Tools Archives

Lindsay Randall’s excellent article on this blog about GEO & SEO explains how websites help establish digital authority. But AI-assisted discovery doesn’t rely only on your website. Increasingly, recommendation systems pull signals from retailer metadata, reviews, author profiles, and consistent cross-platform information. The good news? Authors can improve discoverability without gaming th…

How people and artificial intelligence (AI) search the web continues to shift and evolve. Since web searches now weave in AI-driven answers created by large language models (LLMs), the content of your website should be optimized for both traditional search engine optimization (SEO) and the new frontier of building your digital authority—which, for the purpose of this article, I’ll call generati…

The most important thing we can do as authors is to write the next book. The second most important thing is to let readers know about it. One way to do that is through advertising, but it has become rather expensive in recent years. As costs increased, advertising became a larger line item on my P&L, prompting me to search for ways to promote my books without breaking the bank. So I doubled…

It’s (finally) the end of 2025, and here we stand, with another year of marketing our books behind us … and an empty calendar ahead, waiting to be filled. If you do your planning annually, December seems to be the logical time to plot your marketing course for the next year. While I’ve toyed with the notion of running my promo year from February to February, giving myself the month of January f…

Logitech’s ERGO K860 wireless ergonomic keyboard. Credit: Logitech Over the next few months, I will be transforming one of my bedrooms into a home office. My goals for this project include creating an inviting space and maximizing comfort. Authors spend numerous hours sitting at a desk staring at a computer monitor, wh…

Life as a published author, although immensely satisfying, can be fraught with day-to-day stressors that writers may not anticipate in their pre-published days. These stressors are the things I think of when new writers ask me what I wish I’d known 20 years ago. Let’s explore a handful of things that can influence success and emotional stability in an extremely competitive business. The lonelin…