People are often surprised to learn that even full-time writers, such as moi, struggle to find time to write. You’d think that without the demands of a day job doing something else, a writer would be able to devote hours every day to writing. That’s not true. It’s especially not true for the writing that you…
Tag: The Writing Craft
Behind the Scenes: Pitching Agents
A week or two ago, agent Nathan Bransford did a “Be an Agent for a Day” contest where he challenged his blog readers to read 50 queries (more or less what an agent might see in his/her inbox on any given day), and pick 5 they felt had potential and would, if they were agents,…
How to: Your book and its competition
One of the most difficult parts of writing a non-fiction book proposal is putting together the competitive analysis (this goes by various names but is basically the section where you compare your book to others like it). People often make several common mistakes. 1. They write the competitive analysis after they’ve written the rest of the proposal —…
Practice 10,000 Times
A martial arts master once told me, “You have to practice a kick at least 10,000 times before you start to understand it.” Now, if he had told me that on my first day of class, I would probably have been a little discouraged, but I wasn’t a beginner at the time and I conceded…
How to ask for blurbs
Recently, a writer approached me about blurbing her forthcoming book. (A blurb is a brief testimonial you often see on the back of a book.) Since her book is in my non-fiction niche, I agreed to take a look. She’s not the first person to ask me to blurb her book, but she is by…
How Droll: Pet Peeves
I’m usually a pretty patient reader, willing to give a writer the benefit of the doubt, but occasionally I come across a writer whose verbal mannerisms take me out of the story repeatedly, and then I stop being so patient. Recently I picked up a novel by a much-loved author (loved by other people; I hadn’t…