Get past your fears, your doubts, your lack of expertise, your (you fill in the blank), about creating a writer/author website for yourself. As a writer you want to give readers and potential publishers and magazine editors a place to go and find out more about yourself. In fact, it’s a must. Your website is…
When I heard New York Times best-selling author Cecil Murphey (90 Minutes in Heaven) was doing a workshop for the writers group I belong to, I wasted no time in signing up. How better to learn about writing than to be taught by a multiple, best-selling author? During the day, he taught on dialog. Here’s part of…
The benefits of membership in a writer’s organization are numerous. The benefits vary from organization to organization, but here are just a few: Submission call-outs (markets accepting stories such as Chicken Soup for the Soul) Networking with other writers Print or e-newsletters of industry news and writing techniques Discounts on organizational contests and conferences Webinars,…
Formatting your submissions according to a publication’s writer’s guidelines is essential. Finding those guidelines isn’t always easy, and even in this day of digital everything you often have to request guidelines via email. For easy reference, FreelanceWriting.com provides a database of 836 writer’s guidelines, by category. http://www.freelancewriting.com/guidelines/pages/
I regularly notice that writers incorrectly shift from one character’s point of view (POV) to another. That is, they give us more than one POV in the same paragraph. I know I did when I first began writing fiction, and I continued to struggle until I got my brain wrapped around what POV is. Nancy…
Today is the first in a new series I call Friday Feature. I thought it would be fun to interview authors and find out what their publication journey was like and wanted to offer them a free tool for marketing their debut book. Friday Feature will appear every third Friday of the month and will…
Readers want to see character growth and change through the course of the story. This is the character arc of your story. Character growth can be as simple as having your heroine realize she doesn’t need a man in her life to be happy, or as complex as overcoming the childhood trauma of abuse. Here…
So you’ve started a blog and are wondering if you should trademark your blog’s title. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a trademark is a brand name and includes any word, name, symbol, device, or any combination thereof that is intended to identify the goods or services of a seller. Like…