Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

Should you be a full-time writer?

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This post by Mary Robinette Kowal originally appeared on SFWA on 3/5/15.

A lot of writers have a goal of being a full time writer. I think there’s this image of your life continuing exactly as it is, except that now your job is writing. Sure, you know you won’t go into an office, but it will be so nice to have no demands on your time, except writing.

Yeah… so, about that.

 

Writers are freelancers.

As someone who has spent most of her adult life as a freelancer, let me speak to those of you who have conventional day jobs. How comfortable are you with not knowing where your next paycheck is coming from, or even how big it will be?

Being a freelancer means that you have to constantly be hustling to get work. You get big checks when you turn in projects and nothing in between. Royalties? Twice a year and unpredictable in size.

When you are not writing, you are unemployed.

If this idea makes you uncomfortable, think very carefully before quitting your day job.

 

Your quality of life will change

You no longer need to leave the house. You won’t see people unless you make the effort to do so. Ah…. solitude. At first, yes. It’s glorious. But if you are even a minimally social creature… it can get really isolating really fast.

If you are a midlist writer (likely), you will have less money for indulgences. You might have to move to somewhere less expensive. Or travel less. Or you might have to travel more to promote the book. The only thing that is certain is that your life will not look the same as it does with the regularity of a dayjob.

 

There is no guarantee you will sell the next book.

 

Read the full post on SFWA.

 

How Writers Can Grow by Pretending to Be Other People

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This post by Joe Fassler originally appeared on The Atlantic on 4/22/15.

The author and editor Kate Bolick found that “imaginary time-traveling”—projecting herself into the life of someone else—helped her feel closer to women she admired.

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

In 2011, Kate Bolick’s much-discussed Atlantic cover story “All the Single Ladies” made a case for the unattached life, decrying the lack of affirming cultural narratives for single women. In a new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Bolick combines memoir, literary biography, and cultural history to continue her examination of what it means to remain alone. Spinster studies the lives of five groundbreaking, independent women—Neith Boyce, Maeve Brennan, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edith Wharton. As Bolick considers how these historical figures triumphed, faltered, and made tradeoffs, she explores the pleasures and consequences of long-term solitude, as well as her own competing desires for freedom and attachment.

When I spoke to Bolick for this series, she chose to discuss an overlooked short story by Gilman, one of the five “awakeners” depicted in the book. “If I Were A Man,” falls somewhere between Freaky Friday and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”: the story’s female narrator, Mollie, wakes up one day to find herself inhabiting her husband’s body. We discussed different forms of projecting oneself into another person’s experience, and what’s revealed in our personal fantasies about freedom, relationships, and the future.

 

Read the full post on The Atlantic.

 

Dip Happens—What Do We DO When Nothing Seems To Change?

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on her blog on 4/27/15.

Often I blog about things I am going through. Sometimes just writing things down, sketching out a plan of action, recalibrating MY perspective helps a lot. Hey, if nothing else, I have a blog post 😀 .

Lately, I’ve been in what Seth Godin calls…The DIP. In fact, I am even talking about The Dip over on my Dojo Diva blog for those who want more (and also a better chance of winning my 20 Page Death Star Critique).

*dangles carrot*

What is THE DIP? The Dip is that span of suck before the breakthrough. The Dip is where character develops, where dreams grow, where WE grow. Bad news is this is also the place where most people give up.

I’d love to say I’ve never given up when faced with a particularly tenacious Dip, but I am a terrible liar. Dips are tough. Why are Dips so hard?

Dips Come Out of Nowhere

We are zooming along and then it is as if an invisible force field comes out of nowhere. Maybe you started eating healthy and were losing weight steadily. Then…nothing. Another week? Nothing. Another week, I gained three pounds? WTH? And another and another and pretty soon, why bother?

 

Read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

12 Writing Tips I’ve Learned After 20 Books and 3,000 Articles Over 20 Years

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This post by Andrew Griffiths originally appeared on Inc.

As much as we might think the written word is slowly being phased out in favor of video, right now we are writing more than ever before, both in general communication and in sharing information through content. But very few people are actually taught to write the type of copy that we have to produce these days.

I write a lot. I write books, blog posts, magazine articles, newspaper columns, and much more. I’ve learned a lot, to the point where now I teach people to write and publish everything from books to blogs.

The following 12 tips have really helped me over the last 20 years, and they might prove helpful to you.

 

1. Always visualize a person who is your ideal niche whenever you write

For example, when I am writing an article for a small-business audience, I put a picture of three small-business owners whom I know on my computer and I write as if I were sitting and talking to them (in fact, as if I were sitting and having a cup of coffee with them).

 

2. To keep continuity with your writing voice, at the beginning of each session, go back and read what you wrote last time

This is a great tip to ensure that your writing style and voice stay constant. Great writers and popular columnists have a consistent voice and your writing will develop the same style if you follow this tip.

 

3. Don’t waste a whole session on a piece that isn’t working

 

Read the full post on Inc.

 

Why Can’t We Read Anymore?

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This post by Hugh McGuire originally appeared on Medium on 4/22/15.

Or, can books save us from what digital does to our brains?

Last year, I read four books.

The reasons for that low number are, I guess, the same as your reasons for reading fewer books than you think you should have read last year: I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs. It just seems such an awful lot of words to concentrate on, on their own, without something else happening. And once you’ve finished one chapter, you have to get through the another one. And usually a whole bunch more, before you can say finished, and get to the next. The next book. The next thing. The next possibility. Next next next.

I am an optimist

Still, I am an optimist. Most nights last year, I got into bed with a book — paper or e — and started. Reading. Read. Ing. One word after the next. A sentence. Two sentences.

Maybe three.

And then … I needed just a little something else. Something to tide me over. Something to scratch that little itch at the back of my mind— just a quick look at email on my iPhone; to write, and erase, a response to a funny Tweet from William Gibson; to find, and follow, a link to a good, really good, article in the New Yorker, or, better, the New York Review of Books (which I might even read most of, if it is that good). Email again, just to be sure.

I’d read another sentence. That’s four sentences.

Smokers who are the most optimistic about their ability to resist temptation are the most likely to relapse four months later, and overoptimistic dieters are the least likely to lose weight. (Kelly McGonigal: The Willpower Instinct)

It takes a long time to read a book at four sentences per day.

And it’s exhausting. I was usually asleep halfway through sentence number five.

 

Read the full post on Medium.

 

Fighting With Both Hands

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This post by David Gaughran originally appeared on his Let’s Get Digital site on 4/17/15.

This blog has been quieter than usual lately and I thought I should let you know what I’ve been doing.

I’m going to prattle on for quite a while; you might want to get comfortable (or head off to Tumblr).

So…

It’s good to do a bit of soul searching now and then, to look at what you have achieved, where your career is headed, and to decide if you are on the right track.

My goals and dreams have changed a lot since I started self-publishing in 2011. I haven’t been a big success, but I’ve been able to tick off little career milestones along the way. Some months my sales are wonderful, some months they are terrible – generally a function of how long it is since I released or promoted something. Overall, the good months more than outweigh the bad and I’ve been scratching out a living for a while now.

Dream: achieved.

But the sales maw, as all writers know, is insatiable. So I’ve been noodling ways to take my career to the next level.

I feel like I’ve got a good handle on the publishing/marketing side of things, but I’m still serving my apprenticeship as a writer – especially as a writer of fiction. Non-fiction comes naturally to me. I find it quicker and easier and (much) less of a brain-melting puzzle. Whereas, fiction is much more of a challenge – probably why I find it ultimately more satisfying.

My goals tend to focus on aspects of the craft, rather than some notional sales number. There is always something particular I want to achieve (that’s a euphemism for “work on”) with each book, aside from the general desire to make it better than the last one – and I think that’s something most writers do.

But, perhaps partly because of the above, I wasn’t necessarily selecting my projects with my “career” hat on. I gave an interview to Simon Whistler at Rocking Self-Publishing last September, during the launch of Digital 2 (disclosure: he subsequently became my narrator for the audio edition).

Simon asked why I wrote all over the map: short stories, science fiction, literary fiction, historical fiction, non-fiction, and asked if that was something I would recommend to others.

 

Read the full post on Let’s Get Digital.

 

Keep Your Options Open

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This post by Allan Leverone originally appeared on Kill Zone.

My first book was published a little over four years ago, in February 2011. You may remember that as the chaotic period when the self-publishing phenomenon really broke through and turned the traditional publishing model upside down.

Between December 2009, when I signed my first contract, and February 2011, those changes swept through the industry. One result of everything going on was that I suffered a unilateral modification in contract terms by my publisher—changing the agreed-upon format of my upcoming release from mass-market paperback to ebook-only—a change that forced me to reconsider signing in the first place.

My debut novel hadn’t even been released yet and I was already questioning my decision to sign that first contract.

Should I hire an attorney and attempt to force the publisher to abide by the original contract terms? Should I demand they return the rights to my book based on breach of contract? Or should I suck it up and accept the change?

Eventually I chose the third option and the book was released almost a year later, and I was left with the challenge faced by all authors not named King or Patterson or Grisham.

How the hell was I going to attract readers to a book offered for sale by a virtually unknown writer?

 

Read the full post on Kill Zone.

 

Authors Vs The Marketing Rabbit Hole

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This post by Deborah Riley-Magnus originally appeared on SavvyAuthors on 4/21/15.

Authors are as innocent as Alice when it comes to marketing, but nowhere near as fearless to take the plunge. What’s really down that rabbit hole? It’s called the MARKETING rabbit hole so it must be dark, terrifying, and worse yet, ineffective. After all, everyone knows that marketing is hard to do, takes way too much time, and just plain doesn’t work. You’ve already tried everything, jumped on all those cool promotional ideas your author friends are doing. You’ve tweeted like crazy, held Facebook launch parties, and guest blogged on all your best author friend’s blogs. You’ve purchased book markers and some really cool swag, and participated every time your author friends pulled together for a live or online event. Still not happy with your bottom line results? No? So that’s proof positive that marketing doesn’t work, right?

Nope. Not really.

See, the problem isn’t that you’re not trying hard to market; the problem is that you’re not marketing SPECIFICALLY for your book alone. Really taking that leap down the Marketing Rabbit Hole isn’t about just doing what everyone else is doing, and it certainly isn’t about doing it with other authors—your competition. A true trip down the Marketing Rabbit Hole is a personal adventure that focuses on your book and nothing else. It’s a different way of looking at marketing, and a clearer way of understanding what makes marketing really work for you.

 

Read the full post on SavvyAuthors.

 

Inside the Podcast Brain: Why Do Audio Stories Captivate?

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This post by Tiffanie Wen originally appeared on The Atlantic on 4/16/15.

The emotional appeal of listening

In my all-time favorite episode of Radiolab, “Finding Emilie,” a young art student named Emilie Gossiaux gets into a terrible accident while riding her bike and, rendered blind and deaf, is unable to communicate with her loved ones until she makes an incredible breakthrough. Listening to it on my drive home only got me to the middle of the episode, so I sat in my parked car staring at the garage until it was over. I was captivated by the voices of Emilie and her family. I’ve been an audio convert ever since.

It’s likely that thousands, if not millions, of others had the same experience last year when they discovered Serial, the This American Life spinoff considered to be the most successful podcast* of all time (5 million downloads and counting) that launched the medium back into the spotlight.

As a New York magazine piece noted last year, the increasing popularity of audio storytelling owes a lot to technology, as smartphones allow people to consume shows on demand anywhere, and cars increasingly come equipped with satellite radio and Internet-friendly dashboards. A recent report by Edison Research estimated that 64 percent of 12- to 24-year-olds and 37 percent of 25- to 54-year-olds in the United States listened to online radio weekly in 2104. The same year, 30 percent of respondents reported that they had listened to a podcast at least once, with 15 percent indicating that they had listened to a podcast within the last month.

*[Publetariat Editor’s note: this content may be behind a paywall]

 

Read the full post on The Atlantic.

 

Social Media Without Draining Your Day

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This post by W. Terry Whalin originally appeared on TWJ Magazine.

How in the world, have I tweeted more than seventeen thousand times? Yes, that is an accurate accounting of my activity on Twitter.

First, I was an early adapter and have been on twitter for seven or eight years. While there are times when I have not blogged or put out my newsletter or other ways to touch my audience, there are very few days that I haven’t sent out consistent information about publishing on twitter.

The result is that I’ve built a large following on this platform. Publishers are looking for authors who have a large and on-going social media presence. I’ve often written about platform-building ideas and even have a free Ebook on this topic (use the link to get it immediately).

Social media doesn’t have to consume your day and hours of time. It can—but doesn’t have to do so. It does not drain my day and I’m active in the social media area. For example, I have over 130,000 twitter followers. I want to give you several tools and insights of what I’m doing to consistently have a growing social media presence yet I do it with focused effort.

 

Read the full post on TWJ Magazine.

 

9 Tips for Writing an Insane Character

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This post by Tiana Warner originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 9/30/14.

Nothing beats a good insane character. They’re unpredictable, obsessive, totally spellbinding … and hard to write. Their arcs and motivations can differ completely from ordinary characters. Saying you’re going to write an insane character, however, is like going to a steakhouse and ordering a beef and a wine. You need to get specific. There are about a million types of crazy.

I spent two years studying some of the best crazy characters in order to understand what works best. I even took a university class on abnormal psychology. (Yeah. I went there.) Through it all, I came up with nine ways to intensify the character. For those of you looking to lose your fictional marbles, let me share what I’ve learned.

1. He is a man-vs-self conflict

This character is his own antagonist. Take everything you know about the relationship between protagonist and antagonist, and apply those rules to the sane and insane parts of the character.

For example, we know the antagonist should share a lot of qualities with the protagonist, except for a key moral difference. What flaw is splintering your character’s sanity? Is it alcohol abuse, as in The Shining? Jack’s descent into madness literally changes his character from protagonist to antagonist.

 

Read the full post on Indies Unlimited.

 

The 10 Commandments Of Authorial Self-Promotion

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 4/15/15. Note that it contains strong language.

*wheezes while stumbling down a mountain carrying ten stone tablets*

*dumps stone tablets on the ground and most of them break*

*coughs for like, 40 minutes*

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE. WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE COMMANDMENTS ON STONE TABLETS. IF GOD’S SUPPOSED TO BE ALL POWERFUL WHY DIDN’T HE JUST HAND ME AN IPAD. DOES HE HAVE A THING AGAINST APPLE? GOD’S ONE OF THOSE STRIDENT ANTI-MAC PEOPLE ISN’T HE. SO HEAVY. IT HURTS. IT HURTS SO BAD.

Ahem. Okay. Yeah. Yes. Hi!

It is time to speak about the sticky subject of self-promotion. You’re a writer. You’ve written a book and somebody — you, a big publisher, a small publisher, some spider-eating alley hobo — has published it. And now you want to know how you promote the book so that the world can fling money at your face in order to greedily consume your unrefined genius. But it’s not easy. You don’t know what works. What makes sense. You don’t want to just stand on a street corner barking at passersby and hitting children with your book. But you also recognize that you’re just one little person, not some massive beast of marketing and advertising, hissing gouts of pixelated steam and vacuuming up potential buyers into the hypno-chamber that is your belly.

What do you do? How far can you go? What should you say?

Thus, I bring you these ten tablets.

Ten commandments about self-promotion for authors. In a later post I’ll get into the larger practicalities of self-promotion — what seems to work for me, what seems to do poop-squat for me — but for now, we’re going to cover the overall basics.

Let us begin.

 

Thou Shalt Throw Pebbles

The self-promotional reach of a single author is not very far.

Big publishers and companies have giant cannons.

You, however, have a satchel of pebbles.

A publisher will ideally dp outreach that puts your book in front of various folks within the distribution process — book buyers, librarians, the secret tastemaker cabal that operates out of a warehouse in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. You, as lone author, do not have that effect.

The best you can do is pick up one of your pebbles and throw it.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

Top 105 Blogs and Websites for Writers and Authors

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This post by Hiten Vyas originally appeared on e-Books India on 4/13/15.

Are you a creative writer looking to improve your skills? Maybe you’re a beginner novelist looking to pen your first book. You might be a blogger wondering how to make more money from your blog. Whatever type of writer you are, the Internet has some wonderful blogs and websites that provide advice, tips and inspiration to help you. This article takes a look at 105 of the top blogs and websites for writers and authors.

The blogs and websites have been categorized using the following headings: (1) Writing, Publishing, Sales and Marketing, (2) Freelancing, (3) News, Industry Analysis and Advice, (4) Blogging and (5) Writing Platforms and Communities.

There are of course more blogs and websites relevant to writers and authors. If you think you’re blog or website should also be included in this list, please do comment in the comments box at the end of the article and let us know about you, your blog, what it is about and how it helps writers and authors.

Without any further delay, let’s move onto the 105 blogs and websites!

Writing, Publishing, Sales and Marketing

1. Sameer Kamat

Sameer Kamat is a bestselling author of two books; namely Business Doctors, and Beyond the MBA Hype. He also has a website, which has a list of great articles that Sameer has written based upon his own experiences of writing books and ebooks. You can find advice on both self-publishing and on the traditional route. Many of the articles Sameer has written are geared to helping writers get published in India. These in particular, are great reads.

2. InstaScribe Blog

InstaScribe is an online app designed to help authors create professional looking ebooks. There is also the InstaScribe blog, which provides articles about ebook publishing, writing in different languages, and latest news from across the world in the areas of books and publishing. The InstaScribe blog also has some eye catching visuals in the form of inspiring quotes, and infographics in the areas of writing, and publishing ebooks. You can also read an interview with the founder of InstaScribe, Jaya Jha here.

3. Writers Helping Writers

The Writers Helping Writers blog is run by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. The blog is packed with great articles that help you to improve your fiction writing. In particular, articles at the blog about how to create different types of characters and how to give them various personalities, traits and skills are extremely useful. Interested authors can also submit guest posts to Writers Helping Writers.

4. Nathan Bransford

Nathan Bransford is a former literary agent and author. He also runs an extremely popular blog. He writes articles giving authors advice on how to improve their writing craft, on editing, formatting and get published; both through self-publishing and traditional publishing (and its associated requirements, writing query letters, synopses, finding literary agents etc.).

5. Write to Done

Mary Jaksch is Editor-in-Chief of Write to Done (WTD), which is a huge resource for writers whose archives date back to 2008. The website is updated regularly and contains expert opinions and actionable advice on all aspects of writing including blog writing, writing sales copy, freelancing, writing novels and non-fiction. If you happen to be new to WTD, the blog is well worth a visit.

6. The Procrastiwriter

The Procrastiwriter provides articles that share writing tips to help you to improve your writing, on motivation to inspire you to write, and on how to deal with self-doubt of your ability to be a successful writer. The blog is run by Shanan Haislip.

 

Read the full post on e-Books India.

 

Joss Whedon, Lionsgate Hit With Copyright Lawsuit Over 'The Cabin in the Woods'

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This article by Austin Siegemund-Broka originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter on 4/14/15. The plaintiff in the case is a self-published author.

The author of a 2006 novel has accused the ‘Avengers’ director and ‘Cabin’ director Drew Goddard of stealing his idea.

With just weeks until his box-office victory lap for Avengers: Age of Ultron, Joss Whedon is now facing a lawsuit accusing him of stealing the idea for the 2012 meta-horror movie The Cabin in the Woods.

Whedon produced and co-wrote the script for Cabin with director Drew Goddard, a writer on Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a fanboy favorite in his own right, with credits that include Netflix’s Daredevil (and reportedly may soon include Sony’s upcoming Spider-Man projects). Whedon and Goddard are named as defendants, along with Lionsgate and Whedon’s Mutant Enemy production company, in the complaint filed Monday in California federal court.

In the complaint, Peter Gallagher (no, not that Peter Gallagher) claims Whedon and Goddard took the idea for The Cabin in the Woods from his 2006 novel The Little White Trip: A Night In the Pines. He’s suing for copyright infringement and wants $10 million in damages.

 

Read the full article, which includes a link to the full legal filing, on The Hollywood Reporter.

 

What Is A Story?

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This post by David Baboulene originally appeared on his The Science of Story on 11/3/14.

When I first started my research degree in story theory, the thing that surprised me most was that there is no single definition for the term ‘story’. At least, not one that all the authorities agree, and certainly not one which would cover all the examples that you and I would intuitively agree are ‘stories’. 2,300 years since Aristotle and even the dictionary isn’t right.

Of course, like every other narratologist, I have come up with my own definition, but for this blog post, I won’t be trying to sell you that. I thought I would use this space to capture the top lines that most story boffins DO agree. The common elements that comprise the mainstream and which are useful to know if you are a writer of fiction. Please note the scope I’m setting. I’m not trying to include ‘the story of medicine’ or a poem or a recipe or an argument or the story of ‘last summer’ or Japanese Kishotenketsu conflict free narratives, or all the myriad other things that may or may not be stories. I’m talking about a definition that will help an aspiring writer do good things for their story telling by understanding where the centre of the mainstream flows.

So, let’s look at the simple contents of a generally ‘good’ story:

 

Read the full post on The Science of Story.