Articles

Over the years, I've fielded dozens, if not hundreds, of queries about why a title can't seem to attract a literary agent or traditional publisher. Typically, the problem comes down to not understanding the realities of the book industry itself, and where the project is in terms of its readiness…

By Laurel Kashinn, Certified Ghostwriter A book is both a business and a vehicle. A book's business plan is called a book proposal. Wise authors take time to write book proposals. Why? Because planning always increase odds of business success. As a vehicle your book carries your ideas, vision, story, or message…

Ghostwriting is an intuitive or learned 5-part skill set: creative analysis, industry positioning, concept development, revision and rewrite, and musical line editing. Notice what’s missing from that list? Writing.  Ghostwriting is not writing.  It’s not creating out of nothing. It’s not researching, or pulling ideas from the gut or the…

One of the hardest things to see in your own manuscript is where it is its own worst enemy—where it encourages your reader to stop reading.  Whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, a book’s success hangs on pulling the reader from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, page to page.  Such…

Writing Workshop with guest speaker Erik "Kata" Schuyler of Wambtac Communications, LLC.

SCREAM! ACCUSE! BEMOAN! LAMENT! RAGE! SOB! REVEAL! HOWL! REGRET! In terms of catharsis, nothing beats a first draft.  That’s where you get to yell at everybody, cry your eyes out, sling accusations willy-nilly, and bring up every stored-away-for-the-right-moment injury that happened (or maybe actually didn’t) throughout your lifetime.  Or, if…

In the last post, we talked about how plot and character must be interwoven to produce a satisfying story. In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at every character’s starting point: perspective.  A person’s (or character’s) perspective is colored by their background: their upbringing, their parents’ attitudes and biases,…

Most people think a story’s “plot” is a just-the-facts version of what happens: boy and girl (or boy and boy, girl and girl, snail and fossil—whatever) meet cute; boy and girl rush to lust; boy/girl/both cheats; boy and girl break up; cheater somehow redeems themselves; boy and girl reunite; a…