Career Archives

Authors are always on the lookout for ways to garner more publicity for their books. One way that’s been around for quite a while is to enter a contest. But there are many contests out there, and some of them charge high fees to enter, or require that you mail printed books to judges at your cost. The first thing to consider is what you want from the contest or award. Is there a cash prize, whi…

Traditional publishers offer the whole gamut of getting a book to market. Certain titles can receive attention from everything from editorial crews to marketing departments to teams devoted to online and digital sales. There could even be the boost of imprint-wide campaigns as well as outreach to influencers. The author, however, drives few, if any, of these decisions. On the flip side, publish…

Tis the season . . . for planning! There’s very little that I love more than a shiny new year, all empty and ready to fill with wonderful plans. December is the perfect month to take some thoughtful time to identify our goals for the next 12 months and then ponder how to best reach them. That’s never truer than when it comes to selling our books—plotting our marketing for the next year is essen…

Many novelists are discovering the rewards of writing for games, whether game-ifying their own concepts or as staff or freelance writers for established gaming properties. In 2022, an estimated 3.2 billion people worldwide played games, and the average age of a gamer is 31. Led by video games and mobile gaming, the gaming industry aims for total earnings around $300 billion for this fiscal year…

Being a good listener. Keen curiosity. Flexibility. And checking your ego at the door. These are among the qualities that have best served the ghostwriters interviewed for this article. Ghostwriters create content for others, receiving no credit. Good ghosts are skilled writers who create memoirs, speeches, articles, corporate or family histories, blog posts, or fiction in the voice and vision …

Welcome to the month of December, the time of year when many authors are both looking back at what worked and what didn’t go so well over the past twelve months … while at the same time, we begin to plan in earnest for the next year of writing, releasing, and marketing. For those of us who attended the NINC conference, as well as perhaps a few other author education events that take place in th…