I’m sure you’ve heard before that an author platform is mandatory to your publishing career. You’ve also heard that in building a platform you need to blog, social network, and use video sites. In other words, you have to do your own marketing and promotion. “Publishers want to know how many people you know,” says Jennifer Hill Robenalt, a 20-year communications […]
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Upmarket Fiction, Straddling Genre Lines
It’s important for fiction writers to be able to categorize their work, if for no other reason than to help agents, publishers, marketers, and retailers match it to what readers want. One of the first fiction category breakdowns is easy, since it’s determined by word count: Flash fiction, for instance, is usually 1500 words or less; short stories under 7,500; […]
Self-Doubt, Writer’s Block, and Guilt
Did you know that John Steinbeck kept a journal while writing East of Eden and that it is available in book form? For writers who struggle with such things as self-doubt, writer’s block, and guilt, John Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel is balm to a wound. He wrote it in the form of letters to his editor at Viking Press, […]
Struggling to Break Free
A subject that fuels my writing is the universal struggle for spiritual and emotional freedom. The struggle for freedom also inspires Zenos Frudakis’s work. In a statement about his bronze sculpture, “Freedom,” located at the GSK World Headquarters in Philadelphia, Zenos says: “I wanted to create a sculpture almost anyone, regardless of their background, could look at and instantly recognize that it is about […]
Self-Publishing, A Reality Check
Joe Konrath made $100,00 in three weeks selling his self-published books on Kindle. He explains this phenomenal achievement in an article called “Reality Check,” where one sentence stands out like the warning beacon on a highway patrol car. “In the long run, except in the case of bestsellers and huge advances, a writer WILL make more money self-publishing.” Reality check. Could this really […]
An Unpublished Author’s Website
Why do people visit an author’s website? Well, that’s a no-brainer. To read about the author’s published books, of course. And if the visitors are fans or from the media, they’ll also be interested in the author’s bio, her media information, and ways to contact her. So where does that leave an unpublished author like me? I mean, why should I even bother putting up a website and then […]
