Chris Robley
Chris Robley is an award-winning poet, songwriter, performer, and music producer who now lives in Portland, Maine after more than a decade in Portland, Oregon. His music has been praised by NPR, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, and others. Skyscraper Magazine said he is “one of the best short-story musicians to come along in quite some time.” Robley’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Magma Poetry, and more. He is the 2013 winner of Boulevard's Poetry Prize for Emerging Writers and the 2014 recipient of a Maine Literary Award in the category of "Short Works Poetry."
How long should my book be? (standard word-counts by genre)
Are you wondering how long your book should be?
Well, here's the short answer: as long as it needs to be — no more, no less.
So write, write, write — then edit, edit, edit.
But if you're curious to see how your manuscript measures up to to the standard word-count expectations for your genre, the following is a summary of an informative article by Chuck Sambuchino called "Word Count for Novels and Children’s Books: The Definitive Post."
Check out that piece for all the details, or see the breakdown below.
Adult Novels: (literary fiction, romance, mystery, thriller, etc.)
Here's what Chuck recommends for commercial fiction:
Forbidden print: a brief history of banned books [infographic]
Censorship: it's like a publicist's dream!
Nothing makes me want to read a book more than when someone says I can't read it.
Check out this infographic featuring some now classic books that were banned because of... well, you'll see the reasons.
What makes a great BookShop page?
A potential reader has landed on your BookShop page by either:
* linking from a website, email newsletter, or social.
* searching for you, your book, or related subject matter online.
Now it's time to make a great first impression, and a sale!
How to optimize your BookShop page to capture the most sales
1. You need a striking book cover It’s the first thing someone sees — because it's HUGE. And that’s good. BookShop puts the attention where it should be, on YOUR book. Hopefully your book cover makes people want to read more about it. If so, well done. If not, you still have time to capture a visitor's imagination when you…
BookBaby will handle new VAT changes for EU authors
Have recent changes to EU tax law got you down? Don't worry, BookBaby is handling it for you!
Many of our European authors have worried about how a new law in the EU concerning VAT (value-added tax) — which is similar to sales tax — will affect them. The short answer (at least in terms of your sales through BookBaby's BookShop) is: not at all! We will be collecting and remitting the VAT for all eBook sales on BookShop on behalf of our artists and label clients in the 28 EU countries. If you live in the EU, the VAT will be paid by your customer and will not affect what you make on sales of eBooks. This will save you from having to worry about reporting and remitting the VAT yourself.
15 powerful quotes from writers we lost last year
Buzzfeed compiled a series of quotes from some of the influential writers that passed away in 2014.
Inspiring. Grumpy. Funny. Wise. The quotes run the gamut, but they're all worth reading.
Here are a few of my favorites:
"Each moment is a place you've never been." - Mark Strand
"Once I began to read, I began to exist." - Walter Dean Myers
"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams." - Gabriel García Márquez. 
The bookshelves of your dreams and nightmares
If we book geeks played our cards right, we got a bunch of new books for the holidays. New books that now need a place on our beloved bookshelves.
In my case that means cramming a bunch of poetry collections into tiny spaces in already overstuffed bookshelves, which inevitably leads to me rearranging the books and dreaming of a completely new shelving system.
The folks at Bored Panda have been dreaming of new bookshelf options too, and they've featured a bunch of interesting, ugly, beautiful, impractical, weird, and wonderful designs for us book lovers to ponder. Check out "33 creative bookshelf designs." 
How to know when you’re done writing your novel
When you finish writing the first draft of your manuscript, there's a good chance that your novel is NOT done. In fact, if you expect your novel to be a work of permanent perfection, it probably never will be "done."
Sure, you could just wait ten years to publish your novel, but who's to say that after twenty years you won't have the same "how could I have missed it" experience?
There comes a time when "good enough" is good enough. So how do you know when you've reached that point?
