Here’s Randy Ingermanson’s writing advice to himself before he became rich and famous. At least it’s the advice he would have given himself when he was young and inexperienced. It is from Jerry Jenkin’s blog. You get good at writing by following these three simple steps: 1) Write a lot. The more you write, the […]
by Genevieve Fosa There are a few websites where I like to keep a fairly constant finger, plus my novel writing, which is one of the reasons for all the online publicity that I am beginning to do. Beating my own drum is never easy. Especially when I was carefully taught to keep it hidden […]
By Gina Burgess I put a book down to get some water, and found myself praying for one of the characters. Now THAT is character development. He wasn’t even the main character! I needed to analyze it and see why my heart was pricked so by that character. Georgette Heyer could sometimes elicit in me […]
By Margaret Welwood Most of us want to instill a love of books and learning in the lives of children—and what else might we be teaching them? Whether you’re a home educating parent evaluating materials, or someone who simply enjoys reading stories to young children, it’s interesting to think about the values we’re passing on […]
by Gina Burgess Over and over we hear that authors need to blog in order to build their platform. They need to be reachable and online touchable, or so we’re told by the publishing gurus. Why? There are lots of reasons, but I’m pretty sure the main reason is that when readers become fans they […]
by Pam Lagomarsino Although it was March, my area suffered a record-breaking destructive storm. At the height of it, we were trapped in our small mountain community on four sides. No one could come in or go out for about two hours as we waited for a dam to break and heard news of roads […]
by Sarah Tun I recently had a chat with a colleague who was feeling a bit low about their current lack of book sales. We’ve all been there! It prompts me to share this with you… Writers need income, which rarely comes from the books they create. With so many books on the market and […]
There is a dichotomy in the brain of every writer: I need to believe in myself to even publish my work anywhere in the world, but for quality’s sake, I really need to develop quality self-criticism. So we have a possible over-confidence or over-positive view vs a negative mindset that questions every word produced. So […]
by Gina Burgess In the New Yorker, there’s a good article: Publish or Perish. The future of publishing is discussed, and Russ Grandinette of Amazon makes a very good point. “In [my] view, book publishers—like executives in other media—are making the same mistake the railroad companies made more than a century ago: thinking they were […]
By Margaret Welwood A children’s book writer, editor, and grandmother offers her take, with links to some of her favorite stories for sharing. Tender-hearted toddler that she is, Eliana loves babies. Here, she’s immersed in the photos of babies and drawings of dancing bees in Laurie Salisbury’s Nothing to Fear. Thousands of Words If a […]
