The price of freelance work goes up as you involve more people from your company in their work. Call it the “collaboration tax.” The best analogy I can give is this: I once hired a carpenter to rebuild the porch on my house. I wanted to see if I could get a better price than…
I’ve been writing professionally for 40 years. You can’t write the same way in your sixties as you did in your twenties. But you can take steps to maintain that the quality of what you write and the enjoyment you get from doing it. In this post, I’ll break down the elements of the writing…
When it’s time to promote your book, one strategy is obvious: write articles about it and post them online. But what should you write and where should you place it? Here’s a quick guide. Where to place articles The simplest location to post articles about your book is in places you control: your blog, your…
You wrote a book. It got published. Does that make you an author? Oh sure, technically, you can say you’re an author. But when you file your taxes, under occupation, do you write “Author?” I do. And when I meet somebody new and they ask my occupation, I say “author” then, too. To do that,…
This graphic sums up a popular meme. The supposed idea is that if you improve 1% every day, then you will be 37.7 times better by the end of the year. What a win! After all, that’s how compound growth works! This idea comes from the Japanese concept of kaizen, which is a management philosophy…
The marketing section of your book proposal is crucial to getting picked up by a mainstream publisher. If you’re part of a company you’ve lined up help from the company’s public relations and promotions department, you have a huge advantage. Here’s how to describe that asset in the proposal. Making the most of a corporate…
You did it, didn’t you. You wrote a nonfiction book (or most of one). Now you have 50,000, 70,000, maybe 100,000 words. And it’s a mess. You’re feeling desperate. You can’t start over — but how can you turn this mass of goop into something useful? Don’t despair. It’s not as bad as you think….
If you’re seeking people to provide quote endorsements for your book — blurbs — the biggest mistake you can make is treating them all alike. Each type of blurber requires a different approach. Before approaching these targets, you need to prepare a short description of the book as well as a PDF copy of the…
“I want to write a book,” you say. “That’s a huge undertaking,” your author friend responds. But how big is “huge?” Here’s a detailed way to think about the time it will take. How to use this planning tool To make your planning more effective, I have created a publicly available spreadsheet showing book tasks…