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Book Review & Contest Insights from Real Reviews and Submissions

What separates great books from the rest? Below are articles with insights from real reviews and contest submissions—what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve your book. You’ll also find a wide range of articles covering writing, publishing, marketing, and more. Each article has a Comments section so you can read advice from other authors and leave your own.

Why Some Books Win Awards (And Most Don’t) — Insights From Real Contest Submissions

What separates award-winning books from the rest? After evaluating contest submissions across a wide range of genres, certain patterns become clear. Some books consistently rise to the top. Others, even with strong ideas and clear effort behind them, fall short. The difference is rarely dramatic—it...

What We’ve Learned From Reviewing Hundreds of Thousands of Books (And Why Most Don’t Stand Out)

After reviewing and evaluating books across thousands of submissions over the past two decades, certain patterns become impossible to ignore. Some books immediately stand out to reviewers. Others—even well-intentioned ones—fade into the middle or fall short. The difference is rarely luck. It comes down to...

Breaking into Print. What Length Sells Best? Part 2

Ok, so I can write whatever length book I want; there must be a secret to making sales. Well, yes, there is. Good, honest hard work. That’s it. The process of learning your craft and honing it to perfection never ends. There is always room for improvement and...

Breaking Into Print – What Length Sells Best? Part 1

 There is so much information and advice for authors these days on how to get the first sales under your belt. Some will tell you to publish short stories to get a foot in the door while others will tell you to write really short...

Cut The Fat – Clean Up Your Writing Part 2

So far, you should have cleaned out the unnecessary hedges, intensifiers, and qualifiers from your manuscript. Time to tackle the next bit. Resist Readymade Phrases In 1862, Stephen Foster’s “merry, merry month of May” was fresh and exciting; not so much these days. Seriously, if you can't...

Cut The Fat – Clean Up Your Writing Part 1

There is nothing worse than flabby prose but the English language is one of the wordy ones and we love nothing more than to use those words. Too many sometimes. And it leads to confusing and sometimes ugly reading. Cleaning up your writing is a...

4 Questions to Ask When Writing a Sad Scene

Sad scenes give an emotional impact to your story that adds flavor to the plot. To some authors, overly emotional scenes should be avoided. The writing should be direct and the characters should not be too emotional. However, other well-known authors argue for the inclusion...

Is it a Memoir or an Autobiography?

Despite being closely related, there are key differences between memoirs and autobiographies. One outstanding difference is the timeline that each covers. Autobiographies are systematic and include the person’s experiences in every stage of their lives. Starting from childhood and teenage years, they progress to the character’s...

5 Tips to Jazzing Up Your Sentences Part 3

And so we get to part 3 and the final tip on jazzing your sentences up. By now you should be comfortable playing about with those sentences and seeing what you can come up with so we’re going to take it to the top level...

5 Tips to Jazzing Up Your Sentences Part 2

Are you happy with that? Then it's time to take things up a notch. Combine Independent and Dependent Clauses in One Sentence. Dependent clauses, otherwise called subordinate clauses, cannot stand on their own, despite having a subject and verb that work together. Why? Because they start with...

5 Tips to Jazzing Up Your Sentences Part 1

Are you the kind of writer that uses the same kinds of sentences all the time? Do you think that might be just a little bit monotonous? Think of your writing as being a bass drum, beating steadily with no percussion and no other instruments. Now...

Setting Out Your Basic Plot Structure Part 2

Welcome back. We ended the first part looking at all the parts that make up the plot structure of a story and now we need to look a little deeper into those: Exposition – you describe the setting, where you were, who was with you, what...