Joel Brigham
@joelbrigham
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Fiction Editor (Brigham Editorial), #RevPit Editor, YA/MG author, HS English teacher, former NBA journalist, and all-around good guy.
Illinois, USA
Joined May 2009
You can find me at the place with azure skies. Subscribing to my free newsletter is the best way to ensure we don't lose touch.
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I'm Joel Brigham, and I approve this partnership.
Well, it’s official! @vickyweberbooks and I loved coaching so much, we’re collaborating to offer it permanently! 🥳 These sessions dive deep into character arcs, plot development, and so much more. I’m thrilled to be partnering with At Home Author to help more authors!!
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⛰ The end of America’s oldest environmental organization The New York Times had a deep dive on the Sierra Club’s implosion: how shifting from the environment to social justice tore the organization apart. Sad!
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Laszlo Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature for “Herscht 07769." It's a book about a graffiti cleaner in Germany who writes letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel to alert her to the world’s impending destruction. It features ONE period in 400 pages.
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Just wrote a note for a romance author that the two romantic leads need "to kiss earlier and more often, and probably engage in the horizontal polka." At least no one will ever accuse me of editing with ChatGPT. A.I. *wishes* its sense of humor was as bad as mine.
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I can't support this platform anymore, gang. Sucks to abandon 15 years of connecting with writers, but I'm out. I'll never forgive him for ruining this place. I'll be at the standard alternatives, and my links remain in my bio. Hugs and high fives. -JB
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Check out this post by @joelbrigham from his March newsletter. It's full of great insights on characters and storytelling. #writingcommunity #substack
https://t.co/zoo2imyEb4
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@joelbrigham's newsletter landed in our inbox today, and it's another great one! Our favorite takeaway? "Not everything in a book has to be a surprise."
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1. I'm obsessed with this branding. Logo, color scheme... all of it. 2. This podcast looks amazing!
as an author and as an agent, I’ve seen a lot. Like a lot… therefore, I’m SO excited to share the good, the bad, the ridiculous with y’all. Follow along as I interview authors & industry experts to shine light on a notoriously mysterious industry… introducing THE SLUSH PILE.
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It's a good day in editing when I get to research the 1943 MLB season to make sure my author's throwaway line about the Yankees and Red Sox would've been historically accurate.
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Yesterday I suggested a possible solution to a slow Chapter 1: cut Chapter 1 entirely. @Atomalone made a fantastic point that I've already told writers to cut their prologues. Now I'm telling you to cut Chapter 1, too! But there's a key difference between these: Editors suggest
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I can't tell you how many books I edit where the solution to a slow start is simply to delete Chapter 1. Why? Because Chapter 1 is so often full of unnecessary backstory, stage-setting, and info-dumping, but usually by Chapter 2, authors get things moving on The Plot.
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"It's relatively rare when a human uses it." If we ever needed evidence that AI has been stealing our writing to train its models, this would be it. Cuz y'all are absolutely not using this punctuation mark judiciously. 😂
A shortcut for detecting if something is written with AI is they all use this symbol "—" throughout the writing. It's relatively rare when a human uses it, maybe once or twice, if that. But AI chats love using it. No clue why.
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Quick Author Tip: You don't need to ask a lot of clarifying questions in the narration or in the protagonist's thoughts (things like, "What was going on?" or "Am I going crazy?"). Why not? Because if you're setting up a situation that elicits those questions, the reader should
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Last chance to register! First meeting is tonight!!
I'm doing another group coaching cohort for F-Flat Books! If you're a PB writer, come join this LIVE small group coaching session. 😍 https://t.co/2quoGJ4Qdn
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We’ve been doing a lot of AI enablement work lately at @ThisDotLabs, and it’s been amazing to see how quickly organizations are adapting. In one recent engagement, a follow-up survey showed that daily AI tool usage grew from 33% to 100%, and the share of people who felt
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This cover! 😍
Cover launch! This dark gothic fantasy follows two women as they sink into a world of beauty, poison, and the quest for knowledge to escape lives where their paths feel predetermined. THIS VICIOUS HUNGER by @franwritesstuff is available August 2025. Design by @VonBrooklyn
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After spending the last month writing query stuff for 30-60 minutes every morning, I feel like I'm missing some strange part of my morning routine. On the other hand, I've got an inbox full of people wanting help with query letters, so let's not feel TOO sorry for me :)
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Thank you to everyone who submitted to me! The promotion is officially over, as I've got more than enough queries to look over! Got home late tonight, but I'll reach out to winners over the weekend!
The first five authors who can satisfy the following will get a one-pass query letter critique for just $20: 1. Repost one of my Query Month posts 2. Get your query letter under 350 words 3. Fill out the contact form at my website. FIVE AUTHORS ONLY! HURRY!
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The first five authors who can satisfy the following will get a one-pass query letter critique for just $20: 1. Repost one of my Query Month posts 2. Get your query letter under 350 words 3. Fill out the contact form at my website. FIVE AUTHORS ONLY! HURRY!
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🚀 Introducing ImagineArt for Teams - the feature you’ve all been waiting for. Remember when Netflix let you share your account? Yeah… we just did that for AI. First 200 people to comment “ImagineArt” get added to our official ImagineArt Team for Free!
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Joel has offered really helpful #amquerying advice every day for the last month. If you’re new or not so new to querying, his posts are definitely worth a read :)
January is Query Month (not really, but I made up "Query Month" because I thought it would be helpful for writers). I'm doing one big post per day all month. I'll keep adding them to this thread as they go live. Bookmark this if you want a free month-long Querying 101 Course :)
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