http://www.ingermanson.com/home/personal.php

Jane Friedman, my editor at Writer’s Digest for Write is a Verb, has compiled her best tough love reality slap for those of you who are really serious about being published writers. To paraphrase Betty Davis (who said Old age is not for sissies), writing and publishing are not for wimps.

Get some tough love from Jane and go get published if you (and you work) are up to it:

http://blog.writersdigest.com/norules/2009/10/06/TheSecretsToPublishingSuccessJanes2009ToughLoveGuide.aspx

Called a Vook. Check it out at:

http://promo.simonandschuster.com/vook/

Listen to and watch Seth Godin tell you about how things have changed and what succeeds now in publishing and why most traditional publishers are (mostly) in deep trouble.

http://toccon.blip.tv/file/970223?filename=Toolsofchange-SethGodin10BestsellersUsingNewMediaNewMarketingAndNew237.mp4

“A year from now you may wish you had started today.” —Karen Lamb

How many times have I had people tell me they want to write a book “someday?” Many. The only way to write a book is to write it. And the only way to write it is to start and finish it.

A year from now, will you still be saying to yourself and others that you want to write a book someday? If you start today, perhaps next year you could tell someone that you have written a book.

“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.” –Cormac McCarthy

I came across this quotation the other day and had to laugh. I also realized it spoke to something very important for people who would be authors.

There is a business side to writing and publishing: making sure you write something people will want to read; getting agents and publishers to take the book on; getting readers to buy the book when it is published; getting the word out about the book; managed the money aspects of being a writer.

I cover all this stuff in my live and online courses on writing and publishing.

There are two faces to writing:
1. Your raw energy and writing abilities;
2. Your ability to get the book into the world and have it support your writing.

Some people are better at one than the other, but you must attend to and master both to get the book written and published.

Bill

As usual, I invite you to learn more by visiting: http://www.getyourbookwritten.com

I started out clueless in both Writing-Land and Publishing-Land. I only succeeded at writing and publishing 29 books (my next one, A Guide to Trance-Land, comes out from W.W. Norton next year) because I had such unstoppable passion for getting my ideas and work out into the world to contribute to others.

But I quickly discovered that one gets passive income from books, if they do well enough. Most of mine are still in print and it is so cool to get checks every six months from my publishers. I never know how much they will be for, since sales are variable, and I never count on this money as income, so it is always a pleasant surprise.

I’ve discovered that most people are a bit stymied by the writing and especially by the publishing process, so I have created an online Book Writing and Publishing Course. The course tells you where to start (never write your non-fiction book before you sell it; but always write much, if not all, of your fiction book before you sell it), how to get yourself to write (Did you know you could write a book in five-minute chunks and it would take you less than a year to get it done?), how to get an agent (I’ll tell you how I got one in one day!), and how to make it likely your book will sell to a publisher and to readers.

You can take the Book Writing and Publishing Course at your own rate and pace, when it convenient, from anywhere you have online access. I wish I had had this course when I started. I would have made many thousands more dollars, had even more books published and written, and avoided myself costly errors. It’s a bit like having a friend in the publishing industry.

If you want to see a book with your name on it and want to set up ongoing sources of passive and residual income, visit:
http://www.getyourbookwritten.com/online-writing-course/

While I was at BEA (Book Expo America, the big author/publisher confab) in LA recently, I met a guy from Germany (Gunnar Siewert) who is part of a cool new website for authors called BookRix (www.bookrix.net). You can use this site (free) to create an online book or article and invite others to view it like a real book, but with enhancements. If you want to develop a following or put a sample of your book on the web to gauge interest, this is a nice resource. It’s sort of a social networking site for authors.