Once you finish writing your masterpiece, there are four things you should do:

1. Have a celebratory drink. I enjoy wine or a margarita, but if you don’t drink I suppose iced tea can be fun if you put cinnamon in it.
2. Let the book sit alone in a corner for a while to think about what it’s done.
3. Take another look at it and clean up the obvious messy places.
4. Allow other eyeballs to scrutinize it and revise accordingly.

It’s helpful if the other eyeballs are attached to the heads of other writers, which is where finding critique partners (CPs) comes in.

CPs are different than beta readers. Betas come after CPs, in theory. They read the finished product and tell you if it flows or if there are plot holes or if it’s the most boring thing they’ve encountered since that play they had to read in high school – that…

Nothing beats the feeling of typing The End following the last scene of your manuscript. You’ve spent weeks to months to years laboring over sentence construction, timeline details, and character development, among many other things. Now is the time to celebrate.

Because soon, it will be time to edit.

If you’re groaning, stop it. This is where you take your masterpiece and smooth the rough edges. Not all artists have this luxury. We writers get as many passes as it takes to get it right.

There is a myriad of posts and checklists on how to best attack the editing process. I like to start with three easy (though not necessarily quick) edits that give me a sense of immediate progress. Following these suggestions will result in tighter prose and eliminate several “flag” words that could make an editor or agent pass on your project.

For illustration purposes, I’m using screen shots from my…

by Allison Maruska

A friend emailed me a question. She’s written a book and is considering what to do with it.

Her question: “How do you self-publish on Amazon?”

She didn’t mean what buttons to push on KDP that makes the book go live. She meant: “What are the steps necessary to prepare a book for publication?”

A few weeks ago, Publisher’s Weekly came out with a ranking of America’s top 20 publishing houses for 2016. It’s no surprise who the top 5 were, but what’s really important is what came after.

The sixth and seventh publisher were both that of children’s books- Scholastic and Disney came in right under the ‘Big Five.’ It’s quite a refreshing thing to see. Children’s literature has always been a tough genre to crack because the audience is smaller, the interests change rapidly, and the surge of technology has threatened to turn some children away from reading and the love of books. Nevertheless, books sales for 2016 has proved that there is still so much to love about children’s publishing. For Disney, Star Wars and Rick Riordan books led the way.

Houghton and Workman come in next, showing us that non-fiction titles still have a big impact on our consumption market as…

by Phoebe Quinn

Six year-old me dreamed of seeing my name shining on hardbacks in the window of Waterstone’s as the latest bestselling debut author. Twenty-seven year old me has altered the dream slightly to a single webpage with the all-important average customer rating hovering between 4 and 5. It’s less enchanting, but more practical.