Laurel is a member of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), has various advanced degrees, and a tendency to smuggle vegetables into storylines.
Your X-Wing’s Dashboard To prevent crash landings, get familiar with your X-wing's dashboard—your money decision tools—before launch. Just like Luke Skywalker, you have a speedometer, a gas gauge, and an oil pressure gauge. “Your net income statement is like the speedometer … to let you know...
Six Marketing Features that Make the Marketing Service Worth Exploring As an indie publisher, you have likely built up a hoard of shiny, eye-catching ideas about how to get the word out about your books over the course of your author journey. Unfortunately, the sheer number of opportunities may be...
A Different Way for Indie Authors to Approach Publisher Events Although many international book fairs, such as Bologna, London, or Frankfurt book fairs, have introduced author tracks or highlighted best-selling authors for prestigious readings in recent years, the primary players at these fairs are, and have been from the beginning,...
Marketing Lessons Children’s Book Authors Can Learn from the 2024 Olympic Games Laurel Decher France is making its final preparations for the Olympic Games next month. Stadiums have been erected around famous sites in Paris, including the Eiffel Tower and the Palace of Versailles, so that historic shots of...
The Many Publishing Lives of Skye MacKinnon Never mind that Skye MacKinnon shares her Scotch heritage, teaching ability, and calm courage in the face of a changing world with J.K. Rowling’s Professor McGonagall. Or that MacKinnon’s cat never appeared during our interview, so spectacle-shaped markings around the...
For Creatives, Doing ‘Nothing’ Can Be Essential to the Process Can you tell the difference between wasting time and giving an idea space to develop? Creativity coach and poet Mark McGuinness has a simple rule of thumb. “Procrastination happens before hard work,” he writes in his book Productivity for Creative...
