Dear Purposeful Prose, Most of the people who I’ve seen get book deals are influencers or people whose families are already in the publishing industry. In other words, these are people who already have an “in.” While I’ve done a lot of querying, I haven’t had any responses from publishers. Am I doing something wrong? Is it even possible to get published if you don’t have a connection? It makes sense to say that the people you are seeing get book deals mostly have an “in” with

This article is another amazing collaboration between myself, the editor who's been leaving notes everywhere, and our wonderful guest writer, Chartres Royale. We have been discussing, romance novels lately, mostly the wavering biases that seem to surround them. Whether there is some internalized dislike of the feminine or the difficulty one might feel surrounding relatability to romance novels, there's always something new to bring to the conference. We've decided to expand o

Dear Purposeful Prose, Given America’s growing literacy crisis, will books as we know them continue to stay relevant? Will authors still be able to publish books and expect to be read? What kind of society are we creating? If you haven’t already read “ Speech Sounds ” by Octavia Butler, it was published in Azimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1983. In a mysterious pandemic, researcher and scholar Valerie Rye is navigating life suddenly unable to read or comprehend the writte