Nathan Bransford - The Forums

A big study done by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet has found that writers tend to be crazier than other creatives. The study followed almost 1.2 million people to determine correlation between creative occupations (both artistic and scientific/technical creativity), with a special emp...

The copyright-infringement suit that Authors Guild brought against HathiTrust has been thrown out with a summary judgment. There's more to it than just this, but a key part is that Federal District Judge Harold Baer, Jr., held that associations have no standing to bring copyright infringement suits ...

Penguin has filed suit against 12 authors demanding return of royalty advances, plus interest. The original new report was from The Smoking Gun . Edward Champion reported this list of the individuals being sued and the amounts: Ana Marie Cox: $81K + $50K interest Bob Morris: $20K + $4K interest Caro...

Here's a long answer to the question (it depends on a bunch of things): http://www.annemini.com/?p=13892

Each article is only one page long, and is self-contained on the linked web page.

Here's an article from the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis back in 1974: " The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block” ". A more extensive experiment was performed in 2007 and reported in the same journal: " A Multisite Cross-Cultural Replication of Upper's (197...

The modern, market theory would be that sales equate quality; readers wont continually buy dreck given far wider choice. The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference. I personally haven't read it so I can't vouch for the poor writing, but I've heard that a ce...

Any suggestions regarding preventing the password stealing? You can't do anything about passwords being stolen. That's up to the web site operators. And 100% security is impossible. Provided that the web site has encrypted the passwords, you can make your password harder to decrypt. In recent years...

Speaking as a reader, not an agent or publisher, I think the main question would be whether your name appears to be pronounceable by your target audience. Secondarily, if you're prepared to accept mispronunciations — in particular, most Americans are mono-lingual and aren't too good at pronouncing n...

Author Brian Keene is charging that Amazon is publishing some of his books — Dead Sea , Urban Gothic , Castaways , Darkness on the Edge of Town , and others — in Kindle format without any right to do so. Publishing rights for those titles, in both paperback and e-book formats, have been assigned to ...

So smut includes erotic romance with no naughty words in the title and a cover tamer than most romances? Interesting. It's probably a matter of expedience. They probably blocked "erotica." I wouldn't expect B&N to have someone who sits around making judgment calls on what's an accepta...

it's B&N manipulating their bestseller list. I'm a regular participant on the B&N forums, and I can guess that this is due to the regular pressure on those forums for B&N to "stop peddling smut to our kids." Many of the NOOK reader models bring up book suggestions on the home ...

The incomparable (is that a synonym for outlandish?) Colson Whitehead offers the author a number of options for What to Write Next.

In The Guardian , " Social media and online comments 'causing writers to self-censor' ". Patrick Ness: "Instead of bringing us all together in an omnipresent, multi-faceted discussion, the internet instead has made sectarianism an almost default position." China Miéville: "T...

The annual Bulwer-Lytton awards for (intentionally) bad writing have been announced: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2012win.html Everyone has their own favorite(s). My favorite is: The brazen walls of the ancient city of Khoresand, situated where the mighty desert of Sind meets the endless Hyrkanean s...