WRITING GENRE FICTION – The Productive Indie Fiction Writer

Dash It All! A Writer’s Guide to Em-Dashes, En-Dashes, and Manuscript Dashes

January 17, 2025 / WRITING GENRE FICTION / 5 minutes of reading / Leave a Comment

Ah, the dash. That versatile little line that writers love to use—sometimes too much. Recently, I was asked to assess an ebook prepped for sale. There were many formatting errors in the book, most of them arising because the author, a long-time trad published writer, was making the transition to indie. They knew standard formatting […]

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The Way to Find Where Your Story Starts

September 6, 2024 / Openings, Pacing, Plotting & Outlining / 4 minutes of reading

The Way to Find Where Your Story Starts Stop Backing Off and Dive In! Let me paint you a familiar scene: You’re writing the first chapter of your novel, and the temptation to lay out all the things is overwhelming. You know, the backstory, the history, maybe a tour of the protagonist’s charming little town?

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Purpose-Driven Reading

May 10, 2024 / Notetaking, Research / 6 minutes of reading

Following up on last week’s post about finding more time to read. Once you’ve got back to reading for pleasure, which is key, you’ll quickly come across “other” reading. Call this purpose-driven reading. For example; While videos aren’t “reading” per se, they can be treated in the same way as reading for the sake of

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Why Writing to Market Won’t Serve You Anymore

March 1, 2024 / Creativity, Research, Voice / 6 minutes of reading / 3 Comments

Writing to Market isn’t quite as divisive as Wide versus KU, but it comes close. Mention Writing to Market to a group of indie authors, and you’ll witness a heated debate spring to life almost immediately. Sometimes full-blown arguments can break out. For the record, I’ve never written to market. Not because I’ve ignored the

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Story Preparation for Pantsers

September 30, 2023 / Plotting & Outlining / 1 minute of reading

This is absolutely not a book I could have written! I am so thoroughly a plotter that even when I bought an expensive course on how to pants through a story, I still couldn’t do it. This, despite two serious attempts to work my way through the course material. Plotting is calcified into my bones,

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Platform Will Save You

June 23, 2023 / Genre, INDIE PUBLISHING, Publishing & Production, WRITING GENRE FICTION / 4 minutes of reading

Platform Will Save You When Not Much Else Still Works Kristine Katheryn Rusch recently spoke about the now-gone star system in publishing, and how niche and micro-niche publishing is taking over, in her post “Business Musings: Stars“. Kris intends to write a follow up post, but as I write this post on PIFW, it still

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Fracturing Social Media

February 24, 2023 / Disaster Planning, Futurism, Publishing & Production, Story Concept / 1 minute of reading

A quick post today, which bounces off my post earlier in the year, “What Your 2023 Business Year will Look Like…Maybe“ Anne R. Allen, who is an expert in author blogging, recently ran a post on her site, “Why Blogging is Essential in the Era of Fragmenting Social Media.” The very last point in her

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What Your 2023 Business Year will Look Like…Maybe

January 13, 2023 / Disaster Planning, Futurism, Publishing & Production, Story Concept / 8 minutes of reading

In January, I generally like to post about goals for the coming year, goal-setting, and motivation. But I’ve come across a bunch of articles and reports lately that speculate on what 2023 and onward might look like for indie authors, and realized that goal setting is useless, if you don’t have a good idea of

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Pen Names – 2022 Update.

December 23, 2022 / Distribution, Genre, INDIE PUBLISHING, WRITING GENRE FICTION / 6 minutes of reading

This is Part 4 of an informal series about Pen Names. See Part 1 or Part 2 or Part 3 or Part 4. A PIFW reader reached out to me a couple of days ago, asking questions about pen names, branding and genres, and in particular, how they impact the Amazon algorithms. My response to him

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How to Brainstorm Your Fiction

September 23, 2022 / Getting Ideas, Plotting & Outlining, Story Concept, WRITING GENRE FICTION / 8 minutes of reading

How to Brainstorm Your Fiction 6 Steps, No Rules. Just unique, original stories. I attended the When Words Collide conference on the weekend, and was a speaker on a number of panels, including one on brainstorming. I was taken aback by the turnout for that panel, and the trend of the questions from the audience

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