By Jennifer Hallmark

Learning the craft, or making our work readable, is one of the more important ways to sell books, gain a readership, and be taken seriously in the writing world. But how do we do that?

College, online courses, or conferences can be a great place to start. But maybe they’re not in your budget or timeframe at the moment. Where else can we find resources for our author journey?

I’m so glad you asked. 🙂 The Crew and I want to share our personal favorites:

 Gail Johnson

• A favorite book of mine is Creating Character Arcs: The Masterful Author’s Guide to Uniting Story Structure, Plot, and Character Development  (Helping Writers Become Authors Book 7) by K.M. Weiland. She breaks down and explains the why in the character arc using examples from movies and books. 🙂

Bonita Y. McCoy

•  I love the book Don’t Murder Your Mystery: 24 Fiction-Writing Techniques to Save Your Manuscript From Turning Up D.O.A. by Chris Roerden. It explores the topic of self-editing in a fun and direct way. I use it to look for common mistakes made in my rough draft.

Tammy Trail

• I like one called Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One and Never Lets Them Go by Les Edgerton.

Kristy Robinson Horine

• Anything by KM Weiland is useful. Not only is there a blog, and books, she has a podcast that she transcribes so readers can listen or read.

  Brandilyn Collins has some great books out on characters, plot twists, why stories work, etc.  Steven James has a podcast called The Story Blender. It’s pretty good.

Jennifer Hallmark: I’ve read tons of books on craft in the past, but now I tend to read more blogs and listen to podcasts. Here are some of the best (IMHO):

• Podcast–Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach. She has a lot of good tips and her show is just plain fun. 🙂
• Podcast–Christian Publishing Show with Thomas Umstattd, Jr. You can find a variety of subjects for traditional and Indie authors.
• Podcast–The HopeWriters Podcast-I find it very encouraging and informative.
• Blog–Writers Helping Writers with Angela Ackerman or Becky Puglisi. I first found them with their great book, The Emotion Thesaurus, and quickly subscribed to their blog.
• Blog–The Write Conversation with Edie Melson. Edie is a friend, great writer, and runs a top-notch blog with a lot of interesting guests.
• Blog–Goins, Writer with Jeff Goins. An encouraging blog, not only full of information but resources as well.

And don’t forget about Inspired Prompt and our resources. Here are three links:

• The Craft
• Revising and Editing
• Organizations

We want to see you become the best writer that you possibly can be. There’s no magic formula. As you study, learn, read, and write, your voice will emerge and your skills will increase. It has worked for our Inspired Prompt Crew and it will work for you.

Click to tweet: Learning the craft, or making our work readable, is one of the more important ways to sell books, gain a readership, and be taken seriously in the #writing world.  #pubtip

Writing Prompt: Commit to either reading a writing craft book, one blog post a week, or listen to a podcast a week to strengthen your writing.