Marvel studios 101 book pdf download

Access equals privilege, and I understand that. Revising is my favorite part of the writing process, and clearly a big part of my personal life. In fact I wish I could go back and revise the past six years. Not for this one book deal. Otherwise, I reasoned, they would never have paid me such enormous sums. These publishers must be investing in me for the long run. I was one of their own.

It had happened twice in a row, these six-figures: Surely I had somehow become one of the chosen few. Surely there were writers who had gotten the memo about how advances worked, and the ins and outs of publishing. What came after was beside the point. Someone has to be on the bestseller list, win the National Book Award, have the big movie deal.

Did anyone working with me — agency, publishing team — tell me that a sumptuous advance was not something I should depend on or get used to? Did anyone in the publishing house take me under their wing and explain to me how the company made decisions about future book deals? Did the publisher tap a more seasoned author on their list to mentor me, as many major corporations encourage within their companies?

Did the MFA in writing program that I was part of, in any way, arm me with the knowledge to protect and advocate for myself in the publishing world? I donated large sums of money to organizations I cared about, and delighted in the feeling that I was making a real difference. Did I pay off my student loans? No, though I made a few large payments. Did I set money aside for retirement? Right now, I had to suck the marrow out of life — and invest heavily in trying to build my author brand.

And no one said I should be buying fancy cocktails. That was all my choice, a combination of an almost manic pursuit of joie de vivre Fitzgerald would understand! I figured they had cracked the code — swag, website — and I just needed to follow suit. Despite making some poor choices, I did try very hard to do right by this unexpected reversal of fortunes. The school where my husband taught had a financial planner that offered services to teachers, so we met with him and his partner, but it was obvious they only wanted to sell us life insurance.

Our tax guy told us what to write off, but we had no idea what we were doing. No writer I knew had someone they trusted for financial advice, and our unconventional earnings made getting clear advice very difficult. I lived in Brooklyn, a borough of one of the most expensive cities in the world. While I was buoyed by the very small, very occasional foreign book deal, this was it until there were more books in the pipeline.

What could I have done differently? I could have opted to move to a city that was less expensive, certainly. I could have chosen not to quit my day job, but it would have been tough. I had five books under contract at once, plus the enormous task of building and maintaining an author brand. I had no idea and was not told upon entering the program how nearly impossible it is to find work as faculty in any college or university, regardless of how qualified you are.

I could have and now wish more than anything that I had paid off my student loans. I could have put myself on a strict budget — one that assumed I was never going to get big payouts as a writer again. I could have saved a down payment for a house. And I could have put money aside each year for retirement. As the royalty statements came in, and a foreign book contract was dropped due to low sales, my worry began to grow.

One sent me on tour, which is about as luxe as it can get for an author, but very few people showed up at the events, and that was that. Fast-forward to my third book deal, for a contemporary novel. Bloom Discovery Award , garnered several starred reviews, had multiple books on important lists, and worked hard on author-branding and social media.

What other job would lower your salary after getting such great performance reviews? But no one tells you your numbers, so I really had no idea where I stood. Never mind that the book was critically praised and had made some of those nice lists. It is a business, after all. Which is fair… to a point. In reality, they were paying me less than half the salary of a local public-school teacher. I do more marketing than most marketing professionals, including loads of promotional work such as interviews, guest posts, and podcast appearances.

My publishers have never made so much as a bookmark for me though twice they agreed to design them if I paid for the printing. If I wanted to go to a book festival or important industry conference out of town, I had to pay, unless the festival organizer covered the costs, which they rarely do. For a small writer it makes little sense anymore. This is a bit frustrating — for both the reader and myself, but hey!

Thus for the audience, continuity is fragmented. And of course, that workaround is only useful as you are publishing the book. Carry On Book , when the whole book is available in Medium, the sequential releasing is no longer in effect. The other parts are hyperlinked to the earlier ones. The downside to that is that such unlisted stories are unavailable for generating income through the Members program of Medium.

Medium does provide a publication header on each story, that a reader can tap to get to the homepage of the publication, but I found it useful to add a standard footer image to each article as well, that provides the same function, as it is more useful — in my opinion — for the reader, after reading an article that they enjoyed, to be able to jump up to the homepage of the publication, rather than having to scroll up to the header.

I wanted something that was clearly setoff from my text in a different typeface, but not overshadowing it in any way either. I realized that what I wanted was a font size and style much like that of the attribution found underneath images on Medium. My solution was to do exactly that, only with a non-visible and diminutive image.

I found a 1-pixel transparent gif and I place that where I want the notification to appear. Navigation was another problem. Thus, your menu structure is normally restricted to just a top-level list of sections or groupings, each of which can only have a single story, or a list of stories without any deeper structure — you can only have a collection of stories that share a tag, a single story, or a page of featured stories.

I place it just above the start of the text, underneath the title. I did this because my book has a structural flow, and not just a collection of articles. Being able to move back-and-forth between sections makes sense for the kind of book I am publishing, where the reader may want to refer to another part of the text for needed information.

As an added bonus, the navigation bar I created adds a degree of empty space between the title and the body of text which in my opinion looks nicer. This is what the secondary navigation menu for my book looks like. Here is how I do this: I create a story without tags and no images that Joshua Weissman: An Unapologetic Cookbook serve as a table of contents for a subsection of the book.

There is nothing wrong with having a TOC discoverable in a search, and available for payment under the Medium Partner program. The final piece of the navigation puzzle is to use another hyperlinked attribution line as in the above examples to the next article in sequence within the book at the end of the article.

I do this before any footnotes, above the footer for the publication. Here is what it looks like: Continue on to What is Meditation? In the apps, tapping on any one of these hyperlinks results in a quick overwrite of the present page. Returning to the previous page, in effect, backtracking through your browsing history, is built-in to the Medium apps.

Simply tap on the left angle bracket in the top left corner of your display. Continuing to tap on this icon Joshua Weissman: An Unapologetic Cookbook continue to backtrack to previous pages.

In the browser, the effect of clicking on one of the hyperlinks is different — a new browser page for each story opens. You can set the browsers default behavior to opening a new tab, instead of a new window, but you still end up with a lot of tabs or windows, without the ability to retrace your progress through the book in an automated way.

Instead, you have to click on the tab or window for the previous story or menu. Finally, the medium apps allow readers to bookmark a story, and even archive it for Carry On Book use, both of which are useful in reading your publication as a book. Closing Thoughts So far the results of this have been beyond anything I thought would happen.

The publication has garnered 50 followers very quickly, and a significantly higher number of visitors each day. It is, in fact, now taking off, as more readers run across it.