HP demonstrates: * What is the best approach to take when creating book covers* How to optimize your book's description page* Choosing the category of your book* The question of pricing your book* The importance of Social Media and, more specifically, Facebook, Twitter and Blogging* How to get reviews including interviews with leading Review websites such as Dear Author* What to feature on your website* The importance of Search Engine Optimization* A Q&A with the people from Pubit!, the self publishing platform of Barnes and Noble* The seven steps of self publishing success from the owner of Smashwords, one of the largest and most well known self-publishing platforms* Tips and tidbits from Goodreads, the world's largest online book club website* And so much more!

     In this age of electronic correspondence and self-produced documents, we need a useful and reliable writing guide more than ever. Write Right! covers the essentials of good writing in a concise and easy-to-follow format. The new edition of this classic handbook takes you through the entire writing process, from understanding the parts of speech to constructing a correct sentence to fine-tuning the mechanics. And with clever drawings and amusing quotations to illustrate its points, Write Right! shows that language can be fun as well as an effective communication tool. Whether it's used to find a quick answer to a nagging question or to develop stronger writing skills, this handy reference is the ideal resource for writers of all levels.Includes a resource section with a list of helpful websites and a glossary to quickly define difficult terms.

    Each work of literature featured here is a seminal work key to understanding and appreciating the written word.The featured works have been handpicked by a team of international critics and literary luminaries, including Derek Attridge (world expert on James Joyce), Cedric Watts (renowned authority on Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene), Laura Marcus (noted Virginia Woolf expert), and David Mariott (poet and expert on African-American literature), among some twenty others.Addictive, browsable, knowledgeable--1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die will be a boon companion for anyone who loves good writing and an inspiration for anyone who is just beginning to discover a love of books. Each entry is accompanied by an authoritative yet opinionated critical essay describing the importance and influence of the work in question. Also included are publishing history and career details about the authors, as well as reproductions of period dust jackets and book designs.

    Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often they did their drinking together—Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of 1920s Paris; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams' New Orleans, from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.

    185 practical techniques for improving your story or novel

    DeSalvo advises her readers to explore their creative process on deeper levels by getting to know themselves and their stories more fully over a longer period of time. She writes in the same supportive manner that encourages her students, using the slow writing process to help them explore the complexities of craft. The Art of Slow Writing is the antidote to self-help books that preach the idea of fast-writing, finishing a novel a year, and quick revisions. DeSalvo makes a case that more mature writing often develops over a longer period of time and offers tips and techniques to train the creative process in this new experience.DeSalvo describes the work habits of successful writers (among them, Nobel Prize laureates) so that readers can use the information provided to develop their identity as writers and transform their writing lives. It includes anecdotes from classic American and international writers such as John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as well as contemporary authors such as Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. DeSalvo skillfully and gently guides writers to not only start their work, but immerse themselves fully in the process and create texts they will treasure.

    She shows how you, too, can get terrific ideas for stories, invent great beginnings and endings, write sparkling dialogue, develop memorable characters—and much, much more. She advises you about what to do when you feel stuck—and how to use helpful criticism. Best of all, she offers writing exercises that will set your imagination on fire.With humor, honesty, and wisdom, Gail Carson Levine shows you that you, too, can make magic with your writing.

    This collection, taken from the work of more that twenty years, explores an enviable range of scholarly interests: archaeology, myth, language, education, philosophy, the spiritual quest, mental health, literature, music and film.The book also serves as a poetic autobiography of one of England's best-loved but least public writers. He hears himself declared dead at the age of six; he draws on the deep vein of a rural working-class childhood in a family of craftsmen who instilled the passion for excellence and for innovation and humour. The disciplines he learnt as a Classicist give a shape and clarity to that passion in this richly various book that would have fascinated his forebears, whose work and lives are also celebrated here.This most unusual, most candid, most vivid picture of an English family and its home, its country's history, is also a devastating revelation of a writer's own life. Alan Garner's account of his mental illness will become a classic, and each strand of the book will be a source of fascination to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of an Alan Garner story, as also to all who concern themselves with the craft of writing.

    Experienced editor and publisher Jane Friedman offers insights from more than 15 years of working on both sides of the desk, and offers step-by-step advice on: • evaluating the commercial potential for your work • finding and approaching editors and agents professionally • preparing query letters and book proposal materials • marketing and promoting your work effectively • protecting your rights and avoid infringing on others’ rights, and • understanding the self-publishing and ebook market—and if it’s the right path for you. PUBLISHING 101 describes the dramatic changes underway in the publishing industry, as ebook sales increase and physical bookstores decrease in number. These changes affect how authors get book deals—meaning you need to be prepared to adapt to a risk-averse industry during a time of uncertainty. Avoid frustration—don’t embark on the submission process without being fully educated about how the industry works. You’ll better focus your time and energy, increase your chances of success, and learn to decipher the language of industry professionals.

    You will see how a work takes form and shape once you grasp the principles of momentum, tension, and immediacy. "Tension," Stern says, "is the mother of fiction. When tension and immediacy combine, the story begins." Dialogue and action, beginnings and endings, the true meaning of "write what you know," and a memorable listing of don'ts for fiction writers are all covered. A special section features an Alphabet for Writers: entries range from Accuracy to Zigzag, with enlightening comments about such matters as Cliffhangers, Point of View, Irony, and Transitions.