The Tampa Bay Book Festival Calendar
August 21, 2026
Tampa Bay runs a real literary calendar: a free four-day international book fair in Ybor City, an antiquarian fair, a university festival, and three community events built around local authors.
Article Index (Page 16)
MemoirsThe Mound Under the Picnic Tables
August 21, 2026
There is a Tocobaga temple mound in a county park in Safety Harbor, and the park is named for the Frenchman who showed up in 1842. Which name ends up on the sign is the useful thing to think about.
Book MarketingGetting Your Book Into a Tampa Bay Bookstore
August 21, 2026
Tampa Bay still has a real independent bookstore scene, and each shop takes local books differently. The thing that decides whether any of them can stock you is how your book is printed.
Book MarketingThe Hotel a Man Built Out of One Sentence
August 21, 2026
A man built an eight-story pink hotel on St. Pete Beach because a woman in Spain was forbidden to marry him. It opened in 1928, three hundred percent over budget, and the Fitzgeralds spent a week there in 1930.
Book MarketingWhere to Write in Safety Harbor
August 21, 2026
Safety Harbor has more workable places to write than towns four times its size. The library for long stretches, the waterfront for the stuck paragraph, Philippe Park for the structural think.
Book MarketingThe School That Owns a Newspaper
August 21, 2026
The Poynter Institute owns the Tampa Bay Times, because Nelson Poynter willed it to them so no chain could buy the paper. It is also where much of the modern craft of nonfiction writing was taught and written down.
Book MarketingThe Men Paid to Read Novels Aloud in Tampa
August 21, 2026
For fifty years in Ybor City, cigar workers paid a man out of their own wages to sit on a platform and read novels aloud while they worked. They elected him, voted on the books, and struck when the owners…
Book MarketingFinding a Writing Group Worth Sitting In
August 21, 2026
Pinellas County has more writing groups than most people realize, mostly meeting in library rooms. The useful skill is telling a group that will make you better from one that will correct your commas for two years.
MemoirsYou Retired Here With a Life Behind You
August 21, 2026
Pinellas County is full of people who did something substantial somewhere else and then moved here, and almost none of them have written it down. The reasons are always the same three, and all three are wrong.
Book MarketingFive Hundred Years of Selling the Same Water
August 21, 2026
Five mineral springs in Safety Harbor have been sold as a cure for five hundred years, starting when Hernando de Soto decided he had found the Fountain of Youth. There is a lesson in it for anyone writing a book.
Book MarketingGetting Local Media to Cover Your Book
August 21, 2026
Tampa Bay has more working media than most metro areas its size. None of them want to hear that your book is out. All of them want a story, and your book is the credential instead of the subject.
Book MarketingThe Truth About Bookstore Signings
August 21, 2026
The store will usually say yes if your book is orderable through the standard channel. Then nobody comes unless you bring them. The signing is not the marketing; it is where the marketing gets photographed.
Want These in Your Inbox?
Subscribe to the Substack for new articles, working notes on publishing, and observations from inside the ghostwriting practice. No spam. No sales funnel. Just the work.