#AmWriting

Hooks, tropes, high concept. Comps. The publishing world tosses those phrases around like juggling balls, and I for one (as usual it’s KJ here) had a hard time understanding them for ages, especially the idea of a hook. But now I get it. A hook, in short, is the thing that gets someone—agent, editor, reader, movie-goer, etc—to say, following a one or two sentence description of the book: SOLD. Fic...

Hi all, Jess here! I’ve been getting a lot of questions in the #AmWriting Facebook group and in my DM/emails about speaking, so I’m going to do a series of bonus episodes about the topic. There’s so much to talk about, but since so many of the questions are about speaking agencies (working with them, getting one, how much of a cut do they take, how do you know which ones are good), I thought I’d s...

Sometimes you have to start with a memoir (that you never publish) to figure out who you are and where you’re going. Today’s guest has a nice impressive bio—but 8 years ago, she was just a writer staring at a screen and working on, as many of us do when we first start, a memoir. Emily Grosvenor is the editor of Oregon Home magazine , Willamette Week’s design publication Nester. She’s also written...

Hey #AmWriters! Jess here. I recorded a bunch of videos to answer all of your questions about creating video for book marketing but in the end, I figured an entire episode needed to happen in order to really get into the topic. I started creating daily videos based on the content in The Addiction Inoculation because I wanted to the information out there, and if it sold some books or rustled up som...

I know. I know. Long term listeners know what’s coming first but this first gift combo is an #AmWriting favorite for a good reason. The three of us own the same journal and nearly identical (save for the color of the elastic fastener and monogram) custom leather Fillion and we love them so much. Our favorite calendar/journal is, and has always been, the Leuchtturm1917 monthly planner with 136-page...

Pain by Elsie Robinson Imagine discovering that one of the highest paid, most well known journalists in the world, whose voice dominated the Hearst media empire for more than 30 years, who wrote something like 9,000 published articles… has basically disappeared from living memory. That’s the story of Julia Scheer and Allison Gilbert’s biography: Listen World: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became...

Ever feel like some things are just outside your ken? I’m that way with literary magazines. And I’ve never found the right retreat or residency, or applied for a grant, and I know sometimes it’s just that I don’t think I belong in that world. But worlds don’t usually just reach out and drag you in. That’s a fave theme of ours around here—you can’t be published unless you write something, etc. If y...

Many of you have heard me (this is obviously KJ) whine about my revision in process. Well, I’m here to report that it’s done, and successfully. Below is a full description of the process, and in the episode you’ll hear me talking about it with Jennie Nash. I detail everything except the Peeps that fueled me, and I decided it was wrong to leave them out. So, in addition to a lot of butt-in-chair ti...

Sometimes your first book is a gateway. For me—KJ—it was Reading with Babies, Toddlers and Twos , a book I wrote in 2006 with Susan Straub. Susan was the expert and I was a rising writer with a lesser expertise riding on her coattails. We pitched the book before I had many bylines at all—but adding the words “is the author of the forthcoming book…” to my pitches opened a lot of doors. The book its...

I (KJ here) adore Nanowrimo. Tell me it’s impossible to write a whole novel in a month, especially a month with Thanksgiving in it, and I will set out to prove you wrong. My first novel, The Chicken Sisters started as a NaNo project, as did Playing the Witch Card (which is probably coming out in Fall 2023). I… cannot NaNo this year (yes it’s a verb), because my next set of revisions, with an accom...

Listeners, we’re sharing this interview again because if you’re not already subscribed to Theodora’s substack, you should be. We sent you a taste of it this morning on top of this episode. We adored talking to TT, as we like to call her around here—but now that she’s revved up her Substack, every single time we’re texting back and forth about its brilliance. “Butter” has joined our official #AmWri...

Listeners, you KNOW we got granular with this one because there are just plain so many links! Terena Elizabeth Bell has been writing all her life. Her first short story was published in a literary magazine when she was in college—almost thirty years ago, and she’s published many since and won multiple awards. She’s also written for more than 100 publications, including The Atlantic, The Guardian,...

If you’ve listened to any of us for any time at all you know we love Laura Vanderkam, author of I Know How She Does It and 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think . People often attribute to KJ a piece of advice she learned from Laura: People are a good use of time. We think of Laura every time we start to call ourselves “too busy” and then remember that much of what fills our time is a choic...

Alexis Hall describes himself as a genrequeer writer of kissing books. You may know him as the author of Boyfriend Material and Rosalyn Palmer Takes the Cake , both of which we’ve talked about here. But like recent guest Emily Henry and so many others, those successes were far from his first rodeo. Head to his website, quicunquevult.com , to see the evidence. (Why is it called that? You’ll have to...

Kids, this interview with Gretchen Rubin is just too good not to share again. Find more about Gretchen, and sign up for her always interesting newsletter, here . Want to know which tendency you are? Take the quiz here . And which tendency would you attribute to your hosts? Answers coming soon… (or maybe in the episode…) Don’t forget that Author Accelerator is your one-stop for getting a coach on b...

THIS EPISODE. “Overnight success” Emily Henry reminds us that she’s not—she published three sad-and-serious YA novels before she embraced her real calling and wrote the book she craved— Beach Read , which she says “I never expected to send to anyone.” This discussion was so true to our hearts (KJ writing, Sarina co-signing). It’s hard to for some of us to give ourselves permission to write fun boo...

WHOA heading into fall like Hope you’re feeling the fall mojo more than we are. Struggling here, which is a bummer because usually fall is the season that gives when it comes to forward momentum. We, a subset of three, can’t tell if this is a mood that’s overtaken us all, or if it’s life stage specific when you have kids leaving the house, or if it’s just that that the weird weather is taking its...

You’ve got everything you need to write this book—so what now? You may be feeling pumped and ready to dive in, or you may be feeling overwhelmed. I know that the truth is that you’re all at somewhat different stages of this. Some of you were working with totally new material, others imposing a better structure on a project you’ve been working on for a long time and others somewhere in between. But...

You’re rolling into the final week of the challenge my friend! And yes, this episode is late. We’re rolling into the final moments before school starts in my house, and things are rough. But not in our Blueprints! Those are perfect… hahahahahaha. Listen. Your Blueprint isn’t perfect. This Inside/Outline or Outcome Outline sitting there, so shiny and new? It has flaws, my friend, flaws that will se...

This short outline thing is hard. It’s hard for one of two possible reasons: Either you don’t want to write an outline at all, bc “you know what you’re going to write” or you “hate outlining” or “don’t want to practically write it before I write it” OR you love outlining and could do it all day, to the tune of 17 pages all about what this is about and what it’s going to say and therefore “can’t po...

Pace, y’all. It’s the magic secret sauce in everything. And yet it’s also a squishy sounding word that’s almost undefinable. What is it? Can you point to it? Can you highlight it in yellow so I can see it? Can you tattoo it on my arm? I would if I could. But sadly, pace is invisible. In fact, write it out in so many words: I just knew that if I didn’t get that promotion, I’d feel like a failure fo...

Structure, people. It’s everything. Or it’s a very simple thing. Like I said in the shownotes, for fiction, chronological 3rd or 1st person, present or past tense, following the protagonist through the story is the white-button-down and jeans of structure. Always appropriate, almost invisible. For non-fiction, it’s harder—there is no fall-back basic, but a good trick is to pretend your book is eit...

Kids, this is a Blueprint for a Book Summer Challenge Bonus Episode. I’ll be dropping these weekly throughout the Summer 2022 Challenge. Some of you are already signed up and challenging away, turning in weekly assignments and pushing yourself to get this done. Some of you are #AmWriting supporters who’ve put your $$$ where your

Kids, this is a Blueprint for a Book Summer Challenge Bonus Episode. I’ll be dropping these weekly throughout the Summer 2022 Challenge. Some of you are already signed up and challenging away, turning in weekly assignments and pushing yourself to get this done. Some of you are #AmWriting supporters who’ve put your $$$ where your

THE MARKET. First of all, I am having the best day here. I’m through 9 of 10 phone call/Zoom interviews about In Her Boots, and 8 of those interviewers appeared to have read it or at least in one case started it (a record) and a bunch of them seemed to have genuinely LOVED it and I’m delighted. Why tell you this here? In part because something readers have come back to several times is a piece of...