Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
Writing career mistakes will happen, but these are some you can avoid. by Anne R. Allen Ruth and I like to say we made all the writing career mistakes so you don’t have to. I figure that I’ve collected nearly the full set of authorial faux pas since I embarked on a writing career. So today I’m […]
An author blog can be fun if you ignore the rules intended for business blogs. by Anne R. Allen The most common question I get from authors who are thinking about starting a blog is: “What should an author blog about?” My answer isn’t the same as what you’ll hear from the major blogging gurus. […]
by Anne R. Allen No matter how great a book’s cover and blurb, one thing can stop me from buying yet another ebook for my Kindle: an author bio on the buy page that screams “amateur.” I spent some time as an editor, so when I pick up a book for relaxation, I want to […]
Writing rules, rejection & why to forget them and have some holiday fun! Ruth Harris joined this blog five and a half years ago with a wildly popular blogpost on rejection. Because she worked as editor at a couple of Big Five Houses as well as being a New York Times bestselling author, she knows […]
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 […]
by Anne R. Allen Happy New Year! Congratulations if you won NaNoWriMo in November. And even if you didn’t. In fact, you deserve congrats if you didn’t join in the madness at all, and you’ve been writing slowly and steadily all year. No matter how long it took you, pat yourself on the back […]
Rejections. We all get them. In fact, there are only two things we can absolutely count on in the writing business: rejections and bad reviews. There’s no doubt rejections make us feel terrible. As Brian Doyle wrote in Portland Magazine and was quoted in Letters of Note, “To receive one is to instantly and all at once […]
by Anne R. Allen I’m not going to pretend that picking a title for your book is easy. In fact, it gets tougher all the time. We have to consider a lot more than how grabby a title looks on a bookstore shelf these days. In choosing a title now, we have to think […]
by Ruth Harris Every writer has (at least) one— The trunk book The published bestseller to which the rights have reverted but which is showing its age The half-finished book, the abandoned book, the book—published or not—that fizzled The manuscript languishing on a hard drive or gathering dust under your bed The aargh draft aka […]
by Melodie Campbell I was tickled when the big city (Toronto) library sought me out to do a workshop for aspiring writers on “Building Atmosphere”.“Sure!” I said. “Are you paying me?” I said. (Although not necessarily in that order.) They were, thankfully. And then the anxiety set in. (Cue the strident violins.) Was I the best […]
by Anne R. Allen We get lots of questions from new writers who have spent time in forums and online writers’ groups where they’ve been given advice by other newbies. Some of that advice is fine, but a whole lot is dead wrong. Unfortunately, the wrong stuff is usually delivered with the most certainty. […]
by Anne R. Allen A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote a post about writing as a hobby as opposed to a profession (hint: they’re both good choices), I got a couple of comments from new writers who were discouraged to read how much work and dedication it takes to become a professional writer. They […]
by Anne R. Allen Somerset Maugham famously said, “There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.” But pretty much everybody you meet in the publishing business will give you a list of them. (One is “never start a sentence with ‘there are’” —so watch yourself, Mr. Maugham.) Last year I […]
