Someone has to be willing to tell you your baby is ugly.
Stage two: The Deal
Seven Pages of GLORY
The Five Things Chapter One Must Do
What to ask someone like me before you hire me?
Anyone who tells you blurbs don't sell books lied to you and themselves
This ONE step is in your control right now.
This is a lot of what I do for clients when we get stuck. It always gets us to an answer. If you can’t write your way out of it, you can almost always read your way out of it.
Three reasons I see people put books down in our store. 😬
Here's another one on things I've learned working in a bookstore I wish I’d known as an author: Three reasons people put great books down no matter how hard I work on hand selling them.
The Mystery of the Sarah Cards
In some ways, I think my greatest value-add as a collaborative writer is not that I’ve written three books. It’s not that I was a journalist for a few decades and so I understand the difference between the story you want to tell and the story readers want to hear. It’s that I co-own a bookstore.
Book math.
The first questions I get are about the math of business books. How it all adds up and makes sense in the end. The work that goes into them. (Years.) How it squares with the advances that get paid. FWIW, anything six figures is a great deal.
Stage one: The Proposal
There are four basic stages to getting a book from "maybe?" to my store. I’m going to describe each one in four posts. And also the people you may need. And how long it takes, what success looks like, and your odds of success. Today we’ll do stage one: The Proposal.