Best-Ever Booklist for People Who Want to get Serious About Their Writing

Writers need to read. Full stop - there is no way out of it. And what do you need to read? Well, I always tell people to sit down and read the current top 10 bestsellers in the genre they hope to master. Next they need to read the top 10 great classics in the same genre. Finished? Well here is the next part of your curriculum:

Building a Platform

The Frugal Book Promoter by Carolyn Howard-Johnson - "acting as if" is immensely important, and a lot of the excellent advice in this book can be put to work before you have a book

101 Ways to Promote Yourself by Raleigh Pinskey - could be seen as corny and a bit old, it has, nonetheless, given me some excellent ideas

Guerrilla Networking by Jay Conrad Levinson and Monroe Mann - quite remarkably useful

Facebook Marketing for Dummies by Paul Dunay

Celebritize Yourself by Marsha Friedman

How to Work a Room by Susan RoAne

How to Sell Yourself by Joe Girard

Inspiring Yourself as a Writer and Learning Your Craft

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

On Writing by Stephen King

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

On Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

Writing the Sacred Journey by Elizabeth J. Andrew

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

Rip the Page by Karen Benke

Is There a Book Inside You? by Dan Poynter - particularly helpful early on in the process
The Way In by Rita D. Jacobs
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

More General, but Perfect for Inspiration:

The Success Principles by Jack Canfield

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky

Experience Your Good Now by Louise L. Hay

The Creative Life by Julia Cameron

Excuses Begone by Wayne Dyer

This Year I Will by M. J. Ryan

Mini Version

My publisher is taking my manuscript to the Frankfurt Book Fair to try and sell the rights overseas, which is very exciting. They wanted a photo of me for the catalogue they are publishing, and of course I only had a range of incredibly daggy snapshots taken for Facebook or while I was on holiday. I sent them through a selection of the least embarrassing, and will alow them to choose. Must get some professional headshots taken soon.
Another thing that I have had to put together is a "miniature" version of my book, a brief thousand words explaining to potential interviewers what the book is about and why I am so interesting. This was a difficult process, causing me to go back over the book, select a few highlights and shrink them down to a sentence each.
And oh, the errors I found in the manuscript! Enough to make a man weep. Hopefully the copy editor will notice them all. Just in case I am marking them all in red so that when I get the final edited version back I can double check. The agony of the simple, foolish error!