This guest post is by Ken Thurber, author of Big Wave Surfing   Your book is not just a book. It is a product. You have just finished your prized tome and you have managed to get it into “print.” Now what? Where you go from here is based upon your perception of your book. [...]

Question: How often have you scanned a back cover, specifically to check out the author’s credentials? If your answer is “all the time,” you’re among the majority. If you don’t think you do, chances are that you’ve measured a book’s value against other factors, such as price, return on investment, and good ole fashion worthiness–all [...]

You’ve just reread your final draft for the 6,983rd time. Your friends, spouse, co-workers, and mailman all know you’re within an arm’s reach of being done. The next and final step is having your manuscript edited…and by a professional! You’ve carefully screened and chosen someone with editing chops. You’re feeling pretty good about entrusting your [...]

Once upon a time, Western society as a whole was flushed with anticipation for the END OF THE WORLD. Some thought the rapture was coming, others believed it would be a complete blackout caused by a virtual virus that would completely wipe out our digital structures. I’m not talking about 2012–I’m talking about Y2K. Oh [...]

The great thing about Twitter is that it doesn’t take a lot of time to do it right. The problem with Twitter is that its constant flow needs to be monitored daily in order to gain the rewards. You can have a really great Twitter day on Monday, but if you ignore it for the [...]

You’ve gone through the painful and enlightening process of editing, proofreading, and other general wordsmithing (new word!). You’ve had your designer create the perfect cover for the perfect book. You’ve had your book printed and digitalized in Mobi and Epub files, and it’s finally available everywhere in all formats. In a nutshell, you’re finally there–you’re [...]

In looking at some of the most popular books in the past few years, most have clearly not been NGANs (“next great American novels”). In fact, some of them were so far  off the “literary” mark that they barely had any discernible qualities that made them obviously worthwhile (let’s just say that a particular example [...]

This guest post is by Clare Wilson, author of The Long Staff   As a small-fry author with an independent publisher, you need to be creative when it comes to book promotion. Let’s face it; there are plenty of tiny fish in this very over-populated pond!   While you can’t be in with the establishment [...]

Yes, this blog post is being written for purely selfish reasons. And yes, we sometimes need a get-quick solution for producing a blog post fast. For the record, this blog was created in ten minutes to prove that this can be done. So, when all else fails and you need a blog fast, here are [...]

In the book world, reviews and endorsements are extremely important… Both official reviews and unofficial consumer reviews are vital to a book’s launch into the market. Readers are becoming more and more dependent on reviews of all kinds when choosing which books to buy, and bookstore buyers tend to look at a book without reviews [...]