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 drops his [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 appearances [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]