In this Publisher’s Weekly Beyond Her Book blog post, Barbara Vey takes a closer look at Publetariat’s own Zoe Winters‘ new social marketing project.

I really enjoy social marketing and the whole idea of marketing books. Not only have I given workshops on it, I attend every one I can. There’s always something new to learn and lots of great ideas out there. The big thing to me is branding your name.  Once everyone knows who you are, they will be more likely to pick your book over another who’s author is completely unknown to them.

With that in mind,  I love it when people send me funny, interesting things.  This video came through email yesterday from Edie Ramer.

I thought it was clever and well done.  I’m sure it echoes the thoughts of some writers.

In her blog, author Zoe Winters writes:  So I was really vague the other day and gave NO information about what I was doing. Now I can fully unveil it because the first episode is up. These are going to be 2-3 minute short videos (the kind you could watch at work when you’re supposed to be working). Hopefully it’s short enough, and entertaining enough that people will share it with others. I’m looking for hopefully one or more of the videos in this series to go viral.

I’ll be poking fun at the publishing industry, me, romance, etc.

The only thing I would have liked to have seen in the video was the author’s name at the end and her website.  Of course, this way everyone is asking, “Zoe Who?”  But probably not for much longer.

So tell me, do you think this kind of marketing ploy will work?  Does it make you want to know more about Zoe?  Are you looking forward to her upcoming videos?  Do you wish you would have thought of it first?

Bottom Line: I’ve really got to rethink the superhero outfit for when I do my future Drive By Videos.™

When I first started telling stories almost all third-person fiction (and first-person for that matter) was written in the past tense:

Carlos went into the dealership and looked around. He knew the salespeople would descend on him soon, and it was all he could do to stand his ground.

Past tense means the events happened some time ago, and you’re writing about them as such. The story already happened, and you’re telling it to someone at a later time.

For fifty years prior to my own apprenticeship, everyone who had any interest in telling stories also secretly aspired to writing the Great American Novel. You weren’t a real writer if you didn’t have an unfinished novel in your desk.

At about the same time that I was learning my craft, however, something was happening in Hollywood that would change all that. Directors like Coppola and Spielberg and Lucas were breaking out of the classic Hollywood production pipeline and bringing wildly entertaining and successful movies to the screen. The documents they worked from — the scripts — were also becoming literary properties in themselves. Writers were starting to sell scripts outright, and some of those scripts were selling for what anybody would call a chunk of money.

Almost overnight — by which I mean the five year span between the early and late 1980′s — writers went from having novels in their desks to having screenplays in their desks. When Syd Field published a book called Screenplay the gold rush was on.  

Now, what’s interesting about screenplays is that they’re all written in third person, present tense, as if the action is happening right now:

Carlos goes into the dealership. He looks around, spots a salesman. The salesman flashes a white-bright smile and steams over. Carlos looks for a place to hide.

I don’t know if anyone has ever documented the influence of pop-culture screenwriting on the world of fiction, but in the early 90′s I had the distinct impression that third-person, present-tense fiction was becoming more and more popular, while third-person fiction written in the past tense seemed to rapidly fall out of style. And I don’t think that was a coincidence.

One reason I make this point (whether it’s been made elsewhere or not) is because it reveals an ugly and constant truth about the world of fiction. Many (if not most) of the stories you read at any given time are written not in the pure service of craft, but at least partly in the service of trends. Some of these trends help break molds, of course, but others are simply cliquey conventions.

The main reason I make this point, however, is to show how literary trends can work against authorial goals. It may at first blush seems as if third-person, present-tense fiction is no different from third-person, past-tense fiction, but that’s not the case. Choosing one over the other is not simply a preference, it’s a craft choice, and the effects of each on the audience are different.

Third-person, past-tense stories have the advantage of being more natural. From the time we’re children we learn to tell about the events of our lives in the past tense, because that’s quite literally the way in which such events plays out. We go to school, we get beat up, we go home, we tell about it in the past tense because it happened in the past.

In fiction, this imitation of the natural, logical method of telling about events that we all use in our own lives helps facilitate the reader’s suspension of disbelief. It takes little effort for the reader to believe that the past-tense fiction they’re reading is believable precisely because the point-of-view technique being used mimics the way in which they hear stories from all sources. For example: almost all newspaper reporting is in the past tense precisely because the events being reported have already transpired.

Present-tense fiction does not have this advantage. Instead, present-tense fiction mortgages a bit of structural familiarity for a hoped-for increase in tension. The goal is very much like the difference between a story printed in the newspaper the next day, and a live on-the-scene report of something that is happening in real time.

Except…no reader thinks that what’s being told to them in present-tense fiction is actually happening at that moment. This in turn creates a disconnect: the reader is asked to believe that something is happening right now when it clearly isn’t — and the reader knows it isn’t because what they’re reading had to be printed at some earlier point. Yes, suspension of disbelief can solve this problem, but it’s a problem that past-tense stories simply do not have to solve.

To be sure, people are more comfortable reading present-tense fiction now precisely because it has become more common. Just as the jump cut in film used to elicit confusion in the theater, but can now be interpreted by almost anyone of any age, new techniques become part of the storytelling lexicon as mediums evolve.

The takeaway here is not that you shouldn’t use third-person, present-tense point of view. Rather, it’s that you shouldn’t use it simply because it’s what everyone else is doing. That’s not writing, that’s following the herd. (Admittedly this kind of herd instinct may make you more publishable at any given moment, in the same way that having the right buzzwords in your resume will mean you’re more likely to be hired. But it’s a given on this blog that writers shouldn’t be interested in how to suck up to people in power. They should be interested in telling the best stories they can tell.)

When you set out to write your next piece of fiction, whether it’s flash or a thousand-page epic, consider the craft choices available to you, then make the choices that are best for your story. There are plenty of people out there eager to take the next open spot in the literary clique. There are no people out there who will say what you have to say in the way you would say it if you had complete freedom to do so.

You have complete freedom to do so.

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

The next James River Writers’ Conference will be here before you know it and as a member of JRW, I wanted to pass along a few things I found interesting at our last conference. The discussion I most enjoyed centered on CHARACTERIZATION in NOVELS. A panel of three successful authors held this particular seminar.

One panelist indicated the best writing era for character research was the 1880’s to the 1920’s. He said when writing your book, read novels from that time period to learn how to improve upon your characterization.

Another idea they mentioned is show your readers how a character walks, stutters, or whatever. This makes the character more memorable. This made me think of Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, when Marty Feldman who played a hunchback, shuffled off. He told Wilder to, “Walk this way.” He meant for Dr. Frankenstein to follow him, of course. However, the good doctor shambled off like a hunchback, too. Obviously this is a useful tool as I’ve kept that image in my mind for how long, thirty years?

This leads into the next recommendation the panelists made. They said to bridge characters within chapters when you write your novel. By this they meant to carry a character’s oddities from one chapter to the next. For example, if you have a character who shows irritation by flicking his fingers, (thanks, Richard), have him flick his fingers a number of times throughout your novel.

A time-tested avenue for writers is to pit contrasting characters against each other. Think Laurel and Hardy or Lucy and Ricky. (Am I the only one who remembers these people?) Or, for a more modern example, think the cast of Friends.

Put your characters in situations foreign to them. Think fish out of water. A good example is a goody-two-shoes in a gang fight. Your character’s personality will shine in those odd situations.

Never, and they repeated the word, never put your characters in front of a mirror. Yes, there is an exception in Snow White, but then again, even James Bond learned “never” never means never. Right?

The bad guy can always rationalize his actions. He’s not insane, he’s evil.

Here’s a good one! Find contradiction in your novel’s characters. Imagine our goody-two-shoes who finally succumbs to the neighbor’s wife’s enchantments. You could also write about the vegetarian who is forced to eat meat to stay alive. This idea can present wonderful conflict opportunities, don’t you think?

Characters must want something in every chapter. Do they all get their wishes fulfilled? Not if you’re looking for readers.

Put your characters in an argument as this, too, will bring out their personalities. This is the fundamental turning point in my current novel, so I’m glad to hear it works.

I thought this tip interesting and will incorporate it into my later manuscripts. Your character should be recognizable from the silhouette. They cautioned that this can get out of hand quickly if you’re not careful.

For authenticity when you name characters, find popular names during the decades in which they live. Sites of this nature are all over the Internet.

Another tip I liked also surfaced. If a gun is seen in chapter one, it must be fired by chapter four. There’s a name for this concept which I failed to write down.

And what was the most important of all these great writer’s tips? “Write what bubbles up.” That is, trust your Muse and pen what comes naturally to you.

What other tips might you wish to share to bring out the personalities of your characters?

I hope you know by now I wish for you only best-sellers.

This is a reprint from C. Patrick Shulze‘s Author of Born to be Brothers blog.

Ok, it’s not really a movement, it’s just me, to my knowledge. But I’ve been harboring feelings of anti-bookshelves for a while and wanted to get my thoughts out in the open. Thanks to Indiependent books’ post inquiring about readers’ bookshelving processes, I offered a contrarian opinion (go figure). Here it is:

[Editor’s note: the author’s original capitalization choices in this piece have been preserved]

when i released my first book, i released it for free online and in all electronic versions, and priced it at a very cute, ironic price in print, and even that was still a little steep for a first time author releasing an independent book that was uncategorizable (read: not a genre novel). so all i asked as i started giving it away to everyone on the street i could find who would take a copy was that their payment [be] to pass it on to someone else to read.

This is a cross-posting from Lenox Parker’s Eat My Book.

Some of us write simply because we can’t not write. Ideas grab us, move us, and demand to be written. We strive to make it as real as we possibly can, to improve at our craft every day, hopefully to make it into the realm of literature as well as entertainment. We want to craft an entire world where the places and people are so real that the reader doesn’t feel like he’s reading a book as much as he is going to another place.

In the lofty world of literature that we strive for, the reader will still think about the book after reading that last page. It’s our gift to the reader, something to take with him. Given sufficient skill, this can even happen long after we’re dead.

Then we learn that doesn’t sell. Oh, there are exceptions. Some novelists make a living by consistently writing quality literature. But there are quite a few best sellers who have no such goals. They write for money, and they make it. Even the writer who has written great literature has trouble marketing it that way.

We have to look at our “target audience.” Who will buy this book? Let me see, our heroine survived spousal abuse, so there’s an audience. There’s a suicide, so we can get the bereavement crowd. Where’s the setting? We can get a local audience. The hero’s a cop. Maybe the teen boys will go for that. Nah, too light on action. But there’s a romance. Maybe we’ll market to the romance readers. Give the hero bedroom eyes and pass him off as a romantic hero. Yeah, that might work.

But if you want to write to get rich, even that’s not enough. Nah, the time to think about your reader is before you write the book, not after.

Throw in lots of gratuitous sex, preferably extramarital. One (and only one) character who flirts and is sorely tempted and walks away from “love” to remain true to his wife.

Use taboo words for shock value. Ram, hump, scream, oral sex, voluptuous, female orgasm (the great revelation). Make sure a lot of your leads enjoy sex. Horny women are a good way to pull in the readers you want. We all know men are horny, but most of your readers haven’t discovered that some women enjoy sex too. Tell them this. Give the female readers a balm for their consciences and the male readers someone to dream about.

Your heroine should be tough, sweet, sensitive, and very horny, and has to think she’s not attractive even though every guy in the book except her husband falls off his chair with a tent in his pants.

Don’t let the length of a novel faze you. Just throw some people on the stage, move them around a bit, and get them into bed. Then change the rules so they switch around a bit and get them back into bed. It doesn’t always have to be a bed. Office desks and car seats work too. Hammocks, not so much. When the book’s long enough, stop. Don’t worry about the “climax,” because people are climaxing all over the place.

Exotic locales. Foreign countries with beaches. Lots of rich people. Remember that you’re writing for the lowest common denominator, because they spend most of the money that you’re trying to reel in. Make it sleazy. No one ever went broke underestimating the public.

How to publish? To do it right, write the sales pitch before you write the book. Make sure the book follows the pitch and the formula. If your cover letter alone has eight typos, no problem. Nobody cares. The publisher will wanna rush this baby to print and get you, or an attractive stand-in, doing as many TV appearances as possible before the book reviewers have time to draw breath.

Heck, your target market doesn’t read book reviews anyway. Also keep in mind that once that reader buys your book, you’ve won. They won’t get a refund just because you’re illiterate. So don’t worry about hiring an editor. Hire a publicist!

Think Hollywood. You want your book to become a movie. It doesn’t have to be a good movie, because most of them aren’t. It just has to sell, baby, sell! Write parts for all the hottest stars. True, today’s hottest stars will have faded by the time they start filming your movie, but no matter. Someone just like them will replace them.

I’ve been doing it wrong for all these years. I started writing over 20 years ago, and the seven books I have on the shelves are enough to make it a hobby that barely pays for itself. Meanwhile, I work at a job for my money. But if you follow my advice, you won’t make the same mistakes I have. You’ll get rich!

Very
VERY
Copyright 2005, Michael LaRocca
http://www.michaeledits.com/

Very is an adverb, yet it cannot modify a verb. Why the hell not? Let’s look at some Chinese, shall we?

Wo ai ni.
I love you.
Wo hen ai ni.
I very love you.

That makes perfect sense to me. I love many things, such as bicycling, nature, literature, humor, food, or good music. But I very love Jan. Some cats run, but Miss Picasso very runs. Sometimes she purrs and sometimes she very purrs.

I greatly love Jan, I deeply love Jan, I sincerely love Jan, I quite love Jan, I passionately love Jan, and I wholeheartedly love Jan. Why can’t I very love Jan if I want to?

This is just one question you’ll face if you teach your language to someone with a different native language. And in this case, I have no good answer. “We just don’t.” How lame.

This is getting very silly. I very should very stop now before you very stop reading.

This post, from Chris Brogan, originally appeared on his site on 5/29/10.

Here’s a freebie: if I were an author looking to get the most out of the social web (and I am), I’d do something along the lines of what I’m about to share. Your mileage may vary, but here’s a decent approximation of the things I’d do. Please feel free to share liberally. Just link back to An Author’s Plan for Social Media Efforts, please.

An Author’s Plan for Social Media

1. Set up a URL for the book, and/or maybe one for your name. Need help finding a URL? I use Ajaxwhois.com for simple effort in searching.
    
2. Set up a blog. If you want it free and super fast, WordPress or Tumblr. I’d recommend getting hosting like Bloghost.me.
    
3. On the blog, write about interesting things that pertain to the book, but don’t just promote the book over and over again. In fact, blow people away by promoting their blogs and their books, if they’re related a bit.
    
4. Start an email newsletter. It’s amazing how much MORE responsive email lists are than any other online medium.
    
5. Ask around for radio or TV contacts via the social web and LinkedIn. You never know.
    
6. Come up with interesting reasons to get people to buy bulk orders. If you’re a speaker, waive your fee (or part of it) in exchange for sales of hundreds of books. (And spread those purchases around to more than one bookselling company.) In those giveaways, do something to promote links back to your site and/or your post. Giveaways are one time: Google Juice is much longer lasting.
    
7. Whenever someone writes a review on their blog, thank them with a comment, and maybe 1 tweet, but don’t drown them in tweets pointing people to the review. It just never comes off as useful.
    
8. Ask gently for Amazon and other distribution site reviews. They certainly do help the buying process. And don’t ask often.
    
9. Do everything you can to be gracious and thankful to your readers. Your audience is so much more important than you in this equation, as there are more of them than there are of you.

Read the rest of the post, which includes 12 more steps for authors to use social media effectively, on Chris Brogan‘s site.

Again my living in the country got in the way of being able to work at the computer last week. Not that I’m complaining. I love being an author and a country gal. I’m the one who set out blackberry vines twenty years ago. I dug the starter plants out of my parents ditch. One more plant at my house that has a family attachment. It took a few years for the plants to get established and attached to the barb wire fence back of the garden. Now the vines are so thickly entwined we don’t know the fence is there until we come in contact with a barb. Then we can’t be sure if what punctured our finger was metal or a sticker.

My favorite pie and jelly are blackberry. I make a blackberry syrup for a revel to run through homemade vanilla ice cream. The vines are between a row of spruce trees and cherry bushes and a field of 8 feet tall corn plants. However, I consider picking the berries, in the hottest month of the year and in a spot where absolutely no air moves, worth the effort. This year’s crop has been overly abundant because of all the rain.

When I bat at the deer flies and mosquitoes, I think about what berry picking was like when I was a kid in southern Missouri. My brother and I picked blackberries with our mom every other day for two weeks until all the berries ripened. She sold what berries we didn’t need to pay for sugar, flour and coffee at the grocery store. July days are hot and humid in the Ozarks. We were made hotter yet, because Mom made us wear long sleeve shirts to keep from getting scratched. We wore our cowboy hats with the bead on the string to shade us from the sun. Mom bought vanilla flavoring from the Watkins Salesman. She believed that to be the best for baking. The salesman was good at the over sell pitches. He told Mom she could rub the vanilla on our ankles to keep chiggers from crawling on us. Mom thought the idea was worth a try. We smelled like raw cookie dough and still had bites all over us. The sweet smell probably attracted the chiggers to us.

In the early morning hours when the day was as cool as it would get, we had a quarter of a mile walk down a lane lined with Osage Orange hedge trees to the pasture where the milk cows grazed. It was about that far across the pasture to the blackberry thickets. Cattle didn’t try to eat in the thickets because of the stickers, but snakes like the grassy shade under the vines. So we got the usual cautions from Mom to watch where we stepped. We each had a pail. Once in a while, a popping bug would fall in the berries. I’d have to stop picking to get rid of it.

Back then, I liked the cobblers and jelly Mom made with the berries. She canned and stored the jars in the fruit cellar behind the house for winter use. Even so I was always glad when we had all the ripe berries picked for the day so we could go home for lunch. We were sweaty and tired. Usually Mom had a fresh pitcher of real lemonade waiting for us in the ice box which was something to look forward to. A glass of that lemonade and the shade of the maple tree was as cool as it got in those days.

Back to the present with hay making. We finally got the hay baled. That job always makes me nervous. Last year, the tractor had a smoking problem that turned out to be two wires rubbed together. The smoke came up in my face through the steering wheel. I panicked and jumped off the tractor just about the time the smoke stopped.

This summer has not been good hay making weather. We usually cut hay the first of June, in July and again late August. Almost every day in June, we had rain. We needed the days to be hot and dry. When we saw this last week was going to be rain free, my husband cut the hay on Sunday. The timothy, clover and alfalfa plants were tall, two cuttings in one actually. The windrows were thick which made them hard to dry. By Thursday afternoon, we were ready to bale. My husband warned me to go slow and watch not to plug the baler with the hay. We’d sheer a pin. Just what I needed to hear, but in three hours, we didn’t have any trouble and three wagons full of hay for our efforts. I thought a problem had by passed us this time and found out I was wrong.

It was 7 o’clock that night. The day had been perfect with a breeze and not too hot. My husband suggested we put a load in the barn right away while it was cool. I unload the bales from the wagons onto the conveyor which isn’t so bad with a breeze. My husband stacks in the loft which is hot any time. We were down to the last layer on the first wagon when the chain on our 40 year old conveyor broke. My husband fixed it. I put one bale in the loft and the chain broke. By then it was too dark to see how to work on the chain. My husband did repairs the next morning and about three other times after that. Only about six bales had gone up to the loft. Then a sprocket bent and a chain broke. I’d been trying to talk my husband into getting a new conveyor so I was relieved that the conveyor was finally unfixable. We spent the rest of the day putting 200 bales in the loft by hand. My husband threw the first wagon load in the loft window while I carried them back out of the way. The next wagon, he stacked 15 at a time on the tractor loader bucket and raised it up to the window for me to pull inside. What a relief when we had that last bale stacked.

Saturday, we checked on a new conveyor. The salesman is going to call on Tuesday to let us know the cost and delivery date so I have to keep my phone line free. I definitely want that call to come through so I’m making my blog posts today. By the next time we make hay, something else will have to go wrong. The conveyor is new and the tractor is fixed. That only leaves the baler.

Publetariat is taking the day off on Monday, July 5 in observance of Independence Day. Site members can still post to their blogs and use the Publetariat Forum during this time.

See you back here on the 6th!             – Editor

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

Blurb, a DIY self-publishing service, has announced the publication of one of its most significant titles ever. From July 29th, Boots on the Ground by Dusk, a book written by Mary Tillman with Narda Zacchino, shares the story of US Army Ranger Pat Tillman’s life and a family’s unrelenting efforts to uncover the truth about his death in Afghanistan after he was killed by his fellow soldiers in a friendly fire incident.

This is a reprint from Mick Rooney‘s POD, Self-Publishing and Independent Publishing.

Scrooge McDuck couldn’t get enough of what he thought he wanted. He was never happy with what he had.

No matter how much money and things he collected, he always wanted more. Sound familiar?

This is a cross-posting from Lenox Parker’s Eat My Book.