by Lori Domingo @LoriDomingo22 It’s safe to say that regardless of your chosen genre, when you write your story, someone’s life will be completely upended. Something will happen that will lead to change in this person – usually for the better, but sometimes possibly not so much. Some event, person, relationship – whatever it may be – will be what …
Hello, ACFW!
THE ACFW VIRTUAL CONFERENCE: MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR FEBRUARY 24 – 25, 2024 Hello ACFW! I’m Kathleen Y’Barbo-Turner, a member of the ACFW Executive Board, and I’ve got great news for you! If you’ve been a member of ACFW for any length of time, you’ve no doubt attended or at least heard about our fabulous ACFW Annual Conference–the premier conference …
A Different Kind of Cover Story
By Deborah Raney @AuthorDebRaney I just love stories about how a book cover came to be—the process of working with a publisher’s design team and models, or for some of the more creative among us, how you designed your own cover. Or in my case, how my husband designs the covers for my books. (He designed these beauties below!) But …
The Author’s Stir Fry
By Kathy Maresca @so_tweet Have you ever taken a look at a menu and asked the server to hold a particular ingredient? Sometimes it’s possible, but other times the mix has been prepared and cannot be separated. Let’s consider a stir fry entree. It’s nutritious and well balanced, looks fabulous and smells great. But the sensational Asian spices, rice, chicken, …
ACFW New Releases: November 2023
November 2023 New Releases More in-depth descriptions of these books can be found on the ACFW Fiction Finder website Contemporary Romance: 12 Days of Mandy Reno by Regina Rudd Merrick — Law student Amanda Reno is stuck in her tiny hometown in Kentucky for Christmas and work part-time at the Clementville Café. Her parents are stuck in Brazil, leaving Mandy …
Doing Big, Crazy Things
By Sara Davison Have you ever made the spontaneous decision to do something you know is crazy but that you also know is absolutely the right thing to do (but it’s still scary)? That’s how I felt a few weeks ago when I decided I was going to release a book, The Color of Sky and Stone, this November that …
Make Them Believe
by Tanara McCauley @TanaraMcCauley Long Beach, 1997. I sat in a movie theater with a friend doing something I’d never done before in my life: ugly crying in public. I couldn’t pull myself together, and the frustration of trying made me cry even harder. My only consolation was that my friend didn’t let me cry alone. At the conclusion of …
Goal Oriented or Deadline Driven
By Marguerite Martin Gray Are you goal oriented or deadline driven? I would like to say deadline driven is purpose driven, but it is not all the time. I have always been an over achiever in school, work, life. That has landed me in places where I look around and wonder “Now, what do I do to sustain this?” For …
Five Things I Learned from Launching a Book
By Felicia Ferguson @Felicia_writer 1: Marketing a book is more than hosting a launch party. From guest blogs, to book reviews, to social media posts and ads, the author must be 70% marketer and 30% writer. Yes, I know. Most of us writers didn’t major in PR or Marketing in college. If you’re like me, you have nightmares that book …
Troublesome Characters
by Susan A. J. Lyttek @SusanLyttek Several years ago, I took a course on character development from a well-known Christian writer. Through the multiple session course, we were taught to create a psychological profile for our character, find pictures that looked like him or her, and create brief histories for prior to the story’s commencement. It was all good and …