Andrew Jack Writing

Andrew Jack's Writing Blog

Do You Need An Agent in 2012?

This is becoming a tough question to answer. If Doctor Who showed up in the TARDIS and whisked you and I back even three years I’d have said yes, you absolutely need an agent if you want a career as a writer. These days there are definite ways to make it without one. Perhaps a [...]

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An Outsider’s Look At Publishing, As Of June 2011

While I would love to say I’m an insider, I’m very much on the outside of publishing looking in. If it was colder my nose would be frozen to the window.   There’s a lot going on in publishing right now, but that statement has been true for at least the last ten years. E-books [...]

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Surviving The Publishing Apocalypse

As an aspiring writer, everywhere you turn there’s someone else proclaiming that the sky is in fact falling, and you’d better self publish yourself some shelter before the old gods return and eat your sweet meats for you.   On the other side of the street, wearing nothing but a street sign and a filthy [...]

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Panic Stations

Panic stations, much like battle stations except instead of ending up locked and loaded and ready to fight you end up under your bed with a teddy bear and your undies on your head. That last one’s optional, but for my money you haven’t really freaked out until you’ve managed to screw up putting on [...]

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Five Traits Of Common Writing Scams

We’ve all heard of scams that target writers, and we’ve all thought at some point of another “I’m too smart to fall for that”. Sure, you probably are too smart for that, but there’s a fly in our ointment, a secret all beginning writers harbour that keeps the scammers in business: Desperation. We’re all desperate [...]

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Do Writers Need To Copyright Their Work?

I’m going to preface this post by saying I am not a lawyer and anything I tell you should be taken with a grain of salt. With that said, something that seems to come up constantly is the question of whether or not writers need to copyright their work before sending it in for review [...]

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The Odds (of getting published). Beat Them. Part One.

We’re told all the time what terrible odds we have of making it as writers.  We’re told agents reject 99.9% of everything they receive. We’re told only 5% of fiction authors make a decent living.* We’re told we’d be better off buying lottery tickets than trying to make it big in publishing. The numbers, such [...]

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Ten Reasons I Still Want An Agent in 2011

I’ve not made any secret of the fact that I want an agent.  Even though some people say that agents are a dying breed and self publishing is the way to go, I’m still going to be approaching agents (through carefully worded and edited query letters) to represent me and my writing. Here’s why: 1.  [...]

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