Helping to Change the World…Word by Word
The Steve Laube Agency
Helping to Change the World Word by Word
Did you know we lost 10 letters from the English alphabet?
Amaze your friends with today’s video. Better yet, write an entire sentence using these old letters and feel medieval and scholastic at the same time.
Here is my attempt:
Enjoy.
One of the most challenging aspects of being successful in nonfiction is choosing a topic general enough to interest a broad swath of readers, but unique enough to make them think of the question in a new way so they’ll want to buy your book. Take decluttering. I follow at least three decluttering blogs. My daughter says, “How about just cleaning instead of reading about it? Then you’d get it …
Winston Churchill has been credited with the saying, “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” That may be nowhere truer than in publishing, and certainly in Christian publishing. The right attitude can make or break a writer. And the right attitude can take a fair writer to places that a gifted writer with a bad attitude can never go. What kinds of attitudes should a writer have? …
A challenge for book promoters is trying to market to a narrow group of people and discovering they are not easily distinguished one from another. People are born every day and there is no definable space between demographic markets. Generational identifiers are not scientific, but arbitrary for marketing convenience sake. In case you don’t know all the terms: Traditionalists – Born up to 1945 …
Someone called the other day and asked, “If I’ve self-published my book and want you to consider it for representation, should I even bother sending it? Or am I toast?” I answered, “It depends.” [For you regular readers, do you think that should become the motto of the Agency?] The question suggests it is an either/or proposition…determined by a set of rules that cannot be broken. The reality is …
This video is too funny! Wouldn’t it be hilarious if you could program your “Digital Assistant” like this? Oh wait…I think that day might be closer than we can imagine. Meanwhile enjoy this creative satire!
Sometimes I receive submissions with the note, “I want to get this to the editor before fill in the name of the big conference, or before the holiday, or whatever! Does this make sense? I can answer this question right now. The perfect time to submit a manuscript is… Thursday, 4:45 AM local time, in Guam. Seriously, I understand the desire to enhance a submission’s chances by timing it when the …
If I asked you what you considered to be a writer’s best friend, what would you say? Please don’t say “Wikipedia.” My clients would probably reply, “Bob Hostetler.” But that can’t be everyone’s answer. You might consider “a fine fountain pen” or “a blank page in a brand new journal” to be your best friend as a writer. Maybe the thesaurus is your best friend (ally, associate, buddy, companion, …
Today I am going to stick up for the poor, downtrodden multibillion dollar global public corporations behind social media. Blamed for everything from the breakdown of the family to the dissolution of meaningful personal relationships, they are supposedly the reason society is on a virtual brink of collapse. But for authors of books, social media is the simplest and quickest way to create an author …
Last week there were three significant announcements from Apple, Google, and Walmart of interest to all authors. First the three bits of news and then a few observations. Apple Apple announced that their iBooks app is being renamed to simply Books. Accompanying it will be a complete redesign of the reading app, their store, and the addition of an audiobook tab to make it easier for users to access …
