Is It Romance or Women’s Fiction? The overlap between romance and women’s fiction is a juicy territory. It’s where characters grow deeper, learn more about why love is important, and develop into better human beings. The story may show how they plunge off a looming cliff of disaster but grow wings as they fall. In the overlap between romance and women’s fiction, a story involves the main character’s growth as a person.
Choosing the best Amazon categories for your novel is perhaps the hardest step in marketing a book, after choosing the title and cover. But it may be one of the most important factors in making your book discoverable. Amazon is the largest sales platform for books, and there are approximately 11,000 categories to choose from.
Writing will keep you alive, but publishing will break your heart. Let me tell you why you have to learn to endure, as any good heroine must. How to self-publish like a heroine.
Are you in the querying trenches — querying agents with a fiction manuscript? That’s probably one of the hardest phases of the writing life. Being on submission is hard too (when your agent is sending out your manuscript to editors) but somehow querying agents feels to me harder. Here are some survival strategies.
Happy 2018! What are your new year’s writing goals? Someone in one of my writers groups asked me, while wishing me a happy 2018. I was shocked to realize I don’t have many. My debut novel launches on January 23 — The Renaissance Club, my time-travel love story, available now on Amazon for pre-order. I have a poetry collection coming out in August — Arabesque, from FutureCycle Press. And I’m finishing the last revision before…
I never thought I’d be writing about preparing for National Novel Writing Month, but November 2016 changed my perspective on what I had considered a ridiculous rush to write a novel in one month. How could any self-respecting author write so fast, so carelessly, so focused on the wrong dimension — the sheer number of words? And then I tried it. I was in grief over losing someone close to me. I couldn’t work, I…
The evolution of a cover design for my novel The Renaissance Club has been a fascinating process. I’m thrilled with this cover art, showing my main character walking into a mysterious, dreamlike Italian Renaissance landscape. The scene shimmers with possibility, like the doorway in time through which she walks to meet her 17th century artist hero, sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini. Evolution of a Cover Design The process of working with my publisher on cover art began…
For the decades that I’ve been writing, I’ve often wondered why writers wait so much. We wait for inspiration, we wait for writing time, and excruciatingly, we wait for responses from publishers and agents. Sometimes I’ve waited months for a reply to an agent query or a literary journal. Is it just me and my writing? What makes them hesitate and delay? Or is the publishing industry so clogged with writers pitching their writing that…