10 New Year Resolutions For Writers (that might actually stick)
So, it’s January, and the haze of food and drink is starting to clear. You might vaguely remember making some promises to yourself over the New Year, but we all know how the promises we make on January the 1st usually turn out. Maybe it’s time we made some resolutions that we can stick [...]
Ten Marketing Strategies All Writers Need To Consider
The key word here is “consider”. You don’t have to do any of these, although I certainly recommend you give some of them a try. I’ve geared these towards people who are self publishing, but there is no reason that a legacy published author couldn’t use most of these as long as their editor and [...]
Networking and Writers
This is another one of those things that I’ve spoken about before but it seems to need to be said again. You don’t need to read huge marketing guides nor sell your soul in order to make networking work for you. In fact there’s just one easy step to networking better than 90% of the [...]
Ten Things You Need To Know About Writing Conflict
Conflict is one of those nebulous terms that’s applied to writing but isn’t often well explained. Since it’s such a huge part of any story I wanted to put together list of things I wish I’d known about writing conflict when I’d started writing. First off: 1. You have to have it. Writing is mostly [...]
What I Learned About Writing From A Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Master
Sometimes the best advice comes from unexpected places. I was attending a Brazilian Jiu jitsu seminar on Friday* with BJJ maestro John Will. The seminar was mostly about breaking people’s shoulders with your legs using a move called an omopolata, but it was actually an unexpected bit of writing advice that stuck [...]
Let’s Stop Punching One Another In The Face*
Comic by Randal Munroe of XKCD.com Every month or so it seems like the self publishing vs traditional publishing debate flares up in some new and interesting way. Then four million writers jump on the band wagon and start calling each other dicks for having one opinion or another. I’m guilty too, of sticking [...]
Five Ways To Get Back Into Writing After A Break
Things have been rough here. I discovered that I could no longer go to World Fantasy Con in San Diego this year (Toronto next year, I hope!), the ground continues to shake my city and in general things have been super, super busy. There’s also been a very sick cat. We found Connie [...]
A Different Way Of Outlining
Recently I’ve been writing a full length movie script, and I came across a way of outlining for films that translates well into outlining for a novel. It won’t work for everyone, but if you’re having trouble crafting your outline ahead of time then this is a different way to prod your brain with a [...]
An Interview With Zoe Winters
Andrew: How did you get started in self publishing? ZW: I looked around me and saw so many authors who weren’t getting their contracts renewed. It felt like I needed a platform first in order to have a solid chance at a career. I didn’t want to “get published”. I wanted to have [...]
Review of Zoe Winter’s badass writing book, Smart Self Publishing: Becoming an Indie Author.
It’s much harder to review something that’s excellent than something that’s terrible. Generally the better the book the longer it takes to write the review*. It took me three weeks, two read throughs and an interview (which will be up tomorrow) with Zoe before I managed to write this review for Smart Self Publishing. [...]
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