Category: How To and Tips
Writing and the Arts as Therapy
I remember the day in eighth grade when our teacher, Mr. Johnson, stood in front of the class and called us to attention. “This is the best piece of student writing I have come across in my twenty-two years of teaching,” he told us. Our homework that night was to write an essay. What he […]
Getting to Know my Characters
I’ve always been interested in who people really are and the darker side of human nature. I love creating characters; thinking about what makes them tick. It fascinates me. When an author friend of mine, Nicci Cloke, (who also writes under the name Phoebe Locke) recommended a service called Characters on the Couch run by […]
My Journey To Publication: Anita Frank
Like most would-be writers, I have dreamt of being an author since I was a child. I had my first stab at getting published in my late teens when, encouraged by their open submissions policy, I sent a couple of truly awful romances to Mills and Boon. They were, of course, both promptly rejected, but […]
How Grief Changed My Reading
Books have been my companions since childhood. The books, the stories, the characters all woven into my life. When my days had been full of people and when I’ve been alone. I grew up with my nose forever in a book. I was in Great Books in elementary school, majored in English Literature in college, […]
Not Our Grandmother’s 70
By Jayne Martin If someone had told me when I was 30, that I would be publishing my first book of short fiction at the age of 70, undoubtedly I would have smirked and said, “From where? A rocker at the old folks’ home?” Only the young can be so cocky. In all fairness, at age […]
How to Market a Backlisted Book
Diana Y. Paul, author of Things Unsaid Once buzz of a new book has died down, there’s nothing you can do to market that book except publish the next one. Is that the myth you’ve accepted? You can continue marketing a book effectively to reach new readers well after its release date. Think of how […]
Rediscovering Writing After Publication
As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I never said firefighter or ballerina or astronaut. I wanted to be a writer. In college, and when I first started writing seriously in my twenties, I loved the world that writing created. When I was writing, or thinking about writing, […]
Burn It Down
When an editor at Seal Press approached me in March, 2018 and asked if I might be interested in editing an anthology of essays on women’s anger, I waited to hear what the catch was going to be. There was no way such a perfect project could just fall into my lap! It felt like […]
Writing to Market
There’s this fun little thing in publishing called “writing to market.” Writing to market means picking your genre, characters, central storyline etc. according to what readers want to read at that moment. It’s a brilliant strategy, right? Unless you’re me. I don’t create stories based on demand; I can’t. I write based on character. For […]
Six Books in Three Years: An Indie Publishing Journey By Susan Cushman
The quickly changing world of book publishing can be a difficult terrain to traverse for a new writer. After spending a decade “prepping” for this leg of the journey by writing and publishing essays in various journals and magazines and building a platform on social media, I was finally ready to publish a book. And […]
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