Our weekly trip around the field of YA with stops at the most helpful, interesting, or otherwise entertaining news.
Our weekly trip around the field of YA, with stops at the most helpful, interesting, or otherwise entertaining news.
Our weekly trip around the field of YA, with stops at the most helpful, interesting, or otherwise entertaining news.
Simple and Straightforward. If you want to be published, read this friggin flow chart. You’ll learn more from it than most people learn after years of cold calling publishers (don’t do that). The internet is your friend! Information abounds!
Also, Kate Hart is really awesome and makes the best (and most informative) infographics over on her blog. So be sure to head over there to read about YA book cover trends, sales trends and the like.
Guy, I’m not kidding. Read the flow chart.
so you want to know about publishing?
great! awesome! step into my parlor!
i love publishing! it’s awesome and fun (and by fun i mean fun if you enjoy stress and pressure and waking up with an aching jaw from grinding your teeth all night). i was lucky enough not to dive into publishing without any information, and i am a firm believer that preparation will save you about 75% of the angst. we are writers all and nothing will save you from the remaining 25. publishing, by its very nature, facilitates a lot of angst and frustration.
i am going to preface the informative part of this post with things that the reader must know: what i know and what i’ve learned is almost exclusively about kids publishing (kids being picture books, middle grade and young adult). i am told that genre publishing (sff, romance, erotica, etc) is not very different in terms of process, but i don’t know that for a fact. i WILL put in links that have resources to many of the things i don’t know about, because i want this post to be as inclusive as possible.
i know absolutely nothing about indie publishing. just thought i would put that out there. i know that it is hard, and that even those who are INCREDIBLY SUCCESSFUL, when give then choice go over to a publisher because being your own publisher is hard and takes up a lot of time, and let’s be real, most of us would rather be writing and not marketing.
also this post is about the business of publishing and not craft (i really really don’t think you want to take craft advice from me, haha). BUT it does assume that you have a polished draft (that means it has gone through revisions, and you have had betas/critique partners go over it and you have made it the best it could possibly be). everything outlined in this post should take place after you have produced a polished draft.
AND NOW ONTO THE STUFF
Once I figured out that a book didn’t automatically appear in the world after an author wrote it, and that things like “editors” and “imprints” and “The Big Six” existed, I wanted to work in publishing. And when I was 15 and read my first romance novel (Honor’s Splendor by Julie Garwood, in case…
So I may have mentioned a few times on my tumblr that I have some not-so-good news about the September 11 release of my Gothic novel Unspoken.
Here it is: Barnes & Noble stores near you might not have it. I figured you guys should know now, because I don’t want anyone to go in hoping it’ll be…
Check out YA Highway’s newest resource for writers at any stage of the publishing process: our Publishing Road Map. Created by wildly talented YA Highwayer Kate Hart, it’s a clickable “publishing map” that guides you to a huge database of links to blog posts and articles and other informative things. It’s an all-inclusive resource for writing and publishing related topics, with a distinctive YA Highway tone (see: the leviathan).
The Javits Center is like an airport with no scheduled departures and much more carpeting. It is hot and cold, somehow, at the same time, and it smells like the sad turkey wraps you’ll see hungry souls clutching as they crouch in the corners of the main convention floor eating hurriedly between…
Inside Random House: Bringing Our Authors’ Books to Life
I know a number of you guys are interested in the publishing industry, so I thought I’d share this video which does a great job of talking about the “behind the scenes” work that goes on when getting a book on the shelf. Also, check out the RH offices! Suuuuper pretty, right?
