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Welcome to Author, an on-line magazine for writers and readers, featuring interviews with best-selling and first-time authors, reviews, articles, and more.		Now podcasting on iTunes!		Sign up for Author's Mailing List Author will not share your email address. Coming Soon! (Click Image to Play Trailer)
	Lee Child Interview The author of Nothing to Lose		Daily Minute Lisa See on going to dark places in fiction.
	(Click image to watch interview.) For more author interviews, please visit our interviews section.


Dispatches From The Publishing Front Marketing and Publicity: What Can You Expect from Your Publishing House? by Erin Brown			Editor's Blog by Bill Kenower
Authors often ask me this question. Then they ask, “Wait, what exactly is the difference between the marketing and publicity departments?” Let’s start by answering that question. And for the sake of total honesty: half of the time, I don’t know myself. All I know is that the publicists dress better. I am completely joking (I am not at all). OK, so brass tacks: marketing encompasses paid media, advertising, mailings, websites, blogs, attending conferences, expensive in-store displays, flyers, high-end magnets (more on that later), pencils with the book title, and your ’88 Honda with the cover illustration painted on the hood. All of these things fall under marketing—whether the publishing house pays for them or you do. more...			Pablo Picasso is known to have said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” If I were going to pick nits with Picasso, I would ask, “But what exactly do you mean by ‘artist?’” All right, we all know what he meant by artist, more or less, but I’m a writer, not a painter or sculptor or mask maker, so I’m perhaps more finicky when it comes to words, and as far as I can tell, we all remain artists until the day we die.. more...


Book Reviews			Articles

Editor's Pick: Missy reviewed by Judy Bryant			SASE's Return: A Rejection Survival Toolkit by Brian Mercer

Dol McQueen, the heroine of Missy, is as flawed and irrepressible a young woman as you will find in the Wild West of the 1860’s. A flash-girl, or prostitute, she finds herself in possession of a fortune’s worth of stolen missy – liquid opium. “Gonged” on a combination of alcohol and missy herself a good deal of the time, she sets about trying to find a place to sell it before it is stolen from her or she is killed for it. Traveling with her east from California to “the States” is her friend and fellow flash-girl, Ness, who is determined to use her share of the fortune to leave the flash life. Riding along is Dol’s wayward mother whom Dol hopes to save from her downward spiral of a life. The difficulties that pursue them – including a band of feral children, an assortment of hostile Indians who steal their mules, and some renegade soldiers - only add to the heat and desperation that accompanies them. more...			Anyone who's queried an agent or an editor has likely experienced it. You're walking out to your mailbox, anticipating a package, a magazine, perhaps the occasional, cherished letter, and there it is: That familiar white rectangle; your self-addressed stamped envelope--your little carrier pigeon has come home. And while it can be the bearer of good news, dreams fulfilled, even continued hope if the agent/editor shows interest, what's most likely sitting in that harmless looking envelope is the dreaded rejection letter. It's usually a simple form letter: “Thanks, but it's not right for us,” but what it means, in essence, is "no." And at a core level it means something more visceral. When we send out a query letter, we're not just asking a question: "Can I send this manuscript to you? Will you publish this?" It is something entirely more profound. We are asking for our dreams to be fulfilled. Every query letter equals Hope. Despite what we know of the odds, there is nothing more optimistic than putting a query letter in the mail. more...