Category: How To and Tips
Launch Diaries: The Day I Stopped Querying
I spent three years in the query trenches, determined to land a literary agent. For much of that time, I wasn’t part of a writerly community (didn’t believe I qualified), had told no one what I was attempting (seemed easier should I fail), and didn’t know any published/aspiring fiction authors. All I had were loose […]
On Storytelling and the Tarot: A Personal Journey by Kris Waldherr
by Kris Waldherr One of my favorite literary touchstones is Dante’s Inferno. The story of the poet’s pilgrimage through the underworld has fed some of my creative projects as an illustrator and writer. The Inferno kicks off with one of the most famous sentences ever set on paper. To paraphrase roughly in English: “In the middle of the […]
Six Things You Can Do To Support The Authors In Your Life
By Andrea J. Stein, author of Typecast and Dear Eliza When babies are born, there are celebrations galore. Showers are thrown. Gifts are given. Visits are paid. In many ways, books are authors’ babies. They take hours and hours (truthfully, years!) of work to create and cultivate, and then they face a big world full […]
Creating the Writing Career You Want
By Tiffany Yates Martin Four years ago, in April of 2020, my first book for authors released right as the world shut down in the acute initial panic of a global pandemic. The book, Intuitive Editing, felt like my life’s work, the culmination of my decades working in the publishing industry as an editor: a […]
Lessons in Publishing by Marilyn Simon Rothstein
by Marilyn Simon Rothstein Getting published saves time. That’s because it’s no longer necessary to spend hours yearning to be published. Nine out of ten authors are “bestselling”. The rest are “award winning”. Almost every writer was once a lawyer. Smile at this remark, “I’m constantly lending your new book to friends. Did I mention […]
Losing Steam: the Pros and Cons of Launching Two Books back-to-back
By Jennifer Lang Six months after signing a contract for my first book with a small, independent press, I held my breath, crossed all ten fingers, and submitted my second manuscript to them. After an OFFER OF PUBLICATION email arrived in my inbox a few months later, I was overcome by a mixture of joy […]
Four Ways Being a Magazine Editor Helps Me Write Fiction—and One Big Thing I Had to Learn
By Erin Quinn-Kong When I was a sophomore in high school, I took an Intro to Journalism class where we learned about news and feature writing, the role of editors, and more. That was it—I knew what I wanted to do with my life. After attending the University of Missouri School of Journalism, I moved […]
My Writing Process: An Ever-Changing Work in Progress
Katie Keridan Let me start by reminding you of something you already know, which will also serve to clear up one of the most common misconceptions I continue to hear about the writing process: There is no right way to write a book. There are, however, ways to write a book that will work better […]
Write Local by Sarah Angleton
Write Local About twenty years ago, I stepped into an intimidating academic building that smelled of old books and institutional knowledge to receive some great well-worn advice I should have taken much sooner than I did. At the time, I was looking to change directions from my as yet unused undergraduate degree in zoology toward […]
From Medicine to Writing to Crime: a Natural Progression? By Anne Pettigrew
By Anne Pettigrew You don’t have to search far to find medically trained folk who’ve become writers. For example, Anton Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Richard Gordon, Michael Crichton, Khaled Hosseini, Adam Kay and Freida McFadden were qualified doctors. Even Agatha Christie, the world’s most successful crime writer (two billion book sales) was ‘medical’, being […]
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