Most hybrids only put books on the field You may have written a good draft of your book, then wonder what's next. Everybody suggests editing as a next step. Your vision for the book's future could be more comprehensive. Yes, you probably want to write query letters, compare your book to other books to […]

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 […]

The easiest publisher to protect your book is you Now that the actors have joined writers of TV and movies on strike, story invention is slowing to a crawl. Actors can still work on audiobooks, but just about everything else is shut down for the duration. The Emmys have been postponed, for heaven's sake. There […]

We writers do our work by assembling understanding. As it turns out, understanding is pretty important. Now that we have AI's promises everywhere, one tech journalist says that AI isn’t an intelligence engine — it’s an understanding engine. Lots of us try to understand people we know. We know published authors, some of us. The […]

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.

If you've ever self-published a book, then you're likely to get a phone call from a publishing house. At least that's what the caller will tell you they're representing. The call might well come from Author Reputation Press, like the one I got this week. They'd heard that my 2012 novel Viral Times was for […]

We need to know if we'd like our books to become a part of a bigger world. Many like to call that publishing, but I consider that a business term. Getting a book into the world is all we can count upon. If you’re honest, you might find you’re not counting on it — and […]

If you like running a publishing business, then being a genre author could make some money. I like to tell authors who self publish it’s probably not going to deliver as much money as you want, for a while. You shorten the time to significant profits if you have money to invest, plus the nerve […]