By Helen Marshall and Laura Marshall Book trailers are a fairly recent phenomenon in the industry: from the professionally developed mini-movies put out by the major houses to the slide-show with moving text favored by...
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A couple months ago a friend asked me about doing a book trailer for his latest novel. At the time I was swamped with work and unfortunately had to say no. But it also got me thinking – are book trailers even useful anymore? When Helen and I first started this blog we did a […]...
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By Laura Marshall Very soon I will turn the big 3-0. And though the cliche is that everything goes downhill from here, the truth is I’m looking forward to putting my 20s behind me and embracing my 30s. Before I do, I’d like to take a moment and reflect on all the good times I […]...
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By Laura Marshall The countdown begins. The ball drops. And everyone starts singing. Yes, the New Year has officially been rung in. And with the New Year comes the annual tradition of your New Year’s resolutions. But how many of you, year after year, make the same New Year’s resolution? I want to lose weight. […]...
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The Next Big Thing…
By Helen Marshall So this is in response to a tagging sort of roving blog book questionnaire (whatever it is that might be?) but good people are doing it (Carlie over here tagged me) and so I’m...
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A Practical Guide to Creative Writing Grants in Canada
by Helen Marshall If you’re living and writing in Ontario, then you might have noticed the first drips of what will eventually be a flurry of Facebook statuses agonizing over grant applications. As a doctoral...
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Good News for my Pit of Spikes
Written by Helen I’m very pleased to announce that on Saturday at When Words Collide in Calgary my poetry chapbook Skeleton Leaves won the 2012 Aurora Award for Best Poem! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to be at the...
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By Helen and Laura When we think about elevator pitches, we often divide them into two sections: 1) the description; and 2) the logline. In our last post we showed you how to pare down a synopsis into an effective, short description of the plot of your book.[1] In this post, we’re going to take...
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So when last we left our intrepid readers….it was May 15, 2012. Now, from up here it may look like we dropped the ball. Indeed, it seems cruel to post a “Part 1″ and end with “We’re not done yet. Join us next week for more on elevator pitches and the elusive art of the...
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Written by Laura and Helen When we last left our hero, he was standing the elevator after a late-night of partying, facing off against a beetle-browed[1] Acquisitions Editor[2]: now is the time for him to sum up in thirty words or less[3] the grand sweep of his narrative arc[4]—the superb world-building, the subtle yet definitive...
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Written by Laura and Helen So it’s three AM on the Friday night of a major trade convention: you’re a few drinks in and on your way back to your room after a productive day of panels, parties and pandering. BING! The door opens and in walks a weary Acquisitions Editor. You look at him....
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Written by Laura and Helen Laura’s a sweet-talking, book-pushing redhead with a heart of gold. Helen’s a verb-slinging, comma-killing master of the manuscript. Why do we want to write a blog? Because we have spent far too many late nights with a bottle of wine thinking about by-lines, log-lines, tag lines, #hashtags, font sizes, margin sizes,...
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Revisiting the Book Trailer: Is It Worth It?