Publetariat

Due to vacation scheduling, Publetariat will be on skeleton crew through the end of July. During this time it may take us a few days to process new member registrations, answer emails, and approve comments. Thanks for your patience, and happy summer to all!  (no need to click through, this is the end of the post)

An author who sold several bestsellers and millions of books once shared some insights into becoming a successful author. They indicated that the book has to be well written, professional looking, with a good product description, and for sale at the right price. With a bit of luck, these attributes can help make a book a commercial success.

What the author neglected to add was that successful writing starts with a good idea. Anyone can copy the latest literary trend, but a truly successful novel or story should be based on a compelling idea. The idea does not need to be original per se, but rather one that piques readers’ interest. It means moving beyond the latest paranormal vampire romance into unexplored territory. Can you guess what the next frontier in writing will be? If so, write about it before it becomes passé. A strong idea can be a good foundation for success.

This post, by Peter Cox, originally appeared on his Redhammer blog on 6/8/11.

A major debate is going on in publishing circles at the moment, and you need to know about it.

Frequently, these things are a storm in a teacup.  What excites publishing folk often leaves the rest of the world… a bit limp.  “Inside Publishing” isn’t always as exciting as… watching leafcutter ants.

This time it’s different.

This issue is enormous.  Because it will affect every book deal, every publication contract, from now until the end of time.

It affects every author who has an agent, or who would ever like an agent.  It goes to the heart of what being an agent is all about.

In a nutshell, this is the question:

Should your agent also be your publisher?

In recent weeks, there have been a spate of agents who have cut deals on behalf of their clients with… themselves.  One such involved the agent to the estate of the late author Catherine Cookson.  According  to the Daily Mail, the literary agent didn’t even inform the author’s publishers, Transworld and Simon & Schuster, that she’d done a deal – with herself – to digitally publish 100 of the author’s titles.  “I haven’t told either firm about the deal”, she said, “and I am sure they are going to kick up a fuss about it”. [Click on image at right to read the full story]

Yes, I bet they will.

As should any author whose agent says to them – come on – let’s cut your print publisher out of the picture… give me those lovely digital publishing rights, and I’ll publish you myself!

No doubt many agents will jump on this particular bandwagon before it overturns.

It’s Not OK To be Your Client’s Publisher

Let me be absolutely candid with you.  Although various excuses have been put forward by agents for doing this – it’s mostly about lining their own pocket.

Not that I’m against agents making money – how could I be?

But this isn’t just about making money. It comes perilously close to what is termed in law “self-dealing“, and it is both ethically wrong and legally very dangerous. In taking this fateful step, those agents who choose to do this are in danger of crossing a line that is legally and ethically of immense significance.

Read the rest of the post on Redhammer.

This post, by Juliette Wade, originally appeared on her TalkToYoUniverse site on 6/21/11.

How can you get your reader to feel emotionally moved by your story?

Well, first off, you can’t just tell them, "you should be emotionally moved." This is obvious, I think. I had been thinking about the topic of emotional involvement and creating intensity at particular points of the story, and then I ran across this article by Lydia Sharp, where she gives the following quote from Donald Maass:

Lydia then asks:
"So what does this mean? For starters, it goes back to the age-old advice of "show, don’t tell." Where emotions are involved, it’s best not to simply outright tell your reader what the characters are feeling. Let the reader experience it.

"And how do you do that? By not being obvious."

All of this, I agree with. If I were to take the Donald Maass quote and give my own take on it, I would have to say that our impressions of the emotional experiences of characters grow more out of our own emotions in a particular part of the story than the other way around. In other words, it is our own emotional understanding of the story that deepens the character’s experience, rather than the character’s emotional state deepening our own.

In a way, this makes sense. Because the character inhabits the story, he/she is limited in his/her ability to grasp the entirety of the story. The reader usually does not have these same limitations. I’m going to come back to the idea of the entirety of the story in a moment, but first let me address Lydia’s advice.

Lydia suggests we should let the reader experience what the characters are feeling, rather than telling them, by not being obvious. An excellent point. There are a number of ways that emotional states can be shown. One way is to describe the internal physical sensations of a person – adrenaline surges, feeling hot or cold, and many different kinds of metaphorical descriptions of pain, fear, embarrassment, joy, etc. can be of use for internal points of view. Another way is to show the external behaviors of a person feeling an emotion. If the point of view is external, you can show facial expressions; this is awkward to do with internal points of view, but you can still show actions of rage (as one example) like throwing things across the room, or pacing, stomping, etc. Still another way is to have the emotional state of the character in a scene be reflected somehow in the way that person perceives things around him/her, by including a sense of rage or other emotion in the surrounding descriptions of setting, descriptions of the actions of others, etc. There is a descriptive passage in Snow Falling on Cedars where the destruction wreaked by a storm is treated in intensive detail…and that reflects the inner state of the protagonist, Ishmael.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes numerous specific, before-and-after examples, as well as some concrete tips, on Juliette Wade‘s TalkToYoUniverse.

This post, by Marc Johnson, originally appeared on Longshot Publishing on 6/16/11.

Going indie has some drawbacks. One of those drawbacks is staying on top of the news. While I did that anyway especially in the Fantasy genre, with today’s publishing climate, I’ve had to do it a lot more. I’ve had to not only keep track of my preferred genre, but publishing as a whole. There are many good blogs and news sources out there, but how was I to keep track of them?

The last year and a half, I learned something about a little thing called RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. While I don’t understand the technical aspects, RSS really is simple.

Instead of constantly visiting and bookmarking all the websites I go to or leaving dozens of tabs open, I just use RSS. In most websites these days, they’ll be either a button that says subscribe like what I have in the upper right corner or they’ll be this picture. By clicking on this button, you’ll be able to get the feeds from a whole bunch of websites. You will never need to go to the website ever again.

What RSS does is pull the news from the site. You’ll get their updated news feed whenever they update and you’ll see whatever images they post. In the case of some sites, you’ll no longer need to play the guessing game of when they update their site. It’s also helpful for podcasts and webcomics.

 

Read the rest of the post on Longshot Publishing.

This post, by Jody Hedlund, originally appeared on her blog on 6/6/11.

In the writing community, most of us want to support each other. One way to generously show support is to buy each other’s books. We can’t discount fellow writers as a segment of our readership. (See this post: The New Growing Segment of the Reading Population: Writers)

But in buying and reading each other’s books, we’ll inevitably come across books we don’t like. That’s just a fact of life. We won’t like all books all the time.

We might not like the subject, the writing style, the plot, the development of the story, the typos, the characters. There could be a hundred and one reasons why we don’t like a book. And that’s okay.

But what should we do about the negative reaction we have to a book? Particularly when the book was written by an author who happens to be an acquaintance or friend? What should we do when that particular author knows we read his or her book (and is perhaps waiting for word on how we liked it)?

Let’s face it, as more of us publish our books (either traditionally or self-pub), we’ll continually have more writer friends’ books to read. How are we going to handle the books that don’t resonate for one reason or another? How can we offer our support to our fellow writers when we don’t like the book? How do we tell them our true feelings without hurting their feelings and/or our relationship?

When we read a book we don’t like, here are several possible scenarios:

• We lie totally and completely. We tell our friend we liked her book and think she’s a good writer, when in reality we couldn’t finish the book.
   
• We tell a half-lie (if that’s possible!) We fudge just slightly. We think of the positive aspects we liked about the story and tell the author those things (like how well they used commas), but refrain from telling her how much we disliked the rest.
   
• We’re politely honest. We give truthful but tactful feedback. We figure from one writer to another, our friend will want to know her weaknesses so she can improve. However, we make sure to point out the positives too.
   

Read the rest of the post on Jody Hedlund‘s blog.

This post, by Anne R. Allen, originally appeared on her blog on 9/19/10.

The wonderful Sierra Godfrey mentioned this post in her round up of round-ups last week as one of her favorite posts ever, so I figured it would be a good one to post again.

One note of caution: these are rules for the final draft. When you’re first diving into a novel, you’re not introducing your characters to a reader; you’re introducing them to yourself. All kinds of information about your MC will come up, like she eats cold pizza for breakfast, grew up next to an adult book store, and feels a deep hatred for Smurfs. This stuff will spill out in your first chapters. Let it. That’s the fun part. But be aware you’ll want to cut most of the information or move it to another part of the book when you edit.

When you’re doing that editing, here are some dos and don’ts:

DON’T start with a Robinson Crusoe opening. That’s when your character is alone and musing. Robinson Crusoe is boring until Friday shows up. So don’t snoozify the reader with a character driving alone in the car, sitting on an airplane, waking up and going to work, or looking in the mirror.

DO open with the protagonist in a scene with other characters—showing how he interacts with the world. Two or three is ideal: not too many or the reader will be overwhelmed.

DON’T give a lot of physical description, especially of the "police report" variety. All we know about Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice is that she has “fine eyes.” We don’t have to be told the color of Sam Spade’s hair, or Inspector Morse’s weight. The reader’s imagination fills in the blanks.

DO give us some physical markers that indicate personality. Unusual characteristics like Nero Wolfe’s size, Hercule Poirot’s mustache, and Miss Marple’s age show who these characters are and make them memorable.

Read the rest of the post on Anne R. Allen‘s blog.

This post originally appeared on the Writers Anonymous blog.

As writers, we all struggle with editing our own work. We know what we intended to say, so often our eyes see our intentions in place of what is actually there.

Is all lost? Are we completely unable to edit our own work? Are we forever reliant on the assistance of others?

At some point, we are reliant on others to edit our work. Besides reading our work with fresh eyes, others also bring a world of experience that is different than ours. Others also read our work with (perhaps) different goals in mind–for example, perhaps I intend a piece to be entertaining, and a reader believes the same piece (at least at first) to be educational.  These different perspectives change how our work is interpreted, so we may not get our intended message to the reader.

However, there are several techniques we can use to look at our own writing through fresh eyes.  I have used each of these techniques with varying degrees of success, and have found them to be successful at finding different types of errors.

1. Change your work’s appearance

By changing the size, color, or font of your work, you force yourself out of the familiar feel of your favorite font.  Suddenly, words that fit poorly with the flow of the rest of your article, story, or other work pop out due to the changed appearance.  The best font to use is one that changes which words are on the edge of a page–so, as an example, you might use a fixed-width font like Courier instead of your typical variable-width font like Times New Roman.

This method is best used for looking at the general flow of your article and making sure that it makes sense.  You may also find that this method helps find double word errors, such as “the the” or “of of”.

2. Give yourself some time

The worst time to edit is immediately after you’ve finished writing a piece.  At this point, everything is still clear in your mind, so you’re more likely to fill in holes with what you intended to say.

Instead, go out for a walk, a cup of coffee, read a book, or just about anything to get your mind off what you just wrote.  For best results, you should stay away from what you wrote for at least an hour, and preferably as long as a day.

Once you get back, use this in combination with one of the other strategies to make sure that you are looking at your work in a different mindset than when you wrote it.
 

Read the rest of the post on the Writers Anonymous blog.

This post, by Bill Walker, originally appeared on his blog on 1/4/11.

Many aspiring novelists, begin the writing process without really thinking about what his/her publishing objectives are. They don’t think about questions such as: Why do I want to write a book in the first place? How will this book be published? For whom am I writing this book? Who is my target market? Do I want to make money from the sales of this book? How am I going to market my book?

These are questions that should be answered prior to writing your book. Here are a few things to consider:

What are your goals and objectives?

• Why do you want to publish a book? (What is your Big “Why”?)
   
• Is this a hobby or do you want to earn a living as a writer?
   
• Are you going to print just a few copies for friends and family or do you want worldwide distribution?
   
• Do you want to become a household name?
   
• Who is your target market?
   
• Are you passionate about your writing?

How do you envision your writing career?

• Hobby – A favorite leisure time activity or occupation.
   
• Job – A paid or unpaid position of employment.
   
• Career – A life’s work or journey.

 

Read the rest of the post on Bill Walker‘s site.

This post, from Blue Horizon Communications, originally appeared on that site on 12/8/10.

Brands are those vague but persuasive associations we conjure up whenever we think of any well-known product. Mac computers. TIDE laundry detergent. Nike running shoes. 

Brands are also the far more complex associations that come to mind whenever we think of well-known authors. Often, they’re a flash of images mixed with a dominant feeling, or a scene from a particular book montaged with memory fragments.

Here’s a small demonstration:  Does the name Stephen King conjure something different for you than the name J.K. Rowling?  What about Dan Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert, Jodi Picoult? Or Malcolm Gladwell, Joan Didion, Seth Godin?  What association appears for a second or so when you first see each name? 

People Brands Aren’t Product Brands

Whatever that instant of recognition is composed of, it’s there because that author’s brand put it there. Each association is complex and meaningful —  unlike the association you’d experience for a brand of laundry detergent.

In fact, it’s that much-ado-about-nothingness which characterizes many product brands that makes it easy to imagine authors rejecting the B word as too schlocky, too commercial, too huckster-esque. So let’s substitute the word “story” instead – the “author-identifier” story, if you will.

Brand:  Author-Identifier Story

The author-identifier story (aka brand) refers to the complex messages authors put out into the world about themselves and their books — which we then absorb and retain in a highly individual way.

 

Read the rest of the post on Blue Horizon Communcations.

This post, by JD Sawyer, originally appeared on his Literary Abominations site on 5/26/11.

Preface: I mentioned this in the first post in this series, but because I’m going to be talking about some specific points of law in this post, I need to reiterate: I am not a lawyer, am not qualified to dispense legal advice, and none of what follows should be considered as legal advice. All of what follows is opinion based on experience and on layperson’s research, and you should always consult a lawyer of an appropriate specialty when negotiating an IP-related contract (especially when dealing with a company that can afford bigger lawyers than you can).

— — — —
Previous chapter: Market Awareness
— — — —

If God had a lounge singer in the 40s, 50s, or 60s, I’d lay you even odds that it would have been Peggy Lee. Along with Etta James, Billie Holiday, and Rosemary Clooney, she had a glorious, smoky, rich alto that wrapped naturally around horns and clarinets to make sounds that were the aural equivalent of chocolate.

Peggy Lee had a good friend named Walter, and Walter need a singer/songwriter for his new project. Walter did good work, and he was a good friend, so Peggy gave him a good rate, and in 1955 the result of that project hit the country like Christmas. It was a little movie called Lady and the Tramp.

It was a great collaboration, and they had a good contract for the time (Peggy and her cowriter retained rights to “transcriptions” such as record albums and sheet music–a smart move). Everything might have been peachy for life, if Sony hadn’t screwed up the world with home video.

Videotapes have been around pretty much since the Big Bang (or at least since 1951) in broadcast, but nobody really expected that it would wind up being something people used at home any more than the early computer manufacturers thought that your phone would contain twice the computing power that sent men to the moon (which some of them now do). Even if it were technically possible, why would anyone want home video when they had, you know, lives? And television? A professional toy like video tape wouldn’t appeal to a mass market–or such was the thinking. Sony, by the 1970s the world leader in miniaturization, disagreed. In 1975 they introduced Betamax, the first home video format.

It took a few years for it to catch on, but (thanks largely to the porn industry) by the 1980s home video was THE thing (and in the years since, this trend has only deepened with more formats being released). Studios started making their bread-and-butter money from video rentals and sales, rather than from theatrical exhibition. The only people who had a problem with this were the artists who weren’t getting paid for the work they’d done for theatrical exhibition–but most of them just grumbled. Not Peggy Lee. Peggy Lee pulled out her lawyers and said “Sic ‘em.”

Disney argued that the original license left them with an implicit right to sell the movie in any format, and that “transcriptions” didn’t cover home video because it was just another video format, like film and television. Peggy Lee argued that it was a transcription, and that she couldn’t have sold home video rights, because home video didn’t exist at the time that Lady and the Tramp was produced.

It took a long time for the lawsuits, contrafilings, and court case to run its course. At the end of it, in 1992, Peggy Lee won two important victories. First, she got a few million dollars for her troubles, which helped with her retirement even after her lawyers got their cut. Second, she got a precedent, known in entertainment circles as “The Peggy Lee Decision.” According to this decision, rendered in the California Supreme Court, an artist can’t sign over rights that do not yet exist.

Let me say that again. An artist can NOT license rights that do not yet exist. All those old movie contracts suddenly got complicated, as studio lawyers had to scramble to make sure their creatives (such as composers, songwriters, etc.) signed addendum allowing the use of their work in home video. At the time, Internet streaming didn’t exist except in experimental theory, so very few studios listed that in their addendum–that came later (this is, btw, one of the reasons that certain episodes of TV shows, and certain films, are not available on DVD and/or for streaming–studios would not meet artist’s asking prices for their music and other creative contributions in the new formats).
 

Read the rest of the post, which goes on to address how the ‘rights that do not yet exist’ situation applies to—and can seriuosly injure—authors, on JD Sawyer’s Literary Abominations.

What makes you uncomfortable with or defensive about your story is worth looking at closely for two reasons: 1) it could be a hidden gem, or 2) it could be a little darling.

Hidden Gems

Sometimes as we write our subconscious seeds our stories with hidden gems, like how or where your protagonist will find the answer to his surface problem*.

In Bob Mayer’s book, Novel Writer’s Toolkit, he talks about a writer getting stuck with a particular problem in the story (the main character needs to discover some vital information in order to solve the mystery) and not knowing how to resolve it. It only took a quick look back through what was already written to find the answer in a short bit of description (several journals the character had seen on a shelf in another character’s office).

Another possible hidden gem your subconscious could work in is a story-worthy problem.

While it is important to give at least a minimum amount of thought to what your protagonist’s underlying issue is, sometimes the real issue develops deep within your own mind and isn’t revealed until you begin writing.

For instance I recently wrote a scene where my main character’s father, an ordinarily soft-spoken and gentle character, speaks condescendingly to his son, my protagonist. It’s a scene I’ve hated reading because it makes me uncomfortable. I’ve considered several times removing it, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

However, since going back to basics with this story and trying to develop myself into more of a planner and less of a pantser, I’ve realized this scene reveals my main character’s story-worthy problem — the need to believe in himself. Had I taken it out before finishing the entire story I might have missed this very important detail.

Little Darlings

On the other hand, those “special” scenes that we feel the need to defend as “necessary” may not be necessary at all. They could be little darlings, as Stephen King calls them, and need to be eliminated (or at least banished to a folder far far away from the rest of your civilized manuscript).

To know the difference you can ask this very important question: does this move the story along? If it does, great! If it slows things down you may need to cut it. At the very least you’ll have to revise it, which means shortening and tightening.

A lot of my personal little darlings tend to be flashbacks and memories. They’re fun scenes and often moving, but necessary? Probably not. Some of the information needs to remain, but there are certainly better ways to scatter it through the rest of the story.

One example from my WIP is a flashback where my protagonist’s father is teaching him what the term “warming up” means. It’s cute, even endearing, but it really slows down the story. Instead, I’ll be re-writing the flashback into a memory, most likely as a couple of sentences instead of the several paragraphs it currently is. It’ll be painful, but it’s necessary.

Writing a great novel can be tough, but thankfully we’re not alone. There are multitudes of free blogs and inexpensive books we can read to help us learn about craft. Best of all, there are other writers and readers out there we can get in touch with thanks to social media who can become our mentors and beta readers. With all those great resources available, it makes it that much easier to decide if that scene is a hidden gem or a little darling.

How do you make that decision?



*For more information on surface vs. story-worthy problems check out Les Edgerton’s book Hooked.

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road To Writing.

Publetariat staff are off in observance of Memorial Day here in the United States: the day when we remember all the members of our armed forces who fought and lost their lives throughout history. Whether you’re in the U.S. or not, please take a moment to give thanks for the sacrifices of the fallen soldiers of your nation, as well as their surviving family members and descendants.

Publetariat members can still post to their blogs and use the Forum, but emails to Publetariat won’t be answered until Tuesday, 5/31, and no new content will be posted to the main site until the evening of Monday, 5/30.

This post, by Art Peterson, originally appeared on The National Writing Project site on 5/12/11.

Summary: The National Novel Writing Month’s Young Writers Program makes writing fun for students because of, not despite, its audacious goal: kids must pen a novel in a month.  

Most teachers assign novels for students to read not write. But many teachers nationwide are not only asking students to read novels but also giving them a month to write them.

Yes, you read that right: one month.

Instead of complaining about being absurdly overworked, students participating in November’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) have been known to ask, "Can we work on our novels today?"

That’s because, above all, NaNoWriMo is meant to be fun. An exercise in "seat-of-your-pants" novel writing, it has almost no rules.

The Office of Letters and Light, the nonprofit behind the event, believes this carefree approach encourages writers to take imaginative risks and truly enjoy their work. Founded in 1999, the adult version of the event requires only that you commit yourself to taking a stab at novel writing—and submitting a novel of 50,000 words, no matter how good or bad they are, by the end of November.

Since 2005, NaNoWriMo has entered many classrooms, including those of National Writing Project teachers, through its Young Writers Program. In addition to curriculum and support, teachers receive a classroom kit featuring a progress chart, stickers to mark word counts, and buttons for writers who cross the finish line.

Approximately 1,800 classrooms and 45,000 kids and teens participated in 2010. The rules for under-18 writers are the same as those for adults, with one important exception: young writers can pick their own "reasonable yet challenging" word length.

If a student elects to write, say, 18,000 words and achieves this goal in a month, he or she is a winner. Awards include a "handsome winner’s certificate," a Web badge, and a promotional code to receive a free bound proof copy of the finished novel.

The Young Writers Program also facilitates Script Frenzy, a similar scriptwriting event that happens each April and challenges participants to write a 100-page script in 30 days.

While young writers work primarily as individuals, teachers are also encouraged to write along with them—an approach at the heart of NWP’s philosophy.

Common Core Curriculum Provided

Read the rest of the post on The National Writing Project site.

This post, by Kian Kaul, originally appeared on his Stockholm site on 5/10/11.

I used to find this quote inspirational, but now it just seems puzzling…

“One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.”
– Stanley Kubrick

[Editor’s Note: strong language after the jump]

Not to pick an undebatable point with one of the greatest creative minds in recent history, but having produced a novel (yes, produced – more on that later) it’s fairly clear that all the author traditionally does is put the words together pretty.  Write the manuscript.  What usually follows in the process is turning it over to proofers and editors, lawyers who vet the prose for lawsuits-in-waiting, marketers whose job it is to judge to whom and how to hock the story, which in turn informs the graphic designers who mock up the jacket cover and possibly any accompanying advertising materials (if handled in-house), all overseen by the publisher whose vision greatly supersedes the person who slapped the words together pretty in the first place.  Not to mention the ENG crew who may be hired to shoot crisply-lit interviews with the author to be used in the press kit (produced by yet another company entirely) for media outlets who may want to cover the product (yes, product).

Before the switch is thrown on this assembly line, it’s debatable whether the manuscript is really a book or just a pile of papers.  Or perhaps it was best argued on an especially subtext-heavy episode of Seinfeld , “It’s a pizza as soon as you put your fists in the dough!” “No, it’s not a pizza until you take it out of the oven!”

But, all the above is pure fantasy if you’re an indie author (the recent rebrand of the dreaded “self-published”).  Unless you’re versed in some or all of these skills, or just wealthy (in that case, read no further, you’ve got life on a string!) you’re probably planning to pull in favors, find other skilled creatives who “need to build their portfolios” and enlist friends who will be brimming with enthusiasm to drop whatever they’re working on to help you.  But the truth is, you’re not worth it.

The math is pretty simple; if you’re not in the position to hire for pay, none of the following highly-coveted descriptive terms apply to you: wealthy, famous, influential, incredibly charismatic, double-jointed.  Because, let’s be brutally honest, if you were two or more of those things you wouldn’t be an “indie author”.

The term “indie” seems to be a more sanitized form of “punk” or “underground”, with the aesthetic implications of photocopied demo tape jackets and monochrome fliers, circa 1980-199something (pre-Photoshop, post-Guttenberg).  And that’s essentially what we’re doing, sticking up our own demo albums on the local giveaway shelves until either someone offers us money to do it on their terms or we make enough to pay ourselves a living wage and continue to produce (while screaming “fuck the man” and pretending that we haven’t become exactly that).
 

Read the rest of the post on Kian Kaul‘s Stockholm.