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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...

Article Writing – How to Overcome a Lack of Confidence

Some people are of the opinion that anyone can write an article, that it’s dead simple to do. I would agree with part of that – anyone CAN write an article – but it isn’t easy to come up with high-quality articles. This is why...

Easy Ways to Generate Writing Ideas

Sometimes you may have plenty of ideas on what to write but no time to do it while, other times, you will have the time but are fresh out of ideas. Inspiration isn’t always easy to come by but there are some ways that you...

How To Write For Middle School Kids Part II

Welcome back to my series of articles. In case you didn’t read my last article, I talked about character building, action levels and descriptive terms for books for middle schoolers. This time around we will talk about adding animals to your book, age appropriate topics...

Writing Blog Posts – The Why, What, How

Look at any number of blog posts and you will notice something many have in common – they talk directly about the blog topic. Let’s say that you are reviewing a piece of software for your blog topic; the details, a description of the software...

What Are the Different Types of Verbs?

Every writer knows that, without verbs, their sentences are meaningless. They are the single most important part of any sentence and the hardest part is choosing the right type of verb to get your meaning across. How do you do that? By learning what the...

Nonfiction – What Are You Writing? – Part 3

The last type of nonfiction writing we are looking at is the book. Books Traditional nonfiction books usually start at about 30,000 words or around 80 pages of standard spaced typewritten pages. If you go over 100,000 words, it is considered a giant in the book world...

Nonfiction – What Are You Writing? – Part 2

We talked about short articles in part 1, now it's time to look at what makes up a long article and a project. Long Articles Long articles are usually from 700 up to about 3000 words and are written as if they are a short book. You...

Nonfiction – What Are You Writing? – Part 1

When you start writing, the first thing you need to have clear in your mind is, what are you writing and what will it accomplish? With fiction writing, this isn’t quite so important – you already know that you are writing a story or a...

The Writer’s Notebook

Have you ever thought about writing fiction? If you have then no doubt you have heard that you should always keep a notebook about your person wherever you go. Why? So that whenever an idea comes to you out of nowhere, you can write it down....

Choosing the Best POV for Your Story – Part 2

In the last part, we discussed first-person POV and third-person omniscient POV. Next, we’ll discuss another third-person POV. Third-Person Limited POV – He, She In grammatical terms, ‘he’ and ‘she’ are used in the same way as the third-person omniscient POV but, rather than multiple points of...