by AnnSheybani | Oct 8, 2023 | Writing
A lot of manuscripts slide across my desk each week, which shouldn’t surprise anyone seeing as I run a publishing house. After all these years in the business, I can identify why a particular book draws me in and where another immediately goes off the rails. I... by AnnSheybani | Sep 23, 2023 | Writing
I took an essay writing course in grad school back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and discovered that it’s much harder to wrap up a piece than it is to start one. When it comes time to draw a conclusion, just watch yourself blank out. The same sort of WTF-now? comes... by AnnSheybani | Sep 18, 2023 | Writing
The introduction to your non-fiction book is your chance to make a good impression on potential readers and convince them to keep reading. We’re all busy people, so we need to know, straight out of the gate, that our precious time will not be wasted. These first few... by AnnSheybani | Sep 10, 2023 | Writing, writing lessons
Many of us become coaches, speakers, or service professionals, if you will, because we’ve had to solve a particular problem for ourselves. Through trial and error, we figured out the process required to get the desired outcome. Somewhere along the road, we realized... by AnnSheybani | Aug 28, 2023 | Reading, Writing
I realize, after talking to a number of folks who want to write what they describe as a business memoir–what they really want to do is include a lot of personal narrative in a self-help book–that the average person has no idea what a memoir entails. Years... by AnnSheybani | Aug 19, 2023 | publishing, Writing
When I came out of grad school, writers had to bank on traditional publishing houses to choose them for a sense of worth and/or credibility. You could self-publish—it was called vanity publishing then—but that had all the panache of finding a spouse in the classified...
