The digital revolution is not only changing how books are read—it is also changing the how they are written, produced, and promoted.

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Nieman Reports is the venerable quarterly of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The current issue ends Melissa Ludtke's 13-year run as editor. She is now at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. For her grand finale, Ludtke devotes the issue to articles aimed at journalists whose goal is "Writing the Book." Featured among the 24 pieces are thoughtful discussions of "concept, voice, style, length, audience, platform, self-publishing and marketing." (Included, I need to acknowledge, are excerpts from an interview Ludtke did with me, under the headline "Transformation in Publishing and Optimism About Books.") The entire issue is available gratis. As a contributor, I was sent the print version, which sells for $7.50 (a $25 year's subscription is the standard payment for articles). If you are among the legions of journalists who regard publishing a book as a professional goal, there is a lot to read in the magazine that will be helpful, so go ahead and splurge on the purchase price.

The overriding message in the articles is that books are an entrepreneurial exercise, combining the selection of a subject, the self-confidence to stay with it through the reporting and writing ordeal, and a commitment to marketing the results, which for many authors is an especially unfamiliar process. Among the multiple subjects covered, one of the most informative is how traditional sales strategies are adapting to the digital age. Here's one example: William Wheeler is a freelancer who has endured frustration in landing a book contract, but has the persistence and a resume (a recent New York Times story about Libya was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting) that should eventually lead to success. "What transforms journalists into nonfiction authors," he writes, "is the heft of their voice, the narrative arc of their idea and its marketability. These aren't lessons that tend to be reinforced on the way up the newspaper ladder... Marketing the idea—and selling you as its author—is everything in getting to write a book." With the support of an agent, Wheeler circulated a conventional proposal about environmental crises and collected rejections from publishers who said they liked the idea but felt that the genre was too crowded. Recovering from the disappointment, Wheeler then sold an expansion of another Libya story to Byliner, an innovative new e-book publisher whose founder, John Tayman, writes in his Nieman Reports article that "our idea was to create a new way for writers to be able to tell stories at what had always been considered a financially awkward length."