Pitch Wars has ended after a ten-year run. This event had a profound impact on my writing career and the careers of countless others. Even though I haven’t been closely involved with Pitch Wars for a few years, I feel the bittersweet sadness of the loss. Pitch Wars is like that. It exerts a gravitational […]
Articles on Agents and Publishing
Welcome! Here you'll find articles on the traditional route of publishing: querying and landing a literary agent, revising, editing, going on submission, and getting published. These also cover the state of the publishing industry and my guesses about its future.
Finding the Good of 2021 and Big Plans for 2022
So, 2021. Quite a year, huh? It seems like most people I talk to have said good riddance. A lot of things did not go well. It was our first full year living in a pandemic world, and naturally, it sucked in numerous ways. Even so, looking back I can find some good things that […]
9 Things Every Debut Author Learns
Breaking in to traditional publishing is a coveted milestone for many aspiring authors. It seems like an impossible dream, especially when you’re languishing in the query trenches or enduring a long, slow death on submission. There are countless articles on how to survive those periods. The magical allure of a future debut keeps many authors […]
Querying Writers Should Know the Publishing Industry
It’s a well-known fact that while lots of people fancy the idea of becoming a published author, very few of them actually achieve that goal. The most common failure stage is almost certainly the first one: most people don’t actually write a book. That’s evident from my personal experience and also well-established from the statistics […]
State of the SF/F Market in 2019
Locus Magazine is the trade magazine for the science fiction & fantasy field. Each year, they conduct an in-depth reader survey that provides a glimpse of the evolving SF/F market. To their credit, the good people at Locus provide dozens of detailed tables tracking not only the respondents’ answers, but the results of previous years. […]
