Author Services

Author Articles

Hundreds of Helpful Articles

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...

How to Combat Common Plausibility Flaws

The issue of plausibility is crucial to writing fiction. You need to make your readers forget they are reading a story that didn’t happen. You have to make them suspend disbelief. All readers approach fiction with the willingness to partake in your lies. That is the...

How to Control the Pace of your Story

Getting a reader to finish reading your book to the last page is a skill you should not take for granted, whether it’s in the fiction or nonfiction category. You may have picked a book to read and put it down as soon as you started reading....

8 Techniques to Slow Down the Pace of your Story

A fast pace and a slow pace is how a story goes. There are moments when a story should be fast-paced; there is also the need for lagging scenes that emphasize emotional impact. You can also slowly narrate events to maximize the payoff. Readers don’t...

8 Techniques to Increase the Pace of Your Story

Major plot points need speed in narration. You can slow them at intervals to portray a character’s thought process and emotions, but for the most part, the story needs to be at high top speed. A story can be fast-paced on a line-by-line basis (micro-pacing)...

How to Sharpening your Creative Saw for Revision

Have you heard the expression “sharpening your saw?” This means you can continue to use a dull blade to saw through wood, exerting extra pressure and yielding lesser results, or you can take a moment to sharpen your saw, which helps you work more efficiently. We...

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...