Getting published

Great post at Neil Gaiman's journal on getting an agent (via reddit). Covers much more ground than just agents. Read up. I liked these best:

There is no substitute for writing a book that people want to buy and read. If you can do that, you can get published. If you can't, no clever workaround will help, because we can't force people to buy and read books they don't like.

Be obviously and extraordinarily good.

The first point above is common sense, the most uncommon of all senses. Please don't flatter yourself by imagining that it may hurt your creativity.

On the second, a few years of practice should take you there (10 years of continuous practice, if you want to know precisely. If you haven't got there, you can always write in your blog about how you failed, and who knows, you may afterall make it... So cheer up).

More like this

The 2006 Locus Reader's Poll is now up, with a convenient on-line ballot for you to vote for your favorite books and stories of the year. For those not in the know, Locus is sort of the trade magazine of the science fiction field, publishing extensive reviews, and also all manner of publishing news…
Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly's follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer-- and they're both very good at what they do. You should buy their books, right now.…
Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important?…
I'm sitting in the Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution right now, at the Nature Network's Science Blogging 2008 conference. There are about 100 people in the room, 90% of whom I don't recognize at all. 90% of the people I do recognize are people I've met for the first time somewhere in the…