Our Flash Fiction Contest is still happening. I made the announcement a Sticky Post.
To Recap the Prompt
You are on your last errand of the day. You should have been home, already. You are inside a store or business or bank or gas station.. You name the place. People in hazmat suits suddenly rush the place. They have secured all the exits. You are all being quarantined for an unknowable amount of time. Write a story about how you will be passing your time.
Have you ever felt pressured by friends, editors, publishers, or fans, to include Gratuitous Sex or Violence? Do you feel compelled to add colorful language?
What lines will we draw when it comes to pleasing our readers?
Does it bother you that some of your favorite authors toss in a gratuitous scene?
Does the topic sound interesting? Share this email with your writerly friends.
Flash Fiction Contest
We are going to attempt our first Flash Fiction No Prize Contest here at the Writer's Chatroom.
There is no prize, we are a non profit chatroom but if we gather enough submissions we may turn the work into an e-booklet and encourage you to download it
from our site. Free of Course.
We will begin collecting Submissions on March 9th.
The Deadline for the final submission is Wednesday, March 25th.
Posting should happen on Sunday, March 29th
For this bit of flash fiction you are free to write between 750 and 1500 words, not including the title.
In the Subject Line of the Email put the words “Quarantine Submission.”
In the body of the email ..
Your Name or Chat Room Name
The Title of Your Story
Then the Story
The story itself as formatted as you can get it, maybe a copy/paste from a word processor.
At the end of your submission put ### and on the next line the number of words, not including the title.
Over the next few weeks I will be working on getting the submissions up on the website.
The Contest Prompt...
You are just at your last errand of the day. You should have been home, already. You are inside a store or business or bank or gas station.. You name the
place. People in hazmat suits suddenly rush the place. They have secured all the exits. You are all being quarantined for an unknowable amount of time. Write a story about how you will be passing your time.
Let's Do a Few Writing Prompts
To make it easier I am going to list four of them here. You may work on them before chat or during chat.
My advice is to keep them short. (Less than 300 words or as short as, I don't know, a few lines. It is totally up to you.
Now, I am handing it over to you. Take one Prompt or all four Prompts, don't go over 300 words. Bring them to the chatroom. If you do not have time, come on to chat and I'll give us some time to write on the fly.
Visit all of the links in this article to find more prompts.
See you Wednesday 4, March at 8PM ET at the Writer's Chatroom.
Writing Prompts and Contests or Challenges
We talked a bit about Prompt Chats on Wednesday. I have also been thinking about having a sort of everybody votes and everybody contributes to a Flash Fiction Contest.
Because I have never really done this I thought I'd rely on you to help me through the steps of setting it up. If you don't know any more than I do, come anyway and learn with me.
Sunday's Chat is going to be a group effort.
7PM ET at the Writers Chatroom.
Aggregators, Retailers, Educators and Other Services for Today’s Self Publishing Authors
We are about to wrap up our Self-Publishing Topics and Sunday’s articles contain a lot of links. Possibly enough links to take you well into March. But I promise to wrap up this topic by Wednesday’s Chat on the 26th of February.
There are three main types of publishing companies in the self-publishing world, including aggregators, retailers, educators, and those that offer production services, which we’ll cover in the next section.
Types of Self-Publishing Companies
Publishing Company Type
Purpose
Use them if you…
Aggregator
Book distributor
Want hands-off book distribution
Retailer
Retail store that sells books
Need a platform to sell your book
Educator
Teach authors how to self-publish
Want to learn a proven process
Servicer
Provide author services
Need editing, cover design, printing, etc.
The following website is more up-to-date than the previous link. Because the Publishing World changes continuously, this article is a great read.
Self-publishing companies aren’t publishers. On the contrary, they’re the services that enable you to get your book out of a folder in your computer and distribute it to the world for people to read.
Book retailers, such as Amazon and B&N Press, are the online bookstores in which your book will be discoverable and sold. Each big book retailer generally provides a branded eBook publishing platform for you to individually upload your book.
Aggregators, such as Draft2Digital and Smashwords, allow you to distribute to a bunch of book retailers all at once. This will probably save you time and energy, though you’ll need to pay an extra fee for their services.
Print-on-demand distributors are full-suite self-publishing companies that include print-on-demand services on top of distribution options. Naturally, they’re particularly useful if you’re planning to distribute a printed book!
Before Chat go ahead and read these articles so you can help me talk my way through them.
Join us on Sunday at 7PM ET and we will talk about these different options available to today’s Self-Publisher.
Vanity Publishing, Self-Publishing What's the Story?
Self-Publishing was almost unheard of in the mid 1990s. Now, it is everywhere.
Readers tend to come in two groups. Those who cling to a physical book, complete with that old book smell and dog-eared pages. The second group is good to go
with an e-reader and all of an e-book’s convenience.
There are of course, outliers, opportunists who will read a cereal box if that is the only thing available.
Authors used to come in two camps.
Traditionally published and Vanity Published. The latter was an especially good idea if it was an Ancestry type book. Maybe a cook-book for gifting during a
holiday.
Then during the great transition to all things internet, self-published books became an option. Many people having been stung by the Vanity Press heyday or those
who had submitted a book to publishers time after time only to end up with enough Rejection Letters to paper their walls, saw the option of self-publishing as something acceptable.
We began the Month of February looking at Contracts, we tuned them inside out and attempted to de-mystify their contents. We learned a little about how to get into
a contract and how to get out of them.
For the rest of February I want us to look at Self-Publishing as a viable alternative to Traditional Publishing. With any kind of Writerly Topic, the more you
know, the better able to make decisions you will be.
This Sunday, 16 February, we are going to look at the difference between Self Publishing and Vanity Presses.
A vanity publishing company is a business that an author can pay to essentially be their book
publisher.
A self-publishing company is a business that gives authors the ability to publish their books themselves and pick and choose the needed services to
do so.
If you are seriously ready to try and break your contract with a traditional publisher, there are several things you have to consider before taking action. Keep in mind that publishers are in the business of making money from author’s works. This means they are in it to protect their own interests
and in most cases, consider the needs of their company before that of the author.
Many authors embark on this mission to break their contract in an effort to take more control and see more success through self-publishing or through new opportunities.
HERE’S WHAT WE COVER FOR HOW TO BREAK A PUBLISHING CONTRACT:
I hope you will come to Wednesday’s Chat and explore the reasons an author breaks a contract. There are many links included in this post. Take your time.
Disclaimer: We, at the Writers Chatroom, are Not lawyers. We are not giving legal advice. Please don’t let anything in this post or Wednesday’s Chat be any more than an idea.. You get it..
