Publicity and Writing

Nathan Bransford wrote On Conflict in stories.

Jessica Faust wrote on What Can Authors Do to Sell Books.

Charlotte Abbott wrote about To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Twitter Basics for Publishers and Authors about promoting books in 140 characters or less.

Kristin Nelson wrote You’ve Got Google Questions? Authors Guild Has Got Answers.

Randy Ray wrote about 50 Useful Blogs for Writers.

Jay Lake started a blog discussion asking published writers How many rejections have you had?

Writing and Networking

Nathan Bransford wrote about character motivation in What Do Your Characters Want?

H. L. Dyer wrote about Social Networking Basics.

And, for those using twitter, Sarah Perez wrote about a service that will explain What Does that Hashtag Mean?

Writing, Marketing, Publishing News, and Social Networking

Jessica Faust wrote about Selling Yourself in query letters.

Shrinking Violet Promotions wrote about Swagology 101.

Penny Sansevieri wrote about 50 Things You Can Do to Promote Your Book.

Kristin Nelson wrote about publishing news about the company Anderson News.

Rich wrote about To return or not to return: is that the right question?

Toni Andrews wrote about Confessions of a Contest Judge, Part 3: Thinking Like a Point of View Character.

Cathy Witlox wrote about Editors' Pet Peeves.

Nick O'Neill wrote about 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know.

David Niall Wilson wrote about using the internet to promote yourself or your company.

Michael Hyatt has written The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter.

Sherice Jacob wrote about 10 Twitter Tools that Help You Work Smarter and 10 MORE Must Have Twitter Tools.

And here's instructions on how to How To Opt-Out Of Receiving Automated Welcome DMs on Twitter.

Tim Ferriss wrote about How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You - 5 Tips.

Laurel Touby talked about doing online book parties and using twitter hash tags to have book parties in The Book Party in the Digital Age.

Book Design

Here's some videos on book design:

Book design history:
C.S. Richardson on Book Design, Clip 1

Modern Interior Book Design:
C.S. Richardson on Book Design, Clip 2

Book Cover Design:
C.S. Richardson on Book Design, Clip 3

Queryfail, Novelfail, Marketing, and Writing

Agent Rachelle Gardner wrote about Prepare Yourself for Success.

Shrinking Violet Promotions has a post about You Don’t Have To Go It Alone--Marketing Co-ops.

Kristin Nelson wrote about what to do when your book gets a bad review in So PW Hates Your Book.

Tara Lazar wrote about Query Fail: How Not to Land an Agent. (Agents shared in #queryfail specific lines from queries that turned them off from a query. Tara Lazar read these and picked out some reoccurring themes and gave specific examples from the #queryfail twitter feed. Due to complaints by authors who apparently made these mistakes, she's now diluted the post so people can't see specific lines to avoid, but the post is still helpful. The specific examples should still be available at: #queryfail mainly posted on March 5, 2009.)

There is also a #novelfail where there are tweets about where and why a writer lost an agent as a reader.

Writing, Getting Published, and Making Money

Angela Scheff at Zondervan guest blogged about Being Proactive about Your Cover and Title. If you want some influence on these factors, read her advice.

Jessica Faust at Bookends wrote about Quotes on Books, Query Statistics, and Error-Free Manuscripts.

Nathan Bransford wrote about The Art of Summarizing Your Work and Sympathetic vs. Unsympathetic Characters. He also wrote about the Book Revenue Breakdown (posted on Feb. 23, 2009), but the post doesn't seem to want to be linkable. To quote it:

There were also some questions about how much an author receives from a book sale, so I thought I'd provide a handy dandy breakdown. This varies greatly depending on what discounts the publisher is extending to booksellers/distributors/wholesalers etc. and what royalty the author is receiving from the publisher. I'm not going to get into what is a "typical" royalty, and please don't consider the below as such, because I can't discuss proprietary info. But here's a basic (and rough) rule of thumb to help with your calculations:

Start with a $24.95 hardcover.

Discounts to booksellers vary, but for a rough estimate figure that the publisher receives around 50%.

Let's say the author has a 10% retail royalty, and the author has an agent who receives 15% of the author's share. This works out to (again, roughly):

$12.48 to the bookseller (50%)
$9.98 to the publisher (50% minus author/agent share)
$2.12 to the author (10% of retail minus 15%)
$0.38 to the agent (15% of 10%)

For another example, let's take a $14.95 trade paperback where the author receives 7.5% retail. That translates to:

$7.48 to the bookseller
$5.83 to the publisher
$0.95 to the author
$0.17 to the agent

So there you have it. Note that the author (and agent) do not actually receive the above money until the advance has "earned out," meaning until all those little $0.95s per book have exceeded the amount the publisher paid as an advance. Subrights revenue, i.e. first serial (excerpts in periodicals), permissions, electronic, etc. also go towards paying down that advance.

Also note that this (thankfully) doesn't include rights the agent/author might have reserved, such as audio rights, foreign, and dramatic rights, which can be very important in helping authors earn enough for a new couch to sit on as they frantically write their next book in the hopes of landing the money for a new coffee table.

Kate Elliott wrote on DeepGenre about Writing Process: Writing With A Craft Goal In Mind.