Author-ized Articles

Random House and Oprah Winfrey have more in common than you might think. Hopeful authors see both as the route to fame and fortune, and besiege them with proposals. And both publishers and the media reject—or even ignore—most of the pitches they get.
This isn’t just because proposals outnumber available TV segments (or publishing slots), either. [...]

Ghostwriting fascinates people—not just the ethics of being a ghostwriter, but the mechanics of it. Lately I’ve had a lot of people asking me “So how do you work?” To me, that question breaks down into two parts: “How do you do what you do?” and “What’s it like to be your client?”
I addressed the [...]

In “Blog + Book = Opportunity,” I talked about different ways to turn a blog into a book, also called a blook, or using a blog to write a book. This isn’t the only possible relationship between a book and a blog, however. You can also market an existing book by serializing it in [...]

In the publishing world, POD usually stands for Print on Demand, a technology which lets you print books in small quantities so you don’t have to store thousands of them in your garage and pay large up-front fees for more traditional self-publishing.
But POD has another meaning: Play on Demand. That means watching or listening to [...]

Thanks to everyone who showed up at my “Talk Your Way to a Book: Why Speakers Make Great Authors” presentation for Business Speakers by the Bay last Friday. Contributions from the audience made it a much better experience for everyone.
For those who couldn’t make it, I’ve now uploaded an MP3 recording (see end of post [...]

Blame blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine for adding “blook” to the proliferation of internet-related neologisms.
So what the heck is a blook and why would you want to write one? A blook is one of two things: a blog (short for “Weblog”) created by serializing a book, or a book created from, or at least based [...]

Writing without a byline is a much more secure way to make a living than publishing in your own name. If fortune attracts you more than fame does, contract writing (which is writing on a particular subject without much input from your client) and ghostwriting (writing something in your client’s “voice” and which their own [...]

Every time I look at the writing gigs listed on Craigslist, I see headlines like the following:

“Publicity & Rewards For AMAZING Admission Essays & Personal Statements”
“Model Essay Writers Needed”
“Individuals Needed to Help Students Write and Edit Essays”
“Do You Love School and Writing?”
“Looking for help on writing essays for business school applications”

And those are just the [...]

Not having set working hours is one of the advantages of being a writer. It’s also one of the disadvantages. When you don’t have to show up at work at 9 AM and show results at the end of the day, it’s far too easy to put off writing in favor of all the interruptions [...]

The six-figure book advance, like the New York Times bestseller, is the object of many a writer’s fantasy. Whether it’s also a realistic goal is something else again.
Can you really get a six-figure book advance?
When Susan Page wrote The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book in 1997, she included the following list of [...]