I'm an author and author coach, and I love helping new writers achieve their dreams. Check out the resources I offer and sign up for my newsletter!
Subject: A new home for my writing
MARYLEE MACDONALDDear Reader, Over the years, Grand Canyon Press and my personal blogs about caregiving, writing, and publishing have grown into a wonderful community of over 20,000 book lovers. I am incredibly grateful for your time, your reading eye, and your shared love for a well-told story.To give you a cleaner, more targeted reading experience, I am moving my newsletter and literary updates to a brand new home on Substack. www.maryleemacd.substack.com/ Moving forward, this newsletter will be called The Writer's Workshop. I just put up my first post on Substack, so please drop in and take a look. What does this mean for you?
As a thank you for coming along on this new chapter, my upcoming literary short story collection, Bodies of Water, drops on November 3, 2026. Substack subscribers (even free subscribers) will get an exclusive, early look at select stories from the collection before the book hits Amazon. If you would rather not join me on this new journey, you can safely unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of this email.Thank you for supporting independent literature. See you over on the new desk next week! Warmly, Marylee MacDonald P.S.--As you can see below, I'm spread pretty thin. Also, it turns out that I'm spending a lot more $$$ per month on the infrastructure of my blogs than I want to be spending. I'll explain all this in a subsequent post on Substack. Maybe some of you will find that useful. www.maryleemacdonald.org (my caregiving site) www.maryleemacdonald.com (my personal website about my books) www.grandcanyonpress.com (the small press that supports books by Western writers) Keep scrolling to find the unsubscribe link. |
Hi! I'm Marylee MacDonald
I'm an author and author coach, and I love helping new writers achieve their dreams. Check out the resources I offer and sign up for my newsletter!
MARYLEE MACDONALD Hello Reader, I want to talk about book covers today, because I see authors make the same mistake over and over. They spend a year writing a beautiful book, then put a homemade cover on it that signals to every potential reader: "This is an amateur." Readers really do judge books by their covers. That's not cynical. It's how their brains work. A cover tells a reader in less than three seconds whether your book belongs in their hands. What a Professional Cover Does A great...
MARYLEE MACDONALD Hello Reader, Almost every week someone emails me a version of this question: "Do I really need an email list?" The answer is yes. Full stop. No asterisk. Here's why. Social media platforms come and go. Algorithms change overnight. A platform that sends your posts to thousands of followers this year might bury them next year. Your email list is the one thing no platform can take away. The Number That Changed My Mind A recent survey of indie authors found that writers earning...
MARYLEE MACDONALD Hello Reader, I want to let you in on a secret that took me years to accept: your first draft is not supposed to be good. I'm serious. The goal of a first draft is not to produce publishable prose. The goal is to get the story out of your head and onto the page. That's it. Everything else comes later. I used to write a sentence, hate it, delete it, and rewrite it. I did this for hours. I produced almost nothing. A wise writing teacher finally told me: "Marylee, you can't...