How to Eat a Cupcake
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January 31, 2012

Meg Donohue knows how to whet an appetite and pay homage to a gal’s sweet tooth. Her first book, How to Eat a Cupcake (William Morrow Paperbacks, March 2012) unfolds over the course of a year, opening in June and wrapping up sweetly in May. The story is told from two perspectives and, while the protagonists duke it out, the reader feasts on some delicious… [Read More]

How-To Use Social Media Workshop for Authors
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January 28, 2012

 Are you an author who wants to learn how to use social media tools? Are you looking for some time-saving tricks and tools to help you write and promote your book? Are you overwhelmed and don’t know where to start… or even which questions to ask? This is a 90 minute workshop for authors and writers who want to learn how to: Use track changes… [Read More]

Campfire artfully brings classics to life for kids
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January 24, 2012

For a comic book, its visual design is superb. Campfire’s latest adaptation, Rudyard Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book, is absolutely gorgeous: it’s not in the same playing field as popular superhero comics by DC and Marvel, that’s for sure. (Feel free to disagree, but neither Spiderman nor Green Lantern has ever been drawn so crisply or in colors so rich.) Children will love the drawings… [Read More]

Why authors use social media
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January 21, 2012

Too often I hear writers say they don’t see the point of social media, while others say they will use it after they’ve written their book. It’s a common refrain: writers just want to write. Many writers shy away from social media because they think it is nothing more than hype and sales. These are the same people who use Google search engines, rely on online… [Read More]

Workshop: Social Media Strategies for Authors
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January 17, 2012

Literary agents agree. Editors at Big Six publishing houses agree. Bestselling authors agree. If you want to publish a book, you need to use social media. But what is social media? How can YOU use it to sell your book-in-progress?  Why have a blog, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? How will you write your book if you are always online? And who really cares about social… [Read More]

Social Media for Authors: What is a blogroll?
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January 14, 2012

In WordPress, the Blogroll is a widget that appears in a side column on your blog page. How does a blogroll work? It provides a list of links to blogs (or other websites) you think your readers might be interested in. A blogroll is your personal endorsement of websites – the places you recommend someone visit for related content. To add a blogroll to your… [Read More]

Protagonists and Pandas: An Interview with Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan
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January 10, 2012

Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan (Melville, 2012), will unashamedly tell you that she’s lived with her parents four times. Her newly-released novel, a coming-of-age about post-college angst, is spliced with details from her own experience and speaks volumes to the plight of so many twenty-something’s undergoing a quarter-life crisis. Stein’s protagonist, Esther, is a recent Northwestern graduate suffering from the post-grad blues. While… [Read More]

Social Media for Authors: Baby Step 7
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January 7, 2012

Are you ready to pick a WordPress theme for your new website and blog? If you’ve been following our Saturday social media for authors blog series and completed the first six “baby steps”, you already have a domain name, webhost, and content management system ready to go. Hopefully you’ve found time over the holidays to do a bit of window shopping and figured out how… [Read More]

Work Up Your Pitch
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January 3, 2012

Writing a query letter that hooks an agent or acquisitions editor for your non-fiction book concept is the golden key that opens the door to publishing. So how do you hook ’em? Think of your query letter as a sales pitch for the book. Accept the fact that those who read your initial correspondence are trained, so to speak, to judge books by their covers and make their  first impressions based on marketability…. [Read More]