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Articles about craft.

Creative Commons: What Is It And How Can It Benefit You?

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This is a cross-posting from The Creative Penn site, where it appeared on 9/13/09.

I went to a fantastic workshop this weekend at the Brisbane Writers Festival on Creative Commons. It was presented by Elliott Bledsoe, who is Project Officer at Creative Industries and Innovation in Australia and a wealth of information in this area. (You can find him on Twitter @elliotbledsoe). All the detailed information is at: http://creativecommons.org/

This is such important information for authors online so please read and share!

What is Creative Commons?

  • It is a version of copyright licensing, and it relates to your creative works. The basic Copyright law says that no one can copy or distribute your work, or use it, remix it or profit from it. This law becomes impractical in the digital environment where sharing, remixing, distribution and marketing are so important. Creative Commons licensing is a license you can put on your work to allow some of these things and make Copyright work for you and your creativity. Read this for the full lowdown on Creative Commons.
  • You can license your work for different purposes. The main aspects are Attribution (you let others use/distribute your work but you must be attributed as the creator), Share Alike (you can use my work but you must share your own work too), Noncommercial (you can use my work but you can’t profit from it), No Derivative Works (you can use my work verbatim but you can’t remix it or change it). For more on the different licenses, read this. People can approach you for options beyond the license e.g. you have a novel released under Creative Commons which is Noncommercial but someone approaches you with a movie idea based on it that will be sold. You can still allow them permission.

How can it benefit you as an author?

  • On Piracy vs Obscurity. You need to make your own decision as to whether you want your ideas to be out there and used (and potentially pirated), or whether you want to keep them in a drawer where no one will discover them. If you want to be a successful author who sells books, you need to be known and the internet is the place to build your global presence. The risk of piracyis nothing compared to being unknown. Cory Doctorow addresses this in “Giving it away”, a Forbes.com article where he describes giving the ebook versions of his books away for free under a Creative Commons license. His sales increased but his books were also translated by fans and his ideas spun into new creativity.
  • “Share your creative wealth and accomplish great things”. This is a quote from the video at the bottom of the page which explains Creative Commons in a great way. The internet has changed the way we produce and consume information. We all find ideas everywhere now. We put our thoughts and text online in the hope of building an author platform, or selling our books/products or finding an audience. Other people may get ideas from our work, and Creative Commons enables a legal way for them to re-use or remix it. This has started in mainstream books now with the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a remix of Jane Austen. Is it fan-fic or a remix of a Public Domain book?
  • Collaboration and Creativity. Expanding the theme of fan-fic and remixes, licensing under Creative Commons gives people the ability to take your work and recreate it in different ways based on your ideas. This could spread your work much farther than you could do on your own and may lead to some extraordinary ideas you can take and reuse in your turn. Is your idea your own? or can you release it and see what happens to it out there in the big wild?

How can you license your work as Creative Commons?

  • Advice from Elliott was: Have a really good think before you do license as Creative Commons. Are you really happy for people to use your work? Can they make money from it? Can they remix it? Only license once you are sure.

How do I find other authors and creatives using Creative Commons?

  • You can find works licensed under Creative Commons by including it as a Search term on sites like Google and Flickr. Many of the images I use on this site are Flickr Creative Commons and I add Attribution to each one. Use the Advanced Search option. You can also use http://search.creativecommons.org/
  • I have now licensed this site under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License, you can see this on the sidebar under my books. This license applies to the blog content and does not currently apply to my workbooks, Author 2.0 material and published books. This means that you can use my posts on your own websites, books and projects as long as you attribute me and this site as the original creator, share the work derived from it and don’t make income on it. Start with this one and spread the word about Creative Commons! You can see all the international licenses here. 

 

Just Another Warning Un-heeded…

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Every author that sells books on Amazon has got to come to terms with a couple of things.  First, you’ll have to promote until you’re blue-in-the-face, everywhere possible, leading necessarily (no matter if you’re a private person down deep) to lots of emails in your in-box(es).  Second, you’ll need some reviews. Most of these, you’ll have to ask for.  Here are a couple of recent tips I fell into…the hard way, of course.

1. If you swap reviews with another writer, be sure to read excerpts of their work first.

Not every Independently Published author is as serious about the quality of their finsihed work as you are.  Some are in a hurry to publish, others’ stories are terribly derivative, others never passed their fourth grade English class, etc., etc. 

2. Don’t read from manuscript, read from the actual book — even if you have to buy it.

You can’t review a book from a page of type online.  Not possible. Really.

I recently made an agreement.  The other writer purchased my book ($11.95 on Amazon), read it, and left me a really good review.  He writes very good reviews. 

Now, I’m 5 chapters into his novel( more expensive than mine, but I digress…).  It’s not terribly thick (good) and it’s in 12 point type (also good), but within the first four chapters, the POV changed four times with no warning, characters’ dialog appeared out of thin air, and the puctuation/capitalization is horrendous! And I’m a guy with the comma disease!

To add insult to injury, it’s typeset (shudder) justified instead of Rag Right, so every page is filled with rivers and streams of vertical white space making reading near impossible.  Here’s one way that mainstream publishers usually creat a better product: They can afford to have a book professionally typeset.  Using the best of the newest typesetting softwarte and fonts, it is possible to set a page with justifed margins, that doesn’t also have terribly inconsistent word spacing, rivers and streams of whitespace running vertically on every page.  It’s very difficult to do this with the level of softwarte and fonts most Indie Authors utilize.  Better to set your book flush left, ragged right, to speed reading and prevent holes in your prose, but I digress…

I promised the guy a review, but it’s going to be difficult.  What I’m going to have to do is give him a free edit and make up "notes".  A deal is a deal.  It’s a good thing that with POD, a published book can be easily edited, because if his sales were slow, up to this point, a few changes may make a world of difference.

The real shame of it is that the story is a good one, and the pacing and characters would normally make it a fast, fun read!  So…

Don’t get caught in this situation yourself, and never, never, never put another writer in this situation.  Do your homework, make your book as good as it can be, first…before you publish. That way, when agents and publishers start to go on and on about the garbage that self-publishing and POD foist upon the public, you can beg to differ honestly.

And be sure to read a book before offering to review it.

 

 

 

 

A Conundrum…A Long Conundrum (Be Prepared)

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This is a long one, so grab a cup of coffee and get ready to mull with me…

I’ve been mulling over one of many, odd conundrums that seem to exist in the murky world of mainstream publishing. It’s an obscure, opaque condition writers can run into with a first novel.

It is an undisputed fact that most books sell poorly. No matter whether they are mainstream published with the requisite fanfare, or Indie Published with the fanfare authors can muster on their own. Very, very few books become best sellers, let alone covering their own publishing run costs, with the one exception of POD books.  It can be depressing for any writer who really has the drive and desire to publish.

Now, if we take a look at publishing from the Literary Agent’s perspective, facing the fact expressed above, they must concentrate upon books they are pretty sure they can sell, and remember, they are selling to in most cases, long-established publishing relationships. Personal relationships.  An agent "vetting" a book reduces the risk for the publisher substantially.  It also cements relationships within in the industry. 

There are clearly observed, followed trends in book buying. What readers buy in numbers is what publishers need to publish.  It is a matter of economics, especially in the downturn we are all experiencing. 

Most publishers show great pride in their discovery of a new author with a great, new voice, especially if their work has marketplace traction.  Let’s assume the writer writes fiction, which is harder to sell well than a self-help, non-fiction title.  So the writer starts out with reduced expectations.  The publisher will promote and distribute the book, but probably not as well as they would if it were determined to be a current "best seller" genre book.  The author is still heavily responsible for promoting the book as much as possible in order that a great number of readers is exposed to it, just like an Indie Author must do.  No difference, yet.

When the book sales begin, for most new authors, they will be initially slow.  If you browse discount sales table at book sellers and library fund raisers, you’ll find books from recognized writers, but titles you probably never heard of.  Some of them are early work that didn’t gain market traction. I have several of these in my personal library — some from hugely selling writers, whose initial work wasn’t grabbed up.  Some of it is good, some of it is really terrible by comparion with later work. 

Taken as a whole, despite a huge outpouring of argument I’ve heard regarding the traditional role as gatekeepers, protecting the public from an influx of bad books, mainstream publishers produce bad books too. They also produce good book that don’t sell well. Right now, they can’t afford to tie money up with many mistakes, so they will rely more and more on LIt. Agents to only send them really saleable new work. This puts tremendous pressure on agents to dismiss the overwhelming majority of work submitted, in favor of book genres and styles that are currently enjoying success.

That, by and large, leaves most new literary fiction authors out.  Once a new author’s book is as good as it can be honed, assuming the writer wants to publish these days, the only option seems to be Indie Publishing, for one big reason.  An author who writes well, but whose genre isn’t currently popular, may get an agent to represent them, but if, after the launch and a year on the market, with book poor sales, the publisher will blame the agent.  Depending upon their financial committment to the book, they may cut back on their reliance on this agent.

Publishers today, can rarely afford to put their money towards tenuous future sucess. They need success now. An agent must help create success in order to keep their own bills paid and cover more than their expenses. If a represented book languishes, the agent will think less of the writer’s work, in fact being less than anxioust to pitch the next one.  The writer gets a bad rap, right at the start. A smart writer with an eye to the future would want to avoid this kind of situation. 

Poor booksales, are a killer of potential for everyone involved, yet without promotion, review and backing, good sales are very hard to achieve, even if your book is a jewel.  Most of the — hell, all of big media press goes to best sellers, not to competent novelists working in a literary genre.  The web is full of blogs and writers articles confirming the "death" of literary fiction.  I believe that it is a premature announcement, personally. On the other hand, if you write literary fiction, you must either adapt and begin writing in genres that sell (read: vampires, serial mysteries and religious conspiracies) or be realistic and expect that you won’t be the first best selling author on your block.

Confronting that fact tends to deflate the writer’s ego pretty quickly.  But you can always blow it up again.  By choosing to publish independently, you eliminate most of the poor industry associations that plague most debut novelists.  You are still required to produce work as good or better than anything mainstream published. To do less work in honing your novel is just foolishness.  You will need to involve outside editors, whether paid or unpaid. You will need to keep submitting your work to agents and to online reviewers, but all of the results will reflect upon your involvement. If you were accepted as a mainstream published new author, and your first book did poorly, you would probably not have the automatic deal for your second book anyway. Be realistic.  If you are an Indie Published author, when it’s time to move on, you can move on with little of the baggage that would accompany you to new pitches after a lackluster track record. 

Another important force in mainstream or Indie Publishing are book reviewers.  Reviewers also like the cache and potential financial gain of being in on a great ride, so they are also becoming more selective. Indie authors, unless self-published with traditional distribution will find most mainstream doors are closed to them.  I’ve read repeatedly on the web that the one bright spot in reviews for Indie Authors seem to be the Amazon Top Reviewer List. Not all are actively accepting new book submissions, but the ones that are — and you have to be very selective yourself, pairing your work with the individual reviewer — will read your book, and give you a review that will sit on the page where your book appears.  It doesn’t seem to matter if your book is self-published or not, and online promotion is one area where Indie Authors usually shine, or at least glow brightly! Besides the obvious, these reviewers have followers, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands! It will just cost you the postage and a copy of the book.

So, the daunting task of getting a first novel published can be a conundrum — a puzzle within a puzzle.  Translation: you’re damned if you do, and almost damned if you don’t.  Fortunately for Indie Authors, some of the most opaque, inscrutable parts are missing, along with an out-of-pocket percentage here and there. This leaves you free to find your readers and provide them with entertaining novels, at less risk to your long-term reputation, and less risk to your financial health.

Whew!  Thanks for having the patience to listen to the whole sermon.  Let me know if your experiences differ, how and why, or if you can add anything else to this dicussion.

Self-Publishing: Future Prerequisite

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Until recently, if you were self-published virtually any agent or book editor worth her salt didn’t want to hear about it. Many of them would want nothing to do with you at all, as if your self-published status might rub their own cachet off or something. But given the tenor and content of the sessions at this year’s Writers Digest Business of Getting Published Conference, I predict it won’t be long before agents and editors will routinely respond to queries by asking what you’ve self-published, and how it’s doing. That’s right, and you heard it here first:
 

I predict that within 5 years, self-publishing will no longer be an option, but a prerequisite for unknown, aspiring authors hoping to land a mainstream publishing deal. It’s the logical, inevitable next step in author platform.

At the conference, the prevailing message was that authors, both aspiring and already published, need to be getting themselves and their work out there in front of the reading public at every opportunity. And guess what? If you’re blogging or making your writing available for download in ebook or podcast formats you’re already self-publishing. As for those who aren’t doing these things for fear of intellectual property theft, in numerous sessions attendees were reminded of Tim O’Reilly’s now legendary quote: that for anyone trying to build an audience, “Obscurity is a greater threat than piracy.”

Seth Harwood and Scott Sigler, both of whom broke through to mainstream success after building an audience for their podcasts, advised conference attendees that the best way to get publishers to sit up and take notice is to demonstrate your ability to build an audience and move your material on your own. Social media guru Chris Brogan said the easiest way to get a book deal is not to need one—because you’ve already established your own platform and have your own audience—, and proposed that rather than follow established roads, aspiring authors should go where there are no roads and create their own. Writers Digest Publisher and Editorial Director Jane Friedman reminded us that here in the 21st century there are no longer any rules in publishing, and reiterated the notion that for aspiring authors, platform comes before the book deal. Be The Media author David Mathison hammered away at the importance of connecting with your readership directly. Booksquare’s Kassia Krozser urged authors to push out into every available channel to enable readers to find them, and as for The Writer Mama Christina Katz, the title of her most recent book is Get Known Before The Book Deal (’nuff said!).

So, how do you intend to enable readers to find you, or build an audience, or connect with readers directly, or get known before the book deal if you’re not publishing or podcasting any of your work? You can’t just tell your site or blog visitors your writing is great, they should trust you on that, and then expect to hold their interest with what amounts to a lengthy series of hang-in-there-I-swear-when-the-book-comes-out-you’ll-love-it messages.

As we all already know, a manuscript’s content is only one piece—an increasingly small piece, unfortunately—of the decision-making puzzle when it comes to convincing a publisher to make an offer. When the editors, marketing wonks and other decision makers get together to consider which manuscripts to acquire, Risk is the name of the elephant in the room and mitigating risk is the key to a sale. When you approach an agent or editor with a quality manuscript, you may convince them you can write but you’re doing nothing to reduce their fears about the eventual book’s performance in the marketplace. If you can approach those same people with a book that’s already in the marketplace and already has a fan base, you’ve already answered the question of how the book will perform post-publication. You’ve reduced their antacid intake by half and given them some very good reasons to invest in you and your book.

Don’t let anyone tell you self-publishing is a desperation move. It’s a power move.

April L. Hamilton is an author, and the founder and Editor in Chief of Publetariat. This is a cross-posting from her Indie Author Blog.

5 Lessons I've Learned About Writing Dialog In Fiction

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This post, from Brad Vertrees, originally appeared on his Brad’s Reader site on 9/21/09.

One of my biggest weaknesses is writing dialogue. A lot of times, my characters ramble on about nothing and I end up cutting a lot of dialogue out while editing. So I decided to read up on how to write better dialogue so I can improve this very important element of fiction. Here’s a little of what I learned.

I decided to read the book Write Great Fiction – Dialogue (aff link) and although I’m still reading it, I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons on the art of dialogue. First and foremost, dialogue is not easy to write. Beginning writers, and even seasoned writers, tend to struggle with it. So if you’re like me and have trouble making your characters talk, you’re not alone.

Here are 5 things you should consider the next time you sit down to write a scene with dialogue:

1. Dialogue needs to propel the story forward. If your characters are just standing around chatting, talking about the weather or their weekend plans, chances are the dialogue is not being effective and you need to cut the scene or rewrite it. Dialogue needs to move the plot forward and keep readers interested.

2. Dialogue is used for pacing in a story. Long and drawn out narratives in a story will slow the pace down. At the same time, dialogue generally speeds things up. Good fiction should be a balanced combination of the two. If your story has too much narrative you are likely to put your readers to sleep. On the other hand, if your story is all dialogue with little narrative, you will probably lose your readers and they’ll have a hard time following the story.

The bad news is that pacing isn’t something that can easily be taught. It’s more intuition than anything. The good new is that you can get better at it by reading a lot of varied genres and practice, practice, practice.

Read the rest of the post, including lessons 3-5, on Brad’s Reader.

The Fiction Writing Workshop: Point of View

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This post, from Kristin Bair O’Keefe, originally appeared on Writers On The Rise site on 9/15/09.

Confusion
When I ask a student, “In which point of view is this story written?” I often get a blank stare, a long “uuummmmm,” or a wrong answer with a question mark tacked onto the end (for example, “First person?”).

Clarity
When making decisions about point of view, you must consider two important questions:

From whose perspective is this story going to be told? (In other words, whose story is it?)

Who is going to tell the story?

The Breakdown

First Person: an “I” (or sometimes a “we”) tells the story; everything in the story is filtered through that narrator

          Example: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
           1.   This is Holden Caulfield’s story. No doubt about it.
           2.   Holden is the first-person narrator. He is the “I” in the story.
 
Advantages: strong sense of intimacy; constant opportunity for characterization; a strong voice that draws readers into the story
 
Challenges: a first-person narrator walks a fine-line between interesting and self-indulgent; readers might doubt the narrator’s interpretation of events (thus creating an unreliable narrator); readers can only climb into the head of the narrator

Read the rest of the post, which includes a breakdown on second and third person POV, on Writers On The Rise.

Make A Good Impression With A Custom Twitter Background

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This post, from Hugh Briss, originally appeared as a guest post on the Twitip site on 11/12/08.

A Custom Twitter Background can make a real impression and enhance your brand – but how do you make one? In this guest post post Hugh Briss from Twitter Image (a service that offers custom Twitter backgrounds) shares some tips on how to make your own.

I know what they say about making assumptions but I’m going to make one now and assume that most of you already understand the potential of Twitter, especially for those of us with something to promote. If you aren’t yet convinced that Twitter is going to do for the Internet what sliced bread did for the sandwich, I encourage you to spend more time reading Twitip. My job today is not to evangelize Twitter — which I love to do — but to talk about how to create cool Twitter backgrounds and show you how valuable the proper use of that space can be.

Generic is Only Good for Prescriptions

In addition to the generic Twitter background, Twitter currently offers 12 stock backgrounds along with pleasing preset colors for the elements on the page. You can also modify the colors of the overall background, text, links, sidebar background and the sidebar border. The first thing any Twit (easier to say that Twitterer) should do is change the generic background, unless you don’t like standing out from the crowd, in which case you can stop reading now.

Switching backgrounds and changing the color palette of your Twitter page is easy to do. Simply select "Settings" in the top row of links on your Twitter page, click on the "Design" tab and then either select a "theme" or click on "Change background image" or "Change design colors" and get creative. Don’t worry about goofing anything up. Any changes you make will not be visible to anyone but you until you click "save".

screen1.jpg screen2.jpg screen3.jpg

 

Themes are Good but Why Stop There?

Now I know that some of you will be perfectly happy with one of the themes Twitter has provided for you but there are still going to be thousands of Twits with the same background as you. It’s like going out in public wearing the same exact clothes as a bunch of other people — which is only cool if you’re going to a football game or a funeral.

With the holiday season fast approaching, this would be a good time to start looking for a nice Christmas-themed background, or Hannukah, Kwanzaa or whatever holiday you celebrate.

The best way to make sure that your Twitter page doesn’t look like anyone else’s is to upload your own background image. Those of you with the necessary skills might want to use Photoshop or a similar program to create your own from scratch. If that’s not a possibility, then there are other options. You can simply upload a photograph you’ve taken, for example. Another option is to find an image that will tile (repeat) in an appealing way. Search Google for "tile background" and you’ll find thousands of places to get them.

Colour Lovers is an excellent place to start if you want to make your own tiling background patterns. They also offer palettes that will help you pick colors that go well together so your Twitter page doesn’t look like you picked the colors with your eyes closed or let your 3-year old do it for you.

Twitter Patterns is another great place to find patterns for your tiled background.

Here are some pattern generators that are a lot of fun to play around with:

Read the rest of the post, which includes much more information and links to some excellent free Twitter resources, on Twitip.

Should You Blog? And If So, What Are Best Practices?

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This post, from Jane Friedman, originally appeared on her Writers Digest There Are No Rules blog on 9/14/09.

More writers are blogging than ever. And if you’re not blogging already, you’ve probably considered it. Recently, a writer asked me via Facebook about blogging.

 She said:
 

[It is] my impression that blogs related to writing are primarily written by people with expertise in their field and who have valuable advice and connections within the industry. Now, however, I am checking around and I see that many writers, even writers who are unpublished — and some who appear very far from being published — have blogs, also where they discuss writing and their completed works and/or works in progress. These people generally have direct links to their blogs that become available when they sign their name (or their blog name) when commenting on another blog. So, I suppose they are doing some marketing for themselves.

So, my question is: Should I have a blog?

This writer had some serious reservations about starting a blog, and here’s how I answered her questions.

1. I don’t feel like I have much in the way of valuable advice. What kind of advice do I have to dispense?

For aspiring writers (especially novelists), it often comes down to a matter of voice—an engaging voice, humorous insights, or a unique perspective to bring to the table.

Sometimes you may have specific advice, sometimes not. For many aspiring writers who blog, it’s about a community—writers who are learning from one another. It helps if you can identify what about your experience sets you apart, but this insight may not occur for 6 months or more of blogging.

Don’t assume your blog should be specifically about writing. It could be about whatever sets you apart, makes you unique. The writing life can simply be an accent.

2. One person mentioned on his blog that a literary agent looked at his blog, saw his complaints about the issues remaining with his book, and decided not to look at his book. I suppose it seems obvious that you shouldn’t write negative things about your work on your blog, but to me this seems like one example of potentially many examples of why a BAD blog could be worse than no blog at all.

There’s always that risk that an editor/agent will be turned off by your site or blog. Frankly, though, if you’re sending out material knowing there are still issues to resolve, you should be getting rejected. (Never send material out that isn’t as final as you can make it!)

If an agent/editor is turned off by your site/blog, they may not like your style or voice, regardless of content or professionalism. If your blog is a good representation of who you are as a writer (and most blogs are), then it would be like worrying about a potential mate who decides not to start a relationship with you because he/she doesn’t like your personality. Saves you both some trouble, right?

3. I know nothing about blogging, so I feel my chances of writing a bad blog are sufficiently high that I should be concerned.

Maybe you worry too much. This could a unique angle to your blog.
 

Read the rest of the post, including questions and answers #4-6, on There Are No Rules. Also see the follow-up piece, The Benefits of Blogging, in which Jane responds to reader feedback on this article.

How To Write A Bestseller

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This post, from Robert Gregory Browne, originally appeared on his Casting the Bones site on 6/16/09.

Okay, I’ll tell you this right up front.  That title is misleading.

Why?

Because the truth is, NOBODY can tell you how to write a bestselling novel.  Nobody.  I don’t care if they’ve sold a gazillion books themselves, there is no person on this planet who can tell you how to write something that will rocket to the bestseller lists.  Not even the publishers know how to get their books on the bestseller lists.  If they did, every book they published would be there.

I decided to write this post because I was searching the Internet for subjects to write about when I stumbled across a writer’s website that had an article with a title very similar to the title of this post.  So I took a look at the post and surprise, surprise, the author had included some good advice, but none of it really had anything to do with writing a bestseller.

So I used the same trick he did by using a misleading title.  And I’ll bet your adrenalin rose just a little when you saw it, right?

But here’s the thing.

If you sit down to write a “bestseller,” or a blockbuster movie, you are taking a wrong-headed approach to writing.  Writing great fiction has nothing to do with writing bestsellers.  Bestsellers are, by and large, flukes.  Right place, right time.  And not all bestsellers are created equal.

I can name a dozen of my friends who SHOULD be on the bestseller lists and a dozen authors who are and don’t — to my mind at least — belong there.  But that’s neither her nor there.

You should not and cannot even worry about writing a bestseller.  You can and SHOULD simply write the best book you can possibly write, with a story you just have to tell.  You need to be so excited about the work that you’d write it even if you knew, for certain, that you’d never make a dime off of it.

Read the rest of the post on Casting the Bones.

Introducing a Weekly Diatribe and Toolbox Roundup for Publetarians …

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Labor Day Weekend has come and gone!  I’m so thoroughly re-created that I’m exhausted and rarin’ to get back to work!  Those of you who have been Publetarians for some time now may recognize my writing – cantankerous though it may be.  This serves as fair warning to those of you who don’t need one more online curmudgeon filling your browser page with annoying, endless, self-important opinion.  On the other hand, I’ll be minimizing outright opinion, over the coming weeks to concentrate upon throwing some useful information out there to the hungry masses of Indie Authors and Publishers. 

This column won’t tell you how to write the perfect pitch, or how to hone your books and stories down to where they shine in every agent’s glistening eyes. There’s plenty of good information provided by other Publetarians that covers improving your writing skills.  My aim with this weekly column will be to provide some “nuts and bolts” information regarding how to promote, advertise and sell your work.  The trick, as I see it, is to learn to attack the problem from many different directions at once and to stay “on your feet”, adapting your message to your market as it shifts before your eyes.  A kind of sleight of hand helps keep your audience waiting for the next dove to fly out.

It’s not really magic.  I speak from over 30 years in the trenches of small business management (it’s not pretty in there) and over 20 of them in advertising design, promotional collateral material design and copy writing as well as media placement for the rest of us.  We all should compete upon as level a playing field as possible.  If the rest of us need to roll up our sleeves and get out the shovels, I’m on it. Then watch the dirt fly!

The rest of us are small business owners who can’t afford to hire full time publicists and/or advertising agencies to position and spin our writing into gold.  As I’ve learned, being an Indie-Author or publisher is a full-time, small business – whether you keep your day job, or not! Once we set our goals we have to do our own spinning, and I’m hoping to help other Indies get it right — or at least as good as we can make it.  My clients over the years have ranged from international aerospace corporations to Mom & Pop retail businesses and a lot of ‘in-betweens’. 

The two considerations common to all of them was: make it great, and keep the cost down. Gratifyingly, there were only two primary considerations.  That’s a joke.

From my years as Studio Director in a wide variety of graphics Bull-pens, I’ve learned one rule in the ad business that has never failed when considering a project (see image below)… cut it out, print it, then fill it out and post it where you can see it every day.
 

Advertising and Publicity Checklist...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, if good and cheap (implication: inexpensive, not poor quality) sound like a good course of action, I’ll give you a breakdown of tools that you need, how to use them, and what to expect from your efforts.  Of course, I can’t always get it 100 percent spot-on for your needs, but I hope that you’ll all let me know where an idea has failed as well as when it has worked for you. 

In addition, within the above loosely-organized subject definition, if you’d like to get my take upon something specific, let me know and I’ll work with your idea, see what I can come up with or find some foggy memory in the recesses of my brain. Oh, and I’ll let you know what I think about it, too.  Maybe more than once, but that comes with the white patent loafers and flower print Dacron shirt.

I wouldn’t be a curmudgeon if I didn’t throw around my opinion.  Just bear in mind that after 35 years of writing (2 complete novels, 2 more WIPs), with book sales that always need improving  and a roomful of encouraging, even complimentary rejection letters, my opinions can be pretty unvarnished. Lots of ragged edges. If you don’t mind occasional ragged, come on in.

Next Time: One electronic thing Indies can’t do without…

The Indie Curmudgeon is an Indie Novelist, graphic designer, marketing consultant, guitar picker, Indian Trader and online retail merchant since 1995.

 

 

The wind-up…and…The Pitch!

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Every writer needs to be able to write a gripping, attractive "pitch".  After laboring over parsing my current 200 word pitch into something with more "voice", I rewrote it completely. It’s quite a bit longer than 200 words, but it will still fit on a query letter, if I pare down the bio…

I’d like to post it here, and seek comment, just as I hope others will post theirs and do the same.

A Revised Pitch for The Red Gate

Above the windy, wet coastline of County Mayo, shepherd Finn O’Deirg sits against a mossy rock outcropping and begins to brew his morning tea. He has been quietly bemoaning his tiresome lot, when with no warning, the ground beneath him swallows him up! He’s fallen into a sinkhole, and for hours, worries if he’ll slip into the yawning darkness below.  As night falls, his father, returning from another pasture, pulls him bodily, from the ooze and Finn finds he’s brought up something in his shirt besides all the mud.  An ornately marked bronze ornament of some antiquity lies in his shivering palm.  The bead is covered with oddly scribed markings, or letters completely unintelligible to the sheep farmers, but it prods them to find out what it means.

Finn and his father seek help in determining the value of Finn’s “charm” only to open themselves up to a distressing group of devious archaeologists – academics, who see much more in the farmers’ find than just another curious antiquity.  One professor from Dublin’s Trinity College, thinks it may well secure his future, and will stop at nothing to acquire it, and use it to his advantage. His devious associates are pressed into action and soon, a plot emerges that will eventually reach up into the Office of the Irish Governor General himself and further. Maybe even across the Irish Sea to Parliament and possibly on to a certain, very honorable address in London.

The O’Deirg’s soon find that for them, what the odd writing means is a terrible threat, and not only to their very land and livelihood. This initial discovery leads to a much larger one revealing an ancient secret hiding beneath them for many thousands of years. The secret is what really holds them to this speck of rocky Western Irish coast. Protecting it from all outsiders, it turns out, has always been their family’s primary work.  How can they withstand the gathering power of the Dublin Professor’s connections? Whom can they turn to? What about their sheep?

The Red Gate weaves the academics’ tales of deceit and nefarious dealings, even murder, with the story of family trust and tradition that springs from the very land under the feet of their grazing sheep.  The O’Deirg’s with the help of loving friends and allies unseen, find their resources are much more substantial than they imagined and Finn, at last, discovers what he is meant to do with his life and with whom he is to share it.

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The Wrong Questions

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This post, from Gallagher Girls series author Ally Carter, originally appeared on her Ally’s Diary blog on 9/11/08.

I attended a couple of writers’ conferences last summer. I enjoy conferences. I like notebooks and name badges and having an excuse to wear the three cute outfits I own.

But this year it felt like I gained less from the sessions themselves than I usually do.

This is probably due to a lot of things, not the least of which is that I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’m simply farther along the learning curve than I used to be.

As a result I spent a lot of time twisting in my chair, wanting to shout out the things that I’ve learned so far. But I couldn’t. Because shouting is a good way to get escorted out of the Hyatt or the Marriott.

So instead I’ll do my shouting here–in the comfort of my own blog.

Please note that what follows is my HONEST opinion about the differences in writing for teens and adults. If you don’t want my honest opinion, stop reading. If you continue to read, consider yourself warned.

One of the sessions that I attended was a session on the differences in writing for teen and adult audiences. But two minutes into the session I wanted to stand up and tell everyone in the audience that they were asking the wrong questions.

Now don’t get me wrong, they were no doubt very common questions, but in my opinion if you want to be successful in the YA market, they were the wrong questions.

So here is my lame, Thursday-morning-just-got-back-from-the-gym-and-I’m-too-lazy-to-go-upstairs-and-do-some-real-work attempt at answering the wrong questions and steering people toward the right ones.

WRONG QUESTION: How do I develop an authentic teen voice?

THE RIGHT QUESTION: Do I have a voice that’s appealing to teens?

After all, would you ask "how do I write in a voice that mystery readers would respond to?" Or "how do I sound like a science fiction reader?" No. You wouldn’t.

Your voice is your voice is your voice. Period. And frankly, either you’ve got a voice that teens will enjoy or you don’t.

Furthermore, all teens don’t sound the same and neither do all teen novels.

There are very successful teen authors who use long sentences and huge words and very complicated sentence structures. And then there are teen authors like me.

There is no such thing as a "teen" voice. And no amount of hanging out in shopping malls and eavesdropping on the kids at the next table is going to teach you to write in a manner that will appeal to those kids.

Furthermore, trying to mimic those readers is an almost surefire way to make those kids hate your book. They know imitators when they see them. They don’t take kindly to pandering.

Trying to write like you think teens want you to write is the fastest way I know to fail in this business.

Write how you write. Either it’ll work for the YA market (or the horror market, or romance market, or scifi market, etc) or it won’t. At the very least, teens will respect you for it.
 

Read the rest of the post (it’s quite lengthy, so there’s still much more to learn from it) on Ally Carter’s Ally’s Diary blog.

You Gotta Love The Conflict!

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This post, by author Valerie Storey, originally appeared on her Writing at Dava Books blog on 7/28/09.

Conflict. If you’re anything like me, the very word conjures up argument, avoidance, ‘peace at any cost.’ In real life, conflict is rarely fun or something I go looking for. But leave it out of our writing, and we can have some serious conflict with editors and readers.

The first step toward understanding conflict is to know what genuine artistic conflict is not. Compelling conflict rarely stems from:

* Slammed doors.
* Slapped faces.
* Misunderstood fragment of overheard dialogue.
* A spilled drink.
* Romance characters tormenting each other with “fake” lovers.
* Characters complaining they are never understood because men and women can’t communicate.

You get the picture. All of the above are actions and events; things that can certainly be the result of conflict and that can make characters angry, but conflict is much more than anger. Authentic conflict often begins long before your story opens and is the motivating spur behind every decision and action your characters will make. In order to uncover as many levels of conflict possible (and to make life near-impossible for your characters) it can be helpful to explore the following seven areas.

1) The World or Society at Large. This is the world your story characters inhabit. It can be as simple as a barren desert or as elaborate as a feudal realm set in the distant future. Whatever it is, it contains problems; problems that can disadvantage and hold your characters back from their goals in significant ways. For instance, a world at war can be set anywhere from ancient times to the present day, from Middle Earth to outer space, but no matter the weaponry used, war always involves great suffering.

At the opposite end, a peaceful, apparently beautiful society can be filled with social injustice or a devastating class structure. Characters caught up in a perfect life may be the most discontent of all. Consider the poor heroine who is engaged to the perfect man, has the perfect job, eats perfect dinners with her loving, supportive parents every Friday night. On the surface she seems happy, but she may be ready to strangle them all.

Including a backdrop of social turmoil to your work will provide your characters with either past negative experience to overcome, or an ongoing situation that creates constant hardship. “High society” with all its rules and traditions, vices and hypocrisies can be a terribly low place filled with dark secrets and psychoses.

2) The Immediate Professional Environment or Workplace. No matter the times they are born into, your characters all have to do something to make a living. Even if your heroine’s sole purpose in life is to be married off to a peer of the realm, this is still her “occupation.” No matter if your characters are nannies or rock stars, advertising executives or harried FBI agents; they will at some stage encounter the monster boss, rival co-worker(s), ruthless or incompetent employees. Sometimes the workplace itself harbors corruption and is a great source of conflict, such as an unethical law firm or a company cutting corners on its products.
 

Read the rest of the post, which covers locations #3-7, on Valerie Storey’s Writing at Dava Books blog.

What Is 'Value Added' And What Does It Have To Do With Indie Authorship?

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This post, from Publetariat founder and Editor In Chief April L. Hamilton, originally appeared on her Indie Author Blog on 1/7/09.

I’ve been taking a lot of flak lately from professionals in the graphic arts and typesetting fields because in The IndieAuthor Guide, I more or less tell indie authors that in most cases, the services of those professionals are optional. The flakkers protest, in frequently ugly tones, that I’m giving bad advice in this regard and a book brought to market without their services is a "defective" product.

Here’s my recent response to one such complaint:

The local independent bookseller who stocks my titles has said that to his (professional) eye, apart from the lack of a recognizable imprint logo on their spines, my books are indistinguishable from mainstream books. So long as the readers and booksellers are pleased with my books, I’m meeting the demands of my target audience. And that’s what indie authorship is all about: reaching and serving your readership, not slavishly following the conventions of traditional publishing, regardless of whether or not they form a value-added proposition where your intended audience is concerned…I and my books are doing pretty well. And in the final analysis, in attempting to judge the merits of what I propose and advise in The IndieAuthor Guide, isn’t *that* the only benchmark that really matters?

After I posted, another flakker chimed in to berate me further, pretty much missing my point about ‘value added’, and it occurred to me that it may be a term that merits some further exploration. It’s something one hears bandied about in the business world quite a bit, and entire books have been written on the subject. In simple terms, a ‘value-added proposition’ is something in which you invest time or money because there will be a commensurate payoff, or payback of that investment, in the future.

For example, let’s say you manufacture protective cell phone covers. People like your covers and they’re selling pretty well, but you think you could do even better if you started printing licensed cartoon characters on them. So you go through the paperwork and expense of getting the licensing rights, you re-tool your shop to print the characters on the covers and you invest in some extra advertising to let everyone know about your new product line. Naturally, you must price the new line higher to absorb the added expenses, but you’re confident it’ll be a hit. Three months down the line you find your old, plain covers are selling just as well as they ever did, and sales on the new covers are decidedly slow. Clearly, printing licensed cartoon characters on your covers was NOT a value-added proposition. Customers may like the new covers, and may even prefer them to the plain ones. But if they don’t prefer the new covers enough to pay extra for them, it doesn’t make business sense for you to be producing them.

And what does this have to do with indie authorship, you ask? When bringing your book to market, every time you make a choice that involves investment of your time or money you should be asking yourself, "Does this constitute a value-added proposition for my target audience?" Because if it doesn’t, you should be looking for ways to reduce or eliminate that investment. Based on my research and experience, I’ve concluded the average reader doesn’t know or care about the minutiae of ‘proper’ typesetting according to mainstream pubishing standards. So long as the text is easily legible and looks about the same as that in a mainstream book to a typical (non-industry) reader, the reader will not find fault with the layout and typesetting in a given book. I freely acknowledge that people who follow the directions I provide in The IndieAuthor Guide will end up with a book that’s instantly recognizable as self-published to most industry pros, but since those pros are not the indie author’s intended audience, their opinions are irrelevant in this regard. Therefore, investing hundreds or thousands of dollars in professional typesetting and layout services does not form a value-added proposition for most indie books.

In deciding whether or not to invest in this or that service or product when bringing your book to market, let your target audience be your guide. If your target audience WILL notice and care about details of typesetting and layout for instance, paying for those professional services is a necessary expenditure for your particular book. However, if paying for those services requires you to price the eventual book so high that no one is willing to buy it, then the entire book fails the value-added proposition test.

Cover design is another area where value added comes into play. The IndieAuthor Guide includes directions for designing your own book cover, but many authors feel out of their depth when it comes to graphic arts and design and will prefer to hire out for those services; even so, they must wade through a seeming ocean of possible vendors and price ranges. Of course you want a cover that will draw the potential buyer in, even when viewed as an icon on a webpage if your book will be sold online. However, spending thousands of dollars on a piece of commissioned artwork from a name artist for your cover doesn’t necessarily add value for which your eventual readers will be willing to pay extra.

Since increasing the retail price of your book to absorb that cost may alienate potential buyers, you need to consider how many extra books you must sell at your regular retail price to recoup the money you spent on the cover artwork. In some cases, the investment will be worth it. In other cases, not so much. You can usually get an attractive, professional-looking cover which effectively conveys the theme of your book from a journeyman graphic artist at a much lower cost, or even from an art school grad student who’s willing to do the cover for free in exchange for the portfolio sample and exposure. As with any small business expenditure, you must balance the benefit against the cost when determining how much money to spend on professional services.

Let me hasten to add: I am not suggesting that indie authors try to do everything ‘on the cheap’ for the sake of saving money or increasing royalties. On the contrary, I advise indie authors to do all in their power to deliver a product that, to the typical book buyer, is indistinguishable from the products of their mainstream competitors. That means quality editing, paper, printing, cover design, and more. What I AM saying is that each time you’re faced with decisions about whether, and how much, to spend on some aspect of your book’s production or promotion, carefully consider the matter of ‘value added’.

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff Week: Word Up!

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This post, from author Janice Hardy, originally appeared on her The Other Side of the Story blog on 3/23/09.

I’m in the mood for a theme week, so I’m going to talk about the stuff that writers typically agonize over at some point. These are the things we debate on the boards, but ultimately don’t matter as much as we think they do.

On the list for the week:

Word counts
Adverbs
Exclamation points
Back story
Fonts and formatting

One of the first things writers do is figure out how big the book is going to be. You don’t always know, but you usually have a general idea to shoot for. Going over or under can send a writer into a fit of panic. And there’s so much contradictory info out there. For every person who says you’ll never get published with a 145,000 word book, another says BestsellerBob was 145,000 words, so don’t worry. The really frustrating part, is that they’re both right. But it’s all depends on the book. (Doesn’t it always?)

Basic word count for a typical novel runs between 80,000 and 100,000 words. Mysteries often go as low as 60,000 and historical fiction and epic fantasy rise as high as 140,000. Childrens fiction runs 30,000 to 50,000 for middle grade, and 50,000 to 80,000 for young adult. Chapter books run 5,000 to 25,000 words. Picture books come in under 500.

Now, none of these are set in stone, as evidenced that Shifter, my middle grade novel, is 71,000 words. But it still falls under the basic YA guidelines. You’ll also find plenty of people who offer different ranges, which is okay. These are all just rough guidelines to give you a basic idea of how big a typical book runs. Plenty of books fall outside of these averages and nobody cares about that if the book is good.

Here’s something I’ve learned since selling my own novel and working with top-notch, professional editors who do this for a living.

It’s not about how many words you have, but what those words do, that counts.

This, folks, is the holy grail of word counts.
 

Read the rest of this post, about word counts, on Janice Hardy’s The Other Side of the Story blog. Then see her related posts about adverbs, exclamation points, backstory, and fonts and formatting.