Are you ready to submit your work to an agent or publisher? Want to ensure your work has the best chance to impress? Then you’d better make sure your fist few pages sing. We all know that publishing professionals receive thousands of submissions each year and they’re often so busy that if your work fails to grab them in that first page or two, they won’t persist past that. Sending your work out into the world is a harrowing experience, but if you get those first five pages right, it has a far better chance of success. The focus of …
June OWL | Sink Your Teeth into Appetising Characters with Sandy Vaile
Develop memorable individuals, tailored to your story. Being a brilliant wordsmith isn’t enough. You need a character who is interesting and flawed enough to hook a reader and make them want to stick around long enough to unravel their mysteries. Do you love your imaginery friends, but aren’t sure how best to convey them? Then this interactive workshop is just the inspiration you need to make them come alive on the page. This workshop will be conducted on the RWA Moodle platform and will run over four weeks. It is designed as the ideal prerequisite to Treat Backstory Like a Pungent Spice workshop which will …
June OWL | Pitch like a Professional: Conference primer with Anita Joy
About the Course Gearing up for the RWAust conference in just a couple of months? Excited but silently terrified about the opportunity to pitch your book to an editor or agent? “Pitch Like a Professional” is a four-week conference primer designed to get your synopsis, query letter, in-person pitch (and you!) glinting with readiness. The course will be delivered via Moodle in a series of weekly ‘lessons’ at the start of the week and an ongoing Q/A and discussions as well as critique of participant examples through each week. Each week will focus on one aspect of the pitching and …
The Black Moment: When All Is Lost with Rachel Bailey
Course Dates: 1–28 May, 2017 Cost: RWA Member—$30. Non-RWA Member—$80. The Black Moment is the point in your story when all hope is lost, when crisis peaks, when things seem bleakest and we start to think the characters won’t be able to find their HEA. But how do you make it powerful while still being the right one for your story? And how do your characters deal with their loss during the following scenes—the Dark Night of the Soul? Using examples from romance novels and movies, we’ll explore the techniques authors use and apply them to your own work. The …
The Dark Art of the Blurb with Ainslie Paton
Course Dates: 1–28 May, 2017 Cost: RWA Member—$30. Non-RWA Member—$80. They are tricky those few sparkling sentences, groovy phrases and quick-baked emotions that comprise a blurb. They’re the pitch, the deal, the promise and the shortcut to satisfaction. Like a cover, they can heavily influence a book buyer’s perceptions and actions. Powerful for all their 150-word punch because of their ability to make us do things: one-click that link, open that wallet, pay that pal, read that sucker. Blurb-writing uses the techniques of copywriting, and the more you blurb, the easier it gets. Come learn the dark arts. Course would …
A Thrilling Guide to Producing Awesome Book Trailers
A Thrilling Guide to Producing Awesome Book Trailers Presenter: CT Green/PressedPear (Spielberg eat your heart out!) Whether you’re a novice or more seasoned writer (mmm, seasoned), most authors face a major challenge: ‘How to successfully promote hundreds of pages of written text into one effective cover image, blurb, post, tweet…’. So how does a creative, motivated and talented writer (yep, we mean you!) bring a story to life? To engage with the reader, immersing them into the world of your fantastically crafted book? The answer is simple: You create a Book Trailer of epic awesomeness! Video has become such a powerful …
Edit your own novel: Backburning Backstory, Climbing the Staircase of Turning Points and using the 13 Main Scenes
Presenter: Ebony McKenna In the dark about editing? Let Ebony McKenna show you how to edit your own manuscript with this intensive online course. All welcome! This is for writers who have written a novel in a month and need to know what to do next. Or for writers who have a few manuscripts in the ‘early draft’ stage but can’t figure out how to fix them. It’s also for writers who are great at starting new stories, get stuck and end up abandoning them. In this OWL, participants will use the editing techniques I’ve developed over the decades to look …