Things are changing on a steady course for the trade of selling books. One analyst says the most important part of publishing has become keeping authors happy. This book industry is all about the storytellers. The industry is not the companies which make stories available and try to lure readers toward them. Imagine the […]
In an author’s world, agents and self-publishing can lead to one another. Maybe you’re querying agents, once you’ve completed your fiction. You probably can skip to just completing the sample chapters if you’re querying nonfiction. (If you’re writing a memoir, see the advice for fiction.) After a lot of research in places like QueryTracker and […]
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 […]
Colleen Hoover is white-hot now. Of the ten bestselling novels of 2022, she wrote five. Her output is impressive, too. Over the last eight years, she's released twenty-six novels. She gets started because she knows how to use dialogue. How does she finish three books a year, from halfway through Obama to halfway through Biden? […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
You've finished your book — or at least made it as good as you can. Now you want it to get picked up at a publisher or earn a spot in an agent's pool. What's next? You want to get picked up by readers, agents, or editors. This is a good time to think about […]
There's a real mill operating out there for authors in a hurry. It's what I call the Self-Publishing Industrial Complex. Companies with names like The Write Life offer products and services to make publishing So Very Quick. You can create a book in 90 days, or get it published by the end of the year. […]
