Today’s post is by children’s author and digital strategist Angie Isaacs. Show of hands, writers, how many of you love book marketing? I can’t see through your screen, but I know very few of you have your hands up. Authors hate what they think marketing is. Like most writers, I was not initially thrilled with marketing. But the more I learned, the more my feelings about marketing shifted. Not only is my marketing more successful now, I also enjoy it! (Yes, really!) I’ve seen the same thing with other writers—their feelings about marketing shift. Not everyone comes to love it, but th ..read more

Photo by Espen Bierud on Unsplash Today’s post is by author and book coach Susanne Dunlap. There are many ways to create forward momentum in a story: layering in unanswered questions that create suspense, for instance. Or building a solid cause/effect trajectory from scene to scene, and having your protagonists move inexorably forward on their character arcs via action>reaction>decision>consequence. But there’s another craft element that amps up that momentum not by pushing the story along its established arc more quickly, but by frustrating that progress in a way that acts like ..read more

Photo by Oleksandr P Today’s post is by author, editor, and book coach Julie Artz (@julieartz). Download her Craft Your Query Workbook. There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the challenges around publishing with the Big Five, some of it overblown and some of it valid. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you’ve probably seen some really excellent discussion of alternative options, either in Jane’s Key Book Publishing Paths report, or in her deeper dive into how to evaluate small presses, or in a recent post about the case for pursuing a ..read more

Photo by Nate Neelson on Unsplash Today’s post is by book coach Ayesha Ali. Your protagonist must have a story goal. That is a piece of writing advice that rarely gets elaborated upon. Sure, it’s easy to identify a protagonist’s goal in a quest story, romance or mystery, but even in these novels, the action might not begin until chapters 4 or 5. So what does your character do in these early chapters when things haven’t been shaken up yet? Most story structure guides begin with an exploration of the Normal World. The Normal World serves an important purpose: it introduces you to the protag ..read more

Today’s post is by author, editor, and book coach Suzy Vadori. When you’re reading your own words during an editing pass, your brain works against you in two ways: Your fears can take hold. When this happens, you might be hard on yourself, worrying that everything you’ve written is garbage. This can lead you to over-edit and tinker with your page until you can’t be sure if you’re making your book better, or worse. OR Your dreams can make you starry eyed. You love your idea for the book so much you see it through rose-colored glasses. You skim over your words, nodding along because ..read more

Photo by Antoni Shkraba Today’s post is by author Caroline Leavitt (@carolineleavitt). I’m sitting at a table talking to a friend when they tell me this astonishing, deeply compelling story about what happened to them when they were 15 and they had committed a murder, and yes, they did it, and yes, they served time. Early released, desperate to be forgiven, my friend then created a whole new identity and began to live a new life. Until their forties, when they were outed, losing friends and family. They had to start anew and create yet another identity.  Of course, I’m stunned and shocked ..read more

Photo by Erin Larson on Unsplash Today’s post is by writer Mirella Stoyanova (@mirellastoyanova). There are a select few life lessons that I am fated to learn the hard way. As a therapist, a trauma survivor, and a consummate people pleaser (not to mention a woman), setting healthy boundaries is one of them.  So I should have known that establishing my own boundaries would be an important part of developing my identity as an emerging writer. Yet, what little I had read about boundaries when it came to writing (Protect your time! Don’t compare yourself to others!) and how much I’v ..read more

Photo by Eduardo Sánchez on Unsplash Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin (@FoxPrintEd). Join her for the three-part online class Mastering Backstory for Novelists. Like a genie in a bottle, flashbacks can be wonderful and terrible things. They can grant you phenomenal power—painting in backstory other characters may not know or may be concealing, offering character motivation, raising stakes, creating deeper reader investment, heightening suspense, and more. But, like the genie, if you don’t carefully control them, flashbacks can get disastrously out of hand. If you w ..read more

One of the key pitfalls of backstory, especially early in a novel, is either confusing backstory or overly coy and “mysterious” backstory. Here’s what it looks like. In the enigmatic town of Serenity Falls, nestled deep within the embrace of towering pine forests and shrouded in perpetual mist, secrets were as abundant as the whispers that echoed through the labyrinthine streets. The townspeople moved with an air of quiet reserve, their eyes veiled and their lips sealed, guarding the mysteries that lurked in the shadows of their collective history. Isabella, a newcomer to Serenity Falls, wit ..read more

Podcast host, author, and actor David Temple discusses his shift from being in radio to writing novels, how to navigate author interviews from both sides of the desk, what it takes to make your own book-to-film adaptation, and how he got some of the best known names in thriller writing to appear on his podcast, The Thriller Zone (@thethrillerzone). Having spent his entire career as a broadcast professional, David Temple has hosted top-rated radio shows in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Charlotte, and on both the Westwood One and Armed Forces Radio Networks. Throughout his caree ..read more