Publishing

Before query letters, agents, or book covers: every writer needs to complete their first draft before they can pursue getting published.

Flash fiction tells a complete story in 1,000 words or fewer — and it's one of the most publishable forms of short fiction. Learn five principles for writing great flash: starting from an image, showing without telling, using reader inference, making characters carry the story, and embracing ambiguity.

Copyright doesn't protect everything you think it does. Learn the five things writers cannot copyright — including ideas, titles, slogans, and recipes — and what protections actually apply to your work as an author.

Reviewing books on Goodreads and Amazon gets complicated when you're an author yourself. Learn the ethics of author book reviews, how to handle books you didn't like, when to say nothing at all, and whether to use a separate identity for your reviewing account.

Every writer has a target audience — even if you think you don't. Learn how to identify who your readers are, where they spend their time online, and how to use that knowledge to improve your manuscript, find beta readers, and position your book for publication.

Choosing the right comp titles can make or break your query letter. Learn how to find realistic, well-performing comparison titles for your book using Goodreads, Amazon, and a simple spreadsheet method — from a publishing professional with 21+ years of experience.

Your manuscript has bugs. Beta readers are how you find them before your readers do. Here's how to build the beta reading team that will actually make your book better—and who to use with caution.

Traditional publishers pay you. Vanity publishers charge you. Hybrid publishers do both. Know which one you're dealing with before you sign anything — because most of them will lie about it.

The slush pile: where manuscripts go to be ignored by everyone except the lowest-paid person in the building. If you're querying, here's what's actually happening to your submission—and five ways to make sure it never hits slush in the first place.

Three Evernote templates for writers who want to organize their projects, track submissions, and research markets—plus how to set up a writing life that actually stays organized.

Do I use AI? Sure. For lots of stuff. But publishing is too important to me to jeopardize quality or, worse, copyright, with generative AI. That's why I do all my writing myself and all my editing myself.

You can write a whole novel in first person and still violate POV if your narrator knows something they couldn’t possibly know. You can write in omniscient third and still fail if you head-hop without purpose. That’s why I made The POV Lock.

The flexibility is the value signal. Not the binding. You wondered: Aren’t you selling something less valuable by selling it as a PDF? No. I’m selling something more usable. More reusable. More flexible.

If you’ve been frustrated by the beta reading process, if you’ve gotten vague feedback—or no feedback at all—and wanted a solution, I made this for you.

Authors aren’t an external variable. They’re our front end. Optimize upstream or keep paying for it downstream.