Tagged with publishing

This Is For Fighting, This Is For Fun

Ronald Stowers was nice enough to record my poem during the slam I was in this past Tuesday. You can watch “The Genealogy of Irvine Welsh” below.

I’ve been working on my longest project yet and I don’t really have a deadline for it, taking it 500 or so words at a time. The current word count for it is about 15,540. Unlike some of the fiction I’ve written, I’m not mining anything from my life and surrounding it with out there concepts. I’ll be glad when I get the first draft done and start combing through it.

The project I’m currently working on spun out of a flash piece called From Jesus Christ, Boy Detective: Everything Must Be Slashed and WordPlaySound was nice enough to pick up the audio version (while red lightblubs picked up the text version). You can listen to it here and then I recommend listening to the rest of this podcast.

My boss over at PANK, Roxane Gay, wrote this incredible article about running her micropress Tiny Hardcore. Read it. You’ll learn a thing or fifteen.

I won’t even talk about the bullshit shut out of Drive. I enjoyed the book tremendously and am actually not mad how the movie revised the story to a degree. The movie is gorgeous and one of the few movies I have bought on the day it comes out on DVD. (There Will Be Blood is the other).

Next week starts a deluge of shows. Here they are, linked for your pleasure.

January 31 - 15 Views of Orlando Release Party

February 10 – Culture & Cocktails

February 11 – Our Hearts Are Power Ballads (Workshop on writing love poems)

February 14 – There Will Be Words #10

(All but the February 10th show is free)

Finally, you’ve got until January 30 to vote for the best of the first year of There Will Be Words. You can vote here.

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Charity

The other day, I told my mother I got a piece of fiction accepted in a magazine.  When she asked if I was getting paid for it and I said no, she yelled at me for being a published author giving away work for free.  Fellow writers: are we giving away our work for free?

From a financial perspective, probably.  Most lit magazines are not momentarily paying markets.  Those that publish traditional paper magazines pay in copies, a rough retail value of $5-$10.  Those that are electric pay nothing but are very easy to access by all.  It’s easier to point people in the direction of your online publication through social networking sites like Twitter & Facebook rather than encourage people to pay $5-$10 for a magazine that contains one of your poems or stories.

From a reputation perspective, hardly.  Reputation is more important than money.  A good reputation leads you to amazing people and amazing opportunities that can lead to financial gain if you play your cards right.

What would it be like if all of us only submitted to paying markets?  What would the literary landscape look like from an editorial perspective and a content perspective?

Keep giving it away “for free”.  You’ll be surprised what you really earn in the long run.

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