No author website would be complete without books, though how and where to place them is the question. As with so much in life, the key is to break the connection between your identity and your activities. Just as your author persona is not you, neither are your books.

If you’re just starting out in your writing career, you might wonder how the whole agent thing works. Getting a literary agent often seems just as challenging as getting published, and you can’t undersell the importance of this decision and the relationship that results. Signing with an agent is a legal and financial relationship that shouldn’t be undertaken lightly, but the difficulty in securing an agent sometimes makes writers feel like they have zero power in the dynamic.

When a visitor lands on your website, you’ve got one chance to get them to take an action, or you might never see them again. In this sense, your entire website can be viewed as a delivery mechanism for calls-to-action, in much the same way a museum is a delivery mechanism for inspiration.

A website is 80% about the content, about creating, organizing, and presenting the many details of your author career. But to dismiss the remaining 20% of your site—the style—as unimportant would be a tragic mistake.

Separated by five thousand miles, the amusement parks in Santa Monica and in Asbury Park are basically identical—but Disney World is different. Why? Because Disney World has a brand.

Here’s where things get tricky.

Most writers will agree that writing a book is not inherently an easy thing to do. However, if you ask most published authors, especially self-published, they will typically tell you that they prefer the struggles of writing a book to the myriad complications and roadblocks when it comes to publishing and marketing.

Yes, We Can Talk About Money Now.

If you’ve dreamed of being a successful author, you’ve likely realized that at some point, you actually need to get paid.

When you’re launching a writing career and struggling to get your first work published, it often seems like the worst part of the writing business is rejection—those dry, pitiless notes and emails that say your book “isn’t what we’re looking for” or “was interesting but ultimately didn’t engage us.” Rejection is a grind, and can really wear on you.

Writing is one of the most “if you know, you know” careers in the modern world. But the only people who truly know what it’s like to have a writing career are the people who have them.

I’ve always been a bit of a Grinch. The more people want me to be excited about the holidays, the more hostile I tend to become, which has led to a steep decline in party invitations in my life. As it turns out, being the Grinchy curmudgeon who likes to make 10-minute speeches about the commercialization of the holidays does not make you popular, which is information I could have used twenty years ago.