Fiction Craft Blog

This blog post discusses how social media might be damaging for your business and your well-being, and why the mood has changed so much in 2025. If you're considering leaving social media, read on! Just after the pandemic started, it felt like the world was moving online, and social media was a big part of that. Back in 2020, my business was fairly new, and I was excited to learn how to use all the different social media channels. So I joined the Chartered Institute of Editin

Editors charge a wide range of rates for editing. The industry is unregulated, so in principle, anyone can claim to offer these services. This means you have to choose an editor carefully if quality is important to you. So how much does quality editing cost? In this blog post, I'll share figures in UK currency, but the vast majority of editors (myself included) work for clients all over North America as well, so the market is roughly the same. Trained proofreaders and editors

The standard advice for handling dialect in commercial fiction is to stick to fairly standard forms. Popular advice says that: 1) You can include more dialect in dialogue as it's not expected to be standard or "correct" 2) You can use a basic pattern to infer a strong dialect, but don't try and reproduce the dialect yourself unless you are very comfortable with it and use it. ( More on that here. ) 3) You can go "all in" and write a novel completely in nonstandard forms, but

“Write what you know” is popular advice often given to writers. That’s because it’s easier to imagine a setting you know well and write about it in a way that reflects what it really is like there. You’re less likely to make big errors that will make the story sound unbelievable or unconvincing to readers. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to do any research, and memory is fallible too, but it’s an easier option than writing beyond your experience. Setting and perspective offe