10. Well, that's that: I am officially out of "skip days" until after March. My friend Debbie rather unexpectedly pinged me Tuesday to say that she would be in San Francisco starting Wednesday and would I have dinner with her? So we had dinner (and I dragged her along on the usual round of Wednesday errands, because there's "taking a skip day" ( Read more... )

Because this has become a very popular question in the past few weeks, here's the status of the Toby Daye audio books ( Read more... )

People are talking a lot about eBooks right now. It would be impossible not to talk a lot about eBooks right now, given the recent mess with Amazon and MacMillan.* Before this, people were already talking about eBooks, for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons was what people are calling the "nuclear option": a tendency by some readers to go to ( Read more... )

We knew from the day we started shopping the Newsflesh trilogy that they would probably need to be published under an open pseudonym. There are a lot of reasons for that. The easiest to spot is "avoidance of over-saturating the market"-after all, as a relatively untried author, it's probably best if I not compete with myself.* Oddly, this isn't ( Read more... )

Okay, so here's the thing:

At my DucKon reading, I was making jokes about "the thirty-five dollar retirement plan"-IE, "if everyone I know bought that many copies of my books, I'd be a lot closer to no longer needing a day job." While this really was a joke-I intend to be working in an office environment for a while yet, since I like having ( Read more... )

So I'm merrily cruising around my reading list-amusingly enough, and you'll understand why in a moment, right after composing a lengthy letter to my agent-when I discover that a friend of mine (hi, Jim!) has linked to an essay about literary agents. Now, I'm a big fan of literary agents. I go to have a look. Hmmm. The essay in question is ( Read more... )

I have spent my week being very, very productive, especially when you consider the fact that a) I just got a new kitten, b) Lilly didn't allow me to sleep for over a month during her "kitty go crazy" period, and c) the lack of sleep, followed by sleep's sudden return, has left me slightly sick and very definitely jet-lagged in my own body. It's ( Read more... )

I think 'get an agent' is one of the goals almost universally shared by aspiring authors. Having an agent is like having all the good cheat codes to the video game; it's like having the natural mathematician on your Academic Decathlon team, or having the guy who knows the whole town by heart on your side in the scavenger hunt. Whether it's true ( Read more... )

1. I'm not dead! Since it wasn't widely advertised before I went away, I'm in New York for Business Purposes (tm) this week, hanging out with the wonderful crew at DAW, meeting other fabulous people (hi, Colleen!), and generally being A Good Little Author. This has resulted in some truly fantastic things, many of which I'll be sharing when I'm ( Read more... )

So as I sit here, a safe seven months from my release date, I'm watching various friends and acquaintances as they madly dance through the steps required to promote and advertise a new book. It's important, especially for newer authors, to do something beyond just saying 'I have written a book and my mommy says it's awesome' when they have ( Read more... )