Your book has been published, you’ve raked in a few good reviews, and you’re riding high on the success. Not wanting that momentum to taper off, you’ve been thinking about ways to keep the energy going, and you’ve discovered that hosting an author reading is one of the best ways to expand your fan base and connect with new readers. If you’ve never done this before, it can feel pretty …
Readership
Authors Need To Know About Aphantasia: Here’s Why
Some writing advice is practical (cut your adverbs), some is theoretical (the structure of a story influences its message), and some is factual (the short-fiction market isn’t what it used to be). Personally, I’ve always found that the best writing advice deals with perception – the ability to understand how someone else will process your art. A hard fact of human nature can be revealed to you, …
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Is It Worth Publishing Your Writing In A Zine?
When it comes to self-publishing, most authors are looking to compete with major publishing houses: professional covers, impeccable book binding, flawless presentation, the whole nine yards. It’s certainly true that there isn’t much middle ground – readers have little time for books that ‘almost’ look professional – but there is another way to do things. Enter the zine. Zines are deliberately …
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What’s A Sensitivity Reader, And Do You Need One?
We live in divisive times. As boundaries between ethnicities, nationalities, social classes, sexualities, and genders are chipped away, the old norms of personal, national, sexual, ethnic, and economic identification and organization must be reevaluated. This is, unsurprisingly, a messy, dramatic, sometimes unpleasant, but ultimately necessary process, and the results impact everything – including …
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What Makes Fiction Bizarro, And What Makes Bizarro Awesome?
Genre labels aren’t always useful, but properly utilized, they can help budding authors determine the type of writing they want to bring into the world. In few places is that more necessary than with bizarro fiction, a subgenre of weird writing so unusual that ‘bizarre’ is in the name. That’s why, in this article, I’ll be taking a look at how to identify bizarro fiction and how to use that …
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5 Ways Toni Morrison Can Improve Your Writing
Few names in American letters command as much respect as Toni Morrison. The first black woman to win a Nobel Prize, Morrison, rather remarkably for a writer of such prestige, didn’t publish her first novel until she was thirty-nine. She wrote this novel – The Bluest Eye – by waking up at four AM every day to write before her two children got up. Then it was off to work. Goodness me. Morrison is …
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