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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...

Good Copyediting is Vital to the Success of Your Book (2)

Get Organized for Maximum Effect There’s no such thing as a perfectly copyedited book. If you look hard enough, you’ll find that every book has its errors or things that could have been done better. Nobody’s perfect, after all. And while it’s right to aim for...

How To Build Tension and Suspense

‘The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last.’-- Oscar Wilde. Creating tension or suspense in a novel is not only limited to a thriller or horror. It can be used in any genre. Will the couple get together? Will the hero save the day? Tension...

Creating Realistic Characters

When I first started writing, I struggled continuously with creating good characters. They spoke and acted in an unrealistic and two-dimensional manner. When writing a villain, for example, it is such a temptation to over exaggerate the evilness in the character so your reader is...

Good Copyediting is Vital to the Success of Your Book (1)

There are lots of reasons why a book can fail to find readers, some of which are out of anyone’s control. However, two of the principal reasons why a book doesn’t succeed are these: • It has not been copyedited. • It has been badly copyedited. From the...

Use a Character Collage to Stay Inspired

I am a visual person and I find that using these visual cues helps my writing enormously. For example, if I am using a location I’ve never visited before, finding images of the location really helps. Google Maps is another great visual aid if your location...

Is Your Main Character a Cloned Version of You?

We writers are very attached to our characters. In a strange way they are almost like our children. We brought them into the world. We gave them life. We guide them, try to teach them how to behave. Even the little weasels and evil villains...

Should You Leave the Boring Stuff in Your Story Or Take It Out?

With few exceptions, all stories have boring stuff in them. Even the best selling pros tend to have at least a little bit of the boring in their otherwise perfect novels. If you are a reader or a writer, you know exactly what I mean...

How To Create A Believable Villain

Creating a believable, three-dimensional villain is probably the hardest thing a writer has to do. The mistake most new writers make is to create a villain that is so evil, they are totally unbelievable. So what’s the secret? Quite simple - to create a real...

The Republic of Yemen Myth Monsters

In How to Write a Unique Spooky Story, I wrote about how to write a unique spooky story by either creating your own monster, creature, or horror yourself or by finding a monster that is not well known. I advised finding a monster by researching...

Banish Writers' Block

Everyone experiences writers' block at some point in their writing career... right? We have all stared at the empty computer screen wondering how to start. The 300-page novel seems an impossible mountain to climb. Here are the main things I do that inspire or help me...