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Most writers want to know if there is a magic formula to getting published in any capacity, and most published writers will tell you that there isn’t one. The only way to get published is to continuously send your work out there. The trick is to figure out the “continuous” part. As a working writer, I have discovered one kind of formula for success. The best part is that it is free! This formula comes in three easy steps, and if you stick to them, you can improve your chances of seeing more of your work published. All you need to do are these three things: keep writing, keep submitting and keep earning! Keep Writing You know the advice to “write every day.” Try taking this credo one step further by writing everything you get ideas for. Besides articles, I also write short fiction. One day, I was inspired by an idea for a short story. I didn’t know where to send it, but I wrote that story anyway. I later found somewhere to submit it. How This Can Work For You Writing variety can help you sell more work. How cool is it to be paid to write something More

Most authors and writers, we’re talking both in this piece, think that pitching is a 12-month, year-round activity when it is not. Whether talking contests, book publishers, or magazines, there is a bit of a science in the process, and if you want to improve your odds in this profession known for its high odds, it would behoove you to take note. BOOKS – Of course this advice is not 100 percent because the world is full of big, small, and mid-list publishers, each setting its own rules, but, general rules of thumb are these: 1) Pitch when you see a call for submissions. These are not common, but they happen, especially with small presses. If you are wishing to seek an agent to do this for you, then follow the same advice. Watch them on social media (they love Twitter) for when they say, “Hey, would love to read something involving……” That means they have markets in mind, and they feel the genre/topic is hot enough to quickly sell. You also want to feed them something they are in love with at that moment. That’s assuming what you have to offer fills their void. But this is why you shop for More

While a journalistic interview seems like a chummy experience at first glance, it can often be a complicated dance. The interviewer has to build rapport and keep the subject engaged in conversation while also keeping in mind that the person you are talking to isn’t your customer or boss. As someone who has worked most of the past dozen years freelance, I often liken it to that of a substitute teacher (a job I have also suffered) in that you have to maintain boundary lines with your subjects or you’ll get walked all over. As you start to talk with the source, there’s usually a sussing out on both sides. It self-consciously happens in every conversation but this is a heightened experience since the stakes are higher. From your end, you’re trying to figure out what kind of a source they are. Nearly all sources have something they want out of it: They could have something to promote (often more the case in soft journalism), they could have a message they want to get out, or they need to look good (especially in the case of a publicity representative). If not, why are they participating? To what degree do they More

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’m in my sixth decade, and as I sit here at the computer wondering how to define this point in my life, I realize I’m okay with it all. First of all, I have family. My heart goes out to those missing theirs, and I see on Facebook several of my fans who have lost spouses in the last two years. A day doesn’t go by that I do not silently wish them well. That’s an adaptation I do not look forward to. Maybe I won’t have to. I am not blind, however, to the fact that sometimes folks look at me as an older woman first before they see what I’m about. Especially in person. Everyone does it to a certain degree, making preliminary assumptions about someone due to their years, hair color, and lines around their eyes. I fight hard not to do that, and I work hard to avoid judging others. I can control me. I cannot control them. I avoid saying the word retirement. I retired from another profession that served me well, and few people realize that. But that’s okay. I am the sum total of my past, and what you More

We aren’t at the point—and I don’t want to reach it—where “miracle” AI software writes our stories for us, and we passively absorb them. Sure, AI can output all sorts of text from prompts and prodding, but the human touch remains essential in story shaping. But some writing software performs brawny labors to structure book-length works: like Scrivener. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction books, Scrivener can take tangled masses of information—character portraits, three-sentence notes, research URLs, images, chapter outlines, chapter drafts, chapters to come—into a coherent layout that not only lets you see what you’ve got, but lets you move everything into ordered arrangements. I recently published a memoir of my crazed years of teenage shoplifting, and Scrivener was the cop with his hand on my shoulder saying, “Wait a minute, son, let’s put everything back on the right shelf.” Because the memoir is made of moments from (gulp) 50 years ago, I couldn’t brush aside my brain cobwebs by myself. I needed to question pals and siblings who were around to witness my crimes about certain details. Many, many details rose to the surface, with detail follow-ups. Many, many emails needed re-confirmation, chopping and crafting. Twelve people in More

Call them bad guys or villains or antagonists, you need them in just about every genre that exists if you want an interesting story. Even nonfiction merits an opposition. For a story to capture readers, it needs adversity. And the bad side has to be every bit as devoted to winning as the good side, or the challenge doesn’t pique interest. Bad guys think they are right in their mission. They believe they are every bit as noble in their quest as the protagonist. To bring out the teeth of a story, whether short or long, historical or contemporary, fiction or nonfiction, the two sides have to balance the scale. Why? If the good guy isn’t being challenged by someone equally as strong, the tale carries no weight. The good guy doesn’t even have to flex all of their muscles or use their brain. The odds are too easy. The good guy has to feel defeated at various stages. The good guy has to fight to think like the bad guy, just like the bad guy is attempting to outthink the good. The good guy has to grow in their efforts, using tools they never used before in order to More

At some point, every writer loses an important file. If you’re lucky, it will be only one file. However, if your computer dies, gets hacked, or falls from a great height, you want to make sure you don’t lose your life’s work. The first time I had a computer die on me, the computer repair shop was able to rescue a majority of my creative writing documents. There would have been no way for me to re-write dozens of poems and story ideas. For the creative works that were not rescued from my computer, I was able to retrieve most of them from literary magazine submission portals, which involved logging on to the platforms and right-click-saving any documents I had uploaded. I am sure there are some ideas of mine that are lost to time. After that experience, I made sure to work smarter through the use of a few simple but important document-saving methods. Cloud-Based Templates You can store templates of important files on a cloud-based drive such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive. If you are a creative writer with a limited number of pieces that you are actively pitching to journals, you can keep those documents More

I received this email from a new FundsforWriters reader. I have paraphrased it a little bit to avoid showing her history. <<First, I love your site. I can’t wait to continue exploring all of the valuable information that you have. I am a new writer not yet published. I have read so much material (books, articles, blogs), you name it, about the craft or writing. Some of them try and convince me that I will write a great novel in 90 days. Others imply that self-publishing is the only way to currently get published. I honestly feel like I am swimming in TOO MUCH information. So, I guess my request would be an article helping new writers maneuver through the slush and read what we really need to get started. I hear your voice, “That is too broad a topic.” Probably so, but if you could just highlight a few that would help.>> My response: You are right. That is too broad a subject. But you are also right in that there is too much information. It’s amazing how many people publish how-to without the teeth behind the lesson. They are more known for their how-to than their actually doing. But More

“You should write about your experiences growing up in a haunted house.” Those were my sister’s words. “You experienced the paranormal more than the rest of us.” She never believed I’d seen the ghost, yet, she saw the value in the story. While I pondered her words, I continued writing my other creative nonfiction – stories about my grandmother (“Personal Notes” Moose Hide Books: 2008), my mother (F-Stop: A Life in Pictures Baico Publishing: 2011), close family friends (The Whistling Bishop Baico Publishing: 2008) and I helped Dad with his memoir. In between, I wrote fiction, but my heart lay in nonfiction, specifically that which you could take reality and tell it in story form, emulating novel fiction, and the ghost story kept churning in my mind. The wise words of my editor, “Memoir sell better than fiction,” coupled with my sister’s urging, resulted in the resurfacing of my childhood memories and the ghost that haunted my nights. The result? Mrs. Murray’s Ghost (Tell-Tale Publishing: 2018) and three other books in The Piccadilly Street Series (book five is in the works). Not all of what I wrote in The Piccadilly Street Series was memoir, at least not in the traditional More

You know the song. The one with the lyric, “Dance like nobody’s watching.” You get the meaning. Let yourself be the real you. You know how you are in the car, alone, when the perfect song you sang to in high school comes on the radio. You belt it out, maybe even attempting harmony. But when we post our writing online, we do so with the idea that someone is waiting to judge. Suddenly we become more homogenized with the others hanging out there, like ourselves, who are weighing what to say so that the audience likes us. We debate with ourselves on how to write something that will garner applause so that we fit in better. We don’t want to run the risk of being too different. We often dumb ourselves down, when the crying shame is that there is a uniquely different person behind that screen, behind that pen, behind that keyboard. The world is crying for sincerity. The world thirsts for people who are themselves. That’s not saying everyone should be their weirdest self. Just that they ought to be true to themselves, and that includes in writing. We too often want to know what’s selling, what’s More