How to Prepare for Your First Signing Event as an Author
How to Prepare for Your First Signing Event as an Author There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as readers flowing through an event, stopping at your booth or table, asking questions about your books, and exchanging money for an autographed copy. Although ads, marketing, and social media are all useful tools in your marketing belt, book […]
The Silent Struggle: The Author’s Self-Care Guide for a Healthier Mind
Angie Martin When dealing with mental illness, it’s often hard to power through the low points, let alone write your next book. But there are several things you can focus on during these times, as well as every day, to bring normalcy to your life as much as possible. The National Institute on Mental Health […]
Poetry by the Book: What to Consider Before Self-Publishing Your Collection
Angie Martin As a gorgeous art form that has survived the centuries and that readers around the globe admire and revere, poetry can be more like music than a storytelling genre, with stanzas and word choice providing a unique cadence to access the poet’s soul. These rhythmic works come in a myriad of styles, length, […]
The Silent Struggle: Ways to Manage Mental Health
Angie Martin With one in five Americans dealing with mental health problems, mental well-being is becoming a bigger and more important topic than ever before. Mental illness has been suggested to share a link with creativity, with famed cases such as Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Mark Twain, and Stephen King, and a plethora of […]
Travel the World with the World Wide Web: Research Tips for Writing about Real Places
Angie Martin When it comes to choosing a location for a novel, short story, or script, many authors stick with what they know. Stephen King’s novels typically stay in Maine. Hailing from Kansas City, Missouri, Gillian Flynn’s three novels take place in the rural Midwest. Anne Rice is well known for her exotic paranormal tales, […]
What Writers Can Gain from Clubhouse, the Audio-Only Social Network
2020 was a pivotal year for everyone. COVID quarantines had people scrambling for things to do, especially creatives. For writers, book signings were postponed indefinitely. Screenwriters watched as filming around the globe halted, and life generally took a dystopian turn. More than ever, networking on social media took center stage as we strived to keep […]
The Silent Struggle: A Look at the Relationship between Writing and Mental Health
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), one in five adults in the US have experienced mental illness at some point in their life. Writers and other creative types, however, suffer at much greater rates than the average American. Over a decade of studies show the following approximate statistics for authors and artists: […]
5 Tips for Adding Diversity to Your Manuscript Draft
Writing about topics that do not belong to your culture can be tricky. In today’s society, writers venturing into those areas are sometimes worried about being accused of cultural appropriation or the use of topics from other cultures for gain or profit or in a way that reinforces stereotypes. Even more so, we’re taught as […]
Does Your Writing Suffer from the ‘Wandering Body Part’ Problem?
“Your eyes touch me physically.” —“The Warrior,” performed by Scandal, written by Holly Knight and Nick Gilder Oh, the amazing wandering body parts. The absolute horror inflicted upon readers as eyes fly, hands inch around, and hearts roam the world. The term “wandering body parts” refers to the sentences in which body parts seem to […]
Writing with Chronic Illness
Writing with chronic illness looks much different than writing without—and so does self-care. We often think of self-care as what we see prevalent in commercials or on the internet: spa days, vacations, etc. While these are nice, self-care for the chronically ill takes on a much simpler plan. It is more about taking your medications, […]