Well it’s time for another Free Book Promotion. The last one pushed by mystery novel, Black Mountain Secrets, up the Amazon ranking ladder to number ten. But it was definitely a learning experience. One lesson I learned was you needed more than a general goal of being a successful writer. Giving your work away for [...]

Damien Walter, blogging for The Guardian, explains why piracy not only need not be a concern for independent authors, it may be just what they need.   Genre writers exist, by and large, in the publishing mid-list, where mediocre sales might seem most easily eroded by the spectre of illegitimate downloads. SF, fantasy and horror [...]

Photojournalists have an old saying: “f/8 and be there.” I have a very limited knowledge of photography, but as I understand it, this means that if you want to get a good photo, you set your f-stop (the aperture setting on your camera lens) to f/8 to make sure that most of what you’re shooting [...]

Here’s an opportunity to get a glimpse of a pro editor at work. This blog post from The New Yorker, in 2007, shows the development of Raymond Carver’s classic story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in the hands of his editor, Gordon Lish. The following document compares the original draft of [...]

  I recently read Guy Kawasaki’s book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How to Publish Your Book, and it was full of extremely useful, practical information. It was also funny, engaging, and inspiring. A couple of months ago, Kathy Caprino talked with Kawasaki for Forbes.com. Caprino writes: And if you’re considering self-publishing a book, make the first [...]

  A recent guest post, by Melissa Foster, on Jane Friedman’s blog offered some interesting insights on agent-assisted self-publishing and Amazon’s White Glove Program:   With independent author success on the rise, the role of agents has taken a precarious turn for the unknown. Many agents are seeing fewer sales and lower advances (which equates [...]

A nice piece in Wired about the changes in publishing, which starts with Hugh Howey’s story: While working in a bookstore in Boone, North Carolina, back in 2011, a 36-year-old college dropout named Hugh Howey started writing a series of sci-fi novellas called Wool. His stories were set in a postapocalyptic world where all human [...]

I have, apparently, 539 friends. Facebook tells me so. I have a fan page for my book, with over 1000 likes. My Twitter is a healthy 600 odd and I have over 50 mentions on Google for the title. But you see, I know that not everyone rushed over to Amazon and picked up their [...]

Someone recently asked me for a list of my favorite books on writing. I came up with a few and thought I’d share them here. This is a very idiosyncratic list—just a few I like and an attempt to tell you why I like them. These are not listed in any special order other than [...]

A pretty brutal assessment of Author Solutions at Let’s Get Digital: You see, Author Solutions’ modus operandi is pretty despicable, and they’ve been badgering, swindling and confusing writers out of money—and lots of it—for years. The deceit starts with the web of brands they’ve established. With so many imprints, Author Solutions has tricked authors into [...]