Congratulations, you’ve published a book. Are you ready to sell an experience? Publishing houses have limited time and resources so authors, self-published or otherwise, wear many hats. In part or fully, the job of promoting and marketing a book…
With today’s intense competition for acquiring visibility in the public arena, it’s vital to make your interaction with the media an integral element of your authoring strategies… Consider the demographics of media outlets. Most are designed…
Authors typically find themselves in a funny spot – you write in relative isolation on a book for years, and then once it is getting ready to publish you are expected to promote it to everyone you meet. That promotion part can be tricky, and it is…
Although I am grateful that SFA Press, an independent university press, has published my debut novel, “The Heart to Kill”, and continues to distribute it, I quickly discovered that if I want to sell the book, I’m the one who has to get…
Today marks the start of NaNoWriMo, a month in which aspiring and established writers everywhere embark on a daily writing marathon to complete the first draft of a novel — 50,000 words — in just 30 days. My oldest daughter is…
Analogy warning: I am going to take this analogy way too far, but it is completely relevant, I promise! We recently built a tree house for the kidlets. That is a loose term because it is not actually in a tree; rather it is set among the trees. As…
I was honored to take part (okay I was the head cat-wrangler) for an event in Chicago this weekend that can serve as a template of sorts for other Hometown Reads cities. We had some fun, learned a lot, and made some mistakes. I post this only so…
Your new novel has arrived, those pesky typos are at a minimum, you are thrilled to thumb through the interior and feel a glow of satisfaction. Friends think it’s great; the cover is catchy. Now you have to reach out to others so someone buys your…
Creating a Live Book Event Together. Authors sometimes position the writing of a book as a big, painful deal. You alone wore the heavy cloak of creativity as you crafted your manuscript word by word, dragooning the…
Whenever I get the clever idea to try something new I ask—with a nonchalant shrug—“How hard can it be?” If you ever hear me say this, please smack me, because it is always harder than I thought. Having once taken a video production class, I…