For those who don’t know, I live in Minnesota. The weather here is a perennial topic; the news reports the temperature every hour on the hour, and every fifteen minutes (it seems like) when it’s particularly unusual. People talk about the weather constantly. Yesterday, I overheard at
Read more →Listening to NPR the day after Thanksgiving, I heard a story about an archive of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s manuscripts. “They are covered with handwritten corrections!” the archivist enthused, to which the interviewer responded, “The idea that he corrected himself just blows me away.” Which response rather blew
Read more →I drove down to Chicago yesterday with my father, and I let him pick the route. Instead of taking the freeway through Wisconsin, which I have done many times and which takes about 7 hours plus meal and gas stops, we drove down the west bank of
Read more →“If you’re having trouble with your ending, look at your beginning.” – Anonymous One of the most important elements of a story is a satisfying ending, and a satisfying ending almost always involves closure. You see it in the terminology we use to talk about the structure
Read more →Characters are fundamental to nearly all stories. Whatever happens, happens to somebody or is made to happen by somebody, or both. Even when the characters in a story are not human, as in Watership Down, they tend to be anthropomophized. Most readers remember appealing and interesting characters
Read more →If you or anyone you know is at all serious about a sport, running, or exercise, you’re probably familiar with the concept of cross-training. The idea is that you improve faster and are more likely to avoid injury if you do more than one type of exercise
Read more →The simplest and easiest way to publicize your novel, whether self-published or traditional, is on the Internet. Everybody knows that, and everybody is doing it. When I said I was posting a series on publicity, I got specific recommendations from every single person I mentioned it to,
Read more →The second part of publicity, after generating reviews, is trying to get visibility, attention, and awareness for your book in other ways. The most accessible way for people to do this, these days, is on the Internet, and there are bunches of web sites full of suggestions
Read more →Having talked a bit about generalities regarding publicity and promotion, I’m going to spend this post getting a little more specific. I’d originally thought that I’d do this series of articles according to the type of book and/or publisher – ebooks vs hardcopy, traditional publishing vs. self-publishing
Read more →Publicity is a perennial problem for writers – what to do, how to do it, what works, what doesn’t. I’ve had several queries on the subject in the past few weeks, so despite the fact that publicity is NOT one of my strong suits, I’m going to
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