#AmWriting

Hey writers—super-practical episode this week! Call it part two of the Sarina coaches KJ through her book launch series. This week, it’s the #MarketingMojo page—things you’ll need as you market your book no matter what the book is or when it launches. This is the road to creating things like back-of-the-book or flap copy, ad copy, social media post copy and more, for fiction and non-fiction both....

Feeling a wee bit stuck? Struggling to get anything on the page? Well, we all are—and not only does this week’s guest know from writer’s block (her last book came out in 2004), but she gave a raging case of it to her protagonist in her new novel, which allowed her—and us—to really dig in deep into what happens when the words don’t come. Join KJ and Sarina as we talk to Laura Zigman, author of Sepa...

Well, fellow writers, when we recorded this we were just at the beginning of it all. It’s safe to say things have already changed—all of us have families at home, we’re all shut down, with noisy houses full of people trying in various ways to work online. We went from “trying to work anyway” through “I give up for a few days” and now we’re back to “trying to work anyway.” So this advice still appl...

Hey listeners! It’s been a mad mad mad week here (all of you in the future, check the date), and I bet there too. Result: there are no shownotes for this episode. We’re talking about revamping my website to get it in gear for my forthcoming second book. Here’s the image we mention—the before—and for the after (which is still in progress), head over to my site and see what you think. Any questions,...

And you thought our shelves full of self help books were just to manage our own issues! Nope, there’s another use for them. Our guest this week, Kathleen Smith, is a therapist and writer and the author of Everything Isn't Terrible , a helpful and humorous guide to shedding our anxious habits and building a more solid sense of self in our increasingly anxiety-inducing world. It’s very useful, and w...

It’s our 200th episode! In all that time, we’ve never missed a week and never regretted our choice to spend 40 minutes (ish) together—and with you. We love doing the podcast, so this week we thought we’d answer a few podcast-y questions we get a lot: should you start a podcast? Can a podcast help promote a book? Is there gold in them thare podcast hills? We talk about all that and more—but here’s...

Our guest today, Dan Blank, sure seems like a man who loves his work. On his own podcast, the Creative Shift, he’s a warm and engaged interviewer. In his emails, he’s genuine and engaged. Is he selling his book and his services as an advisor to authors developing their platform and launching their work into the world? Sure, but it never feels like he’s selling. It feels like he’s sharing. Wouldn’t...

We’re interviewing Julie Lythcott-Haims this week and you won’t want to miss it, because 1) she wrote an amazing, best-selling book called How to Raise an Adult and then followed THAT up with a memoir, Real American , that the New York Times Book Review pretty much thought was amazing and is now drafting the sequel to Adult very much on her own terms; and 2) she could very easily have become Jess’...

Marika Flatt is the founder of PR By the Book , an independent publicity firm dedicated to working with authors, publishers and books. Their tagline is “from author to influencer,” and we talk about that process—and how your goals as an author (sell books, get speaking gigs, sell earlier books, increase name recognition, even sell products or services) change how you might work with a publicist, a...

It started with a question in the #AmWriting Facebook group: How do you get it all done? And the answer was, of course—we don’t, no one does, we push things off until tomorrow or we put out fires all day and then frantically write until late in the evening or we drive our children around for hours while chastising ourselves for not making better choices. But really, you all said. Really truly when...

How do you become a science writer? What if you didn’t even think you liked science as a kid? What if, instead of “serious journalism”, you spent the first half of your career covering celebrities and royals, even becoming the London Bureau Chief for People magazine? Then you’re in perfect shape, at least if you’re our guest, Lydia Denworth. She tells us how she made that transition, going from Pe...

Struggling to put a price on your time? Jess and Sarina (an economist and former trader on Wall Street) help your find that elusive number. A listener asked Jess for advice on consulting fees, so in order to find an answer more satisfying than, “It depends,” Jess and Sarina get down to economic brass tacks. Sarina explains how publishers or anyone else who wants to hire you for your writing value...

She writes Emmy-winning television comedy, bestselling children’s books, plays, and sentences for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Is there nothing Jill Twiss can’t do? Musical theater actress and stand-up comic Jill Twiss dreamed of writing for television but did not know how to break in to the world of late-night comedy shows. The stars aligned when a few supportive women called some chits on...

“Every writer,” book coach Jennie Nash tells us, “ thinks at some point that they just cannot do this. That’s just part of the process.” It’s not our favorite part—but it’s true, and getting past that stage and on with the job of finishing a book in any genre is the part of the process that many writers just can’t seem to conquer. But for some of us—like Jennie—helping other people get past that r...

Whoa. Fellow writers, 2020 is upon us. And here at #AmWriting HQ, we love setting annual goals. We really do. We adore everything about it, from the anticipation and planning to the writing them in our handy dandy notebooks (although this year KJ got paralyzed by the need to make them pretty and ended up with temporary under a to-do list scribbles). One reason we love it so much is that we feel go...

We’re reviewing our 2019 goals. Did we gloriously achieve? Live up to our words of the year by focusing on the worthy? Check every box and climb every mountain? We did okay. In some cases, we killed. In others, there were extenuating circumstances. Goals were revised, cast aside, postponed. All part of the process. To hear how we did, listen in—and be sure to share your bests and worsts from 2019...

We all know you can’t really buy the things we writers want: inspiration, the power to spend as much time writing our books as we do thinking about them—not to mention sales, agents and editors. But you CAN grab a few things that make the writerly journey more fun. In this episode, we talk about the joys of journals and the perfect markers, tech tools that qualify as investments and those that are...

Turns out you should judge a book by its cover, and readers do. Which means authors need to consider that (and not our own taste) when we think about our own covers. This week, we talk about the two things to consider whether you’re an indie working with cover artists or a trad with a publisher and an art department: reader expectations and those now-you-can’t-stop-seeing-the-flowers trends, and i...

The infamous how-to meets self-help meets memoir-with-a-dash-of-stunt genre. It may be awkwardly named, but we love it. This week’s guest didn’t realize she was laying the groundwork for her first book when she decided to write 50 thank you notes to the people, things and places that shaped her in honor of her 50th birthday—but of course she was When you can define a thing and the time frame and t...

We wanted to talk holiday writing—as in, writing ABOUT holidays, not writing during the holidays. So we went strolling through the holly-bedecked halls of the Internet—because, #dominantculture, holiday books as they appear without a more specific web search means Christmas books and specifically, the 250 page equivalent of a bonbon of a Lifetime Christmas movie. We found Natalie Cox, author of th...

Here’s one way to learn how to write books that work in audio: narrate over 700 of them, like our guest this week, Tanya Eby. If that sounds a little daunting, listen in instead for the condensed version. Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, we sent out our first supporter-only #MiniSupporter episode this week: #Prewriting. Those will be short and sporadic bursts of advice and inspirat...

Every nonfiction book starts out as a glimmer of an idea. A topic. An area of interest or expertise. But you can’t just pitch a book about beekeeping, kids. You need to know a whole lot more. Is it a beekeeping memoir? A beekeeping how-to? A meditation about the relationship between bees and humanity? In this episode, we dish about how to answer those questions, because—spoiler—that’s exactly how...

Writers need a page, a profile and a whole lot of patience and persistence to even feel like we’re close to getting Facebook “right.” The question first appeared, as these things do, in the #AmWriting Facebook group . A book is coming! I’m on Facebook (obviously), but do I need an author page in addition to my profile? Why—and what should I do with one once I’ve got one? Our answer is yes, but of...

Novelist Abbi Waxman makes us laugh talking process and inspiration almost as much as we do when reading her books, with emphasis on using settings you know and love. Our transcription assistant reports that this was “her favorite episode ever.” It’s definitely a contender—Abbi Waxman is funny and candid about the challenges of creating characters and worlds that are engrossingly real yet also com...

Maybe you’re drafting a novel, maybe you’re not. Either way, we vote for seizing on the community energy generated by NaNo and getting some work done. The magic of NaNoWriMo isn’t in the number of words or the length of time or even the month of November. It’s in the community seizing this time—when we could so easily heave a giant sigh and say oh, well, November, it’s practically December, might...