1. Keep it simple. "He said" and "She said" will usually do. Your reader is trained to accept this repetition.

2. Forget you ever heard of strong verbs. Skip the "He yelped" and the "She sighed." They slow your dialogue down. If you feel need them, look at the words—the actual dialogue— your character used when he was yelping. Maybe it doesn't reflect the way someone would sound if he yelped. Maybe if you strengthen the dialogue, you can ditch the overblown tag.

3. When you can, reveal who is saying something by the voice or tone of the dialogue. That way you may be able to skip tags occasionally, especially when you have only two people speaking to one another. Your dialogue will ring truer, too.

4. Avoid having characters use other characters' names. In real life, we don't use people's names in our speech much. We tend to reserve using names for when we're angry or disapproving or we just met in a room full of people and we're practicing out social skills. Having a character direct her speech to one character or another by using her name is a lazy writer's way of directing dialogue and it will annoy the reader. When a reader is annoyed, she will not be immersed in the story you are trying to tell.

5. Avoid putting internal dialogue in italics. Trust your reader. She will know who is thinking the words from the point of view of the narrative.

6. Be cautious about using dialogue to tell something that should be shown. It doesn't help much to transfer telling from the narrator to the dialogue. It just makes the character who is speaking sound long winded. Putting quotation marks around exposition won't draw the reader into the scene or involve him more than if you'd left it part of the narrative.

7. And magic number seven is, don't break up dialogue sequences with long or overly frequent blocks of narrative. One of dialogue's greatest advantages is that it moves a story along. If a writer inserts too much stage direction, it will lose the forward motion and any tension it is building.

For more on writing dialogue check out Tom Chiarella's Writing Dialogue (Writers' Digest) and for more on editing in general—from editing query letters to turning unattractive adverbs into metaphoric gold—find The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success on Amazon.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is an instructor for the UCLA Extension Writer's Program. The first book in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books, The Frugal Book Promoter, won USA Book News' Best Professional Book Award and Book Publicists of Southern California's Irwin Award. The second, The Frugal Editor, is also a USA Book News winner. It includes many editing tips on dialogue, the use of quotation marks and more. She is also the author of The Great First Impression Book Proposal, a 49 cent Short from Amazon. Learn more at www.howtodoitfrugally.com .

Carolyn has placed on her site a group of articles you can access for free with writing and editing "Tips and Tricks" to help you become a better writer, and self-editor. You can find it under Free Articles 4 Authors, Editors on her site.

My interest in writing came about simply enough; I was reading a series of books and I became fed up with them. I just pulled out a notebook and said I could write one better. That’s it. I never dreamed of being a writer and truth be told, for ten of the twelve years since that fateful day, I was a closet writer. No one read any of my stories; very few even knew that was how I spent my spare time.

I love history and they range from ancient Egypt to modern day. They range in genre from western, mystery, suspense, spies, a few romances pop up even; you get the idea. Then three years ago, my husband said you spend so much time writing you should try to get them published. This from a man I hadn’t let read anything in four or five years and just like that, I did. One of the first pieces I sent out was accepted within weeks. This is going to be easy I thought. I was wrong of course. I had one other piece that fit their guidelines so I sent it in. Not quite as quickly as the first, I got a letter saying the publisher had died and the publication was closing. Come to think of it, has that happened twice.

Why am I giving you a background? Well, it’s a lead up to saying I’m published. I have ISBN numbers, book covers, everything an author needs, except a pallet of books sitting in a warehouse. That’s the whole point of the essay. Most people when they think of the publishing world imagine large New York publishing firms putting out big titles; Harry Potter, John Grisham, you know the names everyone has heard. Then there’s the literary side of small college magazines with little budget, tiny publishers that put out a book a year. They’re the prestige side of it.

Whatever literary actually means, I’m not it. I tell a story, that’s all I claim. What’s a girl to do with forty plus stories and novellas in a world that wants blockbuster novels and short literary pieces? Then I saw one market that sounded promising. Diskus Publishing takes short stories 1,500 to 15,000 words for something they call Quick Picks, quick reads for if you haven’t time or if you want to find out what e-books are all about. I sent in three stories even though I knew nothing about e-books. I knew what they were of course, downloaded books for a reader either hand held or on your computer. You can store dozens in the space in the space of one paperback if you backed them all up. They got started in the late 90’s and now there are multitudes of e-publishers out there. Did I mention they accepted those three stories? Did I mention they’ve accepted six more since? I have books in a variety of versions to accommodate the variety of readers that have come about. A buyer only has to find a book they like, go to the checkout and tell the publisher which version they want to download, html, doc, rtf and or pdf. Some of the most popular reader programs are Adobe Acrobat e-Book Reader, Microsoft Reader, tk3 Reader, PDF Reader, Mobipocket Reader, eRocket, Peanut Reader, Palm Reader. For information on the above, MindLikeWater.com has links to the various options.

The end of traditional books some claimed, but they soon found that some people still prefer the idea of curling up with a book and not a computer screen. So there were e-books out there that lost out on a whole audience, but the idea for Print on Demand took hold with e-publishers. They had the formatting for the book, covers, and all. The best was it didn’t take lots of money tied up in stock. The format sits with the printer until an order come in, then he pulls out a file and prints out a single book if need be. All those books that traditional publishers put out that never sell end up recycled in various ways or at most are a tax write-off, there are no storage costs, and less paper is wasted too. It takes a little time, sometimes a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks.

I’m not going to theorize if print on demand (POD) will lead to the downfall of the traditional publisher either. I, personally, don’t think it will. For instance, I just can’t see all those people that line up in costumes for a release of a Harry Potter book ever wanting to give up that experience. I, myself, like browsing a bookstore probably more than the average next guy and used bookstores beware. However, as rural areas loose out on small business like bookstores, there’s a niche to fill. Sure, there’s Amazon and Barnes and Noble online, but you can’t browse and take everything in. Give them a word and you get thousands of books to wade through that may have nothing to do with what you want.

How many times have you gone into a bookstore and come out with something you never thought you would read just because it caught your eye? With many e-publishers, they recreate the feel of going into an actual bookstore. Diskus and the newly opened DDPstore have new release covers jumbled, cookbooks next to romances, next to poetry and science fiction. The older titles are arranged by genre, from there you can browse. Browsing is back without downloading page after page. The blurb isn’t lost among ads and forms to fill out. Like picking up a book and reading the jacket, there’s nothing to distract you but the next book. Isn’t that the best part?

As in traditional publishing, there are genre publishers as well. Science Fiction being heavily represented, as are romances. I might have stories that leaned that way once upon a time, but I thought it was a fluke when a story was accepted as a romance. That one was out of print for a time, but it got me thinking and a new publisher for it. Titan Press is the mainstream side of erotic Venus Press. Okay, okay, not so long ago I wouldn’t have ever said I wrote romances but I found out romance sells. (Hush, keep this quiet but sex even more) So a couple months after it came out, I had another story that I pitched to a different publisher. You know how I said I write historical? Well, it was a time travel and it was too short. Can you double it and we’ll look at it? When Egyptian Nights came out in October from Linden Bay Romance, I suddenly have a Recommended Read. I go and chat at sites and people know me because of that book. It’s kind of nice I have to say. That was 2005. I had nine books come out.

All those stories I have that rather leaned the way of romance but not really well, I made them lean further and submitted them to all over the place. May 2006 and I already have twelve books coming out for the year and one into 2007. Digital Pulp Publishing put out a western romance I wrote called The Wolf Within, one of my many versions of the novel that I wrote from that series I didn’t like. They are also taking a different approach. Besides putting out books of their own, they are also going to all those small publishers and allowing them to join the e-book realm by putting out e-versions of their print titles. Not to mention a free cookbook I made up with recipes from all those historical periods I write about. All those little publishing houses that put out a few titles a year can now sell e-book versions of their titles without getting expensive software, or setting up an online download center.

Remember how I said I never would admit I wrote romance. Well, I have ten out or coming and it’s not the chaste kiss sort of thing. Did I just admit that?? Thousands of people a day visit web romance publishers, Venus Press alone has an average of 40,000 and I swear I saw one quote as many as 60,000 people every day. This from a company that just started up a year ago. I have four coming out with them. Romance at Heart has had 189,000 visitors since 2004. I have two out with them. One of my babies, a story I wrote about the colonial period in Kenya, is coming from Chippewa publishing. Did I mention I was in the Peace Corps and lived there for two years? Oh yeah and Midnight Showcase took one for a digest of theirs and a short for a line called Romps. With another handful of stories submitted, I’m sure that list will just keep growing too.

If you are really into browsing, like in a bookstore though, you have that option. www.fictionwise.com is the mother ship of e-books. If they are sold off the publisher’s website, they will be there. Mobipocket is another and there are many more and yes, even Amazon has an e-book division. It was a proud day when one of my titles was there. I have a book at Amazon!! Oh yeah and Digital Pulp Publishing I mentioned has a store growing every day. Many of these sites have bookshelves as they are called. If your computer crashes and you loose all those books you paid for, you can log in and download them all again instead of having to store them all in backup yourself.

This is not self-publishing or vanity publishing. All of these companies offer royalties from 35 to 50%. Try getting that from a traditional publisher, with print royalties often being 10% if not 7%. The difference is obvious. You get editors to make it the best it can be, you get marketing, you get into online bookstores, but wait isn’t that starting to sound like a traditional publisher? The final product is the same thing after all; the only difference is how it gets to your hands.

My novel will be submitted to traditional publishers. I mean 105,000 words, that’s a lot to read on a computer screen. I plan to put out many of my stories as e-books though. Yes, there could be that prestige that comes from having them in some little literary journal. Maybe one day I’ll actually write something they would want and for the principle of the thing, I would send it to them again just to see if they would take it. When it comes down to it though a journal with a few hundred readers compared with how many copies I can sell all across the country . . . hey the internet is involved how many can I sell around the world there isn’t much contest for most of what I write. Besides, as I say on my website, I can travel history without leaving my chair and that is the whole point when I write. In that regard, I am still a closet writer, writing just to see if I can make something better than that series of books each time.

At the time of writing, Jennifer Mueller is a 23 time e-published author as well as other pieces published on-line and in print. For more information on Jennifer, and to keep up on her latest releases visit her at JenniferMuellerBooks.com.

“Bloody hell! She writes erotica!” That’s what I heard from the first person I told I was going to be published.

Before then, no one knew about my writing. My secret life, and my inner world, were about to be exposed. When I met my soon-to-be editor at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan, I wore a purple feather boa. I bought the boa to wear when I sat at my computer to write. Somehow, it helped me unlock the inner room where I stored all of my erotic treasures. Wearing that boa in public for the first time externalized my sense of coming out of the closet. Now, only a short year later, erotic romance is a national phenomenon.

The surge in the genre has been widely reported by the media, and has captured the eyes and the imaginations of many romance readers who are ready for more. My emerging from the shadows as an erotic romance author is not that different from what is happening to romance readers. Women are sexual beings, we always have been. The romance novel is a place where women find a safe haven for their secret desires. The gratification that happens by living vicariously though another’s story helps many women cope with the more mundane aspects of their lives.

The escape factor of a romance novel seems to grow proportionally with the heat in the book. As the novels became edgier, women became bolder. They wanted to ride the wave of a more titillating story. The tingles were more intense, and the climax quite satisfying. Women looked for romance novels with more of a bite, because they wanted the stories they were reading to carry them farther than traditional romance had. When erotic romance sales began to climb, publishers noticed, Kensington Publishing being one of them. They launched their Aphrodisia erotic romance line and I became an Aphrodisia author. I write sexually explicit stories for myself. My imagination conjures fantasies, which come alive in my mind. The fantasy grows into a story, with plot, characters and lots of sex. The pleasure of writing the story, and living through the characters, gives me the same rush as reading it.

Readers of erotic romance want to explore their long hidden sensual feelings just as I want to explore mine. As with all things that push the envelope of traditional standards, not everyone is ready for this new explicitness in romance. Some of the detractors say it has gone too far, others have even called it smut. But no one can deny that erotic romance has hit mainstream society. When women find out what I do, they are eager to buy the books. From my personal experience, the enthusiasm about my writing continues to surprise me. From college age to middle age, from a neighborhood Chinese restaurant, from my doctor’s office to bookstore cashiers, from my friends and family, everyone I know wants to read these erotic books. It is as if mainstream acceptance has legitimized the genre and women have been given permission to read erotica openly.

So, ladies, if you are feeling like you want to add some panache to your life, buy yourself a feather boa and an erotic romance. Just remember, it’s not about the boa.

P.F. Kozak, author of Passion, and Sins and Secrets, invites you to learn more about the sizzle and steam of erotic romance at her Web site http://www.pfkozak.com