My teachers

Joanna Penn – The Creative Penn!

Joanna is simply the best … for writing, self-publishing and marketing. Watch and learn. Joanna has recently published a revised third edition of How to Market a Book, in which she includes the most up-to-date information on what’s changed since the previous edition in 2014.

Also, you might enjoy  The Successful Author Mindset: A Handbook for Surviving the Writer’s Journey.

Joanna has lots of other books on writing and self-publishing too.

You can connect with Joanna on Facebook.

Joan Dempsey

Joan Dempsey is an excellent and inspiring teacher. I took her ‘Revise with Confidence’ course, and she has many others on offer.

Joan also has a closed Facebook group linked to her course: Revise with Confidence.

And, Joan’s book, This is How it Begins, is now on sale …

Ria View Writers Group

I formed the Ria View Writers group along with four friends – we’d all met at another writing group, but we wanted something different. Over the years, the group has changed in that members leave and new members arrive – but our objectives and the format remains the same. And we limit the group to 6 members.

We meet once a month for a whole day. Mid-month, we each submit a chapter from our work-in-progress novel or some other piece of writing we want reviewed. We then spend time reading each others’ submissions and preparing our review of those pieces.

At the meeting, we each take a turn ‘in the spotlight’. We all comment on that writer’s piece, verbally, but also provide written comments either on paper or electronically. There is time for discussion on issues we face in our writing, and we each leave the meeting with plenty of food for thought.

You can’t join our group – but you could set up one yourself. Mutual mentoring works!

If you can recommend a great teacher, let me know?

Get yourself a nag buddy!

For over a decade now, Amazon best-selling short story writer and novelist Patsy Collins and I have been nag buddies. If you are in need of motivation, in the form of deadlines, Patsy Collins provides links for upcoming free-to-enter writing competitions and also blogs about the womag market. Patsy has also published a book, with Rosemary Kind, to inspire you: From Story Idea to Reader.

More recently, I’ve teamed up with Jeni Ferris. We became accountability buddies through the Self Publishing School. Jeni and I have a Skype session once a week, in which we catch up on what progress each of us has made with our various projects.