WRITING

Authors Interviewing Characters: L. R. W. Lee

Authors Interviewing Characters: L. R. W. Lee

Morningstar Academy From USA Today bestselling author L. R. W. Lee, Marked is the third book in the addictive Morningstar Academy series, about a fallen angel who fights to save a world spiraling out of control, all while trying to protect humans and her own heart. This intriguing and unseen world of angels and demons […]

May 16, 2024 | By | Reply More
The Default Male in Books – Megan Campisi

The Default Male in Books – Megan Campisi

This is an article about two things: the “default male” in books and how I was once mounted by a cow. They are related, I promise. Why don’t we start with the juiciest? In the 2000s, I was a sort of assistant ranger at an educational farm in California. It wasn’t a bad job. I’m […]

May 16, 2024 | By | Reply More
Kernels of Truth in Tangle of Lies by C. J. Carmichael

Kernels of Truth in Tangle of Lies by C. J. Carmichael

I always chose the settings for my mysteries carefully. They are the “kernel of truth” that lies at the heart of the story. The setting of Tangle of Lies (my new mystery with Tule Publishing) is fictional Tangle Falls on the border of British Columbia, and the state of Washington. Like all my settings, this […]

May 16, 2024 | By | Reply More
The Wild Road Home, Melissa Payne, EXCERPT

The Wild Road Home, Melissa Payne, EXCERPT

A beautiful and enriching novel about unforgettable love and the power of friends and family by Melissa Payne, the bestselling author of The Night of Many Endings and A Light in the Forest. Mack Anders will do anything for his wife, Daisy. Even die. With the woman he loves fading away from Alzheimer’s, Mack fakes his own passing. […]

May 15, 2024 | By | Reply More
DEAR BOBBY: MY GRIEF JOURNEY, Diane Papalia: Excerpt

DEAR BOBBY: MY GRIEF JOURNEY, Diane Papalia: Excerpt

DEAR BOBBY: MY GRIEF JOURNEY, Diane Papalia In Dear Bobby, Diane Papalia Zappa describes the loss of her beloved husband after three short years of marriage. She talks about her own grieving process and outlines ways that can help others cope. The centerpiece of this book is a collection of several “Dear Bobby” letters that helped Diane […]

May 14, 2024 | By | Reply More

HOW TOs and TIPS

Research Is Real for Fiction Writers

Research Is Real for Fiction Writers

by Nan Reinhardt I’m so excited to share this new series with you—The Walkers of River’s Edge. We met the Walkers in previous series—if you are a River’s Edge reader, you might remember that Jazz Weaver is now married to Elias Walker, who left his CEO chair to return to being a carpenter in the […]

May 13, 2024 | By | Reply More
Writing Burnout

Writing Burnout

By Tsara Shelton “I’m just not connecting to my writing in the same way,” I explained to my mom over the phone. Curled into an old rocking chair in my living room in Quebec, I was chatting with my mom – also a writer – who was likely feet up on the old couch in […]

May 12, 2024 | By | Reply More
Something Wonderful: The Ripple Effects of Publishing a Novel

Something Wonderful: The Ripple Effects of Publishing a Novel

Something Wonderful: The Ripple Effects of Publishing a Novel From the time I was a child, I’ve had a notebook in front of me and a pen in my hand. The first time I thought about publishing a novel was in high school when I wrote my first full-length story of about two-hundred pages. When […]

April 23, 2024 | By | Reply More
Writing Dialogue

Writing Dialogue

The best way to write realistic dialogue? Become a champion eavesdropper. Dialogue should flow from the page. Here are my three must dos. Listen to everybody, all the time and everywhere. Concentrate on voice and tone.  Take in the rhythm of real life conversation. Bestselling Irish author, Maeve Binchy freely admitted that she was a […]

April 18, 2024 | By | Reply More
If We Are Being Honest

If We Are Being Honest

“If We Are Being Honest” stands as more than a book; it’s a profound reflection of my journey towards breaking free from the suffocating grip of perfectionism and embracing authenticity. Through its pages, I share the raw, unfiltered truth of my experiences as a woman and mother navigating the complexities of modern life. From early […]

April 16, 2024 | By | Reply More

INTERVIEWS

Authors Interviewing Characters: Peggy Webb Interviews Victoria Logan

Authors Interviewing Characters: Peggy Webb Interviews Victoria Logan

Authors Interviewing Characters: Peggy Webb Interviews Victoria Logan About the book: Rachel, a schoolteacher and widow with two small children and a feisty grandmother, is living an ordinary life on their Logan Ranch in Colorado until a madman dubbed the Collector comes calling.  The Collector has been terrorizing Manitou Springs for almost a year by […]

April 29, 2024 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing Characters: Rania Hanna

Authors Interviewing Characters: Rania Hanna

THE JINN DAUGHTER A stunning debut novel and an impressive feat of storytelling that pulls together mythology, magic, and ancient legend in the gripping story of a mother’s struggle to save her only daughter Nadine is a jinn tasked with one job: telling the stories of the dead. She rises every morning to gather pomegranate […]

April 16, 2024 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing Characters: D.J. Green

Authors Interviewing Characters: D.J. Green

Interview with Paula from No More Empty Spaces, D. J. Green’s debut novel, coming out on April 9, 2024. DJG: Hi Paula, Would you mind talking with me today? I think the world needs to hear a bit more from you. Paula: Sure, I’m happy to chat (chuckles), but I’m not sure about the world […]

April 2, 2024 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing Characters: Van Hoang

Authors Interviewing Characters: Van Hoang

About THE MONSTROUS MISSES MAI A determined young woman in 1950s Los Angeles walks a darker city than she ever imagined in a spellbinding novel about the power to make dreams come true―whatever the sacrifice. Los Angeles brims with opportunity in 1959―though not for aspiring fashion designer Cordelia Mai Yin, the first-generation child of Vietnamese […]

April 1, 2024 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing characters: JN Welsh

Authors Interviewing characters: JN Welsh

Authors Interviewing characters: JN Welsh About IN TUNE A tour manager determined to revitalize her career. The client she can’t stop thinking about. Workplace romance hits the road in this enemies-to-lovers romance from JN Welsh. Luke Anderson needs a manager—fast. His last one quit, leaving his tour and his future in jeopardy. Now instead of […]

March 26, 2024 | By | Reply More

MARKETING AND PUBLISHING

Why is Book Marketing So Damn Hard?

Why is Book Marketing So Damn Hard?

Why is Book Marketing So Damn Hard? I offer a marketing mastermind for writers, called 12 weeks to Book Launch Success. In this group program, I guide novelists and memoir writers to develop a successful launch plan for their book. (If this sounds interesting, more details at the end!) Before developing my program, I interviewed […]

February 8, 2024 | By | Reply More
Things I Wish I’d Known About Book Marketing

Things I Wish I’d Known About Book Marketing

Things I wish I’d known about book marketing: A few specific tips for the author who wants to sell books as well as write them!  (1) When people ask me how I found my agent, I tell them about Publishers Marketplace https://www.publishersmarketplace.com/. This is an enormous database that lists (nearly) every book deal, as well […]

December 3, 2020 | By | 10 Replies More
How I Made Dreaded Book Marketing Fun 

How I Made Dreaded Book Marketing Fun 

I was at a low. I’d just broken up with my literary agent after three years, and it felt as if my publishing dreams would never come true.  I couldn’t sleep.  I was cranky. When The Secret by Rhonda Byrne was published in 2006, I didn’t read it but at 2am one night the Netflix […]

November 21, 2020 | By | 2 Replies More
Second Chances

Second Chances

By Anju Gattani They say cats have nine lives but life doesn’t offer a second chance, at least not in the world of publishing. One book gets one release date, your baby’s out in the world and there’s no turning back.  Now, what if I told you that’s not true. Would you believe me?  What […]

February 17, 2020 | By | 2 Replies More
How To Sell Books: My Marketing Journey

How To Sell Books: My Marketing Journey

I thought my romcom writing career would last forever. I didn’t make much money on my first book, She Sins at Midnight, during its debut year. But I knew going in that would probably be the case. Sales wouldn’t go gangbusters until my second book, The Reinvention of Mimi Finnegan. Which is exactly what happened. […]

November 26, 2018 | By | 10 Replies More

SHORT STORIES

Here’s Why: Short fiction by Anne Leigh Parrish

Here’s Why: Short fiction by Anne Leigh Parrish

Here’s why. You slump, shrink, curl down in your seat, never stand up straight. As if an arrow might pick you off. Not an arrow, a bullet. Not a bullet, a blow. Not a blow, words. Not words, looks. Here’s why. You’re a freak. Four inches in one year? Your father’s colleague says he keeps […]

May 20, 2016 | By | 1 Reply More
Short Fiction: A Sliver of Ivory by Vanessa Lafaye

Short Fiction: A Sliver of Ivory by Vanessa Lafaye

He wanted you to have this. It was written with exaggerated clarity on a scrap of paper, as if the author was unsure of the reader’s grasp of English. The torn paper, rather than a proper card, another signal from the sender. It was signed Elaine, with a rounded, buxom capital E. On the padded […]

January 19, 2016 | By | 2 Replies More
Short Fiction: A New Year’s Friendship

Short Fiction: A New Year’s Friendship

Elaine Walsh Barrington revs up her white BMW and reverses the car out of the double garage behind the house. “I really don’t mind getting a taxi to the station again,” Lorna, her younger sister, says from the passenger seat. “You didn’t have to leave your New Years Day open house like this.” The clenched […]

January 6, 2016 | By | 2 Replies More
Short Fiction: By The Wayside

Short Fiction: By The Wayside

She’s a woman who discards anything which causes sorrow or blocks her path. A man she cares for does both, and she leaves him. She takes only what she really values, an old set of books, a few china plates of her mother’s, an abstract painting she’d found in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She abhors […]

December 20, 2015 | By | 2 Replies More
Non-Fiction: Being Bombed Out

Non-Fiction: Being Bombed Out

This is an account of what it was like to be nine years old and on the receiving end of the bombing power of a well-armed enemy. Like millions in London we were evacuated at the start of the war. My father went to Harpenden with the insurance company he worked for, two days before […]

November 11, 2015 | By | 3 Replies More

AGENT'S CORNER

Q&A with Literary Agent ERIN NIUMATA

Q&A with Literary Agent ERIN NIUMATA

Q&A with Literary Agent ERIN NIUMATA Folio Literary Management, VP and Literary Agent Erin Niumata has been in publishing for over three decades. She started as an editorial assistant at Simon and Schuster in the Touchstone/Fireside division for several years; then moved over to Harper Collins as an editor, and then she went to Avalon […]

October 28, 2023 | By | Reply More
How I Found my Literary Agent

How I Found my Literary Agent

Three years ago, I was a freelance writer with an extremely long Word document chilling on my hard drive. Today, those 98,000 words mark my shift from aspiring writer to fiction author: The Lost Night is coming out from Crown. My novel is a thriller about a woman uncovering the dark truths surrounding her best […]

February 26, 2019 | By | 5 Replies More
Me and My Agent: Christina McDonald and Carly Watters

Me and My Agent: Christina McDonald and Carly Watters

A few days ago I did an interview and one of the questions was did I think having an agent was crucial in this business. The answer for me was a huge, resounding yes. My agent is Carly Watters at P.S. Literary Agency, and I literally wouldn’t be where I am now without her patient […]

February 5, 2019 | By | 1 Reply More
BEING AGENTED IRL – Part Three

BEING AGENTED IRL – Part Three

A Twenty-Five-Question Interview Published as a Five Part Series Part One Part Two | Hosted by MM Finck | | Anonymously Answered By Agented Authors* with Varying Publishing Career Durations and Successes from Debut to Bestselling and Represented by Multiple Literary Agencies of Varying Sizes | QUESTION ELEVEN Historically, how many story ideas do you […]

May 24, 2018 | By | Reply More
BEING AGENTED IRL – Part Two

BEING AGENTED IRL – Part Two

A Twenty-Five-Question Interview Published as a Five Part Series. Read Part One HERE | Hosted by MM Finck | | Anonymously Answered By Agented Authors* with Varying Publishing Career Durations and Successes from Debut to Bestselling and Represented by Multiple Literary Agencies of Varying Sizes | QUESTION SIX Did your first agented manuscript sell? If […]

March 15, 2018 | By | 4 Replies More

Recent Essays

On Writing High Priestess and Empress: Writing Magic in Historical Fiction

On Writing High Priestess and Empress: Writing Magic in Historical Fiction

On Writing High Priestess and Empress: Writing Magic in Historical Fiction By  Susan Wands What genre am I writing? Being on the steering committee of the New York City Chapter of the Historical Novel Society, I read a lot of historical fiction. I love meticulous research revealed in a good plot with compelling protagonists.  In […]

May 14, 2024 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing Characters: Janet Stilson

Authors Interviewing Characters: Janet Stilson

What if your child has special powers and can get people to do almost anything? What happens if the child is abducted? Izzie and Tristan were never mere humans. They are Charismites, with almost god-like powers of magnetism. And they couldn’t be more different. Izzie is a reckless, playful megastar whose popularity far exceeds that […]

May 14, 2024 | By | Reply More
Women Learning to Love Themselves

Women Learning to Love Themselves

Juliet Greenwood When I first had the idea for The Secret Daughter of Venice I knew it was not going to be a conventional love story, but rather that of a young woman learning to love herself, as she uncovers the secrets of her origins, and pursues her own ambition to be make her living […]

May 14, 2024 | By | Reply More
On Disability and Spirituality: Dreaming and Writing a Better World

On Disability and Spirituality: Dreaming and Writing a Better World

On disability and spirituality: dreaming and writing a better world People say write what you know. I’ve never been able to do otherwise. I’ve always dreamed my poems. I wake up and the poem is there. I don’t typically do a lot of rewrites, and the poems come out of my dreams fairly formed.  In […]

May 14, 2024 | By | Reply More
On Writing Five Days in Bogotá

On Writing Five Days in Bogotá

I was in New York City visiting galleries and studios in the early 1990s. A gallerist friend invited me to a dinner party in his apartment in The Old Police Building. Among the guests were Colombian dignitaries who had spoken at the United Nations that day. The cumbia music swept me away as my friend […]

May 14, 2024 | By | Reply More
Background on the writing of Soul Dancing by Gail Priest

Background on the writing of Soul Dancing by Gail Priest

Background on the writing of Soul Dancing by Gail Priest It all began with a conversation my best friend Patt and I had one spring day several years ago as we sat under a huge tree in Chanticleer Gardens in Wayne, Pennsylvania. I told her that I had an idea for a new novel. I […]

May 13, 2024 | By | Reply More
Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis: The Unfortunate Reality of a Nation Plagued by Racism, Patriarchy, and Stark Hypocrisy

Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis: The Unfortunate Reality of a Nation Plagued by Racism, Patriarchy, and Stark Hypocrisy

By Dr. Karyne Messina It’s Barbie’s world, and I wanted to write about it. Consider that, as of March 2024, Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster comedy Barbie earned more than 636 million at the North American box office, with a total of 1.45 billion earned worldwide. It now enjoys bragging rights as Warner Bros’s top-earning movie ever, […]

May 9, 2024 | By | Reply More
Carolyn Clarke: Authors Interviewing Characters

Carolyn Clarke: Authors Interviewing Characters

For fans of the international bestselling and award-winning author of AND THEN THERE’S MARGARET comes the perfect family ‘dramedy’. AND NOW THERE’S ZELDA takes readers on another relatable ‘slice of life’ ride as Allison Montgomery realizes the only way to survive the angst of family is to let go….and let it be. Dealing with a […]

May 9, 2024 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing Characters: Pamela Statz

Authors Interviewing Characters: Pamela Statz

Thorn City: A Novel Suspected murder, eclectic food trucks, and artisanal cocaine: just another day in Thorn Cit It’s the night of the Rose City Ripe for Disruption gala—a gathering of Portland’s elite. Dressed to kill in sparkling minidresses, best friends Lisa and Jamie attend as “paid to party” girls. They plan an evening of […]

May 8, 2024 | By | Reply More
What Called Me to Write Not You, My Memoir by Megan Harris Madramootoo

What Called Me to Write Not You, My Memoir by Megan Harris Madramootoo

What Called Me to Write Not You, My Memoir Megan Harris Madramootoo I love writing and I love helping others. I worked with bone marrow transplant patients for almost 19 years as I took care of my children and finished college. Now I write and teach, and through those I am able to fulfill my […]

May 7, 2024 | By | Reply More