Write

Articles about craft.

Settings

by

Let me caveat this article by saying I wasn’t an English or a Literature major. I double majored in music and business at Indiana University. I state this to explain why the following article is only my perception and opinion. I won’t use standard literature terms but my own.

Settings for writers of fiction and nonfiction are absolutely critical. They are far more than geographical locations in my opinion. Because of my intelligence background, I tend to think of settings as the context. It includes location, but it also includes contextual elements such as culture, dialects, customs, costumes, architecture, manners, and even time frame. All these elements impact on what and how people say and do. They are the glue and rules that hold together societies. A character violating the setting becomes wide open to criticism and conflict, which is fine if the writer knows how to capitalize on it. Put a 2011 Wall Street Stock Broker on a ranch in Wyoming in 1930, and you’ve got one hopeless individual. Likewise, put a cowboy from that time and place into a corporate setting of 2030 (a common theme in sci fi) and you’ll have a totally bewildered, endangered person.

Now I’m not saying don’t do these things. What I am suggesting is that you understand the impact such a change of setting may have on a character and a story. As you develop characters, you must consider the setting and how they interact with it. For example, one of the things that makes writing historical fiction so difficult is doing complete and accurate research so that you get the setting right and keep your characters consistent with their interaction within that time period, locale, and society.

Is your story line plausible within that setting? What impacts has that setting have on people. What activities are expected from an English butler as compared to an Irish street urchin at the front door of a mansion bordering Central Park in 1903? Do you think that might be a setting for conflict?

If you have been having difficulties with word counts that are too low, expanding on setting descriptions and impacts would be a good way to pump up the word counts. On the other hand, I’ve also read writers’ materials that went overboard in the other direction. I’ve come across this problem a lot in romance and gothic tales.

Setting accuracy is also a dangerous area. Let me illustrate this with a real-life example. I once reviewed a historical western set in the 1870s. This is how the author described a particular scene: “We crossed the Missouri River and traveled for hours into the setting sun until we finally reached Fort Leavenworth.” So what, you say? Here is the reality of that setting: The train bridge across the Missouri River was just downstream from Fort Leavenworth, which borders and overlooks the river from some bluffs. There certainly wasn’t any need to travel westward for hours to reach it. The same author mentioned several place names in Arizona, when they actually lay in New Mexico. Making mistakes like these shows the writer didn’t even bother to look at a map of the setting areas. All credibility is destroyed. Don’t you make mistakes such as these. Although they make for great hilarity in the reader’s mind, they also label the writer as a complete idiot.

I think now you should have an understanding of the importance and complexities of settings.Do your due diligence to discover the full composition of a setting and how elements and people within it interact. Enjoy your research and analysis.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear’s Book Trends.

11 Resources To Make Editing Your Novel Easier

by

As if learning the craft of writing a novel isn’t difficult enough, after it’s finished you’ll need to edit it. If you’re going to be traditionally published, you’ll probably work with an editing staff to make your work marketable.

But before it gets to that point, you have to get it past the slush pile – that means doing a lot of self-editing first.

Of course, you may choose to go the indie author route and self-publish. No need to rise out of a slush pile, just a need to catch a reader’s eye out there in the big world. Sounds pretty simple.

But before you catch a reader’s eye (and you want to make a good impression, yes?), you need to have a great story – that means doing a lot of self-editing and perhaps hiring a professional as well.

No matter what you do, if you want to be read and have those readers give you great reviews, spread the word and buy your other books, you have to face the red pen. You must edit your manuscript.

Thankfully there are many resources available to help from blogs to books to videos. Here are 11 resources that will make editing just a little easier on you.

  1. Editing Your Novel: High Level Story Read Through by Joanna Penn – In this video, with transcript, Joanna explains some of the process she went through editing her first draft of Pentecost from weaving in back story to checking for consistency.
  1. A Perfectionist’s Guide to Editing: 4 Stages by Jami Gold – In this blog post Jami narrows our focus from revising the big picture to nailing down those pesky words that need to be just a little stronger.
  1. Proofreading & Editing Tips: A compilation of advice from experienced proofreaders and editors – This article is just what it says, a list of tips from general proofing to content editing.
  1. Copy-Editing And Beta Readers by Joanna Penn – In this blog post Joanna shares how she worked with beta readers and what benefits she found from their feedback.
  1. No Really: Kill Your Clichés by Leslie Wilson – This blog post takes a humorous look at how clichés can hurt your writing.
  1. Do You Copy? Tips on Copy Editing Your Own Work by Janice Hardy – In this blog post Janice shares several concrete examples of common problems such as tense issues, parallel series difficulties and ambiguous pronouns.
  1. Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty – In this book Mignon helps writers understand complex grammar concepts by using simple examples and memory devices.
  1. 10 Actions You Can Take to Improve Your Proofreading by Randall Davidson – This blog post is rather on the nose with simple tips that include slowing down, reading out loud and asking for help.
  1. 10 Grammar Rules You Can (and Should!) Ignore! By Tracy O’Connor – In this blog post Tracy gives us permission to break those “hard and fast rules” like split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition… only when it makes the writing sound natural, of course.
  1. A Good Edit Would’ve Fixed That by April Hamilton – In this blog post April gives several concrete examples of how to fix problems such as using internal monologue for omniscient exposition.
  1. 5 Essential Tips on Self-Editing by Catherine Ryan Hyde – In this blog post Catherine reminds writers to use spell check, but don’t rely on it, as well as four other very useful tips.

Editing is unavoidable and can be painful, but it doesn’t need to be impossible. These are only a few of the resources I’ve found. What about you? What resources and tips have you picked up as you’ve gone through the editing process?

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

All The Cool Kids Are Doing It

by

Self-publishing, that is. Or at least, it can seem so. There are the breakthrough success stories at one end of the spectrum, bitter tales of sales disappointment at the other, and between the two, a generous smattering of testimonials from indie authors who aren’t earning enough to quit their day jobs yet but are covering the rent or groceries each month with proceeds from their book sales. Suddenly, if you’re not releasing a Kindle or Nook edition at the minimum, you feel like you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. The pressure to rush to market is great, but you must resist it until both you and your book are truly ready for prime time.

 

Is Your Platform In Place, Focused and Growing?
Releasing your book before you’ve made it easy for readers to connect with you online, whether via a blog, social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), or an author website, is a big mistake. Readers have come to expect authors to have an online presence of some sort, and not having one paints you and your book as a bit more fly by night.

I’m not saying prospective buyers will check for platform before making a purchase decision, but platform is what spreads the message about you and your work, pulling more and more readers into your fold and making those readers feel you care about their reaction to your work. Building a community around your work makes each subsequent book easier to promote, and creates a cheerleading section that will do a fair amount of promotion for you.

Is Your Book Still In Beta Test, Or Should It Be?
If you just completed your draft a week ago, I don’t care who you are or how fantastic a writer you are, it’s not ready to be published. Don’t scrimp on the workshopping and rounds of critique, and don’t let your sense of urgency about publication color your rewrite decisions.

Let’s say the majority of your workshop/critique readers agree the second act needs a major overhaul, and a certain character needs to either be significantly expanded or cut entirely. Your heart sinks as you realize you’re staring down the barrel of six weeks or more of rewrites, followed by another round of review, which pushes your publication date back by three months or more. It can be very easy to become so focused on your target publication date that you give short shrift to any feedback that could possibly interfere with that date.

Just keep reminding yourself: releasing a book that’s not ready will lose sales and fans. And if it’s your first book, readers aren’t likely to give you a second chance. There’s just too much else out there for them to choose from, and at bargain prices.

Have You Succumbed To The "Good Enoughs"?
Your manuscript is all formatted for print or ebook publication, and for the most part, it looks great. There are some inconsistencies in your formatting, like maybe most passages written in the voice of your protagonist’s deceased son are italicized as you’ve intended, but a few have been left in standard type. Maybe most of your paragraphs begin with a .25" indent but non-indented paragraphs are scattered here and there. Maybe most of your line spacing is 1.15, but here and there you’ve lapsed into 1.5, and it’s barely noticeable. Readers don’t care about these things, right? Most of the book’s formatting is correct and consistent, and that’s good enough, right? Wrong.

You know a quality cover will elevate your book above the crowd, but you have no art or typography skills to speak of, don’t have the money to pay top dollar for a professional design and don’t have the time to search out a freelance artist you can afford. So you get your artsy sister to create a cover image for you, and it may not look like a slick mainstream cover but it’s not bad. It doesn’t scream "my sister designed this for me," and that’s good enough, right? Wrong.

Again, don’t let your sense of urgency about publication set an unprofessional tone.

Are You Prepared To Promote?
The book’s been workshopped, polished to a high gloss, has a fantastic cover and attractive, consistent formatting, and you’ve got an author blog, Twitter account and Facebook page set up. Time to publish? Maybe, maybe not.

Are you prepared to invest the necessary time and effort to post to your blog regularly and acknowledge comments left there, to tweet quality messages and links, and respond to Facebook messages and wall posts? A neglected platform can actually be worse than no platform at all if it makes your readers feel snubbed.

Will you be able to do some guest blogging or write some articles to help get the word out about your book? Can you find the time to reach out to book bloggers and other reviewers, and are you prepared to send out free review copies of your book?

Platform maintenance doesn’t have to be a fulltime job, and you can calibrate your platform activities to match your available levels of time and energy (e.g., maybe you can do Twitter or Facebook, but not both; maybe a static author web page is best for you because you don’t have the time to blog, etc.).

What’s important is that you’re not going into publication with an expectation that once the book is out there, your job is done and all you need do is wait for the glowing reviews and royalties to start rolling in. Raising and building awareness doesn’t happen by accident.

Are You Going To Make The Rest Of Us Look Bad?
Whether for any of the above reasons or something else, if you’re not prepared to do a professional job of preparing your book for release and promoting it afterward, don’t publish. While indie books and authors are gaining widespread acceptance, every amateurish indie book has the power to create or reinforce an anti-indie bias, and that hurts all of us.
 

This is a reprint from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

Five Proofreading Techniques Every Talented Writer Should Know

by

This is a guest post from Randall Davidson.

Professional proofreaders use a number of proofreading techniques in order to produce the most polished and error-free results for their clients. These methods allow them to maintain their concentration on the material while ensuring that it is thoroughly checked for mistakes and necessary corrections. By adopting these proofreading techniques, authors and small business owners can improve the quality of their written communications.

  1. Double check. Most professional proofreaders check each project at least twice in order to ensure that no mistakes have been overlooked during the first pass. This can also help proofreaders to detect errors that may have been caused during the correction process itself, offering additional protection against mistakes at every stage of the proofreading process.
     
  2. Take a break. One of the most underrated proofreading techniques is also one of the most obvious; taking a break during the proofreading process can be exceptionally helpful in maintaining the necessary focus on the task. By stepping away from the project for a few minutes, proofreaders can often achieve a better perspective on the work both as a whole and in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation. This can allow them to detect errors more efficiently and effectively.
     
  3. Look it up. A number of online proofreading resources are available to proofreaders in need of spelling clarification or grammatical help. Google can be useful in cases in which a word has been misspelled in a way that makes it difficult to identify. A dictionary is another obvious source of spelling information. By looking up any words that appear questionable or unfamiliar, proofreaders can ensure that the finished work is of the highest possible quality.
     
  4. Divide and conquer. Splitting the proofreading process into various stages can help keep the process fresh and the proofreader alert. Spell checking typically constitutes one phase, with grammar, style and punctuation each comprising one of the other three stages of the process. The same effect can be achieved by a multi-tier approach; by approaching the material first word-by-word, then by the sentence, then by the paragraph and finally in sections, the proofreader can achieve optimal results. This strict method of ensuring repeated viewings of the same material can provide surprisingly effective proofreading results.
     
  5. Call for backup. Even professional proofreaders consult with each other on long and complex projects. Small business owners and individuals can achieve the same results by enlisting the help of a professional proofreading firm.  These professionals can often identify mistakes that might otherwise go uncorrected, creating a final document that presents the information in the most professional manner possible.

Randall Davidson is a co-founder of ProofreadingServices.Us, a rapidly growing professional proofreading services company committed to providing others with the tools necessary to produce polished documents. He does this both through the informative articles he writes and through the high quality online proofreading services that ProofreadingServices.Us provides.
 

Strip Mining the Authors

by

This post, by Passive Guy, originally appeared on his The Passive Voice blog and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written another important essay on the changing face of publishing. I’ll intersperse some excerpts with my comments, but this is one you’ll want to read in its entirety. There is, as always, a link at the bottom.

As will be abundantly clear from Kris’ examples, traditional publishers and the new agents-turned-publishers are making a brazen grab for as many rights from authors as possible while reducing the amount of money they will pay authors for their books. This is the new strip mining model for publishing.

Why are they doing this?

When the ship is sinking, some of the passengers start fighting over the lifeboats.

With each passing week, the handwriting on the wall becomes more and more distinct. What does the writing say?

Big Publishing, the agents who rely upon it and the traditional bookstores that provide its lifeblood are sinking. Just like the Titanic, they’re not disappearing in an instant. The band is still playing and fashionable people are doing business on the upper decks. The good ship Big Publishing will be bobbing in the waves for some time to come, but Amazon, ebooks and indie publishing have punched big holes in the hull. Those holes cannot be patched and the ship is going down.

Does this mean the end of publishing ships? No, but it means the demise of the grand ocean liners. The S.S. Amazon is an entirely different design, crafted for speed and efficiency and it doesn’t need many sailors schooled in the old ways.

While the band is playing and champagne flows, people make brave speeches about the timelessness of their trade. But, make no mistake, a battle is underway below-decks for spots on the lifeboats. If it’s necessary to toss authors over the side to make room, well, that’s just the nature of the business these days.

From Kris:

[A bestselling] writer, more than any other writer, is in danger of losing money and copyrights, of in fact going from making a lot of money to making little or no money at all. How can she lose money when she will probably maintain her bestseller status, her sales will probably go up, and her work will go into more markets than ever before?

Simple. Her contract terms will change and she might not even notice.

At some time hidden in the mists of time, an ancient rule of contracts was formulated: When a business partner is in financial trouble and wants a change in a long-standing agreement, watch your wallet. The more “routine” the change, the more dangerous it probably is.

Kris talks about e-rights:

Another clause to beware of in the e-rights clause of your new contract is this one:

“The Author hereby grants to the Publisher…the exclusive license to produce, publish, sell, distribute and further license any Electronic Version of the Work…. ‘Electronic Version’ means versions that include the Work…in a complete, condensed, adapted, or abridged version and in compilations for performance and display in any manner whether sequentially or non-sequentially and together with accompanying sounds and images, if any, transmissible by any electronic means, method or device (including but not limited to electronic and machine-readable media and online or satellite-based transmission or any other device or medium for electronic reproduction or transmission whether now or hereafter known or developed…)” [Emphasis mine.]

Yikes! Ick! No. Never, ever, ever, ever sign this clause. Think about this: movies are digitized—they are performance, and they are often distributed online. Not only does that clause allow someone to monkey with your work, abridging it, taking it out of order, adding things to it, making it into a performance piece, adding sound effects, but it also is a backwards way of granting television rights, video display rights, and any other performance right, so long as that performance can be distributed electronically.

And don’t believe that someone in your publishing house won’t use that clause down the road. The editor you trust may leave, the publishing company might change hands, and a clause that was designed for one thing will be used for something completely different.

Gold has been discovered in ebooks. Smart people are prospecting for more gold with enhanced ebooks. Video in ebooks is a definite possibility.

While a few people sprinkled in publishers’ management positions high and low may have seen a vision of what books could become and the effect that might have on publishers’ profits in their traditional lines a few years ago, nobody bothered to tell the gnomes who tended the standard-form contracts.

Kris has seen far more publishing contracts during her career than Passive Guy has, but the ones he’s examined that are more than a couple of years old are tight where paperbacks and hardcovers are concerned and they leak like a sieve everywhere else.

Back to Kris:

Watch out for your option clause. Try to avoid signing one at all. In the past, option clauses were like job security, but no longer. Option clauses have now become a way to tie a writer to a publishing house and to prevent her from working for anyone else. So strike your option clause if possible.

. . . .

Watch your warranty clause.  Now, many publishers are reverting to an old practice. They want writers to warrant that the writer will not write anything until this particular book under this particular contract is published.

This used to be a separate clause, and very easy to find.  It existed in a lot of contracts 20 years ago, then faded away.  Now it’s back with a vengeance.  It used to be that the writer guaranteed that the book she had just contracted for would be her next book and no other book would compete against it.

Now she’s guaranteeing that she will not write another book until this one is published.  And in many cases, the publisher enjoins her from writing anything.

This clause, which has been in every new book contract I have seen from traditional New York publishers in the past six months, is buried in the warranties.  Which are the boilerplate part of the contract, the part that includes bankruptcies and acts of God.  A lot of established writers stopped reading the legal gobbledygook in the boilerplate years ago, and have been snared by this clause.

Sometimes people fighting for lifeboats don’t act in rational ways. During the fight, the lifeboat may be damaged, supplies lost and passengers capable of providing valuable assistance to the survivors prevented from boarding.

When he read Kris’ description of these provisions, Passive Guy was reminded about one of the fundamental rules of making contracts with important long-term partners: Don’t screw your partner in the contract even if you have an opportunity to do so. When your partner realizes you screwed her as she inevitably will, she’ll spend all her time and energy working on ways to get out of the contract instead of doing whatever it was that you wanted her to do when you signed the contract.

What about the clause that hog-tied the author to the publisher? PG’s already thought of a half-dozen likely ways to evade the clause. He can’t help it, that’s just the way his mind works. However, he’ll keep those under his hat for the moment because he hasn’t seen the language in the contract.

Something else also came to mind, however. As described, the hog-tying clause potentially precludes a professional author from earning a living by writing for a competing publisher. When you think of it that way, it sounds a lot like a non-compete clause.

Non-compete agreements are common in the tech world. When you go to work for a tech company or become a contractor for a tech company, you’ll be required to sign a non-compete agreement that prevents you from taking everything you learned while you worked on the Apple ebook project and taking it with you when you’re hired for the Microsoft ebook project.

As with everything else, however, non-compete agreements were abused by some employers and today a dense combination of state laws and court decisions have placed substantial limits on how much a company can restrict the post-employment work of a former employee.

One of the fundamental limitations on non-compete agreements is a public policy that people should be free to work and support themselves in their chosen profession and should also be free to move from job to job. Limitations on that freedom included in non-compete agreements must be narrowly-tailored with time limitations to protect the vital interests of the company, not punish ex-employees or former contractors for quitting.

Back to the bigger picture for a moment, hiding material limitations on an author’s freedom in obscure warranty clauses as Kris describes is an unethical business practice.

Depending upon how it’s done and what extra-contractual representations are made to the author, we may be moving into fraud territory.

This practice exploits the great mismatch in resources and negotiating power between a large publisher and an individual author. Passive Guy has no problems with bare-knuckles contract drafting and negotiations when both sides have access to good-quality legal advice, but this is over the line. It demonstrates disrespect for an author and an intention to fleece the author for the financial advantage of the publisher.

This is antithetical to a relationship of mutual respect between professional colleagues. This is destructive exploitation – strip mining – of an author’s life work.

Such behavior by a publisher gives rise to an additional inevitable question. If the publisher is willing to engage in borderline fraudulent practices in its contract with an author, what additional types of fraudulent practices may it engage in? Even hidden clauses in a contract are far easier to discover than under-reporting of sales and underpayment of royalties.

So, how do we deal with hidden gotchas in a publishing contract?

Next week, Passive Guy will unveil yet another lovely contract provision for authors. Check back to learn about the Smoke ‘Em Out Clause.

And most definitely read the entire post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. This one can make or save you some big money.

 

Word Counts

by

Writers who do so for a living have been focused on word counts over the years. During the hey days of pulp fiction and pop magazines, writers used to be paid by the word. This sometimes led to excessively wordy books and articles. Today, with the internet’s space and attention constraints, writing tends to be much more tightly structured. This has led to articles for a set fee within certain word-count boundaries.

Today’s book recompense is basically focused around a percentage of a book’s retail or net price, depending on the terms of the publishing contract. Various genres tend to have different standards based upon what the reading public is accustomed to. Generically speaking, if a book is less than 50,000 to 60,000 words, it’s creeping into the novella region. Most publishers (and therefore agents) have submission requirements, which are based on the pragmatic realities of the bottom line.

An unknown, first-time author should try to stay within the 60,000 to 75,000 word range. Why? To keep the publishers’ pre-production and printing costs down. They are taking a major risk on an unknown entity–a gamble that the book will at least break even. I once had an editing client, who at the ripe old age of 20, had written a 3,000 page tour de force military thriller. Mechanically, he was a good client. He learned from his mistakes and caught them in future self-edits. His stories were gripping and accurate. He would never be able to sell such a book until he had established a major reputation and fan platform. The book would be way too huge to  risk its initial costs.

First-time-authored books often become self-fulfilling failures. Since the publishers are unwilling to take on the risks of production and marketing, everything is cut back or eliminated. This results in a low-cost cover that won’t attract anybody’s attention. few will get the word because the ad campaign just isn’t there. The bottom line is, there is no bottom line–no profit. Constraints on the word count also contribute to a dismal prediction.

What To Do

So what can you do word count wise to improve the chances your work will make it through the agent/publisher submission process?

  • Know your genre of interest in regard to writing styles (tight? not so tight?)
  • Know your genre agent/publishers’ submission requirements in regard to word counts
  • Pre-plan your word counts and be flexible about what goes into your story

Let me expand a little on this last point. Sometimes, especially if you don’t have much experience) you will write your story and suddenly discover it’s not long enough. Oh oh, what now? Go back through the story. Look for places where scenes that create more tension or more emotional quandaries might be added without creating a sense of padding. This approach is one of the best ones I know to expand a story while adding to its interest.

Of course, if you can plan for this ahead of time, it will make your life a lot simpler. Let’s say you’ve created scenes, chapters, and acts or sections. You’ve arranged them into a logical outline and you suddenly realize, “Hey, all this ain’t long enough!” I faced this while outlining my new fantasy. I’m accustomed to writing snappy little mysteries of 50,000 to 65,000 words in about 42 short chapters. My new fantasy only had maybe 25 or so chapters, which definitely won’t cut it these days. What could I do to lengthen the work while increasing its tension?

I made two lists. The first was all the dangerous animals my questors might confront and what might happen if they did. I then did the same with a list of all the natural and man-made catastrophes they might encounter while traveling on their quest. I then when through the outline seeking logical places where items such as these might be placed in order to increase tension and make the reader think, “My gosh, what next?” You want to give the reader encouragements to keep on reading, even if it takes all night.All this hails back to when I was a lonely little boy on my grandparents’ farm without playmates. I would tell stories out loud to myself for hours on end. The most common phrase you might have overheard from me was: “..and then…, …and then….”

Another way you can pump up the word count is through the use of additional or expanded subplots and characters. I have used these to good effect in the past. I have found one of the easiest methods of doing this is to add a scene. One way to identify or mark these places is with a break symbol of three asterisks centered or with a new chapter designation

There you have: the importance of word counts and how the plus them up if need be..

 

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

10 Things You Need to Know About Self-Publishing

by

This post originally appeared on the Web Design Schools Guide site and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

Today’s authors have started to catch on to the fact that they no longer have to depend on and pay a third-party publisher to do the work that they can do themselves by self-publishing. Self-publishing is no piece of cake, but these books have all the potential to be best sellers and major moneymakers just like their commercially-published counterparts. Whether you’re sold on having endless artistic freedom or complete control over your work, self-publishing is a rewarding task and terrific option for authors who are willing to put in the extra effort. Here are 10 things you need to know about self-publishing:

  1. You Need to Pick a Niche: It’s important to pick a well-defined niche for your book to guide you during the writing process and help determine your target audience. Niche books tend to do best, so it’s generally a good idea to write what about what you know and steer away from personal journals, emotional rants or niche topics that no one has heard of. Also, think about what your audience wants to read and what’s missing from your chosen niche. Once you determine this important information, you can better address the needs of your readers and niche market, as well as make a name for yourself.
     
  2. Study Your Competition: Before you self-publish, it’s important to study, analyze and keep up with your competition. If you haven’t picked a niche for your book yet, but have a couple genres in mind, start your investigation by looking closely at these types of books and authors to compare and contrast. If you do your homework and stay on top of your competitors’ latest works, you’ll be able to bring something fresh and new to the table and hopefully stand out from the others.
     
  3. You Are Your Own Editor: It’s important to remember that self-published authors are on their own for editing, unless you hire a professional editor, which can get expensive, fast. Proofreading and revising your own work is all part of the self-publishing process and is necessary to maintain full creative control of your book. If you’re taking the self-editing challenge, be sure to utilize the numerous editing resources available online, and try to get a second set of eyes to take a look.
     
  4. Make Your Title Memorable: In order to stand out among the rest, you’ve got to make your book title unique and memorable. This is true for any book – self-published or not. A short, clever title is always preferable, but it should still be clear and relevant to your book.
     
  5. Self-Publishing Includes Self-Promotion: If you don’t have a publishing company and literary agent to market your book for you, you’d better be ready to do it yourself. Self-published authors have to put themselves out there and take an aggressive approach to marketing if they actually want to sell their books. This includes promoting the book online, organizing book signings and sending complimentary review copies to newspapers and magazines. Essentially, you should eat, sleep and breathe your book so others will care about it as much as you.
     
  6. Praise and Criticism Should Happen Naturally: As tempting as it is to ask friends and family to write positive reviews for you, whether they’ve read your book or not, authors should overcome this urge and let praise and criticism happen naturally. Fake or forced reviews are easy to spot, and it won’t help your image one bit. So, sit back and let unbiased readers praise your work or rip it to shreds. After all, isn’t criticism better than no attention at all?
     
  7. A Literary Agent Isn’t Necessary: As much help as literary agents can be, they aren’t necessary for selling good books. If you’re dead set on self-publishing and reaping the benefits on your own, you probably don’t have much need or desire for a literary agent who works in mainstream publishing. Having an agent often defeats the purpose and personal benefits of self-publishing because you’ll no longer have 100 percent control over your work.
     
  8. Self-Published Authors Can Still Win Awards: Forget what you’ve heard before – self-published authors can win awards too! Every year, there are several writing contests to enter and awards to be given for superb self-published work, including short stories, fiction, nonfiction, poetry and many other genres. Credibility, a strong readership and strategic marketing will help you achieve your goals and reach the award-winning level.
     
  9. Know Your Audience: An essential part of writing and successful self-publishing is knowing your audience. Since self-published books generally cater to a smaller niche market, you have to consider your audience from the project’s conception, publication and marketing stages. One way of knowing your audience is to study the demographics, interests and needs of readers within your chosen niche. If you’ve self-published work in the past, get in touch with your readers and deeply consider their comments, concerns and questions when writing your new book.
     
  10. Send Out Review Copies: One of the best ways to establish credibility and garner attention for your hard work is to send out review copies to as many people and publications as possible. If your budget allows it, you can snail mail printed complimentary review copies of your book to newspaper, magazine and journal reviewers, as well as publishing companies, bookstores and anyone who sparks an interest in your writing.

 

Of Readers And Gatekeepers: A Call To Arms

by

Are you reading this? Then I’m talking to you. You’re a reader and you have a new responsibility. I’m including myself in this. I’m a writer, but I’m a reader too. Any writer worth his or her salt should be a voracious reader, and we’ve got a new responsibility as well. We’re all the New Gatekeepers. No, not extras in a Doctor Who episode, don’t get over-excited.

There’s so much talk about the changing face of publishing, and justifiably so. It’s an exciting time and writing and publishing is going through a renaissance brought about by new technologies. That means there are options out there for pretty much everyone to get their writing out into the world, and a lot of people are taking up the opportunity. Some people are doing seriously well out of it, like Amanda Hocking. Others are doing rather less well, like the poor woman that immolated her career with one online review – you know who I mean. But one of the net results of this revolution in publishing is that readers have been saddled with a massive new responsibility.

Gatekeeping is important. In the good old days of the late 90s and early 2000s, and since forever before that, the gatekeepers were the publishers. Writers would approach publishers, either directly or through agents, and publishers would decide what was published and what wasn’t. They essentially filtered what everyone got to read. The upside of this was, largely, the stuff that made it into print was generally well written and worth reading. Generally. We all know publishers are quite capable of turning out reams of utter shite too. But on the whole they ensured a general level of quality control. The downside, apart from the afore-mentioned shite, is that they also ensured that anything risky or unusual, something strangely cross-genre, something not immediately saleable, was unlikely to see the light of day. There were self-publishing and small press success stories, where the unlikely became massive, but those hits were very, very rare.

Now, with the advent of Print On Demand and ebook technology, publishers have found those gatekeeping responsibilities ripped away. Writers are still keen to be published by the big guys – there’s a definite advantage to it, both in terms of credibility and distribution, hence readership. But literally millions of people are circumventing the publishers and self-publishing. Millions more are scoring smaller deals with small press. The volume of stuff out there is staggering. And a lot of it is complete shit.

Remember, the publishers themselves have turned out many stinkers over the years, but the strike rate for quality – in editing, formatting, production and so on, as well as writing ability – has generally been kept high even if the stories were rubbish. Not always, but often. Nowadays people think it’s easy to write and be “published” and there’s loads of stuff out there that really shouldn’t see the light of day. Poorly written, poorly edited, poorly formatted – just poor. And that’s where we as readers come in. This is why we are the New Gatekeepers.

Success in writing has always relied on word of mouth. When a big publisher puts the might of the marketing machine behind a new release that word of mouth gets a massive head start, but it’s still the reviews and recommendations of critics and readers that determine whether a book is truly successful or not. That’s still the case, but the mainstream reviewers can’t keep up with the tsunami of words constantly bearing down on them. Along with all the newly published writers, a whole bunch of new reviewers have cropped up, and many book review blogs are developing considerable power. This is a very good thing, as it helps to strim out the crap and let the quality stuff rise to the top.

But you don’t need a review blog to wield power in this new world. You’re a reader – you have enormous power. If only you’d use it. By the Power of Yourskull! Or, more accruately, the brain within it. If you read something you like, tell people all about it. Recommend it to your friends, buy it and gift it to people. You can gift ebooks now as well as print books. There is no better result for a writer than a reader enjoying the book and recommending it. But don’t stop there – there’s so much more you can do, very easily.

You don’t need to be a talented reviewer to review books. Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Goodreads, Smashwords – all these places and more make it very easy for you to leave a review and rate a book. Or just rate it. Your review doesn’t have to be anything lengthy to have an impact. For example, look at this review of my second novel, MageSign, that a reader called Joefredwheels left on Amazon.com (Yes, I’m going to use my own work as reference. Sue me.):

excellent follow up – great story continuing adventure of first book protaganist. hoping for more stories in this world. Baxter is an excellent writer of a fast past exciting plot. THIS IS WORTH THE MONEY. BUY THE BOOK

He also rated it five stars. Brilliant. It’s very short, it’s not worrying about being good writing in itself, it’s simply conveying the person’s enjoyment of the book. Sure, it’s cool when readers take the time to write a few paragraphs of carefully thought out critique when they review, but the review above is just as valuable.

Here’s another example, this time a review of RealmShift, left on Amazon by Cathy Russell “Ganymeder”:

a well thought out tale – I liked that this story had believable characters and explored faith (or lack of), it’s origins, etc. It had a lot of deep themes. The characters were well thought out. The plot was engaging, and I liked the whole idea of a superhuman who could kick the devil’s ass. While reading this, I kept thinking it would make a great action movie or comic book too. I’d recommend this. 4 stars.

That wouldn’t have taken long to write, but in a single paragraph she recommends the book and gives some basic reasons why. Again, brilliant.

I can’t express how grateful I am when people take the time to do this. And it’s something we can all do, for any publication, anywhere on the web.

I tend to review books I enjoy here on my blog, but I’m a regular blogger anyway. I always rate them on Goodreads. I’m also planning to copy my reviews over onto Amazon and Goodreads – I wish I’d done it as I wrote them, as now it’s going to take a while and a concerted effort. But I’ll do it, because I plan to put my reviews where my mouth is.

So we, as readers, are the new gatekeepers. It’s our responsibility to help spread the word about the good stuff we read, and the bad. You don’t have to leave negative reviews on anything – just don’t review them. But it’s an act of true benevolence to leave good reviews of stuff you enjoy, or drop by websites and leave a star rating. You can write a single line or single paragraph review and copy that to all the sites you visit or shop at. If you do blog, then reviewing a book on your site is fantastic. But whatever you do, do something. Help spread the word. As writers, nothing is more valuable to us than the recommendations of readers. It’s always been that way, and now it’s more true than ever. Readers can make sure the good stuff out there gets noticed and more writers get themselves a well-earned career. Power to the people!

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter’s The Word.

A New Freedom of the Press: How Does Publishing Underwrite Revolutions?

by

This is a guest post from Thomas Doane.

The Arab Spring continues, and this month we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible’s publication. 

The question I’d like to briefly reflect on here is: What do the Reformation and the Arab Spring have in common?
The answer that I’d like to advance is that—among other things— what these two historical epiphenomena have in common is that they were both catalyzed by evolutionary leaps between publishing platforms. 

The fortunes of the parties involved in the conflict in the Arab world sway this way and that. Plucking more or less randomly from meta descriptions below the Google News results this morning we read that “NATO is considering intensifying bombings in Libya… Israel is very nervous about how Palestinians are spinning the Arab Spring…The ICC seeks to prosecute Gaddafi…  Syria denies mass grave allegations…” Etc. etc.  Another headline from the Gulf News this morning, May 18th, 2011: “Social Media played a role in facilitating the Arab Spring.” The first line of this article reads: Whether social media led to the Arab Spring or facilitated it, it played a major role in mobilizing Arab streets as they rose against their ruling regimes, said panelists at an Arab Media Forum session on the role of social media.
This has been a mantra since January, when—after Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself on the streets of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia in December—a cascading domino effect of uprisings started to roll across North Africa and into the Middle East. In a now classic article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter, and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” Obviously, there is a difference between correlation and causation, and much digital ink has been spilled to assign social media’s role in the Arab Spring to one category or another.
Meanwhile, this month Harper’s cover story is the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. While nothing about the KJV seems subversive to most of us today (quite the opposite for most of us), historically it can be seen as one of the literary climaxes of a sequence of revolutions that rocked the geopolitical make-up of the Western world in the 16th and 17th centuries—namely, ‘The Reformation.’ 
About 90 years before the KJV first ‘hit the stands in bookstalls’ all over England, becoming ‘the bestseller of all time’ over the next 400 years, a man named Martin Luther sat down and translated the Bible out of Latin and into German. While this sounds rather innocuous from our 21st century point of view, it could be argued that this act—amplified and disseminated across Europe by means of the recently invented printing press—ignited the 16th century’s version of a World War, completely and permanently transforming the global geopolitical landscape for all succeeding centuries.
What changed is that the ‘information’ contained in scripture—the actual words written in the Bible—became widely accessible to the public for the first time ever. There was a massive explosion of literacy. But a streamlining of the publication and dissemination of the printing press was a pre-condition for creating this kind of change. As the European masses (rather than just the priesthood) got hold of this information for the first time, they developed counter-narratives that diverged from the Church’s reading. The King James evolved out of one of these counter-narratives. 
Arguably, the epic shift from print to digital, and from AP journalism to crowd sourced social media communication is the biggest evolutionary leap between publishing platforms that we’ve seen since the invention of the printing press. And while the Arab Spring may not have been caused by social media, I think most people would argue that the social media revolution was a necessary pre-condition to launching the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle-East at the level of well-documented, contagious efficiency that we’ve seen this spring. And it was almost certainly a pre-condition to keeping the body count as low as it has been. 
So I propose a toast to two strange bedfellows: Johannes Gutenberg & Mark Zuckerberg.
Hail old fellows, well met!

And to each, thanks for the merry old  messaging platform they did invent!

Smartphone e-Reader App Reviews: Stanza by Lexcycle

by

As e-books become more popular, they are inevitably merging with the largest platform for e-book readers, the smartphone. Google’s Android operating system is now powering more phones than Apple’s iOs, but both continue to surge ahead in terms of market penetration and new users.

All told, the top 5 smartphone manufacturers sold 140 million phones in 2010. That’s a lot more than all the iPads, Kindles, Nooks, Sony Readers and Kobo tablets put together.

It makes sense to think about whether your book are suitable for the smallest screen. Will the story still make sense on those little pages? Will the formatting of your nonfiction book survive the reader’s desire to see the type at the largest available size?

Time to find out.

I decided to take the top e-Book reader apps for smartphones out for a virtual test drive. Although I don’t claim to be encyclopedic in these reviews, I’m looking at them both from the point of view of someone who doesn’t mind reading on the phone, as well as a publisher looking to find readers where they want to be reading. If that’s for a few minutes while standing waiting for the bus, so be it. That’s up to the reader.

StanzaI decided to start with Stanza, a free e-reader originally developed by Lexcycle, a company that was later acquired by Amazon. It’s unclear at this point whether Amazon intends to keep the program alive or not, since the website seems to have gone dormant some months ago.

However, Stanza, which was the most popular e-Reader at one time, and one of the top free apps in Apple’s app store, is such an unusual e-book reader, it’s well worth a look.

For Readers, You Need Books

One of the things that distinguishes Stanza is the sources for its e-books. Unlike Kindle, iBooks, Google and Nook, the app is not linked to one store for its purchases. Instead, Stanza has access to a lot of diverse libraries of e-books. This is both a strength and a weakness, since you may not find the same coverage or quantity in the different collections as you might with the Kindle app, for example.

But Stanza has other tricks up its sleeve. Let’s look at the main components. Compared to most e-book readers, Stanza has a vast control system that allows you to customize your reading experience in ways no other e-reader can match.

Here are the main elements of the app, with some notes.

  • Reading screen—Stanza gives you unparalleled control over the display, far surpassing what other e-book readers allow. Here the reading screen is shown in Georgia with a beige background, and with the type fully justified and hyphenated, something that’s simply impossible on other e-readers.
    Stanza reading screen

    Click to enlarge

Control screen—This is the screen you get when you tap once, and it gives you access to a huge variety of tools to control the app. From here you can navigate using the buttons along the bottom of the screen, to:

 

 

Stanza control screen

Click to enlarge

Stanza settings

Click to enlarge

Note that in the settings screen there’s a sample at the top showing you instantly the effect of the changes you’re making.

 

 

  • Table of Contents, bookmarks and annotations
  • Settings screens with controls for general items, layout, appearance, and app control.
  • Layout tools like Justify, Left, right or center,
  • Hyphenation with dictionaries in many languages
  • Margins, Line spacing, Paragraph spacing and Paragraph indent. These controls use adjustment sliders.
  • Appearance tools like switching to the Night Theme
  • Choice of 42 fonts, and font size selection with sliders
  • Background and text colors
  • Background image and opacity
  • Even more software controls like lock rotation, use page turn effects and more.
     
  • Library screen—Here is where you store your books, and you can sort on Books, Authors, or Groups.
  • Bookstore screen—You can see right away the difference between Stanza and the proprietary apps that only allow you to shop in one store. The app includes access to these retailers:

     

    And these free and sample e-book sources:

    Stanza bookstores

    Click to enlarge

    You’ll notice even more control icons at the bottom of the screen, including an invert button to switch between black on white or white on black, a search tool and access to yet another screen of controls, this one called Actions, which includes

    • Books on Board eBook Shop
    • O’Reilly Ebooks
    • All Romance eBooks
    • SmashWords
    • Fictionwise
    • Feedbooks
    • Project Gutenberg
    • Random House Free Library
    • Try Harlequin
    • Books from Munseys
    • Books from BookGlutton
    • Pan Macmillan Tasters
    • the command to delete a book
    • a dictionary
    • access to your downloads
    • another set of font size controls
    • and a sharing menu for Facebook, Twitter or via email

Just for fun, I changed a lot of the display parameters and loaded a more heavily formatted nonfiction book. Here it is with a white background, no hyphenation or justification, and typeset in American Typewriter:

Stanza

Click to enlarge

Overall, Stanza is easy to use and gives you terrific control of the reading experience in far more detail than any other e-reader. Although the choice of new trade books may not be as wide as other, proprietary apps, the ability of Stanza to also handle PDFs and other formats is even more reason to add this app to your smartphone.

Next up: Apple’s iBooks app.

Stanza in the iTunes App Store
Also available as an app for Macintosh, for iPad and for Windows.

 

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

10 Grammar Rules You Can And Should Ignore

by

This post, by Tracy O’Connor, originally appeared on Ghostwriter Dad on 1/7/11.

Some people are pedantic twits when it comes to the squishy rules of grammar.

Truth is, grammar is a powerful tool that lends clear meaning to quality copy, but it’s also far more flexible than most people realize. And a lot of what people claim as hard, fast rules can be completely ignored.

It is important to ensure your writing is easy to understand and that you set the proper tone for your audience. Outside of that, the page is your canvas to paint. Despite conventional wisdom, here are some rules you can safely ignore:

1. Never end a sentence with a preposition. Bow down to this rule without question and you’ll end up with unnatural sentences that are more difficult to understand. If the meaning of your sentence is clear and it sounds natural, go ahead and end it with a preposition.

Consider “What are you waiting for?” versus “For what are you waiting?”

Both are correct, but the second sounds like part of an 18th Century soliloquy.

2. Don’t start a sentence with “and,” “but” or other conjunctions. Starting too many sentences with “and” or “but” will make your writing sound like a second grader’s. But use it in moderation and you will have the voice of the everyman.

This can be particularly useful when you are trying to add emphasis or give your writing a conversational tone.

3. Don’t use double negatives. While you’ll probably want to avoid sentences like “I don’t got none,” there is a place for double negatives, particularly if you enjoy being snarky. “Twilight is a not unpopular series of books,” or “I’m not unfamiliar with your blog.”

Be sure to use it sparingly unless you want your readers to become not unwilling to kick you in places you’d rather be licked.

 

Read the rest of the post for seven more grammar rules you can sometimes ignore on Ghostwriter Dad.

10 Actions You Can Take To Improve Your Proofreading

by

This guest post, by Randall Davidson, originally appeared on Nick Daws’ Writing Blog on 5/19/11.

Today I’m pleased to bring you another guest post from writer, proofreader and entrepreneur Randall Davidson. 

Randall has ten top tips for writers on how they can improve their proofreading skills to create better, more professional-looking documents.

* * *

Correct and efficient proofreading is one of the most crucial elements in producing quality advertisements, business documents and academic papers. Misspellings, poor grammar and/or improper word usage can create a negative impression that may overshadow your desired message. Additionally, these mistakes can reflect poorly on the individual or company responsible for the errors. Here are ten proofreading tips that can produce more professional results.

  1. Divide and conquer. By looking at the document in sections, proofreaders can often catch mistakes that might otherwise go unnoticed when reading a longer paper. Smaller sections can reduce fatigue and allow the proofreader to process the material more effectively while minimizing the chance that an error will be overlooked.
     
  2. Slow down. Many proofreading errors occur due to haste during the process. No list of proofreading tips would be complete without a recommendation to slow down and read carefully as you proofread.
     
  3. Sound it out. Reading the document out loud is one of the most beneficial proofreading tips and can help to identify mistakes in word usage and grammar that may not be apparent in the printed form. Additionally, any repeated or missing words are easily identified when the document is read aloud.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes seven more proofreading tips, on Nick Daws’ Writing Blog.

Publishers Be Crazy…Or Desperate

by

I just read this article about Bookish.com, a new joint venture being launched later this summer by Hachette Book Group, Penguin USA and Simon & Schuster. Per the article:

The site intends to provide information for all things literary: suggestions on what books to buy, reviews of books, excerpts from books and news about authors. Visitors will also be able to buy books directly from the site or from other retailers and write recommendations and reviews for other readers.

The publishers — Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group USA and Hachette Book Group — hope the site will become a catch-all destination for readers in the way that music lovers visit Pitchfork.com for reviews and information.  

A couple of sentences further down, you’ll read:

“There’s a frustration with book consumers that there’s no one-stop shopping when it comes to information about books and authors,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “We need to try to recreate the discovery of new books that currently happens in the physical environment, but which we don’t believe is currently happening online.”

There are three problems with Ms. Reidy’s statements.

First, there is NOT "a frustration with book consumers that there’s no one-stop shopping when it comes to information about books and authors," because in fact, there are several sites that offer one-stop shopping for author/book information. Perhaps Ms. Reidy just hasn’t heard of such obscure, underground sites as Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, Shelfari.com, and LibraryThing.com.

Second, nobody needs to "recreate the discovery of new books that currently happens in the physical environment," because for the average consumer, discovery of new books NO LONGER HAPPENS IN THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT. Once again, it’s Amazon, Goodreads, Shelfari and LibraryThing to the rescue here, not to mention genre-specific online communities like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and format- and device- specific online communities like Kindle Nation Daily.

Third, Ms. Reidy and her compatriots don’t "believe [this is] currently happening online." Why not?! How is it possible that publishers are THAT FAR out of touch with book buyers? I’ll tell you how: traditionally, publishers have viewed booksellers as their customers, and book-buyers as the customers of booksellers. They have little to no idea what’s bouncing around in the head and life of the typical consumer, because they haven’t had to know those things to run their business at any time in the past—past being the operative word there.

So these three major publishers are sinking massive amounts of time, effort and money into a huge new initiative that I think just about any typical book-buying consumer on the street could tell you today is destined to fail. And how do you suppose they’ll be financing this new initiative? Certainly not by reducing the prices of their books, or signing more new, unproven authors, or keeping books on physical shelves longer to give them a better chance of catching on, or giving individual authors more marketing money.

I’m sure the publishers would say this initiative is all about supporting their authors and marketing books in a cost-effective way, so kudos to them for good intentions. But while they may know book and author marketing today is all about author platform, they clearly don’t understand that author platform is all about community, and community is about making personal connections and feeling like you’re part of a movement. Which do you think a fan of Stephen King would rather visit: Stephen King’s personal site and online community of fans, or the obviously corporate umbrella site, Bookish.com?

Bookish.com content will necessarily be vetted and vanilla, so as not to hurt the corporate images and reputations of its backers and to avoid offending any site visitors. Anyone who wants the raw, unfiltered version of musings from their favorite authors and opinions of others in those authors’ communities won’t bother with Bookish.com when they can get the straight scoop right from the horses’ mouths elsewhere.

I hate to sound so negative and dump all over publishers like this, because it’s a good thing that they’re finally willing to try something new. But at this point, they face the same problem Microsoft did with its Zune MP3 player: Apple got there first with the iPod, and they did it very well. If you’re going to enter the marketplace with a new product for which the demand has already been fulfilled by someone else (or several someone elses), then your product has to be so incredibly, amazingly compelling that consumers will feel they’re missing out by not switching to it. Microsoft tried it with the Zune; I think by now we can all agree they failed to capture enough of the MP3 player market to even make Apple break a sweat. And Microsoft has decades of experience with technology and marketing direct to consumers.

So Bookish.com gets an A for effort, but a goose egg for vision and sustainability.

Publishers: maybe you’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe instead of trying to supplant the Amazons, Goodreads and Shelfaris of the world, you should be looking for ways to leverage what those sites and communities are already doing, and doing very well: crowdsourcing.

Let them tell you what the readers want to see in print and ebook forms. Listen to consumer complaints about ebook release windows and pricing, and respond accordingly. Switch to POD book production so you can offer a much wider variety of titles at a much lower cost; grousing about the lack of variety and fresh, new voices from mainstream pub is so common as to be a pastime in reader communities. Stop chasing after blockbusters and start tuning into the pre-existing discovery network to locate your new literary stars. Keep your ears to the ground for breakout indie authors, and sign them, knowing they’re already proven commodities. Get and keep a bead on technologies consumers are excited about (color ebooks, interactive book apps, etc.) and invest in those technologies.

Your role as arbiters of taste and gatekeepers is a thing of the past, and the position of Reader Community Leader has already been filled. Own it. Restructure your businesses and legacy thought patterns to embrace this new reality. Now, your role is to find out what consumers want in print books, ebooks and emerging media technologies, and give it to them. Period.
 

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

The Secret Ingredient To A Strong Author Platform

by

This post, by Justine Musk, originally appeared on her Tribal Writer site on 12/9/10.

I have come to believe that an author platform is its own cool thing. It isn’t something you can just slap on top of your novel – a coat of promotion, a sprinkle of marketing – but a living, growing entity in its own right.

It needs to reach into many different places. You can’t just sit on your blog like a spider in its web and wait for the pretty flies to come. You need to find your readers across the different platforms – and you need to re-imagine and re-purpose your content to fit those platforms.

This requires work and time. An editor at a webinar advised her listeners to take half of your writing time and dedicate it to platform. Gone are the days when marketing your novel was something that happened after the fact. Now it has to be baked into the process.

Now it requires big meaning.

And by this I mean a big idea, a theme, an obsession, a vision, a mission statement, a full-fledged manifesto/a. Call it what you will. I like the phrase ‘big meaning’ because meaning is what we seek and make out of our lives, fleshed out through our creative work.

A sense of meaning is intrinsic to happiness. We need to love and work in meaningful ways. When we’re depressed, we say our lives have no meaning.

If an author platform is to be truly powerful, it has to mean something to you and to others.

Read the rest of the post on Justine Musk‘s Tribal Writer.

A Plethora of (Terrible) New Alternatives To Going Indie

by

The internet’s fairly bubbling over with news and commentary about sweeping changes in publishing, and most of it is not good for authors and aspiring authors.

On 5/4/11 on her The Business Rusch blog, Kristine Kathryn Rusch talked about the history of publishing contracts, and how recently she’s been seeing an increasing incidence of contracts with language that greatly benefits the publisher while greatly penalizing the author. She is particularly concerned about questionable terms being offered by the new agency-publisher hybrid companies springing up:

We used to recommend agents, but we slowly stopped doing that. Some of it was simple: we didn’t want to endorse any one we weren’t intimately familiar with.  But it became more complex than that. Some of our agenting friends had left the business. Others had moved to companies that had rather unseemly business practices, and still others had morphed their agenting business into something unrecognizable.

Rather than walk through the thicket of ethics, friendships, business partnerships, and individual monetary policy, we just stopped recommending any particular agent. Over time, we stopped recommending agents at all.

During that same period of time, we saw a lot of publishing contracts that were…dicey…at best.

In the same post Kristine offers a sort of history of publishing contracts, and it’s not a pretty story. In another post on 5/11/11, she discusses a disturbing new trend she’s seeing in recent contracts from publishers and agency-publisher hybrids: Draconian terms that make it virtually impossible for the author to ever earn a profit on his book.

Kristine also points us to a 5/10/11 post on Dean Westley Smith’s blog that takes a closer, and critical look at these new agency-publisher hybrids. He observes:

Because of sheer stupidity, writers once again are losing a major fight that they don’t even realize they are in…In today’s news there was an announcement of yet another agent setting up a publishing company “for their clients.” These agents, of which there are many around the world now, are settling on certain terms for their new publishing business. The terms from agency to agency are pretty much as stated in this new article today.

Three scary quotes from just today:

“…we are becoming partners with our writers.”

“…will recoup expenses first…”

“…then share net reciepts 50/50.”

In just the last few months many agencies have decided to go this way. Many others have been on this road for a time. One major agency has been doing this for over ten years now. In this new world this path is just about the only way agents can see to stay in business. Also, more head-shaking, a number of major bloggers have been pushing this for some strange reason as if it’s a good thing for writers.

Read the rest of the post to learn why this is most definitely NOT a good thing for writers.

Over on The Passive Voice, Passive Guy tries to help us poor authors out with an examination of the rights reversion clause that’s standard in publishing contracts, but can have far-reaching consequences of which authors should be aware. He warns:

A reversion of rights clause without a definite trigger is nothing but an invitation for an author to go begging to his publisher from time to time.

Then he goes on to share some recommended, more author-friendly language for such provisions.

The lessons to be learned here are many, but the bottom line seems to be this: if you’re considering going semi-indie by partnering with an agency or publisher that’s offering some kind of profit-sharing terms in exchange for handling your book’s production, distribution and/or promotion, watch your back and read the fine print. You may think going that route will save you a lot of time and headaches, but if it ultimately costs you the success of your book or overall career, you’d have been better off going it alone.