Manuscript Critiques and Mentoring – did you know that if you want me to, I can review you manuscript (or even your work in progress) and do a structural edit? Well, I can. Click through for details.

Romance Writers Toolkit – a selection of writing and marketing books that are useful.

Resources from Getting Published is Just the Beginning: A Guide to IP Rights for traditionally published authors and creative writing students – This snappily titled book is aimed at authors early in their career. There’s a ton of resources on here. (If it’s all a little overwhelming, you might find the book useful!). 

Free Publisher Offer Checklist – Been offered a publishing contract and overwhelmed by all the things you need to think about? Cut through the overwhelm with a handy checklist.

Design resources

One of the most useful skills to learn as an author is how to make nice images – you can use them in your social media, or even to make nice pictures to use when you’re giving talks. 

Here are some design sites that make the process easy.

Canva.com *A brilliant graphic design resource. I use it to make twitter posts, Facebook headers, book covers, posters, slides, images and logos for my websites. I absolutely love it. There are a lot of things you can use for free, or you can buy images ad hoc for $1. You can join the pro tier and get a whole load of extra functionality (including the one that lets you save the same post in the right size for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and a social media scheduler). They also have a handy design school section, which is good if you’re learning about graphic design.

https://designschool.canva.com/

*As an Amazon Affiliate, I earn a few pence from qualifying purchases. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Bookbrush.com  Like Canva, but made specifically for books. They include things like logos that say ‘Kindle Unlimited’ or ‘Kobo’ etc. They have a free tier that lets you download three images a month. If you want to do fancy things like make book covers and box set covers, you need to pay for the higher tier. I prefer Canva (above) because it lets me do more.

Social media scheduling tools

No one has the time to watch their social media 24/7. Oh, who am I kidding … I spend most of my waking hours linked to my Twitter account. But I’m assuming that you have a life and aren’t constantly checking social media. If you want to schedule your posts, here are a few services that you can use. 

Crowdfire – Has a free tier which allows you to schedule 10 posts on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Facebook and a whole host of other places.. I pay for the higher tier. I like it because I can just reschedule tweets without uploading images again. 

Hootsuite – has a free tier, which allows you to schedule posts on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Facebook and a whole host of other places.

Canva Pro also has a handy social media scheduling tool.

Creative Writing articles (some originally written for the Beverley Guardian)

Find time to write that novel (October 2015)

Get to know your characters (November 2015)

Point of View Explained (December 2015)

Character Arc (January 2016)

Create conflict on the page (March 2016)

Three Act Story Structure in a Nutshell

Seven Places to Find Inspiration 

Seven ways to add humour to your writing (on Jami Gold’s blog)

Smart Bitches Trashy Books

Ways crocheting a blanket is like writing a book (September 2015)

Writer’s Workshop

Diversity in Genre Fiction: When a book is not ‘Asian enough’ (May 2016)

USA Today (no longer online)

When Science Meets Romance (December 2014)

7 reasons why we love geek heroes (September 2014)

Why Do Americans Like Reading British Romance? (March 2014)

Looking back at Meg Cabot’s ‘Boy’ series (June 2016)