The blog below is a competition I am running on a forum for ereaders called MobileReads. They have a good bunch of folks over there, many of whom provide great feedback and engage with authors. Just thought I’d share it with you.

ANNOUNCING THE FIRST EVER Find A Typo COMPETITION

Here’s the deal.

My goal is to produce a quality product which means NO TYPO’s in TAG. The problem is that I’ve read my manuscript hundreds of times. Too many times to see the mistakes that I know remain.

TAG – is slated to be released on Amazon, and at Smashwords, on 31st October 2010. The cover is being shot by a professional photographer and the cover design is being done by a professional graphic designer; they’re on track, but for the copy editing I need your eyeballs. So that brings us to THE CHALLENGE. Find more typo’s than anyone else and win a dollar for every typo you find, plus a credit in the book.

The Prize

A dollar a typo – YES! One whole greenback for EVERY typo you find. 50 typo’s = US$50-00

A listing in the book as a Contributing Copy Editor (Immortality is yours for the taking)

How to Win

Find the most typo’s before 15 September Competition will close on that day at Midnight Bangkok time.

Rules

I am the judge and jury – my word is final.

You MUST be a MobileReads Member doesn’t matter how long but if there’s a tie I’ll award the prize to the one who has been at MobileReads the longest.

Apart from rule #1 there are no rules: You can make teams, or fly solo. Up to you.

How to Play

Place your typo count as a reply in this thread or as a comment on my blog here (strategy is key here).

Email me, sgroyle(at)gmail(dot)com, your list of typo’s before midnight Bangkok time (PST +7) on 15th September 2010.

The Winner will be announced on 18th September and I will post the list of typo’s back in the thread.

This post, by J. Daniel Sawyer, originally appeared on his Literary Abominations site on 8/27/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

If you want the background for this post, check The Binge post for a description of my recent unintentional astronomical word count adventure. Short version: I wrote one hundred twenty three thousand words in fifty days. Yow.

So, you may ask, what did I learn from writing 123k words in 50 days?

Plenty.

What do you need to know if you’re gonna try for this kind of marathon?

Try these on for size:

First, as you can read in my post about the health problems I developed as a result of crappy Microsoft workmanship, ergonomics are everything. You can actually seriously damage your arms, hands, and wrists if you don’t move around regularly, have a comfortable keyboard, and pay attention to your body. Being in a groove is no excuse.

Second, food. I tried a variety of different styles of eating throughout the ordeal, mostly motivated by whatever I could think to put in the kitchen that week. What I wound up discovering surprised me. I expected to want junk food—pre-prepared high calorie, high density, high-protein, ultra-tasty nibbles supplemented with fruits and finger-friendly vegetables. However, it turned out that I gravitated toward made-from-scratch fare. I actually learned to make wood-oven pizza, sourdough from scratch, knishes, and a few other things during this time, and not just because they were tasty. It’s because it gave me something else to do.

If I was doing anything but writing, I felt a lot of pressure to get back to work. But if I was cooking or cleaning, I was holding up my end of the household. Pouring creativity into the cooking also gave me a chance to spoil my partner rotten in return for the tremendous support she was giving me as I tried to see just how far I could push my productivity. There was a lot of culinary experimentation, and between the quality of the food, the physical activity in preparing it, and the fun of creativity without pressure, it seriously boosted the quality and quantity of my output.

Third, exercise. I didn’t get enough of this, really. I can’t write very well at the walking desk—too many typos—so I was only getting on it two or three times a week. When I did get on, though, I went for the long haul. A couple hours at a stretch, and then within an hour of stopping I’d have a new creative flood. Activity helps supply the brain with oxygen—it also flushes lactic acid out of the system, and when you’re sitting that much the cellular waste sits in your muscles and makes them sore. Like bedsore-level sore. It makes you never want to move again, but once you start moving, it feels SO much better.

Fourth, massage. I’ve been doing massage for a long time now, and I have a friend who’s a pro who I trade with. Lifesaver. Getting them kept my RSI from crippling me before I fixed my ergonomics problem (and I did fix it, resulting in a heavenly experience for the last couple weeks here). Giving them helped me relax and remember there were other kinds of touch in the world besides typing.

Fifth, socialization. Weekly gatherings with my nearest-and-dearest, some festivities surrounding my birthday, impromptu meals with friends, all very important. Getting out to help build a retaining wall or join a moving crew for an afternoon was also lots of fun. All of it kept my mind limber.

Sixth, as Number Five said: INPUT! NEED INPUT! Keep your mind ticking over. Hrab’s new album was wonderful for this (you can buy Trebuchet here—it’s a mind-blower, though not for the easily offended). My weekly doses of P&T’s Bullshit!, True Blood, and The Pillars of the Earth kept me thinking in nicely twisty ways that helped the story. My Region 2 DVDs of the British quiz show QI kept me laughing and distracted during the long hours. Reading a Kellerman novel and Mary Roach’s STIFF during down time when I just couldn’t write, and listening to Steven H. Wilson’s Peace Lord Of The Red Planet (which I plan to review soon) kept me smiling and remembering the larger world outside my little projects.

Seventh, pay attention to what motivates you. For me, sitting at the keyboard wasn’t the hard part; it was keeping the juices flowing so my time at the keyboard was effective that I found difficult. Yes, I put in long hours–tortuously long, sometimes. But it wasn’t to hit a word count–I’ve found that doesn’t work for me consistently. It was to finish a story chunk or an article or a topic-based chapter. I wanted to find out how it ended, and I wouldn’t let it go till I did.

What motivates you might be different–figure out what it is and then keep it in the front of your mind.

At the root of all of this (and the plans I have for the rest of the year) is the realization that my backlist is too small. By lifetime word count, I’ve hit pro level. I now have over 900,000 words under my belt (that means 13.6% of my entire life’s writing output has happened in the last fifty days). But the number of properties I have on the market (everything finished piece since the 500,000 word mark) is simply too small, so I’m changing that. And, I suspect, I’ll keep changing that as long as I’ve got the fingers for it.

Telling stories is life for me. Even this one. Hopefully, if you like telling stories too, you’ll find some of these lessons useful.

Happy writing!

Editor’s Note: With NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) coming up in November as usual, these tips may soon be coming in very handy for many of you.

This post, from Jessica John, originally appeared on the Antbear blog on 8/25/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

Pricing among audiobooks varies as much as print books, but here are some averages and rules of thumb that might be useful.

For a 6-hour audiobook on CD, prices are around $25-30, or about $4-5 dollars per hour of audio. For a 6-hour digital audiobook, expect to fetch about half of that, or about $15-17 dollars (~ $2.50-2.60 / hour of audio) . Per-hour prices generally follow an inverse bell curve which dips into the production “sweet spot” where the product-to-package ratio is ideal. This is a greater consideration for physical products like CDs, for obvious reasons.

The good news is that audiobooks hold their value pretty well over time, and older audio titles aren’t discounted as heavily as print versions on sites such as Amazon. Another difference that we’ve noted is that there is a much smaller discrepancy between Amazon and publishers when listing audiobooks (in all formats, but especially digital audio books) than there is with print books.

As with any product, you should research your competition and then price your book accordingly. We are happy to assist you in deciding between various production, duplication, and distribution methods. For your convenience, click here to see a spreadsheet with some of our author-read audiobooks and their various large-publisher prices.

Okay. You’re going along with writing the same articles each and every month, taking some solace in the fact that your source of income was secured by fact that it was a repeat customer who seemed content with your work. You don’t see any issues with maintaining that single income source, whether it is through a service like Elance or as a member of writing team. You haven’t had any trouble getting freelancing work at all.

Then it happens.

Your source dries up.

(In this case, my source dried up.) Now, you find that all those months of focusing on that one client, have left you without a back-up plan. You get reassurances that work will come in…eventually. Yet, it doesn’t. This is no one’s fault. It’s just how the freelance writing game gets played every day. You have to remember that being a freelance writer is not a secure profession.

Freelance writing, by definite, is a mobile occupation. If you’re not literally moving, you are least traveling from one assignment to another. If you’ve become used to the idea of having someone else do the legwork of getting your projects for you this can be difficult at first. You may have inadvertantly slipped into a writing rut.

What happens then? Well, you either curl up in a little ball on the floor behind your desk or you get back to doing the work yourself and finding out what it takes to beat out the competition. (Remember, fellow writers, the competition is fierce.) Take the opportunity to really begin a plan to diversify your freelance writing sources.

What Do You Need To Do?

First, you should start looking around for new opportunities. Don’t just stick with the same old, same old. Expand yourself. Try for magazine work if you haven’t yet. Make the transition from ghostwriting to credited work. Locate new teams to join if that is your preference. The bottom line is that you need to do something. Don’t let self-pity keep you from acting.

Second, you may find that you have a lot more interests than you thought when you have the time to consider your next step. If you are on a time crunch because you still have to make ends meet, then narrow down your interests to the top five and then start finding projects that focus on those niches. Again, you have to focus on something or you will end up doing nothing. Seize any good opportunities that come your way. The idea is to keep moving.

Third, whatever you do, don’t think that since you’ve found something to close the gap in your workload that you just exchange it and stay put. No, that’s not what you’re after. If you lose focus like that you’ll likely find yourself in the same position without work a month from now. Once you have an assignment to ease the financial burden a bit, keep looking around for more sources. If you can find reoccuring ones that will allow you to maintain your other obligations, the more secure you will become. The goal is diversification.

In the end, you’ll feel better about freelancing writing, if you simply have a good selection of work to keep you fresh. A small group of writing sources will keep you from work lapses if you learn to recognize the limitations of each. Multiple streams of income are far more secure than one, believe me.

Now, get out there and keep writing! Until next time. 

This is a reprint from Shaun C. Kilgore‘s site.

There is no more difficult question for a writer to address than the balancing of their intended communication. Readers are not clones. Logical ReaderG may be very smart about plot nuances, while empathetic ReaderT may be intuitive about character motives.

Whether you’re writing genre fiction or literary fiction, how do you accommodate varying levels of audience taste and sophistication? There’s no easy answer here because the problem is not simply one of revelation. If you’ve written a murder mystery, and at the end of the story none of your readers knows who the murderer is, then yes, you failed. On the other hand, if you’ve written a literary piece that attempts to describe torture by means of a subtle metaphor, yet nobody has any idea that your story is about torture, then maybe you’re not showing your work to the right people.

What’s critical in both of these examples is calibration, which you should think of as an intrinsic part of your authorial intent. (It can be tempting to talk about markets in such instances, but I don’t think you should do that. Markets speak to money, not craft.) Your job as a writer is to meet your craft responsibilities, and calibrating your stories for your intended audience is one such obligation.

Again, if you’re writing a murder mystery, you want every single reader at the end of the book to know who the murderer was. To achieve that goal, you will — regardless how oblique or subtle you’ve been in other ways — write something like this: “The murderer is none other than…Mr. Blithers!” And in the mystery genre you pretty much have an obligation to be that bald in your explanation.

On the other hand, if you’re writing a literary work, you don’t want to bludgeon your readers with literal metaphors. Writing, “Each day passed like a day on the rack,” is not simply inelegant, it’s going to turn off readers who appreciate subtlety, which is a de facto definition of the literary audience. Unfortunately, calibrating your story for the sophistication of a literary audience is not only difficult, it may distort your intention as an author. Balancing these two needs — your own, and the needs of your readers — never gets easy, no matter how much experience you have.

How much should you do to explain your work to readers? How determined should you be to make sure your message gets through? There’s no easy answer. Again, you have to take feedback on a case-by-case basis, and you have to ask yourself whether any particular confused or oblivious reader is a reader you intended to speak to.

Please note, however, that this is not a license to dismiss feedback you do not like. In my experience, writers who dismiss feedback because they think a reader doesn’t understand their genius are more common than truly oblivious readers.

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

The news has been plastered all over the web: Seth Godin announced his most recent book, Linchpin, will be the last to be published traditionally. He blogged about it today:

Moving On

Linchpin will be the last book I publish in a traditional way.

One of the poxes on an author’s otherwise blessed life is people who ask, "what’s your next book," even if some of them haven’t read the last one. (Jeff did, of course). To answer your question, this book is my next book. I think the ideas in Linchpin are my life’s work, and I’m going to figure out the best way to spread those ideas, in whatever form they take. I also have some new, smaller projects in the works, and no doubt some bigger ones around the corner.

A little background: For ten years or so, beginning in 1986, I was a book packager. Sort of like a movie producer, but for books. My team and I created 120 published books and pitched another 600 ideas, all of which were summarily rejected. Some of the published books were flops, others were huge bestsellers. It was a lot of fun. As a book packager, you wake up in the morning and say, "what sort of book can I invent/sell/organize/write/produce today?"

It took a year or so, but I finally figured out that my customer wasn’t the reader or the book buyer, it was the publisher. If the editor didn’t buy my book, it didn’t get published. Here’s the thing: I liked having editors as my customers. These are smart, motivated and really nice people who are happy to talk with you about what they want and what they believe. Good customers to have. (In all of those years, only one publisher stole any of my ideas, no check ever bounced, and no publisher ever broke a promise to me).

When I decided to become focused on being an author, the logical thing to do was to sell to that same group of people. And it worked. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some great editors, and my current publisher, Portfolio, has been patient, flexible and, did I mention, patient. Adrian Zackheim, who runs the imprint, is exactly what you’d hope for, even if the architecture of his industry is fundamentally broken.

Authors need publishers because they need a customer. Readers have been separated from authors by many levels–stores, distributors, media outlets, printers, publishers–there were lots of layers for many generations, and the editor with a checkbook made the process palatable to the writer. For ten years, I had a publisher as a client (with some fun self-published adventures along the way). Twelve bestsellers later, I’ve thought hard about what it means to have a traditional publisher.

Read the rest of the post on Seth Godin‘s site.