Tool for Children’s Book Writers (& Parents!): Accelerated Reader Bookfinder

For more than 20 years, the Accelerated Reader (AR) program has been helping kids read children's books they enjoy, at their own pace. Readers of all levels can choose an AR book, read their way through it, then take a computerized quiz to assess their understanding and sometimes earn class credit.  Educators across the US [...]

From “Writer” to “Author of a Book”: 4 Tips for Imposter Syndrome

There's a mental shift for writers when they start calling themselves an author of a book. Many writers seem to find some magic in the term, some kind of promise in the word. If you are among the group of authors with only one published book, there's good news. That's all it takes to call [...]

On Being a Lifelong Book Collector

I went book shopping yesterday. I don’t know why I picked up anything. I already had 130 books on my TBR list, three of which were recent arrivals via my boyfriend that I wanted to check out. And I already had six or seven that I have been sitting around various places in the house, […]

Improve Your Writing Process

The Outcome Can Terrorize You If there's a thousand ways to do something, there's a thousand ways to do it right. And a thousand ways to muck it up. And the truth is -- you'll never find the process that works for you, without stumbling through a few of those. In On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, [...]

Using Personality “Tests” in Fiction

Understand Personality to Connect with Audience & Write Strong Characters Who are your readers? Who are your characters? How do you connect them? In essence, this is the challenge of the fiction writer -- replacing real people with believable ones, and then somehow making them real for the real ones. The connections? Personality. (Not even [...]