Authors need all the help they can get—what with shoddy treatment from publishers and the massive number of books being produced—they can definitely use your help 🙂

I’m reproducing, with the author’s permission, an article from Lindsay Buroker‘s site.

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As authors, we spend a lot of time trying to promote our books. Our biggest obstacle is obscurity because there are a lot of books out there. No, really. A lot.

We like to think that good stories are all it takes to make it (in author terms “make it” usually means “become well known enough and sell enough books that I can quit my day job and write for a living”), but you can doubtlessly think of mediocre books that are selling bazillions of copies and authors you love who never make it out of the “mid-list” category.

Sometimes it’s just the author (or publishing house)…

The other day a blog I follow asked the question “What literary character would you like to have a beer with?” Naturally, I thought about it, and I came up with a host of people that I would love to hang out with, drink a beer with, and just sit around swapping stories with – if these guys actually existed of course.

When trying to weed my list down to a manageable ten, I couldn’t get there. I did find a way to get to eleven, but even then, I found that there were some fantasy and science fiction characters that just had to be put together, because I could not imagine handing a beer to one without the other being there waiting for theirs, so you will notice that in my list there are groups of people as well as individuals. Perhaps this is cheating, but it is my…