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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 Isocolon? Types, Effects and Examples
Isocolon is a rhetorical term for a successive group of phrases, clauses, or sentences with relatively equal length and corresponding structure. The similarities also include sound, meter, and rhythm. Basically, isocolon refers to an almost perfect repetition of similar grammatical forms. Remember the familiar sentence...
3 Simple Research Tips For Novel Writers
Research is essential for writers to help them develop the world of their novel and to create captivating characters and an intricate plot. Your best source is your own experience. It can be using your hometown in your setting or personal and work experience to...
Creative Editing Techniques: Paragraph Analysis
When I’m coaching writers one-to-one, I sometimes meet people with superb ideas and strong characters, but their prose is too confusing to follow. Many writers self-edit and pay careful attention to spelling errors and typing mistakes, but that’s not the only thing that can turn...
Creative Editing Techniques: De-tagging Speech
When I was a kid, I was always told to stop using the word ‘said’ in my stories. We were encouraged to use as many different speech tags as possible to describe dialogue, including ‘yelled’, ‘demanded’ and my favorite at the time: ‘urged’. But in professional...
Creative Editing Techniques: Horrible Homophones
Most writers are readers who have developed a love of storytelling, and not many of them have a technical background in English Linguistics. Sometimes we build up a great vocabulary by hearing words rather than studying them, which can lead to problems when we encounter...
Creative Editing Techniques: Typo Spotting
Creative Editing Techniques explores different strategies for editing your fiction writing which combine together to give you the cleanest ‘oven-ready’ publishing draft possible. These strategies include visual and auditory processing techniques, insider tips from the publishing world, and exercises borrowed from drama education to give your work...
The Amazing Benefits of Starting a Story In Medias Res
"In medias res" is a Latin term that translates to “in the midst of things.” It means altering the typical chronological plot sequence to start a narrative toward the center of its arc. Here, you bypass exposition and gradually provide context through dialogue, flashbacks, or description of...
An Overview of Sensory Imagery in Creative Writing: Importance and Notable Examples
Sensory imagery is a literary device where writers use descriptive language to evoke mental images. It explores the five human senses — sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell — in engaging readers and making creative elements in fiction appear real. In this article, we discuss...
7 Simple Guidelines To Master Multiple Point Of Views
Sometimes writers may discover that they can't find the right point of view (POV) for their novel. Although it has its disadvantages and is tricky to pull off, using multiple points of view can be your solution. Multiple POVs give the writer a way to create...
7 Types of Sensory Imagery in Creative Writing with Illustrative Examples
"Show, don't tell" — the famous maxim of creative writing — is impossible without imagery. This literary device allows writers to use descriptions to evoke vivid mental pictures. Sensory imagery creates vivid mental images by appealing to the readers' five senses (sight, smell, sound, taste,...