Lots of us have friends who are authors. Every author needs reviews, and you may be asked to write a review of a book you've read: a review that is fair and honest. You might have received the book for free in exchange for a review. But oh so many of us haven't written a […]
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 […]
If you're headed to the Texas Book Festival this weekend, congratulations. You'll be going to end of the book galaxy that's 180 degrees offset from the world of ebooks, Amazon and its ilk, and that remote on your table that delivers streaming versions of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Mockingjay. The BookFest is thick […]
This is why there are blogs for authors. Sometimes a careless comment from an entitled, successful vendor-author just shades good authors. Somebody's got to call BS. (See how I used the verb "shade" there to go all current on the language? It means to diss, rag on, or denigrate. But I'm all woke about English. […]
Prizes are important to sales of a book. The kudos make a book stand out and help convince readers to give it a shot. It seems like an easy observation, so why aren't more indie books submitted for meaningful prizes? Cost is always an issue, especially for the indie author. After doing your work getting […]
Readers tend to choose what they already know when reaching for the next book. That's what BookBub, one of the leading advertising hubs for books, said in a report from a recent newsletter. The ad site's studies of book buyers showed that readers most often got their next book because they liked the author. At […]
Independent authors can count on more resources than it seems, sometimes. The latest advice of the day is that your author website needs to be a sales portal. I don't mean a check-out cart. The landing page for your site should have links to your sales outlets, though. You don't have to take orders from […]
The #MeToo movement, also called a moment, has delivered many disturbing ones over the past months. Men have been forced to face their history with the women in their lives, and for some of them, it's a history of failures. There's not an ending coming for this movement anytime soon. It would seem the only […]