Articles

Your normal tasks in life are gone or totally rearranged. Without any timeline for zipping out the door (at least not safely), it’s easy for procrastination to set in. Not only is everyone at home, it’s not temporary. We’re all cramped together ‘til who knows when. That means not only…

Every book you’ve ever admired has gone through multiple drafts. As an author who mused about your book for the longest time before finally getting it on paper, it can be a knife to the heart to think that the story or manuscript you worked so hard on still isn’t…

Literary agents and traditional publishers receive thousands of manuscripts. If your formatting doesn’t meet current book industry standards, it may be ignored. The formatting you do may not carry when you send a document, unless you use a template. A template guarantees your manuscript formatting will hold when agents and…

If you are a professional speaker, you need all the help you can get to stand out from the competition. But in a world of speakers that stretches from sea to shining sea, standing out enough to be chosen is a tall order.  Yes, you promote your name via social…

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…