Category: News and Editorials
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On Choosing to Indie Publish
By way of background… When I wrote my first novel, I was around eleven years old. I wrote it in a paper notebook that has been long lost in the nearly twenty years since then, but I remember the central plot involved bunnies and a princess. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, my […]
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4 Ways to Support Indie Authors!
Being a writer is not for the faint of heart. From actually writing a novel, short story collection, or book of poetry, and editing it to completion, to having the courage to share it with the world…it’s hard work! But the hardest part is marketing, getting your work in front of more readers. In fact, […]
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Book Bans, Draft2Digital Acquires Smashwords, and more news!
‘Dangerous and Cruel’: YA Authors Say Unprecedented Book Bans Hurt Kids Most (Rolling Stone) YA fantasy novelist Kalynn Bayron, who is Black and queer and who writes Black and queer characters, says the fervor over book banning worries her about her ability to reach readers — whether they relate to the characters or not. “It’s important for […]
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A Letter from the Editor: Looking Ahead at 2022
Dear Readers, I hope you are enjoying the content here at Waking Writer. Our readership has grown so much from when I started this site in 2016. Last year was a busy year here at Waking Writer as author interview requests poured in, and I even launched an 8-episode short story serial called Harmony Project. […]
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Self-publishing success stories and more!
LJ Ross: The self-published crime writer making a killing (BBC) Since 2015, Louise has written 18 books in the DCI Ryan series, four novels chronicling the exploits of forensic psychologist Dr Alexander Gregory, a short story anthology and the Cornish cove crime thriller. For the previous 10 years, she had been a financial services lawyer […]
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Serialized Fiction, Authors turning to Substack, Self-Publishing, and more…
Stephen Vizinczey, ‘In Praise of Older Women’ Author, Dies at 88 (NY Times) Stephen Vizinczey, whose novel “In Praise of Older Women,” about a man’s sexual education by paramours not in his age bracket, caused a stir in the mid-1960s and became a cultural reference point, died on Aug. 18 at his home in London. […]
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Kindle Vella, LGBTQ Publishing, Janelle Monae’s Debut Fiction…
An evening with Kindle Vella: First impressions of Amazon’s new attempt to reimagine reading (GeekWire) The serialized story is a mainstay of the literary world, a tried-and-true formula for creating a tantalizing tale, from opening hook to closing cliffhanger. But it’s the rare author who can keep readers engrossed in a narrative when the unparalleled […]
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Writers and Agents, Queer Sci-Fi, and more!
‘I’m Easily Bored by Books,’ Says Writer of 22 Novels (NY Times) “I like to pretend that I’m the most attention deficit disordered person I’m ever going to meet,” Prose said. “I’m very conscious of keeping the reader’s interest. And I’m easily bored — I’m easily bored by books, I hate to say. And so […]
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Importance of Indie Publishing, Alan Moore Releasing New Series, and more!
How to support indie authors and publishers (The Press-Enterprise) Readers who want to support wider success for authors can make a point of looking for and reading books from independent publishers. It’s hard to know at times whether a book’s publisher is a Big 5 house or a small publisher because the big guys have […]
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Afrofuturism, Black Historical Romance, and more…
Page refresh: how the internet is transforming the novel (The Guardian) Towards the end of 2020, a year spent supine on my sofa consuming endless internet like a force-fed goose, I managed to finish a beautifully written debut novel: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, which comes out next month. And yet despite the entrancing descriptions, I could […]
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