Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 43

Self Publishing? What’s Your Newsletter Plan? — Part Four

It’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. We’ve been exploring the choices for what path we want to follow in our indie publishing career, and today, we’re continuing to dig deeper into how to implement our chosen path.

My series about Indie Publishing Paths at Fiction University has highlighted some of the choices we have to make and given us a few guidelines.

We first discussed how we need toknow our goalsbecause that will help us make the be...

Staying Connected to the Writing Community — Guest: Tamar Hela

Even though many writers are introverts, that doesn’t mean we want to stay isolated or holed up in our home all the time. *smile* I’ve talked about the importance of the writing community many times in fact.

We connect with other writers on social media like Twitter and Facebook. We help each other out by sharing links to blog articles full of advice and tips. And we cheer each other on or give virtual kicks in the pants when we need them.

Sometimes we might even leave the house for that wri...

How Can We Make NaNoWriMo Work for Us?

After my last post with my collection of tips for planning and starting our NaNoWriMo stories, a couple of comments on social media asked what was the pointof just writing a lot of words. A common assumption about NaNo is that people write gibberish (or close to it) to meet the word count demands of 50K words in one month.

To be sure, some people do write messy stream-of-consciousness rambles that don’t add up to a story. But NaNo writing doesn’t have to be poor quality.

I’ve participated in...

Are You Ready for NaNoWriMo?

It’s almost time for NaNoWriMo, when thousands of writers will try to cram 50,000 words into a 30-day deadline. If you’re participating in NaNo and anything like me, you might be freaking out a little as November nears.

For the last several years, I’ve offered my popular Lost Your Pants? The Impatient Writer’s Guide to Plotting a Story workshop in October to help writers focus on their story before NaNo comes around. I’m a big fan of NaNo, and an even bigger fan of making sure we’re not endi...

Should Published Stories Be Set in Stone?

Several years ago, I wrote a post questioning whether ebooks were ever “done.” As I’d pointed out in that post, in the world of traditional publishing, if errors make it through the editing process for a book, authors (and their readers) are stuck. While a lucky few authors are able to correct egregious mistakes like wrong character names or missing paragraphs in later print runs, most of the time, errors remain in the text forever.

Contrast that situation with epublishing and self-published...

Writing a Series: How Much Do We Need to Plan Ahead?

It’s no secret that many authors who have found success write book series. With a series, when readers enjoy one story, they’re more likely to purchase other books in the series than they are to buy unrelated books. So an author who writes a series might see more sales than they would otherwise.

But that brings up the issue of how much a series should be planned in advance of later releases. Should authors have an idea of where the series is going in future books? Should they know how the se...

Helping Writers: Writing Coaches, Guest Posts, & More!

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I’m a huge fan of Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s work. They’re the genius duo behind the Emotion Thesaurus, the Positive and NegativeTrait Thesaurus books, the recent Urban and Rural Setting Thesaurus books, and the Writers Helping Writers (which started as The Bookshelf Muse) and the One Stop for Writers websites.

Yeah, geniuses. *smile*

I’m lucky enough to have been friends with them since early in their Bookshelf Muse days—long bef...

When Fiction Is Better Behaved than Reality

(Note: Some of my readers might want to disagree with this post because of politics. However, consent—and lack of consent—should not be politicized, and consent is the topic of this post, not the politics or candidates of the U.S. election. Please try to keep that in mind while reading. Thanks!)

Over this past weekend, the insanity of the current U.S. presidential election increased. While I don’t delve into politics here on my blog, some of the statements excusing the latest escalation drag...

Self Publishing? What’s Your Newsletter Plan? — Part Three

It’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. We’ve been exploring the choices for what path we want to follow in our indie publishing career, and today, we’re continuing to dig deeper into how to implement our chosen path.

My series about Indie Publishing Paths at Fiction University has highlighted some of the choices we have to make and given us a few guidelines.

We first discussed how we need toknow our goalsbecause that will help us make the be...

4 Tips for Preventing Flat Descriptions — Guest: Janice Hardy

Over the past few months, we’ve been enjoying tips on planning and revising in guest posts by the fantastic Janice Hardy. Her post on revising focused on backstory, an element our story needs but that also leads to readers skipping over our words if not written well.

Similarly, story description has a bad reputation for being skippable. Many readers will skim description, looking for the next exciting part with action or dialogue.

However, a story without description happens in a vacuum. At...