Tag Archives: guest blog

New book, new guest post!

Sigh. I have many things I want to blog about, but right now, most of my writing time is taken up with preparing for the LDStorymakers conference next week, where I’m teaching about Structural Self-editing on Friday and Gesture Crutches on Saturday (twice!). We may not be back to our regularly scheduled bloggy goodness until after that’s over. And I’ve recovered.

For now, I do have some awesomeness to tide you over!

heart COVER 300Character Sympathy now has a foreword by RITA award–winning author, best-selling novelist, fiction writing teacher, editor extraordinaire Alicia Rasley! Her articles were among the first really good resources I found for learning more about character sympathy, so I’m thrilled to have her for the foreword!

Also for Character Sympathy: the print version of Character Sympathy is now available! Thanks to those Sneaky McSneakersons who’ve already found it and bought it! The print version does include the foreword. And it’s beautiful! Just check out the proof (side-by-side with Character Arcs):

fiction university faculty logoFinally, I have a guest post at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University about finding and working with a cover designer. Your cover is your book’s first impression, so make sure it’s a good one! Learn how to find a good cover designer and work with them to create an awesome cover for your book.

I’m privileged to be part of Fiction U’s faculty in the Indie Author Department!

Upcoming series: Backstory

I’m planning my next series (starting next Monday!), and once again, I need your help. I need your questions, musings and and topics.

What do you want to know about backstory? What it is? How to tell it from the “real” story? How to work it in? Whether you need it?

As always, guest bloggers are welcome (check out my guest blogging guidelines here, but of course, the topic will be different this time around—you know, backstory?).

What do you want to know (or write!) about backstory?

Photo credits: question—Svilen Mushkatov

Call for guest posts

I’m gearing up for another series—this time on writing resources. One thing I totally forgot to do was ask for guest posts in my last series, so this time I don’t want to repeat that mistake. Today I’m asking for guest bloggers to help with my next series (because we’re all tired of listening to just me, right 😉 ?).

Here’s a bit more on what I’m looking for:

  • For this series, posts on:
    • Writing craft books that really helped you
    • Writing classes or teachers that made a big difference
    • Workshops or conferences that made an impact
    • Writing friends or critique groups that affected your writing (for the positive!)
    • Posts that focus on both the experience of reading/participating as well as the actual lessons learned.
  • Posts between 300 and 800 words in length (though I’m flexible on the long end).
  • A short bio (up to three sentences) of the author (ie you) with up to three links. (Links are allowed in the post itself, too, but if I get too much of a sense of self-promotion I may edit them.)

If you’re up to the challenge, send the post in the body of an email (if you can code in HTML, I’ll love you forever; if not, just include the URL of the links) to contact at jordanmccollum.com . I’ll probably only have room for the first three posts, and I’d need them by Friday, March 19. If that’s too little notice, don’t worry, I’ll have another call for guest bloggers at the end of May (if not before).

But for future reference, if ever you’d like to do a guest post here, go for it! I may not always post them—but don’t worry, I don’t do the whole no-response-means-no thing, so you’ll be free to use a post somewhere else. If you’re not familiar with guest blogging, check out my article on maximizing your guest blogging, as well as this more recent post on guest blogging from Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.

Questions, comments and suggestions for future series welcome!

Photo by Andrea