Sign Up for December Webinars!

This is a quick reminder that I have two upcoming webinars in the month of December, Writing Irresistible First Pages and Rock Your Writing Goals. In January, I’m launching a Submission Blueprint with Writing Blueprints, so I’ll be doing a webinar to support that. In February, I’m participating in WriteOnCon. So I’m skipping my own webinars those months, until a planned webinar on interiority in March. That means these December webinars are it for the near future. Join me!

Very informative, I learned a LOT about what the first pages should accomplish. – Dena Pawling

Mary is an approachable expert. She turns a daunting task into something I can do with confidence. – Shelley G.

Saturday, December 8th, 11 a.m. CST: Writing Irresistible First Pages WITH CRITIQUE

A paid webinar that includes comprehensive notes on the first two pages of your novel. This webinar is geared to novel writers of all categories, from middle grade to fantasy. Not only will you hear a wealth of information about how to write successful, eye-catching first pages, but your novel opening will be privately critiqued with helpful feedback. The cost of this webinar with the included critique is $99. The webinar will last one hour and thirty minutes.

Follow this link to register for the first pages webinar with critique.

Mary’s webinar on Writing Irresistible First Pages was incredibly helpful. Mary is very versed in the subject matter and presents lot of terrific useful information at a good pace. Thank you, Mary! – Charlotte Hebert

You have one month to submit your pages after the webinar date. The submission will be up to two double-spaced pages with 12 pt font and standard 1″ margins. Notes will be returned within three weeks of receipt.

I found this webinar extremely helpful and packed with valuable info. Thank you so much! I feel much more confident to proceed with revising my first chapter. – Amy G.

Saturday, December 29th, 11 a.m. CST: Rock Your Writing Goals Webinar

A fun and motivational free webinar just in time for those New Year’s Resolutions. Let’s spend an hour together this last weekend of December and do some creative brainstorming for the year to come. The webinar will last one hour.

This webinar is for all writers, at all skill levels. I’ll discuss creativity, actionable steps for achieving your writing or publishing goals this year, and send you off into 2019 with a bang!

Query Letter Webinar Registration Is LIVE!

The query letter webinar is coming up! As I posted a few weeks ago, I’m going to be trying a new webinar platform and running some independent webinars. This first webinar is “Writing an Irresistible Query” and focuses on nailing that oh-so-elusive document, the query letter. Registration is now live!

Join Me for a Query Letter Webinar

My first-ever query letter webinar is a test run of the class, as well as a webinar software that’s new to me. If you join me for this first outing, I invite you to participate for FREE! All I ask is that you fill out a short feedback survey after the webinar to let me know how you enjoyed the experience.

The webinar will be held:

Saturday, September 29th, at 11 a.m. CDT

All you need is a computer with Internet access and the capability to play video and audio content. The webinar will feature me, speaking on camera, as well as a PowerPoint presentation.

Once you register, you will receive email instructions for joining the webinar live, or watching the recording after the event.

Please clink the link to register for my first-ever query letter webinar, or fill out the form embedded below:

If you can’t make that date or time, please register anyway. As a registrant, you will receive a link where you can replay the recorded program. Please note: Only the first 100 registered attendees will get to view the webinar live, so show up a few minutes ahead of time. There are already more than 100 registered listeners, two days after the link went live. If you really want to hear it live, please plan to be early. If you aren’t able to hear it live, you will still receive the recorded event via email later that afternoon.

Looking Forward

I love speaking and teaching, so I hope to bring you more webinars on topics like character, voice, interiority, queries, the agent submission process, etc. If I like this webinar platform (and this is where I’m especially looking for your feedback!), I hope to do one or two events per month.

In the future, different webinars will be free and paid. Paid webinars will always include critique of any relevant documents. For example, the query letter webinar will include critique of, of course, your query letter. To clarify, this September query letter webinar will not include query letter critique because my focus is on testing out the platform.

If you’d like personalized help with your query letter without the wait, consider hiring me as your query letter editor today!

Upcoming Virtual Conference and Webinar

I’ve been really getting into virtual conferences lately, like WriteOnCon. They’re a great (and economical) way of hearing some wonderful presentations without, you know, putting on pants and leaving the house. The best of both worlds!

With that in mind, there are two upcoming ways to hear me speak in September! One is run by the awesome Writer’s Digest University program. Another is something I’m launching independently, the very first of many webinars to come.

Writer’s Digest Middle Grade & Young Adult Virtual Conference

Coming up the weekend of September 14th, you can hear me and several other wonderful presenters discussing about topics specific to writing for middle grade and young adult readers!

My specific presentation, all about character development and the topic of interiority, will be on Saturday, September 15th, at 5 p.m. Eastern. You can learn more about it and register for the event here.

I hope you’ll join me there!

Brand New “Writing an Irresistible Query” Webinar

And then, for my next trick, I’m trying something new. I love speaking directly to writers and teaching live. I love it. But since I have a small child, traveling to a conference can get tricky. (Plus, there’s the whole putting-on-pants thing! What a drag it is to leave the house and make oneself presentable!)

So why don’t you stay in your house, and I stay in my house, and I will come to you! A webinar is the perfect venue for doing just that.

In the next few months, I will be ramping up a webinar program that allows me to speak directly to writers via an online video and audio presentation. Some webinars will be free, others will be paid (but include a critique element to really make them worth your investment). I love speaking, and I am so excited about this!

WHAT: My trial run! And there’s seemingly nothing more interesting to aspiring writers than the query letter, so why not talk about that? In the future, my query letter webinar will be paid because I will also provide critique on attendee queries*. For my first outing, I’m really interested in testing the webinar platform and process, so this is a chance to hop on, hear the presentation, give me feedback, and do it all for FREE!

WHEN: Come join me for the first ever “Writing an Irresistible Query” webinar. Pencil me in on your calendar for Saturday, September 29th, at 11 a.m. Central time. The format will be about 40 minutes of presentation about queries, then some time for questions. (If you cannot make this date and time, the recorded webinar will be available to view at your leisure.)

HOW: More info on registering will appear on the blog in the next few weeks. Registration is first come, first served, and attendance is going to be capped to the first 100 people in the room, so keep an eye on this space! (If we reach the limit, all overflow attendees will be sent the recorded version a few hours after the event, but they won’t be able to ask questions or otherwise interact.)

I will be trying out a new webinar platform. The process promises to be seamless, from registration to email instructions to joining the webinar. You will not have to download any software to participate. The only equipment you’ll need is a computer with Internet access. I’m definitely interested in feedback from attendees on the logistics of the webinar. If you could fill out a brief survey after your experience, I would really, really appreciate it.

I look forward to connecting with you at one of these events in September!

* (To clarify, a critique will not be included with this September presentation because I’d really like to focus on creating the best webinar possible.)

MG/YA Blueprint Pre-Launch Webinar

I’ve done a little bit of work for the WriteForKids.org MG/YA Writing Blueprint. (Spoiler alert: I’ll be doing some more work with them soon!) It’s a fantastic video on-demand class on writing MG and YA fiction taught by the incomparable Alice Kuipers.

Alice Kuipers and Laura Backes are doing a webinar to launch this online class on September 12th. Reserve your spot and check it out here. There is no sales pitch, it’s just an informational webinar if you’re interested in learning more about writing MG and YA fiction. The actual MG/YA Blueprint class will be available on September 19th! I’ll post a link when it’s up.

If you sign up for the Blueprint, make sure to find an interview with me about the craft of writing MG and YA in the bonus materials!

Praise for WRITING IRRESISTIBLE KIDLIT

My book has arrived at the Writer’s Digest warehouses and I got to see and buy a copy of it at the Writer’s Digest West conference this past weekend in Los Angeles. Hooray! Now it is only a matter of time before it gets out to bookstores and online retailers. Crazy, right? If you have pre-ordered it (thank you!), I have no idea when it will ship, but I’m guessing sometime in the next two weeks rather than on December 4th (as is stated on Amazon). If, in the meantime, anybody sees the book in the wild at a bookstore or receives their copy, take a picture and send it my way–I would be thrilled to see it!

I started the proposal in July of last year, sold the book on September 9th, 2011 and now it’s more than a year later and it’s a real thing rather than a Word doc on my computer. A lot of books have come into the world as a result of my efforts on behalf of clients, but none have yet been my own. It’s a trip.

For those who don’t know, I took a WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL by Don Maass approach to the guide and excerpted thirty-four middle grade and young adult novels to make various points about character, voice, setting, etc. I find that it’s a lot easier to teach with examples rather than simply sprout off on a topic. I recently contacted most of the authors whose books I talked about and offered them a review copy of my guide.

The legendary author Karen Cushman, whose book ALCHEMY AND MEGGY SWANN is excerpted, was kind enough to read and write a quick review of my guide:

On quiet afternoons, I love to sit curled up in a chair and read books about writing (really!). I’m a writing book nerd. Mary Kole, literary manager at Movable Type Management who blogs at kidlit.com, just sent me a copy of her new book, Writing Irresistible Kidlit: The Ultimate Guide to Crafting Fiction for Young Adult and Middle Grade Readers. And ultimate is right. I can’t think of a topic Mary doesn’t cover. The book is lively and helpful—my only quibble is the term kidlit in the title. It’s my pet peeve, but a pretty minor quibble for what is a terrific book. If you want to write for children or are a writing book nerd like me, take a look at Writing Irresistible Kidlit. I recommend it.

The original review is here. I am flattered and grateful for her kind words! I’ll cross-post more reviews as I receive them. You can see what I have to say about Karen Cushman’s work and the writing craft in general by pre-ordering my book today!

Speaking of more, well, uh, speaking on the writing craft, I’m teaching my Middle Grade and Young Adult Craft Intensive webinar with Writer’s Digest on Thursday, October 25th at 1 p.m. Eastern. As with all of my webinars, you don’t actually have to be available and logged in at that exact time and date to participate, but you should still register. All registered students, regardless of whether they attend the live event or not, get a recording of the session after the fact (audio and video of the PowerPoint), the opportunity to get all of their questions answered in a class-wide PDF, and a critique of the first 500 words of your MG or YA manuscript.

It’s important to note that this might be my last time teaching on this topic for a while, so get in there while you can. Find out more and register here.

Middle Grade and Young Adult Webinar This Thursday

This Thursday, February 9th, I’ll be teaching a Middle Grade and Young Adult Craft Intensive webinar at 1 p.m. Eastern.

This 90-minute webinar will focus exclusively into the craft of writing fiction for the middle grade and young adult audience. I’ll talk about the marketplace, strategies to really make your novel stand out in the slush, character, plotting, tension, description, setting, voice, submissions, queries, and much more. This is only the second time I’m teaching this webinar that’s specific to MG and YA novel writers, so if you missed the one I gave in September, this is your chance to hear it. You can sign up by clicking here.

The personalized benefit of my webinars, as many of you already know, is that they include a critique from me for every registered student. For this one, I will read and critique the first 500 words of your MG or YA novel (one project per student, please). Instructions for submitting will come when you register for the webinar.

If you’re having scheduling issues with the time or date, don’t worry. You don’t need to be available on the exact time and date to still benefit. By signing up, you will receive a recording of the webinar (emailed about one week after the original webinar date), you will have the same chance to ask questions as the other students, and you will still get your critique. So sign up even if this Thursday doesn’t work for you!

Tag: Webinar