Notes on craft, publishing, and the long work of making a book — from the people who do it.
Most writers submit too early, not because the work is bad, but because finishing a draft feels identical to finishing a book. It isn't.
Read more →We say we're selective, and that word does a lot of unexamined work. Here's what actually happens to a manuscript between submission and a yes.
Read more →These aren't three points on the same line. They're three different trades — of money, control, and time — and most advice about choosing between them skips that part.
Read more →Ahead of What the River Kept, we asked Ifeoma Chukwu why she keeps returning to the same stretch of coastline, book after book.
Read more →The Quiet Half was a quiet literary novel. The Currency of Small Lies is a thriller. We asked Ngozi Adeyemi what changed.
Read more →"Hook the reader in the first line" is bad advice taken literally. The actual requirement is narrower, and easier to hit, than that.
Read more →An ISBN is one of the most over-mystified parts of publishing. Here's what it actually is, in plain terms.
Read more →It slows us down, and we still do it. Here's the actual reasoning behind reading every manuscript we seriously consider a second time.
Read more →"Kill your darlings" gets repeated so often it's stopped meaning anything specific. We give authors a more useful question instead.
Read more →Cover design looks, from the outside, like one good idea arriving fully formed. From the inside, it looks like this.
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