You Don't Want to Be Published (and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing)

In these essays, Peter M. Ball-Aurealis award-winning author and founder of Brian Jar Press-explores the seemingly unintuitive lessons he's learned over twenty years of writing, educating other writers, and running writing conferences attended by hundreds of authors at every level of experience.

Drawn from some of his most popular blog posts, author presentations, and articles, You Don't Want To Be Published sets out to bring the kind of conversations established writers have in private to a more general audience. Here Ball explores the anxieties of building a writing career, the unexpected writing lesson drawn from other forms of narrative, the importance of treating your business like a business, and the subtle shifts in psychology and mindset that can help push your writing career to the next level.

Primarily written during the years Ball convened the popular GenreCon Writers Conference and managed the Australian Writers Marketplace, these essays also strive to find the questions new writers don't yet know they should be asking, while arguing the most common inquiry new writers pursue-how do I get published?-is actually the worst place to start.

Whether you're a new writer looking to sidestep the common problems, an established writer trying to figure out why your career feels like it's been derailed, or you're simply eager to figure out a new strategy that can push your career forward, You Don't Want to Be Published is full of blunt, irreverent, and unexpected advice that just might change the way you look at the writer's job forever.

Peter M. Ball is an author, publisher, and RPG gamer whose love of speculative fiction emerged after exposure to The Hobbit, Star Wars, David Lynch's Dune, and far too many games of Dungeons and Dragons before the age of 7. He's spent the bulk of his life working as a creative writing tutor, with brief stints as a performance poet, gaming convention organiser, online content developer, non-profit arts manager, and d20 RPG publisher. Peter's three biggest passions are fiction, gaming, and honing the way aspiring writers think about the business and craft of writing, which led to a five-year period working for Queensland Writers Centre as manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace and convenor of the GenreCon writing conference. He is now pursuing a PhD in Writing at the University of Queensland, exploring the poetics of series fiction and their response to emerging publishing technologies. He's the author of the Miriam Aster series and the Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thrillers, three short story collections, and more stories, articles, poems, and RPG material than he'd care to count. He's the brain-in-charge at Brain Jar Press, and resides in Brisbane, Australia, with his partner and a very affectionate cat.