My recent poll proved Charlie Fox is a favorite thriller heroine ahead of Katniss Everdeen. Oddly, several well-known and long-standing female leads in thrillers fell below the entry “Still Looking”. Are some of the popular characters like Tempe Brennan, Stephanie Plum or Kay Scarpetta played out? Too much of the same thing? Charlie Fox evolved […]
5 FREE Tips on Book Promotion
How many Tweets, Facebook Updates, Google+ entries, blog posts, spam emails have you gotten that say, “How to promote your ebook”? After 30 years in sales and marketing, and watching the independent publishing movement for two years, I can tell you that we’ve now come full circle. A year ago John Locke wrote “How I […]
5 Things the Big 6 Will Try
Why did News Corp decide to break into two companies? Because the path-to-market model has changed forever and new investments are needed. Does that mean publishers will disappear? No. Distributors like Ingram? No. Bookstores? No. Nothing will change in the current supply chain except—volume. So why is News Corp so worried about the future of […]
Review: Petroplague
Petroplague – Author Amy Rogers – 83,000~ words, $19.95 HC / $2.99 E I have a huge ego. To keep its luster, I keep it away from embarrassing situations. Naturally, I was a bit intimidated when I followed a stray link from Booktrib to the website of Havard grad, former Cal State Professor, Amy Rogers, […]
On Writing v5.1: Cash is Good – ROI
Our goal as writers is to craft a story so interesting that strangers will pay money to hear it. Let’s start with definitions: ROI stands for Return On Investment. The equation: Revenue minus Costs divided by Costs. In publishing, this is a very tricky number because books have a startup cost but very little operational […]