Meeting with an acquisitions editor or literary agent can feel like a mixed blessing. Getting to talk with a publishing pro about your work is obviously a great opportunity. But these meetings often come with severe time limitations, which can make the whole experience very stressful. In this article I’d like to offer five things […]
About this time last year, I signed up for a writer’s conference, the She Speaks Conference hosted by Proverbs 31 Ministries. I thought, “This is going to be fun!! Can’t wait till I get there!” But reality confronted me when I joined a Facebook group with other attendees. There was actual WORK to do before the conference! […]
Not long ago my wife and I finished reading Roald Dahl’s classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my son. A great feature of the particular edition we read him was an interview with the author in the back. One of the questions the interviewer posed to Dahl was, “How do you keep the momentum […]
I’m so pleased to bring you this interview with my friend Daniel Harkavy. Daniel is the coauthor of the bestseller Living Forward: How to Stop Drifting and Get the Life You Want and the author of Becoming a Coaching Leader: The Proven System for Building Your Own Team of Champions. He’s the founder and CEO of […]
By far the best thing I have ever done for myself is create a life plan. A life plan is a simple document that you create as an intentional way of envisioning and committing yourself to a future you desire–in every area of life. I wrote my life plan about seven months ago as I write […]
This is perhaps the most obvious question for a writer to ask a publishing insider: How do I get my book published? Funny thing is, people normally don’t ask it that boldly. More often I get questions like: How do find an agent? Is there some way for me to submit my proposal to you? What […]
What are the books that have made you . . . you? Recently my friend Bob Evenhouse asked me how I got started blogging, coaching, speaking, etc. I immediately started rattling off the books that influenced me. I owe so much to these books and their authors. I thought others might be interested in these nine books (as […]
I’ve been reviewing book proposals for well over a decade, and I’ve noticed that for the most part proposals fall into one of two categories. Either publishers fight each other to publish your book, or they don’t give it much attention at all. That’s an oversimplification, but not as much as you might think. For […]
Why do we go to movies?” he asked the audience. “Escape!” someone shouted. “An experience!” “Yes,” the speaker said, “we go for those reasons, but we also go for clarity.” I’m here in Chicago for Donald Miller’s Storyline conference as I write this, and I think Don nails it in the above exchange. We go to […]
I’ve got a platform,” writers sometimes tell me. “I’m on Twitter and Facebook. I’ve got a blog.” But here’s the litmus test for whether you have a platform: If a publisher sent a pallet of books to your garage, how many of them could you move on the strength of your own connections? This question puts […]
