If you’ve ever taken a writing course or read a book on how to write a novel, you would have been told ‘show, don’t tell’ at least once—perhaps several hundred times. But what exactly does it mean? Telling is when you tell the reader facts: what’s happening, how someone feels, even what’s about to happen next—spoiler alert. Showing, on the other hand, is when the writer draws an image so…
Read more
Some people may try and tell you that creating characters for your novel is as easy as selecting an age, gender, hair colour, and goal. But it’s not that simple. If you want your characters to compel readers to care about them enough to read your entire novel, then you have to do a lot better than create a few generic character features. You have to imbue your characters with…
Read more
You’ve woken up, eaten breakfast, and have sat down in front of your laptop. You open the file titled Best Selling Novel and push open the door in your mind that grants you access to the fictional world you’ve spent the past few months creating. You poise your fingers above your laptop’s keyboard, ready to glimpse what happens next in your story. But fog swirls around you when you step through the door,…
Read more
Let me guess, you’ve just finished writing your novel after spending the past year pouring your soul into it—writing it, then editing it again, and again, and again. You think it’s perfect, an absolute masterpiece that will be hailed alongside the works of Agatha Christie and J.K. Rowling. There’s nothing left to do now but publish it, right? Wrong. A writer can’t objectively edit their own work because they’re too…
Read more
So, you’ve woken up after dreaming about a dragon who convinces a witch to transform them into a human, and you think wow, what a great idea for a novel. You leap out of bed and dart towards your laptop, eager to put the story forming in your head onto paper. But you need to STOP and take a deep breath because writing without any pre-planning rarely ends well. Writing a…
Read more
Have you thought about publishing a book? Do you know how to go about it? Are you thinking ‘Do I use a publisher or publish it myself’? There are many questions to consider when undertaking the journey of becoming an author. … What do I want to achieve with my book? … How do I get my book seen by as many readers as possible? … Do I publish it…
Read more
Have you wondered HOW to get your book into the hands of a book publisher? Start with a FREE appraisal! Most appraisals are offered for FREE. This will not only tell you if your book is publishable, but also what might be needed in the way of editing. It’s often not as much as you think. Being an author is hard work these days, there are so many books already…
Read more