More and more authors want to publish ebooks and need covers, but many don’t feel they can afford the services of a designer. To be frank, I see author-created covers that do not serve the author well. But I also see well-done covers, so I thought I’d offer some resources for creating professional book covers [...]

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It was 5 years ago that I wrote a post for Writer Unboxed on using experiential description to add characterization to a narrative. Pause for HOLY COW, 5 YEARS!? Yep, it was 2007. My, how time gallops. I coined the phrase “experiential description” to express the blending of a character’s perceptions of a setting, person, [...]

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This week I judged about 25 entries for a fiction-writing contest at an upcoming writers’ conference at which I’m also doing a workshop. My task was to name first-place and second-place choices. I found 2 that I could honestly say deserved a “win.” Now, each of these 25 or so writers did the best they [...]

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Although I’m now the full-time operator of my own book editing and design business, before that I spent a few decades as a writer for companies and a university. I think my day-job writing has informed and strengthened what I do now as an author, editor, and designer. Maybe you have a similar story in [...]

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1. Unbox your thinking Books are sold in bookstores, both brick-and-mortar and online, and in racks that you find at drugstores and airports and big-box stores. Right? Yes, but if you can identify an audience with an enhanced interest in an aspect of your book, there could be more places to sell it if you [...]

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After a brief hiatus, valued contributor Ray Rhamey is back! We’re so pleased to have him share insights on both editing and the rapidly changing world of publishing. Welcome back, Ray! Here are some of the options available for distributing your ebook: Upload directly to ebook retailers. The top ones include: Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing [...]

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I am schizophrenic. That has to be the answer. Why do I say that? I recently came to understand that I write differently depending on the point-of-view character—and, scarily, I can’t write in that voice unless I channel the character. Here’s the inciting incident for this realization: I wanted to do an “About the author” [...]

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The keynote speaker at the Write on the Sound Writers Conference at which I did my workshop was a film writer named Brian McDonald. He had an interesting take on the shape (structure) of a story. Since storytelling in a novel and on the screen is fundamentally pretty much the same, I thought I’d share [...]

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It’s a conundrum—for most publishers, a writer needs an agent to market a novel manuscript. But today’s market makes even connecting with an agent damned difficult. Here’s what agent Kristin Nelson said on her blog, Pub Rants: “I’m passing on really good novels because currently I believe that really good might not be good enough [...]

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The image you see here occurred to me in talking about one of the submissions to my Crafting a Killer First Page workshop at the Write on the Sound Writers conference. Backstory (yes, yes, I know, but you need to know this! Really.): workshoppers submit their first chapters, and we critique the first page. The [...]

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