Interview With USA Today Best-Selling Techno-Thriller Novelist David Poyer

  

 

Praise for David Poyer’s Tiller Galloway Series:

 

“Riveting enough to terrify experienced divers."

– Publishers Weekly

 

"Fans of Clive Cussler will love this thriller."

- Library Journal

 

"White-knuckle diving scenes, constant action."

- Kirkus Reviews

 

"Local atmosphere and a good knowledge of treacherous currents keep things on course."

- The London Times 

“Plunges the reader into a briny brew… a scary adventure.” 

 – New York Times Book Review  

1.       What is your newest book, Yucatan Blue, about? Lyle “Tiller” Galloway is the black-sheep hero of four previous underwater thrillers, set in various locales. They include HATTERAS BLUE, BAHAMAS BLUE, LOUISIANA BLUE, and DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA. Each book stands on its own, as does this one.  

In YUCATAN BLUE, Tiller’s suddenly wealthy with the proceeds from his haul of gold from North Florida and subsequent real estate investments on Hatteras Island. But now the IRS is asking how a blue-collar oilfield diver and ex-con drug smuggler ended up so rich, and his lawyer advises him to leave the country, at least for a while.  

Fortunately, Tiller has a “job offer” in Mexico, helping an old flame hunt for a mysterious site associated with the collapse of the Mayans circa AD 900.  But it’s not on land, but deep beneath a cenote-fed lake in the thick jungle of remote South Yucatan. 

In the face of a peasant revolt, corrupt federales, murderous looters, and the mortal terror of deep rebreather diving, Galloway, Max, and July Toll struggle to penetrate the sunken temple complex.  But they’ve stumbled on more than the solution to an ancient mystery.  Unless they can stop it, the same evil will be unleashed on the world that destroyed the Mayan Empire a thousand years ago 

2.       It is the fifth in a series of Tiller thrillers. What ties them together? I’d say, two things: First, the character of Tiller Galloway, a reluctant yet competent commercial diver who’s trying to go straight after a prison sentence, but keeps getting pulled back into compromising situations. Second, the lovely yet dangerous world of diving, whether for sport, cave diving, wreck exploration, salvage, industrial diving, or underwater archaeology!  

3.       What served as the point of creation or inspiration for The Tiller Galloway Underwater Adventure series? Diving off Hatteras many years ago on U-85 and other wrecks, and wanting to craft a novel that drew on the rich oral history and legends of the Outer Banks. That triggered the first in the series, and Tiller, Shad, Sticky, Bernice, Max, July, and the crew took it from there! 

4.       You have had over 50 novels published. Which ones stick out - -and why? My personal favorites, for different reasons, include THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN, a novel of 1936, which is about as good as I get as a writer. Reviewers compared it to Steinbeck’s work. TOMAHAWK, for exploration of the ethical side of military service and weapons development.  And STEPFATHER BANK, a dystopian yet comic look at where our economy is heading.  But of course, every reader has his or her own favorite! 

5.       How would you describe your writing style? I try hard to keep sentences straightforward, but I’m not above using terms of art or technical explanations when the plot or credible dialogue requires it.  One of my early mentors, Frank Green, said over and over: “The reader is always in trouble.” I get that! I try to keep my readers in mind through all five-to-seven drafts that these novels require. I coach writers from time to time, and that’s a lesson I try to hammer into their heads too!  

6.       Did you have any challenges to overcome in writing the latest installment in this series? I’d had the plot in mind for a long time. When I finally got the chance to go pyramid crawling and cenote diving in the Yucatan alongside my archaeologist brother-in-law, I jumped at it.  The real challenge came later, in deciding how to balance possibly supernatural elements with the realistic tone of the series. But in the final draft I pulled back and left it unclear what exactly Max and Tiller experience, and whether it is real or induced by drugs or high-pressure nervous syndrome during deep diving.  

7.       As a retired captain of the US Navy, diver, sailor, and marine engineer, how do you exploit your real-life experiences to create authentic, action-oriented, underwater adventures? I’ve never done a memoir, though I’ve taught memoir in creative writing classes. That’s because I’ve embedded so much of my own experiences in my novels. Primarily, these are the 22-volume Navy series (The Dan Lenson novels), the Hemlock County series set in Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and the Galloway books, which draw on my diving experiences and interviews with other divers. I wouldn’t call it “exploiting” – it’s more like using the background and some of my experiences and people I’ve known to add verisimilitude to a story. Or IS that exploiting?  

8.       What kind of hero did you draw in Tiller Galloway, whom some see as a dark character? Well, yeah, he’s got a dark side. That was clear when I first “met” him. After losing his family, torpedoing his Coast Guard career, running cocaine, then losing his freedom to a prison sentence . . . yeah, he’s dark. And he definitely has a substance abuse problem. But he has a little light left inside. Outside forces keep pulling him back to dealing and smuggling. He has his own yens to battle as well. But in the end, I think, he cares for those he loves, and tries to do the right thing . . . in his own way!  

9.       Character. Action. Dialogue. Which is most important and how do they all work together in your books? Oh, difficult question. I start with character and present them with a challenge. The downstream work all follows from that! Dialogue, I work over endlessly for draft after draft. Narrative perspective is important to me. I don’t think too many thriller writers working today fully employ it. And of course, the setting also plays a big part in these books. Setting helps convey tone, I feel. And there are still some dark places on the earth left. Those are the locales people like Tiller seem to end up at.  

10.   How do you build up suspense? Mainly through the challenge and the danger. Fortunately, whether it’s industrial diving on the seafloor of the Gulf, or caves deep in North Florida, or in this latest book, deep unexplored cenotes in the Yucatan, danger is never far away. Your equipment fails, you die. Run out of air or mixed gas, you die. Make a wrong decision, you die. Trust the wrong people, you die. Claro?  

11.   This newest book involves archaeological theft on the black market. What do you want readers to know about that? That it’s a huge business, not just in the Middle East, but in Mexico and Central America. Mayan pots and sculptures sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Aside from being looted cultural items, they fund crime, drugs, and weapons smuggling throughout the region. Very little of that is fictional; it’s all unfortunately true. Don’t buy looted art!  

12.   The story in Yucatan Blue pits ordinary people against forces far larger than themselves. What do you hope readers experience when they reach the climactic ending? The felt knowledge that it’s never over until it’s over. That there’s always a way out of the darkest situations if you can keep your head, control your breathing, and think. And of course, trust your dive partner . . . as Tiller does July in our final scenes deep beneath the limestone crust of Yucatan! 

13.   Mayan history and mythology are a part of your new book. What is so fascinating about their culture? We’re finding out more and more lately about how advanced this supposedly “primitive” culture was. How carefully they used their environment, and how they managed sustainable yield for a massive population in what today is a scrape of dirt and jungle over base limestone. How much they understood about the heavens and time. How intriguing and different their mythologies were compared to the Greek and Roman stories we’re familiar with. But more chillingly, how they regarded human beings as essentially plastic, as formable or pliable, to be remolded mentally and even physically to fit into what was essentially a changeless, eternal vision of society. That’s so foreign to us today! But with modern technology, it might be the way we’re going . . . another book there maybe? 

14.   Each of your books in the series have different geographic settings. How did each of these locations play a role in the stories that you tell? Tiller’s story begins in his home island of Hatteras, and now and then – as at the opening of YUCATAN BLUE – we find him trying to return. (Sorta like Odysseus?) I wrote guidebooks and articles about the Outer Banks, and you’ll find the stories I was told embedded or transformed in my novels. From there, we took him to the Bahamas, where Don Juan Nunez, his old boss, forces him to recover a cargo of sunken cocaine . . . only it isn’t what’s really there. That too is based on what I found in the islands. After those events, Tiller and Shad have to decamp to avoid Nunez’s revenge. Where better than deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, earning big bucks as oilfield divers? A retired oilfield diver took me to Louisiana and got me an intro to that hardheaded hard hat community. And after that, an old friend’s widow needs Tiller’s help in North Florida to sell a cave-diving business.  

      Now, in this latest story, the IRS is sniffing around, and Tiller and his son Max are headed out of the country without knowing if they’ll ever be allowed back. Fortunately, an old flame needs his help on an archaeological expedition deep in the Mexican jungle. So, you see how the setting determines the challenge, but also how personal relationships steer Tiller this way and that as he tries to fight back from the darkest places in his life. 

15.   You are an award-winning, critically-acclaimed, best-selling author. But is success measured, for you, by these things – or something else? Really, for me, it’s more about bringing a good story to an appreciative reader! One seldom gets rich doing that, but it’s personally rewarding.  To my longtime fans, thanks so much for letting me pass my life doing what I love! And enjoy this new page of Tiller Galloway’s checkered career! 

About The Author: USA Today best-selling author David Poyer has over 50 published novels, receiving critical acclaim from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and The London Times. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide. His work has been translated into Japanese, Dutch, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Italian, and rights have been sold for films and audiobooks. He has also had plays produced in America and Switzerland. For more information, please see: www.poyer.com.

Marketing Help?

Brian Feinblum can be reached at brianfeinblum@gmail.com  He is available to help authors like you to promote your story, sell your book, and grow your brand. He has over 30 years of experience in successfully helping thousands of authors in all genres. Let him be your advocate, teacher, and motivator! 

 

About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 8,600,000 page views. With nearly 5,700+ posts over the past 15 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2026, 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2026.

 

For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully) and (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/10-things-my-dog-taught-me-about-marketing-books). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, three times at BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association, Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, five times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum

 

 

 

Interview With Business Experts Michael Pino & Andrew Lopianowski On AI & Their New Book

1. What is the premise behind your new, breakthrough book, HumanCorps?  HumanCorps is a practical blueprint for redesigning organisations for the Wisdom Age: a time when advantage comes less from information, and more from judgement — making good decisions under uncertainty, at speed, with ethics and context. In a BANI world (i.e., brittle, anxious, non-linear, and often incomprehensible), Industrial-Age hierarchy and control no longer scale. Performance now depends on releasing human ownership and agency at every level and then augmenting that human system with synthetic capabilities that help us overcome our biological limits in complexity and scale. We call that partnership Synthetic Symbiosis. Technology isn’t the point; it’s the enabler. The book shows how mindset, purpose, leadership, decision making, information transparency, culture, and measurement must evolve so humans and AI can create enduring value together. HumanCorps is both compass and operating blueprint.

 

2. Why do Industrial-Age transformation models keep failing in Knowledge / Wisdom-Age conditions? Most transformation models assume stability: define a target operating model, roll it out, then “refreeze”. But organisations are now living in constant disruption. When the environment changes faster than the programme, transformation becomes theatre — new rituals, new dashboards, little real change. HumanCorps challenges the idea that you can bolt modern tools onto an old operating system. If you keep Taylorist assumptions — control, top-down decision-making, individualised performance — you don’t get better outcomes; you get faster dysfunction. The alternative is to build a complex adaptive system: minimal structure, distributed decision rights, transparency, experimentation, and learning as the operating logic.

 

3. What do most organisations get wrong about AI adoption right now? Most organisations are experimenting, but many are still treating AI like procurement or a productivity add‑on. They run pilots, roll out copilots, and hope behaviour changes.

The common pattern is speed without direction: AI makes existing processes faster, but the underlying decision bottlenecks, siloed information, and incentive problems remain. Adoption also gets stuck because people aren’t trained to collaborate with AI critically, and because trust is fragile — fear of replacement, fear of mistakes, fear of governance consequences.

Where it goes well, leaders pair AI with transparency, clear decision rights, and psychological safety so teams can question outputs, learn quickly, and apply AI to real decisions, not just tasks.

 

4. What is the “HumanCorps Synth,” and what should people not assume it is? The Synth is a practical vision of a “digital twin” companion — more than a chatbot — that learns with you, supports reflection, and helps you navigate complexity at work. In the book, we use it to make the future tangible: a system that can bring together your goals, organisational context, real-time information, and collaboration patterns, and then act as a sparring partner for thinking and decision-making. What it is not: a replacement for accountability, a black box that dictates outcomes, or a way to bypass human judgement. A well-designed Synth must be permissioned, transparent, and aligned to human outcomes. It should scaffold better questions, not outsource responsibility.

 

5. Why do so many organisations feel stuck, even when they are successful and profit margins are strong? Success can hide brittleness. Strong margins can create a false sense of control, leading organisations to double down on what worked — more process, more targets, more hierarchy — until the environment shifts and the system can’t adapt. HumanCorps describes learned helplessness at scale: people see the dysfunction but feel unauthorised to change it, so they point upward and wait. Add change fatigue from endless transformations, and you get inertia. The paradox is that over‑managed systems often become riskier: when people feel disempowered to take any risk, problems go underground and decision quality drops. HumanCorps “unsticks” organisations by restoring agency through purpose, decision rights, transparency, and a culture of experimentation.

 

6. What’s the “Leadership Delta” — and what must leaders unlearn? Leadership Delta is the shift leaders must make to thrive in HumanCorps conditions: from being the source of answers to being the designer of conditions. Instead of power‑based leadership — being “in charge” and having all the answers — leaders become creators of conditions: they facilitate better questions, foster collective sensemaking, distribute authority, and enable others to lead. Leadership Delta goes deeper than skills; it includes identity (humility, groundedness, belief in others), cognitive capability (systems thinking, business and financial acumen), and real‑time dynamics (emotional regulation and social awareness). In an AI‑rich world, leadership is less about command and more about designing distributed capability.

 

7. What are the most common reasons AI projects fail (beyond technology)?

AI projects often fail for familiar reasons: misaligned goals, poor data foundations, weak adoption, and lack of upskilling. The deeper cause is organisational design. If decision-making is centralised, information is gated, and people feel unsafe experimenting, AI can’t scale beyond pilots. Another failure mode is trust: if people fear replacement or don’t understand limitations — hallucinations, bias, brittleness — they either resist or over-rely. HumanCorps reframes AI as a human system change. You need clear purpose, decision rights, minimal structure, and learning loops. Then build agents into workflows people already use, starting small in low-risk domains and scaling as capability and trust grow.

 

8. What are the three or four primary operating beliefs of senior management that are wrong and harmful when it comes to AI?  Four beliefs do the most damage.

·         “AI is a tool we can bolt on”. Leaders fund platforms and pilots but don’t redesign decision rights, information flow, or incentives — so AI mostly accelerates existing bottlenecks.

·         “Control equals safety”. In BANI conditions, the reflex to add approvals, policies, and central review increases brittleness and slows learning.

·         “Authority belongs at the top”. This traps decisions with HiPPO (Highest-Paid Person in the Office) dynamics, filters reality through layers, and disconnects decision-makers from the work.

·         “Speed/efficiency is the point”. AI’s bigger prize is better decision quality, risk control, and collective learning — not just faster output.

 

9. You say that we need a different structure of organisation, with distinctly different approaches toward decision rights, role definitions, and communication. What are some of the approaches that human-centred organisations are taking now?

We’re seeing organisations move toward flatter, networked systems built for adaptation rather than control. Common approaches include:

 

·         Flattening and reorienting hierarchy into interconnected teams that can reconfigure quickly.

·         Dynamic role definitions: roles evolve with the work; people move across projects based on skills and interest.

·         Decision autonomy with “risk envelopes”: teams choose how decision rights work day-to-day, but do the upfront work to define boundaries, escalation triggers, and accountability.

·         Transparency as a cultural norm: faster knowledge flow across silos, enabled by platforms but sustained by leadership modelling and routines for dialogue.

·         Continuous feedback/iteration: frequent reflection sessions (e.g., premortems, future retros) to improve decision quality and adapt.

 

10. You both have decades of experience advising boards, executive teams, and senior leaders in moments of high pressure: growth, crisis, regulatory change, cultural breakdown, and strategic reinvention. Why is the integration of AI and technologies into the workplace such a disruption that causes panic, confusion, and missteps—or worse, inertia? AI is disruptive because it hits technology, psychology, and power structures at the same time. Technically, AI changes workflows and introduces unfamiliar failure modes. Socially, it raises fears about replacement and fairness, which erodes trust, especially when AI begins influencing autonomous decisions. Organisationally, AI exposes the “data paradox”: we generate oceans of information but still funnel authority through narrow channels, producing paralysis, endless alignment meetings, and slow decisions. Under stress, leaders often reach for more control, which makes systems more brittle and increases learned helplessness. HumanCorps argues this is not mainly a technology problem — it’s a mindset and operating-model problem.

 

11. You say we have entered The Wisdom Age. How do you define that?

The Wisdom Age is the shift from competing on information and knowledge to competing on judgement — how wisely you frame problems, interpret signals, apply values, and act. In the Knowledge Age, advantage came from access to information and the ability to turn it into knowledge. Now AI makes information abundant and cheap, and can generate options endlessly. What differentiates organisations is practical wisdom: turning machine‑generated possibilities into context‑aware, ethical decisions that create real value. HumanCorps describes wisdom generation as an organisational capability — built through reflection, sharing tacit knowledge, collective sensemaking, and shared values — augmented by synthetic systems that help humans deal with complexity at scale.

 

12. You developed a HumanCorps Synth, to go along with the book. What is that and how does it work? The Synth is a vision for a deeper human–synthetic relationship than a chatbot: a “digital twin” companion that helps individuals and teams navigate complexity by integrating context, goals, data, and collaboration patterns. In the book, the Synth is also a narrative device that demonstrates how synthetic agents might support wisdom generation — helping with insight synthesis, scenario testing, learning facilitation, sensemaking rituals, and purpose alignment. Importantly, it’s not about replacing accountability. A well‑designed Synth augments human judgement: it curates signals, surfaces anomalies, runs “what‑if/why‑not” reasoning, and supports reflection. For it to work, organisations need data transparency, trust, and training so people engage critically rather than outsourcing thinking.

 

For more information, please see: https://humancorps.ai/

 

Marketing Help?

Brian Feinblum can be reached at brianfeinblum@gmail.com  He is available to help authors like you to promote your story, sell your book, and grow your brand. He has over 30 years of experience in successfully helping thousands of authors in all genres. Let him be your advocate, teacher, and motivator! 

 

About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 8,200,000 page views. With nearly 5,700+ posts over the past 15 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2026, 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2026.

 

For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully) and (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/10-things-my-dog-taught-me-about-marketing-books). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, three times at BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association, Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, five times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum

 

 

How Many People Do You Influence?

 

Authors are seeking cost-efficient shortcuts to getting book sales, and one of their go-to ideas is to get an influencer to discuss their book. The only problem there is that you often have to pay such a person, should he or she agree to work with you. The other challenge is selecting the right influencer and finding a way to reach them.  

How do you know: 

* If their connection numbers are legit? Maybe these numbers were purchased or are fake.

Even if their numbers are legit, how current and active are they? People who followed them two years ago may not really follow anymore but they never disengaged from the connection. 

* If such numbers will yield enough sales of your book to justify their fee? One can have a lot of followers but how many will buy your book?   

* If they are a good brand match for you? Are their followers similar to the demographics of your readers?  

* What you want them to do for you? Determine how to best utilize the influencer. Will they share something that you created? Will they post multiple times on multiple platforms?  

Maybe what you need to do is build your own brand up and look to see how many people you can influence. Perhaps you are really capable of being the influencer that you hope to find and whom you feel will rescue you.  

Feed a hungry man a fish for the day, and you satiate his empty belly once. Teach him how to fish once, and he can feed himself forever. That is a paraphrase of a famous quote, but you get the sentiment. It is applicable to book marketing.  

If you invest in an influencer, it is a one-time event, but if you become the influencer, you can be in charge of your destiny. Before you look to someone else to make you a known entity, try to become one yourself.  

How?  

Do what these influencers did or do — create content that evokes a reaction. Say crazy stuff, do funny things, and be interesting. So many influencers got lucky because one of their posts or videos went viral. Then they feed of that and seek to appear to be an authority or expert, but really, they are just people who got lucky.  

Yes, some patterns emerge. The young and good-looking rule the Net. Being in beautiful places helps too. But at some point, you need good content that gives people a reason to pay attention and to keep returning. Are you motivational? Funny? Smart? What can you offer others by way of advice, entertainment, information, or inspiration?  

It is not easy, otherwise every writer would do it, but it is also not impossible and many more than you think can become influential. It requires nothing more than initiative, a smart phone, and an idea. You don’t have to buy anything, go anywhere, or hire anyone. No permission is needed and there are no requirements attached to this.   

Write, film, orate, photograph, or draw your way to fame. It is a blank canvas. How will you color it in? 

No boundaries. No limits. Only those that you put upon yourself.  You can start right now. 

You should.

 

“The relationships we have with these books can be complicated. For one thing, we don't read them out of choice. They are imposed upon us by a range of forces beyond our control, by the decisions that teachers and exam boards make on our behalf. They might not be books we'd have chosen to read independently; they might not even be books we like. We can't just curl up with these books and enjoy them: we have to answer questions on them, make notes and write essays, revise them for exams. They make other demands of us, as well. We encounter them at a crucial stage in our development, when our identities are being formed and the world is starting to seem more complex and various than it did before. They can spark arguments and frustration.

 

“They might be loathed from the bottom of our hearts, thrown in exasperation across our teenage bedrooms, but they might equally, at times, hold our hands and help us to feel less alone. On occasion, they might lead us to look at life in a completely different way.”

— Reading Lessons: The Books We Read at School, the Conversations They Spark and Why They Matter by Carol Atherton

Marketing Help?

Brian Feinblum can be reached at brianfeinblum@gmail.com  He is available to help authors like you to promote your story, sell your book, and grow your brand. He has over 30 years of experience in successfully helping thousands of authors in all genres. Let him be your advocate, teacher, and motivator! 

 

About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 8,200,000 page views. With nearly 5,700+ posts over the past 15 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2026, 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2026.

 

For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully) and (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/10-things-my-dog-taught-me-about-marketing-books). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, three times at BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association, Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, five times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum