Book Publishing and Home Building
Putting out a book is like building a house—you need to start with good plans, and it takes a lot of work. And if you approach self-publishing with the amount of rigor it takes to build a house by focusing on the blueprints, hiring the right contractors, having...
New Barnes & Noble Publishing Services
File under production and distribution Barnes & Noble has announced an overhaul of their self-publishing platform. What does that mean for writers? How does their platform stack up against the other "Print On Demand" companies? If anyone is interested in pursuing...
Another Free Image Resource
Here’s an update to my 2015 post about free images.
Design Aesthetic in Relation to the Composition of your Book
I have composed a list of what I believe to be the most important intricate details when composing your book with a publisher.
A Facelift
How we went from all these words to what you see today (we asked a flash fictionist to do it). The old goodbookdevelopers.com was a handsome site (if I do say so myself)—but it was too dense. There were over 1200...
Submittable On Promotion
Michael FitzGerald, one of the founders of Submittable (which you're probably familiar with, if you've ever submitted your work for consideration at a magazine or publishing company), recently pointed me to an article he wrote about the challenges of, and solutions...
What the Font?
Did you ever see an awesome typeface and think, what is that, I want to use that? There's actually a great resource through MyFonts (which is like Amazon for fonts) called "What the Font." You just upload an image of the font and it analyzes its letterforms and gives...
Pro Tip: Don’t Call an Agent
Normally I use this blog to share relevant advice on writing and publishing and marketing and book sales, and today's no different, just more fun: Don't be like oddball genius Mark Baumer and call an agent and say anything like he does in this video:...
Some Thoughts on How to Submit Your Manuscript
The featured image for this post is a big pile of slush, which is often (and unfortunately) the way publishers refer to the manuscripts that they receive. Why? Because there are so many of them that they create big messy piles in the back room of their office, where...
The Mystery of Book Sales, Explained
At Electric Literature, which is a fantastic blog about books and publishing, editor Lincoln Michel has put together a long piece about book sales, how they work and how they are tracked. It's not so much about how to sell books (though along the way some practical...