Things That Go Bump When We Write – Tough Topics

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This post, by Tereece M. Clarke, originally appeared on The Freelance Writing Jobs Network site on 9/16/10.

Life is full of difficult, uncomfortable situations. How we deal with those on a personal basis is one thing… how you deal with tough topics as a writer may be completely different. One thing that doesn’t work is avoidance.

Usually at FWJ we have to caution writers about taking on too much work, but the room clears when sensitive subject posts are passed out. Why?

Fear. No one wants to get their name tagged to a controversial subject because they fear they will lose out on future gigs because of it. No one wants to call the woman with breast cancer and talk about the big “C” because they fear they will come across insensitive or nosey. No one wants to offend.

Debra Stang of Confessions of a Word Concubine (love that title by the way) answered a question I posed from a previous post about this very same topic. She had some great words of advice from her own experience:

Perhaps because I’m a medical social worker and get involved in ethical dramas every day, I seem drawn to sensitive topics; for instance, I recently wrote an article for Suite101 about whether a mental illness could ever be considered terminal. I’ve also written articles about abandoning aggressive care for palliative care and about the efficacy of electro-convulsive therapy as a treatment for depression.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Freelance Writing Jobs Network site.

How to Write a Great First Draft

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Many writers think a first draft of a novel has to crappy. Anne Lamott in her nonfiction book about writing, Bird by Bird, has a chapter called Shitty First Drafts. A recent Murderati blog post was titled “Your first draft is always going to suck.” 

I respectfully disagree. Of course, no first draft is publishable as is, but it doesn’t have to suck either.  There’s no reason a novelist can’t craft a readable first draft that needs only minor revisions in the second round. Every writer has his/her own style, but my personal belief is that if you start your journey with a good road map and a tangible destination, you won’t get lost.

In other words, I believe I write decent first drafts. Which saves me a lot of time and trouble. How do I do it? With a lot of advance planning. These ideas may only be workable for crime fiction, but here’s how I craft a great first draft without any gaping holes or illogical twists:

1. Create an outline. Once I have a basic story idea (comprised of an exciting incident, major plot developments, and overview ending), I start filling in the details. I structure my outline by days (Tuesday, Wed., etc.), then outline the basic events/scenes that happen on each day, noting which POV the section will be told from. For police procedurals (and most mysteries), in which everything happens in a very short period of time, this seems essential. Some people (like Stephen King) tell you not to outline, that it ruins creativity. Again, I disagree. So I fill in as much detail as I can at this point, especially for the first ten chapters and/or plot developments.

2. Write out the story logic. In a mystery/suspense novel, much of what happens before and during the story timeline is off page — actions by the perpetrators that the detective and reader learn of after the fact. Many of these events and/or motives are not revealed until the end of the story. I worry that I won’t be able to convey to readers how and why it all happened. So I map it out—all the connections, events, and motivations that take place on and off the page. Bad guy Bob knows bad guy Ray from prison. Bob meets young girl at homeless shelter. Young girl tells Bob about the money she found . . .

3. Beef up the outline. As I write the first 50 pages or so, new ideas come to me and I fill in the rest of outline as I go along. I continue adding to the outline, and by about the middle of the story, I have it completed.

4. Create a timeline. A lot happens in my stories, which usually take place in about six to ten days. I keep the timeline filled in as I write the story. This way I can always look at my timeline and know exactly when an important event took place (Monday, 8 a.m.: Jackson interrogates Gorman in the jail). It’s much faster to check the timeline than scroll through a 350-page Word document. The timeline keeps also me from writing an impossible number of events into a 24-hour day.

5. Keep an idea/problem journal. I constantly get ideas for other parts of the story or realize things I need to change, so I enter these notes into a Word file as I think of them. (Ryan needs to see Lexa earlier in the story, where?). I keep this file open as I write. Some ideas never get used, but some prove to be crucial. Eventually, all the problems get resolved as well. I use the Notebook layout feature in Word for this so I can keep the outline, timeline, notes, problems, and evidence all in the same file, using different tabs. I love this feature.

6. Keep an evidence file. This idea won’t apply to romance novels, but for crime stories, it’s useful. I make note of every piece of evidence that I introduce and every idea I get for evidence that I want to introduce. I refer to this file regularly as I write, so that I’m sure to process and/or explain all the evidence before the story ends. In my first novel (The Sex Club), a pair of orange panties didn’t make it into the file or the wrap up, and sure enough, a book club discussion leader asked me who they belonged to.

7. Update my character database. It took me a few stories to finally put all my character information into one database, but it was a worthwhile effort. Now, as I write, I enter each character name (even throwaway people who never come up again) into the database, including their function, any physical description, or any other information such as phone number, address, type of car, or favorite music. Now, when I need to know what I named someone earlier in the story or in a previous novel, it’s right there in my Excel database (Zeke Palmers; morgue assistant; short, with gray ponytail). For information about how to set up a file like this, see How to Create a Character Database.

As a general rule, I like to get the whole story down on the page before I do much rewriting, but I’ve learned to stop at 50 pages for two reasons. One, I like to go back and polish the first chunk of the story in case an agent or editor asks to see it. Two, I usually give this first chunk to a few beta readers to see if I’m on the right track. So far, I have been.

 

Look Out Below! Morrell's Exclusive Deal Empowers Authors, Readers, Amazon; Opens Trap Door for Traditional Publishers

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How big a deal is it when a bestselling author like David Morrell decides to skip traditional publishers altogether and announces that he is going direct to Kindle with his new full-length thriller, which is available today in the Kindle Store along with six of his backlist titles including six that were out of print?

It is a very, very big deal.

I thought it was a pretty big deal in February 2009 when Amazon announced that it had signed Stephen King for a Kindle exclusive book deal with Ur, and I was subsequently jazzed when Anne Rice made noises about going direct to Kindle and Joe Konrath pulled his popular Jack Daniels series from traditional publishers in favor of an exclusive direct-to-Kindle deal for the series’ latest, Shaken (Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels Mysteries).

And I apologize for being a teensy bit self-referential in pasting in this paragraph from p. 92 of the August 2008 paperback print edition of The Complete User’s Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle:
 

Since I ordinarily come at these things from a bookselling perspective, I’ve been thinking for a while that the time should come soon when Amazon should arrange with Stephen King or J.D. Salinger to release his or her next book for the Kindle 60 days ahead of print, and then keeping doing this about once a month. Of course Amazon already knows that: nothing sells TVs like must-see TV.

After all, this one is not rocket science, and David Morrell is not Stephen King or J.D. Salinger. In fact, for these purposes, he’s better than King or Salinger. Why? Well, King is just that, the King, and his success as a fiction writer is so relentless and otherworldly that very, very few hardworking fiction writers are going to see him as an example.

Morrell? Yes, he has written over two dozen novels, made gazillions from film adaptations, and sold a ton of books. But his success is not so inaccessible that other writers won’t look at his decision to go "direct to Kindle" and decide that maybe they should do the math for themselves.

Morrell is not the first to do this, but he’s the biggest yet to bring out a new title this way. Konrath does not need his Morrell’s validation, but one effect of Morrell’s move is that a lot fewer people are going to refer to Konrath as "an exception" and a lot more are going to start calling him a trailblazer.

More and more authors are going to follow this trail, and they will soon be making more money and achieving more stable success than would have been the case if they had remained in what will increasingly be revealed as the sad, diminishing little world of the traditional publishers. And of course, for every popular author who decides to go "direct to Kindle" there will be thousands more Kindles sold.

Related post: Bestselling Author David Morrell Goes "Direct to Kindle" with 10 Kindle Exclusives Including The Naked Edge, a New, Never-Before Published Full-Length Thriller

 

This is a cross-posting from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.

When Author Intrusion Rears Its Ugly Head

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This post, by Lydia Sharp, originally appeared on The Sharp Angle blog on 9/10/10.

First, I’d like to clarify what author intrusion is NOT. Although they can appear very similar at times, author intrusion is not the same thing as a POV slip.

That little mishap deserves a post all its own. It is also not author influence, which we discussed in a previous post.

So you’re reading [insert title here] and everything so far is just plain awesome. Then you get to the end of a scene or chapter (because this is where authors like to intrude the most often and the most obviously) and you read something like this (extremely generic example here): 

Kathy was in love. Her heart skittered. Real love. Little did she know her luck was about to change.

Dun, dun, DUN! Um… actually, something like that has the complete opposite effect as what the author intended. They try to make a cliffhanger by insinuating a coming threat, but it’s out of context and most definitely out of the realm of the POV character’s current knowledge in that scene. Which means the only place that information could be coming from is the author.
 

Read the rest of the post on The Sharp Angle blog.

Why I Love Crime Novels

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When reviewers come across a particularly good crime novel, they like to say it “rises above the genre.” They mean to be complimentary of the author, but it’s really an insult to crime fiction, as though the genre was subpar and the writer was able to drag the story to a higher level.

What nonense. For me, crime novels offer some of the best reading on the market. I believe, as many crime writers and readers do, that our fiction confronts the realities of life, across various cultures, in both sensitive and thought-provoking ways.

Crime novels are particularly suited to exploring provocative social issues and showing those issues and attitudes from various perspectives.  Some crime novels are often quite analytical about segments of our society such as illegal immigration, human trafficking, and drug use. Other stories highlight cultural and social ills, such as racism, sexism, bigotry, and the dangers of stereotypes. Crime novels let us see the world from perspectives that surprise us and make us think outside our comfort zones.

Crime fiction also offers a way to vicariously win the struggles between good and evil. We get to see the good guys win and the bad guys get what is coming to them. It doesn’t always work out that way in real life, so it’s important to our collective mental health to experience this triumph and justice in fiction and movies.

As crime writers and readers, we get to make sense of things that would otherwise haunt us. We learn why the family next door disappeared one day or what’s really going on in the creepy warehouse across the street. Sometimes that knowledge helps us sleep better and sometimes it doesn’t, but at least we learn one version of the truth.

Novels with well-written protagonists and antagonists bring us to terms with the duality within ourselves. Humans are all deeply flawed, with the capacity for great goodness as well as for deceit, jealousy, schadenfreude, addiction, selfishness, and often worse. When crime fiction heroes—detectives, FBI agents, and prosecutors—possess such flaws, we not only relate to those characters, we forgive ourselves for the same shortcomings. When a killer calls his mother or pets a stray dog, we hate him a little less and remember to look for good qualities in everyone.

Crime novels explore relationships in a way that few other genres can. What better mechanism to test a bond between husband and wife, parent and child, or lifelong friends than to embroil the relationship in a crime, either as victims, suspects, or perpetrators. Similar to natural disasters, the aftermath of a crime can bring out the best—or worst—in humans.

The genre is rich with possibilities for exploring the complexity of the human condition. Victims become predators; predators become victims. A person is guilty, but not in the way we’ve been led to believe. Most of all, crime fiction is full of surprises, and we readers love the unexpected.

Writing complex crime stories that live up to my own expectations—while entertaining readers— is the most challenging and satisfying work I’ve done.

 

Peeling Away The Layers Of Confusion

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When I first started researching the area of Self Publishing about three years ago, I was struck by the multitude of terms used both writers and publishers to define their own business. We can easily review many self publishing companies and rattle off terms like Vanity Publishing, Subsidy Publishing, POD (Print-on-demand) Publishing, Partnership Publishing and Independent Publishing. I’m sure many readers of Selfpublishingreview can list off a few others.

 
In the development of Self Publishing over many years, the above terms have not only merged, but indeed, the waters of distinction have become pretty muddied. I also have been guilty of interchanging the terms. It just seems that many Self Publishing companies (if I might call any publisher who offers one or more author services at a cost) are often all too eager to add to the confusion—combining romantic notions on the art of the writer with extravagant promises of notoriety and success—simply to promote a form of publishing were money flows to them and not the writer. Let me throw my two cents in on the above terms.
 
Vanity Publishers
 
These are the old timers of the business. Vanity in publishing has become like the ‘C’ word. To me, Vanity Publishers operate on the ‘bait and snare’ model of business. Get the customer interested enough; laud their work to high heaven; demonize traditional publishers; throw a veil of complexity on the publishing process; and like used car salesmen, don’t point out the scratches or the cracked chassis or the full costs until the customer asks how much to make the cheque out for and then hit them over the head with a baseball bat.
 
Sound pretty loathesome? Well, the reality is that many still operate this form of publishing business, and some of them have the highest turnover of self published titles every year. Brazen enough to even advertise four to five digit author fees! Vanity, to me, isn’t Aunt Maple wanting her life story published, nor is it some spotty college teenager thinking he has written ‘The Great American Novel.’ It is a publishing business set up to prey upon Aunt Maple’s and our teenager’s naivete, not their vanity. The vanity lies with the publisher smug and disingenuous enough to keep doing it.
 
Subsidy Publishers
 
Much of my attention two years ago was focussed on Subsidy Publishers in the USA. In the past year, I’ve started looking at UK and Irish Subsidy Publishers. What sets these Subsidy Publishers apart from Vanity Publishers is that, for the most part, they are upfront from the start about what they are offering, in effect—an author service, usually from submission through to design, production, print, final proof and the proverbial 25,000 online available booksellers and anything more is an additional paid add-on. The add-on’s are what is also known as the up sell. You will be emailed about ‘must have services’ which will help your book sell. Their contracts, rights, costs, editing, quality of production, promotion and marketing, if any, and other author services vary widely.
 
Like any serious purchase in life (and I believe a first book is as important as a first car or mortgage) research, shop around, ask a lot of questions, know the depth of service you are getting, talk to other authors who have used their services, and most importantly, be sure this is the right path to publishing for your book. Ignore the ‘Joyce, Whitman, Poe etc., self published’ spiel on the publisher’s web pages, as most of these tales have been debunked and are, at best, true, but this was a time when the common man and woman couldn’t read and hadn’t an arse in their skirts or trousers, and, at worst, blatantly false and misleading. Ignore their ‘listen to what our published authors said about us’ pages on their website.
 
Contact an author on their bookstore page through the web. They usually have web pages set up about their published books and will be far more candid about their experiences with the Subsidy Publisher. A good guide to a reputable Subsidy Publisher is one that actually advertises books on their publisher homepage. Remember, the vast majority of income for a Subsidy Publisher is made from author fees, not selling books!
 
Any author engaging with a Subsidy publisher who has not at first attempted the traditional route of agent/traditional publisher for their book is being very foolish. This has always been my first line of advice to an author. There is a vast wealth of knowledge to learn by pursuing this avenue at first call, pain and disappointment though it may bring.
 
Partnership Publishers
 
Again, this is any publisher who is upfront about a financial input from the author, but with the single significant difference from the Subsidy Publisher; a Partnership Publisher is also financially backing the author for one or more books, essentially, prepared to invest in the author and not just a book. It can also be referred to as ‘shared publishing,’ where there is a contract stipulating little or no advance, but a much larger percentage of royalties, sometimes up to 50%, far beyond the 6 – 12% royalties available from a traditional publisher’s contract.
 
You may be surprised to learn that in the past few years some larger publishers are creating imprints just for this kind of publishing. HarperCollins run HarperStudios, Troubador/Matador and also the London Press run a similar model in the UK, and I believe over the coming year, we are going to see an explosion of this kind of publishing from large traditional publishers caught in the trappings of economic recession, who, in spite of less well-informed observers and critics of traditional publishers, actually do believe in a philosophy of nurturing and investing in first-time raw talent. In the coming months, keep an eye on publishers like Macmillan, Faber & Faber and other such publishers who have strong online presence and are always testing the boundaries of what the publishing model is.
 
POD Publishers
 
I’ve been guilty of using this misnomer. All publishers can be POD Publishers if they are using digital and offset to define the method of printing. POD is a form of digital print technology first used in banking to print out customer statements. Someone saw the potential and introduced it to book printing. It allows publishers to print a single copy or short print run of a title in their catalogue without the need to use an offset print press. Offset printing has been the most common method used for the printing of books with a 2000+ print run. Like any product, the more produced in one run reduced the overall unit price. For the moderate self published books, the average is a few hundred copies, and offset is simply too prohibitive on unit price and storage for this amount. Many traditional publishers use POD (print on demand) to re-issue old back catalogue titles which would not warrant a sizeable print run to make them economical using offset printing.
 
You can bet over the next year that many large publishers will be using POD to print a lot of titles from their back catalogues as commissioning editors, and in particular acquisition editors, all stare with distain at their budgets and cut back on titles and quantities published and printed this year. Again, POD Publisher has become one of those terms which has arisen since the advent of publishers offering author publishing services. It is the tried and trusted method of digitally printing self published, low print-run books, and in fact 80% of Subsidy Publishers use exactly the same printer, Lightning Source, with huge printing facilities in the USA and UK. The remainder use other smaller digital printers, or have invested in their own machines.
 
Infinity Press is one of the few Subsidy Publishers who print in-house with their own equipment. With the advent of the Espresso Book Machine (EBM-a digital print machine, small enough to fit in a retail store), more and more Subsidy Publishers will probably have their own machines, or the buying customer will simply have their books purchased and printer in their bookstore.
 
Independent Publishers
 
All publishers who are not owned by a parent company are ‘Independent’ and make their own business decisions. This has nothing to do with the means an author chooses to achieve publication. If we were to draw a ‘family tree’ and list off all the publishers we can think of—you would probably find it a little disturbing to find out that many ‘publishers’ are often owned by the same large media conglomerate. This was very much an occurrence during the 1980’s and 1990’s, and even today, in the self publishing world, as companies like Author Solutions own Createspace, AuthorHouse, Wordclay and iUniverse.

(This article first appeared in selfpublishingreview.com)

 

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

New Visions For The Book, Part 1

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This post, by Janneke Adema, originally appeared on Open Reflections on 9/13/10.

A few weeks ago the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University brought together a group of digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds as part of the unique summer institute One Week | One Tool. The aim of One Week | One Tool was to come up with an (open source) digital tool to aid humanities scholarship. The catch was that this whole process of tool-building could take no longer than a week.

The tool the group came up with and, as part of the deal, actually build, is called Anthologize. Anthologize, as the tagline proclaims, ‘use(s) the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.’ The idea is that you can grab content from your own blog or other blogs, order it, determine the layout and publish it, both in print and in different electronic formats.

Next to being a refreshing project and a useful tool, what I found interesting about Anthologize is the (implicit) notion that lies behind its conception, namely the idea of what a scholarly book should or can be.

Anthologize it

Let’s take a closer look at a blogpost about Anthologize written by Dan Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media. Cohen is a historian who, in his own words, ‘explores—and tries to influence through theory, software, websites, and his blog—the impact of computing on the humanities.’ In the post he wrote to introduce Anthologize, there are a few interesting preconceptions concerning the book. For instance, he begins his post with stating the following:

“A long-running theme of this blog has been the perceived gulf between new forms of online scholarship—including the genre of the blog itself—and traditional forms such as the book and journal.”

This sentence is very interesting for various reasons. First of all Cohen talks about the perceived (and thus not real) gulf between online scholarship, such as the blog, and traditional forms such as the book. Furthermore he states that the book and the blog are both forms of scholarship, they are just different genres. Finally, he refers to how discussions surrounding the scholarly book mostly have been conducted by opposing new online forms of scholarship to traditional print scholarship such as the book and the journal.

Further on Cohen explains more in detail what Anthologize has to offer:

“Today marks the launch of this effort: Anthologize, software that converts the popular open-source WordPress system into a full-fledged book-production platform. Using Anthologize, you can take online content such as blogs, feeds, and images (and soon multimedia), and organize it, edit it, and export it into a variety of modern formats that will work on multiple devices.”

In this sentence it becomes clear that both Cohen and the One Tool | One Week people argue for a concept of the book that goes beyond the print format, where in their view books can be delivered in various formats (including, but not exclusively, print) suitable to be read on (and by) various devices. Furthermore, they—I would say consciously—push for a broad(er) idea of what a book can consist off: in their vision a (scholarly) book can, besides text, consist of all kinds of multimedia content. Furthermore, it can consist of material that has been previously online available—hence published—such as blogposts. Thus with Anthologize a book becomes a selection of online available material which can be expanded with new texts and/or multimedia content. Finally, it offers the creator of the book the possibility to instantly publish the book her or himself, without the help of publishers or self-publishing platforms.

As I will state, with this tool Cohen and the people from One Week | One Tool argue for a concept of the book that goes beyond the idea of the traditional printed scholarly book. Anthologize forms a, perhaps implicit, critique against connotations that are an intrinsic part of the production process of a scholarly book as it is currently common in print publishing: double-blind peer review and quality control and branding by a reputable press. In this way they try to challenge or by-pass the traditional authorities that determine whether a scholarly book is fit to be published.

The New Age of the Supplement

Read the rest of the post on Open Reflections.

Risner To Speak At Women Health Fair

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I’ve been invited to be the guest speaker at Van Buren County Hospital’s Women Health Fair in Keosauqua, Iowa on October 14, 2010 from 2:30 – 5:30 p.m. I’ll be speaking about my Alzheimer’s Caregiver Experiences. This year’s theme is "Fight Like A Girl". The expected attendance is around 200. This sounds like a fun experience, but I think I’ll keep my fingers crossed that I do a good job.

How did I end up with this invitation? I joined a website for Iowa authors http://wwwhttp://www.iowacenterforthebooks.org Any group looking for a speaker can read a list of books I’ve written and my biography. This is the second speaking engagement I’ve received from that website. I don’t think I can remind other authors often enough to check out their state resources for authors.

What was it in my biography that qualifies me to speak at a Hospital Health Fair? Let me tell you. My experiences include helping my mother care for my father for ten years while he battled Alzheimer’s disease and working in long term care at the Keystone Nursing Care Center in Keystone, Iowa as a Certified Nurse Aide for almost sixteen years. It’s not often you meet someone like me that is a CNA/author/speaker. That’s because I didn’t just do my job for the paycheck. I tried to make a difference in the lives of the residents by understanding how Alzheimer’s disease affected them and their families and doing something about it. In my time as CNA, I was awarded the 2004 award for Certified Nurse Aide by the Iowa Health Care Association and 2006 Professional Caregiver Award by the Alzheimer’s Association. Those awards will be mentioned along with a picture of me on the marketing director’s advertising about the Health Fair CNA/author/speaker.

While I took care of my father, I kept a journal. After his death, I turned that journal into a story about what it was like for his family to take care of him. Realizing there are many books on the market about caregivers struggling to care for someone, I made my book different by adding helpful caregiving tips at the end of chapters. Plus, I had the advantage of being able to write this book from a CNA point of view. The book is Hello Alzheimer’s Good Bye Dad.

As more residents with Alzheimer’s were admitted to the nursing home, I met many families baffled by what the disease was doing to their loved ones. I started a support group to help. I listened and explained what I knew from my experiences with my father and my job. Early on I decided I needed to write a book of examples about how to relate to someone with Alzheimer’s. That book is Open A Window.

Anyone that wants to be an author needs some speaking ability. I’ve been speaking since 1998. The Alzheimer’s Association asked me to speak at a conference for ministers. I was scared stiff, and the subject was a painful one, talking about caring for my father. When I received a packet from the Alzheimer’s Association in the mail with the survey about how the ministers liked my speech, I was overwhelmed by their great comments. Also in that packet was a form to fill out and send back if I wanted to be in the volunteer speakers bureau. There was a need in my area on the far side of the county when the Alzheimer’s Association didn’t have as many experienced employees. Now adequate staff has eliminated the need for volunteer speakers, but I still get an invitation once in a while and I go. Education about Alzheimer’s disease is very important for families. Have I spoke before an audience of 200 people? No! But how much different can that be than speaking to 20 – 50. Besides, I’m doing two sessions so I won’t have 400 eyes looking at me at the same time.

The administer at the nursing home asked me several times to be the speaker for inservices on Alzheimer’s. For one inservice, I wrote a fifteen minute skit about a woman, with Alzheimer’s, in the nursing home. Two nieces came to visit and didn’t know how to relate to her. The employee who found the most mistakes made by the nieces received dinner for two at a restaurant. That skit later became my three act play, Floating Feathers Of Yesterdays.

Van Buren County Hospital’s Marketing Director wants me to bring my books to sell and sign. There will be a variety of health related booths besides mine. My husband has consented to go along with me on this three hour drive. He can help carry in the boxes of books and watch the table while I’m not there. I’ve found he makes a good salesman for my books. He has read them all and never fails to tell people that he likes what he read.

An added plus is I get to take my Amish books, too. When I had the idea to write them, I thought if I set my series about Nurse Hal Among the Amish somewhere in Iowa that might be a way to increase sales in my area. Turns out the marketing director at the hospital says she likes the idea very much that the books are set in southern Iowa and for the Health Fair theme it’s an added bonus that the books are about a nurse. "A Promise Is A Promise and The Rainbow’s End – books in my Nurse Hal Among The Amish series.

So now I’ve a speech to write and practice. Plus I’ve been thinking about what I want on my table. Just recently, I printed out a large batch of business cards and bought a card holder to display them. I have three short story books. These were stories I entered and placed with in contests. I’m taking them to use in a give away. People can sign up for the drawing, and I’ll mail the book from home after I draw. That way no one has to worry about being there for the drawing. Since the three books are different themes, people can list a preference when they put their name in the basket. I will put a list of my books and a business card in with the winning book so that might encourage the winner to want to read more of my books. One of these books goes along with the health theme for that day – Butterfly and Angel Wings.

I’m looking forward to the opportunity and the drive. Fall is coming. The timbered hills along the way should be lovely in October. The marketing director asked if I charged a fee. My answer was I’m free. Ever since I helped my mom with my father I’ve liked educating others suffering the pain of watching a loved one go through Alzheimer’s disease. The bonus is now that I’m an author I get to talk about my books at the same time and sell them. I’ll tell you all about how the Health Fair went after October 14th.

 

Number Of Twitter Followers Is The Most Overrated Metric In Social Media

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This post, by Mack Collier, originally appeared on his site on 6/23/10.

Seriously, it’s total bunk.  I know because I spend WAY too much time tracking my referral traffic from Twitter, and the people that send that traffic here via tweets and RTs.

Two examples of how # of followers can be deceptive:

1 – Several months ago a member of Twitter with 70K followers tweeted a link to one of my posts.  I got a grand total of 3 visitors from that tweet.  I checked, and the guy was following 80K people.  When you try to follow everyone, you usually end up following no one.

2 – Last year, @ShannonPaul RTed a link to one of my posts.  Shannon had around 10K followers at the time.  Her RT led to an additional 600 visitors to my blog that day.  After Shannon’s tweet, a ripple affect started, as people within her network started RTing her tweet, which led to more RTs in their networks.  But the chain reaction started because Shannon was well-connected to her network.  They trusted her and the content she linked to (like my post). So even though Shannon’s network was 14% the size of the guy with 70K followers, her network sent 600 referral visitors, while the guy with 70K followers only sent 3.

This is why I think there is WAY too much emphasis placed on number of Twitter followers that a person has.  Especially when attempting to determine that person’s level of influence.  From what I’ve seen, it’s far more important to see how closely connected a person is with their Twitter network.  If you have a Twitter network of 150 close friends, your effective reach is likely much larger than a person that has 10,000 strangers following her.  I know that when certain people, like Shannon or @BethHarte RT a link to my blog, that I am about to get a flood of traffic.  Because Shannon and Beth are both highly connected to the people they follow.  Roughly 66% of their tweets are replies, so they are constantly interacting with the people that follow them.  That leads to stronger bonds and connections.

So if # of followers doesn’t count, how do you define influence and authority?

Read the rest of the post on Mack Collier’s site.

"I Guess We Should Get A Thousand Printed"

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This post, by Vic Barkin, originally appeared on The Digital Nirvana on 9/13/10.

It was a dark and stormy night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets. No. It was a bright and windy afternoon in the City of Big Shoulders. I had just landed at O’Hare and was waiting for my hotel shuttle.

The fifty-ish business woman to my left had no secrets. She was engrossed in a discussion on her i-Berrydroidpod oblivious to the world around her and with whom she was sharing her conversation, namely me.

Now I’m not a habitual eavesdropper, but this was so blatant I couldn’t help but absorb her end of the dialogue. I’m sure you’ve all been there.

She started out with instructions to her subordinate– edits pertaining to some document: “Move this paragraph here; add the sub-head for Obstetrics there; start a new chapter on page 87; be sure and link the footnotes” & so on. By now it was obvious this had something to do with the medical profession and was some type of publication, to what purpose I could not discern. Then came the kicker—“I guess we should get a thousand printed”, she said matter-of-factly.

At that moment, my old printer instincts kicked in and my ears perked up. Although I muffled the impulse to be a good-printing samaritan and come to her rescue, calculations started rolling through my brain bucket. Let’s see, this publication whatever its purpose is most likely a minimum of one-hundred pages; times one-thousand copies is one-hundred thousand digital 8 ½ x 11 clicks at the very least. A decent job for any short-run facility.

Did she have a use for that many, or was it simply a Pavlovian response to cost-per-piece-effectiveness training she received in an earlier life?

Read the rest of the post on The Digital Nirvana.

Questioning The Brave New World

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A lot of people say it’s a brave new world with publishing. I’ve said similar things before myself, but I’m not so sure about it anymore. Unlike some, I don’t believe that most traditionally published authors with big publishers are somehow “set” and indie authors are screwed. I kind of think for the most part that we’re all screwed.

While I’m against the gatekeeping system on principle… do you have any idea how many books out there were being shut out by that system… books that were good? Why is this a bad thing? Because it makes it harder for everyone. This industry has always been insanely competitive and hard to make a living at. The problem is that there has always been way more supply than demand. Writing isn’t exactly the smartest career move for people who want to make money. But it’s the only thing I can do. My other options are some kind of internet business, which is just as competitive these days.

I gotta say, I’m starting to wonder why I’m so rah rah indie. On some level it’s totally selfish. I know people are going to talk about going indie and they’re going to help other people go indie. Whether I help or not… SOMEONE will. And if I help, then you know my name and MAYBE you will help me when I need it. i.e. tell people about my books.

So no, I’m not all that magnanimously altruistic and have never claimed to be. I’ve never laid out all my motivations, nor have I ever said I help people JUST because I like helping people. I do it because if I don’t someone else will anyway. So I might as well rack up some decent karma and hope to God it comes back to me when I need it.

I think it’s going to be harder for EVERYONE to sell books now. Not just indie authors, but trad authors. There are already too many books. Too many good books.

I always wonder why people worry about the crap. Forget the crap. The crap is no threat to you. It’s not your competition. Few people will ever even see it. Worry about the good stuff. Worry about not only the good traditionally published stuff, where at least with bookstores and such there was a funnel and most of the reading public only ever saw what came through that funnel, worry about the good indie stuff. Worry about every single good book out there… because all this whining about the crap seems to me to be a cover for the real thing we should fear…

Too many good books, not enough readers, and not enough time among those readers to devote to your book.

I believe most authors trad or indie in the next ten years will be negatively affected by not an overload of crap but an overload of books, period. More books will see the light of day and be read and that’s great, and more authors will get a piece of the pie. But those pie pieces will be increasingly smaller.

I feel like it’s already starting to happen. And I feel the pressure and the squeeze, and the fear that if I don’t get where I want to go, very soon, I’ll never get there because there will just be too much competition to gain the kind of visibility I need to really succeed.

That’s another reason I’m trying to withdraw some from all of this… because every second I spend arguing with a tard over something pointless on the internet, is a second I lose of what I feel could be my only shot to get what I want… which is to make a living writing fiction.

 

This is a reprint from the Weblog of Zoe Winters.

Getting Ready For NaNoWriMo

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This article, by Steve Shepard, Storyist developer and avid NaNoWriMo participant, originally appeared in the How To section of Storyist. NaNoWriMo is a scant month and a half away, so if you’re planning on participating, it’s time to start planning.

"What are you writing this year?"

It’s the question on everyone’s lips at the regional NaNoWriMo kickoff parties. The answer, even among seasoned NaNoWriMo veterans, is often "I don’t know."

So if you don’t know either, relax—you’re in good company. Heck, even Chris Baty, the NaNoWriMo program director and cheerleader in chief, claims he doesn’t know what he’s writing yet.

If you’re looking for ideas, there are pleny of resources available to you: The NaNoWriMo forums, and Chris’s book No Plot? No Problem! are two of the best.

As this is my fourth year participating in NaNoWriMo, I thought I’d add to the mix by writing a quick how-to on the techniques that have worked for me.

Play "What If?"

So what should you write?

Conventional wisdom says that you should write what you know. If you’re a teacher, write about a teacher facing one of the many struggles teachers face. If you’re an accountant, write about an accountant facing accountant stuff.

Or not.

I disagree with this "conventional" wisdom. For many writers, part of the joy of writing is in learning about something new, and in living in a world of your making. The trick is finding a story idea that captures your imagination.

One of the more effective ways to do this is to play a game of "What If?" Look around you and ask what would happen if something you cared deeply about changed in a significant way. For example:

  • "What if I finally found my true love only to discover that she was in love with someone else?"
  • "What if my daughter were kidnapped?"
  • "What if my high-school-age self ran for class president and didn’t get a single vote?"

If you are uncomfortable putting yourself at the center of your story, look around you. Family, friends, and co-workers are great sources for "What Ifs."

  • "What if my mom discovered my that dad was cheating on her?"
  • "What if my kid brother finally decided to retaliate against that bully Jimmy Porter?"
  • "What if my boss were a zombie?"

     

Be forewarned though; friends and family can be very prickly if you put them in your novel. And while you could use this to your advantage, you’re probably better off disguising their situations so they won’t know it’s them.

If that doesn’t work for you, you can always turn to the Web. Current news stories make great starting points.

  • "What if Obama was secretly planning to kill my grandmother?"
  • "What if Dave Letterman was sleeping with my girlfriend?"
  • "What if Glen Beck developed amnesia?"

Take fifteen minutes or so and write down as many "What Ifs" as you can. Try to fill a couple of pages.

Tip: Play with a friend. This exercise can be uproariously funny if you give it half a chance.

Tip 2: Be as specific as possible. Use "my boss" instead of "management," and "Obama" instead of "the government." Even a vast conspiracy needs a point person through whom the reader can experience the evil.

Then, sift through the list and find the "What If" that grabs you. If you can’t pick one, take some time to cull the top three, and flip a three-sided coin to identify the winner.

Identify the Story Line

 

Read the rest of the article on Storyist.

Self Publishing or Indie – What's in a name

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 The playing field of publishing has tilted, but it hasn’t leveled by any means. The vast majority of books sold still involve the cutting down of a tree and the passing through of some very tiny gates. But it is has tilted, and if you step back, and make a little director’s square with your hands, you’ll see that it is skewed in favor of those who understand the digital world.

There is no doubt that some of the Big Six (BS) will alter course to swing their mammoth tankers towards the unchartered waters of the social consumer. Others will order the champagne to flow and tell the orchestra on the poop deck to play louder. What shape the industry will take is anybody’s guess, but if you’re looking for direction, Mike Shatzkin’s blog is a good place to go. He has a very good piece with Random House CEO, on transitioning from B2B to B2C.

But this post isn’t about the calamity,or not, that BS are facing. Rather it hopes to delve into something of a different nature. An insecure, abused orphan, lacking in confidence, and reaching its adolescent years suffering from an identity crisis; Self Publishing.

It’s a well-known fact that the label, self publishing, carries with it a stigma. The stigma that once you’ve self-published you’re finished as a writer. A stigma born of the past,  and carefully nurtured by those with a vested interest in the present. The BIG argument from the BS train is that the slush pile is being put on-line. For a near hysterical diatribe from an extremely arrogant and myopic viewpoint, from a lady who’s clearly suffering her own identity crisis ("I’m the man") go here, feel free to flame comment. Guess what, they’re right. The slush pile is being put on-line. So what. I can reject something just as quick as you can, however unlike you, I don’t think that I am the sole arbiter of taste, nor do I believe that I am unique.

We’re reliably informed by many Agent blogs that the vast majority of "real books" by "real authors" (i.e. pure BS), never earn out their advances and end up being returned. OK, so an agent chose those books and BS editors squabbled over them, the marketers marketed and the sales people sold; and then the public didn’t buy them. I can do that :-).

There is a lot of crap out there from both Trad and Indie publishing. Both parties are aware of this and neither has a solution. BS say the slush is going on-line, Self Publishers (SP) are saying we need to change our name from SP to Indie Publishers (IP) to help distinguish between good Indie and bad Indie. Why? Because self publishing has that stigma and it isn’t bleeding palms. How do you change the perception that something published by an individual is at least the equal of something published by a corporation. For a quick and sad (in my opinion) look at how decisions are made about books have a read over here.

You don’t. The market will decide. What has changed is that the market is now a lot bigger and this is a good thing.

The good stuff will float to the top. Amazon‘s way of doing this is via reviews – user driven reviews. Goodreads and LibraryThing are two other sites where readers write reviews on books. And it works. Yes there are the "release reviews" which are impossible to avoid or to police, (hey publishers print "his latest bestseller" on the front of books which haven’t been released yet), but if the author hasn’t done their work in marketing then that’s all the reviews that author is going to get.

If the author has done their work and spread the message that their new book is available, then some people will sample, some will buy, and the reviews will add up. Some will be mean-spirited, I haven’t had my coffee yet, 1 star for you type reviews, with the reviewer not even having read the book (hey, that happens at agencies too); other reviews will be well thought out by passionate readers who have read past work by the author and didn’t like or liked the work for reasons which they point out in the review.

There are two broad assumptions in the BS world. One – Self publishing is OK for niche non-fiction (thanks for that, I’ll rush to print with my in-depth study of the impact of pet rocks upon the modern American Psyche); and Two; that self publishers are a lazy lot who have no idea about editing, cover design, and (here’s the cruncher) what sells. I’ve read enough blogs and seen enough evidence to know that the first assumption is simply BS, and the second is just plain rude.

Excluding my time (in my day job I’m charged out at US$3,000 a day), I’ve spent about USD6,000 on getting my book, TAG, to where it is. The cover and copy editing remain to be finished, and when they’re done I’ll have spent a total of about USD8,000 on the book. Then I’ll put it up for sale on Amazon and Smashwords. I consider every penny that I’ve invested to be money well spent. The vast proportion went on developmental editing; which for me was a crash course in writing. I don’t have the time to take an MFA, and whilst books about how to write, help, there is nothing like having a professional critique of your own work to advance.

My publishing goal is simple: put out a great product. That means an attractive cover, no typo’s, and a well written, hopefully, entertaining story. How hard is that? Dam hard, but it can be done. Will the market like the book? Who knows? But if they don’t, it won’t be because of errors in the text or a crappy cover, ergo laziness. Maybe the writing isn’t ready for prime-time, but I can get feedback on that from an audience. As opposed to trying to decipher months of silence interspersed with snippets of "I didn’t fall in love with it."

What happens if it doesn’t sell? I’ll write another one. I’ve already started, quite some time ago, about a month after the first one. If that doesn’t sell? OK, I’ll write another one. My writing goal is to have what I write read by people, lots of them, and I’d like those people to pay what I write. That is verification. Each time I write I get better. Each time I publish I’ll get better. Each time I read reviews and see feedback I’ll get better. The difference is that I’ll use the market to tell me what they like and what they don’t.

From my perspective the business model offered by BS, and the model offered by IP (note: the acronym for Indie Publishing is also commonly used for Intellectual Property; whereas the acronym of Big Six… well I’m sure you get it) boils down to one significant difference and one thing only. No, it isn’t money, (if it does sell) you stand to make much more with IP.

The only reason that you should consider going with BS is because, for now, they still have the reach. They can put your book on a shelf. All the rest you can do as well, if not better, than Trad. Why? Because BS is firing a whole bunch of talented people and those people are going to want to eat. The shingles will be hung and in some instances they’ll say, I know you can’t afford me so I’ll take a cut, let’s say 20% of that 70% you get from Amazon – deal? Deal.

People don’t buy books from publishers. They buy them from authors. In the past this meant that you had to get on a bookshelf and the bookshelf was a monopoly. Now a portion of that bookshelf is electronic. Your average, serious, Indie author knows their customers better than any of the BS. How many of the BS actually know who is behind the Bookscan numbers. How many email addresses, blogs and facebook pages are tucked away in their CRM databases? I suspect, given that one CEO of a BS recently claimed that the high cost of ebooks was justified due to the high cost of digital warehousing (I’m not making this up), that the answer is, "More champagne Harper, and do get the orchestra to play a Waltz."

 

7 Reasons You Need A Facebook Fan Page

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Facebook Pages (also known as Fan Pages) look similar to personal Profiles, but they are designed for business use and they are a terrific way to promote yourself and your business. You can create a Page for your business, book, or even a character in a book. People join your Page by clicking the "like" button at the top of the page. (That button used to say "become a fan.")

Facebook Pages have several advantages over personal Profiles:

1.  You’re limited to 5,000 friends on your Profile, but there’s no limit on the number of people who can "like" your Page.

2.  Pages are designed for business use, so it’s more acceptable to be promotional on a Page than on a Profile.

3.  You can create multiple Pages to promote different products or businesses.

4.  You can send a message to everyone who has joined your page. Your message will show up in the Update section of each fan’s Inbox.

5.  You can create customized "tabs" or screens on your Page. For example, you can create a tab to promote your book and include your cover image, book video trailer and other content on that tab.

6.  After people join your Page, they will be directed to the Wall tab each time they visit the Page. But you can create a customized welcome screen for new visitors to land on. And each of the "tabs" or screens on your Page has its own URL that you can link to directly from outside of Facebook.
 

7.  You can use your Page to increase your email subscriber list, by adding an opt-in form and free bonus to one of the tabs. In the screenshot below you can see the Free Ebook tab that I added to my own Page.

FreeEbook

Learn how to create custom content like this on your own Facebook page in the August issue of The Savvy Book Marketer Newsletter. If you’re not already a subscriber, sign up now and you’ll receive exclusive access to the newsletter archives, including my tutorial, How to Create Custom Content on Your Facebook Page. You’ll also get a free copy of my ebook, Top Book Marketing Tips.

To learn more about how to use Facebook to promote yourself and your book, read Facebook Guide for Authors or The Savvy Book Marketer’s Guide to Successful Social Marketing.

Have you already created a Facebook Page? Please share the link using the comment section below.
 

 

 

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

The Promise of Fall: How to Achieve a Balanced Writing Life

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Labor Day has come and gone, marking the end of a summer that went by so fast it gave me whiplash and the beginning of fall, which has always been my favorite season, even here in Southern California where September is often the hottest month of the year.

I was one of those odd kids who loved the return of school days, as the nights grew cooler in my Pennsylvania home town, my blood ran faster, washing away the sluggish dreaminess that a summer spent reading had produced. Adulthood, and a teaching career that mimicked the rhythms of my youth, meant fall continued to represent a time of increased activity.

This summer I was supposed to make serious progress on my second historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits. I was supposed to make so much progress that when fall came, and I went back to teaching (albeit a reduced load since I am now semi-retired), I would not falter, but continue to write with the goal of finishing a first draft by winter break. But this did not happen.

I did get 8,000 words written, at the very beginning of the summer, but then nothing. I can blame the two trips out of town and the two weeks on jury duty, which ate away over nearly half of the summer, then there were my husband’s two business trips and the increased responsibilities that this created, but none of these life distractions can explain why I didn’t write at least an hour every day.

So what did happen?

What happened was I sank into my life-long summer pattern-I slowed down. I read, I chatted with friends, I read some more, I upped my rate of exercise, I read, and in between I worked on marketing the book, Maids of Misfortune, which I published last December. I spent hours reading through the various blogs I now subscribed to, reading the threads of comments, writing comments when I thought I had something to add. Off and on during the day I wandered through the chat sites and forums I now belonged to, looking for places to put in my 2 cents. I worked on my own blog, updated my author web-page, and obsessively checked to see how many books I had sold each day. And by August I was now selling, on average, 10.8 books a day.

I had created a nice, healthy, balanced life–and my marketing strategies seemed to be working, but writing–the main point of all this activity–just wasn’t happening.

So, it is fall again. I can feel myself speeding up. And I have decided to experiment with cutting back on the time I spend marketing my first book in order to spend more time writing my second.

This is my promise to myself. I will not work on marketing after 7:30 am or before 6 pm.  The only exception is that I can spend up to 4 hours on Sundays working on a blog post and/or my next marketing initiative, which is to reach out to San Francisco books stores in preparation to my attendance at the mystery convention, Bouchercon, in October.
I will be curious to see if these limitations will harm my sales numbers, and I certainly hope they will help me progress on the second book.

I am also curious, what do you all do to ensure your marketing doesn’t interfere your writing? I would love to know.
 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s The Front Parlor.