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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 New!

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) New!

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...

Rewriting The 7 Dialog Rules – Part 2

Rule 3: Use “Said” Rather Than Any Other Speaker Attribution Tag You don’t want your story cluttered up with obtrusive attributions, that much is true. When your characters are constantly chortling, retorting, chipping in, exclaiming, and questioning and not actually saying anything, it gets distracting. Your...

Rewriting The 7 Dialog Rules – Part 1

We all know the advice about dialog – your characters should all sound different, only say what needs to be said, use ‘said’ rather than other tags, and so on. Yes, these ideas can put you on the right track but they don’t consider characterization,...

Research Sells Stories

No matter what you are writing, be it a blog, a short story or a novel, research is the key factor in ensuring that your audience is kept captivated. Research is what provides authenticity to a story, it's what makes your readers want to keep reading...

5 Tips to Producing a Real Page-Turner

If there is one thing an author loves to hear from one of their readers is that they just couldn’t put the book down. So what makes a book into a real page-turner? What is it that stops readers from getting on with their chores...

5 Common Mistakes that Interrupt Flow

Being a writer is not easy, no matter how established you are. While the writing part is hard, polishing it up isn’t. By looking at what not to do with sentence structure, you can easily create prose that stands out and engages your readers. You...

Character Habits vs Quirks

The definitions for habits and quirks tend to overlap somewhat and this just confuses things, especially for a new writer. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of a habit is “a settled or regular tendency or practice; an automatic reaction to a certain...

Fiction Writing – Why You Should Never Forget the Small Details

Fictional writing is a work of art and it is created much like a piece of art, one brush stroke at a time. You may already know what your bigger picture will look like but if the small details are left out, the big ones...

10 Rules of Writing a Novel – Part 2

Once you have digested the first five rules, you can move on. These are the only rules you need to follow when writing a novel because, believe me, once you learn these, everything else will follow naturally. Rule 6: Read, Read, and Read Some More Most writers...

10 Rules of Writing a Novel – Part 1

There is so much information, so many tips on how to write, how to submit a really great novel but, when you get down to it, most of the information is common sense. But would-be authors go trolling the internet, looking for a definitive set...

Tips on Avoiding Distractions when Writing

As a freelancer, there are many distractions that compete for my attention every day, not forgetting my own work on this list. The interruptions range from something as simple as a phone call to more habits that are harder to drop such as constantly checking...