There's a distinctly rebellious air about the Muse and the Marketplace Conference this year. Come April 6-8 at Boston's Park Plaza, #Muse18 presenters will be letting loose on the writing rules that have held our manuscripts hostage for far too long. To kick off the conversation ahead of the Muse weekend, this year's Muse series explores the writing, publishing, and workshop rules, conventions, and accepted norms that authors, agents, and editors at the Muse love to hate—and why they'd love to see them broken. Some presenters will also offer their own rules or conventions that they want to see adopted in writing …

Last month Facebook implemented new changes in their ever-changing algorithm, this time with the intention to counteract a few things: unhealthy Facebook addiction and ongoing problems with Russian influencers, both brought on by passive consumption of material. Plus a whole slew of studies have shown that users who spend time on Facebook often leave a session feeling worse than when they started. One study, from Harvard Business Review, may have been one of the deciding factors in Facebook deciding to make the changes it did:

Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, …

It's a new year and what better time to think about how you can do things differently when it comes to marketing your book online. These eighteen tips will help you put your best foot forward, right from the beginning. 

1. Converse more with your audience. Too many authors push material at their audience without any real engagement

By Katrin Schumann

I write a lot about writers’ insecurities because for 99.9 percent of us, fear lurks behind the brave faces we put on. Depending on where we are in our careers, we may all be afraid of different types of failures, but these deep-seated anxieties rarely go away completely.

Most artists learn to live with fear—and some learn to use it to drive toward better work. I might even dare to say that if you don’t experience doubt or fear, you should be worried. Overconfidence usually doesn’t serve writers well.

By Katrin Schumann

Media marketing experts agree that maintaining a robust newsletter is one of the best ways for an author to build a core audience--a group of people who will be more interested and committed to you and your work than, say, that stranger lurking on twitter or the random people liking your Instagram shots.