[hughhowey]

This was a lot of fun. I'd already done an interview for a newspaper, and I did a live show on radio, but this was somewhat different. Having the questions in-hand -- with the time to sit and compose the answers -- made the going harder than the impromptu stuff I'd done before.

What's interesting is that I've conducted dozens of these interviews from the other side, asking writers similar questions. Now I've had a chance to see what I was putting those poor folks through!

[KatG]

Hugh -- While we're happy to hear about your recent successes, links to reviews and interviews about your work are considered promotional and are not allowed in the forums, and so I have removed the link. If you want to talk more about what you are doing promotionally -- tips for others, etc., you can, however, do that in the Sticky: Self-Promotion thread, where authors talk about their marketing experiences and ask marketing questions.

Other authors who want to talk about their interview experiences can do so here in this thread, but we're not doing a bunch of links to interviews. Thanks and congrats, hugh, again.

[Laer Carroll]

I can understand the desire to keep this forum from being a lot of self-promotion links. Yet the way the forum is (deliberately?) set up readers can get to homepages of forum members. All they have to do is click on the member ID in the upper left-hand corner of a message and select "Visit (member)'s home page!"

Perhaps this part of the member info popup should be eliminated.

Even that doesn't make it sufficiently hard for readers to get to members' web pages. I Googled KMTOLAN and got 2840 links, the very first one to Kerry Tolan's web page. (If you Google me you will find more that three million links!)

Laer Carroll

[KatG]

No, Laer, we're not trying to make it hard for members to get to other members' web pages if they want to do so. What we're not allowing is soliciting by one member of other members to go to the member's web page for promotional things such as reading their writing, reading reviews and author interviews, advertisements selling things, etc. The forums are for discussion, not promotion. The majority of members do not want to be bothered by promotional requests, hence the rules which are clearly spelled out and which I'm sure you read when you agreed to them as a member of the forums. But if you've forgotten them, they're posted in the forums for anybody to look up.

If there's a discussion and a member says, here's information related to that topic on my website, then we usually allow the link, as long as it does not seem to be a promotional bid for the website (such as a member constantly putting the link to his website in all his posts.) Members are also allowed to list their websites on their member page, in a SFFWorld blog if they have one, and other member i.d., but are not allowed to do promotional signature links in their posts.

So you can go to anybody's website you like; we don't care. The prohibition is that you can't run around putting up links in posts and saying go check out my stuff! See the reviews of my stuff! Buy my stuff! That's not a discussion, it's an ad. We try to err on the side of leniency as much as possible, and we try to be consistent without being inflexible and we try to catch everything but sometimes we don't. Sometimes a member complains and alerts us.

If a member feels that his link was removed unfairly, he can complain -- to the moderator who removed the link and to the rest of the staff, and that complaint will be taken seriously, but if you broke the rules, a complaint that the rules don't apply to you will not be acceptable. We also understand that sometimes members, especially new members, don't remember or didn't really look at the rules for discussions and so we're just giving a warning and we accept that the member did not act deliberately. However, if the member keeps trying to promote things after having received a warning, then they are in danger of getting a Strike, etc.

So I hope the distinction is clear, but if it isn't to anyone, send me an Instant Message and we'll go over it.

[shevdon]

I too have just had my first interview published, not about my work, but about how I went about finding an agent and getting published.

In the circular way these things work, the interview was spawned from a discussion on sffworld as to whether one needed short story credits to get published (short answer, no), resulting in a blog post from me on the subject of agents and submissions. That caught the interest of Gary Dalkin, who turned the whole thing into an article for November's issue of Writing Magazine.

The interview was conducted in a series of emails, with Gary sending me questions and me writing replies. This isn't a bad way of doing things as it gives you the opportunity to think about what you want to say and how you want to say it. I had to resist the temptation to go into too much detail, but that's very like writing a novel, so it wasn't too hard.

Overall, Gary made the experience a pleasant one, and it's great seeing the article in print.

Anyone else want to share interview experiences? I'd be particularly interested if anyone has done radio.