Guest Post by Catherine Lanser Are you a master goal setter? If you are like me, you’ve already read all the rules of setting successful goals. Maybe you even treat your writing like a business and set goals at the end of the year or every quarter. Goal-oriented writers are all over SMART goals and […]
Guest post by Jessica Bell Are your books sales dwindling? It might be time for a book cover makeover. When an author comes to me for a cover makeover, I get excited. I get excited because it’s a sure sign of an author wanting to do things right and a sure sign of their trust […]
Any time some well-intentioned writer tells you, “You can’t do that” in your story, please send them this article. Because this article celebrates breaking the rules! Here are more than sixteen writers who deliberately break the rules of narrative to make their book better. The twenty writers below gleefully and blatantly shatter the most fundamental […]
If you’re a traveling bookworm, Jane Austen’s England will bring the characters and settings in her famous novels to life as you follow her own life story. One of England’s greatest and most celebrated novelists, Jane Austen was born in the late 18th century and grew up in Hampshire in the early 19th century. The […]
There’s nothing fancy about a list. Lists are the vanilla flavor of fiction, the most basic tool the writer can have in their toolbox. It’s the simplest way to organize information — no fancy frills, no tricks, no complexity. What you see is what you get. 1, 2, 3. A, B, C. Yet in its […]
I’ve seen a lot of beta reading questions around the internet, and they’re mostly bad. You don’t want to give the same set of questions to every beta reader. It’s best if you hand-select questions for each reader based on what you know about them. For instance, the questions you want to ask a casual […]
It’s incredibly difficult to find beta readers. It’s almost easier to find an editor, because the relationship is transactional. Money = reading + advice. But with a beta reader, you’re asking someone to commit 5 – 10 hours of their life to your brain and story. For free. That’s a huge commitment, and you have […]
I learned about Tertulia, the book recommendation app, from the New York Times article. So I decided to try it out. When I downloaded the app, it said there was a waiting list (uh, oh). But when I signed up, I immediately got an invite (although it went to my spam folder, so I didn’t […]
So you’re thinking about self publishing your children’s book, but you’re a little worried about how much it will cost you. That’s totally understandable. You don’t want to get too deep into the process and then realize that you can’t afford to finish. What I’ll do in this post is lay out the average costs […]
A great metaphor will have distance between the metaphor and the original object. It’s very important that they’re unlike. The more different your metaphors are from the thing described, the more surprising they will be, and the more they will help your reader to understand. Metaphor Mistakes Highly similar metaphors. For instance, “a pool in […]
