How Keywords, Categories Can Make or Break Your Kids Book Karen Ferreira, The KidLit Creator's Chronicle: One shelf needs 19 sales to hit number one. Another needs 1,073. Same book. Here's my full keyword and category research, numbers and all. One of the categories my book fits in needs 19 sales to hit number one. Another one needs 1,073! I’ll walk you through the three checks from newsletter #61, done on Lilou's Lost Rainbow, step by step. Then I'll run a very successful s

Lulu Buy Button Does Not Need a Storefront to Sell Books Lulu: Direct sales have had one stubborn barrier: you needed a shop. A Shopify subscription, a website, a payment setup, a fulfilment plan. Lulu just deleted most of that. Its new Direct Buy Button generates an embeddable button, product preview, or plain checkout link for any print book you've published with them. Lulu and Stripe handle payment, tax, printing, shipping, and fulfilment. It's free. You can drop it in a n

Celebrate Indie Author Day Nov. 13 with Promotional Videos, Graphics Each year, libraries and organizations around the world bring local indie authors, writers, and their communities together for a day of education, networking, writing, open mics, live panels, and so much more! Whether you currently have a similar event planned or would like to start one, registering with us is free and you gain access to all of our resources, workshop videos, promotional graphics, and suppor

Pity the Period. And Comma, Semicolon. They All Work in the Background Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times: Pity the period. And the comma and the semicolon too. Punctuation is the sturdy armature of written language, yet it does its job quietly, in the background. We tend to spend far more time analyzing the written words than we do the dots, dashes and ellipses that give those words meaning, nuance and tone. In her new book On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punc

Make a plan: You can write much faster if you have a plan Presented to Sarasota Fiction Writers by Jack Massa, September 2026. Introduction This session is mainly about writing novels. Much of what we’ll talk about also applies to short fiction and even nonfiction narrative. Plotters vs Pantsers: You may have heard these terms for two kinds of fiction writers. A Plotter plans everything out in detail first. A Pantser just sits down and writes (by the “seat of their pants

Make your elevator pitch in 3 sentences. Or write a shorter logline. Mark Mathes Independent Book Editor & Publisher President, Sarasota Fiction Writers mmathes1@gmail.com https://tinyurl.com/riversidereader Write your pitch in 3 sentences on a card. A logline, even shorter, can reveal the heart of your story in a single sentence. Then, practice wherever you go. Who is your audience? Who is it for? What is the emotional reward of your book? The result they get? Position y