Saturday, March 23, 2013

A-Z? Not this year...

For those of you looking forward to my A-Z Challenge posts, I unfortunately can't participate this year.  My own work and professional editing have to come first.

But, for those of you who are interested in participating or are wondering what it is, here's their link.  There's still time to sign up, and it's a lot of fun.  If you scroll through my labels in the side-bar, you can access my A-Z Challenge-related posts from the past, including some ideas of strategy.

http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/




In other awesome news, I'll be at the London Book Fair in the middle of April with the publisher I work for! I'm super excited to actually meet some of the people I work with.  If you're in London, come check it out!  There'll be publishers from all over the world there.  Plus, it's freaking LONDON.

http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/

On that note, it's time for me to get some more work done!

xoxo Sarah

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Royalties and Net and Bears, OH MY!

Like it or not, writing is a business.  Sure, we'd happily sit with our laptops, typewriters, pens, pencils, Sharpies, crayons, or what have you, and crank out best-sellers til the cows come home, watching the money magically appear in our bank accounts.  There would be bon-bon eating and bubble baths in there somewhere too.

And as much as I wish it worked like that, it's not going to happen.

At RWA 2011, I attended a workshop on contracts, and, of course, royalties and payment rates were brought up.  My head was swimming with information already, so it all sounded like gibberish, but now that I'm getting closer to querying, it's something that concerns me.  

Unfortunately, most of the information out there still sounds like gibberish to me.  This stuff--math-wise, anyway--is right up there with doing taxes.  


Rather than bore you with my own garbled understanding, I'm simply going to piggyback on two blog entries.  One was done by my friend and fellow author, Laura Kaye, who did some nice neat maths (they put the "s" on math over here in the UK, so I can use it like that, dammit!) and broke some of the confusing bits down for us in a nice, easy-to-understand entry.  

The other entry is more of an informative post by author Maya Banks, who has a ton of books out and uses some real-life examples.  A lot of this entry involves digital publishing, but she is traditionally published as well.  



So go ahead and check these out.  I found them very eye-opening, and would love to know what you think. And, as always, I'm happy to pass on info I thought was helpful in case someone else will find it interesting, too.

xoxo Sarah