Becca Syme discusses common advice writers receive--like "you can't edit a blank page"--and shares advice on how to decide if it's right for you. She explores the importance of questioning the premise, and provides guidance on how you can best match your abilities and preferences to the approach you take to your creative work.
Zach Bohannon shares the personal and creative benefits he gained by living a life of digital minimalism. He asks us to question our assumptions about whether online interactions are really necessary to create community with our fans and to reach new readers. We also discuss what fodder for our work we miss if we're focused on our devices rather than on the world around us.
Kelly Simmons reviews the three core rules of writing a successful query--keep it short, don’t sound like an a**hole, and don’t become an automatic no--and shares guidance on how to make your query stand out in a busy agent's inbox (including emojis!).
Pauline Wiles discusses why authors intent on reaching new readers should not be investing their time writing blog posts for their own website, and shares ideas for alternatives that will offer better returns in terms of building your reader community.
Common wisdom is to write what you know, and incorporating your day job into your books is an obvious method. But how do you do that and maintain confidentiality and professionalism when your job is as sensitive as a funeral director and undertaker? Todd Harra describes how he has walked that fine line in this episode.
Brian Meeks talks through his revision of one of Matty's book descriptions to illustrate the copywriting methods that have enabled him to turn browsers into buyers on the online retail platforms.
J.J. Hensley discusses the Three Hard Truths he has discovered since his first book, the support he found in the writing community, and the importance of assessing your goals for becoming a writer.
Emma Prince shares her process and learnings from translating her historical romances into German--reader outreach that, with some upfront preparation, can earn an author another stream of income from an existing piece of content with minimal ongoing effort.
Liz Jostes of Eli Rose Social Media describes the data that drives search engine optimization, identifies outdated approaches to avoid, and provides tactics that authors can apply to ensure readers can find you and your books online.
Author and podcaster J. Thorn shares some great advice for anyone thinking of starting a podcast, great recommendations for writers looking for a podcast to listen to, and valuable insights into building relationships with others in the writing and publishing worlds by approaching them with an offer rather than an ask.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre brings over a quarter century of experience in the writing, publishing, and bookselling worlds to provide insights and strategies for how authors can benefit from developing relationships with libraries and bookstores and can in turn bring benefit to those organizations.
Jane Gorman, author of the Adam Kaminski mystery series, and I discuss two primary components of a successful book cover--the cover image and the title--and provide best practices and advice on avoiding common pitfalls.
Story Grid-certified editor Anne Hawley discusses what we can learn from masterworks and the importance of meeting a reader's genre-specific expectations.
In this episode, I speak with Julie Duffy, founder and director of StoryADay.org, about creativity, mindset, the importance of community, and the strategies and tools you can use to write today, not someday.
USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Lisa Regan shares the details of her voyage through the traditional and indy publishing worlds, and shares some great advice for making a success of both.
Wendy Tyson, bestselling author of three mystery series, shares her lessons on "Five Things I Wish I Knew Before I Was Published."
Mark Lefebvre, my co-author on “Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction,” discuss the collaboration process and the messages of the book.
This episode’s topic takes a cue from the name of one of Jane’s series—Writing in Time—because the topics of many of Jane’s books are closely tied to a specific time and an event of that time. We discuss the research Jane did on those topics, and what she found.
Master Sergeant Chris Grall (U.S. Army, ret.) has 26 years
of military experience and over 15 years of Instructor
experience dealing with Law Enforcement topics. Chris
has served on a U.S. Army Special Forces Operational
Detachment Alpha as an Engineer Sergeant, Intelligence
Sergeant, and Operations (Team) Sergeant. Before that he
served in a Long Range Surveillance Detachment and an
Infantry Unit. Chris is currently working as a government
contractor and offers subject matter expertise to authors
through his consulting company, TactiQuill.
Ken Lozito discusses his decision to write full-time, and provides advice to others considering that change.
Matty Dalrymple, The Indy Author, discusses the first Lizzy Ballard Thriller, “Rock Paper Scissors,” the evolution of characters across multiple books, and how to juggle writing with a day job.
Tony Conaway has been a published writer since 1990. He has written dozens of nonfiction articles for venues as varied as airline in-flight magazines, business publications, men’s magazines, and medical publications.
These days, he is concentrating on his fiction writing. At present, he has had over thirty short stories published, some of which have been collected in seven anthologies. His fiction spans a wide variety of genres, including serious fiction, science fiction, mystery and noir, historical fiction, and humor. His odder writing gigs include writing someone else's memoir, a script for a planetarium show, and co-writing jokes performed by Jay Leno on "The Toni
His fiction spans a wide variety of genres, including serious fiction, science fiction, mystery and noir, historical fiction, and humor. His odder writing gigs include writing someone else's memoir, a script for a planetarium show, and co-writing jokes performed by Jay Leno on "The Toni
Robert Blake Whitehill is the award-winning author of the bestselling Ben Blackshaw series, which is available in English and German. He's the winner of the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Screenwriting Fellowship for Unexploded Ordnance and the Hudson Valley Film Festival for Blue Rinse, and was a finalist at the Telluride IndieFest for Blue Rinse. He's a proud native of Maryland's Eastern Shore and now lives in New Jersey with his family.
Alexandra Amor is the award-winning author of a memoir about the 10 years she spent in a cult in the 1990s, as well as several mystery novels for both adults and children.
Jim Breslin is the author of Shoplandia, a humorous novel about the working lives of show hosts, producers, and crew at a home shopping channel, which was inspired by Jim's seventeen years as a television producer at QVC, and which was called "a raucous novel" by Huffington Post Books.
His short story collection, Elephant, came out in 2011. Jim's short fiction has appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Molotov Cocktail, Turk's Head Review, and other journals. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was the writer in residence at Elizabethtown College in the summer of 2014.
His micro-publishing project, Oermead Press, has also published two anthologies, West Chester Story Slam - Selected Stories and Chester County Fiction, and a poetry chapbook, Exit Pursued by a Bear by Virginia Beards.
Jim is the founder of the West Chester Story Slam and the co-founder of the Lancaster Story Slam