If you’re a developmental editor, you’ve probably occasionally thought about teaching a class for writers—perhaps as a means to let people get to know you before they invest in the expense of a full developmental edit or because you want to help them solve some common writing problems before they finish their first draft or…
A few months back, a book I wrote more than twenty years ago delivered an unexpected royalty check for $1,000. When I originally wrote the book, I received an advance that earned out in a year or so. After a few years, the book stopped selling all that many copies (this is common), but I…
People like to pretend that you can write a book and make passive income from it. You can’t. If you write a book and stick it up on Amazon and never do anything to promote or market it, you’re not going to sell any copies. Okay, you might sell three or four to people who…
Once upon a time, I would write and publish a blog post and then I would write and publish another blog post, and then another and so on until I had a lot of blog posts. It was a great deal of work, and not always rewarded. Some posts got attention, some didn’t, but in…
Stop Focusing on a Sales Funnel Marketers talk a lot about sales funnels, where you get a bunch of people to purchase a no-cost or low-cost item, then get them to buy a higher-priced product and so on up to your highest-priced product. Fewer people will buy your highest-priced product (thus the narrowing of the…
How can I get someone else to license my content? I got this question a while back and I’ve been pondering what I want to say about it ever since. The idea is that if you’ve written a novel, say, you might be able to license it to a movie or television producer and earn…
Editors often talk about how much they love stories as if this is a reason why someone should hire them. But loving stories is kind of a bottom-line thing, like having a medical degree is the bottom-line for being a physician. No one is going to hire you because you love stories. They’re going to hire…
You’ve probably heard that to get people to sign up for your newsletter list, you should create an information product of some sort (an ebook, a white paper, a collection of templates) to give away in return for their signing up for your newsletter. This is certainly a tried-and-true strategy (and I do it myself…
People like to pretend that you can write a book and make passive income from it. You can’t. If you write a book and stick it up on Amazon and never do anything to promote or market it, you’re not going to sell any copies. Okay, you might sell three or four from people who…