Marketing. It’s the doom of all of us. Oh, there’s a hundred and one books out there about how to use social media to market your books. Facebook’s crap for it. Twitter doesn’t lead to sales, because it’s too short a form. And Goodreads groups have taken to creating spaces for authors to dump their promotional…
Category: Writing
Why do I not have more diversity in my books?
Some background, first: Growing up, everyone around me was white like me. That statement is not literally true. The small, rural town of Colfax, Washington actually contained Asians, Hispanics, African-Americans, Native Americans, Indians, and Arabs. Not in large concentrations, but they were there. Hell, they were within one grade level of me at school. But…
Final Thoughts on Sasquan, The World SF&F Convention 2015
Frog and I had a wonderful, amazing convention. We got to meet fans we didn’t know we had, sell many books, hang out with authors and friends, find more people who share our interests, and even attend a few room parties. It was a beautiful, smokey, unforgettable experience. Conventions always remind me why I started…
WorldCon Report, Day 3: Into the Smoke
So, day 3 was supposed to be simple. I had one job to do. That job, by the way, was to drink beer, an activity that I perform on occasion with no obligation whatsoever. Well, that and work sgt-at-arms for the Business Meeting, which was fun but uneventful (wait for Day 5). No, Friday was shaping up to…
The Streisand Effect
In 2003, Barbara Streisand sued a photographer for posting pictures of her beachfront home on the internet without her permission. The photo was part of a 12,000 photograph collection, meant for the purpose of detailing shoreline erosion in California. It was small, obscure, and nobody cared about it. Yet in her zealous defense of her privacy,…
“On the Hugo Nominations,” or “Giving Zero Poops”
Guess what? There’s a lot of drama surrounding the Hugo nominations. At first glance, this seems like a big deal. After all, I’m a genre writer. This is kind of the award for us, it’s our Oscars, right? It’s all the recognition from peers that matters to us, to validate our writing. Not only that,…
Win a Kindle by Being A Terrible Writer: The Grant-Frog Style Guide
So, many times at cons, we authors are asked to read things and evaluate them. Most of the time the work needs polishing, but is pretty good. Occasionally, though, we get handed something that makes The Eye of Argon look like frickin’ Tolkein. But here’s what’s interesting: when we authors talk about it, the unintentional…
A Larger Perspective: In response to the response to Scott Aaronsen
Before you read this post, read this. Let’s put the comment into context, first. Few of the other commenter’s on Dr. Aaronsen’s comment take it in the context of the full conversation, so let me attempt to outline this one. There was an MIT professor, a Prof. Lewin, who committed sexual harassment. Well, was alleged,…
A winnar is me.
Esther is just behind me in this, but I figured I’d post my thingy to be all thingy now. So, I won Nano. And I feel cheesy even saying that. “Win” is a word that usually refers to a competition. It implies that I somehow accomplished something. But as I said in an earlier post,…
Halfway through Nano
So, this weekend marks the midpoint of November. It also marks the half-way point on my NaNoWriMo word count. I’m recovering after Orycon, which set me back in my word count, but I’ve managed to make up ground this weekend. So far, I’m learning some things from the experience. I’ll try and condense it down,…