Tag: repost

How Does Reading Level Matter in Fiction?

This is cool.

Kristen Twardowski's avatarKristen Twardowski

How well do most published authors write? Would you be surprised to hear that Jane Austen wrote at just above a 5th grade level, Stephen King writes at about a 6th grade level, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote at slightly more than a 6th grade level, and Leo Tolstoy wrote at about an 8th grade level?

To find out all of this information, Shane Snow did a readability analysis of the works of different bestselling authors. He based his exploration off of their scores for the Flesch-Kincaid tests, which were developed in 1975 on behalf of the US Navy to assess the difficulty of technical manuals. These tests take into account total words, sentences, and syllables in order to assess a written work’s grade level.

Snow’s analysis found that higher level writing did not necessarily result in successful sales. In fact, the bestselling fiction books that he looked at all fell…

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5 Key Ingredients All Young Adult Novels Must Have

Post Quote: “The young adult market is unyielding in popularity, at least for the foreseeable future, but this also means it’s a flooded market with content published daily. So the big question right now is how can an author stand out from the crowd?”

theryanlanz's avatarRyan Lanz

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by Katie McCoach

The young adult market is unyielding in popularity, at least for the foreseeable future, but this also means it’s a flooded market with content published daily. So the big question right now is how can an author stand out from the crowd?

The answer is writing a seriously great YA novel. That may seem like the most common advice ever, right? Writing a good book should be the goal of all writers, but to hit the YA readers the hardest an author needs to make sure they are giving readers what they want and telling a good story at the same time. Great content gets noticed, and word of mouth is king in the publishing industry.

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How Different Types of Reading Change Your Writing

Interesting post on how reading impacts writing. I’ve been saying this for years. Post Quote:

“This article describes a study in which a group of adult readers identified their most frequently read materials such as online magazines (and memes), newspapers, genre and literary fiction, and other written sources. Researchers then looked at the level of writing that each participant exhibited and found a correlation between what types of material people read and the complexity of their writing.”

Kristen Twardowski's avatarKristen Twardowski

You are what you read. That is a simple enough concept, but it turns out that it means more than just that people who read mysteries may become better at writing mysteries. What a person reads fundamentally changes the structure of his or her writing.

In June of 2016, the International Journal of Business Administration published “Syntactic and Lexical Complexity of Reading Correlates with Complexity of Writing in Adults”.  (You can read the full text of the article online.) This article describes a study in which a group of adult readers identified their most frequently read materials such as online magazines (and memes), newspapers, genre and literary fiction, and other written sources. Researchers then looked at the level of writing that each participant exhibited and found a correlation between what types of material people read and the complexity of their writing. People who spend most of their time reading Buzzfeed articles…

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What NOT to Post When Marketing Your Book – 8 Common Mistakes to Avoid

Valuable information for every author. Post Quote:
“The goal of marketing is to build a relationship with your readers so they grow to know, like and trust you. If you are constantly asking them to buy something, they will most likely tune you out.”

13 Things Mentally Strong Writers Don’t Do

Excellent article to help jump start your writing week! My favorite Post Quote: “We can’t control Amazon’s rules or Smashwords’ terms of service. We can’t control whether an agent accepts us. We can’t control whether Barnes & Noble lives or dies. We can control getting the words on the page. We can control building a brand capable of driving book sales. I see a lot of writers wasting a lot of energy over issues where they don’t have any control. That energy is better used elsewhere.”

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Author Kristen Lamb's avatarKristen Lamb's Blog

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As y’all know I do a ton of reading and this includes lots and lots of blogs and articles. Over the holiday I ran across one article that just had me jumping up and down and yelling, “YES! THIS!” The Business Insider article “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do” is based off Amy Morin’s book (which I highly recommend).

It doesn’t matter if we strive to have a healthy marriage, strong kids or a killer career, these tenets cross-apply to all areas of life. Mental toughness is a key component to being successful. Yes, even for writers.

So I figured I would tinker with this and make it more directly apply to writers and what we must do (or not do) if we long to do well in this career. Thus, today we are going to discuss 13 Things Mentally Strong Writers Don’t Do.

#1 They don’t waste time…

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