Ryan Lanz's Blog, page 14

Why Successful Writers Need To Do More Than Write

Writing is about a hell of a lot more than just writing. When I started writing, I had a vague idea of what I was getting myself in for. Now that I’ve published, I’ve got a much clearer idea. I’ve released three books, which gives me a matter of perspective.   A writing job description (or, […]

Use Your Verbs

An easy way to empower your writing, build your voice, and help your audience better ‘see’ your message is to utilize verbs over qualifiers like adjectives and adverbs. It’s easy to fall into a habit of using words as they’re ‘assigned’ – adjectives show, so I guess we’ll use them to show – and that habit […]

Advice For New Writers

  The regular advice: Don’t quit your day-job. My take: They are right. Don’t quit your day-job, but make it work for you. It’s been a little over eight months since I quit teaching to complete Settle Down Now, and the only thing I’m missing is my earnings. I love the writing. I’m getting the […]

Writing and Balancing Social Media

As writers, most of us have four jobs: our day job, family life, writing, and social media. For obvious reasons, we have to spend time at our day jobs. We also have to spend time with our families because, well, relationships make life worth living. As for writing, that’s non-negotiable. Except it is. Even when our […]

How to Overcome FOMO as an Independent Author

If you choose the path of independent publishing, you’ll quickly learn that you have a lot of responsibilities. You’ll need to write your book, manage the editing, cover design, and formatting, and handle the publishing and marketing. While you can (and should!) hire professional help, in the end, you’re the one who makes the big […]

The Importance of Author Branding

Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Janet Evanovich – what do you think of when you hear these names? If you know them at all, you’ve got a pretty good idea what you might expect from their books. You might be wrong. They might write something unexpected but probably you’ll get something thrilling from Mr. King, social […]

Writing A Book? Avoid These Two Pitfalls

In the past, I published a post about why we stop reading books. Many of you submitted insightful comments, and as I read through them I realized something: many of our “reading pet peeves” can be boiled down to the author doing one of two things. Not bad, huh? Just avoid doing two things and […]

Do You Really Know How To “Show, Don’t Tell”?

Yesterday marked my deadline for completing the pre-edits for Marred. “Pre-edits” seems like it would be an easy task. It wasn’t. Once the track edits begin in two weeks, I’m not allowed to change anything other than what the editor points out. So I wanted to go through the manuscript…one…more…time…and improve it to the best of my ability. […]

Critique Partners 101: Everything You Need To Know Before Pairing Up

Pairing up with a critique partner or group is very useful in strengthening your writing and getting an opinion on your work in progress before it’s published. Here’s the 101 on what you should know before you find and work with a critique partner:   It’s a partnership. Working with a critique partner or group […]

How Not to Write Female Characters

Female characters would like to have a word with us authors: they would like to be written like 3D human beings, please and thank you. They constitute one half of the human population, after all—and though the landscape for diversity in publishing has improved dramatically in the past decade, manic pixie dream girls and the […]