by Anne R. Allen New writers get a lot of pressure to start a blog. With good reasons: 1) It’s a free website. Most writers don’t need any other website. A free Blogger.com blog allows up to ten pages of content, and you can even post a link to your “buy” pages at Amazon if you […]
12 MYTHS ABOUT GETTING PUBLISHED
by Anne R. Allen When you’re a beginning writer, you’re likely to get bombarded with advice from all quarters—your family, your friends, your hairdresser, and of course that know-it-all guy at work. I don’t know why, but everybody who’s ever watched a few minutes of Oprah seems to think they know all about the […]
HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU’RE REALLY A WRITER?
by Anne R. Allen Ever get the “OMG I’m-not-really-a-writer, why-am-I-kidding-myself” blues? Agent Nathan Bransford calls them the “Am-I-Crazies.” Most of us have been there. Rejections are pouring in. Your WIP is stalled. Your BFF has refused to listen to one more word about the unfairness of the publishing industry. After a sleepless, agonizing night, […]
SELF-PUBLISHING: Maybe You’re Not So Vain After All?
by Anne R. Allen A lot of writers—even established ones—are taking a second look at self-publishing right now. Only a couple of years ago, self-publishing—especially for memoir and fiction—was equated with the grumpy-geezer rants and bored-housewife fantasies of “vanity publishing.”. Serious writers were told self-publishing was the direct route to a dead-on-arrival career. Predatory outfits […]
THE NUMBER ONE MISTAKE NEW WRITERS MAKE…and why we make it
by Anne R. Allen After reading a bunch of agent blogs, submission guidelines, and tweets on the subject of our #queryfails, it occurred to me that most of the complaints can be boiled down to one major offense: querying too early. It’s not only about holding off until you can give that book an extra polish: […]
LURK PROUDLY
by Anne R. Allen Are you a lurker who reads publishing blogs but doesn’t comment or create your own blog? Do you fail to Tweet or network on Facebook? Good for you! You’re educating yourself about the publishing business without wasting precious writing time. Don’t let anybody pressure you into changing your ways until […]
BEWARE THE AUTHORITY OF IGNORANCE
by Anne R. Allen I’ve had a lot of great responses to last week’s post about dealing with less-than-helpful criticism from beta readers and critique groups. I think my favorite was a Steinbeck quote offered by freelance editor (and great blogger) Victoria Mixon: “I am never shy about it when a professional is doing […]
Should You Give an Agent an Exclusive Read?
by Anne R. Allen Sometime during your query process, you’ll get a request for a partial or full manuscript (yay!) But this time it comes with a request for an exclusive read (not so yay.) It happened to me about a year ago. I really wanted to work with the agent, but it would […]
Bad Advice to Ignore from Your Critique Group
by Anne R. Allen Finding a beta reader or critique group is essential to any writer’s development. We can’t write in a vacuum. Nobody ever learned to be a good writer holed up in an attic with no one to review his work but the cat. (Cats can be so cruel.) Rachelle Gardner ran […]
Does Your WIP Have Too Much Dialogue?
by Anne R. Allen I’ve been looking over some of my much-rejected early novels recently and discovered they have something in common with a lot of other unpublished fiction: way too much dialogue. They’re too LOUD. The characters need to shut up already and get on with the story. And yet, in all the […]
Seeking Zoticus Weatherwax: Tips for Naming Fictional Characters
by Anne R. Allen In his painfully funny 2006 book, Famous Writing School, a Novel, Stephen Carter’s writing teacher-protagonist advises his students to seek character names in the obituaries. But although Carter’s bumbling protagonist offers mostly dubious advice, that tip is a keeper. Obits are full of great names. I keep a list in a […]
THE GROUCHO MARXIST MANIFESTO
by Anne R. Allen I know this is a blog on writing, but I’m going to talk this week about Marxism: Groucho Marxism. The Groucho Marxist manifesto is, to paraphrase the great Julius Henry Marx himself— “I DO NOT CARE TO READ A BOOK WRITTEN BY A PERSON WHO WOULD ACCEPT ME AS A […]
88-YEAR OLD SELLS FIRST MYSTERY NOVEL!
by Anne R. Allen You know how everybody keeps telling you to keep sending out those queries in spite of all the rejection? How it pays to persevere? And the only way to fail is to give up trying? Now I have proof they’re right. You’re never too old for success. My nearly 89-year-old […]
