Early this week I let an author know I’d be happy to review her book. She said she’d arrange a copy for me.
Yesterday a marketing person from her publishing company called to confirm I wanted the book. Then, because I had a real live publisher’s marketing person on the line, I asked what else they published.
We gossiped a bit about their type of books and then I asked if they published anything in 12 step recovery. (Remember my book proposal series?) He told me about a “secret project” he’s working on that may open that market for them. I gave …read more

If you’ve got a book you want to market to a trade publisher, you should, in addition to checking out the publisher’s web pages and book catalog, read their blog.
Consider Chronicle Books. Their website does a good job describing what they publish. The Chronicle Book Blog can give you insight into what their editors and marketers are actually thinking.
For example, yesterday, Assistant Editor Matt Robinson wrote a screed about wanting to publish more books for men. This is almost as good as having lunch with him. Poke around the blog and you’ll find other heavy weights at Chronicle Books posting …read more

As a writing coach I sometimes do what I call a manuscript critique. It’s a way an author can get an idea of what works and what doesn’t in either a book or a book proposal.
Over at Writing With Vision, I wrote an article about the process you might find interesting.
Write well and often,

Two newsletters:
Abundant Freelance Writing – a resource for freelance writers including 3x a week job postings.
Writing With Vision – for those who want to get a book written.

Finding the ideal reader for your book is important. I just posted a new article about this called Write for Your Ideal Reader.
Although this article is aimed at book writing, the very same thing holds true for article writing, on or off the web.
Write well and often,

Two newsletters:
Abundant Freelance Writing – a resource for freelance writers including 3x a week job postings.
Writing With Vision – for those who want to get a book written.

Sigh… I’ve finally gotten the last couple of rejections for Powerfully Recovered! And it keeps selling several copies a month all on its own.
I honestly don’t know what to do next. I’m proud of the book; I know it helps people because they email me and tell me so. I firmly believe it deserves a wider audience and I seem to be totally unwilling or unable to generate that wider market.
I’m also in the process of redefining my business… it’s grown helter skelter and over the next couple of months I intend to make some real decisions for the next …read more

As many of you know, I’ve submitted nine book proposals about my self-published book, Powerfully Recovered! Today I realized that although I’ve heard from four – all negative – there are still three out there that I haven’t heard from. I checked and it’s been just about six weeks, which, in my opinion, is long enough, or almost long enough.
While I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised, it’s time for me to consider my next move. At the moment my options would seem to be:

Do nothing. After all I’m still getting small checks every quarter. I don’t like this one …read more

:) Rats – the fourth rejection just arrived… they didn’t use my SASE, but sent the thing in the same way they send me royalty checks from a project I did for them long ago… so I was doubly disappointed.
Write well and often,

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Returned from my trip, and there it was in the mail… the third rejection of Powerfully Recovered! Again, it was a typical form rejection… thanks but no thanks.
Once again, it was a publisher I truly thought would be interested.
Sure it’s discouraging. I wanted this to be easy! Although this is far from my first rejection, I’ll take my own advice.
Write well and often,

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News of the beta test of a service that actually help you track your book sales on Amazon arrived on one of the lists I belong to. It’s called TitleZ and for the moment, at least, it’s free.
Register, then enter the title of the book you want to track and you’ll discover its sales rank on amazon.com. You can also search by keyword or phrase, then compare the results. You can even save the titles you want so their rank will be automatically available every time you log on.
TitleZ also has book and publishing news. They don’t say when they …read more

Egads – the email query I sent yesterday has already been rejected… not quite 24 hours. I think it’s what might be called a standard email rejection and it sounds much like the ones that come printed on slips of paper:
Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to consider for publication your manuscript Powerfully Recovered. The editors here reviewed your proposal and, I am sorry to say, concluded it is not a good fit for Guilford’s list. We receive a great many proposals and are forced to be highly selective about what we choose to publish. Our decision …read more