How to Market Your Book

Congratulations on crossing “Print My Book” off of your bucket list! However, the self-publishing community often faces trials and tribulations after the book has been printed. If the first group of printed books did well, but you’re struggling to keep selling them, we’ve got some fresh ideas that anyone can implement, even those with a … Read more

Tricks and Treats

by Jas Faulkner If you’re reading this not long after it was written (October 31st, 2013)  you have probably seen the many reports about an anonymous woman in North Dakota who declared that she was indeed passing out candy, but not to children she deemed “moderately obese”.  They would get letters addressed to their parents … Read more

Marketing Books to Boys

One of the members of a children’s literature listserv send a query to the group.  She explained that she was writing historical fiction and that the setting of her book was the South during the Great Depression.  One of her characters was a teenage boy who was poor, athletic and used reading as his escape. … Read more

BeListed to DeListed

by Jas Faulkner 

why i hate saturn
Kyle Baker’s comic masterpiece, “Why I Hate Saturn” is one of many graphic novels no longer in print.

I have never been a fan of “best of” lists.  It’s not the subjectivity that gets me.   They always seemed so narrow.  The old sci-fi list books and the current crop of internet sites that are completely devoted to lists  seemed blinkered somehow, whether it was the inclusion or exclusion of certain works or publishers or authors  or in the case of the internet lists, the fact that nothing significant seems to have happened before 1995.  The easy assumption would be laziness on the part of the compilers, but I had to wonder if there was more to it than that.

Last week I got my answer.  An industry site I write for asked sent a request for lists of top fifty graphic novels.  My first response was, “Only fifty?”  It took me about thirty minutes to come up with a list of fifty graphic novels that I would recommend as the best of medium.   I started writing brief entries for each one, explaining why I included them.  Happy that I was so far ahead of the October 30th deadline, I took a break and started working on some other projects.

A couple of days later, I bumped into a colleague online and asked her how was her list coming along.

“Not gonna do it,” she said.  She didn’t care if it entailed getting a mention in a reference book, it just wasn’t worth it. “You are aware that every book on your list has to be in print.”

At that, I nodded and yuh-hunhed.  My list was full of titles that had been shortlisted for and sometimes awarded Nebulas, Ignatzes, Inkpots, Kirbys, Eisners, and so on.  It couldn’t be that hard.   Then I started looking up each title.  My list of fifty was reduced to a list of nineteen.  The thing is, I was not picking obscure collections or rarities.  Many of these books were critics’ favorites that made annual best of lists when they were first released.

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Building Upon the Foundations

  Across Time and Space… “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine:  if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy … Read more