Hi everyone! Welcome to my journey to writing my debut novel, Winter’s Captive, The Georgia Series, Book 1. First, I must thank Taylor for inviting me to write this piece. I would love to share my writing journey with all of you. Writing has always been a part of my life, but not in a professional capacity. This is something that has come late in my life. Writing a novel was a dream of mine for my whole adult life, only life got in the way. My life’s [...]
There's only one person who can answer that, and it's you! Firstly, it has to be said that self publishing is not the easy way out and it's not just for authors who have been rejected by agents and traditional publishers. That being said, anyone can - and does - self publish which means you have to do something to make sure your book is good enough to rise to the top of the pile. And to start with, you need a good story! Once you've got that, edit [...]
Throughout my life I have always been told how to write. Throughout elementary I always had a teacher telling me the wrong way to write. Writing was, to me, frustrating, boring, and pointless. Jump forward to Jr. High & High School. It was in these years that i started getting my own voice. I was told to write essays and book reports but to use my own words to describe everything. Although I was given some freedom it still wasn’t enough to motivate me to write on my [...]
A sage piece of advice for writers who seek commercial success is to choose and know your market before you start to write. Decide who is going to read your work and know what their expectations are. Then write to the target market. Write to fulfill those expectations. This includes understanding the requirements of different categories or genres. The expectations of romance readers about how a story should be told are different from those of readers of thrillers or fantasies. I didn’t choose the fantasy genre of The [...]
Writing! What can be said about it? Are there enough words out there to describe the feeling? I wrote the ''beginning'' of a series when I was 14. I was clueless on how to proceed, lacking the ability to take it further and somehow, in the back of my mind, I always knew one day, I'd publish this book! At the tender age of 7, I visited a castle in my mom's home town in Italy. The ever lasting impression that had plagued me then, and still does [...]
For those of us who have already self published a book or three, we had our reasons for doing so. For those of you thinking of going this route, you may have the same reasons: you don't want to wait that long to hear back from a traditional publisher, you don't know where to begin, or if you're like me, you aren't happy with your current publisher. There are several reasons why you may to go the self publishing route, and whatever your reason, it's worth it in [...]
The hardest part is putting all the information in the order you want as a manuscript. I think you will probably want to make a book with photographs 8.5 x 11 inches size. Novels are usually printed in 6 x 9 inch size. If you create your manuscript in the actual size you want the book, it is easier to proofread and edit it as you go along. It won’t stop you from making mistakes, but it helps. Start with a blank page as they print the book [...]
One of the easiest book genres to write is children’s books. Children’s books do not have to be lengthy or got into a lot of details. The vocabulary used is simple for young children to understand. You can fill some pages with illustrations and some pages with a sentence to a short paragraph. Writing it is easy. Nothing is ever easy. Somewhere down the line, a difficulty arises. That difficulty with children’s books is not completing the project but marketing it. With a lot of writers trying to [...]
After conversing with many fellow aspiring authors over the years I’ve come across a common issue. You would think that the issue was getting started. Actually the real problem its getting passed that block that rears its’ ugly head a quarter into the process. Many authors have problems getting passed the first act. "I’ve successfully self-published two books and working on my third. Why am I saying this? Is it because I’m a show off?" At times, maybe I can be. Is it because I’m proud of the [...]
After graduating from high school I went directly to a job in the newsroom of the Vancouver Sun, one of the city’s big daily newspapers. It was a dream come true. "I wanted to be a crime reporter" and the thrill of being accepted as a copy runner (that is, an apprentice reporter, nowadays called an ‘intern’ which back then meant someone studying to be a doctor). I was the only girl ‘copy-boy’ working with one or two other young fellows who had the same dreams and aspirations as [...]