Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
Writing career dreams? How to prepare while you’re writing that novel. by Anne R. Allen Recently fellow mystery author Carmen Amato said she’d been asked by several new writers where they should be focusing their energies as they start a writing career. Carmen passed the question on to me and I wrote a short answer […]
Amazon’s New Review Rules: Nobody expects the Amazon Inquisition! by Anne R. Allen Amazon has been tweaking its customer review rules. Some revisions appeared in late September and others debuted early in October. So how do they affect authors? Should we be worried? Is the Amazon Review Inquisition going to excommunicate more reviewers and banish our reviews? […]
Fear of success: If you never publish, you can keep believing Midnight in Paris is a documentary. by Anne R. Allen What is “Publishing Success?” Our culture attaches all sorts of romantic ideas to the business of writing. Beginning writers tend to conjure up nostalgic writer fantasies like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris reveries and ignore the boring […]
Email marketing: the Holy Grail of book sales or Spamalot? by Anne R. Allen Email marketing is the only way to sell stuff online these days, we’re told. Get yourself an email address list and customers will beat a path to your buy page door, desperate to buy your deathless prose. Authors are abandoning blogging […]
Is your book the right size? by Ruth Harris Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, size does matter. At least, when it comes to books. 😉 Too long or too short? Wordy and flabby? Curt and brusque? Novel or novella? Short story or novelette? From urban fantasy to space opera, thriller to […]
Facebook ads work to reach the elusive niche reader by Barbara Morgenroth Eight years ago when I began a second career as an indie author after many years in traditional publishing as well as television, my middle grade book, Impossible Charlie, was the only new book in its category. Total book visibility! By the […]
Book review bloggers are friends, not foes–get to know them! by Barb Drozdowich So…who are book bloggers anyways? I know that Anne periodically talks about book bloggers on this blog – but many authors that I talk to seem a bit fuzzy on the subject. I’m going to see if I can help you understand […]
The First Chapter is the toughest! by Ruth Harris Someone waves a gun in the first sentence. In the second sentence, Jim (or is it Jill?) is walking his (or is it her?) dog in the rain. In the third paragraph, the dog gets loose, runs into the middle of a movie set where the […]
Anthologies are an excellent way for a writer to break into publishing. They can also do a lot to expand the audience for your existing titles. Blog ninja and Master and Commander of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, Alex J. Cavanaugh, has edited several anthologies, and gives us the skinny on how they can help your […]
9 Ways Editors Can Make You Look Good…and 7 Ways They Can Make You Miserable by Ruth Harris As a former editor, I’m biased but, as a writer, I’ve learned that for me (and for just about every writer I know), editing is the most productive and transformative part of writing a book. Whether […]
by Anne R. Allen Piracy has become big business in the age of e-publishing. If your intellectual property is available on the Web—in ebooks, blog posts or other web content—chances are pretty good you’re going to be pirated at some point. If you have a Google Alert on your name and book titles […]
By Anne R. Allen We all make mistakes. It’s how we learn. But some mistakes have the potential to end a writing career before it starts. Today I’m talking about the things a lot of writers do that can keep them from having a career—or derail it for a long time. How do I know […]
Meet the faculty, tour the campus and calculate the tuition of the University of Hard Knocks by Ruth Harris Scammers and con artists have been around publishing since writers were using chisels to carve words into stone tablets. They loot, cheat and steal. They’re the faculty of Hard Knocks U. and they are out […]
