How My Spirit Sings Blog - Author Cygnet Brown

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Author Cygnet Brown

Writing Your Book Bio

11/21/2019

One of the biggest roadblock new writers face, especially if they are writing about something personal and important to them, is the fear of writing their own book biography or bio. Putting yourself on paper, and exposing your story to the world, can certainly be intimidating because it takes a lot of courage to bring your experiences and narrative to a broad audience.
Don’t worry. Every writer goes through this, and you can too! Just keep the following in mind when these apprehensions arise, so you can continue to move forward, and add your own unique voice to the literary world. Click here for more advice about writing your bio

How to Contact a Publisher or Agent

11/14/2019

The Difference Between a Query Letter and a Book Proposal
A query letter is a request for a publisher to read your proposal for reading your fiction book and a book proposal is a proposal for reading your nonfiction book. A query letter is usually written after a fiction book is written and a book proposal is often written before the book is written. Since you have written a book of fiction, if you are going the traditional publishing route, you will be writing a query letter.
Of course, you no longer have to go the traditional publishing route. Many people are self-publishing or going through small press publishers or even doing what is called hybrid publishing which is a cross between traditional publishing or self-publishing. This post, however, is about how to contact a publisher or agent. Click here to learn how to contact a publisher or an agent.

Finding the Right Editor for Your Novel

11/7/2019

Where to find a Good Editor
Some of us are lucky in that we know people who make good editors for your work. However, not everyone is that lucky, but there is a solution if you’re willing to look around for the right person for your editing job. Hundreds of websites exist where you can find literally thousands of editors. Some of the top sites include: Click Here to see these top sites and more!

See What a Beta Reader Can Do For You

10/31/2019

“You’re not done with a book until you pass it to another reader.” Donalyn Miller

We spend so much time on our own manuscripts that we can’t see them objectively — no matter how diligently we self-edit. We create anticipation or an expectation early in the book but forget to deliver on it. We describe events in a way that is clear to us. However, they are not necessarily clear to a reader who can’t see the pictures in our head. We leave out vital steps in an explanation and don’t realize it, because we know what we mean. The characters in our books are not convincing, because we know them so well. We simply don’t always realize we haven’t developed them as thoroughly as we thought when we committed them to paper.
This is why we need a beta reader. Click Here to learn more!

One Last Go Over

10/24/2019

You’re Ready for One Last Go Over of Your Novel. You’ve finished the writing, the rewriting, the editing and the polishing. So what’s next?
You’ve been through your manuscript front to back and back to front and weeded out and added in.
Click Here to see what's next!

Editing Punctuation in Novels: Commas, Semi-colons, Colons, Apostrophes and Dashes

10/17/2019

Most writers know about when to use a period, a question mark, and exclamation point. Be sure that every sentence has one of those three at the end. Back on April 29ths post, we went over how to punctuate dialogue. I am not going to go over that again here, but you should probably review that now as well. In addition, go through and make sure you didn’t miss any of your quotation marks. Like the previous forms of punctuation, commas, semi-colons, colons, apostrophes, and dashes indicate added emphasis, an interruption, or an abrupt change of thought. Experienced writers know that these marks are not interchangeable. Click Here to see when to use each one.

Problematic Homophones

10/10/2019

If there is one area where I am apt to be a member of the grammar police, it would be in the area of homophones. I hate it when a writer uses there when they really should be using they’re or their.
One homophone that we recently disagreed about at work was pore and pour. Most of us thought that “we poured over material” as we studied. However, one person argued that we should have used the word “pored”. We looked it up on google and I found four sources that said the word was pored, not poured. We pour milk over our cereal, but this word has nothing to do with studying. Click Here are numerous homophones to check and determined that you have used the correct word.

Correct Spelling in Your Novel

10/3/2019

This week we are identifying and replacing spelling errors. Now is a good time to run a spell check to see find words that are spelled wrong or you have written using British spellings rather than American spellings (or visa versa if you’re aiming to sell to British audiences). You wouldn’t want to insult your reader (or publisher!) with the wrong gray or grey. Now’s a good time to run your spellcheck over your manuscript before going onto the next steps. Click Here to Move On

Fixing Subject and Verb Agreement

9/26/2019

Here we will practice applying one of the most basic and yet also most troublesome rules of grammar: in the present tense, a verb must agree in number with its subject. Put simply, this means that we have to remember to add an -s to the verb if its subject is singular and not to add an -s if the subject is plural. It's really not a hard principle to follow as long as we can identify the subject and verb in a sentence. Let's have a look at how this basic rule works by clicking here.

when to capitalize

9/19/2019

If you’re any kind of writer, you probably noticed that I failed to capitalize the key words in the title of this post. I actually did this on purpose. The titles of books, songs, newspapers, and works of art should all be capitalized. In fact, titles, no matter what the content, should always have their keywords capitalized. In additional to capitalizing titles of content, what other ways should you capitalize?
Click Here to Check Your Knowledge on Capitalization