Five Rules Make it Easy for Readers to Post Reviews
The Five Rules for a Book Review
Every Review Counts
Zara Altair
Zara Altair
A Scene is a Revelation A story is a sequence of small moments. The first moment is make or break for getting your reader involved. Writing advice for beginning novelists can be confusing, like to start with a hook or show the hero’s everyday world. It’s easy to go way off track by starting with…
How A Review Can Change Your Novel Details Careful reading of reviews can give a novelist clues about fine-tuning the novel and how to improve future stories. Thoughtful reviews can even trigger action to change. I work hard to make my historical information as accurate as possible, down to making sure the Latin words are…
Editing & Writing I’ll be publishing The Peach Widow soon. One editor was away and is now back working on the second half of the story. In one way, I’m enjoying the time to work on suggested edits before the next round appears. Rephrasing, augmenting, and rewriting is tedious work for me so I am…

What’s A Red Herring? In logic, a read herring is a fallacy of distraction bringing up another point to distract the argument. In the financial world, a red herring is a prospectus of an upcoming business that is not complete but indicates the future stock. In a mystery, a red herring is a false clue…
Avoid the Sagging Middle in Your Mystery Mystery writers have an advantage over many other genres when it comes to keeping the middle from sagging. Up to the middle the detective has delved into the evidence and suspects in the victim’s worldThe essence of keeping a reader turning pages is heightened tension. Rather than episodic…
Start Now to Gain Your Promotion Skills If you are starting a new novel and you think your fabulous, creative, innovative, engaging, exciting story will sell itself. Welcome to reality. It won’t sell itself. You may dream of people reading your book and sharing their enjoyment with others. Before that happens, readers need to know…