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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...
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...
Six Objectives of an Exceptional Self-editing Process
Completing your first draft is definitely a huge achievement, but that is where a more tedious task begins — the editing process. This process takes your story to another level that amazes readers and critics. You need to focus a significant amount of time editing...
Ways Notable Writers Approach the Research Process
Research is essential to storytelling in varying degrees. Some stories require exhaustive research on the character's profession, the setting of the story or the time in history when the story occurs. It all depends on what information is crucial to effectively tell a compelling story;...
Suspense: A Clever Author's Huge Gift to Eager Readers
A critical aspect of any novel is suspense. Suspense creates questions in readers' minds and triggers the problem-solving part of the brain to anticipate possible answers. Your reader will continue reading to find the answers and see if any possibilities they've imagined were correct. The...
5 Evocative Ways to Introduce a Character
A strong opening in storytelling requires you to present a character. Every character is created out of specific details and both writers and readers should be able to identify those details the first time they meet a character. And in introducing a character, you need...