5 Steps to Writing Better How-To
Learn how to simplify the writing process for how-to books and write them in a way that provides maximum value in an information-filled world.
For Indie Publishers: When and Why to Work with a Trade Book Distributor
A trade distributor is a partner company who takes over the tasks and responsibilities of selling your books to trade accounts like bookstores and wholesalers.
Nonfiction Writers: Beware the Curse of Knowledge
Few of your readers care about what you know, no matter how many years you have spent accumulating that wisdom. They care about what they need or want to understand.
Fix Your Story By Focusing on Place
For beginning fiction writers, focusing on place is one of the easiest ways to improve stories that aren’t quite working.
Resolving My Cheater Shame: Listening to Books Instead of Reading Them
I’ve been air-quoting “reading” since my first legitimate introduction to audiobooks this past winter.
How Traditionally Published Authors Can Repackage and Self-Publish Their Backlist
A checklist for repackaging and republishing your own backlist after you get rights reverted from your traditional publisher.
The 13 Most Common Self-Publishing Mistakes to Avoid
For every new venture, there is a learning curve. When it comes to self-publishing your book, however, that curve can be steep.
5 Ways to Sell More Books for the Holidays
I used to laugh at the “Christmas-in-July” ads until I promoted my first holiday-related book. We actually started the promotion in July, and July turned out to be the perfect time.
How to Skillfully Use Subplots in Your Novel
Subplots help you pace your story and keep the tension rising. Unfortunately, the name “subplots” wrongly suggests they are somehow inferior or substandard.
The First Half of 2018: Traditional Publishers Stand Strong with Nonfiction and Backlist
Broadly, traditional print book sales continue to grow at about 2 to 3 percent per year, but growth is driven by nonfiction, backlist titles, and children’s/YA. Fiction sales have been flat for several years now, with frontlist fiction down 5 percent due to a lack of big titles.
Author Income Surveys Are Misleading and Flawed—And Focus on the Wrong Message for Writers
I don’t trust author-income survey results and I question their usefulness in improving the fortunes of writers. Too often it feels like propaganda from writers’ organizations, with the outcome boring and predictable.
The No. 1 Rule for Flashbacks in a Story Opening
Rule No. 1 for flashbacks: until and unless you’ve invested us in a scene, don’t flash back (or away) from it! The point of a flashback is to illuminate the scene from which it digresses, to add dimension and tension to it.
How to Evaluate Small Publishers—Plus Digital-Only Presses and Hybrids
As the publishing industry has transformed in the digital age, small press activity has proliferated. Here’s how authors can evaluate their offerings.
How to Stay Sane While You Publish
To some degree, we get to pick and choose our publishing and publicity tasks. Sometimes we forget this and freak out because we think we have to do it all.
Character, Writers, and Portrait Photography
In many ways, a portrait photographer encounters the same great issue as fiction writers, chiefly, creating and revealing character.
The Psychology of Author Marketing
It’s one thing to know how to setup something technical like an advertisement, an email system, or your book’s sales page on Amazon. However, crafting them so a potential reader will take action is something else.
Why It’s Hard to Successfully Start a Story With a Dream
A problem with fictional dreams is that they ask us to invest emotionally in an experience only to have that investment rendered null and void when the experience turns out not to have been real.
The Introvert’s Guide to Launching a Book
Unless you are Harper Lee, you are probably going to launch more than one book during your career. For the introvert, learn six ways to keep your head above water not just for your first book, but also for the long haul.
The Power of Silence in a Pitch Situation
Silence—or, in fact, just saying less—is an art that can be strategically practiced by authors who seek attention. It is also a critical strategy when trying to influence people who hear about new books all day, every day.
What Does It Mean to Write a Scene That Works?
On the whole, stories are about change. And scenes are a boiled down, less intense, mini-story. They should do the same thing your global story does: upset the life value of the character and put them on a path to try and restore it.
Writing About Addiction: It Often Takes Two Perspectives
Writing about addiction is tricky business. While most stories have a single protagonist, addiction narratives are usually about two people: the addict deep in the throes of their addiction, and the recovered narrator looking back objectively on the experience.
You Have a Voice and It Means Something
Despite the notion that we are voiceless, the challenge of a good creative writing instructor is to teach students that they do indeed have a voice and that their voice, that all our voices in concert, have meaning.
Art’s Highest Purpose: To Complicate Our Feelings
Now and then my students and I broach the unavoidable question: What makes a work of art? The question can be stood on its head: What makes art work? They’re the same question, really, with (to me, anyway) the same answer: a true work of art is something that doesn’t merely elicit our emotions. It confronts us with emotions that don’t quite fit into any of our ready-made boxes.
How to Lessen Your Chances of an Online Crisis
It can happen to you. Your carefully built author business and your reputation can come under attack and threaten to disrupt your livelihood and your personal life. But you can help prevent a crisis in the first place by using some simple engagement strategies.
What to Look for in a Book Publicist—Plus Tips for Going It Alone
Hiring an outside publicity firm is a big decision, and knowing what to expect on the front end can help you make the right selection and get more out of the experience.
Looking Back: A Retrospective Narrative That Appeals to the Senses
The only stories that matter are those we inhabit personally, not just with our minds, but through our senses. Remember: the fiction writer’s job (or that of any storyteller) isn’t to report experience, but to create it. And experience is processed in the mind by way of the senses.
When Your Opening Has an Excess of Nested Scenes, or Russian Doll Syndrome
If you’re determined to transition readers quickly through various scenes occurring at discordant times, skillful handling of tenses, and particularly of the no-longer-taught past perfect or pluperfect tense, becomes vital.
Throat Clearing: When Your Story Opening Is in Search of Itself
Some story openings happen to get the author’s pen rolling, to blow some warmth onto the icy blank page, to get the narrative blood flowing. Those not charitably inclined will call it “throat clearing.” However it’s characterized, throat clearing should be cut. It’s there for the author, not for the reader.
Starting Later & Starting Over: Launching a Writing Career When You’re No Longer “Young”
Seven-figure deals seem to be given to more 20-something debut writers than debut writers in any other age group, yet Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx started writing at 58—and Frank McCourt began writing in his 60s. Were these writers more talented than younger writers trying to break in at the same time? Or has the industry started gravitating more toward younger writers in recent years? Two literary agents, Sarah Davies and Dr. Uwe Stender, offer their thoughts on the publishing industry’s attitude toward age.
6 Reasons to Relaunch Your Book
Book relaunches can take a variety of forms. If done right, they enhance your overall brand, as well as your book sales. Their first and foremost benefit is the new publication date. Having a new book opens up access to bloggers and media who might not have been available to you with an older book.
Where to Begin: The Search for the Inciting Incident
Where to begin? Of all the questions that harass novelists and others with a story to tell, it has to be the peskiest. The question comes down to structure. Not what happened, i.e. the series of events that make a story, but the order in which those events are conveyed.
What It Really Takes to Break Through with Your First Book Deal
In many ways, it’s never been harder to get a traditional book deal. At the same time, there have never been more ways to establish a career as an author.
Writing About Acts of Violence
Violence can be too sanitized, too tamed into a generic, pre-packaged mold, and so it can’t yield the kind of interesting questions or meditations readers crave, and writers must eventually confront.
Copywriting 101: How to Earn Money By Writing for Businesses
Writing for businesses is a way for skilled writers to earn a good, dependable income. Someone is responsible for writing all the websites, brochures, and marketing materials out there. Why not you?
Asked and Answered: Framing Story Questions Effectively
Sometimes everything we need for our story openings is there, more than we need, in fact. It’s just a matter of cutting and rearranging.
How to Become a Bestseller with Money, Luck, or Work (Mostly Work)
“If you build it, they will come” is the biggest crock of sh*t ever foisted. The second biggest is my own mental script: “If I write it, The New York Times bestseller list will come.” Nope. Wrong answer.
How to Use Adjectives Wisely and Judiciously
With modifiers, you want to choose your battles. Just because every noun offers itself up for modification(s) doesn’t mean you should modify it. Think of adjectives as ketchup or hot sauce; put it on everything and it quickly wears out its welcome.
True and False: Two Kinds of Narrative Suspense
“True” suspense raises the question, “What’s going to happen next?” It arises organically and authentically from characters and their actions as conveyed to us through a firmly established, consistent viewpoint. “False suspense” is generated by an author who, intentionally or otherwise, withholds information.
Building Your Business Model as a Writer
Over the last month, I’ve been talking (and writing) about how to build a business model for career that suits your particular strengths as well as the unique quality of your work. Here are my latest appearances.
In Storytelling: Never State What You Can Imply
Telling readers what to think or feel is the job of a propagandist. A storyteller’s main purpose, on the other hand, is to create experiences for the reader, to involve us so deeply, so convincingly, so authentically in those experiences that we feel what characters feel.
Make Your Writing Anxiety Disappear By Thinking Small
Many people I know are ambitious about their writing. Ambition is not bad in and of itself. But it definitely interferes with your writing. If even before you begin a writing project, you are thinking about where you want it to be published and who, you hope, will review it, you are opening the door to anxiety.
How to Establish Routine While Building Character on the First Page
Routine is important. Without routine the extraordinary events that make for a plot have nothing to work against or to set them into relief. But that routine also needs to evoke character to make us feel something.
Building a Strong Author Platform: It’s Not Just About the Numbers
A smart and strategic author should evaluate their platform strength on three levels: (1) ability to reach new readers, (2) ability to engage existing readers, and (3) ability to mobilize super fans.
Your Characters Don’t Have to Change to Be Compelling
When a character “change” feels beautiful, it’s because the character has confirmed what we’ve hoped or suspected all along. Maybe the character hasn’t changed at all, but rather has finally been put in a situation where her truest self can be revealed.
Writing Scenes: Crafting the Setup and the Payoff
As writers, we’re always either setting up some moment or scene, or paying it off. Since scenes are the building blocks of narrative, we should always be writing scenes.
A Brief History of the Fantasy Genre
While fairy tales are ancient, dating back to the Bronze age, fantasy turns out to be a revival movement, rising from the grave of the recent dead. Mention of the word fantasy is minimal through through the twentieth century, with some peaks here and there depending on your source. Around 1945, fantasy took flight, soaring up and up, well into the twenty-first century. Why the change? What summoned the word fantasy back to life in 1945?
What You Need to Write Your First Book After Age 50
First and foremost: Set realistic goals. Is this book going to change your life? No. After publication, you will not be a different fifty-plus-year-old person. You will be pretty similar to the person you were before, only this fifty-plus-year-old person has written a book. So ask yourself: What are you hoping to get out of the experience?
The Pleasures of Genre
Literary fiction’s subsumption by other genres and vice-versa has become so pervasive one must wonder what distinction if any can still be claimed by “pure” literary fiction beyond pretentiousness.
What I Earned (and How) During My First Year of Full-Time Freelancing
In 2014, I made the leap from conventional employment to a full-time freelance career. Here’s how I did it—and what I earned, down to the dollar.
My New Book, The Business of Being a Writer, Is Now Available!
My newest book, The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), takes it on principle that learning about the publishing industry can lead to a more positive and productive career. It helps writers feel empowered and confident to navigate an ever-changing field.