business Archives | Page 2 of 7

If you’re a professional author, chances are you’ve had a love-hate relationship with Goodreads. Maybe it’s the clunky interface. Maybe it’s the Wild West of one-star ratings. Or maybe it’s just the nagging feeling that your beautifully crafted book deserves a little more …  sparkle. The good news? New kids on the block—The StoryGraph and Fable—are offering fresh alternatives that are built w…

You can never read the same story twice. Some of us complain about returning to earlier favorites only to find they’ve been rendered unreadable by visits from an imaginary being called “the Suck Fairy.” The Suck Fairy brings to our attention the unfortunate assumptions our favorite authors made as they created their fictional worlds: the racism implicit in Tarzan’s superiority over Black Africa…

Gather savvy authors together and guess what we’re going to chat about? Writing craft, publishing, our latest manuscript woes, marketing techniques, and, yes, book covers. We asked NINC members what you wonder about when it comes to cover design, and you answered. You wanted to know about book cover strategies, tactics, and the use of AI (artificial intelligence). Even if you didn’t submit a sp…

I was first introduced to Substack by Joanna Campbell Slan, who migrated her newsletter list there in December 2023. “Substack has brought me 207 new subscribers,” she said. “Since I don’t pay Substack, I count that as a huge win. Previously, I was paying around $120 a month, and the other email list servers sure didn’t recommend me to anyone.” Should you use Substack to deliver your newsletter…

I led my first writer/reader panel nearly 30 years ago. In many ways, Giving a Good Panel is even trickier than Giving a Good Session. The latter is solely dependent upon your skills and knowledge, but the former requires a degree of cooperation, a balancing of knowledge and time, and a seriously good moderator. Over the years, I’ve seen both brilliant and disastrous panels. This can be easily …

The author business books we immerse ourselves intend to be related to craft, processes (such as outlining for plotters), or productivity for authors. Those are fine and helpful, but I’ve learned valuable lessons from books that are not author or writing focused and believe it’s beneficial to pull ideas from outside our industry to help build a successful author career. The following books help…