A Successful Daily Practice Requires Honesty

Today’s guest post is an excerpt from The Power of Daily Practice: How Creative and Performing Artists (and Everyone Else) Can Finally Meet Their Goals by creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel (@ericmaisel), run with permission from New World Library.Your daily practice demands honesty. If you play a passage on your musical instrument and it isn’t strong...

3d

Where Novelists Get Stuck: 3 Common Issues with Early Drafts

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She offers a first 50-page review on works in progress for novelists seeking direction on their next step toward publishing.Many believe that having written a novel is a sort of superhuman feat, but in reality, the bigger challenge...

4d

To Avoid Rejection, Take the Writer Out of the Story

Today’s guest post is by editor and author Joe Ponepinto (@JoePonepinto).An admission: As I read my way through the submission queue for our literary journal, I often decide to decline a story well before its end.It’s not that the stories are always bad. Many times the premise is interesting, and the characters as well. It may exhibit the opening tension...

3w

4 Lessons from 4 Years of Self-Publishing

Today’s guest post is by author Deanna Cabinian (@DeannaCabinian).It’s been four years since my young adult novel One Night was released. Time has flown by, and during the past 1,460 days I’ve learned several things about myself, my writing, and indie publishing. But four lessons stand out.1. There isn’t a magic bullet for selling books.There isn’t...

3w

How to Find Publishers

Note from Jane: If you’d like guidance on researching either traditional book publishers or literary agents, I’m offering a class on Sept. 9, Research Agents and Publishers Like a Pro.The following post was first published in 2011 and is regularly updated to include new resources.If you have a book idea or a manuscript, one of your first questions is...

4w

What Your First 50 Pages Reveals

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She offers a first 50-page review on works in progress for novelists seeking direction on their next step toward publishing.Is your manuscript ready to pitch, or does it still need work? It can be a maddening question to answer....

Aug 2020

Building Your Career-Long Marketing Foundation

Traditionally published authors everywhere tend to experience the same disappointment when working with their publisher: lack of marketing and publicity support.Sometimes this is more perceived than real. Publishers tend to do a poor job of letting authors know about all the things they do to market and promote books, especially within industry channels...

Aug 2020

Are Editors Responding to Submissions During Coronavirus?

Photo credit: Mykl Roventine on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-SATodays guest post is by author Denise Massar (@denisemassar).Since the coronavirus has upended the professional and social practices we all used to take for granted, I’ve seen a lot of writing-community chatter on Twitter wondering:Should I query during coronavirus?Should I go on submission?...

Aug 2020

The Joy of the Work: Q&A with Author Caroline Leavitt

In this interview, author Caroline Leavitt discusses the unique challenges of embarking on a book tour during a pandemic, her indefatigable and unapologetic enthusiasm for writing and publishing after all these years, the importance of writers helping writers, the writers who helped her when she was an emerging author, and more.Caroline Leavitt is the...

Aug 2020

How to Do Honest and Legal Giveaways as an Author

Today’s guest post is by author Chrys Fey (@ChrysFey), author of Keep Writing with Fey.When doing giveaways as an author, it’s important to conduct a lawful giveaway (and stay on the right side of Amazon’s terms of service) that protects the rights of the entrants.Before I outline important principles to follow, I’d like to recommend Rafflecopter, a...

Aug 2020