I’m a children’s ghostwriter and rewriter (editor). I’ve seen a lot of drafts and manuscripts over the years and the one thing that really irks me is when authors hire an editor who doesn’t know what s/he’s doing. The real problem though is that this pattern never ends. I just recently had another client who…
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Visuals in Your Book Marketing
If you’re an author, you’ll need to market you and your books. The first thing is you’ll need an author website and visuals should be a part of it. You’ll need visuals for your header, your pages, and each of your blog posts. You’ll also need headers / banners for your social media networks, like…
Book Synopsis, Book Description, Book Review – What’s the Difference?
The book synopsis, description, and review are three book marketing tools that your books will absolutely need. But, when do you need these marketing elements and how do you use them? Let’s look at each one in the order you would use them. The Book Synopsis You’ve written an amazing story – it’s traditional publishing ready…
Tips on Adding Flashbacks to Your Story
Contributed by children’s author Linda Wilson A flashback is a literary device that momentarily departs from a story to a scene in the past. A flashback can be as brief as a sudden thought, a dream, or a memory. Flashback can help give your story depth, and make your main character more interesting. As Diane…
Focus and Writing
When you say yes to everything, you’re saying no to focused things that matter. Things that will help you move forward and create a strong brand. In addition to this, if you spread yourself too thin, chances are none of your books or products will be quality. The idea is to do it right by…
How Do You Plan Your Children’s Story?
You have an idea for a children’s story, but aren’t sure how to get it started. What’s the first step? Is there a first step? Is there a step-by-step procedure? What’s involved? There are lots of questions that may come up for new writers, but there’s really no ‘for every writer’ answer. What will work…
5 Things You Cannot Recover
5 Things You Can’t Recover The stone … after the throw A word … after it’s said An occasion … after it’s missed Time … after it’s gone Trust … after it’s lost I love this quote and wish I knew who originally wrote it. It was originally four things, I added the fifth. While…
10 Hot Tips for Writing a Good Children’s Story
View Post A while ago, I received a query from a potential client who wanted a children’s picture book series. She had seven ideas for storylines. Numbers 2 through 7 were sound ideas. They focused on a child protagonist and lent themselves to conflict, but the first one wasn’t kid-oriented. The story idea for book…
5 Top Tips to Boost Your Writing Skills
There are a number of strategies you can use to create and build your writing skills, but I’ve found there are five top strategies. 1. READ! If you don’t read, you won’t know what good reading is. Along with this, it will help you fine tune your own writing, by broadening your vocabulary. Another thing…
Your Self-Published Book and the ISBN
Being a children’s ghostwriter, I get a lot of clients who self-publish. Many of them use companies that will do the work for them, actually format and publish and distribute the book, like Amazon does. If you self-publish a physical book or ebook and intend to sell it online, in bookstores, or pretty much anywhere…