You shouldn't talk about yourself all the time - most of us aren't for sale. Our books are. Talk about them. It's not a question of whether or not you're fascinating on a personal level - it's that your trivia and trials might not have any connection to the tone, tenor and sense of your books.
Don't use your advance to buy an antique sports car, diamonds by the yard, or a bottle of wine from Thomas Jefferson's cellar instead of investing in your book.
Smart authors, faced with storms, chose to create umbrellas. That's why a diverse group of authors banded together to create The Fiction Writer's Co-op, which will work to find innovative ways to promote each other's work and cheer each other on in a very competitive field.
I always miss my mom. Mother's Day would be just one more day I'd feel her absence but for the relentless commercialization. Thanks to that, this day is even harder to deal with.
I've had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes.
Back in 1999 and 2000, a few of us... a very few of us... Douglas Clegg, Seth Godin and I... offered free electronic copies of our books in an effort to reach an audience we otherwise wouldn't have reached and to test out a new marketing concept for books. Despite the industry screaming we were crazy, it worked.
When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.
The biggest mistake is to assume that another writer's successful strategy will work for you, too. Publishers' marketers - and even freelance publicists who cost mega bucks - tend to do the same basic things for all books.
I think the most important thing we as writers can do is figure out how we define what success will mean to us and focus on that.
The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.
I know one writer who has been subscribing authors without their permission and sending out what she thinks are helpful advice sheets, but they come off as if she's a know-it-all. She thinks she's marketing herself and her work. All she's really doing is turning readers off.
I grew up in New York and have lived here all my life. I think it's the best city in the world and can write about it with gusto and fervor and passion.
Your agent should be invested in the success of your book past the contract stage. After all, if it sells well, she's going to be getting 15 percent of every dime you make. She can be your best advocate in fighting for your book - not just with editing and the cover, but with marketing and sales as well.
I know some authors who have gotten $25,000 advances and put it all into marketing, others who allocate $5,000 or $1,000.
We need to write books that publicists and marketers and booksellers and book club leaders and librarians and readers can get excited about. That have something about them that makes them stand out. That makes them shine.
They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.
As a self-published author, you have the choice. Embrace the power to create a book that is truly yours. Don't be a whiner or a copycat.
One Tweet can be heard 'round the world if the right people retweet it and the right people notice it on their feeds.
Find out if your radio interviewer has read your book, or you are going to have to do that part of the job on air. It's okay if they haven't, but it's always better to be prepared for what's coming.
When I was in advertising, I did a great deal of work on television commercials. A co-worker and I wrote a screenplay, which led to a few more screenplays, and some were optioned by production companies. I was advised to move to California but didn't want to make the move. I decided to use another form of storytelling, so I wrote a novel.
