Today’s video can be seen as a visual metaphor of the writing and publishing experience.
Can you tell me what is being represented?
Blog
Beyond the Hook: Character Flaws?
My husband gave me a turquoise ring I enjoy wearing. For one, the stone was unearthed from the Sleeping Beauty Mine in Arizona, which has since closed. The location seems cool to me since our agency’s corporate headquarters is located in Phoenix. And since the mine is no longer in operation, the stone possesses special cachet. But more important, my husband likes the ring and wants me to have it. …
Agents Share Their Pet Peeves
Agents are people, too. Most literary agents, that is. And, like most people, we have our highs and lows. Our problems. Our irritations. Our pet peeves. I asked my fellow agents at The Steve Laube Agency to share their pet peeves with me for the purpose of this blog post. Boy, did that open a Pandora’s box. Tamela Hancock Murray, the “ACFW agent-of-the-year” award-winning agent, agreed to come …
Six Easy Steps to Publishing Success
Success in publishing is actually quite simple. Honestly I am surprised more people aren’t more successful financially as an author. So many conference workshops are making this entire publishing thing far more complicated than it needs to be. Today, here are six fast, easy, no risk steps to being a successful author in any type of writing. We will all be shaking our heads at the end for missing …
Retail is Dead! Or is it?
You’ve read the news. This calendar year bankruptcies or total closures were announced by Toys R Us, Gymboree, Bebe, American Apparel, Guess, Rue 21, The Limited, Gander Mountain, Vitamin World, and Family Christian Stores. Sears and Kmart announced last Friday that they were closing another 63 stores in January, on top of the 358 they closed already this year. And the watchful vultures are …
Fun Fridays – November 3, 2017
With the U.S. baseball season finally complete and a new World Series champion crowned, I thought it fitting to post this story of a 99-year-old usher who works the Pittsburgh Pirates games. Think about it for a second. If he retired at the 65-year mark he has been enjoying his post-career years since 1983. I started my career in this industry in 1981 as a young college student. In other words, he …
Beyond the Hook: What Makes Your Reader Care?
Any book lover who’s made the hobby of reading a lifelong habit can name stories that kept him reading well past anything else – dinner, chores, bedtime… What makes this happen? The Problem Sympathetic characters can help as a start, but while they serve to draw in a reader, the story’s dilemma itself keeps the reader engaged. The reader can’t put the book down until the characters solve the …
Deadlines Are Friends, Not Nemeses
When is your next deadline? What? You don’t have one? Why not? Aren’t you a writer? I know some writers create fine prose or poetry without deadlines—I just don’t know how they do it. “But,” you may protest, “I don’t have a contract yet. How can I have a deadline?” I suggest you always have a deadline, whether a publisher imposes it or not. No one is preventing you from making—and meeting—your own …
A Writer‘s Theses
Fifteen hundred years after Christ died, resurrected and started the Christian church with a group of rag-tag disciples, the church had become a culturally, politically and socially dominant force, involved in all aspects of life. Prior to the start of the Protestant Reformation, many felt the church had strayed quite a bit from its original roots and needed a course-correction. Martin Luther, a …
Rumor Control
I was talking with an editor this week who asked me, "How are things going? I hear that your agency is barely making ends meet and that you've had to take on other type of work to survive."
I must admit that I was so startled by this rumor that words nearly failed me.
"Where did you hear that?" I exclaimed.
"Oh it was at a recent writers conference and folks were talking, and your name …