Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 19

How Do We Set Goals When Trying Something New?

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I’ve talked many times before about how we should think about and set goals for ourselves with our writing career. Knowing our goals can help us determine the right path for us:

Should we focus on readers, writing, or income? Do we want to quit our day job? How does our worldview translate to publishing goals? What’s our Master Plan for publishing?

In other words, if we don’t know our goals, we lessen our chances of success. Either we wo...

Making a Big Revision? Stitching Our Story’s Rips Together

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It’s time for another one of my guest posts over at Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s Writers Helping Writers site. As one of their Resident Writing Coaches, I’ve previously shared:

insights on how to approach an overwhelming revision how to increase the stakes (the consequences for failure) in our story 7 ways to indicate time passage in our stories (and 2 issues to watch out for) how to translate story beats to any genre how and why w...

More Than a Happy Ending: What Makes a Story Uplifting?

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A couple of months ago, I wrote about “aspirational stories” and how our hopes and goals are sometimes reflected in the stories we read or write. Today, I want to talk more about the aspirational nature of some stories because this concept is part of why I love the romance genre so much.

As I mentioned before, according to Google, aspiration is “a hope or ambition of achieving something.” Most of us hope for or want to achieve something in...

Social Media: Make It Fun!

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A few weeks ago, I blogged that I had joined Instagram in time for Dahlia Adler’s #AuthorLifeMonth event. Ever since my guest poster Monica Corwin shared her tips on how to make Instagram work for authors last summer, I’d been tempted to see what made the platform so popular, and Dahlia’s hashtag event was the perfect opportunity to try out Instagram.

At the time of that post, I wasn’t sure how much I liked Instagram, as I’m not usually a...

Using Ghostwriters: Authors vs. Author Mills — Guest: Shiloh Walker

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Last week, news of the #CopyPasteCris plagiarism scandal hit the writing world (52 books, 34 authors, 3 articles, 3 websites, 2 recipes and counting). As I mentioned last time, two topics beyond the extreme plagiarism have gained attention:

Authors and readers are frustrated with Amazon.
Scammers will always look for ways to scam systems, but a smart system attempts to change their processes to prevent known scams from continuing. Unfortu...

The Ghostwriting Debate: Get the Facts — Guest: Shiloh Walker

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In the week since news of the #CopyPasteCris plagiarism scandal hit the writing world (51 books, 34 authors, 3 articles, 3 websites, 2 recipes and counting!), two topics beyond the extreme plagiarism have gained attention:

Authors and readers are frustrated with Amazon.
As I mentioned in my last post, Amazon could be doing so much more to prevent the scammer invasion but they choose not to. And given what I’ve seen lately with counterfeit...

What Can Authors and Readers Learn from #CopyPasteCris?

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If you haven’t been on Twitter in the last two days, you might not have heard of the recent issue known as #CopyPasteCris. The short version is that a reader notified romance author (and former Supreme Court clerk and intellectual property law professor!) Courtney Milan that Cristiane Serruya had plagiarized one of her books.

Word spread throughout social media because Courtney is a popular author with over 30,000 followers on Twitter, and...

Struggle to Write Characters? Here’s Help!

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As writers, we have to make our characters seem real to readers. Let’s stop for a minute and think about how amazing that concept is…

We’re taking an idea from our heads — nothing tangible, nothing specific — and giving readers something that feels real. We’re giving them characters…people, really, that they wouldn’t be surprised to meet on the street. We’re giving them characters to look up to, friends to connect to, characters they can l...

Romance Love: Happy Valentine’s Day!

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It’s often not easy to be a romance author. Because we tend to write about women and sex and happiness, too many assume that we’re not intelligent—as though trying to find joy in life means that we can’t also have serious thoughts.

The time around Valentine’s Day can be especially trying. A whole day (or week) focused on love and romance brings out all types of naysayers of the romance genre.

Those who complain or look down on the genre of...

What Social Media Platforms Do You Use?

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A few weeks ago, I saw a mention on Twitter of a social media event called #AuthorLifeMonth. Every year, Dahlia Adler puts together a list of prompts for writers to share a bit about themselves, their work, and their life each day of February.

I remembered seeing the hashtag last year and it seemed fun, but most of the month had already passed by the time I figured out what it meant and never joined in. This year, I saw the notification in...