authors behaving badly

Eight Myths New Writers Need To Stop Believing In

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Portrait of a frustrated student being surrounded with piles of books

As General Manager for Windwalker Media and an independent author service provider, I keep seeing the same mistakes that derail new authors. Here are a few of the biggest ones that I have encountered, out of a lot of love and a little tongue in cheek.

  1. If I write it they will come/but my mommy told me I was special

Perhaps in your heart you know you are the next undiscovered J.K. Rowling, but the fact is she spent many years working her craft and perfecting it before being discovered. Your manuscript is competing against approximately 1,000 new books each day, in the United States alone. You may write it but if you want anyone to read it, you need to make it about your reader and not about you.

  1. But I heard/read everyone is making a lot of money with writing and self-publishing

Nope.

Not even close. Or as my wise old granny used to say, if it sounds too good to be true then they are trying to sell you something. You can make a living as a writer, but it takes time, hard work, and patience. It is a job, just like any other job.

  1. I can just figure it out as I go along

The best time to start planning is before you even write one word.

Why are you writing? What is the goal? To make money or to be famous – see above. The best reason is because writing is your passion and you have a story that wants to be told. Understanding why you need to write, will help you figure out some of the next steps.

Who is your target reader? Write for them, not you, in their language.

This is also when you start to put together a marketing plan. By doing a little work ahead of time, you will save yourself many hours of frustration.

  1. I don’t need a marketing plan, my books is so awesome it will sell itself!

Killing this myth will save you so much trouble down the road.

How are you going to distribute your book? EBooks, print, print on demand? Combination? If you plan on just publishing an eBook, then you might be able to get away with a clean and well formatted MS Word document. However, print and print on demand will require someone who knows how to set up your manuscript per the requirements for the company printing your book.

What is your target genre? If you want to succeed and stand out from the 1000 of books you need to find your niche and promote that. Don’t be a romance writer. Instead be an Edwardian period piece romance that specializes in clean Christian bodice rippers. Writing a historical novel? Specify and be an expert in crooked New York politicians in the early 1800s. By finding your niche, you are also finding the people who are going to want to read your book, and help your rankings.

Do you want to try self-publishing or find an agent go the traditional route. Depending on what you choose, your approach will be different. There are many articles that can describe the benefits and disadvantages of both. Perhaps you will try one path and then switch over. The point is to know ahead of time what your options are.

How are you going to market your book? This is the perfect time to start thinking and to start marketing, before you are ready to publish. Good marketing takes time, much longer than you realize. Think of the worst pushiest salesperson you have ever dealt with. Don’t be them. Social media is a great tool but should only be a part of your marketing plan. Start a blog, build friendships, and solve problems. Build real connections over time, and then when the time comes to promote your book, you will have some solid cheerleaders in your corner.

  1. I can save money by:

Self-editing – If you go on Amazon and look at the number one reason for lost stars, it will be because someone tried to self-edit. After having spent so much time staring at the pages during the writing process, you will miss errors. Typos, grammatical errors, bad sentence structures all upset readers. Upset readers leave bad reviews, which don’t go away. By the way, there are two types of editors, content editors for proof reading and grammar errors and developmental editors which help you make your story flow better. Both are worth every penny.

Design my own book cover – This sounds easy, open up MS Paint, add the title and your name in different fancy fonts, throw in a piece of clip art and voila! Ok, maybe you know the difference between san serif and serif fonts and how they should be used, but it is really easy to tell when someone does their own artwork. If you don’t care enough to invest in your story, why should customers care to read it?

A good cover design will complement your story. This is often the first thing that a customer will see, and it needs to give them information about your book at a glance. A professional will make sure the cover work well as a thumbnail.

Do my own layout – If you are going to offer your book in print, then know there are so many little details that go into making a print book great. Pictures are managed completely differently between an eBook and print book. Alternating headers, gutters, font choices, and a variety of other important details are all items that a professional will handle and that all add up to a quality product.

Have my cousin do the work – The same thing goes for asking a friend or a relative to do any work for you. Unless they are a professional and you are paying them the same rate as any other job, don’t. They might not have the heart to tell you the truth or the skill set needed, so it isn’t worth your reputation. Hire a professional, there are very reasonably priced ones out there.

  1. Nobody cares about the description, I don’t need to spend a lot of time on it

If you have gotten a customer to read your book description, congratulations! It means they are interested in your book and this is your opportunity to really impress them. Start with a one or two sentence summary and then expand with a couple of paragraphs below that lets the reader know more detail about your book. Include any awards or quotes promoting your book. Don’t blow it with typos, run on sentences AND QUIT YELLING AT EVERYONE WITH BOLDED ALLCAPS!

  1. I can write my book and get it published in a weekend!

Every part of building your final product will take longer than you expect, especially if you want to produce a quality book that people will want to read. Don’t use this as an excuse to cut corners, but as motivation to plan ahead! Most decent editors and eBook creators are booked for weeks in advanced, if not months.

  1. Once I put my book up for sale, the reviews will come rolling in

It takes about 50 reviews for Amazon’s algorithm to really start noticing your title and rise in rankings. Customers prefer books that already have reviews, so they can get some idea of the quality of the book. Getting the first few reviews can be painful, especially if you just sit there and wait.

If you have started your marketing and building of relationships before now, then you can offer copies of your book for honest reviews. Don’t be tempted to cheat and pay for reviews. Amazon especially is cracking down on purchased reviews and if your book can’t stand on its own merit, then the paid reviews won’t help you anyway.

This list isn’t meant to discourage you, in fact the hope is to empower you to avoid some of the mistakes that will slow your success down.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com

Can We All Just Behave?

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This post by Maryann Miller originally appeared on The Blood-Red Pencil on 3/25/15.

Last month here at The Blood-Red Pencil I wrote about moral and ethical lines that we writers need to consider before we cross them just to make a buck. We had a great discussion about what we are comfortable writing, as well as our responsibility to consider what we’re contributing to society with our work.

One of our regular BRP contributors, Diana Hurwitz, had this to say on the topic:

Stories have the power to shape the collective consciousness. You can write with brutal honesty about what has happened and what could happen without suggesting that it should happen. Your work has a slant – perhaps a subliminal one. As a writer, you should at least be aware of the message you send and make sure it is the one you intended.

How we use our words is indeed important, and it is also important to consider how we act as professional writers. Addressing that need to always put a professional foot forward, was an interesting article on Writer Unboxed, written by Katharine Grubb. She asked some ethical questions that focus  on how writers present themselves and handle business dealings, such as:

 

Read the full post on The Blood-Red Pencil.

 

No Author Is Too Good for Her Amazon Critics

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This post by Jennifer Weiner originally appeared on New Republic on 10/19/14.

Dear readers, the commoners have reviewed Margo Howard’s book … and Ms. Howard is not pleased.

A bit of background: long-time advice columnist Howard wrote a memoir called Eat, Drink, and Remarry: Confessions of a Serial Wife. Publisher’s Weekly called it a “touching” memoir by a “pampered princess” that relied heavily on name-dropping for its draw.

Amazon’s critics were less impressed—specifically, Amazon’s “most trusted” reviewers who, Howard says, are given “freebies…cold cream, sneakers, pots and pans, and…books!” and allowed to review them in advance of their publication date. She is not a fan. These reviewers—“the freebie people,” Howard calls them—are “dim bulbs,” they are “evangelical, unworldly,” “barely literate, and “deluded.”

The irony, of course, is that in trying to show that she’s not, as the “freebie people” say, a coddled, name-dropping, well-connected rich lady, Howard comes across as a well-connected rich lady. Everything from her name-dropping (both a MacArthur genius and a long-time Vanity Fair staff writer loved her book!) to her solution to the problem (it turns out that Howard knows two members of Amazon’s board of directors!) smacks of barely-examined privilege.

Still, I can feel Howard’s pain. Show me a writer who hasn’t felt savaged, misunderstood, unfairly attacked, or completely misread by an Amazon reviewer, and I’ll show you a writer whose books live in shoeboxes under her bed. I suspect that there are, indeed, reviewers who skim books looking for references of stuff they don’t have—a nanny here, a remodeled kitchen there—so their review can scream RICH LADY PROBLEMS in all caps.

 

Read the full post on New Republic.

 

'Am I being catfished?' An Author Confronts Her Number One Online Critic

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This post by Kathleen Hale originally appeared on The Guardian on 10/17/14. Note that it contains strong language.

When a bad review of her first novel appeared online, Kathleen Hale was warned not to respond. But she soon found herself wading in

In the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic – the type that other lunatics cross the street to avoid. I fidgeted and talked to myself, rewriting passages of a book that had already gone to print. I remember when my editor handed me the final copy: I held the book in my hands for a millisecond before grabbing a pen and scribbling edits in the margins.

“No,” she said firmly, taking the pen away. “Kathleen, you understand we can’t make any more changes, right?”

“I was just kidding,” I lied. Eventually she had to physically prise the book from my hands.

A lot of authors call this “the post-partum stage”, as if the book is a baby they struggle to feel happy about. But for me, it felt more like one of my body parts was about to be showcased.

“Are you excited about your novel?” my mom asked, repeatedly, often in singsong.

“I’m scared,” I said. Anxious and inexperienced, I began checking goodreads.com, a social reviewing site owned by Amazon. My publisher HarperTeen had sent advance copies of my book to bloggers and I wanted to see what they thought. Other authors warned me not to do this, but I didn’t listen. Soon, my daily visits tallied somewhere between “slightly-more-than-is-attractive-to-admit-here” and “infinity”.

For the most part, I found Goodreaders were awarding my novel one star or five stars, with nothing in between. “Well, it’s a weird book,” I reminded myself. “It’s about a girl with PTSD teaming up with a veteran to fight crime.” Mostly I was relieved they weren’t all one-star reviews.

One day, while deleting and rewriting the same tweet over and over (my editors had urged me to build a “web presence”), a tiny avatar popped up on my screen. She was young, tanned and attractive, with dark hair and a bright smile. Her Twitter profile said she was a book blogger who tweeted nonstop between 6pm and midnight, usually about the TV show Gossip Girl. According to her blogger profile, she was a 10th-grade teacher, wife and mother of two. Her name was Blythe Harris. She had tweeted me saying she had some ideas for my next book.

“Cool, Blythe, thanks!” I replied. In an attempt to connect with readers, I’d been asking Twitter for ideas – “The weirdest thing you can think of!” – promising to try to incorporate them in the sequel.

Curious to see if Blythe had read my book, I clicked from her Twitter through her blog and her Goodreads page. She had given it one star. “Meh,” I thought. I scrolled down her review.

“Fuck this,” it said. “I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent.”

 

Read the full, lengthy post on The Guardian.

 

How Not To Respond To A Bad Review

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This post by John Dugdale originally appeared on The Guardian on 9/5/14.

Stephan J Harper’s litany of angry comments about a critic is a textbook demonstration of the reasons why wounded writers should keep shtum

If it’s not the craziest response ever by a novelist to a negative review, it’s almost certainly the longest, most obsessive and most ridiculous. When Michael E Cohen reviewed an interactive ebook called Venice Under Glass on the Apple-related site TidBITS.com, he can’t have expected that underneath it would eventually appear more than 50 responses from a single commenter: the book’s author, Stephan J Harper.

Seemingly unembarrassed by the incongruity of mounting a vehement defence of a detective story in which all the characters are teddy bears, Harper initially penned a series of comments (many of them over a single night between 1am and 4am) in which he quoted passages from the book, hoping to persuade Cohen that his criticisms of its “workmanlike” prose or “juvenile” plot were unjustified.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Guardian.

 

Prose and Cons: A Plagiarist Faces the Judge

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This post by John Doppler originally appeared on The John Doppler Effect on 9/2/14.

To an author, there are few crimes more heinous than plagiarism. Every author knows the agony of the untold story, the grueling birth of a novel, the joy of finally bringing that creation into the world and holding it up for all to see.

Having that joy stolen from you is an unspeakable cruelty.

That’s why Rachel Ann Nunes’ plight has struck a chord with so many authors. Rachel’s novel, A Bid for Love, was stolen, mutilated, and repackaged as a sloppy knock-off titled The Auction Deal.

Rachel’s work has already hit #1 on the Amazon bestseller lists for Christian fiction, but the plagiarist believed she could improve it by injecting explicit sex scenes into the work. She then offered the book for sale under her pen name, Sam Taylor Mullens, and pretended that it was her own, original creation.

The plagiarist tried to take credit for Rachel’s inventiveness, hard work, and perseverance. It was a cowardly act, but it paled in comparison to what followed.

 

An impersonal crime becomes personal

It’s said that character is what you do when nobody is looking. Mullens felt invisible and untouchable behind her pseudonym, and her true character was quickly revealed.

First, she attempted to deflect criticism by offering a bewildering series of lies: that she had permission to use the work; that the work had been given to her by a mysterious, nameless man who later died in a car crash; that she was the niece of the CEO of Rachel’s publisher; and that she had collaborated with Rachel to write the book.

When those flimsy lies failed to stand up to scrutiny, she turned to a campaign of harassment and vicious libel against Rachel.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes more details on how the plagiarist was caught, what charges she’s facing, and how other authors can help the case, on The John Doppler Effect.