non-fiction tagged posts

  (Non-fiction)

  (Fiction)

You’re a member of “writer mama” Christina Katz’s target audience if you’re (1) a female (2) non-fiction writer who’s (3) looking to traditionally publish (4) in around 2010 and (5) have plenty of time on your hands. The fewer of those categories you fall into, however, the less this book is for you. So for me as a male, indie-published, fiction author with precious little spare time in the middle of 2015, this book had limited value.

That’s not to say Get Known is a bad book. It’s not.

Katz, whom I discovered through one of many writers’ blogs I used to have time to read, treats the topic of “platform”—the base on which you establish your credibility and from which you grow your list of followers and readers—quite thoroughly...

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty details of what to critique and how to do it, I want to give you a high-level overview of what the rest of this series is going to cover. We’ll look at twelve broad categories:

• Reader response
• Beginnings and endings
• Characters and characterization
• Setting
• Plot
• Flashbacks, flash-forwards, and backstory
• Narrative and dialogue
• Pace
• Description
• General story-telling problems
• Mechanical errors
• Positive reinforcement, and
• Other topics

Whew, that’s a lot! “But wait, there’s more!” Much, much more, as you’ll see in a minute.

Positive reinforcement gets its own section because writers need positive strokes, to hea...