Shock Point and other books by April Henry are available via the following vendors or your favorite local independent bookseller.

Indiebound.org

Amazon.com

Independent Mystery Booksellers Association

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SO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER?
Ideas from April Henry
(AprilHenryMysteries.com)

Read, read, read.

Write regularly. Write every day, or every weekend. Start by keeping a journal or doing the exercises in Writing Down the Bones. Make writing a habit. Don’t wait for inspiration. Once you are published, you’ll need to make deadlines.

Go to readings at bookstores. You’ll learn something from every writer you hear.

Get some distance from your writing. Once you think you’re done, try to put a piece aside for at least two weeks. Then when you do pick it up again, read it aloud while imagining that you are reading it to an editor at a publishing house. What works and what doesn’t? Truman Capote was right when he said, “Good writing is rewriting.”

Buy a book of baby names. Great for naming your next character. 

Keep a journal. Get in the writing habit.

Keep a file folder full of fodder. Need an interesting trait to give a character? Need your dialog to sound better? Pull out your file folder full of ideas, newspaper clippings, articles about writing, and interviews with novelists you admire. Include photos of interesting people or places. 

Subscribe to free weekday e-mails from Publishers
Weekly. Go to PublishersWeekly.com. Subscribe to free weekday e-mails from Publishers Lunch. Has much of the same information as Publishers Weekly (although sometimes a different spin), but also has information on which literary agents have recently closed deals for which books, with a ballpark reference to the advance. Go to PublishersLunch.com

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Good books on writing or getting published:

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published

The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book

How to Get Happily Published

The First Five Pages

Writer Tells All

How to Write a Mystery by Larry Beinhart

Writing Down the Bones