Steven R. Southard's Blog, page 70

Your Baby’s Ugly

How should you, as an author, deal with negative reviews? You’re going to get them, so you might as well prepare now.

Nobody calls actual babies ugly, not to the Mom’s face anyway, but people will describe your novel or short story with some pretty ugly words. Those words sure can sting, too. After all, just as with real babies, writing is an act of creating something new from almost nothing, something that takes considerable effort and time, and you’re putting your creation out there for the...

What Should Your E-Book Cost?

Most authors (including me) are not experts in economics. Many of them might have a vague idea that if their book was priced high, they’d make more money. But this ignores the relationship between price and quantity sold. The author should be seeking to maximize income over all, not income per book sold.

Caveat: I’m no economist, so this is my best guess at the economics of e-book pricing. The thousands of economists who read my blog should comment and correct any errors I make.

The relationshi...

Thanks to Your Efforts…

My story “A Tale More True” was rated 4th among all Science Fiction short stories in the Critters Workshop Annual Predators and Editors Readers Poll for 2013. I earned a badge signifying a Top Ten finisher.

My thanks to all of you who voted for my story. With your help, next year’s readers poll will be even better for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

Got a Good Case of Writer’s Block?

Writer’s Block gets a lot of bad press. Authors fear it. It’s called an occupational hazard. People write about how to avoid it and how to get unblocked, and I’m one of those who’s written posts like that (here and here).

Could it be that Writer’s Block (WB) might really be a good thing?

Today I’ll try finding some positive aspects of WB. I’ll put it on a pedestal and let it shine a bit.

I came across this brief quote from author Gay Talese and it caused me to look at WB in a different light. He...

Scamming Writers for Fun and Profit

As long as there has been money, there have been scammers trying to separate people from their coin while providing nothing in return. Today I’ll discuss scamming writers, from the scammer’s point of view. (Note: I am not encouraging scamming; I’m trying to make a point to budding writers.)

In general, scams work best when your mark has a strong need for something, but not a lot of knowledge of the world. You’d think that a rare combination, but there’s enough of them out there for you to get...

Formula for Success

Have you ever written formula fiction? Is it good or bad to do so? What is it, exactly?

If your story re-uses the plot, plot devices, and stock characters of other stories, then you’ve written formula fiction. It’s different from the term genre, in that genre fiction makes use of the same setting and style as other works within the genre, but genre fiction may vary plot and characters considerably. I termed such writers formulists in a brief discussion here.

Although literary critics tend to di...

Vote for Your Favorite Story

Each year at this time, the Critters Writers Workshop conducts a Predators and Editors Poll to see which newly published e-book readers prefer.

Anyone can vote for his or her favorite book in a wide variety of categories. It’s not really a scientific poll, but winning it (or landing in the top ten) gives the author(s) some bragging rights.

Oh, I just noticed one of my own stories, “A Tale More True,” is one of the entries in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Short Story part of the poll. How about...

The Publishing Times, They Are A’Changin’

To distort a line from a Bob Dylan song, times are indeed a’changin’ in the publishing industry. In the long march from storytellers to clay tablets to papyrus scrolls to bound books to electronic books, each technology has brought a revolution and we’re now in the middle of one.

After Gutenberg’s printing press and right up until the Internet, the book publishing industry had optimized into a fairly lean and stable operation, full of specialized tasks. Each task was fairly well understood.

The...

Dear Ray Bradbury

I just had to write to thank you, thank you, for the great times, the pleasures of reading your work. There’s no sense letting a little thing like your death in 2012 prevent me from expressing my gratitude, is there?

Sorry, I haven’t read all your books and stories. I’ve read less of your canon than I have of Jules Verne’s, Isaac Asimov’s, or Robert Heinlein’s. But, oh, the few of your books I digested left lifelong mental imprints: Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wi...

The 7 Types of Genre Writers

Some time ago I stated there were two types of great writers—pioneers and giants. What about all the writers who aren’t great? Today I’ll expand on my pioneer/giant idea and discuss seven types of writers, as they apply to genre fiction. I’m not going to list any authors here, but I’ll bet certain names will come to mind as you peruse each type below.

1. Pioneers. These are writers who start a new genre of fiction by themselves. They discover it. They often have difficulty finding a publisher...