The 5 Minute Author

There are techniques for creating thriller books that readers just can’t put down. That page-turning story that they’ll stay up all night to read.

Here are the tips to do just that: Page turning books…

Someone once said to me, I could write a short story, but I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Well, here are some ideas on what to do with and why to write short stories.

First, if you are going to wr…

Wether you’re writing a short story or a novel, having a list of early readers who are going to leave you a review, also known as a group of ARC readers is essential if you want to hit a best selling…

You might’ve heard me mention a couple times that I write a novel in November. And I’m not the only one. But why is that?

I believe it all started with National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that y…

Carl Sagan, the voice for Cosmos, and a prolific writer, would dictate his ideas and stories, and later type them up. Luckily, these days we have Star Trek level technology to take our spoken words a…

Critiques and reviews can hurt. So I’m going to hopefully get you thru the hard stuff so you can get on with the business of writing.

If you listened to episode 2 I talked about the power of a review …

If you’ve been away from writing for awhile, well maybe it’s time to get back to it and I’m going to share tips on how to do that.

I know I’ve stopped a couple of times in my writing career. The lates…

If you have a book on Amazon with very few reviews, this episode is for you.

When I was struggling to get reviews for my book I put my book for free and advertised in reputable newsletters – businesse…

Do not advertise your book with these companies

Let’s say you’ve published your book to Amazon and you’re not seeing sales, you want more downloads, sales, reviews, etc. You receive an email out of th…

You’ll hear it from 90% of writers - write every day. But I’ll tell you, do not beat yourself up or get discouraged if that doesn’t work for you. Because you don’t have to write every day.

There are a…

I took a college level creative writing class with a friend, and the teacher was reviewing some of the stories. She never got to mine so I asked her if she could tell me what she thought of mine. She…

I’m going to try and share all of the self-publishing steps in five minutes. 

Step one is to  get it in front of a review group. For me this is a group of writers who are going to give you honest feed…

Recently the Independent Book Publishers Association released new guidelines that define a hybrid publisher. This is in an attempt to keep vanity publishers or those companies that are really just he…

Inspiration for most of my characters comes from real life, and as I’ve mentioned before I keep a notebook and it has a section for characters. Anytime I come up with an idea for a character I write …

Cheryl Cryer asked me to talk about what to do when you have too many writing ideas. 

Oh boy do I know the feeling. I have so many story ideas right now. So, hopefully these practical types for an unp…

How do you go about finding ideas for your stories?

I’d say first, keep an open mind. We can be bombarded by ideas every day, all around us.

From a snippet of a conversation on the train, to a piece of…

Recently, I was on a book marketing panel at Killer Nashville , and I wanted to share with the audience some quick tips. So I was thinking about the most important things to sell a book. Besides havi…

Some creatives, like me, can find it a challenge to stay organized. But I’ve found that being organized makes for a much better and less stressful situation when you have a lot to do and you don’t ha…

Today I’m going to share with you the different types of publishing, and what to watch out for when you’re looking for a publisher. 

Traditional publishing - You’d start searching for agents, until yo…

I don’t want you to regret not writing that story.  but I’ve seen it too many times when someone I meet tells me that they regret not sitting down to write a story. 

And it could have been either they…