From Our Blog
Game On!
Many novelists are discovering the rewards of writing for games, whether game-ifying their own concepts or as staff or freelance writers for established gaming properties. In 2022, an estimated 3.2 billion people worldwide played games, and the average age of a gamer is 31. Led by video games and mobile gaming, the gaming industry aims for total earnings around $300 billion for this fiscal year…
Generational Cohorts: Applying Gen Z Insights to Your Writing
If your contemporary fiction features teens and young adults, and you’re part of an older generation, you may benefit from insights into Gen Z.
Here, we’ll define current generations (specifically in the U.S.), what makes each unique, and how that can relate to your characters.
As with all generational insights, it’s important not to stereotype, or lump all people within a generation together. …
Creative Things Authors Can Do With Their Email Lists
Building an email list is one of the best things any author can do. Why? Simple. You own your email list. You certainly don’t own Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and all the other social media platforms where you promote your book. Most of us (while we might own stock) do not own a controlling interest in Amazon, where many of our sales likely come from.
In fact, the only retailer you own…
We Need to Talk About COVID
As we enter our third year of the pandemic, writers of contemporary fiction face a dilemma: to write about the coronavirus or not.* In the past, diseases have formed a backbone for artistic storytelling—tuberculosis in La Bohème, for example, or AIDS in Angels in America—written while the maladies they discuss continued to spread uncontrolled. But are contemporary audiences ready to face storie…