Feeling Stuck? Focus on a Single Sentence
Focusing on the smallest thing you can accomplish: this is the magic trick to making progress or getting unstuck.
Switching Literary Agents: Two Agents Offer Advice
If you’re a writer, how do you know if it’s worth the risk of leaving your current agent? Does past representation impede your ability to find a new agent?
Take Charge of Your Creative Life: The SWOT Analysis
When you understand your SWOT as an author, you can take control over your time. You can stop fighting fires, and start focusing on the things that will truly help you in the long run.
How to Describe Neurodivergent Characters
How do you describe a character with Asperger’s—especially if your story takes place before such a thing had a name?
5 On: Amy Tipton
Freelance editor and former literary agent Amy Tipton discusses her love of young adult and middle grade fiction, the “unlikable female character,” whether agents who don’t want a manuscript will be likely to pass it along to an agent friend, her personal editing style, and more.
How to Use Swag to Support Your Book Marketing
Meaningful swag offers the reader something connected to the book and something that’s memorable—but you need something that doesn’t break the budget.
Something to Remember as NaNoWriMo Begins
The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic,
Marketing Advice Roundup: Best of the Last Year
I regularly read and report on marketing trends that affect traditionally published and self-published writers. Today I’m sharing the most useful articles I’ve found and shared thus far in 2018.
How to Research Your Writing to Ensure Technical Accuracy
Misconceptions pervade popular science fiction. Many, if not most, could have been avoided if the writers spent some time doing research.
How to Understand Your Reader’s Level of Awareness to Grow Your Fanbase
Readers start their journey to find new books in a broad sense, but eventually gain experience and understand more about what they are looking for. By understanding the awareness level of a reader, we can better position our books and gain long-term fans.
5 Tips for Selling Your Books at Events—on a Budget
It can be challenging to make back the cost of your books and the price of a table when exhibiting at a book festival. So, finding cheap but cool things to use at book events is essential.
Don’t Be Too Smart or Clever in Your Book Descriptions
Publishers and authors can use sophisticated language to describe books—to sound unique, clever and smart. But readers describe books in more direct ways.
Writing Immigrant Characters: Avoiding Exoticism
When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are valued in society.
Overcoming Creativity Wounds
There’s no one recipe to overcome a creativity wound, but putting a pen between your fingers and then resting it on a piece of paper is a pretty good start to finding one.
3 Principles for Finding Time to Write
How do you navigate the writing life when you have an intense day job? Does such a thing as work-life balance exist?
Pre-Publication Marketing: A Van Tour to Bookstores
Novelist Cai Emmons discusses how a van tour to meet booksellers in person helped her overcome her timidity toward book marketing.
5 On: Russell Rowland
Author Russell Rowland discusses the big mistake he made with HarperCollins, whether the journey of writing is truly its own reward, why his Indiegogo campaign worked so well, and his experiences with publishing—from one of the Big 5 to self-publishing.
6 Questions to Help Nonfiction Writers Find Their Niche
No matter how many books have been written about a topic, there is probably some important facet that has not yet been covered thoroughly or well. A key driver behind success is understanding how you fit into the existing landscape, what distinguishes your work, and why it is likely to appeal to a particular audience.
10 Ways to Build Traffic to Your Author Website or Blog
This post was first published in 2012 and is regularly updated. First things first: an author’s website, whether it gets much traffic or not, is foundational to your career. It offers readers as well as the media the official word on who you are and the work you produce. If you blog, then it can […]
Writing for Connection Brings Both Hope and Fear
Do you write write according to your own internal motivations or creative impulses—with the intention to create serious art—or do you write hoping to create a bond between writer and reader?
10 Instagram Tips for Writers
Younger generations (and older ones!) flock to Instagram for its feed of beautiful pictures. So how can writers use Instagram to their benefit?
How Writers Can Overcome Their Fear of Public Speaking
Public speaking skills are more akin to musical or athletic skills than intellectual knowledge alone. Mastery does not take place simply in your brain; it takes place in your body, in the “doing” of it.
How Long Should It Take to Write a Book?
Writing a novel requires the creation of a living, breathing, fully populated world. Deities can pull off a trick like that in six days, but how long should it take to write a book?
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 Rewards and Challenges of Self-Publishing Children’s Books: Q&A with Four Authors
A Q&A on children’s self-publishing with authors Zetta Elliott, who has released several books under her own imprint, including picture books; Brent Hartinger, who self-published a young adult series and a new adult series; Cheryl Klein, the author of a self-published a work of nonfiction; and Stephen Mooser, who released a middle grade book on his own.
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.