There comes a point of sheer terror: after hours of agonizing over a tagline, you create a mock-up of your book, place it a few inches away and squint, does it look like a blob of gray ink? Did that line you worked so hard to perfect and capture the heart of your story break […]

Good intentions be damned: You get your hands on a graded reader and find yourself abandoning it after chapter three because the number of pages feels never-ending. If you’re anything like me, this isn’t due to your lack of vocabulary size, or even your motivation level. More likely, it’s a matter of planning. The reason […]

This begins with an assumption that costs you hours of productivity. You spot an eight thousand word architecture RFC. You figure it’ll only take you forty minutes to read, since you’re good for three hundred words per minute on a news site. You sit down, open the document, and within moments realize this isn’t reading. […]

A reader is standing in a bookstore with fat paperback in her hands. Will she get through it by beginning of her vacation? Readers love their books; they hate the feeling of having pile of unread ones. The trouble is that a book’s word count doesn’t tell you much. A novel with three hundred pages […]