Allyson E. Machate's Blog, page 5

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 ...

The Maze: How to Be Specifically Ambiguous in Fiction

Sometimes you want to add a little mystery for your readers, but are you being mysterious or just frustratingly vague? Harrison Demchick has written a fantastic piece for Writers Helping Writers that will point you in the right direction and make sure you find the right balance between specific detail and ambiguity. In this blog post titled “The Maze: How to Be Specifically Ambiguous in Fiction,” he explains how to be cryptic without being oblique in keeping your writing mysterious. Head on ...

How to Write a Great First Sentence and Nail Your Opening

In the process of writing a novel or memoir—or anything, really—no single sentence is more outright intimidating than the first. It isn’t easy to figure out how to write a great first sentence.

You hear it in workshops, college classrooms, writer’s conferences, and how-to books, and for that matter in blog posts like this one written by book editors like me: The first sentence needs to hook the reader. If the first sentence doesn’t engage the reader, why bother with the second? There are ...