As anyone who has been following this blog may have noticed, I fell down on the job these last two days. I blame it on having too much editing work, too much non-work stuff to handle, too many promotional projects with deadlines I had to meet, a sick kitty, and just too little time in general. You can imagine, therefore,…
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Query Letters: E-mail or Snail Mail
Query letters represent a necessity in the world of nonfiction writing. If you want to get your writing published, you have to know how to write a query letter, and you have to, of course, send it out to the correct person. There used to be no choice about how to do the latter. You put your letter into an…
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Promote Your Book — and Yourself — with Online Articles
You can gain exposure for yourself and your books by using your nonfiction writing ability to write articles and “news releases” (short articles) that you post to online article directories and distribution services. You can also submit them to e-zines, which represents a more targeted approach. I’ve done this consistently for more than a year, and if you Google my…
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The Internet as Your Promotional and PR Resource
These days publishing houses expect their authors to put up the money for most of the publicity and public relations necessary to make any book a success. That can be an expensive proposition for any author, especially since writers can’t rely on advances big enough to cover these costs. It seems the more money and effort we are expected to…
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Write What You Know or Know About What You Write
I want today to give nonfiction writers a pat on the back for taking what they know and putting it down on paper. I spend a lot of time editing books written by authors who have come up with a great idea of their own, fleshed it out and put it down on paper. They may have done a lot…
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Articles are Nonfiction, Too
I focus so much of my time on editing my client’s nonfiction books and on writing and promoting my own nonfiction book projects that I sometimes forget that I’m trained as a magazine journalist. I still love writing articles, though, and I often use my skills as a journalist. I love to query magazines with ideas and to get assignments….
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My New Attitude About Self-publishing
Today’s blog will have to be short. It’s actually already tomorrow, so I’ve officially missed today’s (yesterday’s) blog. Whatever. It’s 12:40 a.m., and I’m ready for bed. I never wanted to self-publish my work. As I’ve waited for query after query to be answered by agents and publishers, and years have gone by with my projects unwritten and unpublished, friends…
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