A tool by Tin House Press Every novelist has had the thought at least once, usually while describing their book to someone at a party: this would make a good film. And then the thought dies there, because the distance between a finished novel and a screenplay a producer will read is about four months …
A phrase that keeps surfacing across industry analysis this year is “direct-to-reader” — not as a marketing tactic, but as a structural strategy independent authors and small presses are increasingly building their entire operation around. It’s worth understanding what this actually means, because it’s a meaningfully different posture than the “post on social media and …
Labor organizing has become one of the more consequential, less-discussed stories in trade publishing this year, and it’s worth understanding — not because it directly changes how any individual author writes or submits a book, but because it says something real about the working conditions inside the houses authors are trying to get published by. …
Audiobooks have gone from a publishing side category to arguably the format shaping the industry’s near-term future, and the growth numbers are striking enough that they’re worth taking seriously even from analysts who tend toward caution. Estimates vary across research firms, but the direction is consistent: multiple market analyses place the global audiobook market somewhere …
Series are one of the most reliable structures in self-publishing — readers who finish book one and like it will often buy books two and three in the same session, which is a dynamic standalone books simply can’t replicate. But writing a successful series involves planning decisions that are easy to get wrong on book …
“Hook” gets thrown around so often in publishing advice that it’s started to mean everything and nothing. Agents want a strong hook. Producers want a strong hook. Readers, apparently, respond to a strong hook. But what actually is one, mechanically? After years of assessing manuscripts for exactly this quality, here’s the breakdown. A Hook Is …
If you’ve felt like the AI-and-copyright story keeps shifting under your feet, that’s because it genuinely has been — this has become the single most consequential legal fight in publishing, and the landscape has changed meaningfully even in just the past few months. Here’s where things actually stand, and what it means if you’re an …
Query letters get more conflicting advice than almost any other document in publishing. Some of it is outdated. Some of it is genre-specific advice being applied universally. And some of it is just wrong. Here’s what actually holds up, based on what consistently separates a query that gets a request for pages from one that …
Every author dreams the same daydream at some point: their book, on a screen, with a score and a cast and a trailer. Most never act on it. A few reach out to ask what it would actually take. This article is for that second group. Film and TV producers option books constantly, but they …
The math behind royalties is simple. The strategy behind pricing is harder. Pricing a book feels like it should be straightforward. It isn’t. The price you choose affects not just your per-unit earnings but your discoverability, your perceived quality, your eligibility for promotional programs, and how readers categorize your work before they’ve read a word …
