“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 […]

Here’s your rundown on the review hunt. I’m keen for these; I spent more than $1,400 on reviews for my memoir Stealing Home. Lots of authors take another view: why pay for a review? Jane Friedman, who’s an expert on publishing, thinks paid reviews don’t make much difference for many books. She considers them a […]

The challenge we all face when we approach the task of book discovery is making things unique and specific—at the same time that we keep the desires and problems universal. "A young, broke Irish woman narrates her relationship with a successful comedian in New York." That broke Irish woman plus a standup comedian (a situation […]

Marketing and PR is a dark art. Authors can behave badly when they expect such work as part of a contract. But behaving badly isn't very accurate. Authors behave blindly. Many expect publishing pros to just do their jobs, somewhere out of the author's sight, thank you. Take an interest in marketing with these tips

If you've ever self-published a book, then you're likely to get a phone call from a publishing house. At least that's what the caller will tell you they're representing. The call might well come from Author Reputation Press, like the one I got this week. They'd heard that my 2012 novel Viral Times was for […]

What are distribution and wholesaling anyway? If you believe you only need to write your book to publish it, you're going to be disappointed at the sales once it's in the world. D&W are different in a significant way. Distributors do more selling on your behalf. Wholesalers take orders. In the broadest sense, Amazon is […]

So you've finished your book! Good news, if you've already invested in editing and purchased a pro cover. Now is the time to shoulder the wheel of marketing and distribution. Self-publishing is not real publishing until it includes self book marketing. My concise list gives you tasks to accomplish. You need to write sales copy. […]

Every book needs a game plan to play its way into a publisher's lineup. Things like comparable books and the heartbeat promise of a story are the same for fiction and nonfiction. Unlike what you might have heard, every publisher makes an investment and wants to earn it back when they buy a book from […]

This week a mystery author asked me about my plans for publishing my forthcoming memoir, Stealing Home. My book is the story of a father and a son on a road trip to the perfect game. I choose to self-publish because midsize and larger publishers have a limited appetite for memoirs from writers without a […]

Everybody has a book in them, right? Way down on at the bottom of some of your hopes and dreams, maybe. You're doing something to make yours: writing, rewriting, working with a coach, meeting with other writers in a group. The work is bubbling up, maybe nearing the surface. When it's at the surface of […]