Sam Henrie

10 May, 2016

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the First Draft

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:00:45-07:00May 10, 2016|Resources, Writing|Comments Off on The Perfect Is the Enemy of the First Draft

Many writing coaches recommend writing the first draft of a blog post, chapter, or scene as quickly as possible without stopping to rewrite or edit. The idea is once you’ve got that first draft down, however imperfect, you’ll have broken through your writer’s block and procrastination, and accelerated the entire writing process. That’s not how I do it. I rewrite each sentence several times before moving on to the next. I pause to fact check, to look in the thesaurus for the exact right word, to get more coffee, to watch of few minutes of “Better Call Saul”…

Though I knew it would be difficult for me, I decided to try the technique to create the first draft of this article. I started my timer and set about getting four hundred words down in the shortest time possible, without rewriting or editing. My subject: The First Draft. It took me thirteen […]

5 April, 2016

Price your book to make a profit

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:00:53-07:00April 5, 2016|Publishing, Resources|Comments Off on Price your book to make a profit

There’s plenty of discussion about the retail pricing of independently published books, most of it centered on self-publishing book companies setting list prices too high. I get frustrated when industry experts write that these higher prices are a problem, without offering any evidence that this is the case. In the absence of price sensitivity studies, or of testing book sales at different price points, the “experts” are simply offering a guess based on their experience. I suspect that their experience comes from pricing books for the brick-and-mortar bookstore market. What a company like Barnes & Noble suggests for list prices for their stores isn’t necessarily right for a self-published books that will primarily be sold through online bookstores.

The online book sales market is, in fact, such a new market that it is unclear what pricing strategies are most advantageous to book sales.

In the absence of hard data, how should you […]

8 March, 2016

In praise of editing

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:00:58-07:00March 8, 2016|Publishing, Resources, Writing|Comments Off on In praise of editing

Years ago I was reading the bestselling A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (on which the 2015 motion picture of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, is based) and found a typo on one of the first pages. The word the was spelled “th”. How could this be? The book was published by Random House, one of the Big Five! How had all of their copyeditors and proofreaders, not to mention spell checkers, missed it? How had the hundreds of advance copy readers failed to report it?

I told one of the editors here at Wheatmark about my discovery. This editor happened to be a voracious reader. She started circling all the misspellings, typos, or instances of bad grammar that she found in any major publisher’s book she read, and flagging the offending pages with […]

8 February, 2016

Ten Steps to a Finished Book

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:01:09-07:00February 8, 2016|Publishing, Resources, Writing|Comments Off on Ten Steps to a Finished Book

At Wheatmark we’ve worked with thousands of authors, and based on this experience I am proposing this ten-step process for writing your next nonfiction book. This process incorporates blogging in advance of your book’s release, so that you get a head start on building an audience for your book.

1. Make a chapter outline of your book. All you need is enough detail to describe what you are promising to give the reader in each chapter.

2. Get input on your outline from a trusted reader or editor. This should be someone who is a reader of the type of nonfiction book you are writing. Revise the chapter outline based on their input. Repeat as needed.

3. Now that you have a finalized chapter outline, write each chapter as a blog post, immediately posting each chapter on your blog as you finish it. Point all of your followers on social media to each […]

11 January, 2016

The Egg That Hatched The Martian

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:01:14-07:00January 11, 2016|Publishing, Resources, Writing|Comments Off on The Egg That Hatched The Martian

By now many of you have seen the popular science fiction movie released in October, The Martian, starring Matt Damon. I’m sure that many of you have also read the bestselling book of the same name by Andy Weir on which the movie is based. But, I suspect, that many of you don’t know the story of Weir’s journey from aspiring author to publishing phenom.

Weir’s lifelong ambition was to become a published working science fiction author. In the late 1990s and early 2000s he wrote a couple of sci-fi novels and submitted them to multiple agents and publishers. He even took a couple of years off from working as a computer programmer to focus exclusively on his writing career. Unfortunately, he received rejection after rejection from both agents and publishing houses.

Weir went back to work as a programmer, but, undeterred, continued writing, posting his writing on his own blog at […]

12 October, 2015

How big is your audience?

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:10:07-07:00October 12, 2015|Marketing, News, Publishing, Resources|Comments Off on How big is your audience?

A few years ago I had a weekend evening to myself, and decided to go to a play. I found a performance of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘night Mother by Marsha Norman showing at the Tucson Temple of Music and Art.

I arrived very early, so I wasn’t surprised that there was only one other person in the audience, but was surprised when no one else showed up. The play started, and I thought to myself: “Now I am stuck here, even if the performance is terrible. I’m 50% of the audience. I can’t just stand up and walk out.” That turned out not to be a problem. The performance was completely engrossing.

‘night Mother is a two-hour play with only two actors. I can’t even begin to imagine what it took for the actors to sustain the emotional intensity that they exhibited for those two hours, let alone what it took […]

9 October, 2015

Writer’s Block

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:10:19-07:00October 9, 2015|Resources, Writing|Comments Off on Writer’s Block

Hypergraphia is a behavioral disorder I sometimes wish to be stricken with, if only temporarily. People with hypergraphia have an intense and uncontrollable desire to write, and usually churn out page after page, hour upon hour, day after day. Sometimes what they write is chaotic and disorganized, but other times they write The Brothers Karamazov or Alice in Wonderland. (Both Dostoevsky and Carroll are thought to have had hypergraphia.)

I, unfortunately, most often suffer from the opposite condition, writer’s block, sometimes called hypographia. We all know what a serious condition that can be! If left untreated it can lead to the loss of followers, a reduction in the quality and quantity of likes, being an unpublished writer, reduced earnings, and generalized anonymity. Fortunately, there is a lot of help out there. Just type “writer’s block” into your search engine and you will see what I mean. There are […]

26 January, 2015

Tips for Successful Blogging

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:12:55-07:00January 26, 2015|Marketing, Resources, Social Media|Comments Off on Tips for Successful Blogging

As the marketing specialist for Wheatmark, I have the privilege to work alongside many authors as they take their first steps into the unfamiliar world of blogging and social media. For those individuals with little to no experience in this area, this step toward marketing themselves can feel rather daunting and unattainable. This feeling, however, is not unordinary. Maintaining a blog and staying committed to promoting your brand takes a great deal of effort, but having a persistent attitude and an openness to learning will allow you to be more successful in the long run.

I recently stumbled across an article with a list of valuable tips to help you become a successful blogger. Out of the 19 tips provided, here are five that I believe are the most useful:

1. Make sure you have an About page that represents who you are and what you do.
Who you are is entirely unique, […]

30 December, 2014

Near Field Reading

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:13:46-07:00December 30, 2014|News, Publishing|Comments Off on Near Field Reading

It’s the holidays, and no doubt many of you will be out shopping for gifts for your loved ones and friends. By next year’s season you may be paying for your holiday gifts at your favorite retailers using a tap-to-pay app on your phone.

Tap-to-pay apps utilize Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that allows you to pay by holding your phone up to a retailer’s register and tapping a button. With the launch of Apply Pay in October and the card companies mandating all merchants accept NFC payments in 2015, we may have reached the tipping point for tap-to-pay. Near Field Communications seems to be popping up everywhere in my life lately. When I boarded my first ride on Tucson’s new light rail, all I had to do was tap my rail pass to an NFC device to pay for my ride. When I visited my phone carrier to upgrade […]

1 December, 2014

Taking Care of Business

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:15:45-07:00December 1, 2014|News, Publishing|Comments Off on Taking Care of Business

Earlier this year Roberta Grimes called us to order some copies of her books. She is the author of the Letters from Love series and the novel Rich and Famous. She’s also the author of the novel My Thomas: A Novel of Martha Jefferson’s Life, originally published by Doubleday in 1993 and reissued by Wheatmark this year. I answered Roberta’s phone call. “Bookstore, Sam Henrie, how may I help you?” She was surprised that the company president was taking book orders. Roberta said she’d imagined I’d be in my office thinking about the business—conceiving the next killer book marketing strategy, pondering the writing of the great American novel, or planning a leveraged buyout of Random House. But, I was taking book orders.

I like taking book orders. It keeps me in touch with our authors, especially at the times when they release new books, start new marketing campaigns, or hold […]

Sam Henrie

About Sam Henrie