How to Get Published

by D. Keith Howington

It’s your responsibility to feed dialog into your readers’ minds without causing them to do a double-take and have to go back and read a bit again. When that happens, you’ve lost the mood, and lost the reader. Too much of that can lose them permanently.

We all know the basics: that “said” is essentially invisible, that using adverbs like “angrily” to convey feeling is risky, and that using speech tags such as “he smiled” are physical impossibilities and jarring to the reader. (more…)

by Al Kalar

One of my jobs in this madhouse, is “gatekeeper”. I review new submissions to see if they get rejected up front or considered for publication. I hate saying “no”, but if I don’t, we’d be flooded with less than top notch material.

Lousy material takes too much time to whip into shape and often can’t be saved. Although we edit everything we publish, we’re not in the business of editing poor quality stuff to help a writer get published. There are people who do that and some are very good at it (and some are not). But, even though our editors are great, our job is publishing.

Back in May, I gave you 11 Ways to Get Rejected. Well, what about the flipside? You know, the goal of the submission process - acceptance.

Obviously, the most important thing is to not do any of those 11 deadly things.

We’re strictly an eBook publisher, so we do everything digitally. To get a novel accepted at AKW Books, you should do the following: (more…)

by John Bowers

A few years ago I was reading a James Patterson novel and having a jolly old time.  I was deeply immersed in the mystery, which led the protagonist to Southern California and through a number of towns I have visited.  Every single city was correctly indentified, until the narrative mentioned Bakersville!

Bakersville?  Bakersville? There is no such city in California.  But there is a Bakersfield, which is obviously what Patterson meant.  (How the error got past his editors, I’ll never know…except they probably live in Manhattan and think California is part of the Gobi Desert). (more…)