Wounds: we all get them. During the 1988 Jamboree encampment of 32,000 Boy Scouts, one troop (38 Scouts) led the entire Jamboree in cuts treated at the medical tent. The huge number of nicks from busy knives sounded negative until someone toured the camp and saw the unique artistic walking sticks each boy in that […]
marketing
Success Without Self-Promotion?
Not a week goes by that I don’t get an email asking this question: “I don’t have enough time and energy to do the self-promotion and platform building that is required now. It drains my creativity, sometimes stifling the muse altogether. Is there a way out of this?” Some authors and business leaders are now […]
Writing Life: the Reality
“Life is difficult,” wrote M. Scott Peck in his famous book The Road Less Traveled. “This … is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it… Once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.” I’d like to amend Peck’s quote to say that “the writing […]
Set Your OWN Course
Imagine for a moment that you are flying to an exotic island. An hour or so into the flight the pilot announces over the intercom, “I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is our radio is out and our navigational equipment is damaged. The good news is we have a […]
Your Best Promotional Tool
Every week I get questions like this: “I don’t have a book out yet [or my first book came out last year], but do you think I need to have a website, a blog, a newsletter, be on Facebook and LinkedIn and Goodreads, and also tweet on Twitter daily? Is all this self-promotion necessary?” I […]
Obnoxious Marketing
I sat down last night to finally go through a stack of magazines and other periodicals that had accumulated. I looked forward to flipping leisurely through the pages, stopping when a title caught my eye. So why was I fuming within thirty seconds? All that infernal marketing done with post card-type inserts stuck inside. I […]
Marketing Help is Here!
The Frugal Book Promoter: Second Edition: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher. I very rarely read an e-book and then buy the hard copy–but I did in this case. I have to mark it up, add my colored flags and post-its, and turn down page corners. Why? […]
Embracing Changes as a Writer
I admit it. I don’t enjoy changes outside my control. I can change, and I seem to be adapting to some kind of personal or professional change on a weekly basis. [I’m going to ask you for a favor at the end of this post concerning one such change.] As Jack Canfield says in The […]
For Your Holiday Weekend
When you take a break on this hot Fourth of July weekend, try some of these articles. They’ll keep you in a writing frame of mind! What If You Think You Might Be a Mediocre Fiction Writer? Every novelist hits the point, sooner or later, where they think they just might not actually have any talent. What do […]
Today's Slush Pile
The slush pile of old, where my first book was discovered, was an actual tall stack of unsolicited manuscripts. They were read by lower level publishing staff called “first readers.” We thought at the time that the slush pile was huge–hundreds of manuscripts piled up. Today slush piles have gone electronic–and backed-up inboxes may hold many, many […]