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Letters to a Young Novelist

Finding Your Path in Publishing The young writer of fiction today faces a very different publishing landscape than even a decade ago. You can take a far different path in publishing a novel than when I started out, decades ago. Choice! A new writer has so many more choices than existed in the past — which consisted mainly of submitting manuscripts directly to a publisher, if you had connections, or to an agent.

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Going Indie As an Author

About a year ago, I made a momentous decision. I decided on going indie as an author of women’s fiction. It was a choice born of necessity, but it grew to be a good thing for me. I didn’t intend to do it, but I haven’t regretted it, as I’ll explain. My first self-published book, The Renaissance Club, came out in late 2018. It’s done so well under my imprint, Time Fold Books, that a…

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Is Self-Publishing a Novel for You?

The Invisibles on Amazon “A timeless and poignant story of sisterhood, with all its joys and challenges, and also a reminder that we can dearly love and care for those who are not exactly like us.” — A reader. Several writers’ groups and blogs I follow are hosting big discussions about publishing and changes in the industry. Is it a good time to self-publish a novel? Everyone agrees that it’s harder to get an agent…

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In the Querying Trenches? Courage — It’s a Marathon

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.

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How to Build Buzz for Your Debut Novel

You’ve written a novel that’s been published — traditional, small press, or indie — HOORAY! And you launched. Now you’re watching the sales numbers and offering to do blog tours and readings. What else? How to build buzz for your debut novel? You look at author websites and see pitches for freebies and long lists of books. You see bestseller list mentions, excruciatingly gorgeous blurbs from famous authors, and you might feel a little perplexed…

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Writing in a Community of Writers

I’m past the midway point of National Novel Writing Month, and wouldn’t be here without my community of writers. In my fortunate case, it’s fellow members of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and the subset of those who are doing the wild writing marathon of #NaNoWriMo, wherein you write 50,000 words of a new novel in 30 days. Crazy, huh? Yet more than 300,000 people every year are now participating. How many get to the…

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Why Writers Wait So Much

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…

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Writing on a Holiday – Dodging Parties to Get to the Writing Desk

By Writing Holiday, I of course mean Writing ON a Holiday. Holidays are better known as Writer’s Retreats, for all writers truly addicted to their art seize on the first amount of free time to face the blank page. Or the written page that desperately needs revising. Novel writing occurs over an extended period of a year or more. Long form story writing requires you to visit your work as often as possible — that’s…

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