Professional Communications

Do you remember how school taught you how to write letters? Addresses on one side, familiarity greetings, and signing it with personal endearments such as “I can’t wait to write to you again.” If not, you probably didn’t do the pen pal project. Contacting freelancers and writing to submission editors for magazines, agents, and publishing…

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Magical Number of Reviews

We’ve seen posts like this circulating on Facebook and Twitter. Authors holding hard to the line that there is a magical number of reviews when Amazon does these magical things. “Also Bought” and “You Might Like” lists These aren’t determined by a magical review count. When your book has enough sales, Amazon’s AI determines, based…

Authors and Privacy Policy

Lately, every time you visit a site, you’re inundated with pop-ups and notifications about cookies and such. While it seems new, especially in the light of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the requirements to have a privacy policy stretch back far. The first major “win” for the consumer came with the CAN-SPAM law. This…

Newsletter Swaps

A lot of authors push FB ads and AMS ads and countless paid promos, and trust me, they work. It's why they are come so highly recommended. But aside from the few promos that don't have a fee, newsletter swaps are a budget friendly way to get your book in front of the readers. How…

Festivals for Authors: Using Local Events to Build A Local Audience

featured on J.S. Menefee’s blog and edited by J.S. Menefee Spring. Most people think of rain showers and flowers in bloom. For authors, it should be well past the time to start looking at festivals to attend with books in tow. Like submission deadlines, some festivals close the application process three months in advance, while…

Newsletters—Quick and Dirty

Newsletters. Every author/writer/blogger/website should have one, but with the ease of social media, many have let their subscribers stall not realizing the true power of a newsletter. So this is Quick & Dirty 101 for newsletters. How to Send Them? For most, MailChimp and MailerLite are the popular forerunners for managing subscribers and sending newsletters.…

Pros and Cons of a Pen Name

Pen names. Some of the most famous authors known wrote under a pseudonym. Mark Twain. JK Rowling. Joe Hill. Let's jump right in. Why would anyone want a pen name? Testing the waters First time writers or authors wanting to branch into a different genre may want to employ a pen name. It gives them…

Debugging Image Share on FB

Have you ever shared a link on FB and the wrong image appeared? Maybe it's your website. Maybe it's a blog post. But instead of what you thought would display, something else appeared as the accompanying image. The process of making FB re-fetch the data and refresh the cache for your URL is simple, and…

Exploring Publishing Rights

First rights, World rights, One-time rights … the number of rights can make your head spin. Publishers look to rights, whether its first rights or reprint rights, specific markets and global. The rights dictate if something has been published before and can be the difference between earning 10¢ a word in a magazine publication vs…

Global URLs

With the invention of the internet, people from all over the globe can read your book. You could be from the USA, France, Hong Kong, or anywhere and your readers might be from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, even India or anywhere else in the world. You don't know if they found your book through…