TCK Publishing Videos

Odds are, if you’ve been anywhere on a lifestyle-oriented website recently—or just visited Pinterest or Instagram—you’ve heard of hygge . No, that’s not just a random collection of letters caused by your cat walking across the keyboard. Hygge (roughly pronounced “HOO-gah”) is a Danish concept that more or less equates to a feeling of being cozy, comfortable, safe, and whole. Basically, hygge is the state that every writer wants to be in when they settle down to work: comfy, relaxed, and ready to hit perfect flow. For obvious reasons, hygge is massively popular; it was even short-listed as a candidate for the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year. The Danes are consistently ranked as some of the happiest people on earth, despite the often cold and dark climate, so there must be something to their attitude towards life. There are dozens of websites and books that tell you how to achieve hygge in your own life, usually revolving around wearing big fluffy socks and drinki...

If you want to launch your book with strong word of mouth already happening, then you need to do some groundwork months in advance. That involves building your author website, starting your email newsletter list, posting excerpts or teasers, and putting up a listing on Goodreads. Meanwhile, you’re finalizing the cover, finishing the edits, getting everything laid out for print and digital editions…the list seems to go on forever! Of course, if you want to get a professional review for your book, you also need to think about that months in advance, too! Most professional trade reviewers require that you send your book in at least three months before publication, and often prefer four or five months’ lead time. Yipes! You mean you have to have your book completely done almost half a year before you make it available for sale if you want professional reviews? Well, yeah…kinda. Professional reviewers like Publishers Weekly and Kirkus need a lot of lead time to get your book into th...

Monica Leonelle is a best-selling author and entrepreneur empowering writers to take charge of their careers through efficient and inspired marketing. Her recent release, Prosperous Creation , focuses on making art and  money while overcoming the mental blocks that hold us back from reaching our goals. Monica ‘s expertise comes from authoring and marketing more than 20 books of fiction across multiple pen names. She writes about indie publishing at ProseOnFire.com. Engineering Artistic Success This interview yielded so many great insights for authors. We talked about the difference between fiction and nonfiction in the marketplace and dove deep into marketing. Monica’s first career was as a software engineer. She published her first book on social media marketing back in 2009, before Amazon sold eBooks. She published that first book via print-on-demand and used it to change careers from software engineer to a social media marketer. The book established her as an aut...

Time for some cold, hard truth: Self-published authors are still at a disadvantage in the book industry. Even though readers have discovered how awesome many self-published books are, the book industry is an insular place. These are professionals who have devoted their lives to an industry that’s rapidly shifting around them, and it’s small wonder that many look skeptically at the wave of indie authors that are causing that shift. But to make the most of your career as an indie author, you have to know how to work within the industry, where to push the envelope, and when to throw all the rules out the window. Creating a sustainable author career is a balancing act, and knowing how the traditional book industry works can give you an advantage in finding that balance. Book reviews are one of those places where the traditional book industry has it down pat. They have access to a network of professional reviewers, including at respected trade publications, and these reviews carry weight...

Reviews sell books. That much is a fact. And they’re even more important to indie authors, who don’t have the marketing muscle of a huge multi-billion-dollar corporation behind them. In order to take a chance on a new book, people require what’s called “social proof.” After all, even if a book is cheap, it takes a lot of time to read—time that could be spent doing other things. You don’t want to blow time and money on a book that you wind up hating and not finishing, right? That’s where social proof and reviews come in. People tend to read what others they like and trust have read and enjoyed. That’s why we have sites like Goodreads, where we can see what our friends are reading, and why Amazon reviews are so incredibly powerful—we can see what others have thought about a book and determine whether we want to read it. The most trusted reviewers of all tend to be the pros. It makes sense…these are people who get paid to read and review books, and they read thousands of books a year...

Watch on YouTube here: How to Write Book Descriptions for Fiction and Non-Fiction with Bryan Cohen | PPP132 Via https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcZImr64sN4bR4BB_JA82vg/videos

We all know about the importance of getting Amazon reviews, and most of us are also obsessive users of Goodreads, LibraryThing, or possibly both. We’re all over our Kobo and Nook stats, and we keep careful tabs on our Google analytics for our blog and on the bounce and open rates for our email newsletters. We’re informed, educated, and ready to dominate the book scene! Only…the book scene doesn’t think so. Because there are four book publications that you may not even know about that help shape what readers see—and what they want. These publications are referred to in the industry as the “trades,” because they’re the publications of record for the “book trade.” Every industry has similar publications, trade journals that take an in-depth view of what’s going on, down to the tiniest detail, so that people working in that industry can do their jobs better. In the case of the book industry, though, these trade journals also affect what booksellers buy, what librarians order, and thro...

“Traditional” (aka “legacy”) publishing is a relatively recent term to describe the powerful, primarily New York-based publishers that are still the object of most new writers’ aspirations. The term is used today in opposition to “self-“ or “direct” publishing, which is what happens when a book is published without the intervention of the companies that have served as literary and commercial gatekeepers for decades. Then and Now Twenty years ago, there were three dozen independent “major publishers,” which meant an author’s representative like myself could submit a writer’s work to any or all of them. Should more than one or two be interested, you would start a bidding war that could be very lucrative for the author. Today, though a few companies like Grove-Atlantic and W. W. Norton manage to survive independently, most of those three dozen majors are owned by the Big Five trade book publishers. They were known as the “Big Six” until Random House merged with Penguin in 2013. Today’...

As much as we might want to, we can’t write all the time. Our bodies and minds need time to recharge in order to do our best work. And no, jotting down ideas for your next book or updating your accounting doesn’t count as recharging! Still, there are ways to feel productive and creative even when you’re not writing. Podcasts are a great way to expand your horizons and to get new tips, tricks, and ideas while doing other things (like cooking dinner, commuting, or tidying up). Plus, writing can feel a little lonely sometimes, since we spend so much of our time inside our own heads or typing intently. Podcasts are ideal for helping you feel like you’re part of a community—for getting a sense that other people have gone on journeys similar to yours and learning how they succeeded. If you haven’t started listening to podcasts yet, what are you waiting for? It’s easy to get started—you can use iTunes on your iPhone or Google Play on your Android device and just search for the podcast tha...

Unlike, say, wrangling rattlesnakes or teaching tigers to tap-dance, writing isn’t considered a hazardous profession. After all, we’re basically sitting still for way longer than we really should, tapping away at a keyboard. The only real risk is spraining our creativity. Right? Maybe not. All that typing, particularly if you don’t have an ergonomically designed work setup, can cause some serious repetitive strain injuries. In fact, according to U.S. government statistics , repetitive strain injuries are the most common occupational health problem in the country. And writers certainly aren’t exempt from this health crisis. We can develop muscle strain, lower back injuries, carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, and more from sitting at our computers too long and having bad posture while working. Heck, even our smartphones are slowly killing us—because we’re all hunched over looking at screens all the time, we’re causing damage to our spines. Carpal tunnel and other strain injuries ...

Writers are supposed to do what we do for the passion of it—for the pure creative urge to get our stories out of our heads and onto the page. And, of course, that’s a huge part of what drives us. But the last time I checked, the power company didn’t take short stories as payment, and eating typed manuscripts provides a lot of fiber but not much else. So it’s important that we get paid for all that rampant creativity and passion. There are a lot of different ways to get paid for writing , from producing business books to writing blog posts or ad copy to releasing novels. No matter what you’re writing, there’s a way to turn it into a career and even into a full-time income. One of the best ways to earn a living as a writer is to just keep writing—novels, short stories, flash fiction, nonfiction, essays, blog posts, etc. There’s a market for nearly anything you can dream up…you just have to find it. And an entire industry has grown up around helping you find the right market for your...