Articles by A Guest Author

12 Ways Authors Can Use Instagram Reels to Increase Engagement

By Ishitta Nigam Picture this. You enter a café for your morning cup of coffee. There’s a queue, and you are patient enough, but your stomach grumbles in disagreement. You finally reach the counter and begin to recite your order, “Hi, I would like to have a cappuccino and a…” “…a croissant du beurre with…
Issue Five Hundred Fifty Six Special Feature

Writing For Solace

By Ruth Wilson Writers write for a variety of reasons – as a creative endeavor, to clarify or share an idea, as a source of income, to respond to a muse, to play with words, etc. I sometimes write for solace. Journals I’ve kept for over 30 years include entries about sadness, anxiety, disappointments, and…
Issue Five Hundred Fifty Five

Ramping Up My Short Story Success

By Deb Stark My first publication credit was a poem in my high school yearbook. Only eight lines, it was a bittersweet tale about my teddy bear and the angst of aging. The poem was placed on the inside corner of a left-hand page and may have been selected more because of its size than…
Issue Five Hundred Fifty Four

Case Study: How Parental Death – The Ultimate Teen Guide Got Published

By Michelle Shreeve In 1993, I was nine years old and my mother died. There were hardly any books pertaining to the death of a mother to serve as a reference guide for me as a child to try and navigate my difficult loss. I had to try and navigate the death of my mother…
Issue Five Hundred Fifty Three Special Feature

5 Ways to Promote Yourself as an Independently Published Author

By Audrey Wilson Writing a novel in itself is a huge accomplishment. That feeling you get when you write those two precious words, “The End” is truly priceless. You think nothing can beat it. Then months, or more likely years, down the road, your book is published. You’re holding that first published copy in your…
Issue Five Hundred Fifty Two

How to Tighten Your Midpoint Twist

By Ley Taylor Johnson Now that you’ve reached the middle of your story, it’s time to kick up the tension with a good old-fashioned plot twist. The midpoint is a great place to up the stakes of your story, giving your protagonist new paths to explore and new challenges to overcome, all while building up…
Issue Five Hundred Fifty Two

Is an Unpublishable Book Worth Writing?

By Lory Widmer Hess Why write a book that can’t be published? My own first book, a memoir that I wrote in the aftermath of my father’s death, was one of these. I’d never completed a full-length manuscript, only fragments and false starts, until then. But somehow, during this time of loss and grieving, I…
Issue Five Hundred Fifty Two

The Other Side of the Desk: Becky Tuch

This new series of articles is different from anything we’ve ever published before. Most of what we have previously published focused on the perspective of submitting writers and published authors with the occasional article from an editor’s perspective sprinkled in. This series of articles, which are formatted interview style, will focus on the perspective of…
Issue Five Hundred Fifty One The Other Side of the Desk

The Innocent Loss of First Rights

By Craig Westmore You only get one chance to make a first impression and that applies to fiction as well. Writers need to choose carefully where their fiction first appears. Whether you are seeking feedback or posting for family and friends, uploading your story to the internet can cause difficulty when trying to get it…
Issue Five Hundred Fifty One

The 5 Dos and Don’ts of Self-Promotion for Authors

By Ellie Matama Writing a book is an accomplishment because it takes a lot out of you. By the time you finish, you will have invested a lot of effort and time. But completing your book is only the beginning of the struggle because books don’t sell themselves. Below are some basics of self-promotion. 1. …
Issue Five Hundred Fifty Special Feature

How to Carve Out Time to Write

By Aliya Bree Hall We’re all busy. From balancing our jobs, families and social calendars, it can be hard to justify using our hard-earned free time to write when there’s hundreds of other things we could spend that energy on. As you can imagine, the problem with that approach is that if we’re not actively…
Issue Five Hundred Forty Eight Special Feature

How to Write Effective Subplots

By Ley Taylor Clark So you’ve finally plotted out — and maybe even drafted! — all the major beats of your story. You know what’s meant to happen and when, and your novel is starting to take impressive shape. You’re feeling good, but after you do another read through or pass it off to a…
Issue Five Hundred Forty Eight Uncategorized

Dancing to the Finish Line

By Ruth Wilson It all started with a phone call. My friend, Jeannie Dennler, called to say that she needed help finishing a book that she had started ten years earlier. “If there’s one thing I need to do before I die, it’s to finish this book. It’s been hounding me for way too long….
Issue Five Hundred Forty Seven

Mental Health and the Muse

By Kaki Olsen Aristotle is credited with the famous quote, “No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness” and it is true that great art has often emerged from troubled minds, but it is inaccurate to think that authors can’t have one without the other. I absolutely encourage putting your soul into…
Issue Five Hundred Forty Six

To Tag or Not to Tag: Unraveling the Use of Dialogue Tags

By Emily-Jane Hills Orford Dialogue is quite simply a conversation between characters; it is what the characters say to each other. Dialogue is an effective way to move the story forward, enhance the plot, and develop the characters. Dialogue tags are the means to identify who is saying what and how they are saying it….
Issue Five Hundred Forty Six

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