Many years ago I remember walking into Book Expo America in Chicago and seeing Amazon banners hanging from every girder. What was an Amazon? Within a few years, Amazon was a household word. To consumers it was an online e bookstore. To investors it was a giant black hole where tens of millions of dollars were dumped with no return on investment.

How do you get journalists to write articles about you? In the past year, I’ve been featured in over 100 magazines and newspapers worldwide (including many of the biggies, from The New York Times to Fortune Magazine). How do you get that kind of attention for your book or business? Here are my top techniques

Have you ever listened to a forecaster’s prediction of pleasant weather and then made plans around that forecast? You may have been dismayed when it rained instead. But that is the nature of a forecast — it is simply a person’s best guess of what might happen in the future. The metaphor for publishers is that we should calculate a forecast that is a possibility, not a pronouncement of some definite, distant occurrence.

More people today than ever before are becoming authors. Unfortunately, most of them fail in their quest for success. According to a Jenkins Group survey, seventy percent of books published in this country do not make a profit. The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) backs this up. Their statistics show that in 2004, over seventy-six percent of all titles sold fewer than 100 copies. Why are so many authors failing?

A blurb is the book description you find on the back of a book or online to describe a book’s contents. Most run several paragraphs, but some publishers want them shorter or in a special format so be sure to check with your publisher’s guidelines before you begin work.