Susan E. Farris's Blog: The Well-Fed Writer

My readers are some of the best people in the world. Besides “where can I buy your book,” the most frequent question I get is “how can I leave a review?” The answer to both is: everywhere!

Most sites, including Goodreads, Google Books, Apple, Kobo, B&N, and yes, Amazon, allow you to leave a review even if you didn’t purchase the book through them. This is especially powerful on Amazon.

Here’s a quick rundown on how to review a book on Amazon and why it’s important.

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Want to take your poetry to the next level? Maybe you like the idea of poetry and you even have some ideas you’d like to experiment with, but you just don’t know where to start.

Whatever your skill level as an amateur poet, I wanted to share my top tips and tricks with you in a series of blog posts to help you become the poet you’ve always wanted to be.

The biggest trend I see in amateur poetry is an explosion of imagery and emotion. There are so images, metaphors are mishmashed together, we skip from emotion to emotion like we’re hopping from rock to rock across a stream.

On the page, there is so much to sort out, that it is hard to determine what the heart of the poem is. This makes it hard for the reader to develop their own interpretation of it.

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As avid readers, all of us have aspirational books.

Maybe you want to finally dust off that copy of George Eliot’s Middlemarch or tackle Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives. Whatever it is that you have your sites set on, it can seem out of reach if your life is busy or you feel like you’re a slow reader.

However, hitting your literary goals doesn’t have to remain an impossible goal.

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I have been blessed with a number of amazing teachers throughout my life, from elementary through grad school.

These teachers invested in me early on, stuck with me during difficult periods, and saw potential in me before I did.

Learn more about how the teachers in my life shaped me as a writer and leave a shout-out to one of your teachers! READ MORE

A wealth of studies have proven that reading improves our vocabularies, reduces stress, increases our empathy, and maintains our cognitive function as we age.

If reading is so good, why aren’t we doing more of it? I admit that despite all the books I’ve devoured, that I feel like I’m a slow reader. Maybe that’s because I’m married to a speed demon of a reader. But I wanted to learn how to read more each day, so I set out to find some tips to help up my page count (even if I’ll never exactly be a speed reader.)

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Are you a forgetful reader like me?

There are plenty of reasons to read anyway- and a few tricks to help your memory!

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I’m getting stocked up for some serious summer reading! If you want to join me, check out my #TBRpile over on the blog.

See anything that you’ve been craving to read? I'd love to hear about your must-reads for the summer!

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What’s your writing story? Do you have an author or book that made it click for you that you could be a writer?

For me, it all clicked when I read Eragon by Christopher Paolini for the first time as a teenager.

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One of the things that I didn’t realize when I first began my self-publishing journey was just how much it was going to cost me to publish The Gravedigger’s Guild.

Don’t get me wrong- I knew I was starting a business. And businesses had start-up costs. But how much could it be? Self-publishing is “free” right?

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Do you want to be able to dictate notes on the go? I’ve found that writers find some of the best solutions, and dictation apps and tools are no exception!

In several of my writing groups, dictating on-the-go has been bounced around and I wanted to share the top recommendations with you. So whether you find yourself stuck in the car, up to your elbows in bread flour, or simply a verbal processor who’d like an innovative way to journal, you can find the perfect dictation app to help you capture your thoughts.

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