Pies made Karen's stories a household name I once heard that writing is like a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie. Long ago, Karen Stolz was a mentor to me in the earliest days of my fiction career. She evaluated my submission pieces for my unsuccessful application to Texas State’s MFA program, […]

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 […]

Beta reading is the turbo-charger for revising a book. Finding a beta reader or three and delivering a good beta is not simple, but there are practices and rules that make this important task easier to accomplish. During my Workshop's in-person era, writers took on beta duties for each other, twenty pages at a time […]

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. […]

 A dream delayed is better than a dream denied. It's a natural element of being human to look into the future, a skill that the community of HP 3000 computer owners polished over the first decade of the 21st century. Across the same period, working as an editor of a monthly newsletter, I did polishing […]

You may have returned from a writing conference this summer. There were three big ones in a row. Conferences in Austin, San Francisco, and New York all unfolded within 30 days of each other. Chalk up that close timing to the pandemic, which delayed San Francisco from its usual February weekend. A big prize from […]

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 […]

Once your book has arrived at proofreading, it’s time to be pitching it for discovery. You use a selling sheet, something that turns the crank on your pitches for promotion and review. Think of it as a kind of press release. It’s got a block for book description copy (your summary that you created) plus […]

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 […]

An author’s options for publishing include self-publishing, a choice that can represent differing things. For some, self-publishing is a reason to stop sooner. More devoted self-publishing authors recognize the choice to publish themselves as a career move. It’s okay to be either kind of self-publisher. You just don’t want to be the one who stands […]