In publishing, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of industry jargon and abbreviations. I've listed some of the most common ones here. Acquisitions: This is a phase in the manuscript purchasing process, when the acquiring editor pitches your book to others at their publishing house in order to convince them …
Continue reading Glossary of Publishing Terms and Abbreviations
In the buildup to Pitch Wars submissions, a lot of queries are flying around the writing world right now. And I'll admit, I'm a bit of a query junkie. I write them for works-in-progress as practice. I've read the entire QueryShark archive and listened to every Print Run query episode. I spent hours in the …
Welcome to a new blog post series on tidbits of grammar trivia and terminology. We'll cover some interesting things you may not have learned in school, or might have forgotten since then. Today, gerunds! So what's a gerund? It's a tricky little beastie, a word that's based on a verb and looks like a verb, …
First, a disclaimer: I'm in no way affiliated with the Character Trait Thesaurus books I'll be using in this article, and I haven't been compensated for endorsing them. I just really love using them as a resource. Character development. There are worksheets galore on the internet, varying from ones that ask about a character's favorite …
Continue reading Using Key Traits to Create Complex Characters
The short version: good, old-fashioned querying. The long version? Well, that's a little more detailed. First we have to go back a little. The book that my agent signed was the second I queried (though far from the second I completed). I'd previously queried another novel, though not very widely. When I queried my first …
Querying is a rough ride. In a single day, you could receive a full request, a couple of query rejections, and a partial rejection. In fact, it often feels like some cosmic coincidence causes a deluge of responses all in the same afternoon. https://media.giphy.com/media/I6nxG7f3h7qww/giphy.gif [GIF: Rollercoaster] While living in the query trenches, self-care becomes extra …
I'm a wee bit of a podcast addict. And my particular brand of 'cast is most often writing-focused. So without further ado and in no particular order, here are the podcasts I listen to most: Print Run Agents Laura Zats and Erik Hane discuss current events in publishing, writing tips, and a whole array of …
This is Part Two of my critique series. (Part one on Giving Negative Feedback is here). So you've done a beta swap with a new reader and gotten your critique feedback. But it's bad. It's really bad. Not only is it negative, it's hurtful or accusatory. It feels vicious or personal, like the reader is …
This is part one of a two-part blog series on critique swaps. Keep an eye out next week for part two: Receiving Tough Feedback! So, after you've finished a draft, you've looked around in writer's groups, social media, or forums, and found a potential critique swap partner. Hooray! First off, swap sample pages to see …
Oh, the great Writer's Block Debate. You may have heard the phrase "Writer's Block doesn't exist" and wanted to flip a table. Or maybe you truly believe there's no such thing. I fall in the middle. I do believe writers can experience mental blocks or an inability to move forward sometimes, but I think just …
