» A Guest Author

Why I Stopped Tracking My Daily Word Count

Ratika Deshpande I previously wrote here about the benefits of maintaining a writing log and setting concrete goals, such as finishing first drafts or writing 500 words every day. Word counts have always been an integral part of my writing process; reaching the daily goal gave me something to work towards. However, for the past…

Case Study: How Ordinary Devotion Got Published

By Kristen Holt-Browning Ten years ago, I took a writing class in my small town in upstate New York with the novelist Julie Chibbaro. Although I had written poems and stories as a kid and a young person, I had pretty much stopped writing in my thirties. My husband was working full-time and commuting, I…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety Five

The Real Benefit of Persistence

By Gabrielle Brinsmead H. F. Brinsmead, the environmentalist, author and my grandmother, gave me the ambition to write. She and my grandfather (whose successful weed-spraying business may have prompted her environmentalism: they argued about everything), lived in a two-storey colonial homestead on Australia’s Gold Coast. Her writing room was a tiny cubby-hole on the ground…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety Four

How and Why Authors Should Write for Other Websites and Their Own

By Ratika Deshpande Recently, I was looking up authors who had contributed short stories to an anthology of South Asian SFF. As a fan of the genre and an Indian, it’s always exciting to find stories written by my people. So I Googled their names, hoping to read more of their stuff. Unfortunately, many of…

Issue Five Hundred NInety Two

The Secret Sauce for Pitches and Blurbs

By Lynne Curry It wasn’t until a development editor said, “You’ve written a reader-facing novel” that I got it. The secret sauce I’d missed for years that would make my blurbs, pitches, stories, and author newsletters sing. If you’ve read craft articles on blurb and pitch writing, you’ve built the foundation you need. Add this…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety One

How This Simple Strategy Changed My Writing Process Forever

By Sam Muller My second, and still-in-the-works novel, People of Dust, revolves round a mysterious disappearance of booksellers. To make the plot work, I needed a city with a flourishing book industry and, naturally, a large reading public. My genre was fantasy. Wouldn’t a technologically advanced and socio-politically sophisticated city seem too modern or science-fictionist…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety

A Surprisingly Effective & Simple Strategy for Selling Your Books at Libraries

By Kathryn Haueisen I’ve yet to meet the author who claims getting to market their books is the reason they write. Like most authors I love playing with words and editing them. The publication process is tedious, but predictable and manageable. But, oh my, how I dread the marketing required to sell books. I was…

Issue Five Hundred Eighty Nine

3 Avoidable Submission Mistakes that Sabotage Your Acceptance Odds

By Jess Simms It’s not easy to get your work published. I know this from both sides of the table as a fiction writer as well as Managing Editor of the literary journal After Happy Hour. The journal’s acceptance rate is around 3%, meaning we say “no” about 32 times for every time we say…

Issue Five Hundred Eighty Seven Special Feature

How to Actually Stay Focused On Your Writing in the Age of Distraction

by Tanya Shaffer Struggle with focus? You’re not alone. Here are 11 tips for keeping your attention where you want it to be—on your writing. As a writing workshop leader, I hear a lot about the struggle writers have in getting themselves to the table and staying there. Wrenching yourself away from bills, dishes, and…

Issue Five Hundred Eighty Six

My Agent Failed to Sell My Book. So I Landed a 3 Book Deal on My Own. Here’s What Happened.

By Sally Jenkins My first novel was self-published and my second was partnership-published. I was determined to get my third book traditionally published. A round of agent submissions created a mound of rejections. I entered a Twitter agent-pitching contest. Honing my blurb to its bare bones resulted in a call for the full manuscript. The…

Issue Five Hundred Eighty Five

I Fell For a Vanity Publishing Scam. Here’s What I Learned.

By Gabrielle Brinsmead When I was nine years old, I was chosen to represent my primary school at a luncheon hosted by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. Seated across the table from the CBCA’s patron, Lady Cutler, I told her that I was going to be a writer one day. ‘Oh, are you?’ Lady…

Issue Five Hundred Eighty Four Special Feature

Case Study: Pivoting to Publishing — That Summer She Found Her Voice: A Retro Novel

By Jean Burgess Despite joining writers’ organizations, taking multiple webinars, reading a plethora of online articles about getting my debut fiction published, I fell into the many traps that novice writers succumb to when too eager to get their “baby” published. Through learning from my mistakes, being open to the advice of veteran writers and…

Case Studies Issue Five Hundred Eighty Three

How to Use Sound Words Effectively: Onomatopoeia or Echoism

By Emily-Jane Hills Orford Bam, beep, buzzzz, clickety click and the sounds erupt from the pages of a story. Children’s books use a lot of sound words: echoism, or more elaborately identified as onomatopoeia. They can be used in any story, for any age group. In fact, some stories demand the use of sound words….

Issue Five Hundred Eighty Three

Nurturing Your Network: How Community Building Led to Publishing Success

By Damiana Andonova I remember writing my first children’s book manuscript in one sitting as a high schooler. In college, I sent perhaps seventy query letters. I reached out to my mentors at the journalism institute where I worked, I talked to literature professors at my university. I even had my lab partner provide beautiful,…

Issue Five Hundred Eighty Two

The Pros and Cons of Morning Pages

By Gayle O’Brien Kennedy At some stage in most writers’ journeys, “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron finds its way onto their radar. First published in 1992, it is often considered the indispensable workbook for turning the intention to write into the act itself. At its heart are morning pages. If you’re unfamiliar with morning…

Issue Five Hundred Eighty One

Articles by A Guest Author