Writing and Publishing News

I teach 4 courses online and on-demand. When a few people sign up for one of my courses, I will try to get others involved at the same time. Currently, I am teaching the Article-Writing Course. The first class lecture and assignment went out this morning. Subsequent lessons will be sent via email each Monday [...]

They say that we each have a story inside us. A life is compiled of many stories. But how many of them are actually worth telling? More and more people are writing and publishing their life stories. Memoirs of all types are flooding the bookstores and the internet. Authors are sharing their stories of abuse, [...]

What’s more comfortable than sitting cozy in your writing room penning the book of your dreams? You can write when you want and stop when you want. You can tell people that you are a writer—that you are writing a novel or a business book or your memoirs, a children’s story, a YA fantasy… You’ve [...]

Do you know how to use an index? I can hear many of you chuckle at the thought of any adult who completed college or even high school not using an index. But I meet people all the time who don’t even know the difference between a table of contents and an index. You’ll notice [...]

Some writers have trouble disciplining themselves anytime—all the time. They’re easily lured away from their computers by dirty dishes in the sink, a phone call, daytime television, hunger or any number of other distractions. But even highly disciplined writers sometimes find it difficult to work through the summer. Just look at all of the distractions [...]

Are you just about ready to hire an editor for your manuscript? This is something you’ll definitely want to do before you publish your book or before you start showing it around to publishers. And as I’ve said before, choose an editor who is accustomed to working with book manuscripts. The retired professor who attends [...]

As authors or freelance writers, we tend to focus on the agent, publisher or editor when we’re writing a book or an article. We fret, “Will he like this style, this format, the way I’ve handled the dialog?” We worry, “Will she appreciate my attempt at suspense? Is this well-organized? What will she think about [...]

It was in 1990 when I agreed to work, on a part-time basis, writing the history of the Ojai Valley School in Ojai, California. I saw this 225-page comprehensive history book all the way through the publishing process in 1996. I’d already been writing and submitting articles for over 20 years and, when this project [...]

I’m sure you’ve heard about the 17 teens in Massachusetts who made a pact to get pregnant. This sounds like an irresponsible thing to do, doesn’t it? Well, you see a similar irresponsibility among hopeful authors. Just this morning, my Google Alert noted a blog post by someone who was encouraging others to write books [...]

There’s always something new happening these days within the publishing industry—new publishers on the scene, publishers and bookstores changing their way of operating and coming up with new programs for authors, price changes, policy changes and so forth. HarperCollins, for example, is forming a co-op designed to take the place of the author advance. Instead [...]