Writers in the Storm

Querying does something strange to writers. We can spend months, sometimes years, writing and revising a book until we finally reach the point where we believe it's ready. Then we send it out into the world, collect enough rejections, and start wondering if we were wrong all along.

That's the part of querying nobody talks about enough.

Rejection doesn't just sting. If we aren't careful, it can slowly change the way we see our own work. This agent doesn't want my book becomes Nobody wants my book, which eventually becomes the much more dangerous, Maybe my book isn't very good.

I'm about to test that theory firsthand.

It has been twelve years since I queried a book.

Twelve. Years.

The last time I did this, I was at a completely different place in my writing career. Since then, I've published seven books. I've won awards. I've worked as a developmental editor. I've spent years helping other authors figure out what isn't working in their manuscripts and, more importantly, how to fix it.

You'd think all that experience would make querying easier.

It does not.

Apparently, the tiny voice in a writer's head that whispers, What if everyone hates it? has an impressive shelf life. The anxiety I felt twelve years ago when I hit “send” on my very first query is back. And this time, I might actually have more to lose.

Because I really, really believe in this book.

Which means before I send a single query, I've had to decide something important:

Querying gets to help determine what happens next with my book. It doesn't get to determine what I believe about it.

Why Querying Feels Different This Time

There's a strange thing that happens when you've been writing for a long time. You become much better at seeing everything that's wrong with your own work.

Occupational hazard.

Being a developmental editor has only made that worse. I know what sagging middles look like. I know when character motivation isn't strong enough. I know when emotional beats haven't been earned, when tension disappears from a scene, and when a writer is desperately trying to tell something the story should be showing.

Unfortunately, my editor brain doesn't politely clock out when I open one of my own manuscripts.

So when I say I believe in this book, I'm not saying I think it's flawless.

I've torn it apart. Rebuilt pieces of it. Questioned choices. Rewritten scenes. Stared at sentences until words stopped looking like words. I know there are things another editor could make better. There always are.

But I also know what this book is.

I know what I wanted it to be. I know what I wanted readers to feel. And somewhere during all those revisions, I reached that elusive point where I could look at the story and think: Yes. That's it. That's the book I wanted to write.

Which is exactly why querying it scares the hell out of me.

Because there's a difference between knowing rejection is part of publishing and repeatedly watching people reject something you love.

Before Querying, Decide What You Believe

The problem with querying is that writers receive a lot of answers without receiving much information.

An agent might pass because they don't connect with the voice. They might already represent something similar. They might love the premise but not know how to position it. The market might be shifting. Their list might be full. They might simply like the book but not love it enough to spend the next several years championing it.

Or maybe they just don't like it.

All of those possibilities usually arrive in our inbox looking remarkably similar: No.

Get enough of those, and it's very easy for the meaning to change. This agent doesn't want my book becomes Agents don't want my book. And eventually: Maybe my book isn't very good.

That's the part of querying I'm thinking about most as I head back into it. Not the query letter. Not the synopsis. Not even the agent list. I'm thinking about how to protect my relationship with a book I love while repeatedly handing it to strangers and asking them to judge it.

And I've realized the best time to figure that out isn't after the rejections start arriving. It's before I send the first query.

Before querying this book, I want to be able to answer one question:

Why do I believe this manuscript is ready?

Not perfect. Ready.

Those are very different standards.

I believe this is one of the strongest books I've written. I believe I've grown tremendously as a writer since the last time I queried. I've revised it. I've questioned it. I've applied everything I've learned from writing my own books and helping other authors develop theirs.

Most importantly, I believe I've written the story I intended to write.

That's my answer.

Another writer's answer might be completely different. Maybe it's the response from beta readers. Maybe it's finally fixing the structural problem that plagued the manuscript for three drafts. Maybe it's knowing you've taken the book as far as your current skills can take it.

Whatever the answer is, figure it out before you query.

Because once rejection enters the equation, it's remarkably good at moving the goalposts.

Ask Querying the Right Question

There's another question I'm asking myself: What exactly am I asking the querying process to determine?

This one changed everything for me. I'm not querying because I need an agent to tell me whether my book is good. I'm querying because I believe there's a chance it's good enough for an agent to fall in love with it, believe they can sell it, and want to build something with me.

That sounds like a subtle distinction. I don't think it is.

One puts an agent in the position of validating my work. The other asks whether we're the right business and creative match.

Agents aren't grading manuscripts on some universal scale of literary worthiness. They're making decisions about what they love, what they want to represent, what fits their list, and what they believe they can sell.

So, when an agent says no, the answer is: This isn't the book I want to represent. That's all I actually know. Anything I add after that is coming from me.

Know When Querying Is Over

I've also decided I'm not going to query indefinitely. I'm giving myself three months.

During those three months, I'm going to give traditional publishing a real chance. I'm going to research agents, send queries, deal with the waiting, obsessively refresh my inbox even though I absolutely know better, and probably swear more than once.

If the right person says yes, fantastic. If that doesn't happen, I already know what I'm going to do. I'll publish the book myself.

Your plan doesn't have to look anything like mine.

You might query for six months. A year. You might revise and query again. You might shelve the manuscript and write another one. You might decide traditional publishing is the only path you want for this particular book.

The important part isn't having a Plan B.

It's answering the question: What will I do if querying doesn't give me the answer I want?

Because I'll keep querying until somebody says yes isn't really a plan.

At some point, we have to decide what comes next. Having that answer before I start makes querying feel less like surrendering control of my book and more like what it actually is: exploring one possible path for it.

Querying has a job. Its job is to find out whether there's an agent and a traditional publishing path for this book. Its job is not to determine whether the book deserves to be published.

What Querying Rejection Doesn't Get to Decide

There's one final question I'm asking myself before I send that first query. And this might be the most important one. What will I refuse to let rejection convince me of?

I won't let it convince me that writing this book was a waste of time. I won't let it convince me that everything I've learned about storytelling somehow disappeared while I was writing it. And I won't let it convince me that I was foolish for believing in it.

Could I receive feedback that makes me reconsider something in the manuscript? Absolutely.

Could several agents point toward the same problem and make me take another look? Of course.

Believing in your book doesn't mean refusing to learn anything about it. There's a big difference between protecting your confidence and plugging your ears while screaming, My book is perfect!

It's not. No book is. But useful feedback is different from allowing the accumulation of no to become evidence that the book itself has no value.

That's the line I'm trying to draw before I begin.

Four Questions to Answer Before Querying

So, if you're getting ready to enter the query trenches too, maybe don't start with your agent spreadsheet.

Start here:

1. Why do I believe this manuscript is ready?
2. What exactly am I asking the querying process to determine?
3. What will I do if the answer is no?

And finally:

• What will I refuse to let rejection convince me of?

Write the answers down.

Because the version of you who hasn't received a single rejection yet might be a much more reliable judge of your manuscript than the version of you who has opened fifteen form rejections in three weeks and is eating cookies over the sink while reconsidering every life choice that brought you here.

That person should probably not be making major career decisions.

Don't Let Querying Change How You See Your Book

Maybe that's the biggest thing I've learned from being on both sides of the manuscript.

As an editor, I can tell a writer what isn't working for me. I can point to structural problems, character issues, pacing problems, missed opportunities, and places where I think a story could become stronger.

But I can't tell another writer whether their story deserves to exist. Agents can't either. Editors can't. Reviewers can't. Readers can't.

They can decide whether they want it. Whether they enjoyed it. Whether they connected with it. Whether they're willing to invest their time, money, or career in it. Those opinions matter. Sometimes they should even change what we do next.

They just shouldn't be allowed to rewrite everything we believed about our work before we asked for them.

So, before I send my first query, I'm trying to remember the writer who finished this book. The one who read the final chapters and knew she'd written the story she'd been trying to write. I want to remember what I love about it before my inbox gets a vote.

Because maybe an agent will fall in love with this book.

I hope one does.

But if I reach the end of my querying window without that yes, the manuscript won't suddenly contain weaker characters. The romance won't become less compelling. The scenes I love won't somehow disappear from the page.

It will still be the same book. And I will still believe in it.

I'm not querying because I need someone else's permission to do that. I'm querying because I already believe in this book. Now I'm going to find out who else might believe in it, too.

How do you protect your confidence in a book while querying it?

About Jenn Windrow

Jenn Windrow once attempted to write a “normal” book—and promptly bored herself into a coma. So now she sticks to what she does best: writing snarky, kick-butt heroines, broody supernatural men, and more sexual tension than a vampire in a blood bank.

She’s the award-winning author of the Alexis Black novels and the Redeeming Cupid series, where the undead never sparkle and the drama is always delicious. Jenn moonlights as a developmental editor, helping other writers wrangle their wild plots and tangle-free prose.

When not arguing with her characters or muttering about Oxford commas, she can be found binge-watching trash TV, wrangling the slew of animals that live in her house (husband and teenagers included), or telling herself she’ll only have one more cookie.

You can find her at jennwindrow.com or lurking on social media where she pretends to be an extrovert.

Photo by Buddha Elemental 3D on Unsplash

by Lisa Norman

I started my publishing company in 2011, when the general instructions I read started with, “Don’t even try.” In 2016, after five hard years of learning, I published a series of books about indie publishing. Everything I knew at the time, five volumes of it, written for others so they could avoid the headaches I’d had.

This year I finally had time to bring them all up to date.

I expected to need to change a ton of things, and I did, but what surprised me was how much I deleted. Publishing is a lot easier now than it was before.

After I cleared out all of the obsolete information, I had time to think more about the new gold rush that we're in the midst of.

Alex Newton of K-lytics, who has been tracking the Kindle marketplace since 2014, calls it Gold Rush 3.0. According to Alex, the first rush was the Kindle launch. The second rush lasted through the pandemic. This rush arrived with generative AI, and you can measure it in supply: the number of new thrillers published on Kindle each month has gone from around a thousand to over seven thousand. (I read this in Jane Friedman’s newsletter, where Newton talks through his numbers every summer. If you aren't subscribed, you may want to! Jane's newsletter is brilliant.)

Have you seen the get-rich-quick ads posted on your social media feeds? Build your cozy mystery empire. Write an entire book from one keyword. And they’re about as accurate as those original gold-rush ads were.

Those ads brought a lot of starry-eyed miners west with a pick and no plan. Many of them died of pneumonia because nobody had told them that after a day working in a stream, they should dry off before going to bed at night.

What I Cut from my Publishing Plan

One of those books had a worksheet walking you through installing Joomla so you could have an author website. Yes, it was THAT old. Step by step, patient, thorough, and long. In 2016, an author who wanted a website had to become a practicing geek first. Then we moved to WordPress, and there were still a lot of technical bits to learn.

Today? Gone. Most of that technical website time wasting geekiness is no longer needed. We have much better tools. Friendlier tools.

I had worksheets for uploading and publishing to six different stores, each with its own click-path. Every one of those paths has since changed, and most of them don’t exist anymore. Now I can skip the click-paths entirely, because they go out of date before anyone has time to take a screenshot. The steps have changed and they're so much simpler.

We no longer have to format for mobi, because Amazon retired the format.

The social media chapter walked you through Google+, which Google shut down. The print worksheet walked you through CreateSpace, which folded into Amazon’s own program. Whole platforms are gone while others have grown, and the way we interact online has changed fundamentally in those ten years.

Two of the five books lost about forty percent of their length.

What Didn’t Change

I opened the technical volume, the HTML and CSS tutorial, and braced myself. Ten years of web technology. Surely that one was rubble. Maybe I'd delete the whole thing.

I changed some tool names, but that was mostly it.

HTML (the language of the web) is still HTML. An ebook is still a zipped-up little website in a trench coat, and knowing how to look inside is still the difference between waiting three days for a support ticket and fixing it yourself before lunch.

The chapter on telling gold from iron pyrite came through nearly whole. So did the one on pricing, and the one on where your money sits between the sale and your bank account.

The Publishing Geology Is the Same. The Equipment Changed.

The basic things we need to do haven't changed in a decade. You still have to know who you are and what you write. You still have to stake a claim somewhere you own, make the book, price it, and watch where the money goes.

The tedious middle processes, though, those are now often done for you.

The formatting you used to do by hand is just a button press now. The website that needed a weekend and a database now takes an afternoon. The distribution maze used to need a map to find your way through. We have fewer choices now, and they aren’t nearly as complicated.

Every one of those worksheets gave instructions for a chore. The chores are gone, simplified, automated. The craft of storytelling is right where it always was. In some ways, craft is becoming more critical and fascinating, but that’s for another post.

Why The Publishing Industry Isn’t Get-Rich-Quick

So the wall got lower. It’s easier to write and publish a book than ever before. And no, that statement doesn’t sell a lot of classes.

Because a lower wall lets everybody over it.

That’s what Alex Newton’s supply numbers are. Not readers appearing. Writers arriving to what they expect to be a publishing gold rush, and a great many of them showing up with a tool that writes fast and a course that promises an empire.

Making a book got easier. Being found got harder.

Somebody Already Wrote This Down in 1849

I’ve been quoting a miner’s handbook in my classes for years. It’s 177 years old and still wise. Here’s what it says about a rush:

Much time is lost by miners because they listen to every rumor of exaggerated success. They leave a passable claim to seek a better spot… These stories are often made up by traders in the new place trying to lure customers to their stores. I have noticed that those who remain in one spot are most successful.

Read that again: Traders in the new place, trying to lure customers to their stores.

Think about that the next time you see an advertisement stuck to your social media saloon wall.

The people shouting loudest about the new gold field are, with remarkable consistency, the people selling passage to it. That was true in 1849. It was true in the Kindle boom and it is extra true this year.

Your existing claim is still valuable. It may be the most valuable thing you own right now, precisely because everyone else keeps abandoning theirs to chase the shiny bits downstream.

Putting Things Down

In July, I wrote about not picking up every skill that gets waved at you. You only need the next small step rather than the entire collection of skills.

This is the second part of that concept.

Some of what you’re carrying was necessary once. You learned it because it was genuinely required. You were right. But it may have stopped being required while you weren’t looking.

It's okay to put that load down.

Those of you who always meant to get to those things “someday” can also put down the guilt about never getting to them. You can even quietly consider yourself efficient for not wasting that time.

I wrote those worksheets. Taught those processes for years. Watched many authors succeed following them. Deleting them meant admitting that a great deal of careful work was simply no longer required. That felt weird. And yet good, too.

Let it go.

Hope on, hope ever

There’s another story from that handbook: A man dug part of his claim, hit water, got discouraged, and walked away. Three others went in behind him and pulled out nearly twenty ounces in a few hours.

The advice that follows is “Hope on, hope ever.”

Your writing claim is still good. It’s the same claim it was ten years ago, still with the same gold buried within it. You just don’t have to dig it out with a spoon anymore.

Now, go bank some gold.

The class those books came from is open again, updated for 2026, rebuilt with the same goal in mind, but showing you a much easier path to get there. The books are back too, wherever you buy your ebooks, shorter than they were and priced accordingly. I even have the entire set out in one print book.

About Lisa:

Lisa Norman has been working this claim through two of these rushes now. She writes fiction as Deleyna Marr, owns Heart Ally Books, LLC, and teaches writers the technical side of publishing at her school, NoStressWriting.com.

Her book, The Work of Joy, is for when you need a little joy in your life. She's also at deleyna.com. And on Substack.

Images from Deleyna via Midjourney.

By Jaime Buckley

There is a difference between someone enjoying your story...and someone falling in love with your world.

That difference matters.

A reader can finish a good book, smile, put it down and move on with their life.

But when they fall in love with the WORLD?

Oh, that's different.

Now they want to know where the characters came from.

They want maps. History. Languages. Weapons. Legends. Old wars. Family connections. That weird tavern mentioned for three sentences in chapter fourteen. They want to know what happened to the guy standing behind the king during the coronation. They want to know whether that symbol carved into the doorway actually MEANS something. And if you're clever...

...it does.

This is one of the reasons I've used World Anvil since 2019.

World Anvil currently reports more than 7.35 MILLION fictional worlds on its platform.

That's an absurd amount of imagination in one place.

And somehow, among those millions of worlds, my own Wanted Hero universe at WantedHero.com has grown to receive more traffic than any other world on the platform.

I don't say that to brag.

Okay.

Maybe 4%.

But the other 96% is because I want writers to understand something important:

I don't use World Anvil the way most writers think they're supposed to use World Anvil, and that matters. Just FYI, I'm not an affiliate, I don't gain anything from telling you this…I have just benefited in HUGE ways by using the platform.

If you've read any of my articles here, you know writers are my PEOPLE.

…and I want MY people to WIN.

So listen up, cupcake…cause I'm gonna give you the secret sauce of my online success right here, right now.

My World Bible Isn't Really for Me

World Anvil is usually introduced as a worldbuilding platform.

And it absolutely is.

You can build character profiles, cultures, nations, organizations, histories, timelines, family trees, maps, locations, religions, technologies, magic systems and just about anything else your wonderfully overactive writer brain can invent.

That's useful.

World Anvil itself describes the platform as a way to build an interactive world bible and showcase that material to readers through things like articles, maps, timelines and character profiles.

But that's not the part that excites me most.

I don't primarily look at World Anvil as a place to store information. I see it as a place to create experiences.

That's a very different mindset.

I already have notes. Lots of notes. Probably enough notes to make an archaeologist question my mental stability.

What I want is somewhere my READERS can go.

Somewhere they can wander. Explore. Click on things. Follow characters. Discover connections. Find things they weren't necessarily looking for.

In other words...

I want a candy store.

Life of Fiction Is My Flagship. World Anvil Is My Candy Store.

My flagship online is Life of Fiction, through Substack (my SECOND favorite platform).

That's where the relationship happens. Substack is where I write to readers, publish stories, share ideas, release chapters, talk about creativity and invite people into the larger experience I'm building.

Life of Fiction is the center.

But WantedHero.com, built on World Anvil, serves a completely different purpose.

When readers become curious about something inside one of my stories, I want them to have somewhere to GO with that curiosity.

Maybe they love Dax.

Wonderful.

Go learn about Dax.

Read about his history. Follow his relationships. Discover the places he's been. See artwork. Find quotes. Read comments from other characters. Stumble across a piece of information that suddenly changes the meaning of something you read three chapters ago.

And perhaps, if I've done my job correctly, notice something that makes you think:

"Wait...what does THAT mean?"

Now I've got you.

And it's not because I tricked you. It's because curiosity is one of the most powerful forces in storytelling.

World Anvil is the candy store.

Don't Build an Encyclopedia. Build Rabbit Holes.

This is where I think writers can get World Anvil so very wrong.

They create encyclopedia entries.

Name.

Birthplace.

Height.

Weight.

Occupation.

History.

Relatives.

Favorite breakfast cereal.

Done.

Okay, fine. Technically, that's worldbuilding. Nothing wrong with that. But nobody falls in love with a fictional universe because your character database is extremely organized.

Readers fall in love because the information makes them FEEL something.

So give them rabbit holes.

One article should lead naturally into another. A character leads to an organization. The organization leads to an ancient war. The war leads to a legendary weapon. The weapon leads to the person who created it. That person leads to a civilization everyone believes vanished 800 years ago.

Except...

...there's another article suggesting they didn't.

See what just happened?

You're telling stories between the stories.

That's what makes this powerful, AND crazy fun for you.

Let Your Characters Into the Room

Another thing I do differently on Wanted Hero is avoid making everything sound like it came from a sterile reference manual.

My characters participate.

'The boys' comment.

They argue.

They contradict the historian.

They get offended.

Sometimes they reveal things they probably shouldn't.

…they've even showed up on WITS in force to cause a bit of mayhem.

Höbin Luckyfeller, one of my best friends and award-winning gnome historian, is particularly useful for this. He gives me an in-world reason for why so much information exists in the first place.

Then Chuck can (and often does) interrupt him.

Dax can disagree with him.

Other characters can add observations.

Suddenly you're not reading a database entry anymore. You're spending another few minutes with characters you already love.

That's powerful.

The reader came looking for information.

I gave them personality.

And personality creates attachment.

You can see this approach right on the Wanted Hero introduction, where characters such as Chuck and Dax intrude into what should otherwise be straightforward world information.

That's intentional.

My characters don't know they're supposed to behave inside an encyclopedia.

Apparently nobody told them.

(Not like they'd listen anyway.)

Easter Eggs Are Reader Rewards

I LOVE hiding things.

Seriously.

Give me an opportunity to hide a clue six years before someone understands what it means and I become ridiculously happy.

World Anvil is perfect for this.

A strange reference. A symbol. An apparently meaningless quote. Perhaps a contradiction between two historical accounts, or a character saying something they shouldn't know. Maybe a line buried halfway down an article that suddenly becomes important two books later.

These aren't meaningless gimmicks. They're rewards for paying attention.

Readers who casually enjoy the story aren't penalized because they missed them.

But your dedicated readers?

Your superfans?

They get MORE.

That's exactly how it should work.

The deeper they travel into your world, the more the world rewards them for exploring it.

World Anvil even supports secrets, spoiler controls, private material and subscriber-restricted content, allowing creators to decide exactly how much different readers can see.

Now you've turned passive reading into exploration.

This Also Happens to Be Good Business

We writers occasionally have to discuss that horrible four-letter word…

[Jaime casually locks the door…]

SELL.

You good? We good? No freaking out?

Writers need to make money. If we want the time and resources required to keep creating stories, worlds, art, games, podcasts and whatever else we're building, readers eventually have to be able to purchase something.

World Anvil helps me do that without making the whole experience feel like a sales page.

Someone might arrive because they're fascinated with a character. That character appears in a novel. Guess what they can find, often in the sidebar of the page, casually sitting in the readers peripheral vision?

The novel.

Another reader discovers a location.

There's a story connected to it.

Another discovers one of my books, guides or other products while exploring the world.

World Anvil explicitly supports monetizing worldbuilding, linking to storefronts and giving customers or supporters access to additional material.

That's the way I prefer selling.

Don't interrupt people. Give them something worth wanting.

Then make it ridiculously easy to obtain.

And Now There's Another Reason This Matters: AI

This is becoming increasingly important to me. AI is changing how people discover information online. Like it or hate it, that's happening.

So as a creator, I have a choice.

I can leave machines to figure out who Jaime Buckley is, what Wanted Hero is and what my stories are about from random scraps scattered across the internet...

...or I can create a massive, organized, interconnected body of canonical information myself.

Guess which one I prefer?

World Anvil gives me the greatest degree of control I currently have over what the AI Librarian can use when representing and promoting my work to potential new readers on the web.

That's enormously valuable to me.

Because this isn't random content scraped from somebody else's description of Wanted Hero.

It's MY material.

My character descriptions. My history. My terminology. My lore. My explanations. My links. My books. My universe.

The best part of all of this?

I decide what gets published.

I decide what stays secret.

I decide what information represents the world.

This isn't just worldbuilding anymore.

It's positioning your intellectual property for discovery.

And I believe writers should start thinking seriously about that.

PLEASE start thinking seriously about that.

But There's One Rule You Cannot Ignore

World Anvil will not make readers care about a world they don't already have a reason to care about.

Don't spend four years documenting the monetary policies of seventeen imaginary kingdoms because you think readers are going to stumble across your wiki and demand a seven-book publishing contract.

Story comes first.

Characters come first.

Emotion comes first.

Always.

The story creates hunger.

World Anvil feeds it.

That's the relationship.

My novels introduce you to Wendell, Dax, Chuck and the world they're struggling through.

Life of Fiction lets you experience those stories with me.

Then WantedHero.com says:

"Oh...you liked that?"

Come over here.

I've got something else to show you.

That's the candy store.

Build for the Reader, Not Just the Writer

If you're going to use World Anvil as an author, start changing the questions you ask.

Don't simply ask:

"What information should I document?"

Ask:

"What would someone who LOVES this character desperately want to know?"

Ask:

"Where could I send them next?"

Ask:

"What could they discover here that makes the novel more meaningful?"

Ask:

"What could I hide today that will make a reader scream three years from now?"

THOSE are interesting questions.

You don't need 4,000 articles either.

Start with the characters readers love most.

Build the locations central to your stories.

Document the conflicts, cultures, artifacts and mysteries people encounter in the books.

Connect them.

Then leave doors open.

Never answer everything.

Mystery is oxygen for fictional worlds.

Your Book Is the Invitation

I've been building Wanted Hero for decades.

I've published comics, novels, short stories, artwork, podcasts and more, and I'm still expanding the universe.

But I've learned that a fictional universe becomes something very different when readers have somewhere to explore it on their own.

A novel says:

• Come with me.

A platform like World Anvil lets you say:

• Stay as long as you like.
• Explore.
• Meet people.
• Look around.
• Open doors you're probably not supposed to open.
• Read the old books.
• Study the maps.
• Argue with the historian.
• Find the hidden clues.
• And when you're ready...
• there's another story waiting for you.

That is where World Anvil becomes more than a worldbuilding tool.

It becomes part of the storytelling.

And when you're surrounded more than 7 million other fictional worlds, that's the opportunity I think matters most.

Don't merely create a world readers can read about.

Create one they don't want to leave.

Want to see what I mean? Wander through mine at WantedHero.com.

Just don't blame me when you find a rabbit hole.

I put those there on purpose.

What is your favorite way to pull readers deeper into your story world?

About Jaime

Jaime Buckley is the author of the Chronicles of a Hero series and the founder of LifeofFiction.com on Substack. He teaches writers how to build a sustainable publishing practice at JaimeBuckley.com and through the online course Substack for Authors.

Featured image by Jaime Buckley.