Style Guides

MLA, CMoS, AP, ACS, APA (not to be confused with AP), and countless others are thrown around from grade school through college and into the professional world. Some writers complain about the different style guides, giving little thought as to their purpose. The guidelines—aka house styles—provide uniformity by topic and intent. Some house styles are…

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Why Can’t Readers Leave Reviews

You've sent out ARCs or did a giveaway, and inevitably, there are readers who can't leave reviews. Amazon does a good job laying out the guidelines, but few people take the time to read them. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201929730 and various subsets.) Here are the top reasons your readers can't leave reviews: They are trying to leave a…

How Much Social Media Do You Need?

From websites to social media, writers are pulled in dozens of directions. It can be confusing and time consuming. So what do I need? The answer might surprise you. If you're confident in having a social media presence the first thing you should do is make sure your username is available on all the big…

Critique Groups Away From FB

Social media has a lot of perks, but it also comes with a downside. It's a rabbit hole of information and various interests, and it's easy to get caught up in various things. To help reduce that itch to explore when you're supposed to be working on your WIPs, here are some recommended critique groups.…

5-Alarm Heat for Romance

Romance works have long been on the forefront of changes in the writing world. The readership is one of the largest by genre, and that hunger functions in books as porn has for the evolution in film. Romance books are a spectrum of heat from sweet and clean to 5-alarm and spicy. There isn't a…

Increase Counts Like A Champ

Why do writers feel like it's a competition when it comes to how many words they write in a day, a session, an hour, and every other measurable standard? Perhaps it's because we feel like we're standing still while others are accomplishing their dreams. Maybe that's not your reason. I see it every day in…

Self Edit Hacks 101

In a previous post, I took self editing and broke it down to revisions and edits along with what things should be looked at in each part. If you missed that post, you can find it here—http://bit.ly/WwDSelfEditing. In this post, I will cover some of my go-to hacks to make the revision and editing process…

What the Plot

What the Plot?! created by Writing Prompts This was a limited-run crafted game from the social media icon Writing Prompts (FB, Instagram, Tumblr). For those who aren't familiar with writing prompts, they are ideas for stories. It really isn't much more complicated than that. https://www.instagram.com/p/B_H142pH06M/ They're not always so creepy. Some are downright adorable, like…

How Important Are First Lines?

As writers, we hear frequently how "important" that first sentence is. Examples of what are passed around as "first line musts" Must be unique and memorable.Must be vivid.Must be truthful, funny, scary, etc any emotion.Tells the reader the genreIntroduces all the main characters.Make the reader care. It's the magical key that keeps a reader reading…

Typesetting aka Formatting aka Look Pretty

What is typesetting? Typesetting is also known as formatting. People and some programs take your completed story and handle the layout. This could be for submissions to magazines, agents, publishers, or as many do, for self-publications in e-Book and print. What formatters don’t do. They aren’t editors, though I know some editors who also do…