What a Book Costs Before Anybody Buys One
Most first-time authors budget for the writing and nothing else. The writing is rarely the largest line.
Tag: Self-Publishing
Self-publishing puts the author in control and the work in their hands. These posts cover the indie route end to end: platforms like KDP and IngramSpark, what it costs, what it demands, and how to do it without looking self-published.
bloggingYour Book Needs a Better Reason Than I Wrote Some Stuff and People Liked It
Quantity is not quality, and an archive is not a book. The difference is whether it solves a problem for a group of people.
SEE » The Elephant in the Room: Marketing Your Books and Services series
Book WritingOne Book Answers a Question. A Series Answers the Next One.
A reader who finishes a book you wrote has just told you something. A series is the only format that responds to it.
Author BusinessSelf-Publishing as a Professional Path in 2026
Self-publishing in 2026 is a real professional path, not a consolation prize. Control and speed in exchange for owning the whole job.
Hiring a GhostwriterYou Have a Manuscript. Now What? What Happens After the Ghostwriting Ends
The fear nobody names on the first call: spending $40,000 and ending up alone with a Word document. What the engagement covers, what publishing actually involves, and how my clients get to the finish.
Author PlatformWho Decides Which Stories Get Made? What Hollywood’s 2026 Diversity Numbers Tell Every Author
UCLA's 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report found that films reflecting the real makeup of the country earn the most, while the industry funded fewer of them in 2025, with people of color and women losing ground as leads, directors, and writers…
Author BusinessSelf-Publishing Income: Where the Money Comes From
Making real money from self-publishing is misunderstood. The income rarely comes from sales; it comes from the book as a business asset.
FreelancingWe Imagined a Little Flat Somewhere With a Typewriter
I was going to write the great American novel. What nobody described was the part where writing is a business with invoices in it.
Author PlatformI Quit My Job, Moved to Florida, and Sold Twelve Copies
I am not a marketing guru. I am an author who figured out how to market books by doing it badly until I got better at it.
SEE » The Elephant in the Room: Marketing Your Books and Services series
Book LaunchI Clicked Publish on My First Book and Sold Nothing for Two Weeks
I had fallen into the classic trap every new author falls into. I thought writing the book was the hard part. Wrong.
Author BusinessDirect-from-author book sales for authority experts
Every Amazon sale hands over about 65 percent of the cover price and your customer list to a company that competes with you. A direct sale through Shopify, Payhip, or your own site keeps the margin and, more importantly, builds…
AudiobookApple Books for the authority author
Apple Books has 600 million active devices and a customer base that skews professional and affluent, a serious authority-author opportunity almost nobody writes about. Here is why it matters more for B2B nonfiction than for fiction, what its discovery and…