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Mentors in Fiction

Author: Laura Resnick

Mentors in Fiction

Imparting wisdom and leading the way to adventure What’s the purpose of mentors in fiction? In real life, mentors can be found in schools, the business world, in athletic programs, or at church. They teach, guide, and motivate those who are less savvy about the world to negotiate life’s trials. So how are mentors employed in fiction? Taking inspiration from Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler, here’s how fictional mentors—from Merlin and Obi-Wan Kenobi to Matthew Cuthbert to Jiminy Cricket...

craft, editor advice, tutorials, Writing

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Beyond SEO: Five Ways to Help AI Discover Your Books

Lindsay Randall’s excellent article on this blog about GEO & SEO explains how websites help establish digital authority. But AI-assisted discovery doesn’t rely only on your website. Increasingly, recommendation systems pull signals from retailer metadata, reviews, author profiles, and consistent cross-platform information. The good news? Authors can improve discoverability without gaming the system. Here are five practical steps. Step 1: Make your book descriptions emotionally searchable. We’ve...

AI, business, Discovery, tech, Tools, tutorials, Website

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It’s Not SEO vs. GEO: Use Both to Optimize Your Author Website

How people and artificial intelligence (AI) search the web continues to shift and evolve. Since web searches now weave in AI-driven answers created by large language models (LLMs), the content of your website should be optimized for both traditional search engine optimization (SEO) and the new frontier of building your digital authority—which, for the purpose of this article, I’ll call generative engine optimization (GEO). What are SEO and GEO? SEO isn’t just one thing, done and then forgotten....

AI, business, Discovery, tech, Tools, tutorials

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LitRPG: A Genre Spotlight

What is LitRPG? LitRPG—short for “Literary Role-Playing Game”—is a fantasy and science-fiction subgenre built around worlds governed by explicit game-like mechanics. Characters exist in settings where abilities, power, and progression can be measured, tracked, and often displayed through an in-world interface commonly called “the system.” Unlike stories that merely reference games, LitRPG integrates mechanics directly into the narrative structure. Levels, skills, stats, quests, and progression...

genre, market research, Publishing, readers, Writing

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Stop Panicking in the Pause: A Writer’s Guide to the In-Between

The momentum trap As a writer and certified life coach, I’ve seen a pattern—both in my coaching work and in myself—that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. That pattern is what happens to us after we finish “the thing.” My most recent reminder came in late November. I’d been pushing hard, working late nights and early mornings, trying to hit a deadline on a traditionally published book. I pride myself on never missing a deadline, so the final stretch always comes with a kind of brutality....

coaching, creativity, habits, mental health, mental road blocks, self care, tutorials, writer psychology

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Publishing Wide but Shallow: The Mistake That’s Costing You Readers & Revenue

I’ve been talking to authors about publishing wide for well over a decade now. I’ve written books about it, spoken about it at conferences around the world, and spent years inside the Kobo and Draft2Digital operations watching how it all works from the inside. And I keep seeing authors making the same mistakes. Authors hear the message about not putting all their eggs in one basket. They agree that relying on a single platform for their entire livelihood is risky. So they make the decision to...

business, Discovery, Distributors, goals, Marketing, sales, tutorials

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