Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.
Gone are the days of the one hit wonders for authors. You have to build your audience and if you don’t already have a built audience you a great strategy is to write a series. This allows you to start building a following and do clever marketing such as pricing your first book for free to get people hooked. At Write To Done, Sandra Haven has some great hints on how to build on a story to make a series.
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How to Transform Your Single Story Into a Complete Series
Okay, so your single book story jumped to an idea for a nifty book series but … now what?
Even the best of series ideas can miss the mark after only one book.
Ever come to a screeching halt while reading a series because the story just fell apart? Or the character changed? Maybe you moaned, “What is this author doing?”
Not everyone will love every book in a series. There will always be some readers who set your series to the side as times goes on. But readership can also take a plunge and no author wants that to happen.
Good news:
Scary as that is, there are some basic reasons a series fails—and there are ways to avoid them.
Read the full post on Write To Done
By Gabriela Pereira
As some folks know, I spent my misguided youth—all right, all right, my misguided middle age—as a copywriter. Which means that writing blurbs for my books was a piece of cake, right?
The ultimate decision-maker at a publishing house in whether to offer a contract has changed over the past several years. Having done my share of presentations at publishing committees, I soon learned that anyone can scuttle a project. All he or she needs to do is vociferously offer negative opinions about it. By questioning the feasibility of making money on the book (which is the bottomline), that person knows what the outcome of the discussion will be. The tide will turn against the project. But one individual on the committee has the power to sway others to his or her opinion more effectively than anyone else.
So I find a lovely-looking review blog. The posts are thoughtful, fair and seriously considered. I look up the review policy and … it says ‘no self-published books’.
As a literary agent in major trade publishing at the Trident Media Group literary agency, I often have to explain the elements of a good query letter to new clients. This article is intended as a description of what goes into a good query letter, for new authors unfamiliar with what literary agents and editors are looking for in a query letter intended the book-publishing world. For a writer who might be currently querying literary agents, or even contemplating that process, this might be interesting reading. Considering the high rejection rate in the book publishing industry for writers trying to become debut authors, this article will hopefully be enlightening for the countless writers who are experiencing rejection due to a poorly-constructed query letter.
When I was first signing a book contract in 2008, I remember that the industry generally scoffed at writers worried about copyright issues. Some writers wondered if they should register a copyright on their manuscripts before submitting them to agents and publishers. There was even a line of thinking that authors could simply mail their manuscripts to themselves to acquire a ‘poor man’s copyright’ through the postal service.
Way, way back in September of 2013 I wrote 
Greetings from the road! I’m out on book tour promoting 
No matter how great a book’s cover and blurb, one thing can stop me from buying yet another ebook for my Kindle: an author bio on the buy page that screams “amateur.”
I’ve been asked by writers and others if I’d ever query traditional publishers again.
What is the secret of your success?
This guest post is by Kristen Harnisch. Harnisch is the award-winning author of