What does a recipe for white cake have to do with selling a literary novel?
A lot, as it turns out, in the case of The School of Essential Ingredients, the acclaimed debut novel by Erica Bauermeister, described in reviews as a seductively delicious tale of love, loss, and redemption.
Identifying potential readers
“I decided to target foodies [...]

Picture this: An irate local author can’t find his latest title on the neighborhood bookstore shelf. So he slips into the storeroom, grabs his books from the back stock and heads straight for the store’s most exclusive patch of real estate – the front table – where he elbows aside the bestsellers and [...]

Readers are fans. They love author appearances!
What’s more, a successful author reading can spark sales and help build a following for a new book.
Publishers know this, but unfortunately, the days of big budgets for glamorous book tours and star-spangled author events are now largely behind us.
Author readings still a hot ticket
Established and emerging authors, nevertheless, [...]

A shopper who watches a video about a product is more likely to buy it.
That’s why publishers and video producers are rushing to collaborate on low-cost video book trailers.  Publicists and marketing professionals believe these videos are the best new way to create the kind of buzz that attracts readers and sales.
In the past few [...]

Book publishers know that web promotion is the best way to reach readers directly, so for help they turn to experts like Fauzia Burke.
“It’s our job to find an author’s audience online,” says Burke, founder and president of FSB Associates, one of the first firms to specialize in internet book publicity and marketing.  “Our strategy [...]

“It’s a contact sport.”
That’s how one author summed up his experience in a refreshingly frank and illuminating first-person account of what it’s really like to publish your own novel.
A minefield with roads forked in every direction
David Carnoy started out with a literary agent and high hopes for placing his novel Knife Music with a traditional [...]

This hard-working writer has been on the road selling his novel The Art of Racing in the Rain since before it was a Starbucks pick for Spring 2008.
I caught up with Garth during a recent stop in here in Berkeley for the 75th public reading of his New York Times best-seller. Earlier that day, [...]

The secret to getting more up-front money is persuading your publisher to project higher book sales. Every publisher I know has an internal “advance offer calculation” process, based on a formula for estimating first year sales, revenues, and royalties.
The formula for book advances
It’s not a shot-in-the-dark but a scientific data dump that projects a precise [...]

By Contributor Lisa Haneberg ~ I wobbled into the Kennewick, Washington, Barnes & Noble after a 300 mile motorcycle ride from Boise, Idaho. This was to be my 30th and last signing on a 9,400 mile solo motorcycle cross-country publicity tour for my book Two Weeks to a Breakthrough, and most of the earlier [...]

Business is booming at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. Eleven new major book deals nailed down and that was while Sandy was vacationing in Europe.
So look out, now that she’s back!
Widely considered the most powerful agent on the West Coast, Dijkstra has been called “tough” and “abrasive” with a keen nose for new talent.
A [...]

B ook publishers expect authors to take charge of their own online marketing. That means writers need to create their own clever websites and build active blogs and hopefully they’re also out there whirling on the social networks.
Cold hard reality
The cold hard reality is that many authors haven’t the foggiest idea how to do [...]

Editors pray for the perfect book title: a tight high-concept combination of words that crystallizes the content and intention of the work. A title so scintillating and irresistible that millions of readers want to run out and buy this book immediately.
Eureka! It happens.
Think of Chicken Soup for the Soul, or Men are from [...]

It’s the #1 question aspiring authors ask me: How do I get your attention?
Here’s how: Send me a compelling, convincing book proposal that knocks my socks off!
For those who’ve heard that a query letter should always precede a proposal, my view is that you may want to skip the query entirely and instead [...]

Like many authors, Guy Kawasaki has struggled with his publishers to get the cover designs he wants for his books. But unlike anyone else before him, he decided to take matters into his own hands and hold an online contest to recruit and select the best possible jacket for his book The Art of the [...]

As an acquiring editor, one of the first things I look for in an author’s proposal is the “platform”, that is, the writer’s reputation and public visibility – and the ability, willingness, and experience to promote themselves in the marketplace.
What we publishers all hope for when opening a proposal from a literary agent is not [...]

Garth Stein’s new book The Art of Racing in the Rain posted extraordinary sales of 15,215 copies the first week out. Of these, 3,515 flew out the door of retail bookstores, 2,217 were ordered on Amazon, and a whopping 9,483 sold at Starbucks stores throughout the country.
The relatively unknown writer’s book made a big [...]

Don’t miss this laugh-out-loud piece of brilliant parody. Author Dennis Cass has created exactly what every publisher dreams of: a self-produced video that’s approaching 20,000 hits on YouTube. Hope it kick-starts a long-lasting spike of flow-through cash register sales on Nielson’s BookScan for Cass’s book Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind [...]