Wednesday links: What writers need to stop doing, NA speculative fiction, and online book events

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few.

Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. 6 Things We Need To Stop Doing As Writers, from Thought Catalog: Writers — like everyone else in the world — fall into habits. Some of these habits aren’t necessarily good ones, as a Thought Catalog writer points out in this post. Excerpt: “The problem with writing that seems to have emerged recently, is people’s attitude towards writers. Or perhaps writers’ attitudes towards the profession.”

2. New Adult Speculative Fiction is Here to Stay, from NA Alley: New Adult is still a relatively, well, new category. It’s one I enjoy, though I would like to see a more diverse selection of genres. Luckily, as this post points out, speculative fiction is starting to take hold in the category. Excerpt: “I debuted last November with the first book in my NA time travel series and it’s been a serious roller coaster ride ever since … of lessons learned, celebrations had, butt-in-chair hard work, periodic head scratching, and flat out facepalms. Through it all, I’ve come to one conclusion: NA speculative fiction is HERE TO STAY!”

3. 10 Tips to Organizing a Kick Ass Online Book Event, from Kristen Lamb’s Blog: Like a lot of unpublished authors, I’m not really familiar with what would be involved in planning a good online book event — or just about any book event, for that matter. This post has some good advice on the subject, though. Excerpt: “The book launch. The discoverability blog hop. The big Christmas sale. You know you need to do it, that it will be good for your book, but the MOUNTAIN of work looming makes you want to run for Netflix and Big Bang Theory reruns.”