An interactive, craft-focused workshop that covers a new writing concept in-depth every month, offers writing exercises, feedback, and critique opportunities. Get access to ALL of our offered courses and writer community.

This kind of comprehensive, intensive workshop model involves a lot of work and commitment—from the teachers and from you!If you’re ready for an upgrade to your writing practice, we'd love to have you as a WCW member!

Learn the ins and outs of storytelling from idea to publication with exclusive content from Mary Kole, Much Ado About Writing, and the Good Story Company team. Every class, workshop, and webinar ever recorded on topics like writing, revision, marketing and more.

Access videos anytime, anywhere as long as you have your subscription. New content is added every month!

Over six hours of self-paced instruction and over 50 handouts and resources about all facets of writer marketing, book marketing, and author platform. Work your way through this course, and you will generate hundreds of new marketing ideas for your writing career.

Publishing veteran and longtime freelance editor Mary Kole gives you everything you need to know to run your own freelance editing business. This intimate, in-depth class is for aspiring freelance book editors across all categories and skill levels. With this training, you will be on your way to running your own six-figure editing business.

Delve into the art of interiority, the heartbeat of compelling fiction and memoir writing, ensuring your characters resonate deeply with readers across four levels of depth. Explore your protagonist’s thoughts, feelings, reactions and interpretations, expectations, and inner struggles to create a rich, immersive experience.

Former literary agent Mary Kole provides consulting and developmental editing services to writers of all categories and genres, working on children’s book projects from picture book to young adult, and all kinds of trade market literature, including fantasy, sci-fi, romance, and memoir. 

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and has worked at Chronicle Books, the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, and Movable Type Management. She has been blogging at Kidlit since 2009. Her book, Writing Irresistible Kidlit, a writing reference guide for middle grade and young adult writers, is available from Writer's Digest Books. After founding her own editing business, Mary Kole Editorial, in 2013, she started Good Story Company in 2019 as an educational, editorial, and community resource for writers.

Mary has appeared at regional, national, and international SCBWI conferences, as well as independent conferences including Writer's Digest, Penn Writers, Writer's League of Texas, San Francisco Writers Conference, WIFYR, Writing Day, and dozens of others. She has guest lectured at Harvard Extension, the Ringling College of Art and Design, the Highlights Foundation, and the Loft, and her classes can be found online at Writing Mastery Academy, Writing Blueprints, Udemy, and LinkedIn Learning.

Story time had always been Kate Penndorf’s favorite ‘subject’ in school. But when her second grade teacher opted to read from a tattered old diary, Kate’s view on books changed forever. Books were now alive, with adventures, dilemmas, far away locations, heroes, villains, drama, and quite frankly, story. Everything was so real, well at least in her imagination at any rate. She wanted to live in those stories… and she has.

On a train ride into NYC, a vision came to Kate’s sleepy commuter mind: a girl finding a dragon egg in the middle of a Viking graveyard. Presto! The premise for her debut novel was born. A tale, which Kate hopes, will change a child’s view on books forever.

As a developmental editor, Kate loves helping other writers hone their craft and polishing their manuscript. Inspired by the edits she has given, the idea for her new adventure, Much Ado About Writing, was born.

You can also find Kate coaching writers, giving workshops, contributing articles to the magazine Children's Book Insider, and serving at the state level as an event coordinator for her state's SCBWI chapter. 

Valerie traces her squiggly path to becoming a writer back to Mrs. Hodges’ first and second grade classroom, where she wrote and illustrated her very first books. Two decades later, she rediscovered her passion for children’s literature as a middle and high school English and creative writing teacher. An NCTE member and Teacher-Consultant with the National Writing Project, she transformed her classroom into a reading and writing workshop, where she read and wrote alongside her students.

Since leaving behind full-time teaching to devote more time to writing, Valerie has taught composition at the college level and continues to work in the classroom with pre-service secondary English teachers. As a lead writing coach for the Bloomberg Arts Institute (Baltimore) program, she mentors young artists and writers. A recent graduate of Young Audiences of Maryland’s Teaching Artist Institute, she looks forward to returning to middle and high school classrooms as a writer-in-residence.

When not working on her latest middle grade or young adult novel, she can be found contributing articles to the magazine Children's Book Insider, playing violin in a tango orchestra, practicing the energy healing art of chakra balancing, or solving a crossword puzzle.