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Most of the marketing for content is by word of mouth. You build an audience by writing good content that people want to read. Slowly, the natural audience for that content will find it and will sp...
I very much doubt that there was any such thing as a degree in journalism in George Orwell's time. There has been a huge proliferation of degrees over the last half century or so, responding, I gue...
Editors care if you have a good story to tell and can tell is reasonably well. No manuscript was ever or will ever be rejected on the basis of spaces around an ellipsis. Four spelling errors on the...
Let's start with two basic observations: All dialogue is artifice. People in Jane Austen's day did not speak like characters in a Jane Austen novel. Dialogue is not speech. Genuine transcribed sp...
I suspect not. Certainly I have never found any proportionality between a line of an outline and so many lines of finished text. A concept or event that you sum up in one line could take ten lines ...
I think you are looking in the wrong part of the bookstore. Certainly that is not true in general fiction (by far the largest part of the fiction marketplace). There are plenty of best selling auth...
IANAL, but when it comes to rights, it is generally the the right to make copies that is protected. If you own an existing copy of a book you can sell it just like you can sell a chair or a piano. ...
If a character knows the people in a crowded scene, they think of them by name, which indicates to the reader that they are in familiar surroundings. If they don't know the people in a scene, then ...
There are four basic reasons to self publish: The work is not good enough for a commercial publisher to accept. You are not willing to put in the work to get it professionally published. You are ...
Copyright is what it says it is, the right to make copies of a written work. Copyright covers a finished form of expression -- book, movie, etc. It does not cover an idea. There is no protection fo...
English grammar is anything but black and white. Everything is debatable, even the definition of "word". Punctuation is not grammar. This is a punctuation question, not a grammar question. Your pu...
In a nutshell, the answer is, humanity. A more human character is more memorable. The great authors are those who seem to have the greatest insight into what it means to be human. I don't think tha...
Since it is my answer you are referring to, I will take a stab at this. First, I would generally avoid saying that something is "bad" in writing. It is more useful to think in terms of everything...
How would this be different from having chapter one by about their birth, chapter two be about them at 10, and chapter 3 start the main adventure? This is a perfectly normal progression for many no...
Blog audiences (and for that matter audiences for most content) are primarily built word of mouth (or perhaps today I should say tweet of thumb). Yes, you have to seed the process by making the exi...
"Don't confuse the reader" is not a rule, but it is an action with consequences. You can decide to break a rule, but you cannot decide to exempt yourself from consequences. The consequence of confu...
Using footnotes to substantiate claims of fact by reference to published sources is a common and accepted practice. However, it is more common in academic work, or in popular works that pretend to ...
Translation is best done by humans. There is no software available to push a button and Make This Portuguese, and even if there is, word-for-word translation simply can't capture the nuance and mea...
I'm not a lawyer. The correct answer is you should pay for and talk to a lawyer experienced in intellectual property law (copyrights, patents, trademarks) before you attempt to publish. Pay for it,...
You are the author of the work. Authorship means you wrangled the words. It does not mean you originated the ideas. If you composed the words, selected the quotes, and put it all in order, you are ...
It would be hard for me to answer about popular books, but I can answer about literature I enjoy. In Hebrew and Russian (my mother tongues), as well as in English, I gravitate towards either the cl...
If you mean how much work you will have to do between when a contract is offered and when the book is published, the answer is that it will vary depending on how good the MS is and how well it fits...
At the heart of every novel (or almost every novel, at least) is someone who wants something and some form of opposition, internal or external, that stands in the way of their getting it. The novel...
The reasons may be economic. I'm speculating here, but the golden age of the short story was the golden age of the magazine. If a magazine wanted to publish fiction (and most of them did back befor...
No, that would not alienate readers. We've seen this kind of conworld all the way back to Gulliver's Travels, and in more modern form, something like Hogwart's, the TV series Magicians (where they...
