One Voice, But Thousands Participate

“Who wouldn’t like doing a book talk while still being able to hang out in your living room?” says A.J. Jacobs, author of Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection—a man who knows how to work a crowd without interrupting a daily routine. He once answered fans’ questions while walking on a treadmill. “Sitting is terrible for you,” he says. “Sitting is the new smoking.”

Shindig, a New York City-based startup that produces video chat events augmented by cross-media content, enabled Jacobs to remain a stand-up guy in his readers’ eyes. And at ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: How Kristina Ellis Published Her Passion

Many people equate the word “scholar” with genius. Frankly, I think a lot of people were surprised to see me win over $500,000 in scholarships and go on to a Top 20 university. After all, I was the outcast in high school—I was the one they spit on as I walked by; I was the one they spread ugly rumors about; I was the one they bullied. I was not a perfect student with perfect test scores, either. But I was determined to have a better future. With a lot of hard work and a solid strategy, I ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: Publishing an E-book? There’s an App for That!

With e-books estimated to now be comprising almost one-fourth of all book sales, just about every publishing house, writer and aspiring writer is considering their e-book publication options.

Though I’ve had 10 works of fiction and non-fiction published, the task of bringing my most recent book into the digital age seemed like a daunting challenge. Our non-profit The Nobelity Project had just published a coffee table book that expanded the story of my film Building Hope. The movie is a SXSW award winner, which tells the story of our partnership to build the first high school in a rural ...

Read the full post >

First Daughter Turns First-Time Self-Publisher

As the author of eight previous titles–under such imprints as HarperCollins, Plume and Putnam–Patti Davis (The Way I See It, The Long Goodbye) has a notable track record in publishing. Yet, for the past 12 years even she, the daughter of the 40th President of the United States, has struggled to get her latest book, Till Human Voices Wake Us, to the reading public.

“Fiction is hard to get published these days. But fiction was always hard for me to get published,” Davis confesses from her home in Santa Monica. She wields the same light voice and unpredictable ...

Read the full post >

Publishing His Generation’s Story, Himself

What do you call a man who has written episodes of beloved television shows, such as The Jeffersons, M.A.S.H., Cheers, The Simpsons, Frasier, as well as created his own sitcom and written a big studio comedy starring Tom Hanks?

The answer: successful. You may have never heard of him—and he might self-deprecatingly disagree—but Ken Levine is an extremely successful writer and one who has been more than happy to use the benefits of self-publishing to his advantage.

Growing up in Los Angeles during the '60s, Levine got his start writing news briefs for local radio ...

Read the full post >

Martyr Maker, Self-Starter

“Jesus’ death wasn’t the worst of the persecution of the Martyrs. The greater and even lesser known Apostles died equally horrible deaths,” writes Eriq La Salle in his debut thriller, Laws of Depravity, which Kirkus calls “a delightfully twisting roller-coaster ride through light, dark and the shades in between,” in a starred review.

These killings—crucifixions, beheadings, flayings—are mirrored in the crime scene photos of the more than 30 victims, all clergymen, of the “Martyr Maker.” They were also the initial inspiration for La Salle, a successful actor and director, to assume the role as novelist and take ...

Read the full post >

The State of Indie Publishing

The flurry of articles and blog posts about David Mamet’s decision to self-publish Three Stories, a novella and two short stories, and the news that Britain’s Folio prize is open to indie writers, offer a quick bead on self-publishing: Well-known authors still cite control as their reason to publish independently; the number of indie books continues to explode (in an inverse proportion to their discoverability); and any remaining traces of stigma are waning.

Mamet told the New York Times, “Basically I am doing this because I am a curmudgeon.” He also voiced a common complaint among authors: “[P ...

Read the full post >

Pushing the Envelope

General Merrill A. McPeak came of age with the Jet Era. His life in flight parallels the formative years of the U.S. Air Force. Born in 1936, three years before the first flight of Germany’s experimental He-178 and a decade before the onset of the Cold War, McPeak was 23 when he first reached Mach speed in an F-104, the same year Ho Chi Minh declared “a people’s war to reunite Vietnam” and the Air Force experienced “a renaissance in fighter aviation.”

Hangar Flying, McPeak’s debut memoir, takes its name from the expression airmen use for ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: From Blog to Best Seller

The last thing I was thinking about was writing a book. True, I had always written—news for radio, reports and reviews for magazines and articles for journals.  In fact that very day, September 7, 2006, I was meant to deliver a lecture at a huge international conference in the North of England about new ways of writing for radio.

But that life came to an end the second two nervous-looking police officers tracked me down at my hotel. They told me that my wife had been killed in a car crash and that our four-year-old son was very near ...

Read the full post >

Encompassing All Tastes

More than 400 writers spoke about their new books at the 18^th Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, held last weekend at the University of Southern California campus. Free to the public, the Festival of Books is one of the most respected and prestigious big book festivals in America.

It also has more access to stars who have new books to promote than most book festivals do. Paul Anka, Brian Boitano, Carol Burnett, “Iron Chef” Alex Guarnaschelli, Demetri Martin, Debbie Reynolds, Molly Ringwald, Tom Sizemore and Nia Vardalos all talked about their new books at the festival. The L ...

Read the full post >

World Conquerors, Self-Publishers

Ryan and Colin Pyle, whose full-throttle travelogue debut The Middle Kingdom Ride details their circumnavigation of China on motorcycles, grew up in and around Toronto. Children of divorce, Ryan spent his formative years with their father, while Colin remained with their mother. Although they were only three years apart and, at one point, fellow students in the same high school, they were never fully fraternal. They were further separated by Ryan’s decision to relocate to China, where he met his wife, Jasmine, started a family and pursued a self-taught career in photojournalism, shooting images of his adoptive homeland for ...

Read the full post >

Robert Frank's The Americans

It’s a commonplace of anthropology that it often takes an outsider to show a group of insiders what it’s up to. One of the best books I know concerning Catholic pilgrimage in Europe, for instance, was written by a Jewish scholar from Brooklyn. One of the most compelling books ever written about the Arab world was written by a shy young man from the minor Irish nobility. An Italian Jesuit penetrated the mysteries of early modern China. And so on, all pointing to the fact that sometimes we need the Other to show us just how otherly we ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: Social Media Maven Nisa Burns’ Success Story

Even though I never dreamed in a million years that I would become a professional chef—or a cookbook author—my love of food goes way back, to a very young age.

When I was a little girl, my grammy used to hand my sister and I a bowl and a spoon, saying “Make whatever you want! If it's good, we'll eat it; if it's gross, we'll throw it down the drain.” This resulted in many failed experiments, of course, but she instilled in me a sense of creativity when it comes to food, and that ...

Read the full post >

Artist of the Floating World

Read the full post >

Back Story: How Ricardo Ainslie Penetrated the Vicious Drug War in Mexico

The first time I crossed the Puente Libre linking El Paso and Ciudad Juárez to begin working on what was to become The Fight to Save Juárez: Life in the Heart of Mexico’s Drug War was March of 2009. I remember feeling a wave of anxiety as I crested the bridge and the Mexican border city came into full view: Juárez had already earned its reputation as the epicenter of Mexico’s drug war and assassinations were averaging 130-140 a month. Within days of my arrival, the Juárez Municipal Police, a force as infamous for ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: Best-seller Andrew E. Kaufman’s Path to Success

I’ve always been a writer. There aren’t many absolutes in my life, but this much I’ve always known. I’m pretty sure I was a writer before I ever knew what the word meant. I feel like it’s in my DNA.

After graduating with a journalism degree, I worked as a television news writer and producer, first at the CBS affiliate in San Diego, and then at a station up in Los Angeles. For a time, I enjoyed it, then gradually, my writing started to feel mechanical, my creativity drained. By the time I finally got ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: Why I Write What I Write

“In the desert I get quiet and I hear things,” I wrote in the introduction to my book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West. “The beating of wings. The scratching of lizard. The whisper of stories that want to be told.”

These stories have all been of a piece, tales of war and peace on the modern and historical frontier, and they have become books that were years in the making. In each of them, two rivers have converged: my long-time affinity for the desert and an identification with those whose voices are not heard ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: Nita Whitaker LaFontaine’s Self-Publishing Success Story

Even though I've written songs for a long time, I never thought I would be an author. But when my husband was diagnosed with lung cancer a few years ago, I started using writing to get through it all. It was then that the seeds of my story were planted.

Like Don, my husband, I've always had a strong voice. I've been a singer for most of my life; he was the famous voice behind the "in a world…" movie trailer catchphrase–as well as thousands more. But while he was in the hospital, it was hard ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: How Best-Seller Hugh Howey Made His Own Luck

I wonder if lottery winners get emails asking for advice on how to win the next one. Do people inquire after their recipes of divination? How many eyes of newt for every swamp bat? What about where they got their numbers? Birth dates or box scores?

Every week, I get a handful of emails from aspiring authors asking for advice. They want to know how I found success with my writing, and I find myself admitting that luck played the biggest part. It feels awkward (if not impossible) to credit my writing ability. Is that because we writers loathe our ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: How Suzanne Venker Stuck With It

The first time I took to the computer to write a book, or to attempt to write a book, I’d quit teaching. I was so disturbed by what I’d witnessed in public schools I started reading voraciously about education. That research, along with my personal experience, ignited a fire that never went out. Though I didn’t know it then, I had become a writer.

Sadly, I never finished that book. My marriage at the time had taken a nosedive, and my head just wasn’t in it. By the time I took to the computer again, I ...

Read the full post >