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How to Create a Believable Magic System in Your Fantasy Story

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

Today’s post is by developmental editor and book coach Hannah Kate Kelley.

What is a magic system?

A magic system is a map establishing where magic comes from and how it works. It contains a structured set of rules and principles of magical powers in a work of fiction.

Like geography, historical era, and social customs, a magic system is another element of world building. More often than not, your story will employ magic as an agent to instill conflict and drive the narrative forward—and it’s the system that keeps everything organized for both the writer and their readers.

When the young witch Hermione Granger magically lifts her feather in her Hogwart’s Charms class before her friend Ron Weasley can, chiding, “It’s Leviosa not Leviosaaa,” readers understand the scene’s humor. Why? Because author J.K. Rowling has already established a magic system with clear rules. In order to do the levitation spell, the young witches and wizards must pronounce the incantation correctly, which Ron obviously hasn’t mastered yet. Without a magic system in place, this scene would have fallen flat.

Besides the magical world of the Harry Potter series, here are a few more fiction novels and series featuring magic systems:

Fourth Wing by Rebecca YarrosHuntress by Malinda LoMexican Gothic by Sylivia Moreno-GarciaThe Gilded Ones by Namina FornaThe Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by Victoria SchwabThe Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. TolkeinThe Night Circus by Erin MorgensternShadow and Bone by Leigh BardugoWhat makes a magic system believable?

Believability keeps readers immersed. If your readers aren’t engaged with your story’s world, they are more likely to get their DNF (did not finish) stamps out. The more logical your magic system, the more readers can suspend their disbelief.

Before we dive into how to make your own magic system, let’s explore the two most common magic system pitfalls to watch out for:

1. An overly complicated magic system that overshadows the plot

While worldbuilding is a huge draw, your character development and plot should actually take center stage. A complicated magic system often means an overpowering one because readers are spending more time trying to understand your magic system, and not enough time invested in the story.

How do you know if your magic system is complicated? Your best bet is to ask readers—whether that’s an editor, beta reader, or trusted friend. While many readers love in-depth magic systems, if they feel confused or are constantly reviewing details from a previous chapter, it’s time to simplify it.

If you find your magic system is becoming overly complicated, here are a few tried and true fixes:

If one part of your magic system is complex, simplify the other parts. For example, if you have a significant number of magical abilities, simplify the rest of the magic system by giving every ability the same harnessing process.Similarly, if your plot is already complex, keep the magic system simple. A common example of an overcomplicated magic system is one with an excessive number of branches or schools, each with its own unique rules, tools, incantations, and rituals; a dozen different kinds of magic, each requiring specific spell ingredients, incantations in different languages, and physical gestures that vary by moon phase. On top of all that, let’s say you also have 82 different magic beasts. And your plot is complex. Balance the scales by either simplifying the plot and/or the magic system.If two or more creatures, magical abilities or other magical elements serve the same plot purpose, try conflating them. Let’s say your story has sixteen different creatures that attack the protagonist in Book 1, each with their own origin story, abilities, and magic source. While this diversity might feel more realistic, sixteen different beasts is a lot for readers to keep track of. Condensing the creatures into only four or so different types, with a hierarchy of how dangerous their abilities are, will be far easier to follow.Dole out your magical world in waves, just as J.K. Rowling does between Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Book 1) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7). Though Harry doesn’t discover the horcrux magic until the later books, there are other types of magic to keep readers engaged, as well as well-paced clues pointing to the horcrux magic. Readers slowly build up their understanding, no overloading.

Complex doesn’t mean complicated. A good magic system is simple, made richer when the same principles apply to different characters. Think of a good magic system as an expansion of one central idea, rather than a messy exploration of several ideas. And remember to balance your magic system with the plot itself.

2. An inconsistent magic system

New fantasy writers break this rule all the time, whether it’s for an exciting plot twist or to fix a plot hole you accidentally created back in Book 2. A common example is when, early in the story, a character is said to need a specific incantation to cast a spell. Later, they cast the same spell with just a thought, without any explanation for the change.

Similarly, fantasy writers don’t want magic to serve as an all-too-convenient deus ex machina plot device to solve story issues arbitrarily. Say a previously unmentioned magical artifact appears just in time to solve a major problem during the story’s crisis, with no prior foreshadowing or explanation. That’s an inconsistency that will leave readers confused and frustrated.

What’s the fix for an inconsistent magic system? First, establish your magic system with care. And second, stay organized by referencing your established magic system often and updating it if you decide to make a change.

Now that you know the two common pitfalls to avoid, it’s time to create your magic system.

Define the role of magic in your story

Your magic system needs to operate seamlessly within the tale you plan to tell, not the other way around. That’s why the first step is to establish what role magic will play in your story. Will magic control a society? Or will it just exist in the backstory, in a world where magic is newly eradicated?

Sure, you could throw magic into any story, but unless it plays an important part of the plot and character development, you might be better off writing sci-fi or another genre. Imagine if The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald had a league of magicians tossed into the book. Given that the story is a realistic social critique of 1920s America, this magical inclusion would obscure the point. Magic doesn’t fit into this story. Whereas, in Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, mapmaker Alina Starkov’s discovery of her latent magic not only changes her trajectory, but also plays a large role in her self-acceptance, romantic tensions, and ethical dilemmas. Magic fits in this story.

Define magic’s role in society:How does magic fit into your world’s history, culture, and everyday life?How does each society in your world regard magic? Do they hold magic in contempt, fear, adoration, or are they oblivious to its existence?How does each society use magic, if different from one another? Are societies separated by geography, class, gender, and/or magic-users and non-magic-users? How does the presence or absence of magic affect social hierarchies?Define magic’s role in the plot:How does magic directly influence the plot and main character development? How does it indirectly influence these aspects?How does your protagonist’s abilities or lack thereof influence their internal conflict and/or the central theme?Does the general storyline function perfectly well without magic? If so, are you interested enough in writing a magic system regardless?

These questions will help you decide whether it makes sense to include magic in your story or not, and if so, what role magic will play.

Research your genre and subgenre

If you plan to publish your story, the next step is to do a little bit of homework on your story’s subgenre because many of them feature magic in different ways. Understanding genre conventions is all about meeting reader expectations. Some magical tropes you’ll use and others you won’t, or you’ll put your own spin on them, but either way, you need to be aware of them.

The genre conventions surrounding magic look vastly different between a gothic horror story like Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia compared to the cozy, low-stakes medieval fantasy Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree. The former uses more ambiguity around the magic’s source, as is typical of the creeping suspense found in gothic horror, while the latter book plays off a D&D-based realm in which magic deeply integrates into everyday life.

Doing this research can also help writers avoid tired tropes and harmful stereotypes. For example, if year after year, all readers get are werewolf stories depicting the “special” or most dominant werewolf with pristine white fur, consider why writers regard the color white as such a predominant signifier of importance and how you can switch it up.

Study 4–5 comparable book summaries or reviews in your subgenre, preferably published in the past two years. If you’re not sure which subgenre you’re writing, this is a good time to uncover that by exploring what subgenres are out there.

While researching each book, ask yourself:

What roles does magic play in this story?Do the protagonists have magical abilities or not? Do the antagonists? Which traits do the main characters possess?What kind of magic exists in this world? How do magic users, if there are any, use the magic? What do they use the magic for?Is magic explicitly stated and understood, or more abstractly understood?Do the societies within the story accept, reject, or remain unaware of the magic surrounding them?What do readers think of the magic system in this story? Are they excited by or annoyed by any tropes?

At the end of your research, you’ll understand your subgenre’s most prevalent magic tropes and conventions so you can both play into and subvert them as you see fit. Whether you choose to publish traditionally or self-publish, your agent, editor, and readers will be glad you did your homework.

Choose a magic system type

Now that you know the role magic will play in your story, as well as how it will fit into your subgenre conventions, it’s time to narrow down the type of magic system you want to use: hard or soft.

Hard magic systems

These systems are characterized by well-defined rules and limitations where the rules are clearly explained and magic functions predictably.

Writers of high, epic, and urban fantasy subgenres enjoy hard systems because the cast of characters and their various plotlines can be very expansive, and therefore easier to track with a concrete navigation. Hard magic systems can also lead to clever problem-solving scenarios where characters use their knowledge of these rules to overcome obstacles.

In Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, the magic system is rooted in the ten Maji clans, each one able to harness an element of nature (e.g., controlling water, communicating with the dead, and healing). The magic source, known as Ashê, comes from the Maji’s blood. The story provides clear rules about how magic is accessed and used, and there is still room for mysterious and developing elements as the characters discover their powers.In Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, the Grisha magic (also known as Small Science) has clear categories and rules, with practitioners able to manipulate specific elements like darkness, sun, air, blood, and metal, as well as three orders of classification: Corporalki, Etherealki, and Materialki. Within the Grisha’s clear-cut magic system, the sudden emergence of a Sun Summoner (which the protagonist Alina Starkov turns out to be) is a thrilling phenomenon because everyone is already aware of the legends and the potential impact such a power could have.Soft magic systems

Soft magic systems are more mysterious because they are less defined than their harder counterparts. The rules governing the magic are not fully explained, which can create a sense of wonder, suspense, and unpredictability. In these systems, magic often serves as a plot device or an atmospheric element rather than a tool for problem-solving.

This type of magic system is a good fit for subgenres that lean into the abstract, like magical realism, gothic horror, and supernatural fiction.

Writing soft systems can be trickier, because writers must balance clarity and consistency alongside ambiguity. Some writers accomplish this balance by revealing the source of creeping magic by the midpoint or ever later, while other writers only offer speculation on the source but are clear about how the magic can and cannot be used.

In The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab, the central magical element—a deal with a god-like entity allowing Addie to live forever but be forgotten by everyone she meets—is not clearly explained in terms of rules or mechanics. Readers simply accept the fact that the god can manipulate magic, though the limitations become more clearly defined as Addie actively tries to find a loophole in their deal. The story focuses more on the existential and emotional implications of this magic than on the detailed inner workings.In Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, as well as many other gothic horror novels, the magic source comes from the sprawling, fungus-infested estate itself as it threatens to trap her forever. Because the protagonist Noemí Taboada doesn’t initially understand where the magic is coming from, whether or not it is real, or what it has planned for her fate, the magic feels eerie and atmospheric, creating a sense of dread and wonder rather than explaining the mechanics of the supernatural happenings.

The better suited your magic system to your story, the more believable it will be. Using your understanding of your magic’s role and subgenre conventions, choose either a hard or soft magic system before you iron out the details in the next and final step.

Creating a believable magic system

Now you’re ready to put everything together and parse out your magic source, methods of use, visual and sensory details, rules and limitations, and magical character profiles.

Define the source(s) of magic

Where does magic come from in your world? While magic could come out of an object like the High Place mansion in Mexican Gothic, it could also stem from a genetic ability like the witches and wizards in the Harry Potter series (what a bummer for all the squibs or muggles). Other sources include elemental/natural, divine, arcane, cosmic/celestial, blood magic, psychic mind reading, soul/spirit, and techno magic. If your magic system is abstract enough, a source may never be revealed, though it might help as the writer to have a general idea of the source.

Can you have more than one source of magic in your world? Yes, try keeping the other parts of your magic system tighter to maintain the balance between simplicity and complexity. And if you have more than one source, try introducing classifications and hierarchy. For example, in Shadow and Bone, the Corporalki Grisha manipulate the human body, the Etherealki Grisha manipulate natural elements, and the Materialki Grisha manipulate materials like metal, glass, and chemicals. A Corporalki Heartrender who can control the body is more powerful and feared than the undervalued, less-combative Durasts and Alkemi of the Materialki order.

No matter which source you choose or how many sources you choose, remember to select the best ones for your story’s unique plot and magic role.

Define how magic users harness magic

How do people wield, summon or otherwise use magic in your world? How magic users use their powers will depend on the source of their magic, and writers will likely need a different method of use for each source of magic. If you chose blood magic, for example, will they wield their ability through wands? Or perhaps spoken incantations, hand movements, spells, rituals, or touching certain artifacts? If you’re going for an abstract route, maybe they make deals with a devil or fall prey to curses?

Or come up with your own harnessing method. Though The Magicians book by Lev Grossman doesn’t feature intricate hand motions, the TV show rendition employs hand “tutting,” a type of dance where dancers create harsh geometric shapes with their bodies, in order to cast spells successfully. While this may not come across via written word as easily or interestingly as in the show, it’s a good example of an imaginative use method.

The key here is not only to keep it simple but also consistent. If a magic user harness magic in one way at the start of the book, they need to continue to harness it in the same way throughout the rest of the story, though it’s fine if significant practice makes the magic flow easier.

Define visual and sensory details

What does magic in your world feel, taste, smell, sound, and look like? Emphasizing the importance of descriptive details makes magic feel real to readers. A great example of this is The Night Circus, where the writer’s incredible detail captures each new tent’s magic as the two protagonists compete for the most impressive display of magic. Look at the author’s description of the circus clock, an important element in the story that sits atop the Night Circus:

The body of the clock, which has been methodically turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle shades of white and grey. And it is not just pieces, it is figures and objects, perfectly carved flowers and planets and tiny books with actual paper pages that turn. There is a silver dragon that curls around part of the now visible clockwork, a tiny princess in a carved tower who paces in distress, awaiting an absent prince. Teapots that pour into teacups and minuscule curls of steam that rise from them as the seconds tick. Wrapped presents open. Small cats chase small dogs. An entire game of chess is played. […]

An entire game of chess! Though the clock is a fantastical element that could never exist, the description is so detailed and visceral that readers have an easier time suspending their disbelief. Aim to bring your audience the same amount of immersion by defining magic through all our senses.

Define clear rules and limitations

What can magic in your world do and not do? As we know, stories thrive on conflict, and your fantasy story can create a lot of rich tension by stacking rules and limitations on your magic users’ abilities. After all, which sounds more intriguing: an invincible protagonist whose magic reserves never tire, or a vulnerable protagonist who struggles with the limitations of their magic in the face of a powerful antagonist? Rules and limitations make for more plausible storytelling because our lives are full of them.

For each magical element and creature, be clear about the rules surrounding their abilities. For example, let’s say the magic users in your story can manipulate water. Can they manipulate the water at any time? Do they need to be near a source of water? If so, how close do they need to be? Can they manipulate blood and water? Do they tire after using their magic, or not?

Create magical beings profile(s)

What are the classifications, abilities, limitations, and physical descriptions of each magical being in your world? Create profiles for each creature. This will put everything in one tidy place, including their magic sources, use methods, abilities, and limitations. These profiles will keep your magic system organized, especially if you have more than one magical being with their own class or abilities. While you can get more detailed in your profiles, start by hashing out these important characteristics first:

Magical Creature or Being:Classification or Grouping (if applicable):Abilities:Limitations:Physical description or common traits:Next steps

By crafting a magic system that not only works within your story idea and subgenre, it will be believable enough to keep readers engaged. You’ve invested in your story by building up a simple, cohesive map of your magic. And your readers will thank you.

The Florence (Italy) Enigma for Creative People

Photo by Pavle Stankovic on Unsplash

Note from Jane: As many of you know, I recently attended my very first writing retreat in April, on a transatlantic cruise aboard the Queen Mary 2. And I’ve become something of a convert now that I’ve observed the power of writing retreats after 20 years of intense conference speaking. The intimacy and relationships of retreats (and the isolation from “real world” concerns) is powerful.

In a total coincidence: Writer’s Digest (where I was once the publisher) is debuting their first overseas retreat this year, in Florence, Italy. I asked Amy Jones, one of the retreat hosts—and editor in chief of Writer’s Digest magazine—why did she choose Florence? Here’s what she said. (This is not a paid placement; you will find no affiliate links here. I just think it’s a neat opportunity.)

Florence isn’t necessarily the most obvious choice for a writing retreat. Of course, many writing retreats happen in Italy and with the preponderance of memoirs like Under the Tuscan Sun or Eat, Pray, Love, writing in Italy has entered into the cultural zeitgeist.

But if I were asked, where’s the obvious place for a writing retreat paired with literary sightseeing, my first answer would be England. The home of Shakespeare and Dickens, Austen and the Brontës, George Eliot and Tennyson … the list is long with writers that the English-speaking literary world has long obsessed over. Paris would be a close second—where Hemingway had his moveable feast with the Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Stein.

But Florence was my first choice. Not because of those self-discovery memoirs, though I have had moments of self-discovery in Florence. My entire first solo trip in 2016 was when I simultaneously felt more alone than I ever had in my entire life and also the bravest, most fulfilled. I ate nearly every meal alone, climbed bell towers alone, and was the only solo traveler on a wine tour full of 20-something friend groups and 30-something couples. All of that also meant I explored new towns and navigated foreign transportation systems, changed my plans on a whim, and enjoyed the best people watching, food, and wine. To all the people whose first question was “Aren’t you scared of going to a foreign country alone?” (instead of “Are you excited?”), I proved my answer: “Of course not, there’s nothing to be frightened of.” I was empowered.

But none of that is the reason why Florence is my top choice for a writing retreat. The real reason is two-fold.

The city of Florence is a striking blend of old and new. It’s impossible not to be inspired.

To get from the airport to the city center, it used to be that you had to take a bus, hire a taxi, or rent a car. Now, there’s an environmentally friendly tram that stops in several suburban neighborhoods before terminating directly behind Basilica di Santa Maria Novella. Walk around the corner to the front of the cathedral and you’re transported back in time—construction on the basilica started in 1279. Centuries and mere meters separate old from new.

In moments like those, my mind runs wild considering all the lives that had to be lived and the stories that could be told to get from medieval cathedral to environmentally and socially conscious tramway.

Likewise, walk toward the epicenter of Florence to Santa Maria del Fiore. The Duomo you see on the cover of many Italy guidebooks took more than 16 years to physically build and that’s after a nearly 100-year search for an architect and design that would actually work.

From the front of the cathedral, walk to your right, and tucked between a gelateria and an ATM, you’ll see a larger-than-life-statue of Brunelleschi staring up at the dome he engineered, appreciating his biggest achievement (literally and figuratively) for all eternity.

Continue a few more doors down to a smoothie kiosk that, when the gates are shuttered, depicts Dante as envisioned by a contemporary graffiti artist. It’s the old right next to the new again—both wonderfully creative in their own right.

Graffiti image of Dante / statue of Brunelleschi in Florence, Italy / photos by Amy Jones

I make a point to see these sights each time I visit, though the images are already burned into my memory, and I have more photos than I need. These are signs of a city that doesn’t just honor the creators of its past; it also celebrates and encourages the creativity of the people there now. It’s the Renaissance city that continues to inspire innovative thinking today and, for me, it’s places like that where I feel most creative. Imagining, contemplating those lives both past and present sends my imagination into overdrive. I go back to the childlike questioning that’s perfect for storytelling: What if?

There’s something magical about Florence.

My second reason for a writing retreat in Florence seemed silly at first, but the more people I talk to, the more I realize I’m not alone in thinking Florence is magical. Traveling alone in 2016 didn’t only make me feel empowered, it taught me to be open to surprising experiences—and that’s where the magic happens. I went back in 2018 for two more solo weeks, and while I had some general plans, I chose to be flexible in a way that I’m not in my normal life.

I waited until I got to Florence before making a reservation for the Uffizi Gallery so I could pick a day and time that felt right. First entry, 8:15 a.m. on April 25. When I got inside, rather than going room by room according to the path laid out for guests, I hightailed it to the Botticelli gallery. I was the only one there. A private audience with Venus and Primavera. The rooms had just been reopened after renovations (literally the night before—I couldn’t have planned that if I tried), and I didn’t have to share them with anyone except security. I allowed myself to stand there and gape in awe in a way I’d never do if others were around. I stood front and center, then got close to inspect the details, taking up space where I’d usually move to the side so as to not block someone else’s camera view. It may seem small, but the energy in that nearly empty room was a moment of magic I’ll never forget.

A few hours later, as I exited the Uffizi via the back walkway, I heard drumming. A few steps farther and I saw it was a parade—people carrying flags representing various organizations and belief systems all marching together toward the Piazza della Signoria. I watched from the end of the walkway for a few minutes, then asked the Uffizi security guard, “What’s this for?” “It’s Liberation Day, liberation from the Fascists,” he replied. I followed the parade toward the piazza where their march ended and watched the events until they went inside the Palazzo Vecchio.

I had no idea what was being said or chanted, but simply by happenstance, I was part of celebrations going on simultaneously all around Italy. Later that afternoon I went to a cooking class at someone’s home in the hills near Chianti and this began a conversation about the role her family played in the Resistance, hiding paintings from the Uffizi in the cellar of their family church. As a person somewhat obsessed with World War II and its lasting effects (and echoes in the present), it was a serendipitous, and yes, magical, day.

These moments made me feel like I could be someone else for a little while, which allowed my creativity to expand in an entirely different way—what if I let my imagination go to the stories I’ve held back from because they’re not part of my everyday personality or lived experience? Maybe they aren’t stories I’d ever publish, but they’ll influence and grow my writing in untold ways.

When you encounter magic and history like this, it’s hard not to want to share it with others. In some ways, Florence has an unnamable quality, which may be why so many writers, myself included, find ourselves drawn back time and again, trying to understand this enigmatic wonder of a city through our writing.

Have you visited Florence? What did you discover? Let us know in the comments.

Writer’s Digest is hosting a retreat this fall in Florence, Italy, and the surrounding region, hosted by Writer’s Digest editors Amy Jones and Robert Brewer. Learn more and experience the magic of Florence yourself.

Like It or Not, Publishers Are Licensing Books for AI Training—And Using AI Themselves

AI-generated image using prompt “book publishing executives receiving lots of money from a technology company.” Apart from their love of oversized cash, notice their whiteness.

The following article condenses material that I’ve been writing about for the last 18 months in my paid newsletter, The Hot Sheet.

The train has left the station, the ship has sailed, pick your preferred metaphor.

This week, the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) announced the ability for publishers and other rights holders to include AI training rights as part of licensing arrangements. In other words, they’re giving AI companies a one-stop shop for all their model training needs.

What is the CCC? It is a for-profit company that manages collective copyright licensing for corporate and academic publishers. Generally, its mission is to help publishers earn money off copyright and expand copyright protections for rights holders.

In the CCC’s announcement, the president of the Association of American Publishers says, “Voluntary licensing solutions are a win-win for everybody in the value chain, including AI developers who want to do the right thing. I am grateful to organizations like CCC, as they are helping the next generation marketplace to evolve robustly and in forward-thinking fashion.”

A handful of book publishers have already struck deals with the AI companies directly.

Wiley, a major academic publisher who is also known for the Dummies series, announced two deals in June, to the tune of $44 million. Many major media organizations, like News Corp and The Atlantic, have also struck deals. (Here is a running list.)

I think it’s fair to say that, before long, every major publisher will be earning money through AI training, whether it’s through the CCC, another collective licensing agency, or directly with tech companies, if they are big or desirable enough (as Wiley is).

How do writers protect themselves?

I’m asked this question a lot, and often I say things like “Join the Authors Guild,” since they’re deeply involved in the issue of compensation for authors and advocate for their rights.

But increasingly, I’m also pushing back on the question: What do you need protecting from? While the AI companies will always carry the original sin of training on copyrighted work without permission or licensing, they’re now going through appropriate channels to obtain training material. Yes, there are lawsuits underway (by the New York Times and the Authors Guild, among others) that have to play out and may settle out of court. But even if the rights holders win in the end, the models will not shut down. The AI companies will not go out of business. Instead, remedies will be found for rights holders and business will continue as usual.

Recently, Mary Rasenberger at the Authors Guild told Publishers Marketplace (sub required) that they see AI licensing as a good source of income for writers down the road and that they’ve been talking to publishers for months about who owns AI training rights and how to work the revenue splits. She said, “I am completely optimistic there will be joint agreements between publishers and authors on this. It is not the hardest problem in the world.” Fortunately, she says publishers so far agree they need permission from authors to license books for AI.

Theoretically, authors could object and withhold their material from training, but that would be turning down free money. The average author’s concerns about AI training or ingestion often betrays a misunderstanding about what today’s large-language models are intended to do. They are not databases where you retrieve information. They are not machines that intend to steal, plagiarize, or regurgitate. (If and when they do, the developers consider that a flaw to be worked out.) Benedict Evans has expressed this eloquently: “OpenAI hasn’t ‘pirated’ your book or your story in the sense that we normally use that word, and it isn’t handing it out for free. Indeed, it doesn’t need that one novel in particular at all. In Tim O’Reilly’s great phrase, data isn’t oil; data is sand. It’s only valuable in the aggregate of billions, and your novel or song or article is just one grain of dust in the Great Pyramid.”

That said, authors might certainly object to the AI companies themselves, how they are run, the ethics of the people behind them, the future implications of AI use, etc—and avoid involvement for that reason. But refusing to engage at all with the technology may end up penalizing yourself more than them—not because there’s going to be some incredible revolution (I don’t buy into most of the hype surrounding AI), but because you’ll end up working harder or spending more money than everyone else who is using these tools. The technology is destined to be integrated into daily life, for better and for worse.

Authors and publishers are using AI to write and publish—today.

And it plays a role at all stages of the writing and publishing process that many professionals would find acceptable and ethical. While it may be unethical for someone to use AI to generate 5,000 spammy reviews, in other cases people prefer AI content, like when it’s used to improve summaries of scientific articles.

Publishers are beginning to differentiate between two types of AI use in the writing and publishing process. During a Book Industry Study Group panel about AI use, Gregory M. Britton, editorial director at Johns Hopkins University Press, discussed these two types. One is content creation, which publishers have legal concerns about, and the other is the content management, or the editorial tools, which JHU encourages. “I think it would be foolish for an author to submit a manuscript without running spell check on it before they turn it in,” and he sees AI editing tools as analogous.

One of JHU’s authors, José Antonio Bowen, used AI to find all the places where he may have been repetitive in the manuscript, and he also used AI successfully to help him with fact-checking and citations. He disclosed all of this use to his editors. Some may be surprised that AI can find factual errors in a manuscript, given the problematic results it can generate, but much depends on the tool, the user, and the prompt. Which brings us to the next important point.

Authors are responsible for the quality and correctness of their work, whether they use AI or not. Even if the use of AI in content creation blurs the lines of intellectual property and originality, authors remain accountable for the quality of their work. That means you can’t blame the AI for getting something wrong; you remain responsible for vetting what the AI does.

Even those who question the ethicality of generative AI believe that writers and students today should (or must) learn to use it. “What faculty and teachers call cheating, business calls progress,” Bowen said during the panel. “If you say you can’t use a tool or refuse to use it, your colleagues who use the tool will complete their work faster and better.” In other words, AI is raising the average. However, Bowen said, “AI is better than 80 percent of humans at a lot of things, but it’s not better than the experts. … The best writers, the best experts are better than AI.”

AI is being used to fuel translated works.

Machine translation has been around for a long time, but advances in generative AI are leading to a new renaissance in book translation. Once again, a Book Industry Study Group panel examined how AI is being used right now to translate and to assist human translators; panelists included Robert Casten Carlberg, the CEO and co-founder of Nuanxed, a translation agency.

Because AI-assisted translation is incredibly cheaper and faster, it has the potential to grow the market for translations and lead to new jobs in the management of translations. Founded in 2021, translation firm Nuanxed works mostly on translating commercial fiction between European languages, using a hybrid process that includes AI tools before, during, and after translation. They pass savings onto the publishers while still paying a good market rate to human translators. Carlberg said, “Most publishers we start working with are very skeptical to the way we are working but realize once they’ve tried it, the quality is good, and the readers really like it.” And the authors also like it, he added.

Carlberg’s firm is growing fast, and he’s hearing from more translators who want to work with Nuanxed. He says their big value add is that they pass every translation through the appropriate “cultural lens” and make sure the work is coherent throughout.

Yes, there are still problems and valid fears.

Some writers fear that AI use will pollute the market (as it’s doing now) and lead to various types of AI fraud—the kind of thing that happened to me. Some form of this fraud has existed for as long as Amazon KDP or digital publishing has existed, only it’s more prevalent now and easy to execute with AI tools. I sometimes get upset about the pollution as well and what it might mean for writers and publishers over the long term. But I’m hoping we’ll also gain methods of filtering the garbage just as we have in the past.

The other concern is that AI-generated work will be less creative and interesting in the long run, since it tends to generate what’s rather average or what’s already dominant in the culture. For example, a recent study showed that AI could boost creativity individually, but it lowers creativity collectively. (A friend of mine who reads a lot of genre fiction that’s heavily AI-assisted or AI-generated said she’s read five novels recently all featuring a main character named “Jaxon.”) That’s what AI does. Revert to the mean or what’s most predictable. I expect more progress and more tools that modify these predictable outcomes when they’re not desirable for the user or the output.

I’ll close with the words of The Atlantic’s CEO Nicholas Thompson:

AI is this rainstorm, or it’s this hurricane, and it’s coming towards our industry, right? It’s tempting to just go out and be like, “Oh my God, there’s a hurricane that’s coming,” and I’m angry about that. But what you really want to do is, it’s a rainstorm, you want to put on a raincoat and put on an umbrella. If you’re a farmer, you want to figure out what new crops to plant. You want to prepare and deal with it.

And so my job is to try to separate the fear of what might happen and work as hard as I can for the best possible outcome, knowing that because I have done a deal with an AI company, people will be angry because AI could be a very bad thing, and so there’s this association. But regardless, I have to try to do what is best for The Atlantic and for the industry.

If you enjoyed this article, check out my paid newsletter, The Hot Sheet, which always has the latest news and developments related to AI and book publishing.

The Platform Authors Need Now (That Isn’t Social Media)

Today’s guest post is by Allison K Williams (@guerillamemoir). Join her on the weekend of July 20–21 for the online intensive class Zero-to-Platform Bootcamp.

For many writers, platform is a dirty word. You hear “platform” and think selling and shilling and sacrificing privacy. You think of precious writing moments sucked into the gaping maw of social media.

You’re not wrong! For years now, we’ve been told by agents and publishers, “Nice writing, but you need more platform to sell this book,” or “I’m not sure where this fits in the marketplace—what’s your platform?”

You may be seeing your work dismissed for lack of clicks, low follower numbers, or just the way you divide your time—focusing more on good writing than public presence.

But platform doesn’t have to be a full-time job, and you don’t have to rack up numbers like an influencer. True platform—the kind that sells your book to agents, publishers and readers—actually facilitates writing better, while you reach your readers and learn more about what, exactly, you can write that both sells books and fills your heart with joy. 

The secret of true bookselling platform is the Three Ps:

PublicationProjectsPersonal Connections

These three elements add up to Lived Platform—not fame, not clicks, but your subject-matter expertise, or your lifetime of experience that relates to a cultural moment now. Leveraging your Lived Platform to sell books means knowing the cultural conversation and who is having it, then positioning yourself in that conversation as a thinker with something to add.

1. Publication 

Quite simply, start getting your work into the world.

If you’re a more literary writer (where what attracts readers to your work is the quality of the prose and the depth of the concept), start working your way up the literary magazine ladder. Poet and essayist Maggie Smith published in Sweet, The Rumpus, and diode before The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and her poetry and poetic tweets built an audience for her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful.

If your work is more commercial (your readers want the immediate impact of your storytelling, and you’re in a cultural moment or a genre they love), learn how to pitch stories to a national newspaper or magazine and start looking at your larger story in terms of many smaller angles. Aileen Weintraub’s essays and articles dealing with motherhood, menopause, anxiety and body have appeared in Insider, HuffPost, Newsweek and InStyle (among many others). Readers who like her take on an issue that speaks to them may then seek out her memoir, Knocked Down, about a high-risk pregnancy.

Whether your own work is more literary or more commercial, submit widely and often, which also means writing more, and being more conscious of your writing craft. Literary writers, polish those sentences, and judiciously sign up for classes with potential mentors who can help your craft improve. Commercial writers, analyze the structure of the work you read, and see if you can follow the style and tone of pieces already published where you want to be.

Some authors worry about publishing “too much” of their story. For memoirists and nonfiction writers, publication is also proof your story is interesting and someone wants to read it. Try not to publish more than 30–50% of your manuscript, but standalone work almost always needs serious revision to truly stand alone, so it’s not a spoiler.

2. Projects

Doing what you love makes platform-building the good kind of hard work. Authors who show up regularly for a project they care about build a network of people who also care—and those people become committed to helping you in your work.

Author Courtney Gustafson started a program to trap/spay/neuter cats in her local community. Her ongoing work to raise money for organizations that help animals in need has built 100K+ followers on Instagram. Her pinned post announces her new book forthcoming from Crown Publishing (and with several foreign rights sales): “A memoir about accidentally inheriting thirty cats, going viral, building community, and surviving capitalism.”

Ashleigh Renard and I started The Writers Bridge to help authors navigate the challenges of platform-building. We joked about our mailing list of 3000+, “all it took was showing up to deliver quality information every other week for two years.” Our commitment to building community meant that our community supported Ashleigh’s memoir and my writing craft book, Seven Drafts. We’ve both expanded our audiences by continuing to provide information that, in turn, helps us generate material for future books.

Making time for project-related work often means prioritizing. Start listing what you do—and crossing off activities that aren’t serving your work.

3. Personal Connections 

You don’t have to command a stage like Tony Robbins to make people happy to know you. Whatever your Lived Platform centers on—widowhood, historical fiction, family and cultural history—you have become an expert, and there are people who need your expertise. Consider what you have to share, and who needs to hear it.

We become known as experts by sharing. You may enjoy teaching in webinars or small groups, speaking at your local community organization, starting a podcast, or writing a newsletter that shares your research (and how your readers can use that research in their lives). Practice being present, by truly listening to your audience’s questions, worries and wonderings.

Start looking for events related to your interests, and when you attend an event, make an effort to connect beyond the event. Get the contact list and invite those people (once!) to join your email list. Offer a free resource that allows people to give you their email for something they want and will remember you fondly for. Bring your offline people into your online world, and vice versa, by actively inviting them into groups you know they will enjoy, and connecting people who need to know each other.

Social Media

If you’re working hard on the Three Ps, social media is a tool, not a destination. Your social feeds become a place to share all these other activities, to connect people to each other, and to chime in on conversations about the issues related to your projects. Discussing a mutual fascination is far more enjoyable than posting about your book and waiting for likes.

True platform is Lived Platform. We best create an audience of readers—and reach the audience already there—by publishing our work as widely as possible (which means writing better), carrying out projects we care about (and giving up activities that aren’t serving our work and our goals), and making personal connections by actively reaching out and participating in real life and online.

I love my platform, and you can love yours, too.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on the weekend of July 20–21 for the online intensive class Zero-to-Platform Bootcamp.

When You’re Able to Crowdsource Priceless Writing Advice

Photo by Yura Forrat

Today’s post is by author and wellness coach Nicole C. Foster (@nicolecfoster).

In the summer of 2022, I was a few months into writing the very first draft of my memoir along with a group of fellow writers in book inc’s Memoir Incubator. In these early days of writing my manuscript, the writing process often felt akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. I remember literally throwing spaghetti on the ceiling as a child and watching it fall back down immediately. Between fits of giggles, I wondered, do adults really do this when they make pasta? My manuscript journey has felt the same—are “real” memoirists really just going to town on their first drafts and hoping for the best?

As I wrote, I would nestle up with a cup of tea in a mug that one of my PALS gifted me that said, “Keep Calm. It’s Just a First Draft.” While the sentiment was comforting, I craved external validation that I was on the right path. My memoir focuses on two of the most challenging times of my life—losing my dad in the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and, ten years later, being diagnosed with leukemia days before my fifteenth birthday. Since I’ve endured and survived these parts of my life, I’ve always felt the pull to write about them, and with that desire comes the reality of reliving the heaviness of it all. I often find myself telling people, in the most endearing way, that writing a memoir is equal parts catharsis and torture.

In search of external validation, I decided, on a whim, to write into Chelsea Handler’s podcast, “Ask Chelsea,” where she invites guests on and allows listeners to call or write in for advice. While Chelsea is known for her comedy, she’s also the author of seven books. Life Will Be the Death of Me (2019) explores her experience of unexpectedly losing her older brother Chet when she was nine years old and how the impact of this loss has followed her through adulthood. She magically infuses her well-known humor in a sobering story of grief.

Though our stories are very different, they share similar themes of grief, and I’ll always feel a kindred connection with any celebrity from the Garden State. In the email, I shared my writing struggles—how the topics felt so heavy and how I was overwhelmed by my haphazard approach of including too much information. I hit “send” on the email and, for the next few weeks, would eagerly check if I had a response but never did. Still, I listened to her podcast every Thursday release day, soaking in her conversations with well-known guests like Kate Hudson, Brooke Shields, and Esther Perel.

To my surprise, a year and a half later, I opened an email on a Friday morning with the subject line “How do I write my memoir?” The reply was coming from Chelsea’s producer, Catherine, who invited me to a pre-interview Zoom that very day. During our chat, she invited me on the podcast the following Monday and casually told me that the special guest would be Kristin Hannah, the bestselling author of The Women and The Nightingale, among other titles. By Monday afternoon, I felt equally nervous and excited as I rearranged my bedroom furniture to get the perfect Zoom background. When I was finally let into the room to chat with Chelsea, Kristin, and Catherine, I spit out a nervous “Hi!” as my face turned into an immediate smile, ready to soak up their wisdom.

In our conversation, they read my email, where I shared that I was working on my first draft, then they advised me on how to take on this initial phase of writing and overcome overwhelm. Kristin shared her approach to writing in chronological order and gave guidance in finding my groove by making writing a regular practice. Chelsea chimed in with her experience of writing about loss and grief and how feeling these emotions while we write—be it bawling our eyes out—actually makes our writing better. They agreed there’s no right or wrong way to start, and the key takeaway was writing and keeping writing.

This experience was priceless and granted me the permission to feel more at ease in my writing life. It also reminded me of the power of crowdsourcing writing advice. Connecting with fellow writers, like I have through book inc, is an amazing way to stay energized and eager to stay the course. I’ve found that getting close to the source is how I crowdsource the best writing advice, and I have a few ideas of how you can, too.

Write into advice-based podcasts—even if they’re not writing or book-related. Send an email or call to share your writing woes or ask for their opinion on your ideas. You never know who might answer!Join author Q&As—virtually or in person. Recently, I attended a virtual author Q&A with John Stamos about his new memoir, If You Would Have Told Me, hosted by the Library Speaker Consortium. While registering for the session, audience members could write in questions that the moderator used as a guide during the hour-long conversation. By subscribing to my local library newsletter, I can stay informed on upcoming authors’ series like this one.Connect with fellow writers on social media—Substack, X, and Instagram. These days, everyone has a platform and audience! I’ve been able to find all my favorite authors, writers, and editors online and revel in inside peeks into their daily lives. They’re often trying to create a community around their work and often will open up their DMs, offer exclusive chat channels on Substack, or host Instagram live sessions and field questions from followers. I’ve found this is the most accessible way to gain insider knowledge of the writing world and stay connected with the ins and outs of the industry.

If I’m being honest, the best part of the podcast happened when I left the Zoom call. Before taking the next caller for advice, Chelsea exclaimed in her unwavering way, “She seems like an author!” That comment alone made me feel like my spaghetti-throwing approach has not been for naught, and one day, I’ll have a hearty bowl of pasta to share with the world.

How an Independent Midwestern Publisher Not Only Survives, But Thrives

Book publishing is a New York–centric business, to a fault. All of the major US publishers are based there, as are many literary agents. You’ll find prestigious publications, nonprofits, and organizations for writers in NYC—such as The Authors Guild, Poets & Writers, The Center for Fiction, the Council for Literary Magazines and Small Presses, the National Book Award—need I go on?

For those who work in publishing but outside of this nexus, it’s exciting to find someone else who has decided to take up the challenging task of running a stand-alone, traditional publishing company somewhere else—without grants, university support, or venture capital.

When I visited Chicago this past June, I had the opportunity to meet Doug Seibold, the founder of Agate Publishing, established in 2002. Based in Evanston, Illinois, Agate publishes nonfiction across a range of categories, including Black literature, business, food and wine, and regional titles of interest to the Midwest.

Recently, Agate launched a publishing academy for people to learn the business at an affordable price, which caught my attention. After our in-person meeting, I sent Doug the following questions that he graciously agreed to answer.

Jane Friedman: As someone from the Midwest who started her publishing career in the Midwest, I feel like I can say: a well-established and stable publisher like Agate is not as common as I would like. The Midwestern publisher where I started out went bankrupt in 2019, and I’ve seen comparable companies close or get bought up by bigger houses. How or why does Agate survive?

Doug Seibold: Thanks for these kind words—Agate celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2022, and even for someone who white-knuckled it through our first three to four years, and has the very focused approach to business that sort of legacy endows, I too must acknowledge that we’ve become well-established and stable, even if it doesn’t feel that way every day.

First off—I doubt, at this point, I will ever sell, though this is always a never-say-never kind of proposition. One reason Agate has such a diverse range of imprints is because I used to imagine that one day I might want to sell one or more of these, and their relative disparity would make them more easily detachable. But I’ve since learned we’re probably too small for any part of Agate to interest someone in a meaningful way.

A few years ago, one Big Five house was kind of all over us. Their children’s arm became interested in Agate’s Bolden imprint, which had just produced a huge, award-winning book called Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut. And yet another imprint was interested in acquiring the backlist work of two authors who’d launched their award-winning careers at Agate Bolden.

It was a little overwhelming, and the negotiations were a little choppy. At one point, I said: Why not just take the Bolden imprint, if so many parts of your house are interested in Agate? After a few days, though, one of the head honchoes very nicely led me to understand that the whole imprint was too small potatoes for her, and her interest was limited solely to those particular backlist authors. It was instructive.

I’ve also learned we’re probably too oddly constructed, with too many unrelated parts, to interest anyone in buying the whole thing. The company grew around less my particular interests than my particular areas of expertise from earlier in my career—I started Agate at age 40. So I doubt anyone else will ever have that same idiosyncratic mix of capabilities and interests to want the whole thing.

At the same time, this odd construction has definitely been one of our key strengths. Diversifying can be dangerous for small presses, but in Agate’s case, it allowed me to pursue very different kinds of publishing in ways that ultimately strengthened the company by giving us a broader business portfolio. Sometimes certain kinds of books are up. Our two bestselling books ever were from otherwise modest parts of our program. So that’s played a big role in both our longevity and our stability. It’s also had the happy benefit of me continuing to feel fresh and challenged as the decades go by. I love what I do and I’m thankful every day I get to do it. I like to think my zeal for books, and for business, helps me do it better.

Do you consider your location important to what you publish and how you operate?

Yes and no. We have an imprint, Midway Books, devoted to Midwestern topics and authors, of the kind perennially overlooked on the coasts. There is opportunity there for a company our size. And I like to think that bull-headedly staying in Chicago, rather than pursuing a publishing career in New York, which happens to be where I grew up, helped me avoid the herd mentality that afflicts conglomerate publishing, and see my way to opportunities off the beaten path.

But being here also entails perpetual challenges with getting media attention. Chicago doesn’t understand itself as a publishing city in the same way it does as an architecture city and a theater city; the local print media pretty much ignores the local publishing scene, though it gives plenty of attention to local authors. And the national media finds Chicago publishers—or Agate, at least—easier to overlook than the excellent communities of publishers in smaller places like Minneapolis/St. Paul, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Boston.

While still in college, I landed a paid internship at the publishing company I ultimately spent 12 years at. I’m not sure I’d be conducting this interview with you today if that publishing house didn’t offer that internship program. In my opinion, it was one of the most important programs they ran. When did Agate’s internship program start and why do you do it?

We hosted our first intern in 2003 as a favor to one of our authors, whose friend had a son who’d just finished his English literature bachelor’s degree. Over the next seven years or so, while I was still working out of my basement, a steady supply of interns found their way to us, many from local schools like Northwestern. There were also many who’d gone away for school but wanted to return home to Chicago, and sought us out.

I developed a modest training program to help them be more productive at Agate, and also to help them pursue full-time jobs in any aspect of publishing. I saw it as an important part of what we had to offer them, though our internship was always focused at least as much on the benefits to interns as the benefits to Agate.

Beginning in 2010, when Agate had a major growth spurt, our program became more structured, and we also started hiring a bunch of our ex-interns. Over the years, we’ve had a notably diverse group of 130 interns, and ultimately we ourselves hired almost 40 of them at one point or another. I think right now about half our 20-person staff is made up of former interns from over the years, and many have since gone on to work for other publishers or start their own publishing-related businesses. This has been crucial to our growth. Because the publishing community here is so small, developing my own potential staff through this in-house program became an unexpected positive result of perpetuating it.

Along the way, the training got even more robust and detailed, and I began to find more personal reward in helping to elaborate the internship program and support our ex-interns’ careers. I didn’t have anything like that kind of support when I started out—I mostly learned from cautionary lessons. I have only gotten more interested in helping young people learn about this industry and how to flourish in it—which has led me to start Agate Publishing Academy, a new career development and training program for people interested in the field. In particular, we hope to better serve the kinds of aspirants who don’t historically find a lot of opportunity with the conglomerate presses—and who find costly master’s programs just another kind of obstacle.

When people without any background in book publishing come to me and say, “I want to start a publishing company from scratch, do you have advice for me?” my main reaction is: Don’t. Or: Are you sure you really want to do that? Are you trying to lose your savings quickly? What is your response?

I think we need more publishing companies, and more of them need to be started and run by people who aren’t old white guys like me. I’ve mentored a lot of publishers informally over the years, probably about fifteen, and I’ve recently started doing this more formally with a few younger colleagues.

Is starting your own press hard? Yes. Are the odds against anyone who tries to do it? Yes, just like with any other startup. But I hope I’ve learned a few things about how to make this easier for other people than it was for me, and my hope is to formalize some of this further with a startup incubator/training program that I’m going to offer through Agate Publishing Academy. This entrepreneurship course should launch in early 2025, and my aim is to give participants everything they need to get up and running as simply and quickly as possible.

I will say that one of the big issues for many people interested in doing this is lack of basic business know-how. I was a writer and editor before I started Agate and had to take an auto-didact approach to the business side. The fact that I failed repeatedly to launch Agate over a seven-year period gave me a lot of time to learn about business. But over the years—as with my training and career development work—I’ve gotten at least as interested in what helps a company become sustainable as I am in the writers we publish.

To go back to your first question—there are a lot of specific aspects to my background that ultimately benefited me when it came to running Agate. I worked in a bookstore for three years to pay my way through college, and that experience helped me understand that side of the industry. Later, while holding a day job, I helped edit small literary magazines, and also reviewed books for the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and other outlets. Those experiences helped me hone my judgment and acquaint myself with long hours of hard work, which (the hard work part) had eluded me to that point in my life.

I worked three years for a small press that failed; I spent a lot of time coming up with ideas about how it might perform better, trying to save my livelihood. And also, after leaving for college at 17, I was broke and deeply in debt with college loans for the next 15 years, which forced me to become very disciplined about spending money. I was very committed to making Agate work, but I was also very realistic about what that would require of me.

Some of the modules at the Agate Publishing Academy cost $100 each—a huge bargain. Publishing Basics is $1,000. Who is your primary target audience for this?

My aim is for Agate Publishing Academy to become a more focused, more affordable, and more accessible alternative to existing options for people interested in publishing. My primary target audience—for our entry-level “Publishing Basics” offering in particular—is people interested in learning more about this weirdly opaque yet utterly essential field, who don’t have the means or background to follow traditional paths in.

There are few obvious on-ramps to publishing careers. Everyone knows publishing has a diversity problem, but too many people seem flummoxed about how to address it. I hope the academy can help a wider variety of people find that first job, and then also maybe that next job, in terms of building their skills and advancing their career prospects. I am unsure higher education is interested in taking such a practical, career-oriented approach to this kind of learning—which is why I see an opportunity for independent presses like Agate to meet this challenge, and figure out a sustainable way forward. Independent publishing, unlike conglomerate publishing, is distributed across the country. I’m developing a network of small presses and publishing-adjacent companies to, I hope, support this work.

Beyond that, I think it can be of value to anyone trying to learn more about publishing—such as new and aspiring writers, who too often feel like publishing is designed specifically to repel them, rather than create opportunity for them. I feel that the more people understand how publishing works, the better it can be for writers, publishers, and readers alike.

It’s Not About the Research: How to Write for a General Audience When Academia Is All You Know

Photo by Elijah Hail on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author, book coach and historian Christina Larocco.

In “The Voyager Conspiracy,” a season six episode of the television show Star Trek: Voyager, Seven of Nine, a former Borg drone, connects her brain directly to the ship’s computer. All of a sudden, she has access to unimaginable amounts of information—but she can’t make sense of any of it.

Have you ever felt like this when you sit down to write after doing a ton of research on a subject? You have all of this information at your fingertips, yet you have no idea what it means, how it connects to your project, or even what your project is about anymore.

So you end up writing the only way you know how: stringing together block quotes and blah sources summaries, and describing each letter, diary entry, or organizational file without any connective tissue, interpretation, or forward momentum.

You end up with a draft that reads more like a log than anything else.

Your academic mentors let you get away with it because they know that’s what student work looks like. But to appeal to a general audience, you need to do more than present facts. You need to construct a compelling narrative.

To help you with this, I’m going to share the most important piece of writing advice I have:

The research is not the thing you are writing about.

It is a source of information for that thing.

This might sound bizarre, obvious, or both, but it can change your writing dramatically.

Let’s take letters as an example. Letters are fabulous sources of information, but they’re easy to use in a way that interrupts rather than adds to the narrative. Sitting down and writing a letter is static, not dynamic. It’s probably the least interesting part of a person’s day. And so if you are structuring your manuscript around the act of letter-writing—on March 3, she said X. On March 5, she said Y. Then on March 7, she said Z—your work will be similarly static.

Almost every manuscript looks like this at one point or another, and it is actually not that difficult to fix. The solution is to think about letters as sources of information that you will then incorporate into a narrative, rather than letting the letters themselves function as the narrative. Limit how frequently you refer in the main text to the letters themselves—keep this in the footnotes. Focus instead on conveying to the reader what happened and why it is interesting. These changes will make the narrative more interesting and make your writing seem more authoritative.

In fact, I often encourage writers to put away their research notes in their first pass at drafting a new section. Otherwise the temptation to transcribe, copy and paste, or otherwise regurgitate what your sources say, is too great. Otherwise you’re never forced to grapple with how you make sense of the information. And that’s what your reader comes to the book looking for.

Confession: I haven’t just read many drafts like this. I’ve written them, too. As an academic turned creative writer, it took me nearly a decade to learn another way to write about primary sources, as I revised the manuscript for my book Crosshatch: Martha Schofield, the Forgotten Feminist (1839–1916), releasing in February 2025.

As I was working on this article, I pulled out some of my early chapter drafts. The paragraphs were overly long info dumps that didn’t really have much to say or contribute to any sort of broader point. And that’s because I had given the sources all of the authority rather than claiming some of it for myself. As a result, the “writing” in these early drafts was really just stringing together a bunch of quotes and throwing them at the reader.

Over the course of several drafts and several years, I learned how to distill this information down to its essence, guiding readers toward an understanding of the events and their significance. I learned to direct the reader’s attention, selecting for them the important aspects of the info dump draft and making sense out of those materials in the context of a bigger narrative.

A caveat: You will probably have to relearn this lesson for every project. I do. The going-from-document-to-document stage is often necessary and always useful: You have gathered all of your information together and arranged it in an order that makes at least provisional sense. That’s huge!

I’ve come to think of this stage as an intermediate step between the outline and the first draft. Fiction writer Matt Bell even argues that the first draft of the book is not the book at all, but rather an outline of the book.

So, if you’re not writing about the documents, what are you writing about? You likely already know the answer to this question—it’s the larger story you are trying to tell, the question you are trying to answer, the argument you are making. The research only functions to serve this something bigger.

How Printing Innovations (and More) Created an Enduring Class Divide in Books

“The Rival Printers” by Catablogger is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 [image error][image error][image error].

Today’s post is excerpted from The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing by Michael Castleman.

After Gutenberg invented the printing press, Europe’s kings and bishops feared (correctly) that printing might encourage sedition and heresy. They identified material fit for reproduction and offered favored printers the exclusive right to copy it— “copyright.” In exchange, the printers vowed not to reproduce anything the authorities found offensive.

But early copyrights were fantasies. Our concept of intellectual property was centuries in the future. Culture belonged to everyone. Who could assert ownership? Certainly not authors. They didn’t own their work. Printers did. Meanwhile, copyrights were enforceable only within single jurisdictions, while rampant smuggling and unauthorized reproduction spread books everywhere. Today, we call this book piracy, but back then it was like picking wildflowers in an open field.

Piracy ran rampant because it skirted censorship and reduced the cost of books—no licensing fees to copyright holders. From the first copyrights to the present day, piracy has been a thread woven through the tapestry of publishing.

Authors were powerless to stop piracy, but many decried it. In 1623, the preface to the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays denounced the “surreptitious copies” that had “maimed” his work.

Authors’ intellectual property rights were first recognized in 1710, when Parliament enacted the Copyright Act, or Statute of Anne (for Queen Anne). Its preamble stated: “Printers have of late reprinted work without the consent of authors … to their great detriment.” The law granted authors copyrights for 14 years.

Printers were appalled: Authors wrote, printers copied. The right to copy was theirs. Surprisingly, authors agreed. That era’s intelligentsia believed authors wrote for love, not money. They viewed writing for money as dishonorable.

To preserve authors’ precious honor, printers graciously offered to take copyrights off their hands. Authors felt fine about this: My name is on the cover. That’s what counts. So, despite the pro-author Statute of Anne, copyrights quickly shifted to printers. But after 14 years, copyrights evaporated and books entered the public domain. Anyone could copy them.

By 1650: printing in the Americas was rife with piracy.

By 1650, American printers were churning out advertising handbills and pamphlets galore, but few full-length books. Books were very expensive, today’s equivalent of $600 per copy. They would have cost even more had American printers paid English copyright holders for reprint rights. They didn’t. When ships from England docked at American ports, printers quickly pirated the books they carried.

Boston boasted the most printers. By the 1660s, they routinely condemned one another for releasing pirate editions of books they themselves had stolen. Eventually, they negotiated an agreement pledging not to reprint what others had released. But there was no honor among thieves, and printers outside Boston eagerly pirated books that came their way.

In 1673, the Massachusetts colonial legislature granted five-year copyrights to the first printers to publish books, including pirated English titles. But printers elsewhere continued to pirate freely, among them Ben Franklin. In 1740, he bootlegged the first novel in English, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, the book that invented romance fiction and turned many women into avid readers.

Wealthy colonial book buyers raced to buy English titles, so American printers invested in pirating English books. But printers declined to risk capital on American authors. When homegrown writers sought publication, printers said, We’ll print your work—if you pay for it. All early American books were author- (or patron-) financed. In current parlance, they were self-published.

Why pay to publish? Like today’s authors, colonial writers loved to express themselves, and if they wanted to publish, they had only one option.

For early American authors, writing was a sideline.

Washington Irving was a lawyer. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a customs agent, Ralph Waldo Emerson a teacher, Oliver Wendell Holmes a doctor, Louisa May Alcott a governess. Like the vast majority of authors today, they wrote for love, and if they made some money, usually from speaking engagements, they considered it gravy.

By the second half of the 18th century, authors decided that maybe it was okay to earn money writing books, and decided that if they paid to publish, they should hold copyrights.

In 1770, the Boston choirmaster William Billings set Biblical verses to original music and hired a printer to publish his New-England Psalm-Singer, which was quickly pirated. Hoping to save the sequel from the same fate, Billings persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to grant its copyright to him. However, the colony’s English governor vetoed the bill, citing the English practice of printers holding them.

During the American Revolution, prominent writers agitated for author copyrights, among them the political firebrand Thomas Paine and especially Noah Webster. Today, we remember Webster for his dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), or Webster’s. But for decades before that book, Webster ranked among the new nation’s top authors, thanks to his three-volume literacy text, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which included a speller (1783), grammar (1784), and reader (1785).

Naturally, Webster’s books were pirated as quickly as printers could set type. As he traveled the country promoting literacy and selling his work, he found illicit copies of his books everywhere and advocated tough copyright laws to protect authors. He organized writers to petition the Continental Congress, proclaiming “that nothing is more properly a man’s own than the fruit of his study. The protection of literary property would greatly encourage genius and promote useful discoveries.” (At the time, “genius” meant creativity.)

But under the loose Articles of Confederation, the newly independent states were sovereign and Congress had little sway. Nonetheless, the delegates supported author copyright and passed a resolution urging the states to “secure to the authors … copyright for not less than 14 years from first publication.”

With Congressional resolution in hand, Webster returned home to Connecticut and, in 1783, engineered passage of the nation’s first copyright law. It granted the state’s authors “the sole liberty” of printing their books for 14 years, with one 14-year extension. It also created a book registration system and enacted severe penalties for piracy.

Webster hailed the law but objected to its time limit. He advocated perpetual copyright, arguing that his books should be his forever. But printers favored time-limited copyrights. As they expired and books entered the public domain, anyone could reprint them. Intellectuals also supported the time limit to encourage idea exchange. And the majority of the population, illiterate anti-intellectuals, saw no reason to protect authors at all, let alone grant perpetual ownership of anything as frivolous as words.

Meanwhile, Webster’s copyright law applied only in Connecticut. It was essentially meaningless. Books copyrighted there were immediately pirated elsewhere.

In 1789, when the states ratified the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8 specified: “The Congress shall have Power To … promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Writers and inventors are the only two occupations granted Constitutional protection.

Soon after, the first U.S. Congress enacted the Copyright Act of 1790. Taken almost verbatim from the Statute of Anne, it required registration of books with what eventually became the U.S. Copyright Office and granted a single term of 14 years.

The Copyright Act also flipped a post-revolutionary middle finger at England. It specifically protected American piracy of English books: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to prohibit the … reprinting or publishing within the United States, of books printed, or published by any person not a citizen of the United States.”

Ironically, American authors greeted the Copyright Act with a collective shrug. During its first decade, Americans published some 13,000 pamphlets and books but copyrighted only 556. Why so few? Early authors assumed rampant piracy, so compared with today’s writers, they felt less ownership. Copyright violations could be remedied only through litigation, but very few books sold well enough to justify it. And if authors won verdicts in one state, printers elsewhere could still pirate them, so why bother?

Advances in US printing and publishing: type, press design, paper, glue, covers

By 1800, the U.S. population topped 5 million, 2 million of whom could read. America’s biggest book town was Boston, population 25,000, with 30 booksellers, mostly printers, but also stationery shops and dry goods stores (forerunners of department stores). The number two book town was Philadelphia, population 40,000, with 16 booksellers, followed by New York (60,000 and 13); Charleston, South Carolina (15,000 and three); and Baltimore (26,000 and one). The biggest sellers were Bibles, sermon collections, and almanacs.

But Americans showed increasing interest in books dealing with science, politics, medicine, and music—and women continued to adore novels, particularly romance fiction and multi-generation family sagas.

Growing demand for books spurred innovations that, like Gutenberg’s press, allowed fewer people to produce more copies of more titles faster and cheaper. One advance involved type. Until the 1720s, it had to be imported from England. The colonies had no foundries. Ben Franklin established the nation’s first, which cut printers’ costs. In recognition, in 1902, America’s typographers named a popular font after him, Franklin Gothic.

Another advance involved press design. From 1440 through the 18th century, wooden screw presses were state of the art. Franklin’s press looked much like Gutenberg’s. But wood parts wore out and limited the pressure that could be applied, compromising quality. In 1810, the first iron presses improved reproduction quality and quadrupled print speed to 500 sheets an hour. By the Civil War, subsequent innovations raised it to an astonishing 20,000 pages an hour. As press speeds increased, the cost of books fell.

Paper also evolved. Before Gutenberg, scribes wrote on parchment, livestock skins beaten into thin sheets. Parchment was very costly. Each book required a herd of animals. The printing press spurred a quest for cheaper alternatives. Europeans discovered that excellent paper could be produced inexpensively from hemp and flax, source of linen. The Pilgrims introduced both plants to North America, but the colonies had no paper mills, so every sheet had to be imported. The first American mill opened in 1690 in Philadelphia, eventually ending colonial dependence on English paper.

In 1794, Eli Whitney patented his cotton “gin,” short for “engine,” which pulled the seeds from cotton puffs so efficiently that the fiber quickly became the South’s leading export. Cotton, wool, and rags could be chopped and boiled into a slurry, then pressed into low-cost paper, which reduced printer-publishers’ costs.

By the Civil War, as presses became faster and more complicated, printing and bookbinding diverged. Printers presented loose folios to newly independent bookbinders, who sewed and glued them between leather covers, which became standard.

But glues were unreliable. Books often fell apart. In 1808, the Bostonian Elijah Upton introduced a cheap, dependable glue that solved the problem. In 1832, another Boston bookbinder popularized covers and spines of cloth-wrapped cardboard, much cheaper than leather. And a Philadelphia company developed a quick, inexpensive way to glue metal foil. Within a decade, most book covers and spines boasted shiny, eye-catching titles in metal leaf.

These advances further reduced book prices, transforming them from luxuries for the rich into upscale consumer items within reach of the small but growing upper middle class. Still, books remained expensive, typically costing three dollars (around $100 today).

Mathew Carey: book pioneer

By 1800, U.S. printers used American paper and type but still relied on imported ink. In 1803, the Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey organized fellow printers to offer a $50 prize ($1,500 today) for the best American-made ink. An amateur chemist won and launched a company. Printers soon used nothing else.

Carey’s group also offered a prize for the best paper made from a new material. The winner used sawdust from lumber mills. Almost overnight, wood pulp became the source of coarse but remarkably cheap paper. European printers quickly embraced pulp paper, and America, with its vast forests, gained a valuable export.

Finally, Carey introduced proofreading. Early American books were typeset by young, poorly schooled apprentices, who infuriated authors by introducing typos and misspellings. Starting around 1790, Carey printed test pages, “proofs,” and corrected them before final printing. Proofreading required extra paper, ink, and labor, raising costs, which led competing printers to cluck, Authors will never pay for it. But error-free books proved so popular that authors flocked to Carey, and proofreading became standard.

Colonial printers versus early booksellers

Bigger, faster printing presses using cheaper ink on cheaper paper allowed more copies of more books to be produced at lower cost per copy. The number of books rose and prices fell. This was a boon to book buyers, but it forced printer-publishers to invest more in equipment, which pinched their margins, driving some out of business. Periodic financial panics ruined others. And in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where competition was most intense, some printers resorted to arson to destroy their rivals.

As the industry became more competitive, printer-publishers became increasingly concerned with book marketing and distribution. Printers clustered in the nation’s large towns, but 95 percent of Americans lived on farms often many days’ journey from the nearest print shop. Roads were poor. Shipping was costly and unreliable. How could printer-publishers sell books effectively outside their home regions?

In 1806, when Webster published his Dictionary, in addition to selling through his printer, he organized the nation’s first book sales force. At the time, an army of peddlers hiked the lanes of rural America selling household items, Bibles, almanacs, and sermon collections by prominent clergy. Webster sold distribution rights to select peddlers, granting each a territory. This launched a 50-year period when peddlers carried books far and wide, usually on foot with packs on their backs. But books were heavy. Selection was limited.

Back in the towns, printers displayed only the books they printed. To see all available titles, buyers had to trudge from shop to shop. Sensing an opportunity, a few entrepreneurs opened stores that offered all printers’ titles. As bookshops became fixtures in growing coastal towns, printers gradually exited retailing in favor of wholesaling to the new booksellers.

Early bookstores resembled today’s used bookshops: small, cramped, quirky, and off the beaten track where rent was low. They bought stock at 30-50 percent off the cover or “list” price. (Today’s typical wholesale discount is at least 50 percent off list.) Early booksellers also offered writing supplies: quill pens, paper, ink, and blank books for diaries, at that time very popular.

Printer-publishers loved booksellers in theory but in practice often found them exasperating. The few bookshops couldn’t collectively sell titles as quickly as printers produced them. Booksellers retorted that printer-publishers treated them less like allies than adversaries. Printers refused to ship on credit. They insisted on cash up front. And they didn’t accept returns on purchased inventory, which limited what booksellers could afford to stock. Booksellers also complained that printers shipped so haphazardly that many copies arrived too damaged to sell, a loss booksellers had to eat.

One printer critical of bookshops’ “failures” was the enterprising Mathew Carey. In 1802, he rented a banquet room at a popular New York City restaurant and invited printers throughout the Northeast to sell their books directly to consumers—America’s first book fair. Around the country, in schools, hotel ballrooms, and church social halls, book fairs quickly became popular multi-day events. Printers offered as many titles as they could ship. Smart buyers attended twice: early the first day for the greatest selection and late the final day to pick up leftovers cheap.

Book fairs enthralled everyone—except booksellers, who denounced them as business killers: You printers have no business in retailing. Printers retorted, You booksellers don’t move enough titles. If you can’t get the job done…

Pulp paper creates an enduring class divide in books

During the 18th century, women continued to inhale romance fiction, while increasingly literate Americans loved novels, gobbling up instant classics like Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In addition, hordes of men (and some women) read Memoir of a Woman of Pleasure, aka Fanny Hill (1748), the first pornographic novel in English. But for much of the population, one copy of a novel on cotton-linen paper between leather covers cost several months’ wages.

Then wood-pulp paper appeared. American printer-publishers were slow to adopt it, but their English counterparts saw money in the bank. They released cheap pulp paperbacks for the working class for just 10% of the price of leather-bound books. Laborers loved them and pulp paperbacks sold like crazy, which spurred American printer-publishers to follow suit. Meanwhile, affluent buyers of “quality” books derided the new format as “pulp fiction” and “penny dreadfuls,” snooty terms that marked the beginning of a lasting class division between highbrow, leather-bound literature and its bastard pulp cousin.

Pulp paper arrived as the industrial revolution began to turn agricultural peasants into urban factory workers. After the Civil War, American industrialization created great wealth for the few and social upheaval for everyone. The period from 1870 through the close of the 19th century became known as the Gilded Age, but the gilding was a thin veneer over orphaned children, child labor, criminal gangs, overcrowded tenements, sanitation nightmares, virulent epidemics, drug addiction, and Dickensian working conditions.

Out of this volatile stew, the upper class established, in the words of Yale professor Alan Trachtenberg, “a particular idea of culture as a privileged domain of refinement, aesthetic sensibility, and higher learning.” Culture was no longer the sum total of a people’s stories but just those that resonated for the elite, who viewed lower-class sensibilities as boorish.

The arbiters of Gilded Age gentility touted their vision of culture as an antidote to the ravages of industrialization, a way to civilize the proletariat. It’s no coincidence that this era marked the founding of many colleges, museums, orchestras, and opera and ballet companies. Nor is it an accident that upper-class moralists condemned cheap paperbacks for their vulgarity and pernicious influence on the laboring class.

Despite upper-crust hand-wringing, pulp titles proved wildly popular, and the book business changed again. As books became cheaper and coarser, they evolved into everyday consumer items. The grandeur evaporated. In the words of Michael Korda, former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, “We sell books, other people sell shoes. What’s the difference?”

Then Irwin Beadle out-pulped the pulp publishers. The New York entrepreneur introduced hundred-page novellas on pulp paper for just ten cents ($3): detective and horror stories, lusty romances, action-packed adventure yarns, and shocking exposés of patrician villainy and plebian mayhem. “Books for the Millions!” Beadle’s advertising proclaimed. “A dollar book for a dime!!” His output became a sensation among the working class—and vastly outsold leather-bound books.

On both sides of the Atlantic, pulp fiction’s success galled the elite. Publishers Weekly declared that it “degraded literature.” Others railed that penny dreadfuls debased prose, corrupted youth, and caused crime.

Then Frank Munsey, owner of Argosy magazine, out-pulped Irwin Beadle. He used even coarser, cheaper paper to undersell everyone. He published full-length romance and action-adventure tales for just five cents ($1.50). Munsey’s books contained no illustrations, not even on their flimsy covers, and their bindings didn’t last long. But readers loved them, and other publishers rushed into the niche. Escapist stories remain popular today—in print and on every streaming service.

Pulp novels sold huge numbers—but not in bookshops. Booksellers identified with the gentry and served only the “carriage trade,” buyers who arrived not on foot or by bicycle or public transportation but in private carriages. Booksellers refused to stock anything but leather-bound titles. Meanwhile, owners of newsstands and candy and dry goods stores happily offered pulp books, which remained hugely popular until World War II, when government rationing of wood pulp destroyed the genre. After the war, pulp fiction yielded to its better-manufactured descendant, the mass-market paperback.

Literary novels and pulp fiction occupied oddly parallel universes. The former were reviewed, the latter not. Leather-bound books sold modestly but found their way into libraries, sermons, and school curricula. Pulp titles sold in vastly greater numbers but were considered at best ephemeral and at worst corrupting. Successful literary authors were staples of the lecture circuit, while most successful pulp authors remained anonymous. The few exceptions included Zane Grey, whose 90 action-packed westerns sold 40 million copies, and Louis L’Amour, whose 89 westerns sold 320 million.

Amazon • Bookshop

The class divide between high- and lowbrow literature remained central to the book business until the mid-1950s, when bookstores finally embraced paperbacks. But Gilded Age sensibilities linger. Educators continue to tout reading as the expressway to success, and many among the literary elite still scorn pulp’s descendants, today’s genre fiction: romance, mystery, thrillers, fantasy, westerns, true crime, sci-fi, action-adventure, and erotica.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing by Michael Castleman.

Why Your Revision Shouldn’t Start on Page One

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash

Today’s post is by writer and book coach Monica Cox.

There is something invigorating about typing the words THE END on a rough draft. The story has unspooled from your fingers for weeks, months, maybe even years and, finally, you have reached the resolution.

You may feel relief, excitement, or even a renewed dedication to the story. You may even be motivated to dive right into revisions so you can share it with the world as soon as possible.

But rushing to edit can be the biggest mistake a writer makes.

Returning to page one with red pen in hand inevitably leads to reading on the line level. You start fiddling with individual words, phrases, and paragraphs. You are line editing when you haven’t even finished your first read-through. It keeps you focused on the trees and not the forest of your story where the big structural issues tend to hide. These structural issues are the problems in your manuscript you need to address first. No writer wants to realize a paragraph they spent an entire afternoon dissecting and making stellar needs to be deleted, along with the rest of the chapter that doesn’t fit the story anymore once you fixed a plot hole.

Killing your darlings is hard enough, so don’t make it worse by dressing them up for the red carpet first.

To revise most effectively

Step back and take in the 30,000-foot view. See the forest from up high where it’s much easier to spot obstacles, trails, and dreaded dead ends.

To gain some distance, it helps to put it away for a bit after you type THE END. If you can afford to give yourself several weeks off from your story, do it. Use that time to celebrate this beautiful thing you’ve done–you wrote an entire book! Do you know how many people say they want to write a book and don’t ever start, not to mention finish? (Spoiler alert: a lot!)

After you’ve given yourself some time to enjoy the champagne or chocolate, go for a walk, take a nap, or reintroduce yourself to the friends and family you’ve been ignoring while you spent hours on this draft, come back to the manuscript for a full read-through.

But DO NOT sit back down at your computer. Instead:

Change the font of your manuscript. Make the writing look physically different from how you drafted it.Read on another device than the one you created it on. Send your manuscript to your e-reader or a tablet. You can even print it out, but only if you promise not to write on it (yet).Read your manuscript where you’d read a book you didn’t write. Wrote at a desk? Read on the sofa.

These changes may seem superficial, but they help transition you from writer to reader. Adopting a reader’s mindset will allow you to see what is missing in a way the writer’s mindset (the god of the story who knows all the things) will not.

The key rule during this first read-through?

DO NOT MAKE EDITS! Remember, you are reading as a reader, not a writer. Read with a legal pad or notebook next to you so you can jot down only notes with page or chapter numbers where you notice problems. 

The problems you should be looking out for? Not word choice or paragraph order. Look for:

Point of view: What point of view is your story? Is it consistent throughout? Write down the page number of any place where you’ve inadvertently hopped into another character’s head.Character: Are your character’s wants and needs clear at the start of the story? Does the reader know what’s at stake if they don’t get what they want? Note any place where a character’s action or motivation doesn’t make sense. This might look like: “Why did she decide to make that phone call on page 27?”Obstacles: Are readers clear what is standing in the character’s way?Agency: Is your character making decisions? Do those decisions have consequences? Conversely, are things just happening TO your character?Trajectory: Look at transitions between chapters. Is there an action or decision driving your story forward into the next chapter? If not, make a note of the chapter or page.Pacing: Jot down where you lose interest, find yourself skimming, or are flat out bored. Yes, you are super familiar with your story, but if you’re glossing over it, chances are a reader will, too.

After this initial read-through, you should have notes indicating where your story went a little sideways, or the character spent three chapters simply reacting and not acting, or you noticed a little head hopping. Look for patterns and group your issues together by category.

Only once you’ve established your big-picture issues will you begin to revise. Pick a category and work your way through your manuscript fixing that issue before moving on to the next category. If weak story trajectory was a major issue in your rough draft, shore that up first in all the places it was a problem. Then move on to character motivation. Then work through point of view, etc.

Starting on page one attempting to fix all the big picture issues chapter by chapter will only put your brain back into a linear mindset. Don’t fall into the trap! Inevitably it will lead to you reading page by page making line edits and changes that aren’t necessary yet. Focus on those big picture issues one at a time.

Just like a home inspector needs to check the frame, plumbing, and wiring before the contractor walls them in, make sure your story structure is strong and set up for success before you dress up the writing. The style of sink or pendant light doesn’t make a bit of difference if the plumber didn’t put a pipe in the bathroom or the framers didn’t include the beams that will hold up the roof.

Fix your roof, plumbing and electrical first. Then add the walls—those emotional layers, descriptions, checking for realistic dialogue. Only then will it be time to paint and pick your fixtures, i.e., line edit. That’s your final polish and, trust me, it will be oh so much shinier with all the big things in their proper place first.

Be Yourself So Your Readers Can Find You

Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author brand expert Andrea Guevara. Join us on July 3 for the online class How Authors Can Unlock Brand Recognition.

As an author brand strategist, I’m often fighting against the idea that a personal brand is just a cringey, commercialized outcropping of late-stage capitalism. And while there are plenty of examples of brands being used for that exact thing, branding itself can actually be a transformative tool to help authors take back more control of their careers.

Writing a book and then promoting it can make authors feel a lot like that dorky kid in high school trying to get a seat at the cool kids’ table. I was an odd kid, a bookworm, frizzy-haired, freckled, a painfully shy, precocious girl who just didn’t know where she belonged. Growing up as a Fundamentalist Christian in the liberal Sonoma County wine country, I also didn’t like sports, was too shy for parties, too awkward for the cool kids or boys, and too insecure to even know my own interests or potential.

For most of my life, even though I had friends, I usually felt like I didn’t truly belong anywhere. But after working with authors for nearly a decade, and entrepreneurial women for over two decades, I can tell you something you already know: this is a very common feeling.

Writing a book can feel vulnerable enough, but then you have to market and sell it. These are two different skill sets and zones of genius. For some, both come naturally, and there are those who are willing to compromise who they are for popularity.

For the rest of us, seeing our own value and then—and this next part is key—being able to communicate that and attract our people, doesn’t come so easily.

We are the weirdos, the nerds, the awkward, the amazing-yet-misunderstood, and whatever else we’d prefer to call ourselves. We aren’t necessarily immediately popular or viral. And if movies about high school have taught me anything, there are a whole lot more of us weirdos out there than we realize.

One of my super powers (we all have them) is that I am able to see the unique amazingness and untapped potential of each person I meet. This is a fortunate trait for a brand strategist, not so much for dating men. I eventually learned that distinction.

In 2016, after a lot of my own self-development work and a couple decades in business branding, marketing, and design, I launched my first author branding course. And in 2020, I made it my full-time business. Since then, I’ve seen hundreds of writers do the work to acknowledge the value they bring into the world and learn how to identify and attract their kind of people.

Sure, some have become bestselling authors—the equivalent of becoming popular kids—but the real win, in my opinion, is seeing them learn to own their own worth and be able to articulate it in ways that help them deeply connect with the people who most benefit from their work.

In an effort to get you started, here are a few tips.

Be honest with yourself.

One of the first things I have clients do is fill out a big questionnaire answering questions like:

What do you think sets you apart from similar authors?Why do you write?What do you really think of social media?What kinds of ways do you like to share your work?

… And a whole bunch of other questions. In part, this information gathering helps me understand them more. But these questions are just as much for them as they are for me.

The next thing I have them do is describe their ultimate vision of what success looks like for them. Not what they think they want, or what they’ve been told, but genuinely what they truly want their life to look like.

Taking the time to really check in with who you are, what you think, and what you want is something many people rarely do. This self-knowledge is key to beginning to unpack and understand the unique value you bring to the world as well as the parts of yourself that you want to keep just for yourself, or those close to you.

Put yourself in your reader’s shoes.

When I ask most authors who their readers are, they usually start describing a particular age group, income level, and interests—the usual. More often than not, they also add, “But really it’s for anybody.”

I love the optimism of this statement, and if you believe that about your work, awesome. It often takes people with big vision to accomplish the seemingly impossible.

But when it comes to branding, it behooves us to go the opposite direction and think as small as possible. When we focus our energy on who our IDEAL Reader is—the archetype of the one person who would most resonate with and champion your work—we begin to unlock the magic connection that exists between the unique value you bring and the people it’s meant for.

We must try to remove ourselves from the equation temporarily in order to be able to see our readers for who they are and what they need. Once we understand this, we’re able to better speak to them in the language they need to hear.

Articulate your value.

In the business world, it’s long been known that brands have exponential value, apart even from the company that creates them. Think for instance of a brand like Kleenex tissues. It’s so ubiquitous that we often just call tissues Kleenex. That brand is something that Kimberly-Clark could sell (or even license) on its own. It has its own value.

You, as an author, have your own value. Outside of the publisher. Outside of just your book. You, whether you like it or not, are a brand. Your book is also a brand.

In the biz world, we would call your author brand a “house of brands” because you are the creator who has a brand of their own but also creates sub-brands, AKA your books.

Circling back to the idea of brand value, when you do the work of understanding the value you bring, your niche, and your audience, you can begin to put together the pieces in a way that makes it easier for you to articulate this unique proposition to publishers and readers in more effective ways. In a practical sense, this can be evident in your book proposal, marketing plans, bio, website, social media—even in how you talk about your work with your publisher.

I have seen firsthand how this articulation can directly translate into bigger book deals, more marketing support, prioritization with publishers, larger budgets, more author input on things like cover design, more speaking opportunities, more sales, film and TV deals, and so much more.

The publishing industry is well known to be opaque, confusing, complex—and somewhat disappointing. In my years of working in the industry, I’ve seen the highs and lows, the dream scenarios and then the painfully disappointing lack of support that some authors get. 

Much like our late-stage capitalist system, we cannot rely on the powers that be to have our backs, and it can be easy to feel like we have no real power. But if we truly believe in our work, I think we owe it to ourselves to give it its best chance at success.

I believe that developing a personal author brand is one of the essential ways authors can take back more power. Because if we know the unique value of what we bring to the table, we understand deeply who we serve, and we can articulate that, we end up creating not just a table for our people, but our own banquet of fellow nerds, weirdos, whatever you want to call us. And that’s the kind of party publishers and others in power can’t afford to ignore.

We humans are hardwired to crave belonging and connection with something bigger than ourselves. In a society where we are lonelier than ever, people are indeed more vulnerable to marketing and advertising messages prompting them to buy our way out of the disconnection. But we writers provide something so much better, we know that reading/books are one of the most mind-expanding and deeply connective things we can do.

I believe that if we want our work to succeed we must learn the language and customs of the system so that we can use them for good. Brand strategy does just that, helping you understand and articulate your value in a world that desperately needs you to show up as who you truly are.

As readers, we know just how good it feels to read a line that just cuts to the quick of our own emotions or experiences. Who is out there waiting for that moment with your writing?

Be you. Please. People are waiting for you.

Join Andrea and Jane on July 3 for How Authors Can Unlock Brand Recognition.