Category: How To and Tips
Why Won’t (Insert Name Here) Read My Book?
So you wrote the book, which is an amazing accomplishment. You published the book, which is another accomplishment. You also dug in and did your marketing homework and set up a great plan to connect with those readers, and began to get some good reviews, and began to get some sales. Now comes the part […]
Eight Ways To Make Your Writing Funnier
“If someone gets a lot of LOLs on their Facebook statuses, do you think they could be a comedy writer? Asking for a friend.” If someone asked me that, I’d go to their Facebook feed and read where theses LOLs were coming from. Of course, his mother. But then I’d cut him a break because […]
The Trouble With Writing About Family
Let us take a tiny moment from our otherwise busy day to think how difficult it must be to be related to a writer. We are not easy people, after all. Many of us are perhaps a bit moody, tense and insecure, and possibly have a slight tendency to scribble dialogue or check our Amazon […]
How Archival Research Added Texture To My Novel
Let me make this clear from the start: I love the smell and feel of archival documents, those yellowing bits of paper and crumbling photographs that rustle ever so slightly when extracted from their manila envelopes. There’s something magical about scouring through meters of racks, drawers and file folders until you find an interesting or […]
Blogging For The Non Blogger
As a debut fiction writer, I was thrilled to be invited to join The Debutante Ball, a website that features five debut authors as they go through the joys and challenges during their year of publication. Each writer is assigned a day of the week to post a blog (I’m the Tuesday girl), and each […]
10 Ways Art Can Improve Your Writing
Writing and the visual arts may seem different, but at their cores, both are about good storytelling. I’m a life-long art junkie. I took my first drawing class when I was in kindergarten, have a degree in Fine Arts from Vanderbilt University, and sketched the Old Masters in the great museums of Europe. This year, […]
Aiming For Balance
Like so many writers, I don’t rely solely on writing to make my living. My income comes from a range of sources: editing, journalism, creative writing teaching and even a little mentoring. This year there’s been the additional juggle of promotional work related to my book, Salt Creek. The common factor is words: love of […]
Cover Story
‘Never judge a book by its cover.’ In publishing, we know that the opposite of this is true. I didn’t know just how true until the publication of my latest novel, Through the Barricades, an historical love story set in the early 1900s. I had had seven novels published by a variety of houses eg […]
Is Your Book Book Club Material? Ask A Book Club!
Beta readers. How necessary they are, but how hard to find. At least they were for me. I didn’t have that “writing bestie” who was dying to read my copy and who could be that magical combination of brutally truthful yet rah-rah encouraging. Most of my relatives stick to history or political tomes. My friends […]
How Agents and Editors Influence My Writing
Writing your first novel is a wonderful experience – the words flow out because you’ve been itching to write them, you know what you want to say, pretty much how you’re going to say it and if you get stuck, you can spend months unpicking the plot holes and re-writing the passages that don’t work. […]
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