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Written Well

Should I Write Horror?

Do you love creating a gruesome and diabolical villain? Are you sure there is something twisted, something wrong in our world, just below the surface? Then you should be writing horror. If you read a lot of it, you already know the tropes to use, the cliches to avoid, and the basic structures it follows. If you haven't read much horror, go read a dozen of them. If you are hooked and want to write them, read a few dozen more and then come back.  

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Services

We built Written Well to give self-published authors all the tools they need to make a living writing and publishing their own books. But many authors don’t want to be their own publisher, cover designer, blurb writer, formatter, and marketing expert. It can be a lot. Having so many authors asking us to help them publish their books was one of the reasons we started the site, and because we know many authors don’t want to do everything, we continue to offer those services. There is no guarantee of success with these services, and anyone who offers you a guarantee...

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Should I Write Memoir?

Have you led an interesting life? Or better yet, can you write interestingly about your life? Memoir is for those who can turn their personal stories into a tale with meaning, with humor, with characters and themes that people can relate to on a personal level. You must be a good storyteller, and an excellent stylist. It is difficult to find true life that is more dramatic than fiction, so you have to bring that drama with your words.

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Memoir Guide

Memoir gets its own guide simply because of its uniqueness among nonfiction. Most nonfiction can be easily split into instructional or informational. And while it's definitely not instructional, it's not precisely informational because no one is looking for information about you. Unless you're famous. But if you're famous, you don't need our help, someone is already offering you a million dollars and a ghost writer for your memoir. And this is all before creative nonfiction comes along and tells you that memoir doesn't even have to be true. at least not the whole time. So, what even is memoir?

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Should I Write Children’s Books?

The number one reason (and possibly the only reason with the state of the current business model) is that you love them. The pictures, the poetry, the capacity to appeal to both the child and the child inside all of us. If that is your focus, you will do well. Even in traditional publishing, advances are normally very small for picture books. Trad publishers face the same expense issues you do, mostly high printing costs, and paying both an author and an illustrator. So, throw profit considerations out the window (it can happen, but it's tough), and do it for the love of the books and the children who read them.

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Children’s Books Study Materials

Back to children’s Remember to read the articles in the Essentials section. These cover all the essential skills you’ll need as a self-published author. They are not just for beginners either. They go in depth on how to successfully write, publish, and market your own books. Online Resources 8 other programs to format your children’s ebooks. 8 Tips for formatting your ebook — good description of margins and gutters in this article. Consider joining SCBWI, or going to one of their conferences. They are one of the most supportive professional organizations I have ever been part of. Books to Read...

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Children’s Guide

Children’s books are delightful, endearing, important, and very hard to make any money at. Due to the natural format of picture books (as wide or wider than they are high, filled with color illustrations), they don’t look good in ebooks making the market for them thin, and the paperback/hardcover books are expensive to print and hard to format. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can self-publish picture books and there are even a few independent authors making money doing so. Let’s dive into what makes a picture book. Pictures, Obviously Without pictures, it’s just a book,...

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Young Adult Study Materials

If you want to write in a genre, you have to read that genre. Experts in the industry are consistent with their advice that you must be an avid reader of a genre to write well in it. The books below are a few staples of the genre, but with a genre this big, you'll need to go to your particular subgenre in the Amazon Top 100 to really get a feel for things.

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Should I Write Young Adult?

Do you feel younger than your age? More importantly, do you feel you can, as Susan Cooper puts it, "look again at a mystery through the eyes we used to have?" Because that is the essence of writing for the young: the ability to look at things through their eyes — which are, indeed, our eyes just, as Cooper again says, "not yet wearing our heavy jacket of time."

If you can put aside time's weighty coat and douse yourself in the heady perfume of having an entire life yet spread out before you, then you are ready to write YA.

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