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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...

What is Tone?

One of the elements of writing that a writer should always consider when writing is the tone of their work. The tone is important for both writers in the fiction and nonfiction genre. What is tone then? What do you know about tone? We will...

Dead Metaphors

There are many words or phrases we use in our daily conversations or in writing yet we don’t know in what category of literary devices they fall. An example of such a phrase is “the body of an essay”. That phrase is a dead metaphor. Do...

All About Parallelism

What is parallelism? Parallelism is one of the most commonly used literary techniques. You have interacted with parallelism at one point or another either through a conversation, literature, or the other many forms of art. Consider the following examples: “I came to win, to fight To conquer, to...

Writing Persuasively: Why and How to do it

At some point you’ll no doubt want to write something that expresses your opinion and tries to convince others to agree with you. For example, you may want to email your local newspaper or news website on a controversial issue in your community. Or perhaps...

News values, and why they’re important to writers

You’re a writer, and therefore you must continually make decisions about what topics to address. This chapter explains how some writers—specifically journalists—decide what stories they’re going to cover. For anyone who writes non-fiction, this process will help you decide on topics your readers, viewers, or...

What is Passive Aggression?

What is passive aggression? Maybe you don’t know the meaning of the words 'passive aggression', but you will be surprised to learn that you have used or experienced passive aggression at least once before. We all know passive means not being fully engaged or being partially...

Flattery as a type of sarcasm

One of the most important things a writer should do is find a way to appeal to their ever-evolving audience. Being content with a single style of writing is not a wise thing to do for a writer in this age of tremendous change. As...

What's Deadpan?

Humor is one of the few things that writers can use in their work to keep their audience entertained and also more interested in their work. We are going to look at a form of sarcasm that writers can use to make their work humorous. Have...

What's Sarcasm?

We often use or hear the word sarcasm a lot in our daily conversations. Most writers know the word 'sarcastic' but they may not be sure of its meaning. We are going to take care of that by learning everything there is to learn about sarcasm. The...

Tragic Irony

Have you been thinking of a way to make your narrative more interesting? Have you ever heard of tragic irony? From the name of this literary device, you can tell that tragic irony has everything and anything to do with tragedy. Let’s get started on tragic...