Most of us start a story with an idea. You develop it into a concept. Then you build a character to turn that concept into a premise. Secrets of church history hide in plain sight. What if the DaVinci art held the secrets? What if a professor of Renaissance art found secrets of church history […]
Plot is a means to show the journey of characters, their desires, and motivations. Backstory drives your characters. If your plot is failing you, it’s probably time to write out some backstory, even it’s only a few paragraphs on each major character. Focus on seminal experiences for each person. Backstory is the motherload of ore that gives […]
Everybody has a book in them, right? Way down on at the bottom of some of your hopes and dreams, maybe. You're doing something to make yours: writing, rewriting, working with a coach, meeting with other writers in a group. The work is bubbling up, maybe nearing the surface. When it's at the surface of […]
Prizes are important to sales of a book. The kudos make a book stand out and help convince readers to give it a shot. It seems like an easy observation, so why aren't more indie books submitted for meaningful prizes? Cost is always an issue, especially for the indie author. After doing your work getting […]
Fifteeen years ago, the Iowa Writer's Workshop named Lan Samantha Chang as the first female director of the program, perhaps the most prestigious writing school in the world. Much has been said about Chang, who as a 1993 grad of the program was one of the youngest writing teachers to hold the post. Iowa has […]
Readers tend to choose what they already know when reaching for the next book. That's what BookBub, one of the leading advertising hubs for books, said in a report from a recent newsletter. The ad site's studies of book buyers showed that readers most often got their next book because they liked the author. At […]
Independent authors can count on more resources than it seems, sometimes. The latest advice of the day is that your author website needs to be a sales portal. I don't mean a check-out cart. The landing page for your site should have links to your sales outlets, though. You don't have to take orders from […]
Donald Maass offers a lot of advice on writing a book that breaks out a career in Writing the Breakout Novel. In his first chapter he gives scenarios of writers with ongoing careers, already published, but sliding downward. He calls himself the agent who gets the 911 career call when the author's latest novel doesn't […]
On Thursday July 28 the American Copy Editor Society is holding a 1-hour seminar on What's New in Style. I'm an ACES member, ever since I passed through the organization's Advanced Copy Editing Bootcamp at SMU last year. I brought a journalism degree and publications experience to the Society membership. ACES is different from other […]
You've been edited and proofread. You have your interior layout and cover done. Your designer has a PDF file ready for a printer someplace (Print on Demand through Amazon, or Lightning Source, maybe) and you have a ebook-ready file in MOBI (Amazon) and EPUB (everybody else) formats. It feels like you're publishing. Not yet. Your […]
