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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...

Tips to Help you in Carrying out your Research

In researching for your story, there is more than one pathway leading to the same point, and some routes are quicker than others. If you don’t have the right research technique, you might quickly reach a dead end or find the research process more and...

5 Tips to Help Make Your Dialogue More Compelling

Dialogue in fiction is not basic. The conversations between characters should have a purpose and be engaging. And you should write them to be intriguing, involving tension, and worthy of your readers’ attention. To help you with that, here are four tips. 1. Let the Characters...

How to Enhance your Dialogue with Emotional Beats

To make dialogue more compelling for your readers and to also enhance your storytelling, you should, when possible, include a beat. Interject your dialogue with descriptions or actions that reveal the emotional state of your characters during an exchange. These beats need to be appropriate and...

Accommodating Gender Preferences in Storytelling

Differences don’t make us any less equal. A pen and a pad are two completely different things, yet they are equally important. In the same way, men and women are equal, yet distinct. The way a man and a woman write differs from each other....

Four Effective Ways to Add a Backstory

It is not ideal to overwhelm your readers by dumping all the backstory on them at once. It needs to be given little by little and introduced naturally into the narration. You should put the backstory on hold until the story takes off, gradually deliver...

Using a Character's Personality to Improve the Point of View

When you have chosen a point of view for your story or a particular scene, you need to know the point of view character very well. What readers need more than a point of view is to experience the fictional world the same way your...

5 Techniques for Crafting Compelling Scenes

Despite how brilliant a story premise is, it would mean nothing without an appropriate scene to prop it up. You may have extraordinary characters hovering on every page. But they need to be doing something interesting for your readers to care about them. It is...

11 Ways to Save your Story from Plot Problems

It is common to finish the first draft and realize during the editing process that something about the plot isn't just right. Sometimes, writers have had to rewrite their stories to fix this problem. There is no easy route to repairing a defective plot, but...

Four Effective Ways to Create a Compelling Relationship Between Characters

It goes without saying that characters are the bedrock of every narrative fiction. What drives your plot forward and encourages readers to hop on this ride is how fascinating your characters are. And a perfect way to create intriguing characters is by exploring their relationships...

Six Steps on How to Effectively Self-edit your Story

Despite how talented and experienced you are as a writer, you can't publish your story on the first draft. Editing is a necessary process every fictional narrative needs to go through to make it look like the author had it all figured out and accurate...