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A friend of mine, who adores my current WIP (Under the Darkened Moon) asked me, “So, when are you publishing?”

I don’t know, I said, probably once I find an agent and they find me a publisher.
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It was kind of exciting when I heard that Harper Voyager was opening itself up for direct submissions for its e-book publishing department.  Harper Voyager, the Sci-Fi & Fantasy imprint of HarperCollins, is looking for, according to its site, submissions to fill an apparently gaping void in publication schedules of ebooks.

“Currently, we are looking to acquire enough content to release a new Harper Voyager digital title each month,” the company announced.  How many months however is a mystery.  It could be a year, two years, or a couple of months.  No one knows how many books they are looking to acquire.  Even so, expect Harper Voyager to get flooded by authors with big dreams when they open up the submission process on October 1^st.  The submission period ends October 14^th.

However, my initial excitement has been kind of tempered since reading this.  What follows are my thoughts as I have worked through whether or not Under the Darkened Moon, if polished in time, might in fact get submitted. Read more…

People like to knock self-published authors, those brave souls that have decided to try something other than traditional publishing, with broad strokes that lump every self-published author into the category of garbage.  Yes, most of what is self-published is horrid trash.  Bad plots.  Poorly contrived characters.  Not to mention continuity errors, misspellings, and awkward sentences galore!  Sometimes self-published books overcome these problems, Fifity Shades of Grey for one (though don’t ask me how or why), but it is not common.  The crap that is self-published gives everything else a bad name.

But the sad truth is that, for all the bashing of self-published authors who rush their works onto Amazon.com without proper editing and proof reading, traditionally published books are rife with errors as well.  Yes, they are often farer and fewer between, but they are still quite common.  Most traditionally books I read have errors that I spot easily.  So no way a “professional” editor couldn’t.  Usually it’s just punctuation or a cumbersome sentence that takes three or four passes to understand.  These errors stare me in the face all the time, and I wonder how on God’s green Earth they made it past the supposed filters. Read more…