The Debutante Ball, established in 2007, is a group blog for authors making their debut in the literary world. We are now in our twelfth season of celebrating up-and-coming authors. Former Debs include bestsellers in the genres of women’s fiction, mystery, literary fiction, nonfiction, young adult, and more. Click on any of the photos above to learn about The Debutante Ball Class of 2019 and their books. Read about the bestselling…
Selling Your Book Before You Sell Your Book
Querying is hard. Let’s get that out of the way up front. You can be a brilliant novelist who writes stunning sentences and gripping plot twists and still suck at queries. It’s a completely different skill set than fiction writing. Now, to be honest, I don’t think I suck at writing queries. For my first book, I’m fairly certain the query was better than the book itself. I got a…
Attacus Atlas & Other Inventions: Channeling Jean Kwok (and you can too!)
“The query letter is…the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write” — Nicholas Spark This week’s subject of discussion is supposed to be about querying tips, as in what tips can you give an aspiring writer when querying potential publishers and agents? Unfortunately my querying stories and experiences are good only in the theoretical — as in it’s a good topic to discuss in the abstract….
Recipe for a Query Letter
Ingredients: 1 thoroughly revised manuscript 1 aspiring author 1 fragile dream 200-400 words Prep Time: 1-5 weeksCook Time: 1-3 months Step 1. Congratulations! You wrote a book! And you revised it! You did revise it, right? Oh phew, good. Wait – you had someone else read it, too? Yes? Even better. Okay now take those thousands upon thousands of exquisitely and painfully chosen words and condense them down to about…
[News Flash] November 11, 2018
Thank you so much to yesterday’s guest, Christine O’Brien! If you haven’t already, enter the #DebBallGiveaway to win a copy of Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing. You can enter by sharing our post on Facebook and/or retweeting the following tweet (make sure you follow @DebutanteBall on Twitter too!): Interview with Christine O’Brien + CRAVE: A MEMOIR OF FOOD AND LONGING giveaway https://t.co/vxbFVTqVuC pic.twitter.com/CWwwqbH5pv — The Debutante Ball (@DebutanteBall) November 10,…
Interview with Christine O’Brien + CRAVE: A MEMOIR OF FOOD AND LONGING giveaway
I’m so thrilled to welcome Christine O’Brien to the Debutante Ball this week! Christine is a lecturer in the English Composition Department at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA. She earned a BA in English at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a double MFA in non-fiction and fiction from St. Mary’s College, where she was awarded the college’s Agnes Butler Scholarship for Literary Excellence. Christine has previously worked…
Driven to Distraction
Tips to keep your writing distractions to a minimum: Don’t have children. Download one of those apps like FocusMe that let you forbid yourself internet for a certain block of time. See number 1. Alternatively, book a babysitter/bribe your partner/friend to watch the kids you chose to have so you can have uninterrupted time. Kids will not let you write. I repeat: they will not. You will put your…
Are you distracted or just busy?
This is going to be a fairly short post because today I’m a little distracted. There are a million things that I need to get done, but I put together a quick 5 minute list on how to stay focused on writing when you’re feeling as distracted as I am: Turn off your WiFi while you write. You can do all your “research” later. Or, even better, print out the…
Distracting Myself from Distraction
Things that have distracted me from writing this post (and it isn’t even noon yet): GIFs of this hot dude from American Horror Story several of my friends are currently obsessed with Shopping for Star Wars sheets and duvet covers for my grown-ass adult bedroom Reading a book about how social media is ruining your life Petting my dog (you know what, I’m going to stand by this one as…
Attacus Atlas & Other Inventions: Distracts, Distracting, Distractions
“Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.” – Ursula K. LeGuin Well, I’m in the thick of the stew now, aren’t I? I’m trying to expel 50,000 words from my brain onto the page by the end of the month for NaNoWriMo and trying hard not to be sucked in to the countdown until the Midterm Elections. By the time you read this, if you read this, We…
On Being in a Constant State of Distraction or How I Learned to Love the – SQUIRREL
On November 1st, 2016, as part of NaNoWriMo that year, I officially started writing the Perfect Assassin. Less than a week later, the most bigoted, hateful, willfully deceitful human being was elected to the highest office in our nation. Not a week has gone by in these past two years where I haven’t worried for my friends and family, where something more dire, more pressing, more terrifying has occurred to…
