Your “LOOK INSIDE!” Book Preview: Will it Turn Readers Away or Close the Sale?
Often a book intrigues me enough that I click through to look at the book’s full details on the retail site. But I almost never buy. Sometimes the full blurb or a review will stop me, but 90% of the time, it’s the sample chapters that turn me off.
How to Craft a Page-Turning Plot
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a hard core plotter. I have outlines and spreadsheets. I cover tabletops with color-coded Post It notes with possible scenes. I have a system, and I work it religiously. Over the past decade, I’ve helped hundreds of authors get from a chaotic swirl of ideas to a coherent set of plot points. (Usually in under an hour.)
Layering Tension in Happyland
There are a lot of ways to add tension to your novels. You can have characters who disagree, characters who want conflicting things, characters fighting battles against villains and weather and animals and, often, friends and siblings and parents.
Dialog Writing 101: Conversational Mechanics
Of all the discrete parts that make up fiction, dialog might be the most dependent on good technique to make it really work. You can put fabulous dialog in your characters’ mouths, brilliant with personality, culture, and subtext—all topics my fellow editors will be discussing over the next three weeks—but if your technique is bad, the words will fall flat.
Balancing Dialogue and Description in Your Story
In today’s guest post, Alex Limberg discusses attaining the perfect balance between dialogue and description in your fiction.
Spellbinding Sentences: 3 Qualities of Masterful Word Choice
Today’s guest post is excerpted from the recently released Spellbinding Sentences (Writer’s Digest Books) by Barbara Baig.
Business of writing
BEHIND THE CURTAIN: The Truth About R&Rs (Revise & Resubmits)
Very early on in querying a manuscript, I received an R&R (Revise & Resubmit) from an agent I admired. When she asked if I’d be interested in revising my work, I quickly agreed. Honestly, at the time I had no clue what an R&R even meant. All I knew was an agent liked my work and I was thrilled.
Is Your Manuscript is Ready to Submit? The Agony of Deciding
The short answer is, you don’t know. You can only send it out and see what response you get. That’s agony. You want to be accepted and published, but no one can guarantee that. The simple fact is that manuscripts that sit on a hard drive somewhere will not sell. Even if I said your book is “perfect,” it may not sell. You must test the market and learn from every submission.
I read a large number of blogs and sites every week and will be curating them here, on my blog. If you want to see my picks of the best articles each week, just subscribe below. You’ll get an email each weekend with a list of the fiction writing articles I found most interesting or useful.