Succeeding with Self-Published Memoir: Q&A with Ashleigh Renard

I first met author Ashleigh Renard (@ashleigh_renard) in early 2020, when we worked together on her query and synopsis for her memoir, Swing. By April, she had signed with a literary agent, but the submissions process stalled out. By January 2021, she was working on a plan to self-publish and launch her memoir during the summer. She has now done...

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Why and How I Got My Rights Back from HarperCollins

“lets start over” by lonely radio is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Today’s post is by author, journalist and entrepreneur Anna David (@annabdavid), founder of Launch Pad Publishing. When I sold my first book, Party Girl, to the ReganBooks division of HarperCollins in 2005, I thought I’d won the book lottery. Judith Regan was the...

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Want to Win NaNoWriMo? The Secret Is Preparation

Today’s post is by author, editor, and book coach Julie Artz (@julieartz), who’s currently running a free 12 Weeks to a NaNo Win email course. The first time I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I failed. The story idea I’d come up with on October 31 ran out of steam after about 20,000 words and so did I. So I came...

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Why Write This Book?

Photo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels Today’s post is excerpted from Blueprint for a Book: Build Your Novel From the Inside Out by Jennie Nash (@jennienash). Join her on Sept. 22 for the online class The Inside Outline. In 2013, Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats wrote down the rules for storytelling she learned while working at...

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Choosing a Publicist (Again): Assessing Your Changing Needs

Photo by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels Today’s post is by author Barbara Linn Probst. On Sept. 17, she’s teaching an online class in partnership with me, Hybrid Publishing 101. Should I hire publicist?How can I choose a good one?Is it worth it? These are questions that many new authors ask, regardless of their path to publication....

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How to Turn Trolling Into a Fine Art

Illustration by Javier Olivares Today’s post is excerpted from Catherine Baab-Muguira’s Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru, published by Running Press. From his earliest days on the Southern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe reviewed books the way Jack Torrance swung an axe. ...

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I Like Substack. But the PR Is Getting Ridiculous.

I subscribe to more than 50 Substacks. I even pay for a handful. I think it’s a great platform and I recommend it often to clients. That’s not so much because I love Substack the company, but because I believe in email. And Substack, if anything, makes it easy for non-tech people to harness the power of email, whether free or paid. I myself...

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That Second Book: To Write, or Not to Write?

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels Today’s post is by Rachel Michelberg, author of the memoir Crash. In my writing feedback group recently, I was complaining. Kvetching, my mother would say—the whiny, petulant kind of grumbling that’s really annoying for those subjected to it. I was stuck—for blog topic inspiration,...

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How to Make Six Figures Self-Publishing Children’s Books

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels Today’s post is by author and indie publisher Darcy Pattison (@FictionNotes). This post has been edited and adapted from a presentation delivered at the SCBWI’s Big Five-Oh! Virtual Conference. Let’s talk about making money as a self-publisher of children’s books. I bet you think that...

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The Art of Endlessly Revising a Memoir

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels Today’s post is by writer, editor and teacher Anne Liu Kellor (@anneliukellor), author of the new memoir Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging. Writing a memoir is a process of deciding what should go in and what you must leave out. You cannot possibly include everything....

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