By Juliet Greenwood The book I’m working on at the moment is based around a garden. That’s not surprising, as most of my stories involve gardens in one way or another – after all, my first published novel is called Eden’s Garden, and you can’t get more garden than that! Until this year, I wasn’t […]
A Note from Jill Tingley, Star of JILL IS NOT HAPPY Dear Fellow Women (and I use that term loosely for some of you), Since you’re all so fascinated with women’s stories, you simply must read JILL IS NOT HAPPY —if only to learn how a real woman handles the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and […]
By Judith Keim One of the first questions a reader has when she opens a book is Who? What? Where? In women’s fiction, the author must introduce the hero or heroine to the reader, identify a location, and give the reader an idea of what it is the heroine or hero wants. That then sets […]
By Cindy Eastman As a writer, I often look for and submit to anthologies as a way to get my work out there and add a publishing credit to my portfolio. It was probably only natural, then, for the idea to create and edit my own anthology to form. Here’s my advice for those mulling […]
THE EXPAT AFFAIR An American expat‘s startling discovery plunges her into the glamorous but deadly world of Amsterdam’s diamond industry. Following a nasty divorce, Rayna Dumont came to Amsterdam for a fresh start. She’s never been the type for a one-night stand, but this move is all about adventure, and Xander is handsome and successful […]
A micro fiction challenge might be the most fun you can have while improving your writing If you’d told me a few years ago that a micro fiction challenge would change my mind about writing super short stories, I probably would have scoffed. Because writing short is hard (and writing short and well is even […]
By Susan Fletcher My mother was a chemist. Back in the 1940s, she did some of the first research on smog in the Los Angeles basin. One of my sisters is a mathematician and computer scientist; my other sister is a physical therapist. My sister-in-law runs a biochemistry lab at Stanford, and my daughter has […]
by Beverly Burch It started with stories, a series of short fiction over a period of years. Some I published in literary journals, some lived on my computer, but the characters began to recur. I didn’t know they were going to do that. In a story with a new character, a woman from an earlier […]
In 2009, I found myself standing at the threshold of a new chapter, a first-year student at the University of Lagos, Nigeria where the air was thick with the scent of possibility. It was here, amidst the vibrant chaos of campus life, that I first dipped my toes into the vast ocean of poetry. I […]
There’s a kind of magic that happens when you crack open the pages of a romance novel. The world shifts. Suddenly, possibility blooms where there was once doubt. You find yourself tangled in stories of second chances, of guarded hearts slowly unlocking, of broken pieces mending in the light of unconditional love. For so many […]
THE EXPAT AFFAIR An American expat‘s startling discovery plunges her into the glamorous but deadly world of Amsterdam’s diamond industry. Following a nasty divorce, Rayna Dumont came to Amsterdam for a fresh start. She’s never been the type for a one-night stand, but this move is all about adventure, and Xander is handsome and successful […]
Today I’ll be interviewing Maurelle, a spying maid who snuck into my debut novel, Behold the Bird in Flight, when I wasn’t looking. The story tells of Isabelle, King John’s second wife. A romantic headstrong girl who caught King John’s eye. He married her, took her to England, and made her queen where she grew […]
We’re delighted to feature this interview with Lorraine Devon Wilke, whose novel CHICK SINGER came out April this year! Tell us about your beginning, where are you from? Originally from the Midwest, I was born in Chicago, grew up in small towns in northern Illinois, and am the third oldest of eleven kids in a […]
Kaua‘i Storm Returning to Kaua‘i, park ranger Makalani finds her family divided and their way of life at risk in this culturally-rich and emotional adventure by the bestselling author of the Lily Wong series. After ten years away as a national park ranger in Oregon, Makalani Pahukula has come back to Kaua‘i for her grandmother’s […]
Fine, I’m a Terrible Person Fine, I’m a Terrible Person is a funny, heart wrenching adult mother daughter story. It begins when 73-year-old, worn out, former beauty, Aurora Hmans Feldenburg, a hapless, perpetually broke, eccentric, divorcee living in the wealthy enclave of Marin County in Northern California, is wakened by a phone call informing her […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Brooke Deanne, Author of Shattered, Broken & Beautiful I never set out to write a memoir. I set out to survive. To simply make sense of the shattered, and broken pieces of my life. To piece myself back together after years of religious oppression, narcissistic abuse, childhood trauma, and deeply buried sexual abuse that […]
The Very Best of Care started as a tiny seed of a thought twenty years ago. I was working as a nurse practitioner in a forty-bed neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The 1990’s were years of higher than usual birth rates, including preterm births. Often, our forty-bed unit would swell to accommodate closer to fifty, […]
THE LOST BOOK OF FIRST LOVES From New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne comes a brand-new story about two women, a family secret and a lost manuscript that changes everything… Raised by her literary icon father Carson Wells, Alison Wells always felt loved, even though her mother died when she was a teen. But when she […]
About The Chosen Queen Igraine, destined mother of King Arthur, takes centre stage for a powerful, feminist retelling of Camelot. The stories of Camelot do not begin with the sword in the stone—but rather with a twisted chain of murder, magic, and deceit. Igraine is happily married to Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, even though his […]
By Marla Miller When women talk about sex, some blush. Some don’t. In ‘SweetSpot: Now and Then, my protagonist blushes. Set in 1999, Darlene Robinson’s story ends one year later, bookended by a writer’s conference she attends in the spring of that year and returns to the following spring. We meet her in midlife. Mostly […]
Getting ideas can be difficult if you’re lacking inspiration, but the good news is, they’re everywhere. The advice to write what you know might seem limiting, but it can be a great launchpad for getting ideas flowing, then the only limit is your imagination. For example, my current novel is about a woman who forms […]
In November 2021, I embarked on my fourth novel, Higher Love, during the whirlwind of NaNoWriMo, fueled by the ambition to release it by early 2023. That dream, however, was deferred by life’s relentless challenges—relocation, loss, and profound grief. After a long, difficult road, Higher Love finally met readers on May 12, 2025. The delays […]
By Diane Papalia Zappa My husband Bob Zappa and I rarely spoke about an afterlife. He believed life on earth was the end, so there really wasn’t much to talk about. As for me, I wasn’t sure. I was open to the possibility, but wasn’t counting on it. Shortly after Bob passed away late in […]
I wish I had found this image of a confident young Confederate cavalryman before I had written a word of Measure of Devotion. In truth, though, the book was nearly finished and I was actually looking for something else when I encountered him in a huge sheaf of old family photos. The photo you see […]
By Leslie Gray Streeter The story of Dawn Roberts, the writer heart of FAMILY & OTHER CALAMITIES, goes back more than three decades and several major plot changes. She’s been everything from a college student in a garage band finding her voice, the former back-up singer in a 90s R&B group who is getting back […]
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