading crap

Exactly. People like you are the scum of the Earth.

Any artist should automatically be made to live in shit and be disallowed from owning property for the rest of his life. Then maybe idiots like Mack Bolan will go work at Office Depot rather than ruin the minds of innocnet children with his predictable and boring plots.
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Crap sells, now all you capitalist wienies should be falling over yourselves with a "never mind the quality, feel the width" quip. Crap sells or there would be no Hollywood, no US tv industry, it's staring you right in the face but you can't see it. Crap makes money, isn't that measure of anything's worth?
 
Diuretic said:
Crap sells, now all you capitalist wienies should be falling over yourselves with a "never mind the quality, feel the width" quip. Crap sells or there would be no Hollywood, no US tv industry, it's staring you right in the face but you can't see it. Crap makes money, isn't that measure of anything's worth?
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Of course not. How much some idiot gets ripped off for something has no bearing on its quality.
 
Watermark said:
Of course not. How much some idiot gets ripped off for something has no bearing on its quality.
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Point taken, I do avoid FoxNews. A load of shite masquerading as something worth turning up the voume for. Wrong of course.

Hmmm I must be developing some discriminatory powers. I have to be careful about that.
 
Diuretic said:
Point taken, I do avoid FoxNews. A load of shite masquerading as something worth turning up the voume for. Wrong of course.

Hmmm I must be developing some discriminatory powers. I have to be careful about that.
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MWHAHAHAHA!

Let us curse the ignorant masses together now!
 
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