Essays

I am seeing a trend among the authors that I have talked with over the last eighteen months. Self-publishing has gone from an interesting option to a preferred alternative. There is nothing new about self-publishing being a part of the conversation. For the last ten years, bringing your own book into the world has gotten […]

Jack always called himself a merchant. He’d owned and operated a record store that many still herald as the best music store Milwaukee ever had. After a decade, he closed the store and made ends meet as a Jack of all trades, working a variety of jobs.  That ended when David Schwartz hired him to […]

Bard Press Essay #17July 15, 2021 Welcome to the 2021 Mid-Year Review! There are all sorts of interesting things to highlight in the world of book publishing and business books as we reach the half-way point of 2021. Let’s jump right in! 1. Big Growth in Book Market Book publishing is classically a market of […]

Bard Press Essay #16July 8, 2021 Becky Robinson, from Weaving Influence, interviewed me recently for her podcast. The episode was released last week and I think it turned out pretty well. We covered a number of topics that I have written about here in the last several months. Here are the set of topics we […]

Bard Press Essay #15June 10, 2021 In this last week, I’ve been reading two books on mindfulness, and from my work-a-day world of book publishing, it is interesting to look at the approaches the authors made in the opening to their books and what those words say about the rest of the book. Fully Present […]

Bard Press Essay #14May 28, 2021 When you think about the book you are writing, see if there is a way to boil down to one word. Sometimes, that one word is the subject of the book. This has been a popular method to naming non-fiction books in recent years—Quiet, Switch, Drive, Blink, Peak, Rework, […]

When an author writes the proposal for their book, and again, after they finish the manuscript, there is a big focus on the question: What’s the marketing plan for the book? This set of activities is an incredibly important component of launching a book and there are many different tactics that one can employ. You […]

Bard Press Essay #12May 7, 2021 1. When I talk to authors about their projects, they always want me to share my best ideas for marketing. “What are the three best things I can do to successfully launch my book?” I normally rattled off three answers, techniques that I have seen work over the years. […]

Bard Press Essay #11April 21, 2021 So… 10,000 copies sold in the first year is your new goal. So, how do you do it? Let’s build a model for how to think about that. The Long Term Book Launch Model There are three phases to the long-term book launch: Fuel Launch  Accelerate In the fueling […]

Welcome new readers! If you would like to subscribe to the Bard Press Essays, you can do that here. Bard Press Essays #10April 14, 2021 1. Launching a book is difficult and book launches are getting more difficult. For as long as I have worked in publishing, I have wondered what makes some books work […]