By Jodi Brandon With tens of thousands of books published annually and hundreds of thousands of magazine articles published annually, it’s easy to see how you (and your work) can get lost in the shuffle. If you’ve chosen the right outlets for your writing — and by “right,” I mean the most appropriate — that … Read more
By Elisabeth Keely Wilson Ostensibly, it was your basic itch just begging to be scratched. You know—the kind of itch that can’t quite be reached, so it keeps twitching and itching, demanding your attention. Finally, in order to appease the little beast, you have to twist and turn your body into various odd positions, until … Read more
By Dr. Marlene Caroselli “As you are, I once was; As I am, you will be.” Why revisit the past? Why record family stories? Nestled in the gently undulating hills above Celano, Italy, lies a cemetery. The brittle, silvery leaves of olive trees whisper to the tombstones there, creating the smallest disturbances in the buttery … Read more
By Phyllis Hanlon At the mention of “nonfiction” you may cringe and think of wordy, boring essays by long-winded speech writers, technical manuals bursting with legalese that no one except the creators can understand, or dry newspaper stories. Well, let’s place the word “creative” before nonfiction and see what a difference it makes. A new picture … Read more
By Denis Ledoux Is your family one of the many whose history is lost to future generations because no one has written it down? Writing your stories—even just a few—is a great way to memorialize your family and to prevent the experience of your life and theirs being forgotten. The details you take for granted … Read more
By Patricia L. Fry When you become the author of a nonfiction book, you are also considered an expert in your field. People want to read what you write and hear what you have to say. You want to promote your book and get personal exposure by writing articles and speaking publicly. Author interviews are … Read more
By Sandra Beckwith Publishers are willing to publicize nonfiction books when they’re released, but they rarely do much after the launch to keep books in the news, even though most deserve ongoing media exposure. Here are some easy things you can do to generate continuing publicity for your title. Use a mix of these ideas … Read more
Interview by Jenna Glatzer Rudy Shur is the publisher of Square One Publishers, and the author of the book How To Publish Your Nonfiction Book, part of the "Square One Writers Guide" series. Rudy has been responsible for the acquisition of more than 1,000 books, many of which have become bestsellers. He has lectured on … Read more
By Lisa Silverman With the tremendous success of such memoirs as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the 1990s and early 2000s saw an explosion in the genre. The boom was seen in the number of memoirs acquired by publishers, the number of titles shelved in … Read more
By Susan Harrow Top literary agents get about 400–1,000 unsolicited queries every month from hopeful book authors. Publishing houses sometimes juggle 5,000. Most of my private clients and participants in my seminar “How to Get a Six-Figure Book Advance” ask me, “How is a non-fiction author supposed to get an agent’s attention when there is … Read more
