Category: News and Editorials
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New Twitter Chat for Indie Authors!
Dear Readers, If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I have been vocal about Amazon’s shady rule allowing customers to return read ebooks for full refunds. Indie authors on Twitter have been speaking out about the financial harm they’ve experienced because of the pernicious return policy. I ended up having some insightful conversations…
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From the Editor: Launching a Quarterly Newsletter!
Dear Readers, Thanks for your continued readership and support of Waking Writer! I truly love running this site and meeting so many awesome writers. To reward some of my readers, I’m creating a quarterly newsletter, called Berneta’s Reading Misfits, and giving the next three subscribers a free e-book copy of my latest science fiction fantasy…
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TikTok Readers Stealing from Authors, Amazon’s Shady E-Book Return Policy, and more…
Finally, a Novel That Gets the Internet Right (Wired) The Novelist takes place over a single morning, following an unnamed writer as he faffs around on social media while his girlfriend sleeps in their apartment; he occasionally fiddles with novels in progress in Google Docs. That’s it. The first 16 pages describe the protagonist looking at Twitter in…
Berneta L. Haynes
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In the News: Romance Novels, Thor, Queer Sci-Fi and more…
Imagining More: Women Writing Worlds in Crisis (Literary Hub) Like all speculative writers, I was also asking myself: “What if?” What if I toyed with reality? What if I altered our actual timeline, flooding the coastlines in 2017 and sending my characters into one of the submerged cities? What if I gave my characters children…
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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…
Berneta L. Haynes
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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,…
Berneta L. Haynes
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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…
Berneta L. Haynes
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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…
Berneta L. Haynes
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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.…