Wednesday links: Anti-heroes, and book covers

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few. Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. How to write an anti-hero: What I learned from John Wick, from WOW! Women on Writing: Anti-heroes are some of my favourite characters to write. But they’re not the easiest characters; it can sometimes be difficult to make them sympathetic. Excerpt: “That, my writer friends, is the key to writing a successful anti-hero. Before we see him being all surly and, in this case, deadly, we need to care about him.”
2. Book Cover Quiz-with Takeaway, from Books & Such Literary Management: There’s a link to a quiz in this post, as well as some thoughts on book cover designs. If you’re curious, my score on the quiz was (and I’m not very proud of this) 12 out of 22. How’d you do? Excerpt: “When I saw the first set of covers, The Cat in the Hat, I was startled at their similarity. I recalled taking IQ tests as a kid in which you pick one graphic out of a bunch of almost lookalikes. And that’s really what this quiz is about–picking out subtle differences in designs.”