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Seth Godin’s Poke the Box, Doubt, and the Will to Publish

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Could you sell a small, 84-page hardcover book with no title on the jacket for $12.99? Seth Godin can.

Godin, one of the premier marketing minds of our time, a prolific blogger and the author of numerous bestselling books recently closed down the publishing activities of The Domino Project.

This was an experiment in publishing books in partnership with Amazon, and resulted in numerous publications that are interesting to other publishers for lots of reasons.

 

I wanted to take a look at his book production and bought the little hardcover to have a look.

As a fan of Godin’s blog and other writings, I wasn’t surprised to find many of the same themes he’s often written about in the book.

He concentrates on the importance of “shipping,” actually moving forward and putting your work to the test in public, all the while understanding that the risk of doing nothing is far greater than the risk that your effort might fail.

Godin-isms Abound

Godin explained the lack of a title or any other copy on the cover, a pretty unusual move, by reminding readers that the book was only available online, where the cover is always shown next to the title and description.

Seth GodinLike a number of other unusual features of his book publishing, this makes perfect sense—for him. If you’re not a world-famous marketer with intimate ties to the largest book retailer in the universe, it might not work as well for you.

However many of the lessons Godin draws from his work with large corporations are so basic, so insightful about basic human truths, that they are just as useful for you and I, working silently away at our keyboards.

“It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.” All quotes in this article are from Poke the Box

Godin’s background as a blogger is evident throughout the book, which reads like a series of his blog posts. It’s divided into little sections, each with its own headline followed by about six short and conversational paragraphs. It’s a completely “chunked” book, ideal for reading in 3-minute spurts.

Throughout Poke the Box Godin shows how inaction, fear and doubt are the real enemies, not failure or risk.

“We’re extremely adroit at hiding our fear. Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear.”

Godin constantly reminds us that planning, projecting, brainstorming and other activities are fine, but they are not “starting” and they are not “shipping.” Starting means initiating something new, sticking your neck out.

“Part of initiating is being willing to discover that what you end up with is different from what you set out to accomplish. If you’re not willing to discover that surprise, it’s no wonder you’re afraid to start.”

Shipping, on the other hand, is finishing, getting the new project, the new proposal, the new book “out the door” and into the public’s hands. Maybe it will fly, maybe it will crash. Without shipping, you’ll never know.

Poke the Box is, in Godin’s words, a “manifesto about starting.” What exactly does he mean by “starting”?

“Going beyond the point of no return. Leaping. Committing. Making something happen.”

On a small scale, publishing a book with no title on it is a risk, isn’t it? Will it work? Or will the book fail? Godin has often done this, including giving books away rather than selling them. Or trying to sell a book to marketers that’s titled, “All Marketers are Liars.”

But that’s the nature of risk, isn’t it? If you stand to lose nothing, you haven’t risked anything.

Where Publishing Fits In

Poke the BoxOne of the reasons I admire Poke the Box and a lot of other work by Godin is his insistence on owning your own ideas, standing up for your viewpoint, being willing to take the risk.

That’s not so different from self-publishing, is it?

In traditional publishing you can get some of this, but your work is mediated by agents, editors, marketers and publicity people at the big publisher who took the risk on your book.

But when you publish your own books—like Godin did with Poke the Box and others from The Domino Project—there are no intermediaries. Instead there are collaborators, colleagues, contractors you hire and over whose work you maintain the ultimate control.

This puts you in the position of taking a risk with each book you put out. Will it fly? Will it crash and burn?

Doubt and fear are what hold us back. Year after year I talk to authors who want to publish their own books. Some tackle the project with relish, anxious to get feedback from the ultimate authorities—their readers.

But others dither. They find reasons to not publish. There’s a new technology coming along next month. They haven’t decided whether to add one more chapter. They can’t settle on a title, or whether to go hardcover, or what trim size to pick, or who to ask for testimonials, or …

The list goes on and on, but the real reasons are doubt and the fear that it produces.

2 Years of Shipping

Like you, I’ve been confronting this situation since I started blogging a couple of years ago.

Over and over, I’ve been captured by doubt, but somehow managed to ship anyway:

  • This blog, launched despite the doubts that anyone would be interested in “book construction”
     
  • A series of subject-matter guides for authors, despite the doubt that I could sell $10 PDFs from my website
     
  • A Self-Publisher’s Companion, put together from blog posts, although I had written that making a book from your blog is a bad idea
     
  • A website for eBook conversion services, although there was no obvious way to monetize or profit from the site
     
  • A blog carnival, despite the obvious signs that blog carnivals were a dying form
     
  • Monthly ebook cover design awards, despite the possibility that all those judgments might tick off my readers
     
  • An online video training program for authors, even though I had never constructed a course, created lessons, or shot instructional video in my life.

A Self-Publisher's Companion--KindleTo be frank, some of these were pretty much failures. Sales of some of the “for sale” items were dismal and, the last time I looked, the Amazon sales rank for my book was about 800,000 (although I’ve contributed to this by leaving the book at Lightning Source to measure the impact of Amazon’s recent changes to their process for selling books from third-party POD suppliers).

Each time, the doubts in my own mind were the real enemy, it wasn’t resistance from the “real world.”

How Doubt Works

Godin talks a lot about the “lizard brain,” that primitive part of our thinking left over from the time when we were concerned almost exclusively with physical survival.

“The connected economy of ideas demands that we contribute initiative. And yet we resist, because our lizard brain, the one that lives in fear, relentlessly exaggerates the cost of being wrong.”

What did I really pay for the failures? If I remove the emotional let-down, not really that much.

But each time I gained invaluable lessons, lessons in what really works and what doesn’t, what people want, and what they need.

Do you ask people what they want? Do you really understand the needs of your market? Or maybe you’re just a bit ahead, and people aren’t ready for your ideas, your innovation or your particular story.

Without shipping, without actually taking that idea into the marketplace, you have no way of knowing, you’ll just be left wondering or worse, fantasizing.

The Voice of Doubt

The worst part of doubt, the one that affects me and maybe you the most, is the voice inside my head.

You have to pay attention to hear this voice, but it’s there. It’s the one straight from the lizard brain, but it’s a voice you’re so familiar with you might not recognize it right away.

It says things like

  • “I’m not really good at writing copy, am I?” Or,
  • “Screwed that one up, didn’t you? Typical.” Or,
  • “What did you expect? It didn’t work last time either.” Or,
  • “If I write that, people will know how lame I really am.” Or,
  • “If I get it wrong, that will be the end, I’ll never be able to do this.”

These are the doubts that pull us down, desperate to prevent us starting, initiating, focusing and shipping the wonderful thing that’s in our heads.

And that’s one of the reasons I love both self-publishing and blogging.

When you get that book out, when you stop censoring yourself, pulling back from the ideas that really excite you because you’re afraid they might be just too outrageous, too outside your own definition of yourself, you win.

And you win whether the book or the article or the idea “wins” or not.

“Of course, the challenge of being the initiator is that you’ll be wrong. You’ll pick the wrong thing, you’ll waste time, you’ll be blamed. This is why being an initiator is valuable… Initiative is scare.”

So here’s the message: technology has put the tools of publishing into the hands of creators: you and me.

What will we do with the tools, the new reach the online world has given us to promote our ideas, our stories?

Will you start?

Will you ship?

That’s what self-publishing is all about to me.

Remember the little man on the cover of Poke the Box?

“He’s you, the excited, optimistic experimenter who understands that risk is misunderstood and that forward motion is the key to success.”

Our responsibility is to make sure our ideas are clear, and clearly presented. That our books are as good as we can make them.

Keep publishing, and thanks for reading.

 


This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Box Your Can’t-Get-Started-Writing Blues

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This article, from Blue Horizon Communications, originally appeared on that site on 5/11/09.

The most difficult problem you face in writing your book can be summarized in just two words.
 
Getting started.

 
You have a brilliant idea, of course, and an outline or some notes. Maybe even a chapter draft, or two. But now what?
 
If you are like most will-be authors, you begin casting about for other things that demand your attention — first.
 
The birdfeeder needs cleaning. The gardening stuff at the back of the garage needs weeding. Heck, the entire garage needs to be emptied and put back in pristine order. It’s good feng shui, you tell yourself.
 
In other words, after the brilliant idea, the outline, the notes, and the drafts, you’ve earned the right to your resistance.
 
Why? Because you don’t know — that is, know specifically — what to do next with your book. Writing it feels so frustratingly vague, so frighteningly VAST.
 
So, you tackle the things that you do know how to do: birdfeeder, gardening stuff, garage. And then you feel guilty and pained. Uncomfortable.
 
But wait. You needn’t be stuck in discomfort. There is a solution to resistance. A simple solution. It is a . . . Box.
 
Yes, a box. Not a literal box, but the imagined form of a box, which you can use as a magical tool to get to work on your book — without suffering from let’s-just-do-other-things-first-itis.
 
Here is what it takes to create a Box:

 

Read the rest of the article on Blue Horizon Communications.

Yep, Life is Getting Harder for the Indie Author

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This post, by Ruth Ann Nordin, originally appeared on The Self-Published Author’s Lounge on 2/25/12. 

This is a piggyback on Joleene Naylor’s post which talks about Amazon removing about 4000 books.  Details are in her links, so I won’t go over it except to say that it looks like authors (in general) are seeming to have a harder time keeping their books on sites where we need to sell them to make a living or to be on our way toward making a living.  Sorry I’m posting so soon after you, Joleene. 

The post Joleene just made falls in line with the same topic I have in mind, which is the fact that screws are being tightened across the board for authors.  From the post Joleene made, it sounds like small publishers will face some hard times as well.  My focus will be on indie authors because this is an indie author blog. 

Last night, I came across this thread on the Kindleboards:  http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,105037.0.html.  It was saying that Smashwords is dropping erotica titles with incest, beastiality, rape, and underage characters.  I’m summing it up, but you can go to the latest press release on Smashwords to learn the specifics: https://www.smashwords.com/press/release/27.  The Kindleboards link will give you more of a commentary on it and what authors think of this.

I’ve been studying this since last night and through the morning to best form my thoughts for this post.  I wanted to do a post on it because this is something that has the potential to impact all of us, but I wanted to get as many facts straight as possible.  Even after the time spent on looking up articles on this, I don’t know if I have the full scope of what is happening.  Is it only indie erotica authors who write the above taboo themes being removed, or are small press authors affected, too?  If I got my facts right (and I might be wrong so correct me if I am), then it sounds like Siren Publishing still has books up at Bookstrand with the taboo subjects in their erotic books.  That’s the gist I got from this Kindleboards thread: http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,104604.0.html.  I am not familiar with Bookstrand.  Until this week, I never even heard of them.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Self-Published Author’s Lounge.

Take A Break

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I’m getting ready to re-vision my blog. By that I mean I’m going to take a short break to brainstorm some great ideas for future posts. I want to make this a place you can stop by to pick up handy tips and inspirational messages to help you in your day-to-day life, as well as catch a weekly laugh.

That being said, I don’t want to just leave you high and dry while I work up a new plan, so I’ll be re-posting some of the best from the last year. Enjoy!

Maybe it’s just a “man thing,” but both my husband and my father will run themselves into the ground to get a project completed. Given half the chance they’ll drag anyone helping them down, too.

 

Case in point: the guys chose a very hot day to put posts under our front porch roof to keep it from sagging, figuring the job would only take about 2 hours. It took most of the morning and the entire afternoon. Getting them to stop, even for a few moments to take a drink, meant needing to become an overbearing, stubborn commander with a voice that would ring across a parade ground.

Not a happy experience for any of us.

The reason I was given for driving themselves like that was they “wanted to get the job done.” Not an unreasonable response, but it wasn’t a very wise decision.

What’s the real problem?

It’s a combination between wanting to achieve a goal and having little respect for yourself and your body — that thing called a temple in the Bible.*

Accomplishing something you’ve set out to do is a great high. Finishing a goal takes away, at least for a time, those feelings of inadequacy, of fear, of anything that holds us back from being happy. It’s something like a “runner’s high” where endorphins are released.

The problem shows up in not respecting the body’s needs. Just like an athlete on a “runner’s high” can injure themselves, anyone driven to achieve a goal can harm themselves by ignoring the need to rest.

That goes as much for mental labor as physical labor because staying up late to complete a task, like meeting your daily writing quota (guilty!), when you know you can’t sleep in is as bad as pushing through physical exhaustion to finish building a porch.

Taking a break is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of wisdom.

Breaks do prolong the time it takes to accomplish a task. There’s no getting around that. However, not taking a break risks injury.

In the case of my husband and father, it meant possible dehydration and heat stroke. For that sleepy writer it might mean making poor decisions at the day job or saying something to a loved one that you’ll regret later.

A better solution is to plan ahead. Make sure you add in time to take a few breaks. Expect whatever you’re about to do to take at least twice the time you think it should. If necessary, break it up over several days. There is nothing wrong with taking your time.

If you have a deadline, planning far enough ahead means no need to “pull an all nighter.” The other positive outcome is that you might come in ahead of your deadline. That feels even better because, not only are you ahead of schedule, but you’re not too tired to enjoy it.

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

Neil Gaiman Advises on Writer's Block

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From Neil Gaiman‘s Tumblr – Reposted as something that can be reblogged. ON WRITER’S BLOCK.

I’ve seem to be hitting writer’s block far too often now. My grade in my creative writing class is suffering because i don’t turn in anything because i’m never really satisfied with anything i do. all my good ideas seem to turn into bad ones once i write it down. How do you get pass writers block? 

You turn off your inner critic. You do not listen to your inner police force. You ignore the little voices that tell you that it’s all stupid, and you keep going.

Your grade isn’t suffering because your writing is bad, it’s suffering because you aren’t finishing things and handing them in.

So, finish them and hand them in. Even if a story’s lousy, you’ll learn something from it that will be useful as a writer, even if it’s just “don’t do that again”.

You’re always going to be dissatisfied with what you write. That’s part of being human. In our heads, stories are perfect, flawless, glittering, magical. Then we start to put them down on paper, one unsatisfactory word at a time. And each time our inner critics tell us that it’s a rotten idea and we should abandon it.

If you’re going to write, ignore your inner critic, while you’re writing. Do whatever you can to finish. Know that anything can be fixed later.

Remember: you don’t have to brilliant when you start out. You just have to write. Every story you finish puts you closer to being a writer, and makes you a better writer.

Blaming “Writer’s Block” is wonderful. It removes any responsibility from the person with the “block”. It gives you something to blame, and it sounds fancy.

But it’s probably more honest to think of it as a combination of laziness, perfectionism and Getting Stuck. If you’re being lazy, don’t be. If you’re being a perfectionist, don’t be. And if you’re stuck, figure out where the story went off the rails, or what you got wrong, or where you need to go deeper, or what you need to add to make it work, and then start writing again.
 

How Do You Know If Your Writing Is Getting Better?

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This post, by Janice Hardy, originally appeared on her The Other Side of the Story blog on 1/20/11.

A reader asked…
For writers who, like me, have yet to publish anything (For pay) it’d be nice to better gauge where we’re improving, and what weaknesses are still holding us back, are there some exercises or self-study things we can do to figure it out, so we know where to go from there?
Oh boy, this one’s a toughie. There really are no checklists that will say if you’re improving or not. And it’s something that’s really hard to tell on our own, because it’s hard to be subjective about our own work. But I know how frustrated I was by this very same thing, so I’ll do my best to try to provide some way to help here.

 
 
I did do a post on the tour that gave guidelines for some general level ranges, and that could help some to see where you might be and what skills you might focus on to get to the next level.You can also look at old critiques to see what comments you regularly got, and check new crits to see if you’re still getting those comments. If the feedback is the same, that’s a good indication that you’re still making the same mistakes and might have stalled. But if you’re making all new mistakes, that’s an indication that you’re improving. You can also look at your old and new work and try to be objective, and review it as if you were critiquing someone else.

 
To give examples on how you might go about this, I went through old files and found some of my writing from as far back as college. It might help to share some of those and crit myself to see where I improved and where I needed work. Hopefully it’ll give you ideas for things to look for in your own work, and questions to ask, like, are you still telling emotions through adverbs or are you dramatizing scenes? Is there a solid POV or is the narrator floating about somehow? Are you giving the reader reasons to care about your characters?
 
1992-ish:This is from an idea I had that became my training novel. This draft was handwritten in pencil, so that shows you how long ago I wrote it. Eventually I wrote it "for real" with the intent to sell, but these pages aren’t there yet. This is the opening of the first chapter.
The Griff Inn was a dark, dreary little tavern that sat on the end of an equally dark and dreary street. Its windows were dirty, its floors unswept and its customers were an accurate cross-reference of the riff raff of Kintari. It drew the thieves as easily as the murderers, and that naturally brought in the charlatans, the highwaymen and the local scum.
 
Let’s just say it was not the moral backbone of the city and leave it at that, shall we?

It was, however, Aradelle’s destination and she walked through the darkened streets with none of the fear the average person would feel in the same situation.

I cringe reading this. It’s all told, there’s this weird omniscient first person-esque narrator, there’s no hook. Now, it’s not horrific, as it has a bit of a voice that’s kinda nice, and I can see the beginnings of my style starting to come through. There’s storytelling, weak as it is, and it’s going somewhere (eventually). To crit myself, I’d say I need to work on POV in a big way and work on showing, not telling. Get deeper in the head of my POV (and pick a real POV) and show the world through their eyes. Since I’m following Aradelle here, she’d be my choice. (And a decade later she was).
 
1995-ish: Same story a few years later. Again, the opening chapter.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Other Side of the Story.

Print Is Dead! Long Live Print?

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This article, by Jordan Kurzweil, originally appeared on TechCrunch on 2/25/12.

[TechCrunch] Editor’s note: Jordan Kurzweil is Co-CEO of Independent Content, an agency that helps media companies launch new digital products and businesses. Prior to starting Independent Content Jordan worked at AOL running original programming, and News Corp bringing its traditional brands to digital. You can follow him on Twitter @jordankurzweil.

It’s been said before, but it needs saying again (and again and again): PRINT IS DEAD. Across the publishing industry, year-over-year declines in revenue, subscriptions and circulation, are well documented. Yes, there have been a few quarters of blood-stanching flatness (yay!), but – you heard it here first (or few weeks ago from The Annenberg School, or over the summer from Clay Shirky) – print periodicals are going to go away – forced out of this world by the march of technology and changing tastes, and replaced by new powerhouse brands – TMZ, Buzzfeed and HuffPo to name a few — which are poised to own the future, because they know how to adapt to (and even anticipate!) evolving user behavior. As John Paton, CEO of one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S., put it recently “‘You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone’ is not much of a business model.”

Just this week, Gannett gave us a stunning reminder of just how little it understands the world it lives (and dies) in, and how myopically it views its business when it announced its $100M bet on establishing paywalls in all 80 of its local newspaper markets. A gambit predicated on “the public’s strong desire for local news and in readers’ longtime trust in Gannett’s papers,” according to Gannett’s CEO Gracia Martore. Oh my. The paywall, whether for Gannett or other publishers, is a finger in the dyke, a cover-up for tectonic shifts in their businesses. For Gannett, local paper audiences are old (that’s what “longtime trust” means), and may well age out of relevance before Gannett’s gosh-darned paywall gets erected. And where’s the proof that the public wants local news? Readership is declining, local news website traffic is infinitesimal, and even pure digital plays like Patch can’t seem to find readers or revenue. The fact is, the thirst for local news can be sated by a single hometown blog, run pretty much by a single entrepreneurial blogger (granted they’d be very busy – and underpaid).

What can Old Print do to survive?

To use a trite metaphor (or two) – stop rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, grow a pair, and change your businesses. Pivot out of the corner and reclaim your heavyweight title. RUMBLE, Old Man, RUMBLE:

1. Face reality:

– The audiences of traditional print brands on paper and pixel are aging.

– Digital upstarts are capturing the new audiences, and stealing your least loyal current readers.

– The cost structures of Old Print companies are out of whack with the times.

– New technology is further commoditizing content, and fragmenting audience.

– In-house digital innovation at Old Print companies is largely non-existent, stymied by outmoded, editorial-first ego at the top, and fearful protectionism of current revenue sources: print subscriptions, ad pages and banner impressions.

2. Start thinking like startups.

Read the rest of the article, which includes 7 more pieces of advice for publishers, on TechCrunch.

Author Blogging 101: Blogging Platforms & Why I Love WordPress

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I had a book design website once. It was one of those “web 1.0″ websites that you put up because you know you need one, or at least everyone says you do.

It was built with a nifty Mac tool called Rapidweaver and for what it was, it was okay.

It took a lot of time to design and build the 6 or 8 pages and I struggled to get it working right. There were pages describing services and some samples of books I’d designed. The usual thing.

Looking at the little website, I realized there was one question I couldn’t answer:

Why would anyone ever come here twice?

Once you had read about the services and looked at the samples, there was nothing left to do. It was depressing. I couldn’t see how it was going to do me any good, although now I could point people to my company’s website.

Enter Blogging

I tried to use the tools that came with Rapidweaver to add a blog to the site, but it just wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to. And that turned out to be my good luck.

I started reading about blogging, and discovered WordPress.

Even though I had been reading blogs for a while, I had no idea there were different blogging platforms with their own strenths and weaknesses.

For instance, right now you can blog lots of different ways:

  • With WordPress.org software on your own domain
  • On the WordPress.com domain, where you can get a blog for free
  • On Google’s Blogger.com, another very popular platform
  • With Tumblr, where people who seem to like posting photos or other creative work blog
  • On TypePad, a platform hosting many top blogs
  • Or on Movable Type, another robust blogging platform used by big companies and small.

(Note that some of these services are completely free, some have a free trial that then turns into a subscription, and some rely on you setting up your own domain with an internet service provider [ISP]).

Everyone seemed to suggest WordPress software, and I soon understood why.

 

What’s Great About WordPress

Since WordPress is the only blogging platform I’ve used, this doesn’t imply anything about any of the others. But I was immediately struck by how easy it was to do things that once took me quite a while. You could easily:

  • Add an article (or post, in WordPress language), for instance. This took a fair amount of work on my static website. With the WordPress software, it was a matter of dumping the text in, filling in a few fields, and hitting “Publish.”
  • Add a page. In WordPress, you can add a page as easily as a post, and just as quickly.
  • Add stuff to the sidebar. WordPress also makes this very easy, with a whole bunch of pre-coded things like “Favorite Posts”-type lists. Once you’ve done that, it’s pretty easy to add other things like badges and social media widgets, too.
  • Change the look. With thousands of different “themes” available free, you can change the whole look and design of your site in a moment. The ability to customize the software is built right in.

It turned out it was much easier to reproduce the pages from my old website—some of which are still somewhere on this blog—and have a hybrid site. WordPress, along with all the amazing add-ins from thousands of developers, make it possible.

Expanding in Many Directions

WordPress is open-source software, and encourages all kinds of software that extend the way you can use it in many directions.

  1. Themes allow you to change the look of the site, add hierarchy, organize content for use by lots of different kinds of WordPress installations. They can also include their own programming abilities, creating photo portfolios or complete e-commerce sites on top of the WordPress foundation.
  2. Plugins add functions like membership site credentials, e-commerce capabilities, spam protection, new classes of Pages you can create, and thousands of other things.

But for blogging, right out of the box, without much customization at all, WordPress is powerful software that’s

  • constantly being improved
  • is available free of charge,
  • is supported by a huge community of users and developers
  • can grow with you for years to come.

That’s why I love WordPress. It made the transition to real blogging fun and enjoyable and immediately understandable. And the software just keeps getting better.

Data

The Book Designer blog runs on the Thesis theme by Chris Pearson.
There are 12 widgets in the 2 sidebars and 19 plugins that do everything from filtering out 106,872 spam comments (as of today), to providing contact forms, doing search engine optimization, creating audio players and the floating social media share buttons sliding up and down the left margin.

 

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Blog Comments: What To Do When They Just Don't Like You

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This post, by Alice Bradley, originally appeared on the Babble Voices blog on 2/3/12.

Having addressed reader reviews in the last post, I now move on, AS PROMISED, to blog comments. I am nothing if not trustworthy! You can let me hold your bag when you go to the ladies’ room! Or men’s room! Whichever!

Why do you have so many pens in your bag? And why do none of them work?

Now. Blog comments on your blog (that part is important*) are an entirely different animal from reader reviews, in that 1) they are meant for you, and therefore 2) it is appropriate, and often necessary, for you to respond to them. If you’ve enabled comments, it means you want feedback and discussion among your readers. You’re part of your community, so you should get in there as well.

You can’t control what your readers think, and this is both unfortunate and fortunate. Unfortunate in that sometimes a reader will dislike what you said or simply dislike you, and that can sting. Fortunate in that if you could control your reader’s thoughts we’d all be living in some creepy dystopia where you control everything, and you’d probably like that, LITTLE MS. CONTROL FREAK. God! What’s your blog? I’m going to go write an angry comment on it.

It’s pretty obvious what to do when your commenters love you or at least respect you and want you to respond to their comments: you respond, right? (Unless they’re demanding your home address and/or your blood type. You might want to demur in that case.) It’s all quite simple, until that day, the one where you finally get it: the unhappy commenter. The reader who thinks you suck. The person who knows you are an utter fraud and liar and kitten-kicker and calls you on it.

Congratulations!

Listen, if no one cared you wouldn’t have received a comment like this. Either the commenter is annoyed (but cares enough to share his or her annoyance) OR either people care about you and that really gets this commenter’s goat, so he/she had to lash out. Pretty much every blogger who’s read by more people than her immediate family will deal with criticism, in one form or another. It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay. There, there.

Now that you’ve gone for a walk and maybe petted a cat for a while (if you like cats), ask yourself a few questions. Like so:

1. Does the reader have a valid point?

 

Read the rest of the post on Babble Voices.

A Fiction Author Reviews iBooks Author App: Should You Try It?

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This post, by Cheri Lasota, originally appeared on her site on 1/26/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

There’s a great deal of buzz on the Internet about Apple’s iBooks Author App. Most authors and pub­lish­ers haven’t used it or refuse to use it, usu­ally cit­ing Apple’s EULA agree­ment. Controversial as it may be, the announce­ment of the Author app was exactly what I’ve been wait­ing for. You see, I’m obsessed with ebooks. More than that, I’m madly in love with enhanced (inter­ac­tive) ebooks. What fol­lows is a fic­tion author’s take on the EULA Agreement as well as a run­down of my expe­ri­ence using the app to re-​​release my first novel this past week. Curious about the app? Read on.

 

The usual way to code ebooks. *sigh*

When Spirehouse Books released my novel, Artemis Rising, last September 2011, I went all out design­ing that thing with spe­cialty cod­ing. I spent about four months learn­ing how to design, for­mat, and code dif­fer­ent ver­sions for iPad, Nook, and Kindle. The process was clunky, glitchy, and slow. I loved every minute of it (remem­ber, I’m obsessed?), but I found myself yearn­ing for a bet­ter way.

Until now, there wasn’t a bet­ter way. Authors often men­tion Smashwords as their go-​​to aggre­ga­tor for pub­li­ca­tion. But Smashwords’ cod­ing and design is plain and lacks the capa­bil­ity for enhance­ments. Because ebook read­ers are essen­tially still in their infancy, they are rid­dled issues that require non-​​standard cod­ing, workarounds, or sim­ply giv­ing up on desired design ele­ments because valid code won’t work.

 

Enter the iBooks Author App.

I snapped up an iPad and I already had a MacBook. I just spent a cou­ple of days learn­ing the Author app and cre­ated an iBooks 2 ver­sion of my novel, which I suc­cess­fully uploaded. I’ll get to the details in a moment, but my ini­tial reac­tion? FREAKIN’ AWESOME.

Here’s a run­down of the ele­ments I used most often in the process:

Video

It took me four months of research, test­ing, and fail­ure to real­ize I couldn’t man­u­ally code in my book trailer  (still have no idea why it wouldn’t work). How did I do it with the Author app? I dragged the .m4v  file from my desk­top into the Intro Media sec­tion of the app. Done. (And no coding.)

 Photos

Took me a cou­ple of weeks to learn how to cen­ter a damn pho­to­graph for iBooks. I kid you not. But once I learned how, it was easy! *dou­ble sigh* One of those fun glitches in the iPad cod­ing, you know. Anyhoo, as you can imag­ine, drag­ging and drop­ping pho­tos into the app is effort­less. What’s really cool is that as you move pho­tos around the page, smart rulers and arrows help you line them up to other ele­ments. Can’t tell you how help­ful this was, as I had spe­cial glyph GIFs and another large image of a map on all 28 of my chap­ter header pages. Whoa. Resizing is a cinch, but the app is not set up to allow you to edit the pho­tos them­selves much. I sus­pect they’ll expand that capa­bil­ity in a later update.

Fonts

iBooks fonts kick everybody’s butt. Seriously. iBooks sim­ply has more font selec­tion and more typo­graph­i­cal fea­tures to add to your design. No other device  even comes close in this regard. Took me a bit to test the app’s lim­its on font manip­u­la­tion, but in the end I just went with what pleased my eye. I really wanted to delete the chap­ter header text and insert my own graph­i­cal title for chap­ter head­ers, but alas, I couldn’t get it to work. I’ll keep test­ing, because I could hand­code it (took me sev­eral weeks to fig­ure out that spe­cialty cod­ing too) in the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of my iPad epub file. I’ve not even attempted to try any cus­tom html cod­ing in the Author app. To be hon­est, I didn’t want to bother with cod­ing since most of what I needed was already avail­able in the app.

Inserting text

I’ve not played with every method or tried to import text from mul­ti­ple sources. I sim­ply copied the orig­i­nal text from my Word file (which was prop­erly for­mat­ted with clean styles, etc.) and dumped the whole man­u­script into the app. I hear from other sources on the Internet that there are eas­ier ways. But I was play­ing around with how I wanted to for­mat chap­ter header pages, so I wanted to try this method and take it slow. I then added in a chap­ter header page after decid­ing that that was prefer­able to using the “Preface” page for a novel. Which brings me to….

Chapter header pages

Everyone knows chap­ter pages are where most of your design ele­ments shine. And Apple does an amaz­ing job here, design­ing some beau­ti­ful ele­ments that take advan­tage of the hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal views of the iPad. A note on the views though: in gen­eral most ele­ments on the chap­ter pages must be designed twice: once for the ver­ti­cal view and once for the hor­i­zon­tal view. And just because your design looks purdy in one view…Well, much of my pre­view­ing and edit­ing work involved dou­ble check­ing both views to ensure that the read­ing expe­ri­ence was opti­mal all around. I spent a lot of time play­ing with the first chap­ter header page, because I knew that once I had that per­fect, I could then dupli­cate that page for all my chap­ters to save work time. That was fan­tas­tic. After the chap­ter header pages were set, I sim­ply added one page to each chap­ter and dumped my chap­ter text into it. Pages were added by the app to fit the text. Voila!

Glossary

Artemis Rising has a glos­sary of Portuguese and Latin words in the back mat­ter. In the old method, I used InDesign to hyper­link every word and then exported the book as an epub file (a very time-​​consuming process). The glos­sary fea­ture in the Author app is to-​​die-​​for easy to use. I high­lighted each word and added it to the glos­sary with the click of one but­ton. Later I went to the glos­sary sec­tion and pasted in each def­i­n­i­tion. That’s it. When the reader clicks on one of those spe­cial words, a lit­tle bub­ble pops up and gives them the def­i­n­i­tion right there. They don’t even have to nav­i­gate away from the page. Woot!

Preview

Previewing my design progress was ridicu­lously easy. I have iBooks open on my iPad. I plug the device into my MacBook. I hit the Preview but­ton in the Author app. I wait a bit. Presto! The new ver­sion pops in and I get to check out my updates.

TIP: Be sure to down­load the iBooks 2 app on your iPad before attempt­ing to Preview for the first time. Without it, you might run into issues. I did.

Elements I want to try next

I didn’t get a chance to use every fea­ture in this first go-​​around. But I have big plans. I want to build a photo gallery of my book trailer pro­duc­tion pho­tos (all taken by the bril­liant Beth Furumasu) as bonus back mat­ter. I want to cre­ate an inter­ac­tive map of my set­ting (I already have a map cre­ated in flash, but the folks at Apple are in a whiny fight with Adobe over Flash, so I can’t use it. Meh.) But I might be able to insert my own HTML5-​​coded map or use the inter­ac­tive wid­get within the app itself. Still explor­ing that. Doubt I can find a use for the 3D wid­get for my nov­els, but one never knows. =)

Should you use the Author app to design the iPad ver­sion of your book?

Would I rec­om­mend iBooks 2 and the iBooks Author App to indie authors and/​or small pub­lish­ers? A resound­ing YES, given a cou­ple of caveats:

  • You’ve obvi­ously got to have the hard­ware (an iPad and some type of Mac) and soft­ware (Lion OS X) needed. The app itself is free.
  • You’ve read the EULA and feel com­fort­able with what you are get­ting into.
  • You are inter­ested in doing an enhanced ebook–it’s great for fic­tion or nonfiction.

My ini­tial thoughts on the EULA Agreement controversy

The agree­ment itself is short-​​sighted and ambigu­ous. That goes with­out say­ing. But naysay­ers are for­get­ting one small detail that makes the cur­rent EULA’s stric­tures irrel­e­vant for now: the ebook files that the iBooks Author app cre­ates are far too com­plex for any other cur­rent e-​​reader device to dis­play prop­erly. In other words, you can’t read my Author-​​created novel on any other device than iPad, because devices like the Nook and Kindle aren’t sophis­ti­cated enough…yet.

I con­sider the Author app a beta. A test. A glimpse of the future. If Amazon is smart (please be smart!), they’ll hire a pro­gram­mer to cre­ate a sim­i­lar pro­gram and make it open to both PC and Mac users. And Barnes and Noble? They’d best get on it, too, or they’ll be the first of the Big Three to kick the bucket. I’m not even count­ing poor, dead Borders.

Apple’s most fool­ish move is to lock up their pow­er­ful pro­grams and apps from PC users. (Anybody else think it’s ASININE that we can’t read books we’ve bought through Apple on the Web? Silly. iCloud, where’s my damn book? *nar­rows eyes*) But in this case, that hoard­ing and elitest ten­dency is, as I said, irrel­e­vant. They are well aware that no other device can dis­play this con­tent. But that will some­day change, and once again, they’ll be left in Amazon’s dust. But that’s nei­ther here nor there.

My sec­ond thought on this: I can only sell an iBooks Author app ver­sion of my book through the iBook­store. I can sell my other ver­sions just how I always have. I have a spe­cially coded ver­sion for Nook and Kindle. I am curi­ous, though: can I sell two iPad ver­sions, per­haps giv­ing them both a sep­a­rate ISBN? One would be the Author app ver­sion and the other would be the “reg­u­lar” ver­sion. Hmm…anyone have an answer on that one?

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: for a differing, and more conservative, interpretation of the current iBooks EULA, see this post on the Passive Voice blog. The debate rages on among authors and indie publishers as to the correct interpretation of the EULA; as of this writing, Apple has remained mum.]

Next steps

We’ll all wait and see what hap­pens next in this yo-​​yo of an indus­try. The poten­tial of this app is phe­nom­e­nal, and no ambigu­ous EULA agree­ment will dimin­ish that. If you have a Mac run­ning Lion OS X, down­load the app and play around with it. Even if you don’t have an iPad. Try it out and see what could one of the great­est inno­va­tions ever in the short his­tory of ebooks.

I’ll say it again: FREAKIN’ AWESOME.

Want to see an iBooks 2 novel in action? You can down­load a sam­ple or buy Artemis Rising on your iPad. Here’s a link to the book.

Let me know what you think in the com­ments. And if you want to reprint this blog post, feel free. Just give me a credit.

 

Ooh! UPDATE: This is what might make us fall into fits of glee: an open plat­form ebook cre­ator! I just heard about this less than a minute ago.

One eBook Platform to Rule Them All

A com­pany known for long-​​form jour­nal­ism democ­ra­tizes tablet publishing.

http://​www​.tech​nol​o​gyre​view​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​m​i​m​s​s​b​i​t​s​/​2​7​5​1​9​/​?​p​1​=A3

Caveats: It’s not avail­able yet, still in pri­vate beta, and I have no idea what it might cost, if anything.

 

Upcoming West Coast Book Publishing Events for Indie Authors

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One of the staples of an author website or blog is the Calendar page. Fans can find out the next stop on your blog tour, where you might be speaking at a live event, or other notable happenings.

The problem is, in practice, these Calendar pages rarely get updated. It’s quite common to go to an author’s Calendar page and find out where they were speaking two, three, or four years ago. This makes me sad, so I’ve never put a Calendar page on my blog.

Instead, I’m listing right here the upcoming events I’ll be speaking live at, with links to the registration pages for each. These are all excellent educational opportunities being run by great organizations for writers and indie publishers.

 

Not only that, it gives me a chance to meet up with blog readers and indie authors, something that’s a lot of fun for me.

Here’s the lineup.

San Francisco Writer’s Conference

San Francisco Writer's Conference
“Bestselling authors Lisa See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan) & Lolly Winston (Good Grief) will join legendary editor Alan Rinzler as keynote speakers at the 2012 San Francisco Writers Conference.”

San Francisco Writer’s Conference

Pre- and Post-Conference Sessions Flyer (PDF)

This conference runs Friday, Saturday and Sunday February 17 – 19, 2012 in San Francisco. In addition, there will be a “Self-Publishing Bootcamp” on Monday February 20 as well. Always well-attended, you’ll meet writers, editors, agents and others in the publishing business for sessions with over 120 presenters.

I’ll be presenting a session on blogging as well as one on book design in the Bootcamp. Check the schedule for details.

IBPA Publishing University

IBPA Publishing University

“Haven’t published yet?—IBPA Publishing University’s the place to learn how.
Just published?—IBPA’s Publishing University’s the place to learn what’s ‘now.’
Been publishing awhile?—IBPA’s Publishing University’s the place to learn more”

IBPA Publishing University

For the first time, the Independent Book Publisher’s Association (IBPA) will hold their Publishing University on the West coast. This is a major opportunity for writers, self-publishers and indie presses to get both basic and advanced training in the business of publishing.

March 9 – 10, 2012 in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf area. I’ll be presenting a session on book design, and another on blogging. Come by and say hello!

Redwood Writers Conference

Redwood Writers Conference

“Our conference, themed ‘Next Step,’ offers you the opportunity to learn about the evolving publishing industry, to find new ways to promote your books and yourself, and to enhance your skills in the craft of writing. We offer four tracks—Craft, Genre, Marketing, and Publishing—and 16 breakout sessions. We wish, and you will wish, that you could take all 16.”

Redwood Writers Conference

Redwood Writers, a branch of the California Writers Club, is holding a full-day conference for writers and indie authors on Saturday, April 28, 2012 at the Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California. This is about an hour north of San Francisco.

I’ll be presenting a session on using your blog to market your books as well as participating in a panel discussion. If you come to the conference, be sure to look me up.

Ed: As usual at my presentations, I’ll have some kind of special bonus offer for attendees. But I don’t publicize these, so you’ll just have to come to get in on the good stuff.

As longtime readers know, my belief is that education is the most important part of getting ready to publish your own books. These conferences all present opportunities to take your own education in publishing to a whole new level. Added to that are the terrific opportunities to network, meet other authors, talk to vendors, and basically get a huge amount of information and education in a short period of time.

I’d love to see you at any of these events, and I hope you can make one of them if you’re in the area.

 

 

This is a cross-posting from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

The Publishing Cart Before the Storytelling Horse

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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 10/5/11.

I got a little rant stuck between my teeth. It’s like a caraway seed, or a beefy tendon, or a .22 shell casing (hey, f*** you, a boy’s gotta get his vitamins and minerals somehow).

Self-publishers, I’m talking to you.

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

And I’m talking to the pundits, too. In fact, I’m talking more to the pundits than to those actually walking the self-publishing path. Not everybody. Just a handful.

If you get a little froth on your screen, here — *hands you a squeegee* — just wipe it away.

Here, then, is the core of my message to you:

It is time to upgrade the discussion.

Let’s talk about what that means.

First, it means: we get it. Self-publishing is the path you’ve chosen and further, is a path you believe is lined with chocolate flowers and hoverboards and bags of money and the mealy bones of traditionally-published authors. Self-publishing is a proven commodity. You can stop selling the world on its power. This isn’t Amway. You don’t get a stipend every time another author decides to self-publish. You’re not squatting atop the pinnacle of a pyramid scheme. (And if you are, you should climb down. One word: hemmorhoids.)

Instead of trying to convince people to self-publish, it may in fact be time to help people self-publish well. While self-publishing may by this point be a proven path it doesn’t remain a guaranteed path. In fact it’s no such thing: I know several self-published authors out in the world with great books, kick-ass covers, and they are certainly not selling to their potential. In fact, if they continue to sell as they appear to sell then I would suggest these books would have done much better had they been published — gasp — traditionally. Succeeding in an increasingly glutted space is no easy trick. Every bubble pops. Every gold rush either reveals a limited supply or instead ends up devaluing the gold one finds there. The reality is that it’s going to become harder — note that I didn’t say impossible — to succeed in that space and so it behooves the Wise Pundits With Their Long Beards to acknowledge the realities and help authors do well.

It may then be a good time to acknowledge some of the challenges of self-publishing rather than ignoring them. Filter, for instance? Dogshit. Total dogshit. Discovering new self-published authors is left almost completely to word of mouth or to the marketing efforts of one author’s voice. The discovery of just browsing a bookstore and finding great new stuff to read is gone. Amazon offers little in recompense: browsing there is like trying to find a diamond in a dump truck full of cubic zirconiums. Marketing as a self-published author is a whole other problem: it’s tricky as hell. Half the self-publishers out there still manage to sound like Snake Oil Salesman — myself included — and so why not try to discuss the best practices? Why not talk about the way forward?

 

Read the rest of the post on terribleminds.

Goal Setting for Writers

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So many of us become interested in a fresh start at this time of year. We want to do better, get more done, become more successful, etc. For writers, this can include a number of approaches such as:

  • Work or projects accomplished
  • Entering new areas
  • Improved skills
  • Improved discipline
  • Greater recognition

Work or Projects accomplished– This pertains to getting the work done. Goals in this area are focused on various combinations of word counts, pages, number of articles or projects such as books written. Whatever it is, try not to bite off more than you can chew. Be realistic and plan ahead. In the military, we use a method called backwards planning. If you want to plan an attack for a certain time, start at that time and work backwards as to what must be done before that attack is accomplished in reverse order. For example: Let’s say you want to write a book and submit it to an agent/publisher or begin the self-publishing process. What’s the last thing you’ll have to accomplish in that process. If it is to submit the manuscript first, you’ll need to write a query letter or proposal package. Before that happens, the ms will need a final proofing. Before that, you’ll need a professional edit. Before that, you’ll need to go through the self-edit process. Before that, your final draft needs to be finished. Before that, you will need to write the book. Before that, you should outline the book. Before that, you will need to come up with a character bible/data-base. You should have conducted a good bit of your research before that. Before that, you will need to come up with a problem(s) to be solved or a theme and context.

Note, each one of these steps takes time. Some can be done simultaneously with others. Each takes a finite amount of time and effort. By doing a planning process like this, it will insert a degree of reality as to what is doable. It will also provide a series of sub-goals and steps to be accomplished and you will be forced to consider most of what needs to be done.

Related to all of this is setting realistic work effort goals such as when you will work, how long you will work, and how much you will get done each time you do.

If you’re working on projects of lesser scopes, such as magazine article, you can still use a similar planning process, but do it multiple times.

Entering new areas– Lets say you have been writing mysteries or thrillers but would like to try your hand at a different genre this year, such as paranormal romance. Lately, a number of well-established writers have been doing this when they depart from adult writing, changing over to young adult or mid-grade level writing in an attempt to capture more of a market earlier on. There are several important things which must take place before doing that, specifically: read, read, read. Become familiar with what that new genre or form looks and feels like. What kind of structures and language are used? Who are the big-gun writers in the new field and what are their reputations based on?  What’s done and what’s not done and why? Who in the industry specializes in the new area and how should they be approached, be they agent, publisher, reviewer, or market segment. You probably did something like this when you initially began writing in your specialty. Now you have to do it again.

Improved skills– So you want to be a better writer, then you need to learn to do so through self-study and with help from professionals. Although I have written several screenplays, I knew I wasn’t writing them as well as I could be. I had read “Screenwriting for Dummies” and several other good books on the subject. I had also read a number of screenplays of successful movies. I watch a lot of movies and TV episodes on Netflix. Still, that wasn’t enough. I finally signed up for and took a 10-day intensive internet course in subtext writing. I count the tuition I had to pay as an investment in myself. Do you see a pattern here? I did my due diligence with my self-study at several levels and still paid for professional guidance. I’m not saying I will now write great screenplays, but I know what I write will be much better than when I first began buying formatting software and trying my hand at it back in 1997.

Improved discipline– Be firm with yourself. If you set goals, work toward them on a regular, systematic basis. It’s just like setting weight-loss goals. You have to do it the right way and work at it constantly. The key word here is “work.” Have you ever met someone who is constantly talking about their someday dreams but who do nothing to actualize them? All the dreaming in the world will be for nothing if you don’t make the efforts to make them happen. New Years always puts people in the frame of mind to set goals, but that’s the easy part. The hard and meaningful part is attaining them.

Greater recognition– The most successful writers understand how important it is to gain recognition. They are always marketing themselves through the social media, industry organs, public appearances, and creating a fan base. The book industry is like the music industry. Who knows of you and who will buy your product? As iffy as this business is, the powers that be will always consider someone with a strong fan base or platform before they will consider a complete unknown.

OK, this may not be everything, but hopefully it will give you a few things to consider when setting those New Years goals.

 

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

Shifting Parameters: Editing Genre and Experimental Writing

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This post, by J.P. Hansen, is a reprint of an article that originally appeared on his The Art of Polishing Words site on 11/26/11. It is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Recently, I had the privilege of editing a fantasy novel. The job, it turned out, was fairly easy: I had to make suggestions about the delineation of characters, creation of vivid scenes, and formation of quality sentences.
 
Why was this job easy? Because it involved a genre novel which conforms to clearly defined characteristics. The novel’s very category provided me with parameters for editing. What are the expectations of fantasy? The characters need to seem larger than life and involved in epic-like dramas.  The scenes need to convey intense drama and action. And the sentences need to be clear and plainly written.

 
Next, I edited an experimental, mixed-genre manuscript, and all parameters went by the wayside. In fact, experimental literature by definition is writing in search of parameters, writing that establishes its own particular forms and means of approach. Sometimes, experimental writers, as did the author I was working with, even play with grammatical and spelling norms. At the level of proofreading, I needed to discuss with her whether or not some misspellings were intentional.
 
How is an editor to approach such a work? The only answer I can come up with is through empathy (See my post On Editing: a Dialogue Between Evaluation and Empathy on this blog.) My approach was to read through the manuscript once simply to catch on to the norms, forms, and expectations she was establishing. While I do something like this with all manuscripts, only in mixed-genre or avant-garde work does the first read-through involve trying to understand how this writing asks to be read.
 
In such a situation, I rely less on traditional editorial apparatus—the publicly accepted rules and expectations for good writing—and more on instinct and aesthetic taste. My feel for the piece of writing, and my feel for language in general, must be in deep accord with the author’s. For instance, I can’t just learn that she desires a certain "misspelling"; I need to understand why she wants it and how it partakes in her larger writerly palette.
 
The difference between editing genre work as opposed to experimental writing comes down to degrees. In genre work, editors are much more involved in honing the final product for public display.
 
Editors of experimental work are more involved in working with the writer to realize an artistic vision. Editors act as sounding boards rather than skilled and knowledgeable conventional language workers. This distinction is not, of course, absolute. Genre editors get involved with artistic vision, but not to the extent they do with experimental works.
 
As a general activity, the goal of editing in both works remained the same—to help make writing sing—but the feel of the work I did differed greatly.
 
About the Author: J.P. Hansen runs J.P. Hansen Writing & Editing Services and is the author of the Vanilla Lawyer Mystery series. He also blogs at Kindle Mystery and On Polishing: the Art of Editing, where this post originally appeared.

 

The Three Essentials Of A Great Acknowledgements Page

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1. Make It The Appropriate Size

Your book’s acknowledgements page will play an important role in the critical and financial success of your book. Therefore, it is essential that you do not skimp on the quality of information and quantity of time that you need to put into this section. Do not listen to those that tell you to keep this section “short and sweet”. There is no such rule about “keeping it down to one page”, or else you risk “boring your readers”. This is nonsense. If your non-fiction book is on the short side, maybe a few paragraphs are enough. A much longer non-fiction book will almost certainly need a longer acknowledgments section. You need to plan this section with some serious thought while you are developing, writing, and building your book.

2. Find A Good One To Emulate

With some research in your library and on the internet, you will be able to find some acknowledgements pages that are done correctly and certainly look like they should have a beneficial impact on the book’s success. Acknowledgements pages in too many non-fiction books are poorly planned and not well written. When you see one that is done correctly, you will notice it immediately. It will look, sound, and feel like it is talking to you with respect, and show you, the reader, how much effort the author put into making his book.  It will pull you into the book, and give you an inside look at what went into building that book. As you read it, it will make an emotional connection with you, and you will want to know more about that book and about the author. This is a good acknowledgments page to emulate.

3. Do Not Be Superficial

Making superficial statements about your spouse supporting you while you were writing your book, or your hard-working editor, or favorite professor in college, or the famous author you met for thirty seconds, will not help you or your book be a success. Making superficial statements about anyone will instantly make your readers realize that you are superficial, and not treating your book, the book’s subject matter, or the reader, with respect. You must give your readers an honest, sincere, and insightful view into who and what went into making your book come to life. It is your job as an author to write this section in a narrative format and in such a way as to keep it interesting. Show your readers all the wonderful and interesting and productive people that helped you make your book a success – and worth reading.

This article was written by Joseph C. Kunz, Jr. and originally posted on KunzOnPublishing.com.