So I’m working on this book at the moment, You Don’t Want To Be Published. It’ll be finished and released in February, and it’s basically a collections of essays and posts I’ve pulled from this blog and other publications that you can get for free if you sign up for my newsletter.
Basically, the stuff people have pointed to over the years and said it would be useful if this was in a book or something. Technically, I already had “or something” covered by the existence of the blog, so I’m doing the other half of that statement.
There were fifteen essays/posts originally, but the incredibly smart Kate Eltham made the case for including a sixteenth after I wrote about Patreon and digital tools back in December.
Kate’s considerably smarter than me, given that she has four brains and was thinking about digital publishing long before I got my shit together, so I listened to her and included the post she suggested (albeit rewritten, given that Petreon moved to change their policy very quickly after I wrote my post).
But it did occur to me that there’s no reason I have to limit this at sixteen. I’ve been posting here for a few years now, and while I’ve got stats and my own gut telling me what people have found useful, there are also a whole bunch of you who have engaged with my writing over the last few years.
Here’s the current Table of Contents:
- You Don’t Want to Be Published
- The Nine Business Mantras of the Cranky Writer
- Focus on the Mountain, Not the Map
- Writing, Budgeting, and Shame
- Lets Be Clear: I Know Fuck-All About Writing
- How To Process Writing Advice, Part One
- How to Process Writing Advice, Part Two
- There Is Nothing Surprising About A Writer Getting Rejected (Even JK Rowling)
- 5 Reasons Rejection Letters Are Actually Awesome
- Yes, You Are Wasting Your Time As A Writer
- The First Rule of Write Club
- The Incredible Sucker-Punch of Success
- Networking Tips for Reclusive, Introverted Writers
- How to Get the Most Out of an SF Con as an (Introverted) Emerging Writer
- Al Snow’s Advice for SF Writers (Originally an Apex Magazine essay)
- Patreon, Tools, Tactics, and Strategy
So I’m turning this over to you, dear readers – what have you found useful on this site over the last decade? If you were compiling a best-of from my writings on the business and the craft of writing, what would you include? Any posts you’ve got linked for repeated reference that I could package a little more conveniently for you?
