The Hartsock Agency

I’m at BEA and it’s wonderful. The only downside is that my modem in my laptop crashed so I’m writing this from the press room itself!
So here’s a wrap up so far:
1. Taught two classes on Advanced Blogging and Web 2.0 for PMA’s Publishing University. This was a wonderful experience and lots of authors/publishers are [...]

I’m at Book Expo America and have spent the past two days being surrounded by amazing, insightful and fantastic folks through the PMA University, where I was lucky enough to teach two classes this year. The classes were Advanced Blogging and Web 2.0.
Both of them went really well and there are so many independent publishers [...]

Great NPR brief with the Dude (if you don’t know who the Dude is, I can’t really help you.) This is part of NPR’s series on memorable characters. You can learn if you listen and either way the Dude abides.

I’m leaving on a jet plane to head out tomorrow morning to Book Expo America. It’s so exciting at the Expo and one can hardly recover from the heady joy of walking through aisles and aisles of brand new shiny brilliant books. Love it!
Before I go, I must urge a quick fiction pick for all [...]

This is a superb interview about the book world with one of the best and most respected publishers in the field, Steve Piersanti, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. I’m a giant fan of Steve and his publishing house and Curt Rosengren’s podcast with him is insightful and full of great ideas.

I got this over the weekend from a Facebook connection who is an author. It’s not an author I’ve done work for or am going to do work for. I’m deleting the author’s name because I don’t want to completely out the author.
I do feel compelled though to advise against what this author is doing [...]

This is disappointing news and what will be more interesting is to see long-term why this decision was made. Microsoft is ending its LiveSearch Publishing Program.
In books and publishing right now there is so much focus on Web 2.0 but I think it’s very important for authors to understand that you need to balance [...]