Trust me, I did not set out to establish three pen names and, for the record, I do not recommend it as a career strategy. The idea back at the start was that I would stick with the name that proved most successful.
These days it seems like any idiot with a laptop computer can churn out a business book and make a few bucks. That's certainly what I'm hoping. It would be a real letdown if the trend changed before this masterpiece goes to print.
My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.
My e-books sales have overtaken everything else, so I think all the marketing has become very much driven by the author now because of social media.
Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.
Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing.
I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.
Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
Thanks to social media like Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads, I can easily reach out to so many people. Being a writer gives me the added bonus of a targeted audience: readers, who enjoy targeted 'prizes' for participation in fundraisers - books and other neat promo items.
I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.
A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.
Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.
I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.
When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.
The only time I was ever approached to write a book was when I was most famous.
I knew people were independently publishing, and I buy books on Amazon. I began seriously considering it when Amanda Hocking was in the news about her self-publishing success.
Don't do a hard sell or try to tell the agent that you're going to be a bestseller or the next John Grisham. This goes down very badly. If your work is good, then they are skilled enough to know this within a few pages.
Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.
Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
In 2006, I published my first novel, 'In the Country of Men.' The publication of the book gave me a bigger platform to speak about my father's abduction and Libya's human-rights record.
I know there's a lot of talk about self-publishing right now. Everyone's giddy with the possibilities. And I'll admit that it looks good on paper: sell your books directly and keep a bigger chunk of the profit for yourself. No rejection letters. No hassle with agents. Sounds good, right?
Most fledgling and mid-list writers are lucky to be offered a 4-figure sum and are not only expected to deliver copy that needs minimal editing but also take an active part in marketing and publicizing their work.
I don't have a publisher yet, so I'm not in the process of that next stage and I don't know what that's going to look like. So I feel like I finished stage one [with my book].
Writing a good query letter has very little to do with writing a good novel. But if you can't write the one, it makes it really hard to get the other published.
If a traditional publisher offered me a quarter of a million dollars for a novel, I'd consider it. But anything less than that, I'm sure I can do better on my own.
