Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Hi Margo, Congrats as well...I'd be curious as to how you marketed your writing endeavors with specific concentration on all things internet. Hope you get another 60,000 and beyond... Matthew Matthew- I know one of the things she talks about in other posts is that she does not do any marketing. She...

I was spoiled to the book the week it came out and normally that would drive me nuts, but in this case I'm grateful and my friend knew she needed to warn me before I broke down and bought it. It is very, very, very dark. I like dark stories, don't get me wrong. I especially like dark endings. What I...

And then I go and write in the personalization section of my third query: "I enjoying reading your blog" *Double facepalm* NO!!! This never, ever, ever fails to happen. Right fater the first time I posted my first 500 words for an agent critique thing I noticed I'd left out the word "...

While I ponder splitting the story up, I wonder if it is the publishing world and those who abide by centuries old writing concepts that holds back the writer who wants to do something out of the norm. There may be wisdom in a serial, but that is not what this particular author had in mind. Those t...

Congrats on the request!! That's awesome!

In my rush to post today I forgot to include my one sentence synopsis monster. It's not great. Once my beta readers tear through it I'm going to pick their brains for help smooshing it into not being so stretched out. When an unknown enemy outs sixteen year old hero Leah Kelley to a world that hates...

This is something I do not have. Trixie and I were chatting by email recently about this phenomenon of being completely brain dead when it comes to boiling down an entire story into one sentence. I'm very awful at it. Are any of you very good? It feels so impossible when you're staring at 100,000 wo...

There are still plenty of review bloggers out there, particularly in YA, Fantasy, and Romance. That being said, almost no one will review a self-published work. There are bloggers out there that specialize in self-pubbed and indie books, but the bigger review blogs won't touch them. There are a numb...

Keep it simple. Figure out what that ONE thing is that has an importance to the story, a feeling, a look, a sensation, an emotion, a color, a shape whatever it may be that the characters experience in this location and concentrate on building off that. Too many rules and locations and complicated de...

My first year self-publishing under my pen name is almost over. Last year: 400,000 words roughly 60,000 copies sold (I lost some data when my thumbdrive broke and don't have time to go through my records right now) ummm...more than twice the average family income for my area. Let's put it that way....

So we are slightly less than a month away from NaNo 2012. Who will be participating this year? Have you already started outlining or are you going dive in cold and go wild? I am going to be working on a short story project that I expect to be at least 50,000 words. What's interesting is that after w...

Margo wrote: Until the conversation this morning, I didn't know how common it is to SELL spots on bestseller lists.

That really doesn't surprise me. They sell top display spots in bookstores, why not their lists? (sort of defeats the purpose of calling it a bestseller list, of course.)

I agree, but what makes this particularly pathetic is that these are NOT her erotica titles. She writes those under a different name . These are her erotic romance (I know you know the difference even if B&N does not). I think the first issue is that the connection between the two names is well...

Congrats Quill! This is such wonderful news I'm glad we can be a tiny part of your big day!

In case anyone was wondering how this turned out... One of the two authors hit with this in September indicated her sales never recovered. The other received an apology from B&N, who tried to make it sound like an accident despite the fact they were caught doing this intentionally once before. ...