I just finished off two blog entries for my pseudonym, and yesterday wrote a guest blog entry for somebody else’s blog, and now, here I am, writing again for you. One of the questions authors keep asking themselves is, how much promotion do I *have* to do?  Do I have to blog/Facebook/tweet/Goodreads/ whatever-is-the-next-big-thing? When I tell [...]

My father used to tell me “It’s not what you know it’s who you know.”  He was a wise man able to offer a pithy remark for just about any circumstance and his words of wisdom stuck with me because they are true. On the morning of my thirty-second wedding anniversary (apropos of nothing except [...]

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion in writers’ circles about the practice of offering free digital books as promotion and the repercussions of such a marketing choice. I’ve been trying to make some sense of it myself, so let’s wade in and take a look at the issue together. There have always been [...]

The Novelists, Inc annual conference is coming to a close–alas!– with a great talk by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, a platform for creating and distributing e-books.  One of the difficulties of traditional publishing he pointed out is the limited distribution rights often controlled under various contracts, leading, as he points out, to frustrations like [...]