Category: How To and Tips
’How’s Your Book Doing?’ and Other Post-Publication Questions
By Lorraine Devon Wilke Every step in the process of birthing a book has a life of its own: Imagining the book. Writing the book. Editing the book. Querying the book. Not querying the book. Publishing the book. Celebrating the publishing of the book. Then marketing and promoting the book. And marketing and promoting the […]
HOW A FAMILY HEALTH ISSUE INSPIRED AND INFORMED ONE OF MY STORY LINES
I started writing The Summer of Love and Death in January 2022 and submitted it to my publisher in November 2022. In this early draft of my novel, the story did not include Vera Ford, a pivotal character in the earlier books, and the mother of my protagonist, Detective Susan Ford. I couldn’t quite fit […]
From Messy Truths to Meaningful Fiction: Five Keys to Transforming Life into Story
Cynthia Morris Some of us, like me, prefer to lead with our intellect. Makes sense. We want to be taken seriously. Vulnerable in public? Pass! That may work in real life. But when I set out to write my second novel, Her Lisbon Colors, I discovered the very traits I’d hidden—my tender heart and emotional […]
Researching a Book in the Time of Covid, and What I Learned
By Pamela Toler One of the oddities of my career path as a writer of historical non-fiction is that I didn’t have the chance to do archival research for my first nine books. In some cases this was because I often had ridiculous deadlines, which did not leave time to hunker down in an archives […]
Genre Soup: Now with 87 New Flavors
By Lee Bukowski Welcome to the wonderful and confusing world of fiction genres. From Romantasy to Grip-Lit, it sometimes feels like we authors need a decoder ring to classify our books. There’s Literary Fiction. There’s Upmarket Fiction and Contemporary Fiction. And Women’s Fiction. And Book Club fiction. All those genres. So many genres. And sub-genres. […]
What’s your Writer Identity? How Your Writing Beliefs Impact Your Writing
By Sarah E. Pearsall What does it mean to be a writer? In my scholarly life, I study writer identity as it pertains to writing teachers, but much of what I research also applies to writers who are not teachers of writing. What the research tells us is that how you identify as a writer […]
A Duck is a Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickenson wrote the famous poem, Hope is a thing with feathers. As soon as the first book in the Simpato Mystery Series came out, I was asked, “When did you start writing humor?” My answer was, “I always did. But it wore a heavy overcoat.” Now it was time to take the coat […]
So Your First Novel Just Got Published…Now What?
Your dream finally came true. You wrote a book, you found a publisher who loved it as much as you do, and now, your book is in your hands. You’re officially a published author. After the unboxing and the champagne, you sit back and wait for the royalties to roll in… And that’s where the […]
Keeping Your Book in the Public’s Eye
By Carol Hoenig If you’re like me, you worked on your novel for a number of years before it’s ready for publication. Then once it is published there’s the feeling of accomplishment and celebration along with upcoming events and interviews. But about six months later you discover you’ve had your opportunity to get readers but […]
How Did I Get Here? On Dating Myself (and Writing it all Down)
By Abby Rosmarin I didn’t know it at the time, but the initial groundwork for the year of dating myself began with me in my bathtub, choking back tears, and asking myself, “How did I get here?” I was attempting some form of self-care via a bubble bath after seeing my now-ex for the first […]
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