Author Release Form Template: Fill & Download for Free

You can start by checking out Prowly’s resource with 13 Free Press Release Templates for Any Occasion. It covers press release templates and actual samples that you can use on various occasions, tailoring them to your needs.Regardless of what you’re writing about – every press release should have:Headline – a taster of what you can expectLead – a brief overview of the story, including answers to the questions: Who? What? When? Why? With what effect?Body – an explanation of the information provided earlier in the lead, starting from the most newsworthy info to other less important, background infoCompany info – a short paragraph about your company to help journalists understand the nature of the business and make writing about it easier.Media contact information – author or company’s/agency’s contact information.I hope that helps!

All right, time for some industry secrets. (Well maybe not secrets, but certainly not widely known). For context, I work in the industry, have several clients in publishing, including one of the Big Five, and have been involved in campaigns for a few bestselling books.The first thing I should say is that most authors who aspire to the title of Bestselling Writer focus heavily on the ‘writer’ part and not nearly enough on the selling. For the purposes of this question, I will assume you have already mastered your craft, and have a product that is bestseller-worthy.Second, it is important to understand that in publishing, bestselling doesn’t necessarily equate to biggest selling. For example, a fiction book that doesn’t make the bestseller list may still greatly outsell a nonfiction bestseller.Third, there are several major bestseller lists and some are harder than others to get onto. The New York Times list remains the gold standard when it comes to prestige, but don’t knock the ones maintained by USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, Publishers Weekly, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, among others.Finally, as you’ve probably already guessed, there are no guarantees that your book will become a bestseller. (There is one sneaky way that almost guarantees success, but we’ll come to that later).Here then are 10 tips that will significantly improve your chances of becoming a bestselling author:1. Pick your niche.I include this only because the question is about how to become a bestselling writer. The category you publish in has a major impact on whether or not your book has a shot at becoming a bestseller. The New York Times, for example, maintains more than 40 different lists, and you may need to sell tens of thousands of copies more to make Top 10 in, say, Hardcover Fiction than you would require in Humor.To further increase your chances of becoming a bestselling author, shoot for making the Amazon list instead. The online retailer maintains hundreds of niche categories, so look for the ones that most closely match your interest while requiring a lower sales threshold than other popular genres to be labelled a bestseller.2. Start planning well ahead of the release.I am currently (November 2015) working on a catalog that goes out to the trade, and it features books scheduled for release as late as July 2016. Prior to this, there would have been galley proofs sent out to high-profile people who might supply quotes worth using on the cover, as well as to potential reviewers, cover designers, possibly even pitched to studios who might be interested in optioning it for film. All that adds up to nearly a year of prior planning.3. Build out your website.Launch your own dedicated author website if you don’t already have one. Learn the basics of keeping your site updated—free CMSs like WordPress and Joomla and the availability of good, inexpensive templates have made it reasonably affordable for most writers to manage their own sites. Don’t think of this as a cost, but as an investment that will more than pay back for itself.Use your site to post information about your upcoming books. Get people to sign up for updates. Post teasers. Have cover reveals and contests. Allow comments. Add a bio and downloadable images that media outlets can use. Your website is Publicity Central, treat it like the valuable resource it is.4. Get social.Don’t rely on traditional media to generate buzz. Use Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to keep you and your book in the news. Build a relationship with active bloggers and ask if you can guest-post on their blogs. Connect with those who show interest in your book; having a core of supporters (Team You) is valuable in spreading the word.5. Seek out early reviews.Once your manuscript is done, reach out to better-known authors you might have connected with or—if it is a nonfiction book—to experts in the field. Request short reviews, and if you receive something that’s especially good, consider using a blurb on the cover. Praise quotes help sell books.But what if you don’t know anyone you can approach for a quote? Some industry publications like Kirkus offer paid reviews. (Kirkus charges $425 for the service). There’s no guarantee that the book will get a good review, but if it does, there’s certain to be something you can pull and use as a praise quote in your marketing.6. Front-load your sales.Pre-selling on Amazon is a powerful strategy. The e-tailer allows you to list your book ahead of time and take pre-orders. If you can get enough of your fans, family and friends to order ahead of time, the sales will register as having taken place the day of release. If these numbers are fairly high, it might be enough to propel your book onto the Amazon bestseller list. Use this in conjunction with Tip #1 to increase your chances of success.7. Time your release.Unless you’re already a popular author, releasing your book between Thanksgiving and Christmas might not be the smartest idea. It’s the time that book sales peak, and you have to sell a heck of a lot more than you otherwise would to have a shot a making the bestseller list. Research the low sales period for your category and release your book at that time. The lesser the competition, the better your shot.8. Go for the big push.If you’ve built a relationship with bloggers (see Tip #4), request posts about the book just before and on the day of launch. Ditto for any media interviews that you might be able to schedule. If you’ve set aside some dollars for marketing, this is the time you want to spend it. Go for as much bang for your buck as you can possibly achieve rather than dilute the effort. With a little bit of luck, it might all come together for you.9. Pray for luck.Seriously. No matter how well you write, how enticing your cover is, how well you’ve planned, how good your marketing is…there is no magic formula that will guarantee your book will wind up a bestseller. Anyone who possessed that formula would be very, very rich. You can do a lot to improve your prospects, but converting bestseller potential to a chart listing comes down to the stars aligning for you that week.But if you absolutely, totally HAVE to get onto a bestseller list, you might want to…10. Buy your way.Unfortunate, but true. There is one US firm (which I will not name because I strongly disagree with their methods) that guarantees your book a spot on various bestseller lists…if you’re willing to pay a price. And that price isn’t cheap—I’ve seen figures of $200,000 and up bandied about for a NYT listing; less than $100,000 to rank on other lists. The firm apparently does so by making hundreds of small individual book purchases at stores whose sales figures are used to compile lists. The Times naturally won’t talk about what it does to safeguard itself from such manipulation, but the firm in question remains in business.So there you have it. Hopefully these tips help your book enjoy great success, whether or not it makes it to a bestseller list!Also see: Archie D'Cruz's answer to How do you become a New York Times bestselling author?

Well, there are many… but I’ll keep this relatively brief.Remember that the original designer of Swift was Chris Lattner, who started and led the LLVM project. LLVM is written in C++ and the Clang C++ compiler is one of the primary drivers for its continued development. So Chris was very familiar with C++ and incorporated his experience with C++ to decide how to design Swift (including what not to do). But that’s not all. When it came time to select a lead Swift compiler engineer and a lead Swift standard library designer, who did Apple turn to? Doug Gregor for the compiler and Dave Abrahams for the library. Both were some of the main contributors to the C++11 standard and widely recognized as world-class C++ experts. Doug is also a co-author for my “C++ Templates” book — I asked him to join that project because he is a friend, but also because he was behind some of the most fundamental new template work done during the C++11 standardization cycle (including variadic templates and the ill-fated C++0x concepts work).All that to say that Swift was tremendously influenced by C++. (Apple does not acknowledge this. I’ve been told that it is because more senior Apple decision-makers dislike C++ at a personal level, in part because of the bitter rivalry between C++ and Objective-C in the 1980s.)Some SimilaritiesSwift aims at ABI stability. That was always the goal, although the first few releases did break the Swift ABI to evolve the language (and from the get-go it was explained that this would happen). Now, however, new releases of Swift do not break the ABI in significant ways, much like C++ implementations typically have not broken their ABIs in decades (in significant ways; there are always some bug fixes and “accidents”).Swift supports a value-based model that very much mimics the C++ object representation. When using that model, C++-like idioms translate rather well (and performance tends to be good).Like C++, Swift puts a high premium on performance. In practice, however, it’s not quite in the league of C++ or even Rust.Like C++, the Swift standard library has a rich collection of sequence algorithms. I find it less intuitive than the C++ library, but that’s probably just a matter of habit.Notable DifferencesSwift has a richer type system than C++; one which has fewer idiosyncrasies imposed by a long history.Included in that is that besides the “value-based model” mentioned above, Swift also includes a reference-based model. The latter model includes automatic memory management through reference counting (ARC = automatic reference counting). It’s not bad (e.g., I find it more thought-out than the “optional-but-included garbage collection” in D), but I do sometimes still find the switching between the two models within a single code base somewhat jarring (though admittedly I’m not a heavy user).Swift has some nice language features that are completely missing from C++ at this time. One notable one is “pattern matching” (but there are plans to add that in C++, perhaps as soon as C++23). There are various others. Sometimes, C++ has less-capable library counterparts (e.g., std::optional) of features that are part of the Swift core language.Swift generics are somewhat like C++ templates, but they are (a) more type-safe/dynamic, and (b) less capable. When reading the Swift standard library documentation I often think “this could have been done better with templates”, but then I’m thinking of C++ templates rather than Swift generics.Swift syntax is both inspired by C++, but also deliberately different (and often a bit more compact). For example, semicolon terminators for statements are optional.And finally…The Swift compiler is written in C++, but (as far as I know) no C++ compiler is written in Swift! :-)ADDENDUM (January 13, 2020)Dave Abrahams has added an answer of his own: Don’t miss it!