Posts by Michael
Middle Grade Magic
In this guest post, author Laura Anne Bird (Crossing the Pressure Line and Marvelous Jackson) shares what she loves most about middle grade fiction. I can’t think of one grown-up who wouldn’t benefit from reading a middle-grade novel. But why would an adult want to crack open a book written for eight- to twelve-year-olds? Because…
Read MoreOn Writing Slim, A Technique for Productive Writing
All credit to author Colleen Behnke for the term “writing slim.” She mentioned it to me as we discussed working together to publish her middle grade novel Marshmallow. I had asked her about her approach to writing, and she said she tends to “write slim.” I immediately connected to the term. It reminded me of…
Read MoreHow Well Do Ebooks Sell?
It’s royalty time here at Orange Hat Publishing! We have a new system that I’ve built for handling all the data and calculating what is owed. I wrote it all in the statistical programming language R, because that’s the programming language I’m most familiar with. It does a pretty good job handling datasets, and our…
Read MoreTailspin, Unexpected Success, and What’s Next
In this post, guest author John Armbruster reflects on publishing Ten16’s bestseller Tailspin. My book Tailspin came out in April of 2022. This narrative nonfiction work centers on the story of Gene Moran, a World War II tail gunner from Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, who was shot down over Germany in 1943 and survived a four-mile…
Read MoreStumbling Over Pebbles—The Little Things in Stories
I’m going to write a little scene here, and I want you to tell me what you think about it. I stopped over to visit Jenny at her home a mile outside of downtown Milwaukee. She and her husband had bought the ten acres of land about four years ago and had built an intimidating…
Read MoreComfort Reads
My family and I all ended up getting the flu over the weekend. Our symptoms have been tiredness and cough and thankfully none of the grosser aspects of flu. Our daughter Plum (age 2) got it first on Friday and stayed home from daycare. I started feeling it Friday night and was pretty exhausted Saturday…
Read MoreTrying Out “AI Proofreading” in Our Editing Process
I’ve yet to see any “intelligence” in so-called artificial intelligence (AI) tools, but I’ve tried out as many as I can to see if they can be useful in proofreading. For the most part, the tools do poorly. The problem is that they are focused on rewriting (or even writing from scratch) based on tone…
Read MoreSchool Author Visits: 5 Things NOT to Do!
You’ve written your first (or third, or tenth) children’s book, and you are ready to share it with the world! And what better way to get your book in front of kids than at a school? Author visits at schools can be a wonderful way to engage with your core audience.
Read MoreWhat Publishers Owe Authors Submitting Work
It’s common for an author to feel that publishers hold all the power. Until the advent of print-on-demand and self-publishing, authors trying to break through felt their limits acutely, with the metaphor gatekeeper feeling quite literal at times. And publishers abused this power, taking advantage of the oversupply of would-be authors to treat authors as…
Read MoreSummary, Exposition, and Narrative
Facts and information! All books need them in order for the reader to understand the story. But deciding how to deliver them is often the difference between a book that’s a slog and a book where the pages turn themselves. Whether fiction or non-fiction, and with works for any age of reader, the writer’s ability…
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