» A Guest Author

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

Is Your Manuscript Reader-Ready? Your Query Can Tell You!

By Julie Artz There’s a reason I advise my book coaching clients to write their query before they draft their full manuscript, and it’s not so that they’re ready to query agents or editors as soon as the first draft is done. A good query letter: And if you can do that, you likely have…

Special Issue

Misheard Inspiration: Turning Mistakes Into Writing Opportunities

By Ellen Levitt Have you ever misheard lyrics to songs? Lines of dialogue in a TV show or film? The tagline of a commercial or jingle? If you have, you might be embarrassed; you might laugh it off; and you might even turn it into fodder for your writing. For all my musical knowledge, I’ve…

Issue Five Hundred Eighty Special Feature

What People Don’t Tell You About Writing a Memoir

By Liz Alterman Writing a memoir is a wonderful way to capture your experiences, imbue them with meaning, and share them with others—whether you choose to keep your audience limited to friends and family or pursue a more traditional route, hoping your work reaches the masses. There’s no shortage of articles about the challenges of…

Issue Five Hundred Seventy Nine

We’re Not Robots: Why AI Chatbots Can’t Replace Good Writing

by Fiona M Jones I’ll always remember 2023 as the year when the manure hit the rotating blades with regard to AI-generated content. For the first time, AI chatbots showed that they could produce, on demand, sentences and paragraphs in response to a given prompt. To all appearances, robots were writing articles, verses, narratives—and doing…

Issue Five Hundred Seventy Eight

Start Small and Write Books Later On

by Thomas Smith I have to be honest. It’s pretty nice to walk in a bookstore and see your novel on the shelf. Or to get a note from your editor saying your novel is still in the Amazon top 100 for the second week in a row. Having written a novel is a big…

Issue Five Hundred Seventy Seven Special Feature

From the Blank Page to a Self-Published Novel

By Amy Glin The road to seeing my novel, G.O.D., self-published on Amazon (and other sites), was long and worth it. It began in 2008. I hit the publish button in 2024. It took nine years to write and edit. I threw out the first 80 pages and the second 35, and then I found…

Issue Five Hundred Seventy Five

Articles by A Guest Author