If you are an indie author, you know that your books and eBooks must be formatted properly before being submitted to the publishing platform. Traditional, on-demand, and eBook publishing services usually have exacting standards. You want your book to appear professional by adhering to those standards. Most of us don’t want to spend the time and tedium working through our manuscript…
This week we came across this article, “Writing Success: How To Engineer Your Novel For It” by Larry Brooks of Storyfix.com, a novelist and nonfiction writer. Larry first addresses whether storytelling is an art or science. The answer, of course, is both. He briefly discusses how work, the crafting of them and then spends some time talking about…
Whether you are writing nonfiction or a novel, research is almost always part of the process (or should be!). You might be a mystery novelist who writes your first draft, then turns to research to make your characters, settings, and topics more realistic and lively, adding the details and rewriting. Or perhaps you write historical…
In my experience, there are two kinds of authors when it comes to editing: those who love it and those who hate it. I have not met one yet that says, “yeah, it’s ok.” But even those of us who love it sometimes find parts of it a grind. Perhaps the most difficult thing about…
Proofreading, Editing, Formatting, Indexing Do you need an editor? While most writers get pretty good at editing (if we say so ourselves), it is always better to have a third party edit your work. Whether it is us or someone else, make sure you get someone with experience editing professionally! Our editors have over 25 years of…
Here are some excellent articles from around the web to hone your writing skills. This month’s posts focus on time management for writers and what to write about. setting realistic writing goals (thewritersaurus). As the title states, this article discusses how to set realistic writing goals. Importantly, the author notes that ‘word count’ goals will (and…
How Long Does It Take to Write a Novel? (Anne Charnock for Writers Digest). Of course, the real answer is “it depends.” On the writer, schedule, desire, research needed, and many more options. In this post, Anne compares the writing of her second novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind as compared with her first novel, A Calculated…
The best books in the world will not sell if no one knows about them; the best essay, paper, or blog posts won’t be read if no one sees a link to it. We hope you are doing some promotion of your work, whatever it may be: on your website, through a FaceBook page, on…
This article, by Bellow Beth Cooper, si based on some reading she has done about writer routines and advice. She has compiled six of the most common in this post: The best ways to get over the “blank page hurdle” Discard clichés: How to stop writing like “you’re meant to write” Don’t make it sound…
The positives of an indie author are control, freedom, and high royalties. The negatives, however, are well-known—book promotion being one of the more important. However, there are resources—both free and paid—that will do advertising for you. How well they work depends on a lot of factors (a topic for another post). This is a list of top free and paid options.