Writer Unboxed

When I was in eighth grade, I had really bad hair. It was thick and curly and I had no idea what to do with it. Worse yet–I had swimming first hour. This meant that no matter how semi-normal I was able to look when the first bell rang, by the second bell my hair [...]

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They say, “Even a bad book can teach you something.” And it’s true: we can learn almost as much from a bad example as we can from a good one. Slow opening? Cut the backstory. Cheesy dialogue? Listen to how real people talk. Clunky or complicated prose? Read your work out loud. These are all [...]

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As I write this, it is the last morning of summer. My yearling kittens are crouched in the garden, watching a squirrel on the fence make his way through the face of a sunflower, methodically plucking out striped seeds with his tiny hands, cracking their shells, devouring the kernels. There are piles of hulls, here [...]

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Therese here. Today’s guest is author Laura Harrington, who’s here to talk with us about the importance of reading your work aloud. Laura’s debut novel, Alice Bliss, was published this past June by Pamela Dorman Books. It has since been widely acclaimed–chosen as a “People Pick” by People Magazine, a “Listeners’ Top Book Pick” by [...]

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One of the most common questions I get at writers conferences is this: Can I query multiple agents at once? My answer is that not only yes you can, but you’re encouraged to. After all, though an agent will usually reply quickly (bless you, e-mail), they may take three whole months to get back to [...]

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Therese here, with a special post today. Several months back I heard about a group of authors who’d decided to pool their talents to create an anthology, giving all of the proceeds to charity. How wonderful, no? Since that time, the book has indeed been born. Called Entangled, it offers paranormal short stories by eleven [...]

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In my post last month, I talked about a really hard-to-find essay that was written in 1985 (thanks for the fabulous feedback, by the way). This time, I’d like to talk about a very easy-to-find conversation that took place in 2009 between two extremely popular writers/speakers in the tech community (John Gruber & Merlin Mann). [...]

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Knowing how to effectively market your e-book can be a challenge if you don’t have any formal education or professional experience in sales and marketing. Plus, these days, the default strategy seems to be “I’ll use social media.” But that’s not a strategy, it’s a tool. When I teach the basics of marketing communication to [...]

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I’m up to 233 Twitter followers, yay me. I give a lot of attention to my tweeps, and feed them a steady stream of entertaining true fact/bar facts, twitter-tales and newly invented words, interspersed with those not so entertaining but oh so critical calls to action (“Buy my book! No, that one! No, the other [...]

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In an idle moment a few months ago,when I was between novels and feeling at something of a loose end, I finally got around to doing something I’d been thinking about for a while: start my own blog on food and all sorts of culinary matters, with a French-Australian slant. I wanted it to be [...]

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Therese here to introduce Crystal Patriarche’s first post with Writer Unboxed as a regular contributor. Crystal–a public relations expert and founder of BookSparksPR–will bring us publicity tips every other month. Enjoy! It’s no secret that getting your book publicity is not an easy task these days. In a market where book reviewers and media receive about 150 [...]

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An amazing book by Yannick Murphy was the impetus to pull this post together, and I’ll gush about it in a minute. First, the question I hope we can work on today: How does a quiet book, likely written by a quiet writer, become known in a world increasingly dominated by the loud? The background During the [...]

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