The lovely and talented Pamela Ross writerross recently attended a conference for adult writers -- that'd be folks who write for putative grown-ups, rather than those of us who write for more discerning readers. One of the issues that came up repeatedly was the need for writers to have a platform.The concept of a platform is something I know about from my ( Read more... )

Or at least out of the mouths of hot young lifeguards ( Read more... )

how time away can lead to productive work. Not that anything I saw inspired me in particular. In fact, I reprised work on a WIP -- a nonfiction project that is fully researched and fleshed out as an idea, but which needs me to finish my book proposal. So, today I spent four and a half hours (!) in Panera, working through some of the necessary ( Read more... )

As anyone can tell you, writing a table of contents is a piece of cake, right? All you do is write down the chapter name or number and what page it starts on, right? Wrong ( Read more... )

"Before editors can be interested in what you propose to say about the topic, they have to find the topic interesting." Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction and Get It Published by Susan Rabiner and Alred Fortunato. You need to "inform and seduce" your editor and/or agent in order to get them to read on ( Read more... )

“[A] good proposal tells a story and is most effective when written as a short story, a little narrative tale of perhaps ten to twenty pages double spaced.” From Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction - and Get It Published! by Susan Rabiner and Al Fortunato ( Read more... )