For Writers

  • How to Tackle Editorial Feedback

    How does editorial feedback work? First I send my manuscript in Word doc format to my US and UK editors. I think it’s generally more common for writers to work… Read more

  • Dealing with Bad Reviews

    For obvious reasons, we authors tend to share our good publication news and hope the less-good stuff gets buried in the far corners of the Internet, but I thought it… Read more

  • How to Organize Your WIP

    The best part of writing is organizing the writing. (Kidding.) (Kind of.) First off, WIP = work in progress. Secondly, writing a book is… f***ing chaos. Truth be told, the… Read more

  • How I Pitch My Book Titles

    Today I’m going to share the PowerPoint deck I prepared for my book 2 title pitch. With my debut, Darling Rose Gold, that title was found by consensus—and, frankly, was… Read more

  • My Proofreading Checklist

    For me, there’s standard proofreading, which I do to every draft before I turn it in, and then there’s heavy duty proofreading, like what I’ve outlined below. I don’t proofread… Read more

  • How to Self-Edit

    Thank you to the reader who asked me to discuss how I approach edits. To be honest, I’ve been stumped about how to answer this seemingly simple question! That might… Read more

  • How to Find Beta Readers

    If you don’t know a single fellow writer, where the hell do you get qualified feedback? For this question, I turned to some writer friends for their advice. First, though,… Read more

  • My Essential Writing Tools

    I suspect that we writers like to discuss our tools of the trade because that’s a more straightforward conversation than where our ideas come from or how we turn garbage… Read more

  • How I Beat Writer’s Block

    Writer’s block is something I stressed a lot about before becoming published but have rarely thought of since. The block is nothing more than our inner perfectionists wresting control—we resist… Read more

  • How a Novel Gets Its Cover

    A cover is incredibly important to a book’s success, so you want to get it right. I was lucky in that I loved my cover for my first book, Darling… Read more

  • How a Novel Gets Its Title

    One question I’m frequently asked is how my book ended up with its title(s), so I thought I’d shed a little light on the process. The book you know as… Read more

  • 8 Questions to Ask a Prospective Agent

    Congratulations! The hardest part of the agent journey is behind you: you’ve received one—or more!—offers of representation. Now it’s time to figure out whether you and this agent are a… Read more