Top takeaways from the Author Nation conference, including using curiosity gaps to hook readers, leveraging new tools and services for authors, and thriving in self-publishing. Learn about marketing strategies, metadata tools, and standing out in the age of AI—plus advice from experienced authors.

Learn how music producer Rick Rubin’s insights about the creative process can help writers.

Pickens, a psychologist, explores roadblocks like time, work, money, fear, and isolation that commonly beset creatives.

Trubek offers a behind-the-scenes tour of a small press.

Is this popular book worth your time? It depends on where you are in the writing process.

How visualizing your readers can help you embrace your creative power and overcome writer’s block.

The Way of the Writer is a book from a long-time writing instructor that is remarkably short on specific writing craft advice.

Advice, encouragement, and wisdom from a range of writers.

Advice and encouragement from Walter Mosley for authors facing a blank page.

Advice and inspiration for doing deep, meaningful, difficult creative work.

Is the tough love Twyla Tharp provides in The Creative Habit the push you need to get past writer’s block?

Natalie Goldberg’s wise, generous book, Writing Down the Bones, can help you escape from the fog of writer’s block.

What Elizabeth Gilbert teaches us about creativity and the writing life in Big Magic.

Stephen King’s On Writing is revered among authors. But does it really teach you much about how to write?

A review of Anne Lamott’s generous and encouraging guide to writing, Bird by Bird.

Writing a book is a big undertaking. Brilliant ideas can take seconds to formulate and months of labor to bring to fruition. But once you find your path, the work of hauling yourself over the mountain of the first draft simply requires putting one foot in front of the other.