Allyson E. Machate's Blog, page 4

“Which Editor Do You Need?” at the Washington Writers Conference – May 13, 2023

Please join us on Saturday, May 13th, 2023 for the Washington Writer’s Conference. This event will be held at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center at 5701 Marinelli Road, Rockville, MD 20852.

Hosted by the Washington Independent Review of Books, the conference includes numerous talks and panels, including “Which Editor Do You Need?”, featuring our very own Ally Machate. Here are the details:

Get your questions ready for top book editors Ally Machate and Katherine Pickett....

Sell More Books with Targeted Cover Copy

I recently posted an article about how target audience should influence your book’s cover copy, aimed at nonfiction authors. But novelists and memoirists also need to know how you can sell more books with targeted cover copy, meaning that you are providing an intriguing summary of your book’s plot and themes that takes your target audience into account.

Before we dive in, a brief note on why I’m lumping fiction and memoir together, even though memoir is nonfiction.

Memoir is a story about ...

How Target Audience Should Influence Your Book’s Cover Copy

When I speak to nonfiction writers, I talk a lot about the importance of identifying the correct target audience for your book. Many authors understand that knowing your target audience is a crucial factor in planning your book’s content, but do you know how target audience should influence your book’s cover copy as well?

Your cover copy, which often doubles as your online book description on vendor sites like Amazon.com, is more than just a summary of your book. It is an essential piece of m...

Your Book, Your Choice: 3 Proven Paths to Publication with the MWA, Feb. 11, 2023

Dreaming of “getting published?” With many options for bringing books to market, how do you choose the way that’s most aligned with you and your goals? This in-depth presentation reveals how traditional and self-publishing paths work, what kind of projects are best suited to each (as well as an underappreciated third way to publish), and the decision-making shortcuts that will help you identify which of the 3 proven paths to publication is ideal for you.

You’ll also learn insider secrets...

Get Your Brain on Straight with MWA Annapolis, Feb. 15, 2023

As humans, we’re predisposed to underestimate how long it takes to do something, or how hard it is. Make that human an author, and the degree to which your expectations tend to be out of alignment with reality grows exponentially.

In this talk, we’ll explore why the right author mindset is your #1 key to having an enjoyable author experience and how getting your brain on straight can make or break the success of your book. You’ll get the skinny on some of the biggest misconceptions about...

How to Write About the Pandemic (or Not)

Many, if not all, are trying to cope with their thoughts and emotions surrounding the pandemic and authors are no exception. Our own Harrison Demchick offers insightful tips on how to write about the pandemic without directly writing about masks and shutdowns on Helping Writers Become Authors. With the experience of his first novel The Listeners, a pandemic-fueled dystopia novel published in 2015, Harrison shares his thoughts on how to write about the pandemic and writing in the post-pandemi...

Get Your Brain On Straight: Cultivating A Success Mindset – SelfPubHub, May 8, 2022

Our own Chief Ally, Ally Machate, spoke recently to the awesome people at SelfPub Hub about having the right author mindset and how it can make or break the success of your book. As with many things in life our thought process and our outlook can impact our results in a positive or negative way.

Drawing on her experience as a seasoned editor and book publishing entrepreneur, Ally shared how having a positive author mindset can make a significant difference in how your book performs on the ma...

Writing To Market: How to Write Smarter and Sell More Books Easily

The Writer’s Ally is pleased to feature this valuable post explaining what writing to market really means, from USA Today Bestselling mystery and thriller author Tom Fowler. Read on to learn more about his tried and proven strategies.

Whenever an author suggests writing to market in an open forum, you’ll often find some version of “You’re selling out” in the replies. In reality, writing to market is simply considering your audience before you write. This will enable you to release a book to f...

Plotting Literary Fiction

In his guest article for Jane Friedman’s blog, our very own Harrison Demchick explains that so many resources you’ll find on writing plot focus on genre fiction and thrillers, which can be confusing if you’re writing a quieter story like with literary fiction. Causation is fundamental in character-driven literary fiction too, but it doesn’t look the same. It’s subtler. It’s quieter. So how do the mechanics of plot relate to plotting literary fiction? Harrison discusses the principle of causation...

The Best Way to Start Your Story Type

It’s an oversimplification, but also very much a truism, to suggest that starting a story is difficult. That’s why we’ve devoted an entire four-part series to the challenge of how best to do it. In the last three installments (click here to read Part 1), we’ve discussed establishing momentum and avoiding exposition in the opening pages, and what to do and what to avoid in crafting the opening sentence. These tools are fundamental in capturing the reader from the beginning.

But you’re not ...