Most WPP ebooks are currently 25% off at Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale! You can check out WPP’s books here and browse the entire sale here. The sale is live until July 31!
I won't publish the ask (they asked me not to), but I thought I'd still answer it publicly!
no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.
when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.
an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).
advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.
this isn't meant to discourage anyone from seeking out writing as a career! however, there is a reason that many authors have alternate jobs with writing on the side. or, you know, rich spouses.
this isn't me making a fuss about pirating (I've pirated way too many shows to run my mouth on that lmao), but there IS actually a financial incentive to having people buy your books!
buying books shows the publisher that they can make money off you, which means they're more likely to give you advances for future books. and advances are what authors live off (if they don't have a side job). that's why I always push pre-orders so hard! you have to be a racehorse worth betting on, or else they send you to the glue factory....
if I can offer one alternative to pirating: asking your library to stock the book also helps authors, and doesn't cost anything. the only downside is the patience required.
OOPS yes, @stjohnstarling makes a good point! everything I'm saying is from the perspective of traditional publishing, but it's a very different game if you're a self-published author
I will also add that this is why pre-orders can make a HUGE difference to authors - because if there's enough hype, publishers can pull more levers to build that momentum and reach more readers to help authors earn out their advance faster.
Trad publishing contracts person here to co-sign everything in this post. If you want to support an author you really like but are broke as hell, then you can buy their book when it's discounted, buy it used, borrow it from a friend, or use the library. The first step as an author is to get your book read, not to get it bought. The important thing for you as a reader is to spread the word about how good the book is so the publisher knows the audience is there even if sales aren't spectacular. Piracy of books, especially books from small/indie publishers, means the publisher will print fewer copies of their next book, and sometimes if it's an ongoing series the next books in the series will be canceled, either to be replaced by a book with a different premise or they'll cancel the contract for the next books entirely. The "hack" where you buy the ebook or audiobook and then return it for a credit also takes money directly out of the author's pocket since those payment/royalty systems are set up differently than if you were to buy a book from a bookstore and return it. In that situation the bookstore absorbs that loss, but returning the ebook means the money gets clawed back from the author's advance or royalties and they'll have to earn that back.
Pre-orders and Amazon/Goodreads reviews are used as a gauge by publishers to predict how many copies they are likely to sell and therefore how many copies they want to print. They want to sell most of what they print rather than print too many and end up with a bunch of copies no one wants that they'll have to pay to store or sell at a huge discount or recycle, which is what happens to unsold books. Most publishers have a limited amount of money and manpower to dedicate to any particular book, so if there's a book building up a lot of buzz, that'll give them reason to put their resources towards promoting that book to get a better return on their investment. If the publisher can't make money off a book or author they'll dump them.
Generally, every aspect of the publishing and book industries, including writers, agents, publishing employees, librarians, and booksellers are overworked and underpaid. Unless you're Stephen King or already famous, you don't make money off of books. We do it for sheer love of the game.
Use your library! Publishers have a whole department dedicated to selling their books to libraries and the author gets part of those sales. Increasing circulation of library resources means the libraries can make a better case to get more money from the government to buy more books that you want to read and they're a place to hang out for free. Libraries are the best gift humanity gave itself, use yours as often as possible.
lol this person needs to read Vulture's David Cronenberg interview from a few years ago (it's paywalled, but you can access it through archive.ph here)
Louder for the people in the back:
... you cannot tell what an artist is going to be like personally from being very familiar with their art.
(incidentally, this article also talks about his film Crimes of the Future, which was super weird and which I really loved)
WPP's seventh anthology will be titled Nature Wants You Dead, and the theme will be environmental whump! Thank you so much to @nature-wants-you-dead for lending me your blog name for the title of this anthology. (You can check out her environmental-whump filled book, Creatures From the Caldera, here!)
Environmental whump includes things such as extreme weather, natural disasters, hypo and hyperthermia, cave-ins, building collapses, animal attacks, etc. Your story doesn't necessarily have to be whumperless, but the environmental whump needs to be front and center.
Word Count: Up to 17,500 words
For this anthology, we are looking for stories in the following categories:
Micro-fiction: 250 words or less
Flash fiction: 251-1,000 words
Short Story: 1,001-7,499 words
Novelette: 7,500-17,500 words
Each author can submit one story per category. So for example, you can submit a short story and a micro fiction but you can’t submit two micro fictions.
Compensation: ebook contributor’s copy, one free paperback OR $10 USD, and discounts on additional paperbacks
50% of proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to charity.
Submissions Open: February 1, 2027
Submissions Close: March 7, 2027
Expected Publication Date: July 2027
The Nitty-Gritty (aka more details about submitting)
Simultaneous submissions: Allowed, but let us know immediately if your story is accepted somewhere else.
Multiple Submissions: One per category. So for example, you can submit a short story and a micro fiction but you can’t submit two micro fictions.
Reprints: Allowed, but please indicate where your story was originally published. This includes if your story was originally posted on AO3 or Tumblr!
Rights: Nonexclusive worldwide English language electronic and print rights. All copyright remains with the author. A simple contract will be provided.
Compensation: One ebook contributor’s copy, one free paperback OR $10 USD, and discounts on additional paperbacks
Submissions are open to residents of any country.
You must be 18 or older to submit.
No explicit torture of children under the age of 13. No sexual content of characters under the age of 18. No torture or sexual content involving non-sentient animals.
No fanfiction, for legal reasons. No stories generated partly or in whole by artificial intelligence.
Formatting: Please submit your story as a Microsoft word document with 12pt, Times New Roman font, double-spaced. Indicate scene breaks with ***
Edits: Stories will be lightly edited for spelling and grammar. The content of the story will not be changed, and all edits will be sent to you for approval.
*Submissions must be submitted via the form linked below. Emailed stories will be deleted unread.*
My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.
Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?
What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?
Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.
We're ecstatic to reveal the cover of Rattler's Moon: A Starslinger Tale by Kras Nebula (@scrawlingmouse)! Cover art by the lovely @thewisestdino
Alida Perez had been living on her own for so long she was convinced that nothing could shake her anymore. She’d spent the last few decades building her farm out of the dead of the Wastes, and she’d seen it all: bandits, dust storms, rich folks from the next town over trying to buy out her farm to gain access to the mysterious flowers growing there. It’s a hard battle to fight, though, when gumption goes up against a monstrous snake appearing out of nowhere, size fit to eat the moon. Alida, her farmhands, and the mysterious gunslinger who fell into her raptor pen have a long and winding fight on their hands— will they hold out? Or will this finally be the thing to drive Alida from her land?
This book is part of the Starslinger Tales series of standalone novellas, all of which are set in a post-apocalyptic weird west world and follow a wandering, immortal, nonbinary gunslinger named Xal.
Rattler's Moon will be released on July 21, 2026. We are running a preorder promotion over on our ko-fi! All paperback preorders will come with an exclusive map postcard of the Wastes, featuring original art by Nicole Alessi. We're also offering a bundle, where you can get both Rattler's Moon and Deepest Canyon in ebook or paperback. Preorder here!
P.S. If you've already preordered a paperback of Rattler's Moon over on BackerKit, never fear! Your book will come with the postcard.
Voting for the theme of our seventh anthology is now open! We've narrowed it down to the top 11 themes (we were going to do the top ten but there was a tie). Voting will be open until June 28, 2026.
Voting for the theme of our seventh anthology is now open! We've narrowed it down to the top 11 themes (we were going to do the top ten but there was a tie). Voting will be open until June 28, 2026.
Stuff your ereader with a collection of 10 queer whumpy books!
25% of profits from sale of this bundle will be donated to The Trevor Project, which provides crisis support to LGBTQ+ youth. The bundle starts at $17.45, which is a 50% discount from buying each ebook individually! So you get a great deal AND get to support a great cause.
You can grab this bundle over on our ko-fi until July 5, 2026.
Included ebooks:
Lux in Tenebris: Poena et Salus by Isaac Ryals (nonbinary rep)
Hunting Static by Jayde Layne (nonbinary and trans rep)
The Windows to a Shapeshifter's Soul by Booker G.A. Feniks (trans and nonbinary rep)
Creatures From the Caldera by A.E. Pillow (sapphic rep)
Deepest Canyon: A Starslinger Tale by Kras Nebula (nonbinary rep)
Showstopper by Rae Ellis (nonbinary rep)
Chipped by Lux Thorn (m/m rep)
Savage Sunset and Magnanimous Moonrise by Nox Spacey (sapphic, trans, and gay rep)
Cry of Fangs by Kailey Alessi (aroace and nonbinary rep)
Pleading His Belly on Zakon-4 by E.J. LeRoy (aroace rep)
Something nobody prepares you for is that the better you get at writing the harder it becomes. beginners write freely because they don't know enough to know what's wrong. then you learn. and suddenly you can see every single flaw in real time as you're making it and you have to write anyway while your own brain is in the corner going "that's a weak verb. that transition is lazy. you've used that word three times." getting good at this is mostly just getting better at ignoring yourself.
i wrote this post over on bluesky today and, after receiving a few of the predictable "but what if i Want to write badly" responses you get to any opinion that can be taken as prescriptivist writing advice, i thought i'd talk more about what i'm getting at.
basically, it's an issue of suspension of disbelief. there are a lot of things in fantasy and historical writing that we're willing to look past. dragons, potatoes, the divine right of kings. we are able to suspend our disbelief that a monarch could be anything but a despicable tyrant if the story we're being told is convincing enough, or plays to our comforting worldviews about nobility and Great Man theory. we can also suspend it if we straight up didn't know that europe didn't have potatoes pre-columbian exchange. basically--it means it doesn't bother you that these elements aren't perfectly realistic. fiction is not required to be realistic. clue's in the name.
but there are some things we just can't ignore. some things hit us as out of place for the setting we've been presented, or the world as we understand it. it pulls us out of the story by reminding us, in that moment, that we are reading a constructed narrative made of a series of choices by an author. and for whatever reason, they made a Wrong choice, like plucking the wrong guitar string.
bdsm safety protocols are the classic example, since a majority of people that encounter this sort of thing often enough to identify it online are reading fanfic and romance. things like a red light/green light system appearing in a chinese fantasy world where cars have not been invented, or cowboys intuiting the concept of a safeword while having spit-lubed anal sex in the desert. absurdisms that break suspension of disbelief, because who is teaching these cowboys the principles of consent. nobody.
now, we've beaten the dead horse of 'don't write like you're afraid of a callout post' a million times when it comes to including bdsm best practices in writing. you are allowed to write whatever you want forever, and if what you want to write is perfectly safe, negotiated sex between two adults who would have never received sexual education and probably thought a woman's uterus wandered in the body depending on the temperature, you are free to do that. i'll think your writing is bad, but you don't have to care what i think. you don't have to care about the people who'd get upset at cowboys doing unnegotiated "lasso tricks" either.
anyway, i'm getting off track. the actual point of the post above was that i see this same kind of thing with modern terminology for queer concepts in completely incongruous settings, and it pulls me out just as bad as any cowboy therapyspeak. i simply do not believe the local dirt farmer who binds his chest and changed his name from helen to troy would call himself "trans". i do not believe the wizard who has no time or interest in sex would call himself "asexual". and 1800s english dandies would not be calling themselves "gay" unless they were in a holiday mood.
that doesn't mean they couldn't understand those concepts, but it's not the language they would use to express them, because they would not have it. you see this with discussion of actual literal history--we technically cannot call historical figures "gay" or "transgender" with 100% confidence, even when their behavior lined up very closely with our modern idea of those concepts, because those people did not have our modern idea of those concepts. would they have identified that way, if a time traveler taught it to them? possibly! but we can't know that. they might like "transsexual" better, even if it's no longer in vogue.
and much like nobody is teaching cowboys the concept of aftercare, nobody is teaching our dirt farmer troy the word "trans", which is itself a shortening of several words that have come in and out of fashion as recently as the last century. troy would be calling himself something else, if he even has a word for what he is.
and that's where you, the author, have a Choice. there's plenty of reasons to default to the modern term--you're writing for a modern audience, you want to be clear about your representation, you're afraid of getting yelled at for getting something wrong--but i think it's the wrong move in any serious writing. because what you're losing by doing that is an opportunity to get creative and actually say something with the character, rather than tick a box.
troy might describe himself as a man trapped in a woman's body, because that is how he experiences it, and that experience informs his character. or he might think of himself as a man who just has breasts, because he's always been a man and has been treated as a man, and he's never had to examine it. or he might call himself a "rock", because he lives with dwarves and that's the dwarven word for masculine-presenting.
or he can just say he's "trans", and you don't explore what it means to the character in the world he lives in, while also implying somebody sat this boy down on a stump in the dirt fields and said the word "transgender" to him, and then said it often enough he shortened it to "trans". while living on his dirt farm. where he would never have seen a pineapple.
i am more interested in a troy who doesn't have a perfectly modern understanding of what he is and what he wants, because that's where a story lives. i don't read to see my understanding of things perfectly mirrored back to me, i read to experience something different. i want to read about the guy who calls himself a slur because it's the only language for himself he has, and what that means to him. i want to read about the guy who never calls himself a man, but understands implicitly that he's something different. i want to read about messy, complicated people who don't know shit from fuck. it'll absorb me a hell of a lot more.
anyway.
this is all opinion and i am just one guy so you're allowed to disagree with me. i just won't be interested in your work if you do. and that's only a loss if you make it one.
“You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Last Interview and Other Conversations
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