Showing titles in Writing & Publishing

The craft of writing is a lot like spinning a web: You take threads and weave them skillfully together, and only you know where this intricate network of twists and turns begin and how it will end. Now, with Lawrence Block's expert advice, you can learn this art of entrapping your reader in a maze of fascinating fiction. Spider, Spin Me a Web is the perfect companion volume to Block's previous book on writing, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which Sue Grafton noted "should be a permanent part of every writer's library".

"The Elements of Style" is an American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and it was published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition," "a few matters of form," a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused," and a list of 57 "words often misspelled."

Are you an author interested in preparing your book for audiobook narration? Do you need advice on narrator-friendly writing and editing for voiceover and audio production? This practical guide to radio writing techniques will help you prepare your book for a voice artist or your own narration. Discover how to: edit with your narrator in mind; use audio flow words and phrases; convey information with clarity; write from an audio-first viewpoint; and much more.

On the morning of July 3, 1994, a misreported forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado became one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. In this dramatic reconstruction of the disaster and its aftermath, John N. MacLean tells the heroic and cautionary story of nature at its most unforgiving.

Point of view is one of the most powerful tools in a writer's kit, but it's also one of the hardest to understand and master. In this book, Sandra Gerth draws on her experience as an editor and a best-selling author to teach you how to handle point of view in a way that will make your readers identify with your main character, draw them into the story, and keep them captivated until the very last page. The book provides concrete examples and exercises that will hone your writing skills, whether you're a novice writer working on her first story or an established author.

In The Content Fuel Framework, trained journalist and award-winning content marketer Melanie Deziel shows you how to maximize your creativity by systematizing it. No more writer's block. No more asking, "what should I post"? How can you fill all those web pages, social feeds, blogs, and newsletters, every single day? The Content Fuel Framework will challenge you - and enable you - to tell stories in entirely new ways. It's an adaptable and evergreen guide you'll come back to again and again.

All successful writers use resonance to enhance their stories by drawing power from stories that came before, by resonating with their audiences' experiences, and by resonating within their own works. In this book, you'll learn exactly what resonance is and how to use it to make your stories more powerful. You'll see how it is used in literature and other art forms, and how one writer, J. R. R. Tolkien, mastered it in his work.

This is an exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber, whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors captured the spirit of the 1920s.

This book will show you how to pick your topics like a trained detective. If you put this process into play before you start writing your book you are immediately increasing your chances of picking a winning topic, and selling more books. People can be fickle. They won’t just buy any old book about any old subject. Write about things that people actually want! That is the way to sell book after book.

Do you want to be a more relaxed author? There are plenty of books and tips on writing faster, learning more marketing tactics and strategies, trying to maximize your ranking, hitting the top of the charts, juicing the algorithms, and hacking different ad platforms. While these are all important things - which the authors themselves regularly write and talk about - it's also important to recognize that your author journey is a marathon, and not a sprint.

Beyond Powerful Radio is a complete guide to becoming a powerful communicator for radio, Internet, TV, public speaking - anyone who wants to learn to communicate powerfully. It's a cookbook for communicators and broadcasters to improve. It's practical; it's easy. You'll find techniques to create content, produce and host a show, grow an audience, news gathering, coverage of investigative and breaking stories, and writing and delivering commercial copy.

Robert Olen Butler, author of Perfume River, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and A Small Hotel, teaches graduate fiction at Florida State University—his version of literary boot camp. In From Where You Dream, Butler reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual and tells writers how to achieve the dream space necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction.

Richard Charkin's experience as a publisher is unique among his generation. Over the past half century he has been (at different times) a scientific and medical publisher, a journal publisher, a digital publisher and a general publisher. He has worked for family-owned, publicly-owned, and university-owned companies and start-ups. In this memoir he uses his unrivaled experience to illustrate the profound changes that have affected the identity and practices but not the purpose of publishing.

Every business making sales online is engaged in a battle to get customers to click. More clicks equals more sales equals a more successful business. How do you write copy that will encourage more people to buy from you? How do you persuade customers over the line to make that final buying decision? What is the art of the click? The answer lies in the power of direct-response copywriting.

Turning Pages: The Adventures and Misadventures of a Publisher is the well-told story of forty years in the publishing business. For twenty-four of those years, John Sargent ran one of America’s largest publishing companies. Rather than a straight chronological narrative, Sargent uses the best stories of those years to give us an intimate look inside book publishing. In weaving these stories together, he brings the listener with him through triumph and despair, and a very interesting daily life.

They call you a fake because you’re the best. Being called a fake is the last rite of passage on the internet. In the relentless pursuit of excellence, you only know you’ve arrived when you have “haterz”—your most valuable marketers. So Good They Call You a Fake is how you get there. This book teaches step-by-step with no steps skipped how to get the visibility you’ve already earned, become an energy monster who thrives on all kinds of attention, and then monetize that attention to the max.

Ninja Future is an essential listen for businesses and individuals striving to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving world: Gary Shapiro, the president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, casts his eye toward the future, charting how the innovative technologies of today will transform not only the way business is done, but society itself.

Do you want your readers to feel like they're really there - in the place where the story happens? Whether you want to enrich stark prose with atmospheric detail, add vibrancy to a dull piece, or curb waffling descriptions, this guide can help. Learn how to make your settings intense, realistic, and intriguing. This is the 10th book in Rayne Hall's acclaimed Writer's Craft series.

Love horror? Want to write it? Write Horror: Good Enough to Wake the Dead is a writing guide like no other. Specialized to the genre, Write Horror includes examples from movies, literature, and film as well as practical examples. Escamilla includes writing exercises, charts, and introduces two new writing methodologies: The Basement Method and the Horror Pinch Theory. Once you listen to this audiobook, you’ll be ready to scare the world.

Flash fiction is changing the way we tell stories. Carving away the excess, eliminating all but the most essential, flash fiction is putting the story through a literary dehydrator, leaving the meat without the fat. And it only looks easy. Enter Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction. In this, her treatise on the form, veteran writer Nancy Stohlman takes us on a flash fiction journey: from creating, sculpting, revising, and collecting stories to best practices for writers in any genre.