Guest Post: So You Have a Writer Friend…Don’t Panic
One of the first published novelists I got to know told me that it was really awkward to be friends with a writer whose stuff you don’t like.
Archive for the ‘Advice for New Writers’ Category
Guest Post: Things I Know?
Buying into a personal mythology of hierarchical status can harm your career. It’s one thing to expect respect for your work and experience. It’s quite another to expect demonstrations of your status or to make pronouncements like “I will not attend any conventions at which I am not a guest of honor.”
Guest Post: Long Sentences
We do need, not more, but a deeper relationship with what we have. Not knowledge, or not just knowledge, but understanding. That’s what writers give us.
Guest Post: 25 Reasons Readers Will
Keep Reading Your Story
A good story should always be raising questions — not asking them directly, but instead forcing the reader to ask them. “Wait, what’s that weird symbol they keep seeing on the walls? What was that sound? Something’s up with that top hat-wearing fox that keeps following them, too.
Guest Post: Book Publicity: Working with Bookstores
If you do set up an event at a store, it may sound obvious, but an author promoting their event on their own Facebook and twitter helps out a lot. We have our own ways to publicize an event to our customers, and we have our events listed in the newspaper weekly, but the more an author can say, “I’m going to be in this city, on this day,” the better our event turnout is going to be.
Guest Post: Debut Author Lessons–How to deal with self-promotion and award season
Let’s talk about self-promotion and how it feels icky.
Yes, self-promotion is awkward to do the first time. Yes, it is very easy to do badly. But–it is incredibly important to your career. Someone asked, “Isn’t it enough to write a good story?”
No.
Guest Post: How I Went From Writing
2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day
When I told people at ConCarolinas that I’d gone from writing 2k to 10k per day, I got a huge response. Everyone wanted to know how I’d done it, and I finally got so sick of telling the same story over and over again that I decided to write it down here.
Subject: Hello from your Publicist
Today, when the dominant form of communication is email, it’s easy to go through your publicity campaign without ever hearing your publicist’s voice. This would be a mistake.
Guest Post: Having a Saleable Novel
Doesn’t Make You a Sell-out
So let’s get back to that whole laughing at work-for-hire authors or trashing popular books or not understanding what a saleable novel is.
Guest Post: Novelists, Inc., Conference Report
According to Carolyn’s research, aided by Google, there are about 288,355 books published every year by traditional publishers. Current estimates anticipate 800,000 books will be self-published this year. So how do you make your book stand out among literally a million titles?
