Nonfiction Writing Tips: How to Show (Not Tell) Your Story

Connection. The bonding that glues humanity together. How is it done? It is always done through the power of a good story. Stories can drill a hole into our hearts and drain our love like the color off our checks. Or they can plug the hole with grit and perseverance and fill our soul with fire that ignites others. Stories have true power. Stories are the connection for all of humanity.

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How to Write a Guest Blog Post

As an author, you’ve probably started a blog to promote your book or at least considered doing so. However, you’ve probably found that it’s difficult to build a blog readership
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How to Start Writing After a Long Break

It’s happened to all of us. You set a writing goal you felt was realistic—maybe 500 or 1,000 words per day—but somehow, life got in the way. Someone got sick, there might have been a death in the family, or maybe you’re simply exhausted from working too many hours at your day job. Anything can happen in life to throw you off track, but one thing is still true—you have a dream of being a successful author and finishing that first book! So, what can you do?
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Fiction Writing Tips: Show vs. Tell

For beginning fiction authors, one of the most important—and hardest—techniques to master is how to show the story through action and dialogue rather than telling the story through internal thoughts and emotions. While the latter isn’t inherently bad or forbidden, we can engage our readers much more by pulling them into the story directly by showing them what’s going on rather than telling them about it. That gives them something they can see, imagine, and experience, which will inspire them to keep that book in their hands. And that’s exactly what we want to do with our fiction!
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Hacking the Facebook Algorithm Machine

Facebook can be a really great social media platform for getting your book and your message out there and for reaching a wider audience. However, there is a right and a wrong way to do it. Facebook uses algorithms, an automated machine, to score its users either in a positive or a negative way, so your choices and interactions matter. (These are similar to the algorithms or computer programs that Google and other search engines use to rank your web content.) It matters because the higher your score, the more Facebook users you’ll be permitted to reach.
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From Published Author to Successful Ghostwriter

For many Author Academy Elite authors, the journey doesn’t stop at publishing our books. We have dreams of doing more, both to inspire our vision of our potential and to inspire the potential of others. Author April Tribe-Giauque dreamed of taking her story of survival and perseverance to another level by helping other abuse survivors tell their stories. Today, not only is she a soon-to-be twice-published author, but she also runs a successful ghostwriting business that allows her to further pursue her writing dreams. I sat down to have a talk with April this week about her book Pinpoints of Light: Escaping the Abyss of Abuse and how that launched her into her current success.
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How to Start a Blog to Promote Your Book — Part 2

In part one,I talked about all the work you’ll need to do to start your blog. Now that we have all that planning out of the way, it’s time to execute! Step 6: Decide what your first blog post will be about. Now that you know what you’re writing about and how often you’re going to post, it’s time to get started with actually writing your first blog post. It’s a good idea for this to be an introduction to you and your new blog. You can talk about several things to encourage your readers to get to know you.
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How to Start a Blog to Promote Your Book — Part 1

If you’ve already published your book, you probably know that it takes more than simply hitting that publish button to reach your readers. To understand the challenges that lie ahead of you, consider how many books are published on Amazon every day. According to an article published by TechCrunch in 2014, there was one new book published on Amazon’s website every five minutes. Two things are important to note about this statistic:
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Beginner’s Guide to Surviving Your First Book Signing

After you’ve written and published your first book, the work doesn’t stop there. Especially if you are a first-time author, you need to have a strategic marketing plan in place to start growing your reading audience. One of the ways many of our authors do that is through hosting and attending regular book-signing events. But if you’ve never attended a book signing, you might be wondering how to prepare yourself for your first event.
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Three Secrets to Boost Your Book Marketing Efforts

Writing a book is an intense and creative endeavor that many of us enjoy because we are creative people, but sometimes that creativity doesn’t flow through to other aspects of our book. We don’t always see the bigger picture, which often gives us permission to turn our creativity off for other aspects of our books.