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 […]
Top 10 Ways To Write a Self-Rejecting Query to a Blogger, Agent or Publisher
by Anne R. Allen Bloggers sometimes feel like Rodney Dangerfield. We get no respect. This week, we heard how Amazon is banning 100s of book review bloggers and removing their reviews. Some of the bloggers may be violating “affiliate” rules, but others have no affiliation with Amazon and are having all their reviews removed anyway. […]
10 Things that Red-Flag a Newbie Novelist
by Anne R. Allen Beginning novelists are like Tolstoy’s happy families. They tend to be remarkably alike. Certain mistakes are common to almost all beginners. These things aren’t necessarily wrong, but they are difficult to do well—and get in the way of smooth storytelling They also make it easy for professionals—and a lot […]
Six Pieces of Bad Advice New Writers Need to Ignore
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 […]
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 […]