This year’s SPR Awards has thrown up some points that we’d like to share with you to help you avoid the pitfalls when entering your book for a contest. You can take a look at the entrants here.
1. Book Covers
Time and time again we’ve said it, and time and time again, authors don’t listen. If you are selling a book, it needs to have a professional finish. If we are staking a reputation on a book by choosing it as a winner, it must have a well-designed book cover. That probably means not using a beloved drawing or […]
Let’s not talk about the c-word. Here’s a list of happy literary stuff online to help you get writing indoors again. If you do all of these now, you’re going to be writing tonight, guaranteed.
Open Culture has curated a massive list of brilliant, properly taught courses for writers including videos and audio tracks on subjects such as Shakespeare, writing about the Civil War, fairies, Japanese culture, and Lord Of The Rings.
A silver lining for all writers out there stuck without transport, concerts, sporting events, shopping malls, and parties?
We’re told to stay at home, not travel, stop seeing each other, and wait for the plague to pass over our roofs…so without all the distractions of weekend barbecues, Little League games, and the TV sports you were going to watch, why not bury those procrastinations you always use and open that Word file and crack on?
Why Now?
Without much else better to do, people are flocking to Amazon to dig into new reads. Take this opportunity and finally get around […]
We all face a bout of sickness in our lifetime at some point. But what if this hits as we are writing a book?
“I was literally in the middle of a three-month sabbatical to write my book when I was diagnosed with Lupus. Plagued with fatigue and nausea, as well as insomnia, I had no idea how I was going to finish what I had started,” says Pam, a self-published author from London, UK. “And I had a deadline of less than two months. After that, I’d have to go back to work.”
There is some degree of impatience that goes along with self-publishing. Why wait around for a publisher when you can have a book now? That’s one of the bigger fallacies of the industry, because if you choose to do everything yourself it can (and should) be more work. Writers are still driven to cut corners because it can be so difficult to handle every side of the business. So long as you understand there’s difficulty every step of the way, you will hopefully give each step in the process the attention it deserves.
I’ve been telling stories about my Sicilian-American family and my career in musical theater all my life. In my delivery, I always attempted to embody the various characters I depicted—specific accents, vocal cadences, facial expression, and gesticulations. Well, I’m Sicilian for God’s sake; we use our hands to tell stories. Can we even talk without our hands? I doubt it. People seemed to enjoy these anecdotes, but I was never certain whether they liked the story for itself or because of my delivery. If they were just seeing words on a page, would it resonate? For this reason, I was
Provocatively titled, Punching Babies (a how-to guide) by Adron J. Smitley is a writer’s reference book that breaks down story structure creation in easy to understand parts and brings clarity to the story structuring process. With a no-nonsense way of explaining some complex concepts, Smitley walks the reader through the essential components of a literary work with real-world explanations and examples.
The insights given in the book allow an author to get not only a high level view of how their work will be broken by down by publisher, editors, and in the end, readers, but also allows a reader […]
An inspired state of mind reminds me of the dreaming state in one crucial respect: No matter how hard you try and revive the memory of it later, that recollection will never be quite as vivid as the original manifestation. I keep a notebook close by, as often as possible; in my backpack when I’m hiking; beside me at the table in a restaurant or café. The Muse tends to visit me when I’m on the move, when the sounds of life are stretching out all around me and new sights are constantly unveiled before my eyes. She tends to […]
Punching Babies (a how-to guide) by Adron J. Smitley is a writer’s reference book that breaks down story structure creation in easy to understand parts and brings clarity to the story structuring process. With a no-nonsense way of explaining some complex concepts, Smitley walks the reader through the essential components of a literary work with real-world explanations and examples.