There's a lot of talk about blurbs in the author world. Even if you're traditionally published, you'll be asked to help out with something called endorsements. These are not blurbs. You create a blurb while you're making marketing copy. They sum up the goodness of the story. Endorsements are those powerful snippets of praise from […]

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 […]

You need to get people talking about your book for it to become a bestseller. There are steps for a bestseller. Advance reviews, ready to release on your Day One, help accomplish this. You can get reviews into the world before the book drops. Even if you're publishing yourself, this kind of coverage is within […]

It's time to have a genteel discussion about pricing, especially as established by small presses. Too few of them seem to recognize that buying a book is a price-sensitive transaction. I would not want to be the author trying to sell my book on my limited platform for 30 percent more than a bestseller's novel. […]

You worked hard through your revisions, your edits, your cover designs and interior page layout. You got proofing. The book's ready. Now your fine book deserves the work of discovery. These tasks will go beyond the release date of the book. They should be an every-month effort. • Send out a reminder to your network […]

Books are ideas, then manuscripts, then paperbacks. Knowing how to make a paperback is a certain way to deliver a book to the world. I formatted my debut book using InDesign and a lot of printer advice in 2012. It took many hours, and I'd already logged four years of publication layout work in the […]

Would you rather be promoting your book, instead of formatting it? Doing promotion is always the author's job, whether you have a book contract or you publish yourself. Here are your choices.