National Association of Independent Writers & Editors
Member Benefit #31
Ghostwriting Professional Designation Program (GPDP) trains writers, journalists, and published authors to be book-industry experts proficient in ghostwriting theory, skill sets, unique tools, and mindset transitions. The GPDP prerequisite Introduction to Ghostwriting is the 6-week class to help you decide if professional ghostwriting is a good fit for you.
NAIWE members receive 10% off Introduction to Ghostwriting!
Visit the NAIWE website to see all of the member benefits.
Member Benefit #30
Write faster with your word processor! Whether you’ve been using your word processor for years, or have just begun to learn a new program, it’s easy to fall into the trap of complacency and accept a basic skill level. But whether you write for pleasure or write for a living, you should be spending more time writing and less time figuring out how to use the tools. In Write Faster with Your Word Processor, Geoff will teach you how to use your software more effectively—both the tools you’ve used previously and new tools you haven’t yet tried. The skills apply equally well whether you write fiction or nonfiction. Although Geoff will use Microsoft Word 2019 to make the explanations more concrete, the same approach will work equally well with any word processor.
NAIWE members receive 21% off the print book or 33% off the e-book!
Visit the NAIWE website to see all of the member benefits.
Member Benefit #29
Most editors must now edit manuscripts on the screen (“onscreen editing”). Though the editing skills remain the same, transferring them into a word processor can be challenging. For editors who are already editing on the screen, the book will teach you the skills you need to greatly increase your editing speed and accuracy based on Hart’s more than 30 years of experience as an editor and as a mentor for other editors, improved by incorporating feedback from students who have taken his courses on onscreen editing. To make the editing strategies concrete, the book uses Microsoft Word 2016 for both Windows and the Macintosh to show how to implement these principles. The information is provided in small chunks, designed for easy reading and browsing. You can dip into the book to solve a specific problem, or read it a chapter at a time to increase your mastery of the art of onscreen editing.
NAIWE members receive 22% off the print book or 25% off the e-book!
Visit the NAIWE website to see all of the member benefits.
Member Benefit #28
Thirteen professional story editors edited the same novel. Each editor worked separately in Fictionary StoryCoach. This course compares their edits and shows you what worked and what didn’t. You’ll see actual examples of edits. It will also show you a scene before and after revisions were done based on the edits. If you want to elevate your skills as a story editor, this course shows you how Fictionary Certified StoryCoach editors work. You’ll know what you need to deliver to a client to help them tell a powerful story. If you’re a writer looking to hire a professional story editor, this course shows you what you should receive from a story editor. If you want to self-edit your novel, this course shows you where to start.
NAIWE members receive 60% off the course!
Visit the NAIWE website to see all of the member benefits.
Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides
Author: Tyler Tichelaar
Culture can be seen through many outputs within a society. And while many once believed that culture stopped at a country’s barriers, this excellent analysis shows otherwise.
In the nineteenth century, the French and the British shared their culture through their tellings, retellings, and translations of their gothic literature. While the Gothic Golden Age began in France with three prominent authors, it led to a second Gothic Golden Age in Great Britain, and then bounced back to France, lending to an even richer time in gothic literature.
Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides offers the context needed to better understand how some gothic literature of that time gained in notoriety, while others were lost in the shuffle and translations of the time.
Tyler Tichelaar focuses his analysis on some widely known novels and essays, but also on some stories that may only be known by a gothic-reader enthusiast. Tichelaar analyzes the popular authors and tracks how their works became famous, whether it be through an aspect of their writing or the usage of a particular gothic element. He also mentions other writers who were influenced by the authors and others who penned works using the influencer’s name or the title of the original work.
Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides is a great analysis on the works that were written during the nineteenth century and how they affected the culture of their own, but also other, countries.
Sinking Your Teeth into Proper Dental Care
Author: Miriam Ruff
Most people will have their teeth for their entire lives, but the only education many people have had about proper dental care typically came from their parents when they were little or from their dentists when they were doing something incorrectly.
Sinking Your Teeth into Proper Dental Care helps to fill this gap. This book begins by educating the reader about tooth development and tooth structure. Once the reader has been informed about all of the parts of a tooth, the reader is enlightened on the most common dental problems, periodontal disease, common dental procedures, and dental emergencies.
This book continues with educating the reader on proper dental care, choosing a dentist, and how dental care can affect one’s health.
Sinking Your Teeth into Proper Dental Care offers a great source of information to teach readers how the small items in their mouth can have large effects.
Catching Cold Volume 3: Judgment
Author: Lem Moyé
For those readers who aren’t already hooked on to this series, book 3 begins with a bang — literally — or at least the aftermath of one. A bomb has just destroyed the 29th floor of Triple S Pharmaceuticals, injuring and killing employees, many of whom had become like family to Meredith Doucette, the company’s CEO.
However, for readers who have read the first two books in the series, Dr. Jon DeLeon, Meredith Doucette, and Olivia Steadman are at it again. While the three independently pursue reining in the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. DeLeon’s team of researchers has dissolved once again.
Olivia Steadman, now a retired regulatory director, leaves the team for Washington, DC, to develop legislation, while Kevin Wells, her boyfriend, remains at CiliCold to rebuild and discover cells’ chemical language.
While the book is nearly 300 hundred pages, the chapters are short, allowing the reader to get in some reading even when they only have a few minutes.
Catching Cold Volume 3: Judgment is a realistic read, with the author offering information based on his scientific, lab-driven profession.
Member Benefit #27
Fictionary is a creative story editing software for fiction writers and editors. It provides a structured approach to story editing that makes every scene count. Evaluate your writing against the 38 Fictionary Story Elements. Keep track of your characters, improve your plot, and create engaging settings. StoryTeller automatically creates powerful visuals by analyzing your manuscript from start to finish. Insights such as the Story Arc provide a 30,000-foot view of your manuscript and quickly highlight structural areas that need improvement.
NAIWE members receive 20% off the software subscription!
Visit the NAIWE website to see all of the member benefits.
Authors: Valerie Swinton and Fred Kirby, Jr.
Losing a loved one is hard. And while many books focus on coping after the loss, Good Grief focuses specifically from a biblical perspective of coping with the loss of a spouse after a long illness.
Both authors share their stories of their personal struggles with their spouses and their spouses’ illnesses. After the loss of their spouses, the authors felt a loss of purpose and hope. Though they each had children, the children were grown, leaving the authors with an empty feeling in day-to-day activities.
To assist those in the grieving process, the authors disclose the effects of grief and the potential effects of grief on the body. The authors then share in more detail their stories about the grief they have endured in their lives. Those stories are then followed by short essays written by other surviving spouses and how they have rebuilt their lives after the loss of a spouse.
The authors explain the stages of grief and answer a list of questions to show how they moved through the stages. The final section of the book is a guided grief journey that includes those same questions and space for the reader’s response to help one move through the grief process and begin to heal.
Good Grief is a well-designed book to help the reader journey through the grieving process. It allows the reader to understand that their feelings are normal. While this book can be read in a single sitting, it may be best for the reader to read the section related to their current need and work through that before continuing in the book.
Highway to Homelessness: Road to Recovery
Author: Brian Masters
Many look to the homeless as people who want to be there, people who are addicted to drugs, and while some do want to live on the streets, and some are addicted to drugs, this life may not have always been what was desired.
Brian Masters was a successful technology sales executive, married with a son in college, living in a nice neighborhood, and owning a second house on a lake. However, when his wife chose to leave him, all of Masters’ plans for his retirement years disappeared. Even his attorney told Masters that the divorce settlement, the worst one in the county, would leave him without any money.
While the financial settlement from the divorce did leave Masters with a significantly smaller nest egg, the economic circumstances occurring in the 2008 banking crisis caused him to not be able to afford his home and soon after he found himself unemployed as his employer closed up shop. Masters was left to live out of his car and fall into a cycle of drugs and depression.
Once Masters has the reader hooked based on his circumstances, he doesn’t leave the reader behind. In his final chapters, Masters offers an 11-point action plan that turned his life around and shows the reader how they can use it too.
Highway to Homelessness offers a real-life story of how a successful life can be turned upside down, and how one can overcome those obstacles and live a fulfilling life.
