11 Free YA Romance Books. Offer Ends on the 15th.
Click Here to see the free YA romance books.
How Important are Beta Readers to an Author’s Career?
What are beta readers? Beta readers are people an author asks to read their book and give feedback on it before it’s published or sent to an agent. How important are beta Readers in the development of a novel? The main point here is that authors can get so close to their work that they don’t see the holes in it. They think their book is ready for publication, but they can’t see it the same way as someone who has never read it before, and all readers who purchase the book are in that category, so it has to work for them. Authors need others’ opinions to help them see their book from a reader’s perspective. It’s better to get feedback while you can still change the book than either have poor reviews after self-publishing or an agent or publisher stop reading and discard the book because the author…
28 Free Teen and Young Adult Ebooks
CLICK HERE for 28 free teen and YA books
100 Free Ebooks in a Range of Genres
This month is a freebie and promo month. I’ve joined several group promotions that I’ll be sharing with you. So expect more free deals in the next few weeks. All books are Rated R or below. That means you will see books that would be rated G, PG, PG-13, or R if they were made into movies. If the links don’t work for some reason you can see the original post HERE Young Adults – Rated G – PG-13: Urban Fantasy – PG – R: Fantasy – PG – R: Sci-Fi Romance – PG – R: Science Fiction/Dystopian PG – R: Historical/Western Romance PG – R: Paranormal Romance PG – R: Paranormal Suspense/Romantic Suspense/Suspense-Thriller – PG – R: Cozy Mystery PG – R: Christian/Inspirational G – PG-13: Literary Fiction/Chick Lit PG – R: Romance PG – R:
Plot Structure: Using a timeline template of the 6 Stages of Plot Structure.
This post on plot structure continues from the one on Writing a Novel: the First and Second Draft where one of the points to check at the 2nd draft stage was how your plot points sat relative to a plot structure template. A template makes sure that your plot points come at the right time to keep the reader interested. I use the 6 points of story structure by Michael Hauge and, using sticky notes for the events, I make changes in the order of events or the time given to some events so that the major changes, challenges and opportunities fall at the best place. This is the work in progress for the timeline for Dispossessed. And here’s Mani Moon sitting on the finished template for The Magan Illusionist, a story I laid out several years ago but haven’t actually written – apart from the first few pages, which happen to be…
What are you Writing? Finding the Right Genre
Two options for when to decide on genre. Many people advise you to consider genre at the very start of your writing process, and that’s good advice if you’re a plotter—one who plots their stories in detail from the start. Then you can be clear on what kind of story you’re writing, and you can write specifically to suit that market. Excellent. Problem solved. All you have to do is make sure that your story has all the elements to satisfy reader expectations. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work for those who discover a story somewhere in their creative mind and then write it down. Such stories often don’t fit into clear genres. Nor does it work for those who like to write their first draft without concerning themselves with where it’s going (pansters). In these cases the author may not know exactly what it is…
Hang in there!
It’s possible that no one cares or notices, but if you are one of my regular readers, you might have noticed a lack of posts in the last week. This is primarily because I’m working on a book, my fantasy romance Dispossessed. It could also be called metaphysical romance – if you know me, you know I can’t not put some metaphysics in my work. I’m presently trying to cut 40,000 words from it and have removed 22,000 so far. I’m not sure if I’ll get down to 100, 000 or less, but I’m having a good go and I’ll tell you how I’ve done it when I’m finished. I’m doing this while doing my editing work and I just came back from 6 days in New Zealand for my mother’s 90th birthday, so I’ve let some things slide. I’ll get some more riveting content to you as soon as I’ve…
Writing a Novel. The first and second draft.
First Draft Your first attempt at writing a novel is called your first draft. First drafts are easy really; that is if you take the idea that a first draft is where you just write the story using your creative mind and leave your critical mind out of it. The idea of a first draft is to get it all down, all your ideas, and not worry about details. The details will be sorted out during later drafts. The best and the worst thing about a first draft is getting it all down. But if you manage to do that, then you deserve some congratulations, because no matter how much of a mess it is, to complete a first draft of a whole novel is a big accomplishment. After that comes the hard bit, because now you have use your critical mind to evaluate what you’ve written and make changes to…
Will I Make Money from Writing Fiction? The Truth.
These days, due to the ease of self-publishing, you can write what you want and still have it published, but does that mean you will make money from writing. Prior to the electronic reading revolution, you could still write whatever you wanted, but if you wanted it published, you’d better hope that what you wanted to write was whatever the publishing houses wanted. The trouble now is that you can write what you want and publish it, but that doesn’t mean that anyone will buy it. Are your expectations realistic? The days of indie authors making a living on the back of free and 99c ebooks is pretty much over. Authors who entered the game after 2012 can’t expect to join those who made it big when the ebook market was new, but some blogs and many books and courses still give the impression that it’s easy to make money as…
What is it about unpacking boxes?
Apparently videos of people unpacking boxes are big on You Tube. I guess people like to share in the excitement of revealing something, or getting something new. Anyway, beacuse of this phenomena, when I got my last big box of goodies, I decided I might as well video me unpacking it, just for fun. So here it is. And, no, it’s not masks in that box! Masks I tend to pack up, not unpack, and I suspect that people wouldn’t want to watch that. Still you never know. They may not want to watch this either, but it didn’t take me long to do and I did think that maybe, just maybe a few people might like to see what’s in that box.