Much like salaries, book advances are surrounded by mystery. Authors who get big advances like to brag — but how much can you actually expect? Here’s a frustrating answer: it depends. But in this post, I’ll at least give you some benchmarks for advances, based on my survey of nonfiction authors, and explain how you…
In my experience, there are two types of authors: those that start with planning, and those that start with writing. Call them planners and pantsers (seat-of-the-pants writers) if you want. Both ways work. But the people who start with writing suffer more. If you’re okay with suffering, go for it. But you should at least…
There are three basic ways to publish a book. You can pitch a traditional publisher, hire a hybrid publisher, or self-publish. If you want to make an impact, especially with a hardback book, self-publishing isn’t nearly as effective as traditional or hybrid publishing. But how do those two publishing models compare, based on authors’ actual…
In the next several weeks I’ll be sharing lots of data from my 242-person survey of business and nonfiction authors. (All the key data is also available in my new book, of course.) So I want to be clear about where that data came from. The reason for this post is to enable you to…
Over the next six weeks, I’ll be sharing data from the 2019-2022 survey I did of 242 nonfiction authors, 172 of which had completed publishing a book. I’ll share information about the struggles they had, the challenges they found most difficult, and the tools they used. But today I’m going to start at the very…