Authors’ Thoughts
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As an Eagles fan and someone who works in publishing, nothing has fascinated me more so far in 2025 than the Inner Excellence story. For those who aren’t aware, Inner Excellence is a book by Jim Murphy that went completely viral after Philadelphia Eagles star wideout AJ Brown was caught reading it on the sidelines…
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Jack Ryan is a political thriller book series (sometimes known as the Ryanverse) written by the late Tom Clancy centered around the titular hero and protagonist, Jack Ryan. Having been adapted into several movies and TV series featuring actors like Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin, with the latest iteration starring John Krasinski on Prime, it’s…
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Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott, two of the best filmmakers in the business, made noise in the box office in 2023 with the releases of Oppenheimer and Napoleon, respectively. However, both of these films garnered wildly different reactions, and here, we’re going to do a deep dive into why that is. Nolan and Scott are…
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Something that stumps a lot of writers I see – including myself sometimes – is coming up with a decent novel premise to begin with. I’ve a solid number of clients who tell me they want to make a living writing. While it’s great to have goals, chances are that’s not going to happen with…
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One of my favorite literary devices is the foil character. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but my hunch is that most foils work towards a more satisfying resolution for our protagonist’s arc. What I mean by this is, say, if you have two foils whose stories are closely intertwined, their resolutions will…
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Point of View is a critical literary technique when tackling a fiction novel. It is the usage of narrative voice in a way that clearly defines how much knowledge both the narrator and the reader have. We refer to these as 3rd and 1st person, and within 3rd and 1st, we have subsets of POV…
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My best free advice as a writer to another writer is to read. Read as much as you can. Read the contemporaries, read the classics, read from a local author, read from a bestseller, read from a debut. Read the free stuff on Inkitt and Medium. Read all of it. This is the John Wesley-style…
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I recently appeared on a PenPodcast with Matthew Harms discussing how to navigate the query process, and we went back and forth on a discussion about self vs. traditional publishing (a topic that warrants many, many different articles on its own) and surmised that a big reason authors find their way to self-publishing is the…
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Aspiring writers sometimes fall into a simple trap. They have an idea for a book, then they research the subject, then they go on Google, Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and they see another author already wrote pretty much the same subject, with great reviews and beautiful cover art. Then the aspiring author rolls over on…
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Coming back from my own hiatus (and making a few updates to the site’s theme and appearance), I’m writing to let you know the benefits of ‘taking a break’. Hustle culture has demonized ‘breaks, hiatuses, and vacations’ to the point where enjoying yourself seems blasphemous because you’re not ‘productive’. I once even watched a YouTube…
Donovan Levine | Agent, Writer, Copyeditor 