Three Tips for Fitting Your Writing Time into the Festive Season
It’s that time of year again. Evenings are spent vegging out on the sofa after yet another rich, heavy meal. There are invitations to office parties and family gatherings a-plenty. Food and drink flow freely. Days and nights blend into one another, and normal is a distant memory. The belts around our waists move up […]
How the Right Mindset Turns Storytelling into Sanctuary and an Answer to Doomscrolling
Turn on the news. Read a paper. Scroll through social media. No matter where you go, it’s hard to avoid today’s world. It seeps in through your pores even when you try your best to switch everything off. Go to the grocery store, and mawkish headlines greet you near the entrance. On the radio, advertisements […]
What It Takes to Make Your Next Book a Holiday Hit
This issue falls as autumn begins, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. But writers invariably set Christmas-themed books amid images of pine trees laden with snowy boughs, despite 50 percent of the world experiencing the height of summer on December 25. It is a statement to the cultural prevalence of this part of the globe […]
SPS Live from a Volunteer’s Point of View
Susan Odev When Mark Dawson made his clarion call for volunteers to help backstage and front-of-house for the Self Publishing Show Live event, held June 28 and 29 in London’s South Bank, I hesitated to raise my hand. The inaugural event, back in 2020, heralded the start of lockdown, and there was an excellent chance […]
Getting Cozy with Mysteries
In her book Writing the Cozy Mystery, Nancy J. Cohen defines a cozy as a “whodunit featuring an amateur sleuth, a distinctive setting and a limited number of suspects … ” When challenged, many authors will simply respond, think Murder She Wrote or Agatha Christie. Simply, a crime occurs within a small community of colorful […]
Why You Should Be Approaching Your Goals The Wrong Way
SMART Goals Aren’t Always The Smartest Before I was a writer, in the days when I earned a living training public and private sector workers how to manage their time, their teams, or themselves more effectively, I would advise everyone I met that the secret to goal setting was to write SMART objectives. If you […]
Kill or Cure?
Alfred Hitchcock famously said, “I think everyone enjoys a nice murder, provided he is not the victim.” In reality, there is no such thing as a nice murder or a perfect murder but, in writing, there can be the “right” murder. The death that best suits the victim’s or killer’s character, situation, motives, and place […]
Neither a Plotter Nor a Pantser Be: The benefits of outlining
If you stand at the front of a conference room full of authors and ask for a show of hands who are “pantsers” and who are “plotters,” you would start a literary battle, possibly literally. Feelings run high in both camps. The question for any indie author is, will one method prove to be more […]