Morning world builders, I hope you’ve all had a great week.

Last Sunday I sent of my first ever submissions. I sent my carefully crafted work out into the world, and now I am up against the long wait for inevitable rejections and potential feedback.

It’s taken a long time to reach this point and I’ve needed to do a lot of research, and seek a lot of help, to get here. So I want to share with you some of the advice that has helped me, and some of the things I’ve learned. Please share your advice in the comments, as there’s still plenty I don’t know.

1. Make sure your novel is finished
This is the first advice you’ll see anywhere. It’s really tempting, when you’ve had an amazing idea, to pitch it before it’s ready. But the truth us, most agents want to hear from writers who…

on The Book Designer:

Intro by Joel Friedlander:

Audio books are increasing in popularity.

If you’ve ever considered creating an audio version of your book, most likely you’ve planned on hiring a narrator.

But, have you ever considered narrating your book yourself?

In today’s post, professional narrator CJ Critt shares her insight and offers some tips on how we can narrate our own books and maybe even venture into a new career path of narrating books for others.

Continue reading HERE

Jenn Hanson-dePaula of Mixtus Media provides us with a great article on conversation started for social media. Thank you Jenn!

Have you ever posted something on social media and nothing happens? You might feel like it’s a waste of time because no one ever responds to what you post. Or maybe you feel like you’re just contributing to the noise online and everyone simply tunes you out.

Social media outlets have hundreds of millions of users worldwide, and each outlet wants their users to see posts that they will find interesting. So to make this possible, they use something called algorithms.

An algorithm is like a filter – it keeps the posts that people aren’t responding to out while letting the popular posts through.

So how do you actually get your posts seen and in your audience’s news feed? One effective and simple way to do that is by asking…

We talk a lot about how to write books, about author’s craft and writers’ tips. This post is instead focused on the act of writing — on the recording of words. There are probably as many methods of writing a novel as there are authors — writing longhand with a Montblanc fountain pen in a Moleskine notebook, typing with one finger at an ancient PC à la GRRM, or using the latest gadgets for on-the-fly note-taking. Regardless, there are certain steps and tools that make the steps of recording a manuscript, editing it, and whipping it into book shape easier. This post is about the tools I found are best for each task, and about my process in transforming a manuscript into a novel.

by Lev Raphael

I’m just back from reading from my memoir/travelogue My Germany in Windsor, Ontario.  I was at a fundraising event for BookFest Windsor and people asking me to sign books afterwards said they enjoyed it especially because most authors read from their books so badly.

I tend to avoid author readings myself because I’ve seen too many authors make basic, embarrassing mistakes.

Italics were invented by a famous Renaissance printer called Aldus Manutius. Italicizing passages became much easier after word-processing virtual-paper technology overcame the tedium of typewriter backspacing and underlining in a manuscript. Print-on-demand permits Indie Authors to be their own publishers, which means they assume the role of compositor, too, and must know how to set type to achieve the most visually pleasing and easy-to-read presentation of their works in the Art of Communication. To see how italics can function when typesetting for your own Indie-published book, we’ll discuss the ways I used italics in Irish Firebrands.

I learned about italics in primary and secondary school, in English composition and typewriting classes, but how I chose to italicize parts of my first novel is probably an amalgam of the “house styles” of the many different traditional publishers which put out the books I’ve read over more than fifty years.

I am reblogging Melissa’s excellent post form 2016, it is that good!

Literary Style in Storytelling Posted by Melissa Donovan on December 13, 2016

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https://www.writingforward.com/storytelling/literary-style-in-storytelling

What’s your literary style?Today’s post includes excerpts from What’s the Story? Building Blocks for Fiction Writing, chapter five:

“Narrative Style, Voice, and Tone.” Enjoy! Literary style is the aesthetic quality of a work of literature—the distinct voice that makes each author unique. It’s the way we string words together, the rhythm of our prose, the catchphrases that pepper our language.

Literary style includes every element of writing in which an author can make stylistic choices from syntax and grammar to character and plot development.

Seasoned writers have cultivated a style of writing that can be identified by a snippet of prose alone. For example, a common English literature test gives you excerpts from several authors whose works you’ve studied. The challenge is to identify…