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. […]

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.

What makes a publisher traditional varies a lot. It comes down to editing, design, promotion, and business. A publisher that doesn't edit a book has a strikingly different idea of what traditional means.

Even an author who's published multiple books feels the siren call of a big book. One day, they might think, I can get that 150,000-word epic published. I've cut a lot, they might say, already 20,000 words. I need to stick to my guns, submit something that big, and not get talked out of it. […]

Fly your flag high for your book The Bookends Literary Agency posts videos to lead authors through the submission process. The agents at Bookends suggest these to-do's for your query process. Use your book's title and a word count range Use the right agent's name; don't query "Dear Sir" or "To whom it may concern" […]

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

Today is National Donut Day. But is it really spelled and styled that way? The question offers a look at three facets of copyediting: style, house-style, and usage.

Writing stories in first person is an electric thrill for many authors. You have easy access to emotions and sensations, plus the mystery of solving the problems of the plot is intense, too. Sometimes it’s tempting to want to use multiple first person points of view. Consider why you need more than one.

Some authors like publishing. Others just like books. Some just like storytelling. The wide range of publishing paths is mapped in Jane Friedman’s annual report, Key Book Publishing Paths. The 2021 edition contains a new path: hybrid publishing. These are companies that package services authors need in one bundle. Friedman’s report only gets better with […]

Some easy writing advice to follow, offered all the time, is show instead of tell. But it takes careful work to preserve the showing while you remove filter words from your writing. These are words that make a story less vivid and make the writer more obvious. You don’t want the latter to happen. We […]