Old horror writer back from the dead…
In my first two posts of this three-part series, I showed you how to spot scams and explained why indie authors are such attractive targets for fraud. Now let’s talk about what you should actually be doing instead: the legitimate, bootstrap book marketing approaches that work when you’re willing to invest time instead of money. … Read more
In my last post on indie author scams, I dissected a sophisticated email that fooled me for several seconds—a fake Macmillan representative offering to help the memoir I wrote about my late wife reach more readers. Today I want to step back and look at the bigger picture: why indie authors like us are such … Read more
I recently received a fake book marketing email that made my 77-year-old heart skip a beat for about five seconds. Someone from Macmillan Publishers—one of the Big Five traditional publishing houses—had apparently read my memoir Ellen: A Memoir of Love, Life, and Grief and wanted to help me reach more grieving readers. On initial quick … Read more
Five years writing a grief memoir… That’s how long I spent writing about my life with Ellen, my wife of 47 years who died on Thanksgiving Day 2019. Five years of wrestling with memories, confronting regrets, trying to honor a complicated woman and an even more complicated marriage. Five years of starting over, deleting thousands … Read more
Last week I wrote about why memoir is having a moment in 2025 and why your story matters. Today I want to get practical and tell you how to write a memoir. How do you actually take a lifetime of memories and turn them into a coherent story that readers will want to finish? I … Read more
I’ve been watching something interesting happen in the publishing world regarding memoir writing in 20205, and I’ll be honest: it surprised the tar out of me. Memoirs are everywhere. Not just the celebrity tell-alls you’d expect (though yeah, those too), but regular people writing about their regular lives. And here’s the kicker: readers are eating … Read more
In my first two posts, I talked about what documentary fiction is and how structure shapes meaning. Now let’s get completely practical and discuss writing documentary fictions, the tools that help, and the ethical responsibilities you can’t dodge. Because here’s what I wish someone had told me before I started The Healing Physicians: documentary fiction … Read more
In my last post, we wrote about what documentary fiction is and why it matters. Today I want to get practical about the craft itself—specifically, how you build a documentary fiction structure that makes verifiable facts feel like inevitable story. Because here’s what nobody tells you when you start writing documentary fiction: it’s not just … Read more
You know that moment when you’re reading a history book and you think, “This is fascinating, but I’m falling asleep”? And then you pick up a novel and think, “This is gripping, but is any of it true?” I’ve been wrestling with this problem for months while working on The Healing Physicians—a project that tracked … Read more
In my last post, I gave you the brutal truth about freelance writing in the age of AI. Entry-level opportunities are vanishing, the market’s brutal for generalists, and companies want human quality at AI prices. Now let’s talk about what you can actually do about it. I’m not going to promise this will be easy. … Read more