Marketing is essential for any writer who wants to be successful. Without effective promotion of your services and connectedness with your current and potential clients, it’ll be challenging to maintain an overflowing pipeline of work. There are many approaches to take regarding marketing, but social media marketing presents a uniquely powerful opportunity to promote your… Read more »
In my new book, The Linchpin Writer: Crafting Your Novel’s Key Moments, I talk about how movies can sabotage a novelists’ writing skills. Novelists can definitely learn storytelling techniques from movies, but you shouldn’t rely on movies too much. After all, they are a different storytelling medium, and books can do things that movies can’t… Read more »
Writing is hard. It requires a unique balance of mind, heart, soul, time, resources, and bravery to write a book and work to get it published. That means not only do you have to write the dang book, but to be able to get your butt in the seat to write it. You have to… Read more »
The popularity of novels with an art world theme continues across the decades, with new bestsellers like The Art Forger and The Goldfinch being released every year. For readers who enjoy learning about art and history while being engaged with a good story, the art world appeals as the perfect setting. What separates excellent narratives… Read more »
Let’s face it. It’s hard to care about a story if you don’t care about the characters. Reading fiction is almost always an act of empathy: for a brief time, we get to live another life. Therefore, above all else, writing compelling fiction requires empathy, too—lots of it. It’s one thing to know facts about… Read more »
Coming of age stories are timeless. They’re found across a multitude of genres, from children’s books (picture and chapter books, middle grade, young adult) to adult fiction and even in nonfiction form, such as memoirs and biographies. And many novels ostensibly focused on something else contain coming of age content or aspects, whether it’s memories… Read more »
The main character in my novel, Andrea Hoffman Goes All In, is an institutional equity salesperson. Don’t be alarmed if you don’t know what that is. Neither did I until I became one. But it is important that my readers understand the basics of the job and some facts about the stock market and investing… Read more »
A great novel is like a well-made house: it needs a sturdy structure, or it will eventually collapse. Unfortunately, that structure doesn’t just happen all on its own through some sort of divine story magic (boy, wouldn’t that be convenient). Instead, structure must be developed and applied with great care. Some authors create this structure… Read more »
There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and it often seems overwhelming. Escapist fiction can give readers a break, but it can also feel too flippant for the moment. We want to read and write books that balance the heavy themes of this point in history with a strong, engrossing story that… Read more »
As a writer, it’s tempting to want to test out new styles and approaches to storytelling. One such is writing multiple points of view—where instead of one character’s voice telling the entire story, the author writes with more than one “narrator.” Multi-POV books are popular for many reasons: They allow readers to hear from more… Read more »
