Courses

In Profiting Off Passion: Blending Business and Craft to Build Your Author Career, students explore how to turn their passion for writing into a career, by merging strong writing craft with business sense to create a foundation for long-term success.

The course focuses on conceptualizing novels with an understanding of business, industry, and audience to ensure development of a sellable idea. Craft lessons in this course will hone the execution of a commercially robust idea, hook readers, and convert them to long-term fans. Then, students will examine how to get their book to market – through indie vs traditional publishing, building habits for success, and considering their author backlist as the building blocks of a long-term career. At the end of this course students will have a solid framework for developing ideas they love, while also understanding how to best position themselves in the author market.

The Business of Books: Demystifying Promotion in Traditional Publishing will empower students with in-depth knowledge of the traditional publishing industry and strategies for engaging professionally with the people, processes, and practices behind it.

Marketing. Sales. Publicity. These three departments are crucial to a book’s success and reception. Join the founder of Malmo Public relations, a boutique firm that represents authors such as Holly Black and Chloe Gong, as she gives students a look behind the curtain of the traditional publishing promotional process. Cassie will guide students to explore what they can do both before and after a book deal to build and grow their author brand and public presence, promote their book’s release, and be a strong partner in the publishing process.

On Muses, Myths, and Legends: Storytelling from Start to Finish, will reawaken students' sense of wonder to find inspiration in the world around them. Students will explore the gaps and fissures in myth and fairytale and be equipped with critical tools to find access points for retellings, new perspectives, and fresh angles. Students will be able to test the strength of their story ideas, and see them through from start to finish. 

Roshani guides students through craft foundations such as how to build stories around emotional anchors and how to pay homage to history while still engaging with audience and, most importantly, honoring our intentions as authors. Though rooted in myth, fairytale, and fantastical elements, these tools and techniques can apply to works of any genre.

Unlock the full potential of your manuscript with New York Times bestselling author Rachel Griffin in Writing is Rewriting: The Magic of Revision, an online course designed to guide you through the magical process of revising your novel. 

Begin your journey by understanding the crucial role of revision in the writing process, equip yourself with practical tools like crafting a detailed edit letter to guide your revisions and create a chapter-by-chapter outline to map out your manuscript's structure, and learn how to conduct thorough read-throughs with targeted revision passes. Through a blend of instructional videos, interactive exercises, and peer feedback, this course will empower you to embrace revision as a creative opportunity and transform your novel into its best possible version. Join us and take the next step toward becoming a published author with a manuscript that truly stands out.

In bestselling author Jasmine Guillory’s Selling a Love Story, students will learn to create compelling romance narratives by exploring the foundational aspects of romance, including its rules, structure, and key terminology.

This course dives deep into character building while also teaching students how to depict the journey from attraction to true love, ensure a satisfying happy ending, and craft a believable resolution after the Third Act Breakup. Video lectures are complimented by applicable exercises for students to clearly tie story arc to characterization, and it’s discussion of how to make romance believable is applicable not only to the Romance genre, but strong romance B-plots as well.

The Dark Fantastic: Crafting Unputdownable Fantasy explores how techniques deployed by mystery and thriller, the Gothic, and horror can be used to build suspenseful, atmospheric, and thrilling fantasy. Isabel Cañas breaks down how mysteries and thrillers use pacing, foreshadowing, and red herrings to manipulate reader expectations and create tension and suspense.

Students will learn techniques employed by the Gothic to enrich their settings thematically, deepen atmosphere, and embrace the subversive. Finally, students will study how character is the beating heart of horror and will learn concrete methods for bringing emotion to life on the page in vivid, fresh ways. Throughout the course, Isabel draws on her critically-acclaimed, bestselling novels to demonstrate how stealing the best of what darker genres have to offer can only strengthen your own work, regardless of genre.

National Book Award winner Sabaa Tahir introduces students to the narrative elements that make up a writer’s voice and teaches students how to use those elements to write as only they can. 

Using case studies, self-interviews and writing assignments, Finding Your Voice: Writing as Only You Can guides students through her process of identifying and honing an authorial voice. The goal of this course is to demystify the authorial voice by defining it as the sum of its parts. Students will explore how the Big Seven–style, tone, narrative perspective, point of view, language, characterization, and dialogue–all work together to shape not only how a book sounds but how it feels.

Romance author Tarah DeWitt introduces her approach to balanced romantic storylines through a detailed look at her 2022 contemporary romance Funny Feelings. 

DeWitt believes that romance, specifically, is a safe space to explore some tougher themes, with the guarantee of a happy outcome at the end. In Balancing the Heavy with Humor in Romance: A Funny Feelings Case Study, DeWitt details how to create multi-faceted characters, build perfect meet cute moments, get unstuck in the sticky middle, and utilize the power of 3s to craft compelling relationships and juicy tension. At the end of this course students will feel confident crafting a gorgeous love story with some truly funny moments.

Prolific author Zoraida Córdova guides students through the different entry points of science fiction and fantasy worlds in Fantasy Gateways: Approaches to Magical Worldbuilding.

Drawing from her extensive experience, Zoraida Córdova walks students through her worldbuilding process, including character, setting, and magic system development. Presenting her own works as case studies, Córdova shows students how to bridge the fantastic to reality through research and cultural analogs. Students will join Córdova as they map a hero’s quest using her preferred story beats, research checklist, and worldbuilding questions. This course applies to all writing genres, expanding beyond novels into screenplays, comics, video games, and more.

New York Times bestselling author Ayana Gray guides students through approaching their writing craft with respect, responsibility, and accountability at every stage of the process.  

Intentional Craft: Writing Outside Your Lived Experience will inspire you to create interesting, diverse stories by teaching students the importance and skill of crafting characters outside your own lived experiences. Storytellers have the unique power to open doors and build bridges when they write stories that are inclusive and encompass more than one community. In this foundational course, Ayana addresses how to respectfully and responsibly write characters of different races, ethnicities, gender identities and expressions, sexual orientations, disabilities, and neurodiversities. From her own experiences and research, Ayana includes best practices, dos and don’ts, as well as practical ways to avoid stereotypes when venturing out into new territory.

Kristin Dwyer, critically acclaimed author of romance novels, takes on the mechanics of the “third act breakup” to analyze the key elements of storytelling that create the foundation for an emotional impact in the darkest moment of your character's journey.

The Third Act Breakup is an examination and defense of one of the romance genre's most controversial story beats. In this course, Kristin destigmatizes the trope and emboldens romance writers to capture human emotion at its most sincere. Students will explore the rules of writing romance, strategies for cultivating and maintaining tension, and frameworks for earning a happily ever after. Using myriad case studies from her extensive study of the genre, Kristin will teach students how midpoints, tension, emotion, and tone all set the stage for a devastating story beat that truly earns a happily ever after.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Ross unveils her personal method for developing the symbiotic relationship between fantasy worlds and the characters who navigate them.

In Magical Echoes: Worldbuilding That Supports Character Arc, Rebecca shares her process for building unique worlds that enrich, inform, and fulfill the protagonist’s journey. Students will investigate inner maps, study worldbuilding elements that pique the reader’s interest and inform the quest. They will also take a deep dive into magic and magic systems, and create folklore that echoes the character’s arc. Using her novels as case studies, Rebecca shares the frameworks and tools she uses to craft bestselling fantasies.