Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Anne R. Allen When you’re beginning to write, you’re likely to be bombarded with advice from all quarters—your family, your friends, your hairdresser, and that know-it-all guy at work. I don’t know why, but everybody who ever watched a few minutes of Oprah’s show seems to think they know all about the publishing […]
by Anne R. Allen Update: I’m so pleased this post has had thousands of hits over the last year and is energizing so many writers to take up short fiction. But I fear a number of readers don’t read the whole piece and assume I’m telling newbie writers to self-publish their first efforts at […]
by Anne R. Allen First: This week marks the anniversary of that fateful day three years ago when I started this blog…and then promptly lost it. But luckily I found it a few months later, and this blog now gets an average of 12,000 hits a month on its four monthly posts and […]
by Mark Williams Today we have a different kind of post. And yes, it’s long. But our guest poster, author and publisher Mark Williams, has a lot to say. Mark is the co-author of the thriller Sugar and Spice —the most popular self-published book in the UK for 2011. He has also started a […]
by Anne R. Allen I’m often approached by parents or grandparents of children who’ve shown a talent for writing. They ask how a child can learn to be a writer. Or sometimes a person going through a mid-life job change will ask my advice about going back to college to pursue a long-deferred writing dream. […]
by Anne R. Allen This is the 200th post on this blog. Since I started it on Friday the 13th in March of 2009, I’ve learned an awful lot. (The first thing I learned was that you have to actually post stuff. My second post wasn’t until late June.) Another thing I’ve learned is […]
by Anne R. Allen Blogging is fun, and a wonderful way to network and build your author platform. But it’s not always rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes a visitor may disagree with you or be confrontational in some way. Nothing wrong with that. If it’s done in a friendly manner, disagreement can be an excellent […]
by Anne R. Allen When I teach blogging, the most frequent question I get is “What do I blog about?” (For info on what not to blog about, see Part II of this series: How Not to Blog ) A writer starting a blog right now faces two problems: 1) There are already, like, a trillion writers out […]
by Anne R. Allen They say we all have a book inside us—our own life story. The urge to put that story on paper is the most common reason people start writing. Adult education programs and senior centers everywhere offer courses in “writing your own life.” Memoir is the most popular genre at any writers […]
NEWS: The book I’ve been writing with Catherine Ryan Hyde, HOW TO BE A WRITER IN THE E-AGE—and keep your E-sanity! will be published by Mark Williams international in June of 2012. The book will be available as an ebook that will include free six-month updates. AND it will also be available in paper in both a US and UK edition. We’ve […]
by Anne R. Allen If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to start sending that masterpiece out into the marketplace, you’re going to run into words like “hook,” “logline,” and “pitch.” The terms come from the film industry, but they’re becoming standard in publishing as well. So what do they mean? Are they just sexy […]
by Anne R. Allen Happy 2012! What a year it’s been. Exactly a year ago, I woke on New Year’s Day to one of those emails that used to flood my brain with a mix of adrenalin, serotonin, and hope—a burst of euphoria that somehow made my life of constant rejection bearable. It’s […]
THE BEST REVENGE has been published by Popcorn Press! It’s another rom-com mystery, this time set in the 1980s—a prequel to GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY and SHERWOOD, LTD (an ebook now, with the paper version to follow in about a month.) Long before the events of GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY and SHERWOOD, in 1980s New York, a […]
