Many books (and stories) end with characters that the reader has grown attached to biting the dust, be it for dramatic purposes or otherwise. In some cases, that’s fine! However, keep in mind that some of the best revenue that you, as an author, can get from book sales is if you create a series....Read More
This blog won’t pertain to anyone except the authors I’m working with, so I apologize that this isn’t exactly a “general consumption” blog. However, I’ve been asked many, many times how to respond to my edits and what some of the marks mean. Also, I will be posting one on Tuesday, but I felt that...Read More
I get quite a few queries every day and more than half of them seem to not read the website that we post. It’s frustrating as an editor to have people send you things without essential information. The reason that the process asks so many questions is that we require specific information to not only...Read More
I’ve come to see that there seems to be a lot of confusion about what will impress an editor and while I can’t speak for every editor out there, I can certainly speak for myself and I hope that it might give some insight into what you should consider when you are making contact with...Read More
The first, and most important, thing to know about writing a query is to follow the guidelines that the publisher gives you. If your query letter does not follow the required format and contain the required information, it will show that you are not able to follow instruction and that you don’t care enough to...Read More
The tempting tome of torpid turbulance! If having a large and varied vocabulary is gold in writing then an over-reliance on a thesaurus is lead: worthless unless you’re making bullets out of it. Some authors attempt to use a thesaurus to compensate for what they feel is a lack of large or impressive words. But...Read More
One of the things I’ve noticed in editing is that the biggest stumbling block many writers have is research. Particularly with pieces that are not about the modern era. The old adage of “write what you know” is actually a good idea, but in the context of writing about something you can expand “what you...Read More
