Zebras are like horses. If you like horses, you'll like zebras. Comps are bullshit, one author carped at me. They're not easy to write, but it is easy to find authors who don't consider them useful. What's sometimes overlooked is how a comp makes a book easier to find. Here's a comp from a TikTok […]

The easiest publisher to protect your book is you Now that the actors have joined writers of TV and movies on strike, story invention is slowing to a crawl. Actors can still work on audiobooks, but just about everything else is shut down for the duration. The Emmys have been postponed, for heaven's sake. There […]

We writers do our work by assembling understanding. As it turns out, understanding is pretty important. Now that we have AI's promises everywhere, one tech journalist says that AI isn’t an intelligence engine — it’s an understanding engine. Lots of us try to understand people we know. We know published authors, some of us. The […]

“And we gave her a blog tour” could turn out to be an education for you, even though a publisher is paying for it. The tour is sometimes a murky journey. It’s very hard to show how any blog tour sells books directly off the content on the blog. They often have few visitors. Success […]