You’ve spent hours drafting query letters. You have suffered through rejections. Finally, after almost giving up, a literary agent has expressed an interest in representing you and your book. She has sent you a contract, perhaps in the form of a letter. You read it...
Editor’s note: Looking for our most updated list of best writing websites? Here’s our list for 2021. Your story deserves to be heard, but how do you get people to read it? How do you muster up enough courage and discipline to finish? What are the rules to...
When I finally started writing a memoir, the story had been hiding in my brain for a decade, percolating without me knowing it. Back in middle school, I dated a guy, and it turned into a seven-year, mildly abusive relationship. A decade after it ended, my mother...
Drafting your novel is only the first step in the writing process. Many authors complete several rounds of revision followed by multiple copyediting passes before they even think about sending their book to beta readers, and then complete another pass or two before...
“Write what you know” is incomplete advice. And you probably know more than you think you know. If you start digging into your gray matter, you might find a book in there. Once found, it will want to come out. But it takes more than knowing something and wanting to...
Pick up any newspaper or magazine, and you’ll see something that’s fairly unusual in the blogging world: most articles contain several quotes – words from people other than the author. Here’s the start of a BBC News article, for instance, with the quotes marked up: By...
Are you ready to rank higher on Amazon and sell more books? This may seem like a daunting task; however, it can be done with a little bit of time and marketing know-how. When it comes to figuring out how to self-publish a book, marketing is often the most dreaded...
In 2018, I launched the Belize Writers Conference (BWC). It was a dream of mine to start a writing conference and introduce fellow writers to my beautiful Caribbean birthplace. Although I was raised in California, my ties to Belize are strong. I knew there had not...
It can be challenging to find good writers, especially if you don’t come from the writing world. I liken this to looking for a reliable contractor when you’re not in the home-building space or a high-quality designer when you don’t work in design. Where the heck do...
You may lead a discussion, a writers’ group or a parade — but how do you explain your role when it happened in the past? It may seem like a little thing, but for some of us (ahem, like me), the past tense of “lead” is actually pretty elusive. After all, there’s...
