Bios can be quite boring, especially when we’re given low word counts to work within. Creative minds tend to want to break out of the name-location-profession-hobby box. One hundred or fifty words just doesn’t seem to leave much room for our explosive ideas. Luckily, we’re practicing flash fiction. We’re used to telling a story in just a few words, and making our readers feel something. We’re used to leaving our readers wanting more. Isn’t that what a bio should do?

These genres are broken down and defined, to give you a better idea of where your book might fit. All of these definitions can seem daunting, but being able to place your book in a specific genre will be enormously beneficial. Keep in mind that these labels might mean slightly different things to different people, and some books will crossover into multiple genres. This is not a complete list of all genres; rather, it’s an overview of some of the most common terms and their definitions.

For the novelist, the first introduction to the concept of the “crowded shelf” usually comes in the form of a rejection letter. I don’t know a writer who hasn’t been told that their story simply won’t stand apart from other works of fiction on the market. Yet even when you find your champion—the agent or editor who believes in your story enough to bet on it—you’ll still be asked to play a leading role in positioning your novel for discoverability.

Learning how to edit your own work is a critical skill for any writer. Even if you’re going to be working with a professional editor down the line, it’s always a good idea to take a crack at it on your own first. That way, you ensure your editor is helping you with problems you couldn’t have fixed yourself. You’ll learn more from their edit this way – and it will save both of you from wasting your time.

In other words, is writing about writing a good way to build a platform for fiction authors? Should all fiction authors create writing how-to blogs? To really understand how to create a useful platform for fiction writers, I think it’s important to talk about what a platform really is. Your platform isn’t your blog. It’s the trust you have with your audience.

What’s interesting—and maybe a bit counterintuitive—is that reading fiction can provide many of the same self-improvement benefits as non-fiction books, even while exploring other worlds through stories that exist only in the mind. Fiction is a uniquely powerful way to understand others, tap into creativity and exercise your brain. The next time you feel even a tiny bit guilty for picking up a work of fiction instead of a self-help book, consider these 9 benefits of reading fiction.

You’ve written your novel and polished it to a shine, composed the perfect blurb to excite readers who alight upon your book’s Amazon listing, and all that remains is to find the right keywords to help them discover that page in the first place. If the blurb is, as Ben Cameron once memorably described it on this blog, the hardest 100 words you’ll ever write, those final but crucial keywords must surely be the most slippery seven. How to hone in on just seven words (or strings) to describe your 80,000 word masterpiece? David Penny, English historical novelist and general technical wiz, shares his top tips, drawing on his own experience with promoting his medieval mystery series, with impressive results.