Category: travel writing

Your book is the answer to one question.

What follows is the most important step you will take if you want to write a publishable and much bought book. Otherwise you will likely spend a year writing or dabbling at five unfinished books—and none will see printor will you receive a dime! Fortunately, there’s an almost fail-safe way to get your book timely [...]

How to Interview a Famous (or Infamous) Person Abroad

Some years back I was headed to northern South America to write five or six travel articles. I got tickets to/from Manaus, Brazil, on the Amazon River, and planned to divert to Quito, Ecuador, and Bogota, Colombia, if I had time when I returned. A lot to squeeze into three weeks. I followed the process [...]

Never type out the title of your book. Here’s why…

A short blog about something I stumbled on last year that has saved me a ton of time writing in Word on my computer. This may be “new news” to 5% of you reading it, but I was in that 5% for a decade or more while I presume all of my friends knew the [...]

Interviewing famous men at the urinal

Sorry, ladies, but this is one place where male reporters have a leg up, so to speak… Don’t despair. I only interviewed one famous man, or any man, that way once, and that was by chance. But it worked, and since that was all I needed at that moment it let me dance (better said, [...]

What do you do first to deduct your travel-writing trips?

Two premises: (1) you want to write and sell something about a coming trip, and (2) you want to be able to keep all of the money you earn, or at least increase your IRS tax deduction as much as you can. Good thinking—and totally legal. You are supposed to take every deduction allowed. More [...]

Resell your article again and again? Here’s the needed tool.

If you’ve had a good article in print, why not sell it again and again? To do that you need a cover letter to send to the second editor. These are full-page letters sent to editors who buy reprints (same as second rights)—usually editors who pay on publication. If you sold first rights to the [...]

15 Publishing Tips from Published Professionals

Let me share some of the best Q-A info from the June 9 BAIPA Meeting in San Rafael, CA. (BAIPA is the Bay Area Independent Publishing Association, a first-rate monthly gathering of published folk living near San Francisco.) 1. If you want to use a famous (or even little-known) painting on your pages, find out [...]

BookBaby and publishing your ebook

Half of the reason I went to hear Brian Felsen give a 2 1/2-hour program on June 9, sponsored by BAIPA (Bay Area Independent Publishing Association), was to hear what additional magic he was going to unravel about this out-of-the-woodwork e-publishing phenomenon. Just months back who had heard of BookBaby? Now, who hasn’t? It’s the [...]

See how an excellent website is critical in empire building

How can one double and triple their income quickly from writing, photography, speaking, consulting, teaching, or other related means? The process is called empire building, and I focus on it in my free monthly newsletter. Atypically, I’m going to prematurely share the key article in this month’s newsletter as this blog post because I so [...]

How to very profitably resell derivative rights to your writing and photography

Selling the rights is easy. Finding them and keeping them is a lot harder. First, what are derivative rights? “Derived from another source, spin-off” says the Oxford dictionary. But I mostly know them as second or reprint rights. And why are they important? Because every sale without a tail (some restriction of your reselling the [...]