by Amanda Clay Plotting with a comprehensive outline is the ONLY way to write! If you plot, you’ll stifle your creativity! To be successful in the digital marketplace, you have to write a book a month! You can’t possibly write a good book in under a year! Have you heard any of this writing advice?
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Creative Ways to Virtually Connect with Your Readers: My Virtual Test Kitchen
By Carole Bumpus March 14, 2020 was Pi Day or Pie Day. This was the first day I awakened to the fact that the world in which I lived had radically changed. Freedoms I took for granted were coming to a halt or had been heavily curtailed. Planned out-of-the-country travel had been placed on temporary
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Podcast-Direct Sales: Benefits for Authors Chelsea Bennet
Carla King interview with Chelsea Bennet of Lulu.com Direct sales allows authors more control, enabling them to own the customer journey, including gathering data unavailable through traditional sales channels such as Amazon. Having an author website is critical, so that readers have a hub to visit—and because it can act as a platform for direct
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Capture Magic Moments in Your Writing
by Louise Nayer During the pandemic it can be hard to focus on magical moments in your life. Often, however, those moments come when things are hard. For a moment, you turn a switch in your brain and see things differently. My father, who was badly burned, came to pick my sister and me up
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Can a Woman Write a Book for Men?
By Michelle Travis, Author of Dads For Daughters After seeing how my two daughters inspired my husband to become an outspoken advocate for gender equity, I became curious about the father–daughter relationship. I sensed that this relationship held unique power to build men’s empathy and engage male allies in the fight for women’s rights. I
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Sentence Starts – Journaling for Insight and Solutions
Monday Motivation By B. Lynn Goodwin Since our bodies are confined but our minds are not, I’d like to share these sentence starts with you in case you could use a writing nudge as we shelter in place. I’ve been creating these writing prompts since 2004, then writing about them with my free-writing group. I’ve
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Walter Mosley speaks on not picking a lane, fomenting change, and the publishing industry
Podcast Interview by Joey Garcia with guest Walter Mosley. When questioned about his thoughts on writers sometimes being told to “pick a lane and stay in it,” i.e., choose fiction or nonfiction—but not both—Mosley explained that notion is inherently a capitalist one. He added that even when artists are told that what they are working
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An Update from the World of Publishing (from an agent’s POV)
By Laurie McLean, Fuse Literary Co-founder and SFWC Director It’s mid-April as I write this, and the world has entered the second stage of this horrific pandemic. Most of us are staying at home, only going out for essentials like groceries and gas. Writers are either actively writing or at least keeping notes on their
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4 Accountability Tips To Meet Your Writing Goals
By Paul Hobday Have you ever sat down and tried to calculate the actual time you spend writing a manuscript? I did this a couple of years ago during NaNoWriMo. By the end of November, I was at around 47,000 words and about 63 hours of writing. I kept it going and the final manuscript
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A Good Thing, Hope
by Victoria Zackheim I’m searching for glasses that are perched on my head. I’m putting the carton of milk in the cupboard and the box of cereal in the refrigerator. I’m looking outside and see my car, covered in bird droppings, no longer the sparkling silver it once was. It looks abandoned. There are days
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