Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Justine - You are right that self- and e-publishing are very different things, but there doesn't seem to be much awareness of this. Or at least none that I can detect on the traditional agent/publisher blogs. Maybe this will change as e-books become more prevalent. Or, as another (traditionally publ...

Thanks for the reply! Perhaps I'll do a round of queries with and without the e-pub credit and see what kind of response I get. Hopefully, as you say, the query itself will carry the day (or at least get a partial!).

Nathan - I've searched the blog and forums (thanks for the treasure trove of info!), and I haven't seen this answered, so I'm trying here. I recently signed a contract with an new e-publisher for my first book (contemporary teen romance). The e-publisher is not a self-publisher or a vanity press, ju...

Ink, you are so right, and in your wonderfully lyrical way. The danger is not that we don't know how to write well; the danger is thinking we write well enough. It was a revelation to me that my chapters came out better if I wrote them badly first (then revised). It's so counterintuitive, I had to d...

Ink, I think you and I must have similar brackets, because I'm dying with that Villanova loss. Mind you, I really know nothing about any of this. And yet, here I am checking my brackets as though I really knew something about basketball. It's that competitive urge I try to keep hidden and peeks out ...

I've done both ways - taking a week to write a chapter, and then another week and another...6 months later I have a 2nd draft novel. Then I wrote a novel in a month, and spent a week revising each chapter...6 most later I have a 2nd draft novel again. Either way, I still had to do major revisions on...

Somehow the 1921 version seems more surreal. I would never expect to hold Aristotle's Poetics in my hands, not one actually published in 4th BCE (natch). Sure, I could hold Shakespeare's original works, reprinted - but not the original . But I've browsed 100 year old books in the dusty stacks, never...

It's jarring and rather cool to download a 1921 book on writing to my nook. :)

This is a fascinating discussion. Voice is one of those slippery things that everyone seems to search after, some claim to find, and many of us are wondering what the heck it means! :) I once heard voice described as that essence in your writing that comes when you a free drafting - writing from the...

What do you get, Nathan, if you win? Besides supreme bragging rights? And it must break your heart that the Lakers aren't even in the bracket. As an ex-Bruin, I was bummed I couldn't at least have one sentimental favorite.

I think the right approach is to look at your market, not so much the number of agents (although, granted, that could be an indicator of the market). YA is big, MG is getting bigger. SF adult is dying on the vine, but I'm hopeful that MG SF is on the upswing (right Nathan??). I think writers (and ag...

Blogging = addictive.

My latest post: What Memories are on Your Kid's Bookshelf?

Thanks to Nathan for reminding us about the Forums!

Goosebumps scares me, but I'm going to have to check out Secrets of Droon. And they have zombies for MG, too? I should have known.

An awesome manga tutorial! My niece's birthday is coming up, and now that Twilight is so last year (according to her), maybe I'll surprise her with my impressive (thanks to you) manga knowledge! The closest I've come to any Japanese imports are Pokemon and Bakugan, and the associated books, TV shows...

Wow, Nick, thanks for the awesome list! My niece is huge into manga, and one of these days I'm going to have to dive in and figure out what that's all about. And it's interesting to see some "adult" books on your list. With our (recent) focus on YA, I think we forget that a lot of teens sk...