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double digit sales growth month by month over the last year.

Imagine for a moment what it would feel like if people walked into your company and used the lobby to call your competitors and buy their products. That’s standard consumer behavior in a bookstore.

To truly compete, he would also have to solve consumer’s expectations for instant gratification and delivery.

The skill is copywriting.

A query letter is not a straightforward description of your work. It’s a sales letter. It should be persuasive and seduce the agent into requesting your work.

And this is why writers struggle with queries, because they can’t bridge the gap between writing to entertain (or inform or inspire) and writing to persuade. It’s a different mindset, and it requires an ability to look at one’s work as a product that has a selling point.

Unless bookstores can not only acknowledge their role as beacons of culture, but really embrace that role and market themselves as such—as long as they try in vain to compete with one of the world’s largest retailers at its own game—they will slowly lose ground as they steadily morph into increasingly bizarre hybrids of book-music stores, bookstore-cafes, and bookstore–tapas restaurants, until they simply become businesses that sell the latest quirky breakout novel on the side to customers who’d rather pay $15 for a sandwich and a cup of coffee than for a book.

Here in the Boston area, two bookstores have managed to not only survive but thrive: the Harvard Bookstore (not affiliated with Harvard University) in Cambridge and Brookline Booksmith in Brookline.

they also sell a great selection of used titles at lower prices.

Although children sometimes read picture books by themselves, most of the dearest picture book experiences arise from an activity shared between parent and child. The parent is an actor, performing for the child; the two are teammates as they jointly explore illustrations.

moving a work that relies heavily on visual and spatial elements from one medium to another is extremely hard to do well.

Publishers must commission some digital-only picture books to explore what the creative possibilities are when print is not the starting point.

EBooks accounted for 6.4% of all publishing in 2010, according to the American Association of Publishers, and 114 million electronic books were sold last year.

EBook lending is growing at a fast pace at the New York Public Library. The number of downloads of electronic books on the library's website grew by 81% in the last 12 months

why would someone pay for an eBook if they can download it free from a library's website?

In the United States we’ve developed a concept for these books that relies on the subtle interplay between text and art—a trapeze act, as it were, between writer and artist.

I was shocked to see how few picture books made the new hardcover best-seller list, aside from Jane O’Connor’s “Fancy Nancy” books and titles such as Lane Smith’s It’s a Book. Looking at the list, it’s easy to understand the pressures on editors who love to create picture books. Any bottom-line-driven publishing executive looking at what’s selling in America would order them to hunt for more werewolves, zombies, and vampires.

So possibly the problem isn’t with the genre itself, but what’s happened to it.

color represents the core of merchandise

presenting colors to the reader

bette

I'm not talking about throwing in the towel on writing.

if a writer is pursuing publication with the goal of making money, they're going to find themselves sorely disappointed.

hose who are pursuing publication for the money are probably better off getting a job at Walmart for a much steadier and reliable income.

the nine independent publishers who finally took a stand: Abrams Books, Chronicle Books, Grove/Atlantic Inc. Chicago Review Press, Inc, New Directions Publishing Corp., W.W. Norton & Company, Perseus Books Group (where I work), the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, and Workman Publishing.

the independent publishers asserted that, “in aggregate, according to market data published by Nielsen BookScan the independents accounted for approximately 49 percent of total trade book sales nationwide in 2011.” A significant portion of those sales were through Amazon, which is why their decision to challenge the settlement and incur the possible wrath of this retailing giant is cou rageous.

If the agency model is effectively banned, Amazon will have the ability to price whole categories of e-books below cost in a way that is likely to drive out competition from other less deep-pocketed booksellers as well as brick and mortar booksellers.

Don’t worry about making word counts each day.

writing in a notebook instead of a word processor

a weekly writing day/coffee with a friend.

A big part of that control stems from Amazon’s ownership of the Kindle, the leading e-book reader, and that books bought for the device have DRM built in. Stross argues that this effectively locks many e-book buyers into the device, since it’s virtually impossible to read Kindle books on other devices

Publishers — and some authors, especially those who control the Authors Guild, which has fought every attempt by Google and others to open up the book market — have been so obsessed with piracy and locking down their products that they have allowed Amazon to take control of their fate

even if you take advantage of Amazon’s self-publishing options to avoid having to get a traditional publishing deal, you’ve really just exchanged one corporate overlord for another.

Many editors of literary journals don’t want work that has been published anywhere—even online. Even on a blog. Even on Facebook.

lit mag editors will likely refuse to consider the individual works for publication, citing the fact that they were previously published.

Brilliant website design and why it’s so important for authors. James mentions some of her favorite authors who have ugly and terrible websites. BUT if the author is established, it doesn’t matter. New authors don’t have this luxury. We have to stand out in the market. We have competition. The author website is a way to connect. It’s critical to make a good impression and a personal connection. You can only do this through your web presence and social media. Bring them back to reading your work, so they will read your books, enjoy them and tell their friends. Chris Guillebeau, author of the recent $100 Startup tells how it was easy for him to get a book deal as he had an established platform online. Read more in James’ guest article - Is your website hurting your writing?

A bad choice of colors can kill first impressions.

A mystery might be greys and blacks, whereas a go-getting kickass non-fiction book might be red and modern white.