You're finally ready to start pitching literary agents for your unpublished novel. Those first few pages have to sing if you're going to hook the agent. How do you know if you're ready? Founding Partner of and Literary Agent with Folio Literary Management Jeff Kleinman recently shared three key elements he looks for in the …
Tag: book publishing
Road to Publication: Committed Now Available for Pre-Order (at Discount!)
So it's starting to become real. Committed: A Memoir of the Artist's Road is now available for pre-order. Even better, my publisher is offering a 10% discount to Artist's Road readers; they just need to enter the promo code PREORDER2014 at checkout. You'll be shipped the book on the day of the "soft-launch" publication, October …
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Road to Publication: Marketing without Selling
It's about the author, not the book. That is one promotion strategy for a publisher, particularly in the memoir genre, the category for my forthcoming book Committed. So it is with a combination of admiration and curiosity (as to the possible results) that I find myself a guinea pig for my publisher. Black Rose has, …
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Road to Publication: Hurry Up and Wait
After weeks of frantic effort, I returned my revised manuscript for Committed: A Memoir of the Artist's Road to the publisher a day before its July 1st deadline. And now I wait. I'm learning that in publishing there are deadlines and there are dead times. I met the deadline of providing the publisher a revised …
Road to Publication: Killing Your Babies Part One
"Your reader will never miss what she doesn't know was once there." I frequently told this to reporters in my news-editing career when I would trim their stories for length. Often what I was cutting was their favorite part--their baby, if you will--but it didn't sufficiently inform the reader on the main point of the …
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The Artist’s Road Memoir will be Published this Fall
So it's official. I've signed with an enterprising independent publisher and my memoir--four years after I first started working on it--will be published this October. So many readers of The Artist's Road have traveled with me as I've chronicled this pursuit. I've shared my highs and my lows, and there were a fair number of …
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Creative Control in the Age of Kickstarter
How much creative control do we cede when other people's money is involved? Before I get to Kickstarter, let me throw in a historical anecdote. Galilee Galileo was not only the Father of Modern Science, he also earned a decent income from book sales. He was driven enough by profit maximization to eschew writing his …
Why I Left my Literary Agent
It was the hardest professional decision I ever made. Harder than leaving a stable think-tank job to join a start-up as its CEO. Harder than walking away from that successful start-up four years later to answer the call of an art-committed life. After three years of labor, with the finished memoir in hand, I chose …
What are the Top 50 Blogs for Authors?
The Artist's Road turns two years old next month, and I've received some pretty fishy emails during this run, such as people wanting to pay me to run their blog posts. I always decline; my readers aren't for sale. Yesterday I was told I was named a Top 50 Blog for Authors. I was immediately …
Selling Someone Out: The Ethics of Writing about Your SEAL Team Operation to Kill Bin Laden
September 4th isn't just the day after Labor Day in the U.S., it's also the new publication date for No Easy Day, an autobiographical account of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Nearly 600,000 copies of this book--allegedly written by an ex-Navy SEAL who participated in the raid of bin Laden's Pakistan compound a little …
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