Guest Post

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Write Your Book Like You’d Run a Startup

Sharing his work-in-progress has helped one writer build confidence and conviction about who his readers are and what they’re interested in.
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Crafting Cinematic Action by Scene Segmenting

By thinking like a filmmaker—planning your beats, deciding your shots—you create a vivid experience that pulls readers into the story.
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Comps Can Clinch Your Query

When pitching to agents or editors, the right comp titles help you articulate where you position yourself within a very competitive market.
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Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: Use Stress Responses to Strengthen Your Scenes

Understanding stress responses as learned survival strategies can help you turn every high-stakes scene into character development on the page.
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Please Allow Your Characters Moments of Happiness

When a story barrels from one conflict to the next, hitting pause for a well-placed glimmer of light can benefit both characters and readers.
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No, Colleen Hoover Did Not Email Me: Current Scams Targeting Authors

If you receive solicitous emails from book clubs or famous authors, follow these simple steps before replying or clicking on any links.
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Why Your Memoir Feels Like Rambling (and How to Fix It)

Having analyzed over 1000 memoir manuscripts in a 15 year span, Wendy Dale found two linked components of powerful, plot-driven storytelling.
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It’s Not About You: Your Memoir Is Someone Else’s Story

The person on the page can’t be the person writing the book. Because if your life has changed enough to write about, you aren’t that person anymore.
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My Brush with a Pay-to-Play Book Award

The majority of book awards are pay-to-play deals. Some do little harm, others are genuinely useful, but most make no difference to your career or sales.
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The Case for Shrinking Your Novel

Even experienced novelists overwrite. Here are five insights about ruthlessly cutting a manuscript—and why that’s a good thing.
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Why Print Never Died

This excerpt from the new book Digital Inc. by Richard Curtis examines why ebooks failed to supplant print as many tech pioneers expected.
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Edit Your Book As If It’s a Screenplay

A writer’s script-editing experience helped fix her novel’s problems with pacing, flat characters, and scenes that didn’t propel the story.
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Crafting Ethical and Moral Dilemmas in Crime Fiction

In crime fiction, the most powerful moments often aren’t about car chases or shootouts—they’re about impossible choices.
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Using the Workplace to Add Depth to Your Novel

Using the workplace as more than a backdrop can supercharge the stakes, conflict, and character development of your fiction.
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How a 100 Rejections Challenge Prepared Me for Life’s Biggest Rejection

A slew of literary rejections helped one writer develop the perseverance needed when a failed marriage left her urgently seeking a new job.
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What I Got Wrong About Memoir and What I Now Understand About the Genre

An author reconsiders her biases, finding the best memoir writing to be courageous, complex, and capable of transforming others and ourselves.
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How Revising My Novel While Querying Helped Me Win a Book Award

When agents suggest further revision, we might need time and distance to see our MS through their eyes—but doing the work can pay dividends.
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What Makes Character Voice Memorable: Emotion

This excerpt from a new craft book by Jordan Rosenfeld explores the many ways our fictional characters manifest their internal emotions.
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Before You Say Yes: What Writers Need to Know About Anthology Offers

Learn how to find and assess anthology opportunities, which offer short fiction authors income and visibility by sharing audiences across contributors.
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How I Secured a Big Five Publishing Deal with Almost No Social Media Platform

Learn how one author’s publishing “fairy tale” hides years of struggle, with practical lessons to unlock your own resilience.
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Make Good Knots: How Learning to Knit Saved My Novel

Learning to knit renewed one author’s confidence, allowing her to take a risk revising a manuscript that was already out on submission.
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Prologues That Work and Why

Prologues get a bad rap as backstory or info dumps but, done well, they can intrigue readers and ignite interest in the story to come.
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Coach Your Characters: A Life Coach’s Toolkit Offers a New Lens

Life coaches help clients gain insights about how we shape our own life stories, and the same tools can be used to create richer characters.
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“All Others”: The Memoir Writers Who Keep Going

Jane’s reporting has shown that unknown authors still land memoir deals, a fact which gave one writer the will to persevere—and succeed.
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Why Your Book Isn’t Enough (and Why That’s Good News)

If we view platform-building as part of a mission to transform lives, not just sell books, the possibilities for engagement are endless.