What's launching your book really like? 

By Katrin Schumann

Your first event is with a panel of authors in front of a crowd of 200 people. You buy new lipstick and pray your voice doesn’t quiver.

The alarm rings at 5am. The Uber doesn’t turn up. On the road late!

Within three days of your book launch, you catch a cold and lose your voice. It's so bad that you have to postpone your big radio interview.

In the March 2019 edition of "Best of Boston," we bring you our top Boston lit events this month, curated from the Boston Literary District's event calendar, an essential source of literary happenings.

Tina Cassidy at Brookline Booksmith

The March 2019 edition of "Writing Life Essentials," a monthly hand-curated list of contests, grants, scholarships, submissions calls, and awards, with a focus on opportunities that are at least one of the following: local, free to apply, and/or committed to celebrating and supporting writers from historically marginalized communities. We do the research, so you have more time for what matters: the writing.Or, the adjustment to daylight savings time. That also matters.

When writing the fiction of violence, Katrin Schumann finds that there are no easy answers about how to get it right. This article first appeared in CrimeReads.

Years ago in a writing workshop in San Francisco, a lanky middle-aged student sitting next to me held his pages in trembling fingers. He began to read aloud a story about a body found in the trunk of a car. As he read, we all listened attentively, drawn in at first by the obvious questions: who was this woman and what had happened to her? We were trying to learn to become better writers

Katrin Schumann explores what it's really like for authors in the months before launching a new book into the marketplace.

A book launch is a prolonged, and frankly rather strange, experience. You've already been working for what seems like ages (and sometimes is ages) on a manuscript. Eons pass as you prepare that manuscript for the reality of a commercial marketplace: editing, cover design, interior design, more editing, acknowledgements, nightmares about who you've forgotten to acknowledge, and diving into promotional activities. Your book--it's themes, characters, the whole point of it--seems far away now. It's become a product, one ...