Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
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 Ruth Harris A lot of people start writing because they’ve got a real-life story to tell—something that happened in their own lives or the lives of friends or family members they think would make a great book. Sometimes these stories work well as memoirs, but, for a lot of very good reasons, a […]
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 […]
Roni Loren’s blog Fiction Groupie has been one of my favorites since I first began reading blogs. I was so happy for her when she signed with her agent, Sara Megibow (who is with one of the classiest, most pro-author agencies around, the Kristin Nelson Agency.) Then I was even happier when she got her […]
There’s no doubt a lot of not-ready-for-prime-time stuff is getting uploaded to Amazon every day, and (OK, I’ll whisper it: A LOT OF AUTHORS DO GET FAUX RAVES FROM THEIR SISTERS AND THEIR COUSINS AND THEIR AUNTS.) Those are just as unhelpful as the ones written by trolls who leave semi-literate 20-word negatives for […]
Yes, that Lawrence Block. I can’t quite believe we have one of the most successful mystery writers of all time here on our blog! Mr. Block is the author of over fifty novels and even more short stories, including his two long-running series featuring P.I. Matthew Scudder and gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. He has been named […]
by Anne R. Allen Publishing insider Alan Rinzler said in a blogpost last summer that traditional book marketing is no longer working. “That $50K space ad in the New York Times?” he said. “Forget it. It’s only for the author’s mother…not even an appearance on the Today Show can guarantee more than a brief spike in sales. The old ways […]
Anne R Allen’s Blog With Ruth Harris