On a recent Saturday visit to my local bookstore, I noticed that almost every aisle, with the exception of the sports section, was filled with women. In that moment it dawned on me that as a writer I seem to always have women in mind when I think of my audience. I suppose that’s because I’m working on a romance novel, but still, it would appear that women are who’s shopping for books–and everything else–for themselves and their families.

A couple of years ago I started a magazine in Virginia called AVA–which was an acronym for Advertise Virginia. The magazine was all about small business marketing. In our debut issue, we ran an article all about the female customer. I thought I’d share some of that with you here. The article was actually written by my tremendously talented editor, Andrea DiSalvo, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind my sharing it with you here. I think this info is as important to writers as it is to businesses.

Continue Reading »
The Writer’s Most Powerful Customer — Women!

Bookmark to:
         

I recently completed an editing job on an action/adventure novel by a first time author. When I handed over the manuscript, his first question was, now what do I do? The answer is, write a query letter.

A query letter is a formal letter sent by a writer to literary agents, editors, or publishing houses. This is a way for writers to propose their ideas. If you are a writer who aspires to get your work published, then getting this right is vital. After all, literary agents and publishers get their first impression of you and your book from this document.

Query letters should be limited to a single page and follow specific guidelines. The ideal format includes single spacing and a twelve-point font size. Your query letter would also consist of four sections in its single page format: the hook, synopsis, biography, and closing.

Continue Reading »
What Is A Query Letter?

Bookmark to:
         

My husband, who is the author of three books, was just asked by a close friend to write the foreword to his new book. He agreed, even though he’d never written a foreword before. I decided to do a little research for him on how to write a great foreword. I figured I’d share that information with you since, as an author, you may one day be asked to write a foreword for another author, which is a real compliment!

Continue Reading »
Writing the Foreword in a Book

Bookmark to:
         

Okay, so I had this brilliant idea to use creative visualization to spark my creative juices. Then my hubbie took off for Hawaii to do a hypnosis training video and took my iPod with him. Bad husband! So I decided to write about how obstinant we writers need to be to get our jobs done. So here are a few pointers from the trenches as I continue to crank out a few pages of my new novel even while spending most of my day writing business articles, brochures, newsletters and the like.

Continue Reading »
When life gets in the way of your writing

Bookmark to:
         

You may have noticed that I’ve been gone for awhile. Well, I’m back! In just the way we writers do, I’ve been mentally analyzing why I’ve found it so difficult to keep up with this blog and, admittedly, beating myself up a bit for it. Then one day it hit me in the head like a knuckle sandwich. When I’m writing all day long, taking the time to add writer’s resources to a blog is tough. Writing is a creative endeavor. Consequently, we writer’s seem to have only so much juice each day to devote to our writing. Some writer’s, like Stephen King, were born with oodles of juice. Others of us, not so much. I’m not talking about talent here; rather, I’m talking about the energy, drive, focus, concentration, and clarity of mind it takes to pump out really great writing–and at a rate we can make a living at it. This is why I’ve decided to take up creative visualization specifically for enhancing my creativity. Fortunately for me, my husband specializes in this arena. I’ve used his creative visualization processes before to help me get motivated to exercise and to get through treatment for breast cancer. So the other night I asked him if he could put something together to boost my creative writing juices so I can pump it out like a Stephen King or Janet Evanovich. Because he loves me, he said, “Yes.” So this is my first in a series of blogs about how I’m doing with the creative visualization, and how I’m progressing with my novel. Be sure to check in. Whatever happens with creative visualization, it’s almost always interesting. In the meantime . . .

Happy Writing!

Bookmark to: