TCK Publishing Videos

Evan Marshall is a literary agent and owner of the Evan Marshall Agency. He’s also a multi-published novelist and a nonfiction author, and the creator of The Marshall Plan novel writing software . Evan was born in Massachusetts. His first job was with the Big Five publisher Houghton Mifflin in Boston. Then he moved to New York and worked with Signet Books and a small company called Everest House, which is no longer in business. He also worked for a very famous old company, Dodd Mead , known for publishing Agatha Christie. After working with these traditional publishers, Evan became a literary agent. He started working for another well-known agent, Sterling Lord. Evan started his own literary agency in 1987. What’s Changed in the Publishing Industry over the Last 30 Years When Evan started in the publishing industry, there were many more publishers than there are today. There were many small independent publishers that were actually considered major industry players, typically b...

Why should a professional writer care about blogging? The first and most important reason to blog is marketing. Starting a blog can be an important part of your social media campaign for book marketing . This doesn’t mean that you’ll only blog for the sake of marketing—it’s not very effective to have a “blog” that only consists of posts asking people to buy your book. If you want your promotional efforts to be successful, you have to write valuable content consistently. You’ll write posts on various topics related to your niche and the interests of your audience. Why You Should Start a Blog Blogging also makes you a better writer. How? You’re developing a closer connection with your audience. When you’re working on a book, you’re the writer and they are the readers. In contrast, blogging is interactive. Your followers tell you what to write about. They give you immediate feedback through comments and likes, and you take their preferences into consideration when developing your...

Business advice guru Michael Gerber famously noted one of the top reasons freelancers often fail—we just don’t like the boring stuff. The kinds of people who are happy with the detail-oriented, boring scut work that makes for a successful freelance career are also the kinds of people who are happy working a regular job with a commute and benefits. This is truest when it comes to finances. Freelance work of any kind is a feast-and-famine situation, with periods of strong income interspersed with periods of worrying about your next mortgage payment. Worse, the kinds of folks who become freelance writers often never took classes about how best to manage money for a business—and make no mistake, when you’re a freelancer, you’re also a business. Worse than that , the gray area for one-person shops makes money management and staying on top of tax laws confusing, to say the least. Put it all together, and the financial side of freelance writing is a huge ball of potential disaster. We wo...

Rachel Starr Thomson is a bestselling author with more than 50 published books, including The Seventh World Trilogy . She is also a freelance editor, publishing consultant, and founder of Independent Publishing Solutions . From a very young age, Rachel spent her time sitting in nature and making up stories in her head. Rachel was homeschooled. Her parents encouraged a lot of reading and a lot of independent study. Rachel read hundreds of books growing up. Her dad had a library of thousands of books. She loved books and reading. That translated very easily into writing for her. She finished her first book, Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, at the age of 13 and has been writing ever since. Prior to her first novel, Rachel was writing a bunch of Lord of the Rings knockoff-type stuff that she was never able to finish. She was able to finish Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe because it was funny and she was being quirky and writing with humor. As a teenager, Rachel dreamed of b...

Although the options available to you as an author with a completed book are just this side of boundless, most ways to publish fall into three broad buckets: You can go the traditional route by getting picked up and published by a traditional press. You can self-publish via a platform like Createspace, Lulu, Kobo, or KDP. You can hire a publishing services company. Of those, you’ve probably heard and read the most about options 1 and 2. However, option 3 is a middle ground fewer writers have heard about, despite being a viable choice… if you avoid the most common mistakes, pitfalls, and scams. Since this is the lesser-known option among most writers, let’s take this from the beginning, starting with the first question most people ask: What Is a Publishing Services Company? Looking at what a publishing services company does day-to-day in their facilities, it would be hard to tell the difference between one of these and a traditional publisher. Publishing services companies: ...

As an up-and-coming author, it can be difficult to know when exactly you should start marketing your soon-to-launch book. You don’t want to leave it too late because you’ll start twiddling your thumbs as the campaign sets off. Instead, you want to start as early as seems right. This means you can build up a huge following of interested people so that when your book does come out, you’ve already got a massive audience to promote it to. Not sure how to sell a product that doesn’t actually exist yet? Don’t worry; here are six steps you can take for success! 1. Choose When to Start As a rule of thumb, it’s best to start marketing your book around 6 to 12 months before you actually plan to release it to the public. This way, you’ve got more than enough time to finish your book and run your marketing strategy, and it’s enough time to build up a loyal band of followers. During this time, you’re going to want to set up a calendar so you can plan your content posts and your content r...

Ricci Wolman is the founder and CEO of Written Word Media . You may not have heard of Written Word Media before, but I’m sure you’ve heard of some of their brands, including Free Booksy , Bargain Booksy , and Red Feather Romance, all of which are very popular book promotion websites. Ricci has more than 10 years of experience building online audiences using data-driven customer acquisition techniques, and she has an MBA from Harvard University. Ricci’s background is in online marketing, and specifically the part of online marketing that is data-driven. She is an expert at running ads and figuring out the ROI (Return on Investment) or figuring out how much it costs to acquire a customer, whether that’s getting a customer to give you their email address or getting them to buy something at your online store. Ricci actually got her start with The Body Shop, a natural beauty company, working with their e-commerce division at headquarters. After helping build their e-commerce division and...

  One of my business cards lists my title as “Word Sensei.” It has a tied black belt in the front—a nod to my first career as a martial arts instructor. On the back, it lists the various services I primarily offered at the time I had that batch printed: Ghost Writing Online Content Social Media Book Coaching Writing Mentor At conferences, attendees and other “civilians” would take my card and say variations on the theme of “neato.” Veterans and professionals also liked it, but about half would do that hissy intake of breath when they saw “Book Coaching.” Especially if they didn’t know me well. Fortunately, almost all of them were willing to talk with me about that snap assessment. Without exception, we agreed on several points about book coaches: The overwhelming majority of book coaches mean well, and practice their trade in good faith Many writers can benefit from a book coach If you ask 1,000 people what a “book coach” does, you’ll get 1,000 different answers 2,000...