What is it like to finish a novel? The first time you do it, you feel utter euphoria, and you should. Unfortunately, what follows isn't always instant acceptance by an agent, an editor, or even your beta readers and friends.

Every week literary agents receive hundreds of query letters from aspiring writers. Why then, would agents take time from their busy schedules to go to a writers conference and meet yet more writers in person? I asked a few of my favorite agents why they attend writers conferences.

What is a synopsis, anyway? Just a summary, right? Wrong. Sure, a synopsis is a summary of your novel's narrative arc and describes the main characters. However, a synopsis must also be its own entity, with dramatic turns and a clear beginning, middle, and end.

I keep meeting authors who rave about their agents as if they were combinations of the Buddha and Captain America. My own experience with agents has been anything but positive, and the first agent who took me on was a paragon of imperfection.

From Writer’s Relief staff: Let’s face it: Writing a book requires different skills than writing a query letter. While there are no “rules”...

From Writer's Relief staff: In the tradition of David Letterman’s Late Show Top Ten, the submission strategists at Writer’s Relief want to shar...

The true novelist must continue to soldier on, keep writing, keep trying, taking the increasingly painful hits of rejection after rejection until ... well, until someone out there catches on ... or doesn't.

In recent weeks, there have been a spate of agents who have cut deals on behalf of their clients with... themselves.  One such involved the agent to ...

I started my career at a time when the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't even have a career without an agent. But experience has proven something different.

Yes, there's lots of junk among self-published titles. Let's be honest though. Traditional publishing also releases a lot of pollution.

From Writer's Relief: After years and years of watching our client list receive hundreds of acceptances per cycle, the staff of Writer's Relief fin...

I highly recommend reading Publish Your Nonfiction Book to any writer of nonfiction looking to get published for the first time as well as those authors preparing for a second or even third book.