Thursday, December 18, 2008

'Tis the Season for Sharing

In the spirit of the season (and, well, in the spirit of my blog year-round), I'd like to share a few cool sites I've stumbled across in the last few days. In fact, there are so many of them, I'm going to sprinkle them a little at a time over the next few days. Consider it my holiday gift to you :)

So all you authors out there, make sure you keep on coming back for more!

First off, Author Author is an online bookstore that not only stocks a variety of in-print hard-to-find books, but it also features an Author Purchase Program. Here's the skinny: you can order your author copies of your own book from them, at a discounted price. If you buy 50+, they'll ship free of charge. Now, you can order your author copies from your own publisher, of course. But you don't get royalties on those copies. If you order from Author Author, those copies count as external sales (which looks good with your publisher) PLUS you make royalties on them. They'll send you a free quote, and then you'll have to do the math - for me it works out that it's cheaper to order them through Author Author, so I'll do that in the future. Even if I broke even, though, I'd probably still do that, just because it will bump my sales numbers.

Second, I read an article titled "What Agents Hate" yesterday, and while it had your standard fare, it also included this gem" "I don't want to read about anyone sleeping, dreaming, waking up or staring at anything." LOL - my new editor at Samhain said basically the same thing last week!

Finally, here are some writing-prompt/creativity sites you might want to check out:

Book in a Week - think NaNo is challenging? How about writing a book in 7 days?
SmithMag - write your memoir in 6 words. Yes, really.
The Story Starter - has 340 million sentences, if you're stuck and don't know where to begin.
Writing Fix - one more site that creates writing prompts for you, on the spot.

OK, that's it for today! More fun sharing tomorrow...

Current Word Count for Entwined: 24,173

Yesterday's Fave Sentence: Or are they so entwined in the womb, one curled around the other, that a left foot of hers and a right foot of his make one complete set?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have a site that I'd like to recommend, too. It's not free like blogger, but you might check out illumitas.net for posting your work online. It does a pretty good job of making your writing presentable by breaking it up into easy to read pages.