Author Blog

How important is having an online presence for authors? Could you be losing sales by not being easy to contact? Find out just how important it is to make yourself available and stand out from the crowd.

Will swearing hurt your book sales? Many readers today will not be offended by a certain amount of profanity in books, but shocking words often pull readers out of the story. Read this before you decide how much profanity to put in your next book.

When should you use apostrophes with omitted letters and possessives? Which way should they face? A few simple rules will help you use apostrophes with confidence.

We are excited to announce that My Book Ratings is almost ready for debut. On My Book Ratings all books submitted will have a permanent content-rated listing that readers will be able to search. Look for upcoming notices and get ready to post content-ratings on all your favorite books.

Romance often gets a bad rap, but romance sells more than any other genre besides general fiction. So today we share important tips on how to write a stronger romance novel.

Tenant/tenet, then/than, bad/badly—do you really know the difference? Here are some words that writers commonly confuse and examples on how to use them.

When recounting events, “then” is a weak transition. Try eliminating “then” with specific references to time or location, or by listing characteristics. The excessive use of “then” can quickly become repetitive and is a lazy way of showing sequences of events.

Punctuation usually goes inside quotation marks, especially in dialogue, but that is not always the case with other usage. Deciding where to put punctuation with quotation marks is simple if you follow a few rules.

We see authors using a variety of single and double quotation marks in text, especially in dialog. Which way is the “right” way to do it? When should a double quotation mark be used versus a single quotation mark?

Images or dingbat fonts made into images can make great scene break icons, but making a scene break look good in your ebook and on vendor previewers can be a challenge if you don’t know about resolution.

Having an audio version of your book often helps your overall book sales, and anything that helps authors market their ebooks and earn more cash is something My Book Cave is very interested in.

Improper em dash formation screams inexperience, but em dashes are simple to make, and all authors can become an expert in a few minutes. Understand not only how to form em dashes, but also the difference between American and British usage. Start looking like a pro!

Do you get sick of writing “he said/she said” or are you unsure how to punctuate dialogue tags? Do you use too many -ly adverbs that drive readers crazy? Dialogue tags can be complicated—something that the editors at My Book Cave have noticed when reviewing books. But worry no more. Here are eight tips that will help you write and punctuate dialogue tags well, so that your book will be one step closer to promotion on our content-rated site.

Change the speed that Microsoft Word’s “Speak” feature uses to dictate text back to you. It’s possible to do—and pretty easy, too. But it’s buried in your Windows settings, not in your Word program. Read on and we’ll tell you how to do it.

So, who cares about formatting? It all reads the same. Well, yes and no. Many books are read on phones these days, and that extra spacing between paragraphs can be irritating. But there are other reasons, so read on.

Author Rachelle J. Christensen shares some tips she learned about using memories to create a powerful, memorable story.

How to add em dashes (—) to your Wordpress blogs and pages using functionality already built into Wordpress. It’s easy, really, but not immediately obvious.