Writer Unboxed

 Alyssa B. Sheinmel has quietly been building a reputation in the YA market for excellence. She came on my radar when her debut novel, The Beautiful Between, garnered a slew of positive reviews and buzz. The New York Post called it “Endearing, realistic and heart-wrenching. Sheinmel offers a thoughtful look at teens,” while Publisher’s Weekly [...]

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It seems publishing houses no longer have the capacity to provide the kind of promotional efforts on a writer’s behalf that they would have done only a few years ago. Market pressures have combined to put far more of the responsibility on us, the writers. Like it or not, we have to blow our own [...]

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Judging WU contests has become more difficult! This time around, there were 200 entries in our hooks-for-books contest, with the winner set to receive 14 of Mary Stewart’s beautiful reissued titles. Kath and I debated, we compromised, and finally we came up with our Top Ten hooks: 1. Sarah opened the door to see her [...]

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Let’s talk about the dress. You know the one I mean. Months of speculation finally were satisfied last Friday when we glimpsed it at last, then studied it in detail as Kate Middleton slowly processed down the aisle of Westminster Abbey. There are a lot of adjectives we could use to describe it, from sophisticated [...]

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Therese (Walsh) here. Please welcome today’s guest, Therese Fowler. Therese’s third novel, Exposure, about the dangers of teen “sexting,” releases today by Ballantine Books. Said Eleanor Brown, New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters: Complex, gripping, and rich with emotion, Fowler’s 21st-century Romeo and Juliet beautifully blends ripped-from-the-headlines drama with honest and carefully [...]

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So many writers are introverts. You’d think that a roomful of writers at conferences would devolve into mass silence, a staring contest several hundred people strong. But that’s not what happens. I spent this past weekend at the Muse and the Marketplace conference, and at breakfast tables, cocktail hours, and in the hallways between sessions, [...]

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Therese here. Today’s guests is debut novelist Kaira Rouda. Kaira is the bestselling author of the nonfiction book Real You Incorporated: 8 Essentials for Women Entrepreneurs, which was published in 2008, the same year she won Best Entrepreneur from The Stevie Awards for Women in Business. A former journalist, award-winning marketer, entrepreneur, and national speaker, [...]

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