Playing Chicken With Your Story Part IV of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series And now we come to the hard bit. You’ve got your theme, and you’ve figured out how to bury it so that it’s there for you, and SOMETHING meaningful is there for your reader. You’ve let go of the temptation to write a message book—always difficult—and have embraced telling your story for the sake of the story. S...

Planning A Heart-Stopping Story Part VII of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series Over the last six lessons, you’ve figured out your theme, and you’ve worked out at least one and possibly several subthemes. You’ve learned how to use blended scenes, intercuts, and cliffhangers to work both themes and subthemes into your work. You have great conflict waiting to happen. What do you do next? A...

Pick a Theme for Your Next Storytelling Program Recently when I was asked to give a storytelling program at a Saturday night session hosted by our local MetroParks system, the woman who called wondered if I had a theme in mind. What a good idea! It not only helps with their write-up and advertising of the event, but also helps the storyteller plan a cohesive performance. Because I will be telling...

Parenting Tip: 7 Ways to Master Storytelling and Mesmerize Your Child Human beings have been telling stories for several millennia. And, as parents, we’ve all heard about the benefits of telling stories to our children. The only problem is that, as with so many things, no one ever teaches us how to tell a story. The best that most of us can do is to emulate our parents’ and teachers’ storytelling...

Now Appearing: 9 Tips for a Well-Attended Event When I made the decision to do free workshops and book signings for my latest book, Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer, I thought it would be easy to draw an audience.  I had, after all, done all the right things to prepare for this big event: I had a successful e-zine, AbsoluteWrite.com, sent weekly directly to my target market; I was a contr...

Nine Success Indicators for Tracking Your Book Marketing Results At the foundation of any successful marketing campaign are tracking systems—it’s helpful to know how your marketing program is doing. This is an area where I believe most authors (and possibly most business owners) drop the ball. It’s foolish to spend endless hours developing marketing strategies for selling your products without cr...

News Releases 101 Who cares? Why do they/should they care? What do they want and need to know? If you can answer these three questions before you begin to write a news release, you've got a good start. Now all you have to do is make your release stand out from the avalanche of approximately 300 that editors in the Seattle market receive every day. How can you increase the odds that your release wi...

Networking Your Home Business within Circles of Influence When you need an auto mechanic or an air conditioning repairman, where do you turn for help? Sure, some people turn to the yellow pages. But most will turn to friends and family and ask if they know of anyone who can do the work. The best place for your business to be positioned is to be the business on the tips of the tongues of the peop...

Networking on the Net Networking is one of the most effective ways to find clients for any consulting or professional services business. But if you limit your networking to only what you can do in person, you’ll be missing out on a huge number of possibilities.   Networking is more than entering a room full of people and exchanging business cards. It’s creating a pool of contacts with whom you c...