Hi, I’m John Fox, and as an editor I’ve helped hundreds of authors write, edit and publish their novels.
If you’re planning on writing a novel, you’ve come to the right place. Let me guide you through the process.
A key part of writing a novel is figuring out the structure of your story. However, this structure might actually only be one layer of your novel.
Complex plots often contain multiple layers of story.
Although we mostly focus on writing craft here at Bookfox, sometimes I talk about other subjects, like marketing your book or technology.
And recently, I did a podcast about how a new technology, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), can help writers.
I often find action movies boring because I have the same criticism every time: More backstory.
I want heroes and heroines and villainesses with complicated motives that are tied to experiences from their pasts.
In preparation for this post, I read query letters until my brain went numb. I looked for the letters marked “successful” — those that garnered agent’s attention. After days of reading, certain constants emerged.
A successful query often includes a combo of:
One of the greatest strengths of novels is their ability to include the voices of a wide cast of characters.
However, if these characters speak different languages from the one you are writing in, you end up with a dilemma: How do you handle other languages within your fiction?
Young Adult novels, or YA, has been spiking in popularity.
According to Publisher’s Weekly, sales of Young Adult novels rose by 18.6% between 2020 and 2021 despite the pandemic.
Mystery fiction is a plot-driven genre. Because of this, both plot and character must be handled differently in mysteries than in literary fiction.
This does not mean that character—or any other element of fiction—can be neglected in a mystery story.
Revision is painful. When I sit down to revise, I find I would rather be doing anything else: scrubbing the toilet, doing taxes, scooping my own eyeballs out with a spoon — whatever.
Anything to avoid the act of revisiting the first draft.
What are NFTs?
NFTs are digital collectibles. If you remember collecting baseball cards when you were a kid, an NFT is a digital version of that card.
You can also have art NFTs, video NFTs, music NFTs, and, of course, book NFTs.