• What to Know About Co-Authoring a Book

    There are steps you have to take when co-authoring that you wouldn’t typically think about if writing solo. Having a writing partner can be very beneficial when it comes to splitting the work and dividing tasks based on strengths and weaknesses. But there are also a handful of steps you should take when co-authoring a book that you wouldn’t typically have to think about if you wrote solo. Here are 10 tips about co-authoring a book: 1. Pick someone with a similar writing style and work ethic as yours. The best way to get your joint writing project off the…

  • The First Draft: Skeleton Draft or Bulging Draft

    Just like there are two different types of plotting styles—plotting and pantsing—there are also two different camps writers fall into when it comes to how much writing goes into the first draft. There are writers who choose a skeleton draft, meaning they put the bones of their stories down during the first draft and then use subsequent drafts and rounds of revisions to continue to grow and fill out their manuscript until it’s complete. Other writers aim to put anything and everything down on paper during the first round, which is typically a bulging draft and way over word count.…

  • Tips for Brainstorming Book Titles

    If you’re not part of the lucky group of writers that knows the title of their book right from the start, we have compiled a few tips to help. By the end of these book-titling exercises, you should hopefully be able to put together a decent list of title ideas for your book. The list of prompts below should help spark ideas. We recommend reading them one day at a time (so you can look at them with fresh eyes each time) and writing down any book titles that come to mind. Book titles should ideally be 5 words or…

  • 2021 Writing Self Check-in

    Self-Check  How are your 2021 writing goals going so far? If you feel like you’re devoting a lot of time to writing, but you aren’t seeing your word count climb, then you may want to start keeping tabs on yourself. Is self-editing, as you go, slowing you down? Starting each writing session by editing what you wrote during your previous writing period can eat up a significant amount of time you could have been writing, and you’ll never make large strides in your word count that way. Find a paper planner you can use solely for this self-check. Add in…