Tag Archives: recommendations

December 15, 2019 · 3:37 pm

The 8 Best Books for Writers in 2019

Read reviews and buy the best books for writers from top authors including Randy Ingermanson, Susan Thurman, Zachary Petit and more.

Source: The 8 Best Books for Writers in 2019

Become a better author in no time

By Emily Delbridge

Updated November 21, 2019

 

https://www.thebalance.com/best-books-for-writers-1360649

 

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Making money as a writer is not an easy task. Depending on your goals it can feel downright impossible. Being a successful writer has nothing to do with luck, and everything to do with hard work, dedication and perseverance. Overcoming challenges like writer’s block and finding a publisher can be excruciating. The best thing you can do is continue self-education. Most people know reading more can make you a better writer. Reading the proper book at the right time can make all the difference. If you are looking to make things easier on yourself and make the best of your writing, you are in the right place. Take a look at the best books for writers beginning with tools for becoming a better writer and ending with getting your writing out to the masses.

Best for Fiction Writers: How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method

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There are many different ways to approach writing a fiction novel. The Snowflake Method is a popular method of writing and the author, Randy Ingermanson, lays it out in a unique book where the technique is explained in a story. He uses the fairy tale characters, Goldilocks and the Three Bears with a murder mystery theme, and walks you through the process of using the Snowflake method. It makes it fun and easy to understand. If you have never heard of the Snowflake Method, it begins with a simple idea then develops and adds more intricate details along the way. It is a little different than laying out a rigid outline or just making it up as you go along. It is most helpful for writers who prefer to write as they go but often get stuck somewhere in the middle. The Snowflake method can help even a seasoned writer complete a novel with excitement.

Best for Improving Your Writing Skills: The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need

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One skill that can not be overlooked as a writer is grammar. Having a resource you can depend on and refer to as needed is an absolute must. The Only Grammar Book You Will Ever Need is the one stop shop for your grammar needs. It is less than 200 pages and has a quick reference guide. Proper grammar is not always intuitive. Common misspelled words can leave a reader running or clicking away from your content in a heartbeat. Get expert tips for writing clearly and directly. Learn the parts of speech and elements of a sentence. Figure out how to avoid the most common grammar and punctuation mistakes, and finally get the right punctuation in every sentence. This is an excellent book for helping writers create professional documents, writing A+ school papers or writing effective personal letters. It is very likely your writing will improve rapidly after reading this book. Even though there is a lot of software available to correct writing errors, it is great to learn the why behind grammar errors. You will write more efficiently and will have a more cohesive end product.

Best for Freelance Writers: The Essential Guide to Freelance Writing

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The life of a freelance writer has its perks, but it has its challenges, too! If you have been looking to earn extra income, or if you are ready to kick the 9- to-5 day job completely, freelance writing is ripe with opportunities. It is a great way to enter the writing world and hone your writing skills. Freelance writing can help you gain experience, so you are more skilled and confident to write more elaborate pieces such as a novel. The Essential Guide to Freelance Writing will help you reach your goals, whatever they may be, faster. Learn how to write and structure different styles of articles. Get tips on how to dream up the perfect article idea. Explore various aspects of being a freelance writer you may never have considered before. The author Zachary Petit has a lot of expertise in the writing, which includes being the longtime managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine. He sprinkles in humorous antidotes and makes this an easy read. If you are serious about becoming a freelance writer, this is the book that can help you make it happen.

Best for Self Publishing: Write. Publish. Repeat.

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There is one common goal nearly every writer works towards in their writing career, to write content your readers will love and come back to again and again. The publishing world has changed dramatically in recent years. Publishing options have exploded. However, it can be overwhelming to learn about all the different options and how to be successful in reaching your ideal reader. Write. Publish. Repeat. is written by a collaboration of successful Indie authors and is written in a conversation style. They make it clear it takes hard work to be successful at self-publishing; however, they provide invaluable insight on how to make it work without relying on luck. Expect to learn a little bit about everything, including building a story, understanding your market, tips for creating book covers, titles, formatting, pricing, getting your content on multiple platforms and more. Aspiring writers will learn a lot from this book. You will be motivated to continue and know there is proven success.

Best for Getting Published: Get a Literary Agent

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Securing a deal with a traditional publisher might be the most laborious task of any new writer. Some publishers are willing to take on the work of a writer without an agent, so check Writer’s Market books that contain publishers of all kinds. It is in the Writer’s Market books that you will find the majority of prominent publishers that want you to have an agent. The book Get a Literary Agent will help you figure out how to research agents and target the best ones for your work. It will teach you the ins and outs of the submission process. It delivers fantastic pointers on writing the perfect query letter and pitch. It also provides pro tips on assembling a book proposal, and how to form a healthy relationship with your agent. If you are still not sure an agent is needed, this book also dives into what a literary agent does and how they can benefit you. Getting your book on the Best Seller’s list is not an easy task. You will be happy you learned what to expect when getting a literary agent before spending tons of time trying to figure it out on your own.

Best Children’s Book Writing Resource: Children’s Writer’s Word Book

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Writing for children is a little different than writing for adults. If you are used to freelance writing for adults readers, there are a few things you need to consider when you change gears. The Children’s Writer’s Word Book written by Alijandra Mogilner will help you recognize some of the differences and make writing more natural for this target reader. You will need to pay attention to the reading level of the words you use. This book provides a list of specific words ranked by grades kindergarten through sixth. It also includes a thesaurus of those words and guidelines for sentence length. It has a useful introduction to each grade level and provides an overview of what the age group traditionally studies. Every children’s book writer will find this to be an essential handbook.

Best Writing Strategies Book: The Element of Style

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Do you want to learn how to write well? The Element of Style written by William Strunk is considered being one of the most concise yet all-inclusive writer’s handbooks despite being nearly 100 years old. It has almost every grammatical concept you might need to know. It is easy to find what you are looking for and can be used as a quick reference. The best part is its size. It is small enough to fit in your back pocket or backpack. Most writing guides are enormous textbooks nobody wants to read. This one answers most style questions in around 100 pages.

Best for Writer’s Block: The Miracle Morning for Writers

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Writer’s block can happen to anyone. Words are not flowing, and you are not sure what to do next. Creating good habits in your morning routine might be what you need. The Miracle Morning for Writers written initially by Hal Elrod has been described as the most life-altering book ever written. It has sold over 750,000 copies and has several different variations available. This edition, co-written by Steve Scott, pinpoints the specific habits you need to work into your morning routine to become a better writer than you ever thought imaginable. Learn how to overcome limiting beliefs and how to enter the “flow state” ending writer’s block once and for all.

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November 24, 2019 · 2:21 am

The Ten Best History Books of 2019 | History | Smithsonian

Our favorite titles of the year resurrect forgotten histories and help explain how we got to where we are today

Source: The Ten Best History Books of 2019 | History | Smithsonian

The history books we loved most in 2019 span centuries, nations and wars. From womanhood to nationhood, they challenge the construction of identity and mythology. They tell the stories of celebrity weddings, bootlegging trials, and people, places and things we thought we knew but prove, upon closer inspection, to be far more complex.

The Season: A Social History of the Debutante

When Consuelo Vanderbilt of the wealthy American Vanderbilt family married the Duke of Marlborough in 1895, she was one of the most famous debutantes in the world, at a time when interest in the doings of the rich had never been more scrutinized. Consuelo had spent her whole life training to marry a royal, and the event itself was covered in major newspapers across the globe. In The Season: A Social History of the Debutante, author Kristen Richardson contextualizes Consuelo and her wedding—and those of other famous debutantes, or young women making their societal debut, from the 1600s to today. The book is a centuries-spanning look at how debutantes and their rituals, from the antebellum South to modern-day Russia, have shaped marriage and womanhood in America and abroad.

 

The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America

For a time, George Remus had it all. The most successful bootlegger in America, Cincinnati’s Remus controlled nearly 30 percent of illegal liquor in the United States in the early 1920s. Historian and bestselling author Karen Abbott traces the rise of Remus—he was a pharmacist and a defense attorney—and the inevitable fall as he found himself on trial not just for bootlegging, but for the murder of his own wife. In an interview with Smithsonian, Abbott talked about the connection between Remus and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby: “I think Gatsby and Remus both had these longings of belonging to a world that didn’t wholly accept them or fully understand them. Even if Fitzgerald never met Remus, everybody knew who George Remus was by the time Fitzgerald started to draft The Great Gatsby.”

 

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

Many Americans know the names of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, key figures in North American Indigenous history. In his new book, Oxford history professor Pekka Hämäläinen (his previous book, The Comanche Empire, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2009) looks at the history of the Lakota Nation as other historians have looked at ancient Rome—a massive (and massively adaptive) empire that shaped the literal landscape of the Western United States as well as the fates of Indigenous groups for centuries.

 

American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation

Civil Rights, free love and anti-war protests have become synonymous with the 1960s, but in American Radicals, Holly Jackson, an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, traces these movements back a century in a reconsideration of radical protest and social upheaval in the mid-19th century. While some of the names that appear in Jackson’s story, like famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, will be familiar to American history buffs, she also revives forgotten figures like Frances Wright, an heiress whose protests against the institution of marriage inspired Walt Whitman to call her “one of the best [characters] in history, though also one of the least understood.”

 

Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence

Only six people attended Thomas Paine’s funeral. Once the most famous writer in the American colonies (and, later, the United States of America), the corsetmaker-turned-pamphleteer had been virtually expelled from public life for his radical beliefs and writings, like the ones that suggested a tax on landowners could be used to fund basic income for everyone else. Harlow Giles Unger, a renowned biographer of the Founding Fathers, looks at the Paine we know and the one we don’t, in his telling of the story of a man who pursued Enlightenment ideals even when those ideals ran afoul of what was socially acceptable.

 

The Cigarette: A Political History

As every day a new story about the dangers of vaping—or the fervent support of vape fans—appears, historian Sarah Milov’s The Cigarette looks at the history of smoking in the United States and reminds us that once upon a time, the government was more concerned with the rights of tobacco companies than the rights of non-smokers. The book deftly connects the rise in organized opponents to smoking to food safety, car safety and other consumer rights movements of the 20th century. Kirkus says Milov “mixes big-picture academic theory with fascinating, specific details to illuminate the rise and fall of tobacco production.”

 

Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom

In Policing the Open Road, legal historian Sarah A. Seo argues that while cars (and highways, for that matter) have long been associated with freedom in the eyes of American drivers, their advent and rapid domination of travel is the basis for a radical increase in policing and criminalization. From traffic stops to parking tickets, Seo traces the history of cars alongside the history of crime and discovers that the two are inextricably linked. “At times,” says Hua Hsu in The New Yorker, Seo’s work “feels like an underground history―of closeted gay men testing the limits of privacy; of African-Americans, like Jack Johnson or Martin Luther King, Jr., simply trying to get from one place to another.”

 

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Using the oral histories of formerly enslaved people, financial records and property history, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, makes a clear case that in the American South, many white women weren’t just complicit in the system of chattel slavery—they actively encouraged and benefited from it. Jones-Rogers’s work dismantles the notion that white women in slaveholding families were silent actors—instead, she argues, they used the institution of slavery to build a specific concept of womanhood that shaped the history of the nation before and after the Civil War.

 

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

In 1856, the United States passed a law that entitled citizens to take possession of any unclaimed island containing guano deposits—guano, of course, being the excrement of bats. Guano is an excellent fertilizer, and over the course of the 20th century, the U.S. claimed dozens of small islands in remote parts of the world, turning them into territories with few rights of their own. The story of guano is one of many that touch upon the empire forged by the U.S. from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Daniel Immerwahr, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, tells the often brutal, often tragic stories of these territories in an attempt to make the ‘Greater United States’ truly part of U.S. history.

 

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

In 1998, Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic changed the way we talk about the Civil War and the American South by making the point that for many, even 150 years after the war’s end, the conflict continued. In Spying on the South, published after Horwitz’s death this year, the author returned to the Southern states, this time following the trail of the young Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect whose work defined northern cities like New York and Boston. Jill Lepore, writing in the New Yorker, called Horwitz “the rare historian—the only historian I can think of—equally at home in the archive and in an interview, a dedicated scholar, a devoted journalist.”

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October 30, 2016 · 9:58 pm

Best Space Books and Sci-Fi: A Space.com Reading List

Space.com’s editors present a reading list for space and sci-fi lovers, as well as children who are interested in astronomy and spaceflight.

Source: Best Space Books and Sci-Fi: A Space.com Reading List

There are plenty of great books out there about space — so many, in fact, that it can feel a little overwhelming to figure out where to start. So the editors and writers at Space.com have put together a list of their favorite books about the universe. These are the books that we love — the ones that informed us, entertained us and inspired us. We hope they’ll do the same for you.

We’ve divided the books into five categories, which each have their own dedicated pages. On this page, we feature books we’re reading now and books we’ve recently read, which we will update regularly. Click to see the best of:

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Spaceflight and Space History
  • Space Photography
  • Space Books for Kids
  • Science Fiction

We hope there’s something on the list for every reader of every age. We’re also eager to hear about your favorite space books, so please leave your suggestions in the comments, and let us know why you love them. You can see our ongoing Space Books coverage here.

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December 6, 2015 · 7:47 pm

PW Picks: Books of the Week, December 7, 2015

This week at Publisher’s Weekly: a bibulous Southern preacher’s perverse quest for sainthood, plus how human perception is changing.

Source: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/68840-pw-picks-books-of-the-week-december-7-2015.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=9e2d958a01-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-9e2d958a01-304545489

Sophia

Sophia

Sophia by Michael Bible (Melville House) – Bible’s short, comic novel, which relates a bibulous Southern preacher’s perverse quest for sainthood, is full of small miracles. The Reverend Alvis T. Maloney is a Rabelaisian figure, the “lazy priest of [the] town’s worst church,” whose irrepressible appetites lead him into distinctly unholy alliances with his parishioners and the Holy Ghost, about whom he has recurring erotic dreams that would make John Donne blush. Whether he is a man more sinned against than sinning is an open question, but his desire to follow his own unorthodox righteous path is undisputed. The plot is almost secondary, though there is an excess of it: a cross-country chess tournament tour with Eli, a prodigy and Maloney’s “redneck Virgil”; an attack on a suburban house involving a hot air balloon; and a game of wits with a blind bounty hunter chasing Maloney and his pregnant lover from “the great Southern Bohemia” to New York City. Bible shrewdly pairs his maximalist comic style with a minimalist form. The novella is composed of short, paragraph-long scenes that are variously poetic, bawdy, and zany.

The Verdict

The Verdict

The Verdict by Nick Stone (Pegasus Crime) – This propulsive legal thriller from Thriller Award–winner Stone (Mr. Clarinet) centers on the arrest and impending trial—seemingly a certain prosecutorial slam dunk—of multimillionaire hedge funder Vernon James, a poor West Indian immigrant’s son, for the murder of the young blond whose strangled body is found in his luxury suite at the London hotel where only hours earlier he accepted an award from the Hoffmann Trust, a liberal umbrella organization, as “Ethical Person of the Year.” James’s predicament should come as catnip to Terry Flynt—at 38 hanging on by his fingernails to a job as a lowly legal clerk—who blames James, his former childhood best friend, for getting him booted out of Cambridge and starting him on the downward spiral of booze and depression that nearly destroyed his life. But, as Flynt is stunned to discover when he’s tapped to work on the defense team, his feelings are significantly more complicated, especially once the evidence he starts to uncover suggests that James might be innocent.

To see other picks: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/68840-pw-picks-books-of-the-week-december-7-2015.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=9e2d958a01-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-9e2d958a01-304545489

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December 21, 2014 · 8:09 pm

The Millions: A Year in Reading: Tom Nissley

The Millions : A Year in Reading: Tom Nissley.

I did something in 2014 that would throw a wrench into anyone’s reading: I bought a bookstore. Selling books, as I wasn’t surprised to find, doesn’t leave much time for reading them. Also, it meant I became — not for the first time, but never so publicly, on such a daily basis — a professional reader, as many of us are lucky to end up being in one way or another, as teachers or editors or researchers or some other line of work that corrals your attention from the luxury of polymorphous curiosity into something more traditionally productive, in my case trying to keep up with some of the new releases I might be able to share with my customers.

So, early in the year, my reading shifted back from personal to pro, but there were good books on both sides of the divide. And aside from a few favorites (see below), what I find myself remembering as vivid reading experiences are not consistently excellent books like Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, David Markson’s Reader’s Block, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, Lawrence Wright’s Thirteen Days in September, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Edward Hirsch’s Gabriel, Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong to Us, and William Gibson’s The Peripheral — all very good books I’d happily put in your hands if you walked into my store — but the more jagged-edged books I might hand you with a caveat.

I remember, with delight, the first half of Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds — “Finally reading Trollope,” I told everyone, or, rather, tweeted. “What took me so long to sample this deliciousness?” — before his stamina started to outlast mine. I was delighted too with the first half of Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog and the voice he captured, as companionable as Netherland’s but more chilling (like P.G. Wodehouse telling a J.G. Ballard story), even if for me that voice never grew into a full book. I admired and enjoyed Farther and Wilder, Blake Bailey’s biography of Charles Jackson, but I wondered if his subject was worth his talents until the final third — usually the least interesting in any biography — when Jackson’s accumulated troubles, and his belated reckoning with them, made his life profoundly moving. And though Joel Selvin’s Here Comes the Night had for me a hole at its center == the interior life of its ostensible subject, unsung record man Bert Berns, remained a cipher — I loved Selvin’s hepcat riffs on Berns and his fellow “centurions of pop.”

The rest of the article at: http://www.themillions.com/2014/12/a-year-in-reading-tom-nissley.html

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