Guides for new authors
Practical, honest guides to querying, craft, rejection and finding readers — shared with us by Carol Light, who has published seven novels.
Getting Published
Querying, agents, submissions and the road to a contract.
4 guides
Craft & Technique
Plot, character, pacing and the mechanics of a mystery that works.
3 guides
The Writing Life
Discipline, doubt, rejection and the challenges nobody warns you about.
3 guides
Marketing Yourself
Newsletters, launches, reviews and finding readers without a budget.
2 guides
Latest guides
How to query a literary agent
The query letter is a one-page sales document, not a summary. Here is what actually goes in it, and what to leave out.
What goes in a submission package
Query, synopsis, sample pages, and the formatting details that quietly mark you as a professional.
Small press, big publisher, or self-publishing?
Three routes, three honest trade-offs. What each actually asks of you, and how to tell a real small press from a vanity operation.
You have an offer. Now what?
What to check in a publishing contract, what is negotiable, and why you never sign in the first conversation.
Plotting a mystery that plays fair
The reader should be able to solve it and still fail to. That is the whole trick, and it is a structural problem, not a clever one.
Writing an amateur sleuth readers believe
The hardest question in the cozy mystery: why is this person investigating instead of calling the police?
How to write a series without painting yourself into a corner
What to decide in book one, what to leave open, and how to keep a character interesting across four books.
Surviving rejection
Rejection is not feedback on your worth, but it is not meaningless either. How to read it, and what to do next.
Finding time to write when you have a full life
Most novels are written by people with jobs, families and no spare afternoons. The constraint is not time — it is re-entry.
The messy middle, and how to get through it
Most abandoned novels are abandoned around the 40% mark. It is a predictable structural problem, not a sign the book is bad.
Follow the series
News from the writing desk, and word the moment there is a publication date.
Message the authors
Goes straight to the inbox — no bots, no autoresponder.