History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

WriteHive Online Conference 2025: Video Marketing for Authors

| October 13, 2025

I’m slowly but surely catching up on panel recordings from the 2025 WriteHive Online Conference that I missed during the weekend. Not too long ago, I watched the panel on “Video Marketing for Authors,” which was one I was particularly interested in because I don’t currently do any video marketing. The panelists mentioned that video […]

Newsletter Marketing at Worldcon

| September 22, 2025

One of the panels I attended at Worldcon in Seattle was about newsletter marketing, and I wound up with an absolute TON of notes from this panel. The panelists shared a lot of great advice, so I’m going to recap some of what I learned about newsletters there! One of the early things the panelists […]

Back of the Book Blurbs as Marketing Tools

| June 23, 2025

If someone is picking up your book, whether physically or at an online retailer, they’re likely going to make their choice to buy your book based on the back of the book blurb. And if you’re a self-published author, you’ll be the one writing that back of the book blurb. While I don’t think writing […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Passive Marketing

| February 10, 2025

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! Jessica Salina’s presentation, “Passive Marketing: How Authors Can Leverage SEO,” is a brilliantly useful watch for anyone who […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Marketing Tactics for the Self-Published Author

| December 23, 2024

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! “Marketing Tactics for the Self-Published Author” was a fantastic panel filled with great information for self-published authors who […]

WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Writing Multiple Genres and Author Brand

| December 2, 2024

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here! I was particularly interested in “Writing Multiple Genres and Author Brand” because I write in a bunch of […]

Marketing Makes the Book at Flights of Foundry

| May 22, 2023

One of the panels I spoke on at Flights of Foundry was titled “Marketing Makes the Book.” I shared this panel with a couple of other small press publishers, and we talked about what has and has not worked for us when selling our books. One of the topics that came up was, of course, […]

Marketing in 2020

| November 23, 2020

A lot of authors went into 2020 with lots of excitement and hopeful feelings about it being a good year. And while things may have gone well for some, the majority of us may be looking at the year as a dark spot in an otherwise promising career trajectory. But that doesn’t mean you have […]

Bookstagramming?

| October 22, 2018

I was recently talking with another author about Bookstagramming, which neither of us had heard of. I did a little bit of research and found this article, which suggests that it’s a thing that I already do sometimes: take a picture of what I’m reading and post to Instagram about it. It’s apparently not as […]