When you’re a writer, you need to know the best strategies to get your reader’s attention and hold onto it.
The goal is to get them hooked on your content, so they’ll want to read more.
Only then can you cultivate a relationship that serves you both.
So, how do you do that (without actually hypnotizing them)?
You learn different writing strategies, applied to advantage by the pros, and work on making them your own.
The first question to answer is, “What is a writing strategy?”
Perhaps you’re one of the thousands of people bitten by the writing bug who would love to make a living from writing books all day.
Can it be done? Absolutely!
The world of publishing has changed dramatically in the last ten years.
Self-publishing your book doesn’t have the negative reputation it once did. I
n fact, thousands of authors have self-published because it gives them more control over their work and a greater share of the profits.
Some self-published authors have received movie deals and created seven figure royalties, not to mention millions of readers who now recognize the author’s name and enjoy their work.
Amazon has given self-published authors the necessary tools and resources to edit, format and distribute their books to readers around the world.
Not only can authors track sales with up-to-date rankings and analytics, but they can also research and choose a profitable niche by understanding the 30,000 Rule in Amazon’s Best Seller rankings.
Wait … You had no idea you could predetermine profitable book niches?
From the time you learn how to talk, you have stories to tell.
Faced with a classroom writing assignment, though, you can feel the fog rolling in, hiding all your best personal narrative ideas.
To clear that fog, sometimes, all you need are some simple questions to get started, which is why so many of the personal narrative prompts in this post include them.
You’ll find the prompts grouped by theme to make your search for ideas easier.
What is passive voice misuse?
How do you know if you’re overdoing it with passive voice constructions?
And is active voice always better?
If you’ve ever run your work through the Heminway Editor, you know it flags passive voice right away (along with wordy or overly long sentences).
Human editors, too, tend to bristle at the overuse of passive voice.
So, it’s a huge time-saver when you know how to recognize and correct it in your writing.
Read on to learn how.
You scrape your memory for something you can use in your search for a forgotten book title.
But what are the best details to use if all you’ve got is a vague description?
Fortunately for you, forgetting book titles is such a normal human thing that we’ve devised a number of clever ways to get around that.
It might seem unlikely to find a book title by plot or description, but it can be done.
The first step is to take an inventory of what you do remember.
So, you want to write a short story — and not just a mildly entertaining short story but one your readers can’t put down until they’ve finished it.
You want a story that gets reactions like “Wow!” and “How did you do that?” and “Do you have more like this?”
What writer doesn’t want that kind of reaction, right?
And since short stories are short, you have less time to wait for your readers’ reactions — but you also have less time to grab their attention.
That’s why a great topic is worth its weight in gold when it comes to writing these little gems.
Even with the challenges inherent to short story writing, you’ll most likely finish a short story in far less time than you would a novel.
So, you’ll get to explore more story topics in less time than if you were writing longer works.
But how do you generate short story ideas that are worth the time you’ll invest in crafting a short story your readers will love?
If you’ve been writing for long enough, you already know good story ideas are everywhere, and you might even have some in mind as you read this.
But which of those ideas should be on your shortlist for story writing projects?
And if you don’t have any great ideas at the moment, where do you get some?
Researching pseudonyms for authors is an academic pursuit in and of itself, and an author’s pen name can reveal a lot about their life and time.
So today, we’re looking at 15 writers who’ve shed their “government names” in favor of something different.