Go Read Nick Mamatas Over on Booklife

[ann_leckie]

Behaving in a professional manner, for writers, is really quite easy. Professional behavior basically means writing publishable work, meeting deadlines, not plagiarizing, and not libeling anyone with one’s work. The problem with discussions of professional behavior is that this brief list really is pretty much it, and if one is not yet writing publishable work then none of the rest matters.

Click. Read the whole thing. If you find yourself saying, "But..." print it out, tape it to your wall, and read it every morning.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That was great! I'm all for getting people to give up on magical thinking regarding what they can and can't do with Twitter, Facebook, blogs, statements of opinion, and so on. But people *like* magical thinking. How comforting to think that walking widdershins round your laptop each morning might lead to something wonderful.

... At some point in the past year I realized that no magics were going to help me advance my publishing career (such as it is/will be). It's hard to do without magical aids, but freeing, too. I don't get any magical boosts, but I don't have any magical taboos, either.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Amen.

I'm tired of people using social media to market themselves - it doesn't make me want to buy their books - I know nothing *about* their books... many of them don't even have books published I *could* buy, and talking amusingly about their cats would make me much more willing to buy a book than talking about marketing ever will.

These days, I miss writing posts. Posts where people talk about a snag in the flow of words and how they resolved it, sometimes stumbling through it or throwing the question to their flist with 'how would you tackle this'. Instead I see post after post about 'how to market yourself' and writing tips from... people who haven't been writing very long, and who don't seem to be very serious about writing, at least they never talk about words and stories, only about marketing. And these people are offering ebooks and workshops and-

No. Tired of it. Seen far too many, don't care.

I also don't care for the CONSTANT VIGILANCE! that seems to be expected in the yet-to-be-published. It's costing me considerable effort to talk on my blog about the books I've written that weren't published (and are, for reasons of a) not there yet and b) niche interest, not likely to be publishable). What if an agent or editor (several of whom are on my flist) reads it and decides to pass on my next novel (which won't be ready for some time yet)?

_Maybe_ putting off an agent who is not interested in representing a writer with a large number of novels under the bed (or a number of self-published novels) seems the smaller problem compared to being afraid to talk to one's own friends on one's personal blog :-(