The Author Guy Blog

  27th November 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., and I hope it proves to be a truly wonderful holiday for you and those family and friends you hold near and dear. For me, I’m going to do as I always do and invest a bit of quiet reflection on all the wonderful things for which I am thankful. At the top of the list are the people and opportunities my God has permitted me to cross paths with during my seventy-five trips around the sun. I hope you will do the same, as well. ‘Nough said for this week. Until next week … Vaya con Dios Larry B. Gildersleeve

20th November 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. It was exactly one year and fifty-two consecutive installments ago that I began writing and publishing a blog at the encouragement of my wonderful marketing guru out in the high desert of Oregon – R.J. McHatton. I write the words and he works his distribution magic. I had resisted this endeavor for several years for a couple of what I felt were very valid reasons. First, I didn’t know if I had enough worthwhile to say to publish a weekly blog. And, to be completely honest, that thought still nags at me from time to time. And second, like the millions upon millions of books a reader has available for purchase on Amazon, I knew there were likely 10s of 1,000s of blogs and podcast already clogging up the virtual world and growing in number daily. Yet here we are, a year later and still at it each and every week. At times, my content flows easily. At other times, I sit and stare at a blank computer screen hoping and praying for inspiration....

  13th November 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Decades ago, during my climb up corporate ladders on both coasts, I learned a valuable lesson about the difference between those things I could control and those things I might only be able to influence. That same reckoning has found its way into my author journey. I can control what I write. I can elect to accept or reject the advice and guidance of professional editors. I can control with whom I choose to align for publishing. I can make the final selection of a book’s cover. But what is immensely frustrating for almost every author are the things we cannot control. Assuming our work product is quality, and I truly believe mine is, we cannot control outcomes. We cannot control if an agent even responds to an inquiry, let alone agrees to representation. We can labor long and hard crafting and executing marketing initiatives, but at the end of the day, we have no control if readers will purchase our books. And if a reader purchase...

 6th November 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Writer’s Digest (WD) magazine has been around for eighty-five years and is one of only a handful of publications I trust implicitly in a publishing industry replete with scoundrels, mis-information and disinformation. Sounds a bit like our national political scene, doesn’t it? In the magazine’s current issue can be found a couple of things I felt worth of sharing. The first one is disheartening to authors like me clawing their way in pursuit of a reader following. My research over the past ten years indicated that somewhere between 750,000 and a million books are added to Amazon’s virtual bookshelves – the place where the preponderance of books sales, at least in the U.S., occur. Without quoting a source of the data, WD has now revised this estimate upward by 100% -- to two million new books being added annually by Amazon. WD’s other less-than-good news is that the tradition of mainstream publishing houses sticking with and nurturin...