Writing and Publishing News

Well, it’s the last day of the year. Tomorrow begins a new year and a new decade. Are you satisfied with your writing/publishing/book promotion accomplishments to this point? Are you excited about your writing/publishing/book promotion goals for 2011? Are you aware of the steps you can take in order to change your bad “luck” in [...]

Do you feel as if you are up against a deadline? There’s just one more day of 2010 and it’s over. Do you have regrets? Unfinished business? Do you feel a need to hurry to complete or start something in order to meet a goal you set early in the year (or even several years [...]

Today, I want to discuss query letters and cover letters and explain the basic differences. Query Letter The query letter is your sales pitch. You send a query letter to a publisher first in order to inform him about your wonderful book and to pique his interest in seeing it. Here is where you introduce [...]

“What do you do as an editor?” This is a question I get fairly often. “What can you do for my manuscript?” My typical response is, whatever your manuscript needs. My main concern with your manuscript is readability, flow and consistency. I want to make sure it is organized logically and that we catch any [...]

Today is the first class of my free book proposal course. I’m excited. I always enjoy working with authors on their projects—which is why I do this for a living. Hopefully, there will be several success stories emerge from this course. And word will get out about the value of what I offer and bring [...]

If you’ve spent any time at all studying the world of book publishing, reading articles and books on authorship, visiting blogs like this one, etc., you know that publishing professionals highly recommend that you hire a good book editor for your book before publishing. I am one of those who advises authors to hire an [...]

Merry Christmas. I hope you all get exactly what you want most today. There’s only one way to make this happen, isn’t there? You must make it known what you want. I remember those years when I would only hint at what I wanted for Christmas. I spent months hoping that my husband would notice [...]

When is the last time you Googled yourself? Have you noticed something different? I run a search on my name every once in a while. I believe it is good to know who’s talking/writing about you, which links are most prominent in a search using your name, how you are being represented—as an author of [...]

We talk about the publishing industry being highly competitive. There are a couple of reasons why we use that term and they might not be what you think. Definitions of “competition” include “opposition,” “rivalry,” “contest,” “war.” And this isn’t exactly the tone I intend portraying to new authors. I don’t actually see authors fighting with [...]

Do you remember when writers were not well-respected because it was believed that no one could make a living as a writer? I was there—making a living with my writing at the time. Writers weren’t taken seriously because, after all, writing is an art—something that you do when inspiration strikes, not on demand. In those [...]