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How to Build an Audience for Your Novel
Our guest today is Fauzia Burke, the founder and president of FSB Associates, an online publicity and marketing firm specializing in creating awareness for books and authors. She’s the author of Online...
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Why Authors Should Use Instagram
Please welcome back guests Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke who have been best friends for over twenty-five years and survived high school and college together. Together they have written The Year We...
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Authors Out of Carolina (or Anywhere Else, for That Matter)
Photo by Nancy Anne L. Merolle via Flickr Creative Commons Please welcome Kim Wright as our guest today. Kim is the author of Last Ride to Graceland, The Canterbury Sisters, The Unexpected Waltz (all...
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Are Libraries the New Bookstores?
NYC Public Library photo by Andrew E. Larsen Please welcome return guest Martha Conway! Martha’s first novel was nominated for an Edgar Award, and her novel Thieving Forest won the North American Book...
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Why Book PR Can Have The Most Impact BEFORE You Land An Agent
The question of how important book promotion is to sales and an author’s career is the subject of continual, heated debate. On one hand, many agents these days urge their clients to hire an outside...
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Short Stories: The Novelist’s Workshop
photo by Flickr’s andrej “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” —Henry David Thoreau Laurie R. King once remarked that she tends not to write short stories...
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Free Books and What to Do With Them
image by Jerry Paffendorf The free book is a delightful and welcome creature. Even more delightful is the Advance Review Copy or ARC, also called a galley. These are, as the name suggests, advance...
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How to Panel like a Pro
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody. Being on a...
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Turning Social Media into the Grandest Writing Exercise Of All
By Bob ‘n’ Renee, Flickr CC Please welcome Maria Ribas as our guest today. Maria is a literary agent at Stonesong and a blogger at Cooks & Books. She helps turn great ideas into beautiful books,...
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Got Galleys? What They Are and Why You Need Them
At the risk of making everybody’s eyes glaze over, today I’d like to talk a bit about one of those hands-on, practical issues that’s key to any book’s life cycle but totally unsexy: Galleys. No, this...
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If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say
I’ve been an avid Amazon shopper since the mid-90s. It started with books, but as we moved into the 21st century it’s come to where I now buy everything from groceries to musical instruments from this...
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Learning to Outsource and Then Let Go
In a few weeks I’ll be leading a session with independent editor Nicola Kraus at Grub Street’s annual Muse and the Marketplace writers conference, on “Outsourcing for Writers.” When we first pitched...
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A Community of Debut Authors Unite to Help Each Other
by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Please welcome Kate Brandes as our guest today! An environmental scientist with over 20 years of experience, Kate is also a watercolor painter and a writer of...
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How to Prepare for a TED-style Author Talk in Less Than 10 days
Photo by Tormod Ulsberg, Flickr’s CC Please welcome Deanna Cabinian as our guest today. Deanna is a marketing director who lives in the Midwest, but dreams of living by the ocean. When she isn’t...
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An Arms Race of Monetized Distraction
Image – iStockphoto: Celafon Suiting Up for the Attention Economy From time to time–many journalists know this moment—it feels as if several stories or trends you’ve been covering (or trying to dodge)...
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The Secret Promo Power of Obscure Media Outlets
Deep down inside we writers know that those pie-in-the-sky dreams we all harbor of getting our books reviewed by the New York Times, or featured in Oprah Magazine or on NPR’s Fresh Air are, for the...
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Please Do Not Support My Patreon
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody. Have you...
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Your Book, the Movie: Interview With a Hollywood Producer
Seeing your book on the silver screen: it’s a universal dream, one that nearly every novelist I’ve worked with has confided that they harbor. Barely a day goes by when an author does not ask me...
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One Important Question You May Not Be Asking Your Publicist
One of the things I am most grateful for in my post-writing-life adventure of running a small but busy literary PR agency is the wonderfully talented team that makes it all possible. Their...
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Don’t Get Rolled by Bad Publicity
Image: Procter & Gamble, Business Wire, the 2017 Times Square holiday restrooms, a promotion for Charmin. The line too small to read in this image is: “The best seats on Broadway.” This “media...
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