Wrapped Up In Books

It is said that to get published, you must have an agent. And to get an agent, you must be published. We’ve taken classes where instructors have implied that the only path to publication is through an agent — yet this always seems to be news to the editors we encounter. Yes, like everything else in this business, the rules are completely made up by people who take their individual situations and extrapolate them to the entire universe. And, yes, we do it all the time. That’s merely because we’re always right — it’s only appropriate that we share our […]

I’m headed out to do a stock signing today. I won’t sit at a table and wait for people to ask me to sign it for them (or ask me where the bathroom is), or anything like that. No, I’ll go to the storage room and sign all the books the bookstore has before they put them on the shelves. (I hope) Now, I’ve never done this before. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to call ahead and say “Hey, is it okay if I visit?” What if this is a no-no? What if they really don’t want me to

If you want the down and dirty truth, I’m obsessed with book rankings. I spend way too much time stalking Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. And what gets me is that the rankings can change by thousands in a matter of minutes (seconds, if you want to be technical). How does that happen? Canceled orders? A mad rush of orders? Aliens abducting everyone who buys my book so their secret society won’t be revealed?? Can you guess what I want to do every time my number jumps?: A) scatter little pieces of my computer all over my office. B) scream, rant, and

We’d like to thank Gena for her time — and remind her that we are the Master now. She must dance to our tune until we tire of toying with her. We will, however, give her a few minutes off to eat. Well, that seemed like enough time to us. Now it’s back to work. First, we’d like to remind Gena that when she told us things in strict confidence, we had our fingers crossed behind our back. Probably, we should have mentioned this earlier, but things get so crazy around here. We bring this up because we’re going to

What was I thinking. . . well, I think we can all agree there was absolutely none of that going on. Images of my name of the cover of those books got in my way. No, I honestly love having so many books due. I’m time obsessive, so deadlines work well for me. Here’s the breakdown of books: When I signed my first contract with HQN, it was a two book contract and both books were written. Next up was a two book contract with Pocket. Only one book was written. Right away, I signed another contract with HQN, this

As mentioned, debut author Gena Showalter is spending the week with us, and has fearlessly (if one can consider terror to be fearless — we do) agreed to answer any and all questions. No really, she said (and we’ll paraphrase in the interest of space), “I’ll talk about anything. Consider me an open book.” We won’t say we knew her when, but we sort of did. In addition to her unflagging generosity (as evidenced by her critical reads of our work when we’re feeling particularly insecure, and this happens more often than we’d like to admit), she’s a rising star

We know many things (and we’re always willing to share), but sometimes, we can only imagine certain experiences. Not that we don’t do an excellent job of making things up (that’s a technical writing term), but every now and then, we turn to experts for what is known as “first-hand experience”. Sounds a little messy, but there you have it. So next week, we’re going to force first-time author, Gena Showalter (who’s already introduced herself), to answer lots of questions regarding selling your first book (and your second…and your seventh), the editing process (“I only have how many days to