Fiction Writing

Research, Write, and Promote Your…

October 31, 2018 | Evan Marshall

Writing a novel isn’t easy. In some ways, however, it has never been easier. Remember when writers used typewriters to prepare manuscripts? No? Be thankful.

And that’s not all that’s changed. Whether you have mobility problems due to age, handicap, a lack of money, or you just don’t like the look of the weather, you can now handle researching, writing, and promoting your novel without even getting near your front door.

Researching Your Novel Online

Going to the library and visiting the settings you want to use in your novel is a great idea. Many writers supplement this with any of the many online tools that aid research. And let’s face it – that big search engine beginning with G is a great starting point. In many cases, it’s possible to do all your research without leaving your chair.

Even if you need to research a location, Google Street View allows you to visit places and look around 360 degrees. This can save you time, as well as potentially saving you a fortune on air fare.

Also remember that people like to be helpful. Quora is a great place to find experts who will answers your questions for the love of sharing their specialist knowledge and building their platforms online.

Writing

Today’s authors have the power of desktop publishing at their fingertips. You can outline, plot, write, and redraft your novel without taking a step outside your home.

When you’re ready, send your book to your editor by email. Then review the edits via Office’s Track Changes. Finally, you can read your page proofs online.

This not only makes things more convenient, but it also makes the writing and publishing process faster.

Writing and publishing is still a collaborative occupation for most people, but collaboration with other professionals can happen via your laptop, which is good, because many authors like to collaborate in their pajamas at 5 in the morning.

Promoting

If you’re an author, you will have heard about the importance of your author platform, which comprises your website, social media presence, and email newsletters.

Guess what? You can create and maintain all of these from your desk chair.

Many authors handle much of the business of being a writer via their smartphones. They are connected to their readers via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many more.

Facebook, in particular, has fantastic tools for targeting readers and advertising to them. With the right social media platforms, some reading, and some persistence, you can put the power of a small marketing team behind your words.

People say that writing is a solitary profession. The tools now available to you as a writer mean that it is potentially more solitary than ever. For some, this will be a blessing. For others, don’t forget to get out for a walk every now and then.

Computer Generated Novels

October 31, 2018 | Evan Marshall

Fans of “A Song of Ice And Fire” – the epic fantasy series on which TV series Game of Thrones is based – are eager for George R R Martin to finish the next book the in series. Fan Zack Thoutt demonstrated his impatience by creating an AI system that wrote the opening of the next book. To do so, he fed the machine 5000+ pages of the series and sat back while it generated predictions for how the series would progress.

While not perfect, it was able to learn about Martin’s style. It starts each chapter with a character’s name, just as he does.

This isn’t the first time that a computer has generated a novel and it won’t be the last.

When Did Computer-Generated Fiction Become a Thing?

You may have heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but have you heard of NaNoGenMo? In 2013, developer and artist Darius Kazemi tweeted a suggestion that people write code that generates a 50,000-word novel and so NaNoGenMo was born.

National Novel Generation Month encourages people to write computer programs that will generate a novel. For now, computer-generated novels are more about entertainment for the creators and amusement for the readers than a serious competition to traditional writers – that is, writers without a built-in CPU.

Examples of Computer Generated Novels

Teens Wander Around a House by Darius Kazemi– As the title suggests, this is a novel in which teens wander around a house.

The programmer had the characters move around a house at random, with the program narrating their movements. When they ended up in the same room, they started a dialogue that was pulled from Twitter.

Each sentence would use the same keyword, keeping the conversation focused, though not necessarily making much sense or being interesting.

Twide and Twejudice by Michelle Fullwood – In this take on Pride and Prejudice, the original dialogue has been substituted for a word that was used in a similar context on Twitter. It makes for some amusing, but largely unintelligible reading.

50,000 Meows by Hugo van Kemenade – In this novel, all words a replaced with a meow of the same length. Punctuation is unchanged.

Whether you want to read The Jungle Book or Moby Dick, you can now do so in cat language.

Here is an excerpt from the meow version of The Jungle Book, with translation:

He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his

Me mew m meeoooow, meeeow meow m meeeow mew me mew mew mew mew

tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His

meow, mew meoow meow m meeeow me mew meow mew mew meeoow. Mew

eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink. He could scratch

meow mew mew mew me mew meooooow meow meow meow. Me meeow meeeoow

himself anywhere he pleased with any leg, front or back, that he

meeooow meeeeeow me meeooow meow mew mew, meeow me meow, meow me

chose to use. He could fluff up his tail till it looked like a

meeow me mew. Me meoow meeow me mew meow meow me meeeow meow m

bottle brush, and his war cry as he scuttled through the long

meeoow meeow, mew mew mew mew me me meeeeeow meeeoow mew meow

grass was: “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”

meoow mew: “Meow-meow-meeow-meoow-meow!”

And so on.

Definition Book by Sam Coppini – This novel starts with an 8-word sentence. The program then chooses a word to define for the reader and continues to do so, defining one word used in each subsequent definition, until the book is 50,000 words long.

Generated Detective by Greg Borenstein – This is a noir comic. The developer’s program searches detective novels on Project Gutenberg for sentences that include the following words:

[:question, :murderer, :witness, :saw, :scene, :killer, :weapon, :clue, :accuse, :reveal]

It also selects images from Flickr, runs them through a manga app, and delivers the reader a noir story that Kazemi describes as being “a very disjointed, dream-like narrative, like most NaNoGenMo narratives.”

Who Reads Computer-Generated Fiction?

It seems that computer-generated fiction is best when consumed in small doses. Twitter makes a great delivery system. Via Twitter, authors can space content out so that a novel is ready over several weeks or months in an episodic fashion rather than all at once.

This kind of fiction is popular with people into conceptual art and new forms of fiction. It also appeals to people who desire more customized reading experiences. Through advancing digital technology and AI, people can read novels in which they appear in the action, or in which the reader can swap the genders of various characters.

Computer-generated writing is not about to replace the author. Nor is it intended to. Rather, it’s a fascinating way to consider what a novel is and how they are written. Those that reach for humanity miss in hilarious, disturbing, or heartbreaking ways. Others make no attempt to replicate the human touch, but the results are often nonetheless interesting.

You’re Never Too Young or…

October 31, 2018 | Evan Marshall

If you’re a young writer, you have an opportunity to write from the heart or from a perspective to which most readers may be unaccustomed. If you’re advanced in years, you may have enormous life experience and maybe even some wisdom to bring to your work.

Some of the best novels combine the two. There are plenty of very young and very old authors who prove that readers are not prejudiced against the age of the writer.

Don’t want to take our word for it? How about taking the words of these well-known authors who started writing and publishing in their youth?

Ida Pollock – best known for her many romance and erotic novels, written under multiple pseudonyms, Pollock completed her first thriller, “The Hills of Raven’s Haunt,” at the age of 14.

Christopher Paolini – You may have heard of the “Inheritance Cycle,” the fantasy series comprising the books: “Eragon,” “Eldest,” “Brisingr,” and “Inheritance,” but did you know that he wrote these after graduating from high school?

A best-selling author at the age of 19, Paolini even designed the cover art and maps for the first edition of “Eragon.”

Françoise Sagan – This French novelist (and playwright and screenwriter) was best-known for her first novel, “Bonjour Tristesse” (1954), written when she was a teenager.

Anne Frank – Almost everyone knows the tragic story of this remarkable young woman. She began writing in her diary on her 13^th birthday. She journaled her time in hiding during the war, she wrote short stories, and aspired to be a journalist and famous writer.

Though she and her family were transported to concentration camps, where they died months later, her diary lives on. It is one of the world’s most widely-known books. “The Diary of a Young Girl” was published in 1952 and has been translated into more than 60 languages.

Mary Shelley – Some people are shocked to discover that 1818’s Gothic novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus” was written by a woman. If you manage to elicit this reaction during conversation, pause, then drop in the fact that she wrote the novel at just 20 years old.

At the other end of the age spectrum:

Marquis de Sade – Before “50 Shades of Gray,” there was Marquis de Sade. Best-known for his novel “Justine,” he was imprisoned for real-life sexual excesses. In prison, he wrote sexually graphic plays and novels to cope with his anger and boredom.

He wrote an early version of “Justine” in 1787, in his late forties.

William S. Burroughs – An influence to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Burroughs admits that he wouldn’t have become a writer if it wasn’t for the tragic death of his wife, by his hand, in a drunken game of William Tell. “Naked Lunch” was published in 1959 when Burroughs was in his mid-40s.

Helen Hooven Santmyer – She worked as a writer, educator, and librarian, but is best-known for her best-selling “…And Ladies of the Club,” published when she was in her 80s.

Ida Pollock – When it comes to staying power, we return to Ida Pollock. She was the world’s oldest novelist when she died at 105 in 2013. Although she was unable to sit at her typewriter, she was dictating novels to her daughter beyond her 100^th birthday.

It’s never too soon to start writing your novel. And it’s never too late.

One thing connects all of the writers in this post: once they started writing, not one of them gave up.

The Rise of Shorter Works

October 31, 2018 | Evan Marshall

Publishers and agents understand their genres and their readers inside out. At least, they should. Genre is one of the main factors that influence how long a book should be. The length of the novel used to be more of an issue for novelists and publishers, however, before the rise in popularity of the ebook and digital reading platforms.

Typically, publishers consider books to be “novel-length” when they are between 50,000 and 120,000 words. If you’re in the middle of this territory, say around 80,000 – 90,000 words, this is a good length as far as most publishers are concerned.

Young Adult novels can be shorter without raising eyebrows. A novel of 50,000 – 80,000 words is probably about right. Thriller and horror novels are often between 70,000 and 90,000 words. Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, however, tend to run longer, at between 90,000 – 120,000+ words.

Publishers have come to these conclusions based on experience and market research, as well as the cost of print materials, distribution, and how print books are displayed in bookshops and, to a lesser extent, libraries.

Factors that might have dissuaded a publisher from buying a shorter work, such as the cost of production, are no longer a barrier with digital publishing. Shorter fiction is having success online.

We’re seeing an increase in the popularity and study of microfiction, with stories as short as a few words finding a growing audience. Alice Munro, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 as a master of the contemporary short story, has a catalog that consists primarily of short story collections.

While short fiction has traditionally been unrewarding or even considered hobbyist, it is now commercially viable.

Of course, we have classic novels that are shorter than the standard novels, such as John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange.”

Check out the Amazon Bestseller list and you’re likely to find several very short books, under 100 pages, ready to give readers fast entertainment.

Amazon promotes “Short Reads: Great Stories in One Sitting” and allows readers to browse by reading time, from “15 minutes” to “2 hours or more.” There is even a category for “15-minute Coffee Break” reads.

James Patterson tops the charts in “Kindle Single Best Sellers,” with stories including “Manhunt” and “Detective Cross,” alongside Jeffrey Deaver’s best-selling “Surprise Ending.”

By producing shorter works, you can get your books in front of readers faster and more frequently. There are plenty of paying readers enjoying shorter novels, so writing shorter novels is not only good for new authors, but it can be a lucrative business too.

When considering the length of your book, however, it’s helpful to consider the following two things: the expectations of your readers, and how many words it takes to tell your story effectively. Your novel should be no longer, nor any shorter, than is necessary to tell the story.

How to Write a Novel:…

October 24, 2018 | Evan Marshall

Scenes in novels are always written from a specific viewpoint. Your novel should have a “set” of viewpoint characters. Every scene or chapter is written from the viewpoint of one of these characters. Generally, the longer the novel, the more viewpoint characters you’ll have.

The concept of viewpoint writing is important to understand, because it makes your novel come truly alive by giving readers the illusion of living your story through these characters.

The Pitfalls of Novel Writing with No Viewpoint

You’d be surprised how many projects I see that are written with no viewpoint. I think it must be the influence of the movies.

Movies and TV shows have an omniscient viewpoint typically, in which the viewer knows and sees all, like an observer floating over everything in a god-like position. We don’t ever get inside characters’ heads the way we do in novels. Omniscient viewpoint works in film but does not work in today’s commercial novels because it shatters the illusion of living a story through certain characters’ eyes. “Head-hopping”—jumping back and forth between two or more characters’ viewpoints in a scene or chapter—is a no-no among editors (an exception is often made for the romance novel, because many readers like knowing what the hero and heroine are both thinking in a given scene or chapter).

Deciding on your story’s set of viewpoint characters brings focus and power to your novel, making it a more immediate and realistic experience for your readers. A mastery of viewpoint writing also signals to agents, editors and readers that you are a professional and know your craft.

Viewpoint as a Novel-Writing Technique

To stick to one viewpoint, it is as simple as only sharing what a given character knows, sees, and experiences directly. From there, choose first person, second person, or third person viewpoint. Use:

• “I said,”

• “you said,” or

• “he/she said.”

How to Write a Novel with the Marshall Plan

I defined this essential technique in my book The Marshall Plan® for Novel Writing in 1998, and the concept is one of the cornerstones of the NovelCreator® software, first published online with Martha Jewett in 2008.

A longstanding literary tool, The Marshall Plan® was set for an update. I’m excited about the just-released version five of the Marshall Plan® software, offering many more viewpoint writing tools and an integrated character development screen. It also includes a flexible novel structure.

Users will have many more powerful tools at their fingertips. To be one of them, visit www.themarshallplan.net to learn more and download our free trial.

How to Turn a Short…

October 19, 2018 | Evan Marshall

A well-crafted short story doesn’t have to stop where it is. If you are interested in developing your short story into a longer novel, ask yourself the following questions to make the path clearer.

Why Do You Want to Expand Your Short Story?

This is an important question to ask, and likely the first issue you should address.

Do you want to explore and expand the characters and universe you have created? This can be an exciting motivation for adding to a short story that will keep you motivated. Perhaps you want to explore the format of a novel, which may be more challenging if you are used to creating shorter pieces.

Whatever your motivation, be sure that your story is worth expanding. If it’s perfect as a short story, you may want to pick something else, but if it’s clear that there’s more to tell, go for it.

How Can You Add to the Plot?

Of course, expanding a short story into a novel means adding more to the plot. You will have to look at your existing main plot to see where there is potential for more conflict, character development, and action.

Make sure anything you add contributes to the central theme of the story. A novel is not a short story plus filler material.

It can be helpful to look at your short story as one small part of the novel. The ending of your short story doesn’t have to be the ending of the novel. You can use it as a jumping point to explore what happens in your characters’ world next.

Beware of adding dialogue, too many characters, or extraneous details to add to your word count. Everything you put into your novel should belong, just as it did in your short story.

How Can You Ensure Writing Success?

Structure is key in any written work, but especially in longer pieces like novels. Mapping out your short story as a novel is key to making sure that it has a solid structure that can be filled in with the details, characters, and plot points that will bring your world to life.

Set up a good plan for your short story and remember your goals so that you remain motivated. By being ambitious and staying dedicated to the task, you can have a powerful novel on your hands in due time.

How to Fix a Bad…

October 17, 2018 | Evan Marshall

There are two major ways a book manuscript can fall flat. A manuscript may have no real beginning, or it may have no real ending. While both are signs of a bad manuscript, you can fix either problem.

A Story with No Start

Beginnings are hard. We know. They are the introduction to your book, and perhaps the most important part of the novel, as this is what readers use to determine whether or not they are going to read on. A manuscript with no real start, therefore, has a massive problem.

You can fix a manuscript with no real opening by digging into your characters and their motivations. Why are they in the situation that makes this story worth telling? What events led up to this?

The opening situation or crisis has to be strong enough to motivate your character to action. By showing your character before and after the plot point that has turned his or her life upside down, you will have a start for your book.

Fixing a Manuscript with No Ending

If your book has the opposite problem – no ending – there’s a way to finish the story with a bang. A classic climactic ending is classic because it works well.

Consider an ending that brings your main character face to face with the antagonist. Write a confrontation. Think about bringing your main character very close to peril or failure, but let them turn it around with their skill, bravery, and talent.

Whatever you do, remember that your climax should typically be the most exciting part of your novel. That doesn’t mean that it needs to be an action scene with your main character jumping from a helicopter onto a moving train, but it should be emotionally charged. It’s the moment for which your readers have been waiting.

From there you might consider writing briefly about your character’s path forward and what he or she has learned from this colossal event.

You can always try writing various endings to see which fits best. Plot out potential conclusions and ensure that they fit into the overall structure of your novel. This will show you what works and what feels most natural.

By asking and answering the right questions, you can turn a bad manuscript into something that shines. A combination of good writing and strong structure will help you bring your ideas to life.

Computer Generated Novels

October 15, 2018 | Evan Marshall

Fans of A Song of Ice And Fire – the epic fantasy series on which TV series Game of Thrones is based – are eager for George R R Martin to finish the next book the in series. Fan Zack Thoutt demonstrated his impatience by creating an AI system that wrote the opening of the next book. To do so, he fed the machine 5000+ pages of the series and sat back while it generated predictions for how the series would progress. While not perfect, it was able to learn about Martin’s style. It starts each chapter with a character’s name, just as he does.

This isn’t the first time that a computer has generated a novel and it won’t be the last.

When Did Computer-Generated Fiction Become a Thing?
You may have heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but have you heard of NaNoGenMo? In 2013, developer and artist Darius Kazemi tweeted a suggestion that people write code that generates a 50,000-word novel and so NaNoGenMo was born.

Examples of Computer Generated Novels
Teens Wander Around a House by Darius Kazemi. As the title suggests, this is a novel in which teens wander around a house. The programmer had the characters move around a house at random, with the program narrating their movements. When they ended up in the same room, they started a dialogue that was pulled from Twitter. Each sentence would use the same keyword, keeping the conversation focused, though not necessarily making much sense or being interesting.

Twide and Twejudice by Michelle Fullwood. In this take on Pride and Prejudice, the original dialogue has been substituted for a word that was used in a similar context on Twitter. It makes for some amusing, but largely unintelligible reading.

50,000 Meows by Hugo van Kemenade. In this novel, all words are replaced with a meow of the same length. Punctuation is unchanged.

Whether you want to read The Jungle Book or Moby Dick, you can now do so in cat language. Here is an excerpt from the meow version of The Jungle Book, with translation:

He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his
Me mew m meeoooow, meeeow meow m meeeow mew me mew mew mew mew
tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His
meow, mew meoow meow m meeeow me mew meow mew mew meeoow. Mew
eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink. He could scratch
meow mew mew mew me mew meooooow meow meow meow. Me meeow meeeoow
himself anywhere he pleased with any leg, front or back, that he
meeooow meeeeeow me meeooow meow mew mew, meeow me meow, meow me
chose to use. He could fluff up his tail till it looked like a
meeow me mew. Me meoow meeow me mew meow meow me meeeow meow m
bottle brush, and his war cry as he scuttled through the long
meeoow meeow, mew mew mew mew me me meeeeeow meeeoow mew meow
grass was: “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”
meoow mew: “Meow-meow-meeow-meoow-meow!”
And so on.

Definition Book by Sam Coppini. This novel starts with an 8-word sentence. The program then chooses a word to define for the reader and continues to do so, defining one word used in each subsequent definition, until the book is 50,000 words long.

Generated Detective by Greg Borenstein. This is a noir comic. The developer’s program searches detective novels on Project Gutenberg for sentences that include the following words:

[:question, :murderer, :witness, :saw, :scene, :killer, :weapon, :clue, :accuse, :reveal]

It also selects images from Flickr, runs them through a manga app, and delivers to the reader a noir story that Kazemi describes as being “a very disjointed, dream-like narrative, like most NaNoGenMo narratives.”

Who Reads Computer-Generated Fiction?
It seems that computer-generated fiction is best when consumed in small doses. Twitter makes a great delivery system. Via Twitter, authors can space content out so that a novel is read over several weeks or months in an episodic fashion rather than all at once.

This kind of fiction is popular with people who are into conceptual art and new forms of fiction. It also appeals to people who desire more customized reading experiences. Through advancing digital technology and AI, people can read novels in which they themselves appear in the action, or in which the reader can swap the genders of various characters.

Computer-generated writing is not about to replace the human author. Nor is it intended to. Rather, it’s a fascinating way to consider what novels are and how they are written. Those that reach for humanity miss in hilarious, disturbing, or heartbreaking ways. Others make no attempt to replicate the human touch, but the results are often nonetheless interesting.

Novels Based on Real Historical…

May 21, 2018 | Evan Marshall

While history is fascinating, it can seem dry if you’re stuck with historical texts and academic textbooks. For history lovers looking for the human side of famous events, it’s worth picking up a novel based on real historical events.

While authors may take artistic license, elaborate, and bend the truth with characterization, these novels can fire up the imagination and transport you to an authentic time and place.

Anita Shreve’s “The Stars are Fire”

Shreve’s novel, “The Stars are Fire,” is based on real-life events that took place in Maine in 1947. Drought led to a major fire that killed sixteen people and left many without homes. Fishermen and the Coast Guard had to rescue people from the coast.

In this novel, the protagonist Grace is a young mother, pregnant with her third child, and she has a husband she no longer loves. She is one of the people waiting for rescue with her children. With her home gone, she faces an uncertain future, which Shreve explores.

Shrive was inspired by the Maine fires and used archival information to research the disaster and build the story.

V. S. Alexander’s Novels

“The Magdalen Girls” is set in Dublin in 1962, in the city’s Magdalen Laundries, workhouses for women. The protagonist, Teagan, and her friend Nora plot a way to escape.

The book is known for its attention to historical detail, truly showing what life was like in this era and setting, and depicting the inhumane treatment of women in the laundries.

Another of Alexander’s novels, “The Taster,” is a World War II-era read. It tells the story of a German woman who, in 1943, is sent to Bavaria and then the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat. There, she is employed as a taster, trying Hitler’s food first to see if it is poisoned. She finds herself confronting the atrocities of the Reich, and falling in love.

Again, this is a work that exemplifies attention to historical detail, with the added humanity of Alexander’s characters.

Historical fiction can be as delightful to write as it is to read. It involves research and deep digging to be accurate, but for the history buffs out there, there is no better combination.

If you are looking for good story ideas, think about looking to the past and allow yourself to be inspired by historical events.

The Ever-Popular Sequel

April 25, 2018 | Evan Marshall

It can be tempting to try to cash in on the success of a novel with a sequel. Sometimes this is an effective way to keep a good thing going and shore up sagging sales. Other times, however, nothing can compare to the original and an author risks tarnishing the reputation of the earlier work.

“Peyton Place” / “Return to Peyton Place”

“Peyton Place,” written in 1956 by Grace Metalious, quickly became a bestseller and sold more than 30 million copies. It became the bestselling novel of the 20th century until “The Godfather” displaced it from that spot.

The sequel, “Return to Peyton Place,” was published in 1959. A Time magazine review said the book “bears all the marks of a book whacked together on a long weekend.”

Though successful, it sold far fewer copies than the original, reaching #13 on the New York Times bestseller list.

For authors looking at this scenario, it goes to show that it’s worth taking the time to develop and write a great sequel. It’s imprudent to assume or simply hope that your original success will carry over to the next project.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” / “Go Set a Watchman”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning “To Kill a Mockingbird” is well known and well loved by many. Protagonist Atticus Finch risks his life to save the life of an innocent black man. In Harper Lee’s novel “Go Set a Watchman,” however, Finch is racist.

The book was originally marketed as a sequel to “To Kill A Mockingbird,” which has perplexed and upset many readers who loved the original portrayal of Atticus Finch as a moral stalwart.

Fans agree that it doesn’t seem to work as a sequel, although its events are sequential to the first book. The power of marketing, however, is such that the publishers tried to sell it as a logical progression.

If your characters undergo massive changes, as Atticus Finch does here, be prepared for your fans to revolt.

“Gone With the Wind” / “Scarlett”

Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 classic saw a 1991 sequel, written by Alexandra Ripley. While it was panned by many critics, including authors, it did well commercially and sold over a million copies.

While reviewers might not have loved it, fans did. If you choose to write a sequel, consider the balance or trade-off between critical approval and pleasing your fans.

“Fifty Shades of Grey” / “Fifty Shades Darker”

This modern-day series is another set of books that reviewers hate but readers love. E. L. James’s

“Fifty Shades of Grey” hit the top of worldwide bestseller lists and sold well over a hundred million copies.

The sequel “Fifty Shades Darker” did well, too, as did the third book in the series, “Fifty Shades Freed.” While these sequels didn’t match the success of the original, the series is holding strong.

Smart marketing and getting your idea out at the right time can help a series realize its commercial potential.

The best sequels build on the original story, delivering something deeper or something new. Whether you are working on your first novel, or part of a larger series, focus on creating a strong outline with believable characters and your fans might follow you anywhere.

Research, Write, and Promote Your…

Researching Your Novel Online

Writing

Promoting

Computer Generated Novels

You’re Never Too Young or…

The Rise of Shorter Works

How to Write a Novel:…

How to Turn a Short…

How to Fix a Bad…

Computer Generated Novels

Novels Based on Real Historical…

The Ever-Popular Sequel

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