In the months leading up to my layoff last spring, I experienced a crisis of values. Let's call it a mid-life awakening. I realized that I hadn't prioritized the things that mattered to me--not to the extent I wanted to, anyway.

You’ve polished your manuscript, found a great agent, and sold your book to a publisher. Now you get to sit back and watch your book fly off the shelf, right? Very likely not.

I was watching this interview with author Brit Bennett last week, preparing for my Book Club for Writers meeting next week, when she said something that made me sit up: A story becomes much more interesting when you tell readers things versus holding them back.

I didn’t feel great about the conclusion I came to last week on what constitutes success in writing. It’s not that I disagree with myself; I just found my conclusion rather pat. Something was missing.

I used to have a picture in my mind of what writing success was, and it looked like nothing less than a fairytale.

Our goal for the Book Club for Writers is to read and discuss books through the lens of narrative form, and our meeting last night did not disappoint!

If someone tells you they’re reading a book, your first question is likely to be, “Is it any good?” This is one of the most common questions I get at the bookstore, and it might be one of the hardest to answer. And it can be just as tricky when you’re considering whether the project you’re working on is any good—and whether it’s good enough to pitch to agents or to self-publish.

It may not be earth-shattering news that bookstores return books that don't sell to the publisher, but the process of physically pulling these books from shelves to ship back to their publishers has profoundly illustrated for me the power that each bookseller, each reader (that's you!) has in keeping books on the shelf.

With the launch of the Book Club for Writers last week I have rediscovered the pleasure in spending time with a novel and really looking at it from a craft perspective. Reading a book this way means you don't even have to like it to get something out of it.

This past week, in the swirl of conversation around AI and whether or how it will replace writers and other artists, word broke of Jane Friedman's discovery of work attributed to her on Amazon.