The Business Basics for Today’s Writer—Part Five—Cover Letters and Proposals

Today we’ll discuss how to format Cover Letters and Proposals in email. One thing I can’t stress enough is the need to find out if the editor/publisher you’re submitting to will allow emails with an attachment. There is no industry standard. Some publishers allow attachments and others require submissions to be pasted into the body of the email. For our purposes, we’ll assume you’ll be sending an attachment. If they require it to be within the body of the email, just make sure everything is included.

Don't Miss the Selah Awards—Live Streaming at 8pm Eastern TONIGHT!

Today I'm giving Kirk another day off, the play catch-up with his own engineering work.

Truthfully it couldn't have come at a better time. Right now I'm in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference.

As most of you know, I'm the Co to Director to Alton Gansky. He's the HMOC (head man on campus) this week. Tonight's award banquet is the culmination of a week of connecting with others in the industry and concentrating on going deeper into the craft of writing.

Containing Powerful Emotions

By Laurie Epps

When you're in love, sometimes it's next to impossible to write. The only rubbish you can mumble out is, "I love you, I love you, I love you." What a boring story that makes for your readers. I have to often think of something else to write about, you can't write about love when you are in love. For me, that's next to impossible. But give me a good break-up and I can write about that for hours. Sometimes, the greatest tragedies in our lives makes for the best writing we have to offer.

Social Media Monday—Gain Traction with Social Media instead of Spinning Your Wheels—Part Two

Social media isn’t a fast pass to a super Internet presence. As I said last week, anything worth having takes…well…work. If you didn’t catch last week, click for Part One of Gain Traction with Social Media Instead of Spinning your Wheels.

BUT that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work at it. It can give you a distinct advantage when you’re looking for a publisher for your book, and when you’re trying to connect to readers for your book.

So what work pays off by helping you gain traction and what is just useless wheel spinning? Today I’m gonna give you what you need to gain traction and move forward.

Weekend Worship—Out of the Fog

Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass. I Thessalonians 5:24

Many of you know today is the start of the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian WritersConference. I’m privileged to be the co-director of this wonderful conference and it’s one of the highlights of my years.  

But I didn’t start out on staff—far from it.

I started where most of you are, as a nervous, first-time attendee who wondered if she’d heard God right when He called. It’s a daunting prospect to take your dreams out of the clouds and into real life. And that’s what you’re doing if you’ve attended a writers conference.

Life Lessons—I Wasn't Expecting That

by Reba J. Hoffman

I looked in the mirror this morning and stared at the ever-increasing number of very prematurely gray hairs glistening under the fluorescent lighting. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of them were caused by fretting about things that just were not reality.

We all face times when we sit in silence and decide what someone else is thinking, or why something happened. Since we are writers—you know, creative types—we can invent all sorts of great fodder. Unfortunately, we often believe our own hook and it makes for a lot of needless worrying.

The Business Basics for Today’s Writer—Part Four—How to Format an Email Query

This week I’ll share how to handle an email query professionally. But before I start let me give you difference between a QUERY LETTER and a COVER LETTER.

A QUERY Letter is a letter inquiring (where the word query comes from) if there is an interest in an idea you have. It can be an idea for a devotion, an article, blog post, book, almost anything.