One More Chapter

Author: wdavis26

  • 4 Tips for Getting Published in 2026

    Getting published in 2026 is both more accessible and more competitive than ever before. The rise of independent presses, digital platforms, online literary magazines, and hybrid publishing models has expanded opportunities for writers, but it has also raised the bar. Success today requires not only strong writing, but persistence, professionalism, and a strategic mindset. Whether you’re pursuing traditional publishing, independent publishing, or a blend of both, the following four principles can significantly improve your chances of seeing your work in print.

    Start Small 

    Publishing short stories, essays, or serialized fiction in literary magazines, newspapers, or online journals can be a valuable stepping stone. While it is not a prerequisite for landing a book deal, it offers important benefits. First, shorter works allow you to refine your craft under real editorial scrutiny. You learn to meet deadlines, follow submission guidelines, and accept constructive feedback—skills that are essential when working with agents and publishers.

    Second, smaller publications help you build credibility. When an agent or acquisitions editor sees prior publication credits, it signals that other professionals have vetted your work. In 2026, many editors still browse respected literary journals and curated online platforms for emerging talent. A publication history demonstrates consistency and seriousness about your writing career.

    However, it’s important to emphasize that starting small is optional. Many debut authors publish full-length novels without prior short-form credits. If your focus and passion lie entirely with long-form storytelling, you can go straight to querying agents or submitting to publishers. The key is ensuring that whatever you submit represents your absolute best work.

    Polish Your Work to a Professional Standard

    In today’s market, “good enough” is rarely good enough. Publishers receive thousands of submissions annually, and the difference between rejection and consideration often lies in polish. Before submitting your manuscript, revise it multiple times. Address pacing, character development, plot structure, clarity, and consistency. Beta readers can offer invaluable outside perspectives, helping you identify blind spots.

    Professional editing is increasingly common in 2026, even among writers pursuing traditional publishing. Hiring a freelance developmental editor or line editor can dramatically strengthen your manuscript. While not mandatory, professional editing demonstrates seriousness and can make your submission stand out. Clean formatting, proper grammar, and a compelling query letter are equally important. A strong manuscript can be overlooked if it appears careless.

    Remember that professionalism extends beyond the manuscript itself. Research submission guidelines carefully. Personalize your queries. Respect word counts and formatting requests. Editors notice writers who approach publishing as a professional partnership rather than a casual attempt.

    Keep Submitting After Rejection

    Rejection remains an unavoidable part of getting published. Even celebrated authors have accumulated stacks of rejection letters before securing representation or a deal. In 2026, rejection may arrive via automated emails, brief form responses, or occasionally detailed feedback. Regardless of the format, it is not necessarily a verdict on your talent.

    Persistence is often what separates published authors from unpublished ones. If one agent or publisher declines your manuscript, revise if necessary and submit elsewhere. Each submission increases your exposure and odds. Track your submissions carefully, and learn from patterns. If multiple agents cite pacing issues, that definitely signals a need for revision.

    Rejection can also be strategic. A manuscript might be strong but not fit a specific publisher’s list or current market focus. Tastes shift, trends evolve, and timing plays a role. Continuing to submit ensures that your work eventually reaches the right person at the right moment.

    Develop Promotion and Branding Early

    Publishing in 2026 extends beyond writing alone. Authors are increasingly expected to participate in marketing efforts. Building your platform early can significantly enhance your appeal to publishers. This doesn’t mean you need hundreds of thousands of followers, but it does mean establishing a consistent presence.

    Create a professional author website. Secure your name on major social media platforms. Decide how you want to present yourself; are you a writer of dark literary fiction, uplifting romance, speculative thrillers? Clear branding helps readers and industry professionals quickly understand your niche.

    Engage authentically with writing communities, book clubs, and readers. Share insights about your writing process. Offer newsletter updates. If your manuscript sells, you’ll already have an audience primed for launch day. Even independent authors benefit enormously from early branding and direct reader relationships.

    Final Thoughts

    Getting published in 2026 requires talent, resilience, and strategy. Starting small can build credibility, but it’s not mandatory. Polished, professionally edited work is essential. Persistence through rejection is non-negotiable. And proactive branding positions you as a serious, market-aware author.

    Above all, treat writing not just as an art (though it obviously still is), but as a long-term professional endeavor. The path to publication may not be immediate, but with preparation and persistence, your work can find its place in the world.

  • Are Books Still “Unfilmable”?

    Spoiler: If a Book Is Popular Enough, Hollywood Will Try Anyway

    For decades, readers and cinephiles alike have time and again labeled books as “unfilmable.” And yet, against all odds, Hollywood continues showing up with a camera and a dream. Some of these enormous swings have even satisfied book readers, who as we know, are extraordinarily difficult to satisfy through adaptations.

    Let’s take a stroll down the aisle of recent adaptations that once made fans clutch their paperback spines and wail in despair.

    Dune: Sand, Spice, and a Whole Lot of Faith

    When Dune by Frank Herbert was first dragged (gently) onto the silver screen by David Lynch, some critics worried the sandworms would devour the plot, the politics would put audiences to sleep, and wait, did someone just say “Bene Gesserit”? Fast-forward a few decades, and Dune (especially Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 opus) proved you can have your intricate worldbuilding and watch cool laser sword fights in slow motion. Sure, you still need a PhD in Arrakis geography to keep track of every character, but it’s a marked improvement over sandworm PTSD. The takeaway? Even the most labyrinthine sci-fi epic can thrive if you cast wisely and keep the spice flowing.

    A Song of Ice and Fire: A Feast of Characters (and Occasional Dragons)

    George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books are so dense that some fans joke they’re half novel, half history textbook. When Game of Thrones arrived on HBO, skeptics braced for disaster. There were too many characters, too many subplots, and honestly, who could possibly resist debating every casting choice on Reddit for years? And yet, for most of its run GoT brilliantly translated sprawling fantasy sagas to the screen.

    In fact, many fans of the novels said that the fatal flaw of the much maligned later seasons was that they strayed too far from the story of the books, before absolutely crashing and burning once they ran out of books to adapt. Still, seeing direwolves and dragons in living color was almost worth the collective forehead slap of “Did that really just happen?” even if we collectively wished for a few extra book pages at the end.

    The Three-Body Problem: Physics, Aliens, and Very Confused Viewers

    And then there’s The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, a novel that makes quantum physics feel like an extreme sport. For years fans declared it unfilmable not because it lacked spectacle, but because the spectacle was basically people having existential crises about cosmology. Enter the recent adaptation (a Netflix series), which approached the book like a chef tackling a soufflé: with equal parts terror and hope. Did they get everything right? Hardly. But they showed us that even a story of astrophysics and philosophical dread can be at least attempted on screen. The result? Some viewers are thrilled, others are bewildered, and a select few are rewriting Wikipedia pages at 3 a.m.

    So, Are Any Books Truly Unfilmable?

    Here’s the honest answer; Maybe in theory? But in practice? Hollywood’s already on the case. With enough budget, enough episodes, and enough visual effects artists powered by caffeine and questionable life choices, someone somewhere will attempt almost any story.

    Will every adaptation please the book purists? Absolutely not. Will faithful fans sometimes feel personally betrayed? Also yes. But the idea that something can’t be filmed has become increasingly quaint, like dial-up internet or pants without pockets.

    In the grand cinematic universe, “unfilmable” now just means “not tried yet, or tried badly once.” And that’s probably why someone, somewhere is already prepping the next impossible adaptation with a grin and a massive budget. But that’s also why it’s probably still worth reading the books.

  • An Introduction to Nonfiction Reading

    Ah, nonfiction. The often forgotten side of reading. But, why? Not because there is any less that readers can gain from it. While fiction may teach vague yet powerful lessons that may be applicable at one point in time or many, rarely do they have the specificity and nuanced understanding of the world that they inhabit that comes with living in that world all one’s life. A fictional world might captivate a reader, but when the reader inevitably wants to know more about it, all they can do is imagine. But when something is left out of a story about an existing culture, they can turn to more stories and other writings on that culture. They can always learn more.

    Nonfiction reading is simply an intimidating venture. I would be willing to bet that most of us did not grow up reading nonfiction as we read fiction, and I would bet that those who did did so in a manner similar to yours truly, limited to simply flipping through travel guides looking at maps and pictures of far-off landscapes and cityscapes. The type of readings that will get focus in this article will be more akin to traditional novels. However, even these types of more heady and dense nonfiction reading need not be so intimidating. This article will give you several ways to view nonfiction reading as it is, which is simply more reading!

    Before we get into some recommendations, I think it is important to define the two types of nonfiction readings that this article will focus on by both their structure and their goals as pieces of literature. These are; expository nonfiction and narrative nonfiction. If you’re looking to start in someplace more familiar, narrative nonfiction will be just the place. It has many of the same trappings as traditional fiction, including narrative direction (as the name suggests), character development, order of events, and story structure, with little of the dry presentation of something like a textbook.

    Narrative Nonfiction:

    We can separate narrative nonfiction even further into three groups. These groups can be quite similar but still have their important differences. Memoirs focus on a certain time within the writer’s life, usually one of particular note in the context of the rest of their life, whereas autobiographies will chart the course of the writer’s life up to the point at which they wrote the story, and (this part can get confusing, so pay close attention) biographies are a study by the author of someone else’s life. Here are some recommendations:

    • Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane; an autobiography about Mathabane’s life under the apartheid system in South Africa
    • A River in Darkness by Masaji Ishikawa; a memoir about Ishikawa’s experience growing up in and escaping from North Korea
    • A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar; a biography looking into the life of schizophrenic mathematician and economist John Nash

    Expository Nonfiction:

    Expostory nonfiction is more for those who want to dive straight into the deep end, so to speak. It can have some sense of narrative direction, particularly if it is charting the events of a study, although this can be seen as having elements of both narrative and expository nonfiction (if something like that is interesting to you, I’d recommend Wild Dog Dreaming by Deborah Bird Rose, which explores the human role in the current mass extinction event, or Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which blends Western and Indigenous knowledge to explore humanity’s relationship with nature). True expository nonfiction, however, does not tell any story in the traditional sense. Rather, they can act as anything from a guidebook on the likes of travel, cooking, and even parenting, to a stand-up routine.

    From here, the most important piece of advice I can give about reading expository nonfiction is to start with what you already have an interest in. With that in mind, some recommendations:

    History: 

    • Europe’s Last Summer by David Fromkin; a look into the events surrounding the beginning of the First World War

    Philosophy: 

    • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius; a series of private, spiritual, and philosophical writings that is surprisingly readable even almost two thousand years after it was written

    Politics: 

    • Defeating Dictators by George Ayittey; the White House advisor on Africa provides an honest exploration of the fight against dictatorship, with special focus on Africa

    Comedy: 

    • Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell; perhaps this one could also fall under politics, but Vowell’s writing makes it more of a comedy as she looks at the commercialization of presidential assassinations in the US

    Final Advice:

    Of course, there are any number of genres and subgenres that I have not covered here. To make up for that however, I have some last words of advice. Firstly, audiobooks are your best friend, apart from maybe yours truly. If you can listen to a book effectively while doing something, not only is it far more efficient, but it can also take some of the tedium out of whatever else you’re doing, whether that is cleaning, driving, or even nothing.

    Secondly, and this applies especially to expository nonfiction, don’t think that you have to finish every book that you start. I know, this sounds so incredibly counter-intuitive, but many expository books are divided into sections similar to fictional chapter books. The difference is that you don’t have to have read all the previous chapters to understand the later ones. If certain information interests you, you can look through that section for the information, and then stop reading. If you enjoy these books, or have recommendation of your own, let us know in the comments