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Book publishers have long attested that short story collections don’t sell; Wolf would respond they’re not trying hard enough. “Traditional publishers don’t do a lot of marketing for the midlist authors today,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s that they’re too busy trying to survive or they don’t have the budget.”

“I’m organizing and coordinating all the different authors and having them all communicate to their specific niches and audiences. I’m driving them to a common landing page and we created a book blog. We’re leveraging social media and talking to the press.”

it’s true that, with limited marketing budgets, publishers often have to focus on the big titles, and smaller authors must pick up a lot of the marketing work themselves for a shot at success.

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.

What are those authors doing in those precious first pages? In every book I looked at they were introducing me to a character so unique and compelling that I cared about what happened when the high stakes action came into play a few pages later. They opened not with a bang but with a voice—a choice well worth emulating. 

Rosanne Parry is teaching "Vampire-Free Fiction: Writing Real-World Novels for Young Readers"

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 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.

[We want stories that are] adventure-oriented, certainly, but hopefully with an emphasis on some literary or artistic merit, something to catch the eye and let people know that it’s a little bit different from other genre work they’ve seen.

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?