Doris Booth is founder and president of Authorlink.com, the news and information magazine for editors, agents, writers, and readers. She began her journalism career at age 19 writing weddings and obituaries for a local newspaper, a subsidiary of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She eventually became the company's vice president and the award-winning managing editor. Doris amassed numerous journalism awards early in her career. Her newspaper series on U.S. race riots of the late 1960’s was included in the U.S. Congressional Record. In Washington D.C. and Texas she worked as a District publicist for the third most powerful man in government, then U.S. Congressman Olin E. (Tiger) Teague. She was later hired as an investigative reporter by then-Dallas Times Herald Publisher Tom Johnson (later head of the Los Angeles Times). Instead, she turned to advertising and marketing.
After a short stint at a Dallas advertising firm, she opened her own advertising firm, representing Fortune 1000 companies. She produced award-winning video advertising and training pieces. But her first love has always been books and writing.
In 1996, she founded Authorlink.com, ranking among the top 100 best websites for writers. The company also has a literary agency that represents several bestselling authors. Booth has sold projects to St. Martin’s Press, Simon & Schuster, Sterling Press, Berkley Books/Penguin, Farrar Straus Giroux and other dominant houses.
Doris adamantly believes in and supports traditional publishing houses and maintains there is an overwhelming need for curation in the literary world.
However, self-publishing also fills a specific niche. Authorlink‘s production unit has produced more than 200 e-books and print books, using the latest technology.
The challenge for authors today, Doris believes, is in navigating the complex publishing market. One of her primary goals is to provide traditionally-published and self-published authors alike with the resources they need to navigate the publishing process and to get savvier about distribution. Her book, UNLOCKING THE SECRETS OF E-BOOK PUBLISHING, GET YOUR BOOKS INTO EFFECTIVE SALES CHANNELS (WITH OR WITHOUT AMAZON), has been cited by Ingram Spark/Ingram Content Group as “A must-have resource…packed with imperative information for navigating the [sales] channels.”
Insights Into Doris
Doris is a slightly reclusive writer, speaker, editor and entrepreneur who relishes people’s stories. Her favorite place is a secluded get-away house in the East Texas piney woods. She hates traffic, noise, and crowds. She also hates fish and likes pizza and Mexican food. She loves being around other creative people and spending time listening to sounds of the woods from her long porch overlooking the forest.
Reading and writing have been Doris's lifelong interest. The books that appeal to her the most are those with heart, and yes, an intelligent “message.” To catch her eye, the story must have shape. Her favorite writer remains Ernest Hemingway who indeed fathered the modern novel. Doris's favorite contemporary is GREEN ON BLUE by Elliot Ackerman, which gave her more insight into the Afghan War than any other work.
She believes most American writers have forgotten how to tell stories, while Europeans still know how. Somewhere out there in America, excellent writers are waiting to be discovered. Getting readers to notice good writers is the ultimate challenge. Authorlink is passionate about helping them achieve that goal.
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So, you are about to self-publish a book in e-book or print-on-demand format. It seems like a no-brainer to sign an exclusive contract with Amazon Kindle and up goes your book to Amazon’s vast online audience. After all, presumably they own 60 or 70% of the e-book market. This super-rich company has overall product revenues of more than $107 billion and more than 304 million active customer accounts worldwide. But are they playing fair with the average author dreaming of selling a million copies of his or her e-book?
In today’s digital publishing environment, many authors wonder if having a literary agent is at all necessary. The short answer... View Article
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Followers of the "Me Too" movement (or "#MeToo" used in social media) may find Barry Eisner's latest thriller, THE NIGHT TRADE gratifying to see justice done
All well-written stories have a compelling shape. Think of story shape as the underlying form or structure of a piece, often called the story plot. Some writers envision story shape like a pyramid, hourglass, stack of blocks, or a line graph. I like to imagine the tale as a lump of clay which takes on human form and meaning in the hands of a skilled writer.There are nine essential parts of a story:
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The National Book Foundation announced winners of the National Book Awards on November 15, 2017. See the full list on their site. Jesmyn Ward is the winner of the fiction category. Here are added details about her winning novel.