Five Secrets Of Better Proofreading

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This post, by Matthew Stibbe, originally appeared on his Bad Language site on 8/8/11.

 Proofreading can be a time-consuming task. Being a good proofreader requires being thorough and accurate. Letting even a few errors slip through the cracks can be a source of embarrassment for any writer. Since most writers do not want to let proofreading cut into their writing time, finding a balance between speed and quality is important. Using the following suggestions can help you speed up your proofreading process without diminishing the quality of your efforts:

 

  1. Create a checklist. Organize your proofreading efforts by writing down all the areas you will need to cover. A checklist can cover things such as grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation. Simply check off each item on the list once you have completed it.
     
  2. Do a preliminary read. Rather than diving right into the document, briefly read over it once before starting your actual proofreading. Make a note of what stands out and come back to it when you start. It will help guide your efforts so you know where to focus your energies when you proofread.

Read the rest of the post, which includes three more proofreading tips, on Matthew Stibbe‘s Bad Language.

40+ Tips To Improve Your Grammar And Punctuation

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This post, by Jay White, originally appeared on his Dumb Little Man site on 12/22/2007.

After all these years you finally have the courage and opportunity to write the email announcing that you and you alone have single handedly saved the company from utter disaster. You’re excited, you type it, you spell check it, and you hit send.

Everything is great except that your gold star memo has dangling modifiers, double negatives and run-on sentences colliding with each other.

Now I am no grammar whiz but I know a good resource when I see it. Purdue University maintains an online writing lab and I spent some time digging through it. Originally the goal was to grab some good tips that would help me out at work and on this site, but there is simply too much not to share.

Learn and enjoy!

Adjectives and adverbs

Nouns

Prepositions


Read the rest of the post on Jay White’s Dumb Little Man.

Will Print And Ebook Publishers Ultimately Be Doing The Same Books?

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files blog on the Idea Logical Company site on 8/7/11. 

Recent performance reports from Simon & Schuster and Penguin, which can be taken as indicative in some ways of what’s going on at the rest of the Big Six and instructive about what’s happening across trade publishing, say that revenue is flat or down, profits are up, and the ebook share of revenue is growing. The most recent reports were that ebooks grew to 14% of revenue at Penguin and at Simon & Schuster.

First a few observations about what those numbers really mean, and then some thoughts about the implications for the months to come.

We must remember we’re comparing apples and oranges when we talk about the percentage of sales that are ebooks versus print books. This percentage is, presumably, arrived at by adding print book sales (which are shipments subject to returns) to ebook sales (which are actual consumer purchases with zero or negligible returns) and then dividing the ebook revenue number by the total revenue number.

This explains the apparent anomaly pointed out in the S&S reporting which sees the ebook percentage higher in the first quarter than in the second, which has occurred in successive years. This is not actually hard to understand. One report I saw pointed to part of the explanation: that Christmas recipients of ereading devices are loading them up in January, an effect which is absent in the second quarter. But what is also the case is that Q1 print sales (which are shipments, let’s remember) are depressed by two factors: they contain returns from Q4 Christmas sell-in and Q1 is not normally a big one for new book shipments.

So as long as there are larger shipments of returnable print taking place in anticipation of Christmas sales and large numbers of new device owners created each Christmas, we can expect the Q1 number to be artificially inflated and the Q2 number to show an apparent decline.

The annual Q2 decline is only apparent; it is not real.

The percentage of revenue number lends itself to misinterpretation. It is an average. You will pardon me for repeating the truth that “the six-foot tall man drowns walking across a river that is an average of three feet deep.” Averages are misleading. That mid-teens percentage number, quite aside from the apples-and-oranges base of it, is also misleading. (I hasten to emphasize that nobody is being deliberately misleading; there is no suggestion intended here that the number isn’t real or that there is any desire to lead people to mistaken conclusions by reporting it.)

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files blog.

The Lawsuit US Publishers And Apple Are Facing Over Agency Pricing

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This article, by Philip Jones, originally appeared on the Futurebook blog on 8/10/11.

Five US publishers and Apple have been named in a US lawsuit that alleges the companies "illegally fix prices of electronic books" and that the publishing houses "forced Amazon to abandon its discount pricing and adhere to a new agency model, in which publishers set prices". The suit alleges that "collusion was a necessary ingredient of the publisher defendants’ anticompetitive plan to gain direct control over e-book pricing".

Sounds scary enough, but if you look at the detail of the complaint there isn’t a whole lot of evidence to back it accusations of conspiracy, though it will nevertheless raise concerns on both sides of the pond, particularly as regulatory inquiries are ongoing.

US law firm Hagens Berman filed the suit in a San Francisco Federal Court against Apple, along with Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, over the agency model of e-book pricing. The same firm is also investigating claims that several large e-book publishers are under-reporting the number of e-books sold, paying authors less than their share of royalties. Worryingly for publishers, the law firm claims that once approved, the lawsuit would represent any purchaser of an e-book published by a major publisher after the adoption of the agency model by that publisher, and has called for "potential plaintiffs" to get in touch via an online form.

The suit has its origins in the switch to the agency model in early 2010, led by Macmillan US, which resulted for a period in that publisher’s e-books being delisted from the Amazon.com website. You can trawl through The Bookseller’s articles from that time here. Though Macmillan moved first, it was closely followed by Hachette USA in early February, and ultimately by the three other US publishers named in the suit – but not by Random House, which did not switch until late last year, and is not named in the filing.

Read the rest of the article on the Futurebook blog.

Is God Necessary In Christian Fiction?

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In Mike Duran’s post How Do We “Glorify God” in Our Writing? I discovered I wasn’t the only person asking if you can write a Christian story without specifically mentioning God.

As Mike points out, it seems most Christian writers (and I would say most Christians) think you absolutely must include God specifically in a story in order for it to be Christian:

…And, sadly, that’s what many folks mean by glorifying God in their writing. For most Christian writers, glorifying God is all about their message. It means not backing away from the Gospel and not avoiding references to Christ in their novel. It means developing content that is virtuous, redemptive, and spiritually uplifting.

Which leads me to ask: Can only writers of explicit “Christian content” glorify God in their writing?…

IF NOT — if only Christian writers can glorify God in Christian stories — then how can a Christian ever hope to “do all to the glory of God”?

IF SO — if Christians can glorify God in whatever kind of story they write (or task, service, job they perform) — then how is glorifying God in a Christian story any different than glorifying God in a “secular” story?…

This is a question I’ve struggled with for years. I enjoy reading secular fantasy. I’ve tried reading Christian fantasy, but found it lacking (although I really enjoy Christian thrillers like This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti). My natural inclination is to write secular fantasy, but I feel compelled to follow the path writing greats like C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien have blazed. They wrote what they wanted to read because what they wanted wasn’t already abundantly available.

I want to write Christian fantasy that I would want to read, which may or may not explicitly mention God. But would it be considered Christian if I don’t get explicit about the Gospel?

So, what do you think? Should writers mention God in order for their work to be considered Christian, or can a Christian writer “glorify God” without getting specific?

 

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

Why Are Agents Speaking Anonymously About Amazon Publishing?

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This post, by Richard Curtis, originally appeared on e-reads on 8/14/11.

In a recent Publishers Weekly article about Amazon’s foray into trade book publishing, every agent PW interviewed spoke “under condition of anonymity.” Why?

Apparently, writes PW’s Rachel Deahl, “their chief concern is selling a book to an untested entity. One agent said he would be particularly leery about taking a big author to Amazon. ‘As a matter of rule, I don’t like to test the waters with big authors. I’d rather deal with a firm that is well established.’”

We find this statement astounding. It seems to equate Amazon Publishing with all those one-horse self-publication presses with interchangeable names started up by penniless ex-editors. What makes these agents imagine that Amazon, boasting enough assets to acquire all Big Six publishers without raising a sweat, would fail at book publishing any more than it has failed at any other goal it has set for itself?

The anonymous agent’s remark is even more puzzling when you look at the deals reported daily in Publishers Lunch and note how many famous agents are making “nice” deals for books by big name clients with those selfsame small presses after the Big Six turned them down. “Nice” is defined (by Lunch‘s founder Michael Cader) as advances of $1 to $49,000, sums that no self-respecting superagent would be caught dead admitting just a few years ago.

 

Read the rest of the post on e-reads.

What It's Like Being A Writer: An Examination and Explanation

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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 8/10/11.

Okay, you know how Muggles don’t get what it’s like being a wizard? And how crazy people don’t know what it’s like being sane and sane people don’t know what it’s like being crazy?

Those who are not writers do not know what it’s like to be a writer. Ask someone who is not infected with the Authorial Virus (Types A through G) what a writer does and you’ll probably get a blank stare. Then that person will noodle it and shrug and say, “He sits up there in his room with his My Little Ponies, pooping fairy tales out of his fingertips for ten minutes. Then he masturbates and talks to people on Twitter.”

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

Masturbate? Well, fine. Everybody’s got a lunch hour, and it doesn’t take me 60 minutes to eat a damn sandwich. Nothing wrong with exploring my own body with various textures and food products. As for Twitter? Hey, you go and mill around the water cooler like a bunch of thirsty water bison, and I go and mill around Twitter like a digital version of the same.

But I do not defecate fairy tales out of my fingertips. If only the act of writing was quite so simple as all that.

(And, by the way, leave my ponies out of it. They didn’t do anything to you.)

Point being, it’s time to take this big callused toe of mine and drag it across the sand. There, then, is the line. On this side is me, the penmonkey. On that side is you, the… I dunno. Pen-muggle. Shut up.

What I’m trying to say is, this is what it means to be a writer. Got people in your life who just don’t grok the trials and tribulations of the everyday word-chucker? Show them this.

I Swear On The Life Of Word Jesus, It’s Actually Work

This one sucks because you know what? I get it. I’ve tried explaining to people what I do, and at no point does it sound like work. “Uhh, well, I wake up at 6AM and I get my coffee and then I get in front of the computer and I… make stuff up… and then I try to convince people to buy the things I just… made up.” It sounds like the world’s biggest scam and explains why so many people want to be writers.

I might as well have said, “I sit out in a sunlit meadow and play Candyland with a bunch of puppies.”

Let’s just clear this one up right now:

Writing is work. It’s not back-breaking labor, no — though, by now I probably do have scoliosis (and a Deep-Vein Thrombosis whose clot-bullet will probably detonate in my brain) — but it is mind-breaking just the same. I can sit here for hours metaphorically head-butting the computer monitor until this story — or article, or blog-post, or sex-toy instruction manual — bleeds out across the screen. And then I have to keep fucking with it, keep hacking it apart and juicing my skull-meats until it all makes sense. Everything else is emails and spreadsheets and outlines and porn and shame and homelessness.

Am I doing work on par with fire fighters or soldiers? Fuuuuu-huuuu-huuuck no. But neither are you, Mister Cubicle Monkey. Or you, Target clerk. So. You know. Hush up.

All I’m saying is, no, I don’t need a “real job” because I already have one.


Read the rest of the post on Chuck Wendig‘s terribleminds.

Publishing Service Index – August 2011

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This will probably be the last index published until late September/early October as I have a pretty busy schedule  coming up over the next two months. I suspect as we move closer to the financial quarter four for 2011, there will be quite a number of changes with a the companies I include in the index. There are one or two publishing services that I don’t expect to see surviving into 2012, and there are also a few at the bottom I am considering removing because of their poor showing, lack of foresight and development, and output.

The index takes a great deal of time to put together, and it involves following and analyzing not just the 70 companies included here, but a further 50+ on the edge of entering the index. As always, I would ask companies to keep me updated on what they perceive to be improvements to their services, but again, as always in my correspondence with them; don’t spam me with correspondence about actual books. I am not interested. The Publishing Index was set up to review your company services and it is not a device or platform to promote your authors or books. What matters to me is the value of your services, experienced by your authors.

Let me once again thank the authors and companies who regularly feed me back with updates, experiences and information which all goes into producing the Publishing Index chart every month. Your input is invaluable and always welcome.

Beyond my own reviews on each company (which plays a small part in each company’s index evaluation), all the data gathered is entirely subjective and based on positive and negative correspondence and formulaic analysis. I deliberately avoid making my own comments when the chart is produced and published each month, in so far as highlighting movements of significance in the index. It should speak for itself if followed closely. The companies in the top 20 are there for a reason, because they follow and respect the core values a good self-publishing service should offer. If you want to know what those vales are then you’d best go here to read the book I published on self-publishing, or here, to read the articles I have written on the values I believe should exist in self publishing.

For now, here is the [publishing service] index for August [2011]…

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney’s The Independent Publishing Magazine.

The Formula For Success And Life In The Way

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My apologies for things being a bit quiet on this front lately. I’ve been overwhelmed by general life things when I’d much rather have the time to post here and write more. But that’s ever the way. The life of the writer is a combination of rejection, poverty and distraction, in varying quantities.

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

But we soldier on, burdened as we are with the un-fucking-shakeable need to tell stories. Because every once in a while we reap the rewards.

It’s all justified when we get that acceptance letter from a publisher, that incredible high when someone with no bias, no knife pressed against their fragile carotid artery, actually wants to buy something we’ve written. There really is no feeling like it and we all dream of the day when that kind of acceptance is enough to pay the bills and put food on the table. It doesn’t happen for many, but it does happen. And we’re all bloody-minded sons(and daughters)-of-bitches, refusing to give up on the dream. I firmly believe that equally important with talent is determination.

The successful people in the world are the ones who never give up. They have the dreams, but everyone has those. They have the talent, but anyone can learn that. Of course, there will always be those people with a natural gift. They’re the writers other successful writers envy. Some people are just too damned talented for their own good, but anyone can get good. With practice, with a desire to learn and a determination to succeed, people get talented. But the really successful people also have that old donkey stubborness. That “fuck you if you think I’ll quit” attitude. Dreams, talent and determination – that’s almost the formula for success. Almost.

You need to liberally add the essential spices of help from friends and luck. None of us get anywhere without those things too. It’s all very well to say that you only have to believe hard enough and anyone can reach their dreams. That’s bollocks. You need luck. But I’m also a fan of that other great proverb: The harder I work, the luckier I get.

Dreams, talent, determination, friends and luck. Put all that in a cauldron and stir it up with a heady stew of hard fucking work. That’s all there is to it.

But life does get in the way. During the process, other shit happens. You all know life, you’re living it with me. Shit’s hard, people die, nothing is fair. That’s life in a nutshell. It needs to be dealt with, decisions have to be made, money needs to be earned to pay bills and buy groceries. We’re often distracted from the real stuff by life. Because life isn’t the real stuff – it’s the essential stuff. The unavoidable, no choice stuff. The real is the dream. Make your dreams real, remember that? What’s it all for, the struggle to survive, if you’re not chasing something? Whatever it is you feel the burning need to do, whatever moves you like writing moves me, has to be the real thing for you. The thing you’re living for. The rest is existence. The dreams are living.

So life gets in the way. I’ve been a bit burdened by it myself lately. But will I give in? Hell, no. Old donkey stubborn, that’s me. Still working hard. So if things go a bit quiet around here from time to time, don’t worry about it. I’m too determined to quit.

The Formula:

Dreams, Talent, Determination, Friends, Luck
____________________________________
Hard Fucking Work

Never give up. Go on, you can do it!

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

What To Do With Your Stale-Dated Prose

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Ah, progress. Had telephones existed in Verona of old, Romeo and Juliet would’ve been able to synchronize their plans perfectly and avoid all that mistaken suicide business. Consider the movie, It’s A Wonderful Life: if security cameras had been mounted in the Bedford Falls Building and Loan, George Bailey and his scatterbrained Uncle Billy would’ve known in a matter of hours what became of the missing $8,000, and Clarence the apprentice angel would’ve had to find another way to earn his wings. Underwater radar and GPS technologies could’ve reduced Moby Dick to a short story. My point is, changes in technology and social norms can eliminate certain kinds of problems and conflicts, create previously unforeseen problems and conflicts, and more generally affect the way people behave.

 

Many writers and authors are jumping into the indie fray these days, dusting off old manuscripts and shorts that have yet to find a home with a traditional publisher, giving them a cursory once-over and forging ahead with indie publication. I applaud these efforts, and hope they continue. But a word of warning: that pre-publication once-over needs to a be a bit more thorough if your material is contemporary, but more than a few years old.

If your upper-middle-class dad gets lost when he hits the road in his brand-new SUV, the reader will be wondering why he doesn’t just use his car’s (or phone’s) GPS to get back on track. Similarly, if your characters’ pop culture references include The Oprah Winfrey Show and the post-divorce exploits of Lady Di, those references are dated and the reader will notice.

You may think, "So what if the reader becomes aware at some point that the book was written years ago; it’s not like they’re going to stop reading it, or think it’s a bad book just because of that." I don’t disagree, but with all the distractions of the modern world’s wonderland of electronics, technology, social media and noise of all kinds, it’s already a big enough challenge to get and keep your reader’s attention. Anything that takes the reader out of your story world for any reason is to be avoided, even if it’s only for the moment or two it takes the reader to mentally observe, "Nobody uses Thomas Guide road map books anymore; this story must’ve been written a long time ago." Far worse for the reader is the supposedly contemporary story in which the central conflict or source of tension would be easily eliminated with some modern (and common) convenience or other, like caller ID or the internet.

However, stale-dated prose doesn’t necessarily require an extensive rewrite. It just calls for the author to manage reader expectations. The simplest fix is to insert subtle cues and signposts in the beginning pages that will let the reader know your story takes place in the recent past. This may be as simple as editing to highlight the anachronisms, rather than merely observing them in passing. If you make a point of the fact that your protagonist works in the Twin Towers in New York, the reader will immediately know the story must take place prior to 9/11/2001 and therefore won’t expect to find anything that happened, was invented, or was popularized after that year.

Stories that were intended to be of-the-moment when they were written will probably require a more extensive edit to update or eliminate dated references. For example, your story about the impending doom of Y2K will no longer work as the straightforward thriller you had in mind when you wrote it. You can either take it in the direction of satire or comedy, or change the threat to something people are still worried about today: 2012, anyone?

Finally, don’t lose sight of editorial repercussions. If you decide to change your protagonist’s paranoia about Y2K to paranoia about 2012 for example, make sure you update all such references throughout the manuscript to maintain consistency.

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

Free Book Marketing

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This post, from Mindstir Media, originally appeared on that site on 7/25/11.

The term free book marketing is self-explanatory, but words like “Goodreads” and “LibraryThing” –book marketing tools–are not. Here’s a short list of free book marketing tools each author should utilize:

  • Blogger/WordPress/Tumblr: It’s important to have your own blog. You should write quality content relating to your book(s). For example: If you’ve written a fantasy novel, you could blog about fantasy writing, review comparable books, interview other fantasy authors, etc. Make sure to include book ordering information on your blog as well as subscribing options and icons linked to your social media accounts.
     
  • Facebook: Read this post–Facebook For Authors by Cindy Ratzlaff–to understand the personal profile, the fan page, and the benefits of using the leading social network as an author. Over 600 million people use Facebook nowadays, so it’s not a tool you can ignore!
     
  • Goodreads: The #1 social networking site for book lovers. This site, from an author’s perspective, is all about targeted marketing and networking. You can network with tons of fans from your genre; include your book in Goodreads’ giveaway program (which they promote to their members for you!); customize your author profile after signing up for the free Goodreads Author Program; launch a targeted ad campaign with self-serve advertising (not free); and more!
     
  • LibraryThing: Much like Goodreads, you can run a giveaway on LibraryThing.com (LT), but the LT giveaway program is superior. Here’s why: You can give away e-book downloads, which cost you absolutely nothing but help you gain readers and reviews. Each author also gets a free author profile like on Goodreads.

Read the rest of the post, which includes 7 more free book marketing tools, on Mindstir Media.

The Trouble With Trailers

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This post, by Peg Brantley, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective site and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

Do book trailers really do what they’re intended to do, or are they more of an ego trip for the author?

This post originally appeared on my personal blog, Suspense Novelist, but I still feel pretty much the same way.

Book Trailers

What makes a successful book trailer?

I’m beginning to believe that just as one person loves a book while someone else puts it in their DNF (Did Not Finish) pile, it’s pretty much the same with book trailers.

With all of the creativity, time—and often expense—that goes into the creation of trailers, the bottom line has to be sales. Does the book trailer make you want to go out and buy the book? Or, at the very least, check into it a little more?
Here are some things I like:
 

  • Short. Maybe as long as 2 minutes, but 1 minute or less is best. Sort of like a visual Twitter program.
     
  • Endorsements. If you’ve got some name-candy to throw around, throw it around early in the trailer. I’m shallow enough to pay more attention to something endorsed by Dean Koontz than well . . . Peg Brantley, or no one at all.
     
  • Live action. Unless your still photos are super spooky and filled with tension, I’d much rather see living beings in action. I don’t need to see their faces, but I want a sense of real people, not photos or statues or drawings. Even with historicals.
     
  • Set the mood. If the trailer is for a cozy, it shouldn’t be dark and evil. Music is huge, but so is color choice and pacing.

These are my personal preferences, and I’m curious . . . do you have any? Are there book trailers you love? Some you hate?

Have you ever bought a book because of its trailer?

By Peg Brantley, Writer at Work, Stumbling Toward Publication

What I Have Learned In The Last 2 Years: 100th Podcast Celebration

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This is podcast number 100 and it’s just over 2 years since I started podcasting.  [Editor’s note: podcast is included at the end of this article]  At the time, I had one non-fiction book out with pretty much zero sales and I was living in Australia. Self publishing had a huge stigma and I wasn’t even on Twitter!

How things have changed. I now have an Amazon bestselling thriller novel that has sold over 7500 copies and 3 non-fiction books behind me, I have a pretty big social network now and I’m living in London. I knew nothing when I started and this morning I did a webinar on how to podcast!

In the last 2 years, self-publishing has morphed into indie, John Locke has sold over 1 million Kindle books as an indie author, big names are going indie and Amanda Hocking got a massive book deal from indie success. Oh, and JK Rowling has left her publisher to self-publish her own ebooks and start Pottermore direct to fans. So I was part of a fringe movement 2 years ago that is now solidly mainstream especially with layoffs in publishing and bookstores close – Borders has just gone under as I speak today. It is a very different time and most people agree that there has never been a better time to be an author taking charge of your own destiny!

Today I am discussing some of my lessons learned from the process of podcasting and also from some of the stand out interviews for me:

First up, the state of the podcast in July 2011 is that there are around 2500 downloads per month of new and old episodes. 60% of the listeners are in the US, with 15% in China and 14% in UK and the rest spread between Australia, Germany, Canada and some other countries. It’s truly a global show! Thanks to everyone for tuning in and I’m so glad you enjoy the show. I’m always keen to hear from you – email: joanna AT TheCreativePenn.com

 

Here are some of my lessons learned in general from podcasting:

Just start, even if you don’t know what you are doing. My first interview was with 4 Ingredients author Rachael Bermingham who is HUGE in Australia, self, published and has sold millions of books now. I did it on the landline phone, I held a recorder next to it. I edited in Audacity and loaded the file to my very new and pretty ugly blog (which has since been redesigned). I didn’t know about mics, or Skype or Pamela/ecamm or hosting or anything. Things have changed and here’s how I do it now.

Fear and nerves will always be there. Just do it anyway. I am still nervous before phoning anyone. I have to force myself every time. My heart races, my mouth is dry and I go to the bathroom three times before starting. I also do public speaking and its the same thing with that. But we need to get our ‘breadcrumbs’ of content out there, so it has to be done.

I credit the podcast with the growing success of The Creative Penn because of my ability to network and offer something that many blogs don’t offer i.e. multi-media interviews. I get requests all the time and other people promote the blog because of it. All the people I interview link back to their show so the incoming links have helped my SEO ranking. I have connected with you as listeners – you have heard my voice and laugh and mannerisms and annoying tics for years now. I know some of you have bought my books for which I am very grateful. I am also personally fulfilled by being useful and I feel this is useful to people, so I love to do it. I love to get emails from people who have found the information helpful.

You can learn from everybody. Podcasting is a great way to learn about writing, publishing and book marketing. It’s also an amazing way to network. The people I have had on the podcast I have connected with and got to know more. There is a widening circle of mutual support. I also firmly believe in no snobbery – you can learn from everyone. It doesn’t matter what they have written or done, you can’t underestimate anyone’s experience. You also never know where they will end up.

Stand out episodes for me

I learn something with every podcast but these are particular ones where something clicked and my own life changed.

JC Hutchins on transmedia. This was an early interview and a big influence for me. JC had the 7th Son podcast, a book deal and is now transmedia guru and he was generous with his time. He had just spoken to the NY Times or something and is generally the nicest, loveliest man. He gave me a chance which I appreciated greatly. He also got a book deal from his podcast success. I saw how he was doing marketing with internet based and fan based methods and realized you could basically ditch mainstream media. He sparked my massive interest in online marketing which I credit with all my book sales now. Pivotal moment! I had just done national TV in Australia and multiple newspapers and got no sales at all, so it was great to just stop all that work and focus on online methods. Here’s the interview with JC on transmedia. Here’s the interview on writing thrillers.

Tom Evans on writer’s block. I have been scared about writing fiction for many years as I always held up Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose as the way you had to write. Prize winning literature as Eco is an academic although that book still had mainstream success. We discussed this block and Tom basically helped me get over it during this episode. All I needed was a kick in the pants. I have continued to interview Tom about this work – he is a brilliant guy especially if you are into the more esoteric world of thought and consciousness. Here’s the interview with Tom Evans on beating writer’s block. 
Here’s the latest interview we did on lightbulb moments.

Mur Lafferty – It’s ok to suck. After speaking with  Tom, I decided to do Nanowrimo in 2009 and get into some fiction. I’ve been listening to Mur’s I should be writing podcast for a while and asked her on to the show to discuss one of her mantras which is “it’s ok to suck”. Basically your first draft is going to be bad. This is also said by Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird “shitty first drafts”. IT’S OK! This released me from more fear and I wrote 20,000 words of crap during Nanowrimo BUT that turned into the seed idea for Pentecost which has now sold over 7500 copies and is still in the Amazon bestseller lists for Action-Adventure and Religious Fiction. I am now 20,000 words into Prophecy and I see myself as a fiction writer. This is a HUGE turnaround for me. HUGE. I mean my life has changed and I am thrilled and overjoyed to be here! Here’s the podcast with Mur Lafferty.

Gideon Shalwick on using video for book promotion. This interview finally changed my view on video and I had been teetering for a while. I took Gideon’s advice and got heavily into video and now I make them every week. I rank on the first page of Google for the search term “thriller novel” in text and in video. I’ve had nearly 50,000 views of my videos on YouTube and it continues to be a traffic source for me. I personally prefer audio to video and I hardly ever watch videos myself, but it’s a great way to reach new people and VERY few authors are doing video right now so it’s another way to stand out in a crowded market. Here’s the interview with Gideon Shalwick.

Scott Sigler on being a NYT bestselling author. I learned that successful authors work bloody hard. Scott is a machine, writing every day, podcasting his novels, networking, promoting and basically getting out there. He is a businessman as well as a great author. I seriously recommend his books , his latest Ancestor is a kind of Jurassic Park/ genetic engineering style thriller. I also learned that writing is a long term career, you’ve got to keep writing. Here’s the interview with Scott Sigler.

Clare Edwards on accepting criticism, being an introvert and resilience. This really helped me at a time of burnout. I have a day job and at the time I was working VERY hard and was exhausted, plus I have tried to keep the momentum with the blog, podcast, videos etc and trying to write the novel – my confidence was low and I needed the help. This podcast helped me reassess my own life and get back on track. We all need help and I am lucky to have built a great network of people who I can trust and talk to. Here’s the interview with Clare Edwards.

There have been many, many more amazing podcasts and a big thank you to all my guests and also my listeners. I look forward to the next 100 podcasts!

I would love to hear from you. I don’t get much mail from podcast listeners so I send these out into the ether and hope you enjoy them.

If you do have something to share please email me: joanna AT TheCreativePenn.com or leave a comment as I would love to know which episodes you enjoyed and which ones you learned from, or what else you would like to hear on the show.

If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to The Creative Penn podcast in iTunes by clicking here.

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

 

Podcast: Download (Duration: 34:48 — 21.6MB)

Book Marketing Toolbox – Logo Snap, SnagIt and Jing

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There are several online services that allow users to create a logo at no charge or for a modest fee. [After the jump] is a new logo that I just created using Logo Snap. Their service is by donation, so you can choose how much to pay.

Logo Snap allows you to select from a number of different icons and then add one or two lines of text. Because I wanted three lines of text on my logo, I exported the icon to Microsoft Publisher and added my text there. (You could do the same thing in Word, using text boxes.) Then I took a screenshot of the logo and saved it as a JPG file.

I make a lot of screenshots to create images for my books and articles, and in creating graphics. I use a terrific program called SnagIt that captures an area of my computer screen and then lets me edit the image by adding borders, arrows and other cool things.

The makers of SnagIt also offer a free program called Jing, which can make screenshots or short video clips of what’s on your screen.

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Why Self-Published Authors Know Best

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I ran across this quote today, from a post that historical romance novelist Courtney Milan wrote this week as an open letter to agents.

The traditional information storehouse has been inverted. Right now, the people who know the most about self-publishing are authors, and trust me, the vast majority of authors are aware of that. For the first time, authors are having questions about their careers, and their agents are not their go-to people. 

While not having an agent, in fact having decided in the fall of 2009 not to look for an agent for my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I can’t really speak to this group’s effectiveness in this new publishing climate. Neither do I want to go into whether or not I think that the decision on the part of some agents to begin to publish their authors’ work has ethical or conflict of interest ramifications.  Although the latest brouhaha that just erupted when an agency threatened an author with legal action because she said they were setting up as a digital publisher, when they insisted they were just starting an “assisted self-publishing initiative,” suggests that this question is not going to go away.

What I want to address is Milan’s assertion that authors are the people who know the most about self-publishing. I not only agree, but I would take this one step further. I think that self-published authors may know the most about publishing, period, in this time of expanded ebook publishing and social media marketing.

Let me count just some of the ways:

1.  Most self-published authors know about both legacy publishing and self-publishing, which gives them a uniquely broad perspective.

In my experience, most of self-published authors have already had fairly extensive experience with the legacy publishing industry (as traditionally published authors, as authors who have spent years trying to become traditionally published, and as friends of published authors). From this experience we are in a better position to make well-informed decisions about the costs and benefits of both paths to publication, and which path to choose for a given project.

For example, since we understand the lead time it takes to get a book published with a legacy publisher, versus a self-published book, we might choose self-publishing for a non-fiction book that is very time-sensitive, but willingly pursue a legacy publisher for a work of fiction that we feel would do best in print and distributed through brick and mortar stores.

2.  Self-published authors were among the first to embrace ebook publishing as their main method of publishing, and therefore they have longer and greater experience in this realm, which is where the market is expanding the fastest.

For most of us the lack of capital meant learning how to format and upload ebooks ourselves, therefore we understand both the relative ease of this process and the importance of it. Even if we decide to pay someone else to do the formatting, our experience helps be better judges of the value of this service.

For example, we would be much less likely to be snookered into paying a high fee to an agent or anyone else for “taking care of” this for us. We understand that while most readers of ebooks are fairly tolerant of an occasional formatting error, they don’t like a lot of white space, including indents that are too large, blank pages, and unnecessary page breaks. We understand the cover design that works on a printed book sitting on a shelf doesn’t work on a thumbnail on the virtual bookshelves of an eretailer or a website, and we have had the chance to experiment to find the most effective covers for our books in this environment.

3. Self-published authors have up-to-date information about sales data, and they can and do share that information.

The turning point for me in making the decision to self-publishing came when I read Joe Konrath’s initial blog postings listing his ebook sales. I finally had the concrete numbers to determine what kind of sales I would need to pay for my capital outlay, and what kind of income I could make, compared to the advance I could expect going the traditional route.

Agents, publishers, even traditionally published authors, are very unwilling to ever talk about numbers, unless, of course, they are talking about a New York Times bestseller. The whole convoluted publishing industry accounting system, the lag in recording royalties (which go through the agent-I mean, what is up with that??), the fear that weak numbers are going to be the kiss of death for achieving the next contract, all work to keep a veil of secrecy. If you are an author this means you may never really understand how many books you sold, when and where you sold them, which covers worked, which price points worked, and which method of delivery got you the most profit.

Self-published authors working through such methods of delivery as CreateSpace for print or KDP or ePubit for ebooks not only have ready access to this sort of information, which is so crucial for designing effective market strategies, but we have no reason not to share this information. I can write that my sales have been lower this summer than in the winter, and not worry that this will hurt the chances that my next book will be published, or marketed aggressively, or reviewed positively. And I can learn from other authors if they are experiencing a similar pattern, and if so, what they are doing about it. This is one of the reasons we knew that ebook readership was going up, that certain price points worked better than others, that the Nook was beginning to claim a significant share of the market, before most of the traditional pundits did.

4.  By necessity, self-published authors have had to rely on e-retailers, but this has made them savvy about how best to attract customers in this expanding retail environment.

For example, authors published through legacy publishers are often slow to understand how important it is to get your book into the right category on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. In my experience most traditionally published authors, and their agents and editors, don’t even know that categories had been chosen for their book, and, as with most aspects of publishing (the title, the cover design, the product description), the authors don’t have ultimate control over the final choices. Getting any changes made after publication (in a cover or category or price that doesn’t work) is also difficult.

5.  Again by necessity, self-published authors have had to develop alterative methods of marketing—which have made them innovators in using social media for this purpose.

I am still amazed when I read comments by traditionally published authors on various sites saying that their books have just “been put up on Kindle,” and asking if anyone has a suggestion how to market those books. Obviously neither their agents or their editors have had much to say on the subject, beyond “set up a website.” Not surprisingly, it is self-published authors that seemed to give the most detailed advice in response to these queries. See Rob Walker’s huge thread on KDP community forum.

6.  Self-published authors are going to continue to be the innovators in publishing, no matter what the future holds, and therefore the best source of information.

We have to be innovators, because we don’t rely on anyone else-not agent or editor-to ensure our books are out there and being read. Two years ago, when I researched self-publishing, Amazon’s Kindle and Smashwords, were the two major ways open to me to independently upload my book. Since then Barnes and Noble’s ePubit, Google Editions, Kobo and many other companies have made it possible for independent authors to publish on their sites. In addition, while the iPad’s ibook store has been slow to expand, more and more people are downloading books, often using the Kindle or other aps, not only to the iPad, but more often than not to the iPhone or other similar devices. Traditional publishers are forced to deal with each of these changes slowly, often with protracted negotiations, which slows their authors’ access to these venues.  Self-published authors were able to respond immediately to these changes, as they will be able to do with what ever new twist the ebook or print on demand aspects of the industry takes.

Self-authors are intrinsically less conservative than people who work within the legacy publishing industry, where risks can ruin a career. An agent who takes on too many cutting edge writers and can’t sell their books, an editor whose choices don’t make back the authors advances, the author whose sales don’t pan out, all risk losing their business, their jobs, and their next contract. The motivation, therefore, is to choose authors and books that either fit this year’s trend (no matter that by the time the book comes out the trend may have peaked), or fit squarely into a niche market, and aren’t too long, or too short. Self-published authors have the choice to take risks, because they answer to no one but themselves and their readers.

7.  Finally, I believe that most authors are going to become self-published authors, and therefore will remain the major source of information about self-publishing. Not because they are all going to leave legacy publishing, but because more and more authors are going to see self-publishing as one of their options over their career.

Practically every author I have ever known has an idea for a book or a manuscript squirreled away, or a short story or novella they have written, that they either had failed to sell to a legacy publisher, or simply never tried to write or sell, because they knew that this work wouldn’t be acceptable. These ideas, these works, now can see the light of day. The market may turn out to be small for any particular work, but if you have written something that pleases you, that you as a reader would like to read, and you can self-publish that work and watch as people buy it, review it, and email you about it, the satisfaction is enormous.

I spoke to a college journalism class this spring about the possibilities of self-publishing, and a young man came up to me afterwards, all enthusiastic, and he told me that I had given him hope. His father had tried to discourage him from pursuing a career as a writer, telling him it would be years and years, and maybe never, that his work would ever see print. I had just told him what he had written already, what he chose to write next month, could be out there being read in a few days time.

This is one of the reasons that agents or publishers who try to lock authors into exclusive clauses, or manipulate print on demand to keep hold of copyright, are simply going to drive even more of their authors into self-publishing. Once an author has been exposed to the liberating belief that all of their work can get in print, and all the work that is good, will get to be read, they will not go back to telling themselves that the gatekeepers were saving them from the awful mistake of publishing a bad book, and that the favorite quirky cross genre manuscript they wrote really is better off never being read by anyone.

Does this mean the end of agents or publishers? Of course not. But it does mean that those people in the traditional publishing industry who continue to hold self-published authors in contempt, who continue to try to argue that all authors and all published books should go through their doors to get to the reader, who fail to turn to their authors and their readers for advice, are going to find themselves losing out in the future.


This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s site.