I hold in my hands a trade paperback titled We the Enemy. It’s the real thing—except you can’t buy it anywhere because this is the one and only copy.
This rare, one-of-a-kind book, written and designed by me, cost me all of $10.86 (including shipping). This is by way of Lulu.com. I couldn’t buy one at [...]

Tonight is the night! Carleen Brice’s lauded debut novel, Orange Mint and Honey, was purchased by Lifetime Movie Network and has been transformed into a made-for-TV movie for the network called Sins of the Mother. [Read our interview with Carleen here.] Check out the trailer here, and be sure to tune in to the Lifetime [...]

This is pretty cool. Seeing as Writer Unboxed readers are keen to learn more about the the book publicity space, we thought you might be interested in a homegrown, zero-budget, author-fueled project that WU contributor J.C. Hutchins recently coordinated. It was a cross-promotion that was so savory, it snagged the participation of several New York [...]

Happy Thanksgiving! Hope everyone had a wonderful, food- and family-filled holiday. Now it’s Black Friday, and on this, the biggest shopping day of the year, I’d like to make a special plea: buy books this holiday season. Not my books, I don’t mean, or even those of my fellow WU contributors. Just books. Fiction, nonfiction, [...]

One of the questions that comes up for writers over and over again is, “how much of this book is true?”

Every story a writer composes somehow emerges from the writer. But where to draw the line between truth and fiction might be hard to distinguish. I am not a character. The character is herself. Some of my experiences lend verisimilitude, perhaps, but mostly, I’m cobbling together bits of this and pieces of that, gathering anything and everything that might be helpful to create a sense of a whole world for a reader.

So last week, I posted the first excerpt from The One That I Want, which is out next June, up on my blog. Whoo boy was I nervous about this. You see, this book was more labor than love for me, and well, I’m at that point with it where I simply cannot be objective [...]

Our guest post today is by YA author Isabelle Merlin. For her line of romantic thrillers for teen girls, Merlin has used a variety of online interactive media such as websites, YouTubes, music downloads to engage her readers and make them a part of the story. Merlin agreed to guest post with WU to share [...]

WU contributor and bestselling fantasy author Juliet Marillier has a new book out! Heart’s Blood hits shelves in the US and Australia today. To celebrate, she would like to offer two copies of her new book to Writer Unboxed. Becoming eligible for one of these copies is as easy as leaving a comment at the [...]

One of the fun things about having a book out is that random people will drift into your life and want to talk about Your Book. Through a series of e-mails, the coordinator of a mother-daughter book group invited me to speak at their meeting. This group had been meeting for over a year, had [...]

A good many of you will be writing madly for NaNoMo this month, trying to finish a book in 30 days. How will you stay healthy during this time? As a veteran of numerous NaNoMo’s (otherwise known as the deadline blitz), I have a few suggestions.

So about ten months ago, when the hardcover of Time of My Life hit the New York Times best-seller list, I posed the question: just what does becoming a bestseller really do for you? I wasn’t sure, but thought, because I didn’t see much of a difference in, well, much of anything, after it hit [...]

One of the regular commenters on my own weblog asked me recently to write about genre. She wanted to know if an author starts out with a particular genre in mind, and if so, how is such a thing planned? How do you write yourself into a genre?
I’ve been thinking about this for days, and [...]