Honestly, I don't think I'm a good promoter. I spend almost zero time or effort asking new readers to sample or purchase my work. That's not the job of the author. We should write our best material and leave it up to readers to spread the word.
Markets work best when there's lots of information available and a historical track record to go on; they excel at predicting things like horse races, election outcomes, and box-office results. But they're bad at predicting things like who will be th...
Ultimately, the first, best step in getting your work noticed is to write good work. If people don't engage in your writing, no amount of serialization or free downloads is going to matter. You have to write something worth reading, and often it take...
Google is my best friend and my worst enemy. It's fabulous for research, but then it becomes addictive. I'll have a character eating an orange, and next thing I'm Googling types of oranges, I'm visiting chat rooms about oranges, I'm learning the hist...
I've had to work hard all my life, and I will never, ever ask a fan or reader to pay for something I've rushed. It's not fair to them, and I will never give them anything except my absolute best.
Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a...
The sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who might have worked, having been canonically established as being ineffective on wood, but nobody had ever figured out how to use the controls on the blasted thing.
This past year I grew up to know hunger, grief, darkness, fear. I began to understand how lonely you can feel even when all you want is to be alone.
Look, I'm the DD tonight, but I'm offering to be more than just your driver. I'll be your bodyguard, and your bartender, and most importantly, your friend. I promise to look out for you tonight, Wellsy.
I was a married woman! she said. Why does every generation believe it is the discoverer of pleasure? Your father was a spectacular lover. Even through the wall, I could hear the triumph in her voice.
Function? Why function? Who needs more functioning human beings? It's really quite astounding, if you ask me, the sheer quantity of normal in the world today. I think that's the real horror of modern life.
I have always kept a stack of library books next to my bed as a lifeline. If I ever woke in the middle of the night too scared to move or too sad to roll over, the books were my saviors.
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Policy makers and business leaders take note: money matters. But often the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table—so that people can focus on the work rather than on the cash.
Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks?
My happiness has to come from within myself or it is too fragile a thing to be of any use to me and too much of a burden to benefit any of my loved ones.
Pero, ¿por qué lloras? No llores, Catalina, ya prometo serte fiel con marido y sin marido, en las carcajadas y el miedo, y amarte y respetar tus preciosas nalgas todos los días de mi vida.
Louis-Cesare slowly pulled himself into a half-standing position against the side of the winery.'What? Did you think one little mage was going to do me in?' He swallowed hard. 'Hell, that was just a warm-up.
Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. The...
She was looking for a husband, partly because she was afraid no one might want her, partly because she couldn't decide what to do with herself until that problem was solved, partly because everyone else was looking for a husband.
Life, she realized, so often became a determined, relentless avoidance of pain-of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain had to be acknowledged and even touched so that one could move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed...
