I've not been here - apologies. It's not you, it's me. My small bint is unwell and life is chaos. I'm not even sending out invoices, so life will be poverty-hobbled as well as chaotic soon.
Here is some light relief because I'm not thinking about speaking publisher or any of that.
Ten techy, publishing-y things I have done in the last five years that I couldn't or wouldn't have done a decade ago:
1. Write a picture book text on my phone
2. Write part of a book on my phone and submit it to an editor as text messages from Eurostar
3. Check what time it is by typing 'what time is it' into Google [OK, that's more lazy than anything to do with publishing - that's an extra!]
4. Pitch to a publisher on twitter
5. Pitch to a publisher on Facebook
6. Argue about ebook and app rights
7. Write a proposal for a picture book app
8. Work on a book trailer for YouTube
9. Refuse to submit hard copy of a manuscript
10. Send a PDF along with the Word document of a manuscript to show which special characters and symbols are used where
11. [because 3 was a cheat] Read a book on my phone/iPad.
Which things do you do now that you didn't do a decade ago? Please tell me!
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Read The New York Review Of Books on my Kindle
ReplyDeleteSo sorry to hear about small bint and hope she gets better soon. I may have sent mss by email a decade ago, though I doubt it but I certainly would have had a hard copy in my possesion, nicely printed out. I've just sent in a picture book text I haven't even printed out....Not got an e reader though.
ReplyDeletePS...I also wouldn't have been reading my daily newspaper online but it's hard to get deliveries in this part of the world, right? I buy paper newspaper when I can but otherwise it's all online.
ReplyDeleteOh yes, Adele, I'd forgotten sending in books that have never been printed out! Thank you for that one. I was certainly sending MSS by email a decade ago, but they were still insisting on paper copies as well at that point.
ReplyDeleteBrian, I'm impressed that you red the New York Review of Books in any form.
A decade ago? That was the very start of my writing career. I did not have the internet at home so I didn't waste hours on Twitter. I didn't (obviously) keep a blog. I had a website courtesy of the British Fantasy Society, but someone else built it and I hardly ever saw it or updated it. I don't think I used email, though I may have just started to. I normally spoke to my editor on the phone or face to face, and posted my manuscripts as double-spaced wads of paper and/or files on floppy disks. (My computer could not cope with files much bigger than a chapter, and a picture would cause it to crash. I actually wrote my first novel on a typewriter!)
ReplyDeleteI knew no other professional writers and consequently had no idea how small my advance was or how amazingly well my first book was doing despite this. Neither was I so paranoid or depressed, which is of course the downside of knowing what everyone else is doing.
Strangely, I had a dream last night in which I visited a beautiful green valley where the people who lived there told me they didn't have internet access or a telephone, and I felt an immense calm descend over me... now I realise that was a decade ago!