What an AI Detector Score on Your Manuscript Is Worth
An AI detector looks like a breathalyzer and works nothing like one. It measures resemblance, not residue, and careful editing is what makes honest writing fail it.
Tag: Writing
The broadest tag on the site, and the subject underneath everything else here. These articles cover the practice of writing itself: the habits, the craft, the business, and the strange satisfaction of putting words in a row until they mean something. Start here if you want the wide view.
AI WritingWhat It Costs to Fix an AI-Written Manuscript
The author thinks he is eighty percent finished. He is at page one, and somebody has to tell him. Here is what an AI-written manuscript really costs to turn into a book.
AI WritingWhen a Client Thinks the Ghostwriter Used AI
A publisher pulled a novel over work done by someone the author hired. If you have paid a writer and you are uneasy, ask for the trail instead of the score.
GhostwritingMonthly or Milestone: How Ghostwriting Gets Billed
Most authors do not know there is a choice. The billing model you agree to decides what happens when you travel for three weeks or the business has a bad quarter.
GhostwritingThe Clients Who Pay and Vanish
He signs, he pays, he says next week. Next week does not come. Some of these files are ten years old now and I still have them.
GhostwritingThe One-Hour Call Before I Quote Your Book
Eight months is what you are buying, and almost none of it is writing. Nobody assesses that from an email thread, which is why the call is not a formality.
Authority Through AuthorshipWhy Fiverr Sucks for Ghostwriting: The Buyer’s Side
You can buy a ghostwritten book on Fiverr for a few hundred dollars. The arithmetic of what that buys is not a secret and not a matter of opinion, and it explains what arrives. This is the buyer's side, written…
Fiction WritingBooks to Give a Writer
There are four books that get given to writers, and anyone who has been writing for more than a year owns all four. This is a guide to what to give instead, organized by what the person is struggling with…
Fiction WritingThe Beach Read Argument
Calling a book a beach read is usually a way of praising it while making clear you are not taking it seriously. The assumption underneath is that easy reading means easy writing, and that assumption is exactly backwards.
Book MarketingBehind the Book: Publish Your Book
I clicked Publish on my first book in 2016 and watched nothing happen for two weeks. Zero sales. I had assumed writing the book was the hard part, which is the assumption every new author makes.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Show Don’t Tell
Show, don’t tell was the advice I disliked most, because nobody ever explained it. Critique groups told me I was telling too much without once saying what that meant.
Character DevelopmentBehind the Book: Stuck in the Middle
Four books ago I sat down to write about why Americans had stopped thinking. Each one dragged me somewhere I did not expect, and this is the book where all four of them meet.