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 I'm thrilled to be a guest on Peppa's Conversations tonight at 7 p.m. ET. It's a live radio show out of Baltimore, Maryland with fabulous hosts Peppa and Q. Should be a lively conversation, and you can call in to the show and ask questions during the broadcast. I look forward to speaking with Peppa and Q, and I hope you enjoy listening!
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 I'm so excited to join the Global Girls Online Book Club as Author of the Day tomorrow, May 4th! Looking forward to sharing my story as an author and connecting with these fabulous ladies from all around the world. I'll be posting pics and videos throughout the day and talking about my writing, as well as hosting a book giveaway. The group is free to join. Hope to see you tomorrow!  Today, I had a wonderful time speaking at the Spring Writer's Conference of the Writers Foundation of Strathcona County. My panel was the first of the day and the attendees and I had a great discussion and Q&A throughout. One thing I shared with the attendees was a worksheet with some links of helpful websites for authors who are planning to market their books and looking for ways to encompass a strategy to do so. I figured I'd share those links here as well. These are just a sampling of different websites that I've found helpful over the years; there are many others out there. ~ DIY WEBSITE HOST CHOICES ~ Having an author website is key to any marketing strategy. If you're on a budget and would like to do it yourself, here are some recommended websites (and one that I'm not so keen on). Substack - Recommended. Very flexible; easy for people to follow you. Weebly - Recommended. VERY easy to use - it's just point and click. Wix - Recommended. Flexible website setup. WordPress - Based on personal experience, not recommended. I found it harder to use, and my website crashed shortly after I built it. ~ ARTICLES ~ A few helpful marketing articles, including one from yours truly. Budget-Friendly Book Marketing (Alison McBain) Marketing & Promotion (Jane Friedman) Self-Publishing 101: Marketing (Alliance of Independent Authors) ~ AWARD SUBMISSIONS ~ There are so many book awards out there. Which ones are reputable? Which ones accept indie books? Here are a few databases that can help you sort the great awards from the vanity ones. Book Award & Contest Ratings (Alliance of Independent Authors) Writing Contest, Grants & Awards (Poets & Writers) Firefly Creative Writing ~ INDIE BOOK REVIEWERS ~ Not every book reviewer out there will take a look at indie-published or small press books. These are a few databases (and one review site) that contain places that do, including a number of select book bloggers who are always interested to take a look. The Indie View Independent Book Review (free/paid) List of Indie Book Reviewers ~ MAGAZINES THAT PUBLISH BOOK EXCERPTS ~ How do you find new readers once your book is published? One way is by having excerpts of your novel published in various magazines. Here are four that will publish short excerpts from your book. Bewildering Stories Book Life Commuter Lit Embark Literary Journal ~ MARKETING PLANS FOR WRITERS ~ Marketing plans are very useful in order to help you stay on budget and organize your marketing strategy. Here are a couple of sites that explain what goes into a book marketing plan, as well as offering templates to compose your own. Book Marketing Plan: The Definitive Checklist Book Marketing Plan Template (ManuscriptReport.com) ~ PODCAST DATABASES ~ These are several databases that connect you to podcast hosts looking for writer guests. Pitch Podcasts (free) Podcast Guests (free/paid) PodMatch (paid service) ~ SHORT WRITING SUBMISSIONS ~ New/shorter writing can be helpful to sell older/longer writing - and you get paid for it too! One of the best marketing strategies I've found to stay on a reader's radar is by having your short stories, poems, and essays published regularly in magazines and journals. Below is a list of several submission databases for shorter writing.
Authors Publish The Short List The Submission Grinder Winning Writers  I'm very excited to be one of four authors who will speaking at the Spring Writer's Conference of the Writers Foundation of Strathcona County. It's taking place one week from today, on Saturday, May 2nd from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. I'll be kicking things off with a panel about the ins and outs of author marketing. Here's the full day: CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Tickets are $40 for members ($60 for non-members) and you can buy them either in advance or at the door. There will be breaks between panels, and I'll be hanging around and happy to chat with anyone who's attending and has questions about any aspect of writing - always happy to talk!
I'm excited to be a returning guest to The Midweek Drive hosted by the fabulous Alex Lewczuk. I'll be joined by fellow author Trevor W. Harrison, and we'll be having a lively discussion about poetry during National Poetry Month, which takes place during the month of April in the USA and Canada.
We'll be kicking off the discussion at 11:30 a.m. EST today, April 24th, although it will be recorded and you can tune in later here.  I'll start out by talking about the NEW. Starting tomorrow and continuing through Thursday (April 22-23) is Atmosphere Press's FREE online summit with a fabulous lineup of authors, editors, marketing gurus, and more. Some of the names to look out for: Megan Sells, Madeline McKay, Natalie Musgrave Dossett, Tal Renfro, Amy Kelly, James Blakely, Claire Denson, Selena Carter, and Dr. Nick Courtright. There will be topics to cover all aspects of publishing, from craft workshops such as polishing your work for publication, and the line between truth and fiction. Then there will be panels that take you beyond the actual writing to getting your words out there, such as how to choose a publisher, how to craft submissions, pitching your work, transforming your books to audiobooks, and how to tackle marketing. I'll be doing a panel called How to Keep Drinking When the Creative Well Runs Dry on Thursday, April 23rd from 2:30 p.m. - 3:10 p.m. ET. I've been on both sides of the burnout conundrum, and I'm happy to share tips and tricks to getting back to enjoying your creativity when you just don't know how to pick up the pen again. It's free to attend online - just sign up HERE for the Zoom link. And now I'm going to talk about the OLD. While it's over now, I had a great time this past weekend when I drove down the Lethbridge and participated in the Wordbridge Writers' Conference. I had a fun talking on panels, as well as chatting with various authors and editors and taking in some fabulous presentations. Here are a few of the highlights:
In the meantime, I picked up a copy of Ms. Good's award-winning Five Little Indians, and she was kind enough to sign a copy for me. Looking forward to reading it!  Jenna Greene led a very entertaining presentation called "1001 Mistakes: What NOT to do as a writer." She guided the audience through her adventures in writing and publishing, from her first book to her most recent one (which was released at the convention this year). It was a great talk that outlined the good and bad realities of publishing (vanity presses, publishers going out of business, using her life experiences to inform her fiction and nonfiction stories), as well as the balancing act between raising a family, working a full-time job, and squeezing writing in there somewhere.  Dr. Robert Runté gave a number of informative presentations, including a very useful talk called "Writing When You're Dead (Estate Planning Business for Authors)." It highlighted his experience with handling the unfinished manuscripts of the late, great SFF author Dave Duncan, and the many pitfalls to consider when planning not just your will for all the physical stuff you want to give your heirs, but also how to distribute your writing rights and unpublished manuscripts after death. Another useful presentation Dr. Runté gave was "Common Mistakes & Weaknesses in Writing Fiction" about the craft of writing and what NOT to do (seemed to be a theme at the conference, LOL).  Rosey Hwang gave a delightful presentation about marketing oneself as an author, and it was chockful of useful information about different avenues of book marketing: how to start, when to start, what steps to take to grow one's readers, and more. Ms. Hwang also had an announcement at the end: her debut romance novel will be released at the end of the year. Everything She Wanted is described as a, "binge-worthy contemporary romance."  There were a number of other great panels that I enjoyed attending, plus the two that I took part in. While I don't have any pictures of me as a panelist (since I was speaking, not taking photos), I do have a pic of a prop I used to highlight a point during the panel "Hitting 'Send': The Big, Scary Next Step."
The other authors and I spoke about our various experiences, including how many submissions we've sent out over our careers, our success stories, our rejections, and where we started out versus where we were now. It was a fun chat between Christina Romeril, Joan Donaldson-Yarmey, Dr. Robert Runté and me. Anyways, the prop I dug up was my very first rejection from Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2003. Back then, all submissions were sent in via snail mail, and you'd send a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) to get your manuscript returned, as well as to receive your acceptance or rejection. Well, I obviously got a rejection, and I've kept it all these years on my bookshelf (along with a few others from prestigious magazines such as Analog, Asimov's, and the like) to remind me of where I started. I don't have enough hardcopy rejections to wallpaper my office, but I definitely have a few. That's all for now, folks. If you can make it, hope to see you at the Atmosphere Press Summit online tomorrow and Thursday!  I had a lovely chat with Bianca Vandenbos at Book Notions, and we talked about my latest novel The New Empire, my Author Versus AI project, and much more. You can check out the full interview HERE.
Also, there's a new podcast episode that came out and includes me chatting with my writing buddies Henry L Sullivan III, Debra Every, and B Marcus Walker in The Writer's Room where we talk about AI and other human-made disasters (just kidding... sort of). Check out the full episode HERE. Last but not least, I'll be one of the panelists at Wordbridge, a writers' conference in Lethbridge, Alberta this weekend from April 18th-19th. If you're attending the conference and see me wandering about, please stop and say hi! Always happy to chat with fellow readers and writers. It's been a busy month! More news coming shortly, so stay tuned.
I'm so excited to be one of the poets chosen by the Alexandra Writers' Centre Society (AWCS) to be a part of their Poem a Day for the month of April. For those non-poets out there, April is National Poetry Month, so there are usually a ton of poetry events to usher in the spring weather.
My poem is called The Path to Peace, and I actually wrote it when attending the AWCS's weekly Write-In Group. So, the poem has come full circle! It's a villanelle, a French poetic format that follows a specific structure of repeated lines and a specific rhyme scheme. I hope you enjoy reading it!
I'm still working on some larger projects, so stay tuned for some news on those hopefully soon, but I've had some recent success with my poetry that I'd love to share.
My poem "drought" was recently published in the Stroll of Poets Anthology, which came out in mid-March. It's a beautiful print anthology, released every year by the Stroll, and I was happy to be included with so many of the wonderful poets local to Edmonton. When I pick up my copy of it at the next Stroll meeting, I'll be sure to include a photo of the collection in my next post. I'm also super excited that my poem "Chains of History" was published in Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag. Not only is Penumbric a fabulous magazine, but I'm especially attached to this poem. It intertwines the ideas of science fiction and slavery, and it's a bit thematic to the times we're living in. Hope you enjoy reading it. And I just found out that I have two more poems coming out within the next month or two. My Shakespearean sonnet "Like Mother, Like Daughter" took home an honorable mention in the March 2026 poetry contest at Off Topic Publishing, and will likely be published in the next couple of weeks. And my poem "Lost", originally published in Write City Ezine, was chosen by the editors for inclusion in The Chicago Writers Association 2026 anthology, in association with Eckhartz Press, forthcoming in June 2026. Whew! A good warmup of poetry to get ready for National Poetry month in April. Until next time - happy poeting!
I'm about to hop into my car and drive five hours southwest to the lovely town of Banff. I'm one of the invited attendees to the National Summit on Artificial Intelligence, and I'm excited to be part of this important discussion when it comes to AI and how it's being used in the creative industries.
From the government website: "The National Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Culture, presented in partnership with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, will convene leaders from the cultural, government, technology, academic, and civil society sectors to shape a shared vision for the future of culture in the age of artificial intelligence." Here's the initial question that usually gets asked: does AI have benefits? And the answer seems to be a resounding yes when viewed across multiple industries - it's had positive results in the medicine, scientific research, agriculture, and other fields. But I'm one of a growing number of creatives who are questioning its validity when it comes to our own work, which, in essence, is meant to capture the human experience. Can a non-human program do so, and do it for the benefit of those who consume the content we produce? That's a more complicated question. Now, it's no secret that I've been against using AI in the creative sphere ever since it first appeared. My Author Versus AI project in 2024, where I wrote a book a week for 34 weeks using NO AI at all, was essentially a way to open up the conversation about how creatives don't have to turn to this shiny new thing and incorporate it into their writing process. Human ingenuity, to me at least, will always be more desirable than something produced without effort on the "author's" part by using a program to write instead of drawing on their own lived experience. And I'm not alone. Many authors haven't used AI and don't plan to - there's been a growing backlash against AI in the the creative arts, including thousands of authors publishing empty books in protest to AI using their copyrighted works without permission to build LLCs to Amazon being kicked out as a sponsor for a Paris book festival due to protests against the company allowing the market to be flooded by AI-generated works to the UK Society of Authors launching a logo to identify solely human-created books. In the rush to stay "cutting edge," some authors ARE using AI, and that's their choice - I'm not evangelical in my approach to AI, although I will often advise against its use, especially to new writers. But I'm hoping to see a balanced discussion at the Summit about both the benefits - and pitfalls - to the merging of creativity with the so-called "slop" that AI is producing en masse. I don't think the answer is better AI - I think the answer is a separation between what creatives do because they love it, and what programs do because someone wants to benefit in what they see as the next get-rich-quick scheme. What's the answer? I'm not the only voice chiming in on the debate, but my grand hope is that we'll see a way to both ethically protect creatives and appreciate their original, human-created work for many years to come. |
Who the heck is Alison McBain?I am a freelance writer and poet with over two hundred short pieces published in magazines and anthologies. Check out my 2024 writing challenge to write a book a week at Author Versus AI. For more info, please check out my "About Me" page. © Alison McBain. All rights reserved
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