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Marketing: Part 1 You have an agent. You have a publisher. You don’t need to market your book, right? Wrong. Even if you are with a large publishing house, you need to market your book. Or if freelance is your gig, you need to market yourself. I was chatting with another writer online the other day. She wrote: “I can’t market my book. I don’t know where to start.” She was talking about the fact she had a contract for her very first novel and was learning that she had to do some of the marketing if she wanted the book to be successful. It’s a tough lesson to learn. I assured her she was already doing a great job at marketing. She was. She had pitched her story to an acquisitions editor, provided the publisher with written materials, told me about her book, and shared on Facebook that her book was accepted for publication. That’s marketing. Of course there’s more. For Breathing on Her Own I am trying everything I can think of doing. Chip MacGregor , a highly respect...

News Alert : Check out on American Christian Fiction Writers website this week! I am the featured author in an interview. Wow! "Who woulda thunk it?"  Here is the link:  ACFW   Now on to the blog post of this week…dust off your stationary bike to read this one! Remember walking into English class every Monday in high school? Mrs. Morrison had written a prompt on the dusty black chalkboard. She called it a writing exercise. I have said this before: Good writers become better writers when they write, just as good runners become better runners when they run. Talking about writing isn’t enough. Do it. Get started every Monday with an exercise that would make Mrs. Morrison proud. I keep a list of exercises by me. Sometimes if I am struggling with a writing project, I will turn to one of those exercises to get the creative juices flowing. Stretch and Flexibility Like any good exercise program, start with a few stretches. Get out of your comfort zone to add f...

I have discovered that most people don’t think of writing as a job. A career. A business. I’ve been told it’s nice I found a hobby. Others have praised me for developing my “gift.” Few realize the hours it takes to write, pitch, publish, publicize, ….in a word: work. Is my writing fun? Yep. Rewarding? Yes. Purposeful? You bet. Lucrative? Not yet. As a writer I am self-employed. Writing is my business. And to prove it, I have real honest-to-goodness business cards. (Thank you, Danielle.) More importantly, I have a business plan. No one told me I needed to draft a business plan when I started this career in earnest in 2012, but common sense dictated I create one. At the time I was still teaching at the university. I knew I would be leaving that setting in December of 2012, so in March of that year, I spent a good portion of my Spring Break drafting my business plan to become a writer. It helped me get my ducks in a row. Most business plans have a mission or vision sta...

Delighted to have guest author, Tamera Lynn Craft, sharing another avenue for publishing your story:  Writing Novellas By Tamera Lynn Kraft Novellas are basically stories that are too short to be considered a novel and too long to be under the short story category. They are fiction between 15,000 and 40,000 words. Although novellas used to not be popular with traditional publishers because of the high cost of printing them, they have come into vogue. The main reason for this is because of e-books. A novella can be sold in e-book format for as little as 99 cents which makes it very popular with readers. Many publishers have created anthologies with a group of novellas around one topic, such as the Civil War or Christmas on the frontier. I have a published novella in both of these categories. Although there are no hard fast rules in writing, here are some things to remember about writing novellas: One Plot: Novellas generally only have one plot. They are too short to ...