8 Tips for Turning "Real Life" into Bestselling Fiction

A lot of people start writing because they’ve got a real-life story to tell—something that happened in their own lives or the lives of friends or family members they think would make a great book. Sometimes these stories work well as memoirs, but, for a lot of very good reasons, a lot of us prefer to present the stories as fiction. But if you decide to write your story as a novel, you have to take that raw clay of factual material and shape it into...

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How to Blog Part V: 12 Dos and Don’ts for Author-Bloggers

This is the 200th post on this blog. Since I started it on Friday the 13th  in March of 2009, I’ve learned an awful lot. (The first thing I learned was that you have to actually post stuff. My second post wasn’t until late June.)Another thing I’ve learned is there’s no wrong way to blog—BUT if you’re an author who wants to get published, you need to be professional about it. If you want to be taken seriously in the industry—and we have to remember it is an industry—you need to create a helpful, reader-friendly place that’s an easy-to-navigate...

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Trolls, Sockpuppets, and Cyberbullies—How to Blog Part IV: Dealing with Difficult Blog Visitors

Blogging is fun, and a wonderful way to network and build your author platform. But it’s not always rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes a visitor may disagree with you or be confrontational in some way. Nothing wrong with that. If it’s done in a friendly manner, disagreement can be an excellent way to stimulate conversation and learn to see things from another point of view. I’ve learned a lot from people who have pointed out my mistakes and blogging faux-pas.But the occasional commenter crosses the line from polite disagreement to a verbal attack...

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How to Blog Part III: What Should You Blog About?

When I teach blogging, the most frequent question I get is “What do I blog about?” (For info on what not to blog about, see Part II of this series: How Not to Blog )A writer starting a blog right now faces two problems: 1)     There are already, like, a trillion writers out there lecturing the blogosphere about how to write vivid characters, prop up saggy middles and avoid adverbs. A lot of them probably know more than you.2)     If you’re a writer with books to sell, you want to reach a general audience,...

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