I shared the disillusionment that comes from watching your Amazon sales rank ebb and flow, then ebb again. I'd also tasted the same bittersweetness of the mixed review.

I'm not talking here about the mechanics of writing, though craftsmanship is important. Like a clock, a novel has many moving parts--pace, momentum, tension, plot, characterization, story arc, character arcs--and they all need to work perfectly together.

What is it like to finish a novel? The first time you do it, you feel utter euphoria, and you should. Unfortunately, what follows isn't always instant acceptance by an agent, an editor, or even your beta readers and friends.

Where are book lovers gathering these days with less and less bookstores around? And where will they gather in years to come as technology continues to change the way we live?

When we first met Virginia Pye three years ago, she'd been writing and rewriting a novel for a very long time.

If you are a female author, you are much more likely to get a package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality. We're the high fructose corn syrup of literature, even when our products are the same.

After publishing 17 books traditionally -- from Knopf to Penguin to W.W. Norton -- I decided to explore what my New York literary agent calls "the great experiment" of indie publication. Even for a technophile, indie publishing was a high learning curve.

We watched as he built this strange, beautiful community of lunatics and dreamers who, every November, write a 50,000 word book in 30 days. NaNoWriMo, as it's called, now has hundreds of thousands of participants all over the world, writing writing writing.

Post-Fifty Shades, the new publishing paradigm is clear: do it well yourself, and then have a traditional publisher do it better.

These six steps will help you to crystalize your needs, your hopes, and your dreams, and give you the tools to help you achieve them.

Barnes & Noble is fighting the good fight, but it looks like it may be going down big time.

You're thinking of taking that leap, where you can sit calmly with your cup of tea, look out your writer's window, and craft one beautiful sentence after another. Well, here are some things to bear in mind before you do.

"The Curious Incidence of Dogs in Publishing" draws a series of conclusions ranging from the speculative and unsupported to the downright sexist -- although I will give credit for having found new and inventive ways of hammering the old "women with cats haz the sads!" canard.

In honor of women's history month and to celebrate the paperback publication of The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R., I arranged an interview with Eugénie R. herself (heretofore known only as my fictional character) to find out how this 19th century woman feels about our 21st century world.

The current dispute between the book retailer Barnes & Noble and the publisher Simon & Schuster has caused much handwringing and worry. But the dispute is one that has visited all changing industries fighting a rear-guard action against newer, more visionary competition.

Although vending machines have long been considered acceptable for newspapers, they've never really caught on where books are concerned.

We first met Caroline Leavitt at the Miami Book Festival. Not only is she an incredibly accomplished novelist, she's also a crackerjack human being. So we decided to take a little peek into her world and see what makes Caroline Leavitt tick.

Here's an excerpt from Episode 157, my conversation with Ayana Mathis, author of the bestselling novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. It was hand-selected by Oprah Winfrey as an official pick of Oprah's Book Club 2.0.

Here's an excerpt from Episode 155, my conversation with Lenore Zion, an author who also works as a sex therapist.