A great title, cover and concept are often enough to get a reader to pull your book off the shelf. But what keeps her reading until the every end, and gets her to recommend the book to friends? The answer is an amazing reading experience. One where the content of the book flows so seamlessly … Read more
What’s the hardest part about writing? DOING IT! You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but setting aside the time to sit down and put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard) is a whole different story. So how do I help my authors skirt the deadly territory of “writer who isn’t writing?” I … Read more
No matter how you slice it, writing a book is a big, long, complex job. Most first-time writers assume that once they finish their draft manuscript, the heavy lifting is complete. All they have to do is wait for their publisher to put a few things together, and they’ll have a beautiful book in their … Read more
So, I’m going to go ahead and come out with it: while I enjoy helping authors pursue and acquire book deals, I’m also super excited about self-publishing. The whole thing gives me energy. I like the idea of creative control. I like knowing that artists are out there, doing every single thing their own way. … Read more
Writing dialogue seems like it would be so easy. We talk all the time, right? How hard could it be to just write it down? But it takes a little more than that to make dialogue seem real. Frequently, the dialogue we imagine for our characters sounds stilted or overly formal. That’s partly because, when … Read more
One of the first things I learned when I first opened KN Literary arts is that the term “ghostwriter” has a realllllllly bad rep. I would be chatting with prospective clients, and the same publishing obstacles would come up: Not enough time to write a whole book or proposal Not confident in the writing process … Read more
So often we hear the phrase “write what you know.” I would take that a step further, to “write what you love.” Many times, a client will ask me to help her choose between multiple ideas. She’ll present me with the one she thinks she ought to write, the one that is more “commercially viable,” … Read more
When we think of writing, we often think of the sexy parts. The inspiration of the muse! The poetic prose, flowing on the page! The readers whose lives are about to change! While all that’s well and good, the truth is there’s nothing sexy about the butt-in-chair time required to actually write that book. If … Read more
Remember the days when we learned to type in school? “Remember, kids, the way you break up a sentence when you type is by putting two spaces after a period. Got it?” Those days are over. Today, every major style guide, including The Modern Language Association Style Manual, the Oxford Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of … Read more
Today, we diverge from our regularly scheduled program to bring you a math lesson. Groan. I know. But if you’ve spent any time working on a book proposal, you know that one piece of information prospective agents and publishers want to know requires you to do some futuristic math. Even though you haven’t written the … Read more
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