Posts tagged: article writing

Landing pages help sell your books (#6 of 10)

If you’re writing a book to sell, you need some launching pad where the potential buyer can see the book cover, the title, the copy on the title, the copy on the back cover (if it’s a paperback)–or the copy that would go there if it’s an ebook, some selling prose that would be on [...]

How many book pages a day should you write?

A hard reminder: if you really want to write a book (even better, get it published), the whole writing issue is up to you. Novelists often write two to five pages a day, unedited. Old veterans can plunk out 10-20. Nonfictionfolk pretty much write once they have the facts. Somebody wrote the story of the [...]

(#5) Your book needs a description, a price, and your bio

#5 in our “how to publish your own book” series focuses on a description of your book, its price, and your biography to list in your book “open” publishing listing. Since the submission form requires all three items to have your book published free, or almost free, at Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, iPad, CreateSpace, Scribd, and [...]

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 [...]

What do you do with a 5,000 to 30,000-word “book”?

Whatever your fame or literary legerdemain, a “book” like that is a size orphan. It’s too big to fit in a magazine, newsletter, or journal and too small for major publishers to even consider. Of course, you can publish it yourself. It may be too short to get a spine as a paperback at CreateSpace [...]

Write a dandy book and sell it worldwide in minutes, hands-free…

It used to be that 90% of your time getting in print was spent finding some big house to look at your query (or proposal), then writing the chapters they wanted, then rewriting the final book. Not to mention that it then took 18 months to see print! How things have changed! In that time [...]

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, [...]

Four ways to get magazine or newspaper interviews

Over the past 30-years, in my “Writing Travel Articles That Sell” seminar, I’d talk for about 20 minutes about interviewing. The entire process has almost completely changed during that time. First, though, why bother to interview at all? Who really cares? The editors who will hopefully buy your article (even book) care a lot. It’s [...]

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 [...]