Discovering Book Design: One Small Step

I asked the talented Dave Bricker for recommendations on book design, especially interior layout. He recommended Richard Hendel’s On Book Design.

And for the first time in a very long time, I’m completely sucked into a new discipline.

It’s a hygiene sort of art; when you’re done, it should be invisible. Most readers know nothing about book design. Most people I’ve talked to, voracious readers, never thought about what goes into the layout of the interior of a book until I mentioned it.

The exploration has just begun. I’ll be taking it slow, not wanting to derail the rewrite of anodyne. Besides, these books are semi-rare and not cheap.

I’ll keep you posted.

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Marketing, Promotion, and Publicity (Guest Post by Ed Teja)

A conversation with Ed Teja often turns educational. I wrote something about “marketing” and Ed responded very much like this:

There are numerous discussions, blogs, courses and (of course) books on things writers can do to sell their work—both better and at all. They are comprehensive, exhausting and often contradictory. Partly the problem is that we confuse the activities that make writers more visible and their books desirable purchases. So, after hearing various comments from writers online, I thought it appropriate to help clarify what are becoming muddy waters.

Writers are supposed to be wordsmiths, so let’s start with some definitions.

• Marketing activities are things we do to sell books.
• Promotional activities are things to help with discovery of a product (yes, even a book.)
• Publicity is work done to gain mind share…to ensure readers are aware of and think about the writer—the person.

We tend to blur these together, resulting in a great deal of confusion. They are quite different. Note that you can squish a bit of this or that from one category to another. I won’t quibble over specifics. The important thing is that an effective business plan must address all three aspects. Although they overlap, they do different things.

Knowing the difference

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Lemon Juice: Not the Solution to Resistance

The Dunning-Kruger effect, in brief: those who know least about something have the most confidence, while those who are advanced in the same field feel the greatest doubt and indecision.

After decades of fighting Resistance, tricking myself (and, when I do it right, Resistance), finding tools, processes, and methods to make it irrelevant, I still face it. The past two years have been the single greatest bout of Resistance I’ve faced since I started writing.

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