Don’t Let Others Bring You Down
I had sat down here today to write a ranting blog about how disappointed I was with certain things that had happened recently in regards to my writing. But as I got ready to write the post, I kept staring at the screen. I didn’t want to come off whiny, or complaining, or even like I was ranting. That was when I realized that no matter how I wrote that post, I would be writing a whiny complaining rant. So I scrapped it.
What was I going to rant about? I was going to rant about how the people closest to me seemed to treat my choice to be a writer as a joke. As if I was just doing a cute little hobby. About how I have family and friends who ignore everything I post about my writing, who never share it with their friends and followers, and on and on and on. See, I am already starting to rant again.
But as I sat there looking at the blank Ranting Blog I was about to write, I wondered to myself, Why do I care? Why do I let these people bring me down? The answer is pretty simple. It is the same answer to why rejection bothers writers. It is human nature to care about what others think of you. You may not like it. You may even deny it. But we all care about what others think. We care even more when it is family and friends.
But in reality you are just letting those people drag you down into the depths. There are many reasons why people belittle artists. I am well aware that writing is not the only art form that suffers from the “that is a cute little hobby” remarks. I think every art does.
Art isn’t the Focus
We don’t live in an art based world anymore. Wait, that is not entirely true. Art is all around us. We don’t live in an art focused society. At least not here in the United States. We cut art from schools, we close museums, we cut music performances, and we close the local theaters. When money is tight, we cut from the arts first. Because our society see’s it as more important to get “real jobs” in the corporate world. If you like to write, perhaps you should get a job writing training documents for a major HR company. If you like art, perhaps you should get a job designing advertising. If you have a glorious imagination, you should be an inventor. Better yet, just learn Math and get a job as an executive that will never use those math computations. Schools, here is my idea. Just cut math, give every kid a calculator, and bring back art.
No teacher, that I have seen, has told my oldest son, who has a very active imagination, that he should consider a career in writing, acting, or art. Instead they tell me he has ADD. Or they have the nerve to say, “If he would focus that energy on math he could be a great scientist or inventor some day.” I say, how about you… Teacher… realize your personality won’t match every student. How about you foster his imagination and recommend he find an outlet for it? They didn’t make those recommendations. Instead my wife and I are seeking out art and acting classes for him. How about the fact that you admit he knows the material, so clearly he must have paid some type of attention. And if he knows the material, put your pride aside and stop worrying about if he paid attention to you.
Wait… breath…. I am ranting again.
The point is this. Our world see’s art, music, writing, and all other art forms, as hobbies. They are something to be done when you have time around your 60 hour work week. Writing is not a career. Photography, never. You want to draw pictures all day? You’re lazy. You want to be a painter, no way. You want to act? This isn’t Hollywood. This is one reason people bring you down as an artist. They just don’t see the arts as a realistic career.
Jealousy
There is a lot of talent in all of the arts. And well, we don’t all have that talent. I can hardly color within the lines, let along draw a realistic human form. The best photographer I can ever be is with my Android phone and I don’t pretend to even know how to use that.
Could I learn any of those things? I think so. There is an amount of natural talent needed to do any of the arts. Some are just not that into art. Others, they simply wish to do what you do. They are jealous of the fact that you are doing what they want to do. Why don’t they do it? Well they either don’t think they can, or they don’t make the time to do it. Others still, are simply jealous that you’re reaching for a dream while they accepted they’d never reach theirs.
We all get jealous from time to time. The same is true with artists. You are making a dream of yours come true, and to others that is a symbol of dreams they never accomplished. I’d argue that Jealousy is one of the most powerful human emotions.
Misunderstandings
The last of the three main reasons people bring you down, is misunderstanding. This is a two way street folks.
They misunderstand what you are trying to do with your life. They may not think that your writing is anything more than a hobby to you. They may think that writing is an easy, leisurely activity. They may not understand just how important a “share” or a “like” from them is to you and your career. They may not understand that adding their Amazon review would mean the world to you and your career. They don’t know that for a writer, their recommendation to their friends is the life blood of your success. They could think they don’t have the time to help you out, not realizing that the simple two second share on social media means a lot. This list can go on and on.
But you could also misunderstand. You could assume that they don’t share your stuff because they think you are just “messing around.” But it could really be that they don’t read. Or it could be that they didn’t see your post. You could assume they hate your writing, but they have just been too busy to read one line. Even though they have been dying to read it and write you a review, they just haven’t had a chance. Or you could be assuming they never pay attention, but in actuality they are reading everyone of your blog posts, publications, and social media posts. They just never said so.
So, Stop letting them drag you down.
This sounds easier than it really is. When you find out someone you care about, and follow their career closely, doesn’t do the same for you. Well it is soul crushing. But it is also a downer when you find that others just don’t care about what you do. Naturally you will get a little down. And the critics. Those that bash you just to bash you. Or, those that simply don’t understand what you want to do for a living. They are the hardest to deal with.
But you can’t let them pull you all the way down to depths. These people have had me doubt myself more than I can admit. These people have made me give up on a number of my dreams in life. I can’t let them win this round. I have to rise above them and achieve my dream for a change.
Prove them Wrong
This is a powerful motivator for many people. It is the old, I’ll show them. It works for me in many ways. I’ll be honest I even fantasize about becoming famous and snubbing those people when they come calling for something. Sure, that sounds cruel. But when I am really ready to quit, the idea of being able to shove someone’s nose into their own… well let’s just say it works. I feel a burst of motivation. It is also perfectly natural to want to show someone you did what they said you can’t do.
But more so, you have to realize that in many cases they are wrong. So show them they are wrong. If they say you can’t do it because you’re too old, show them you are never too old to learn. If they tell you you can’t because you’re not the right “type of person”, show them that art takes all types of people. If they tell you that there are too many other people out there trying to do the same thing, show them that there is room for you. As I have aged, I have quickly learned that nine times out of ten, the people telling you you can’t do something are wrong. So don’t let them be right. Show them you can, you will, and you have.
Make them Jealous
While I had said Jealously is the reason so many hate, or say you can’t, you can use it to help you too. If they are jealous, well that means you are doing something right. You are succeeding someway to warrant their jealousy. Rather then let that work against you, let that be something that raises you up. People envy that you can make time for your art. They envy that you can work forty hours, run a business, have a family, and still tell great stories.
Get Rid of the Negative
Rid yourself of the negative people. This may not always be something that can be done. I’m not about to cut off my family over something simple like, they won’t share my books with others. But if they are trashing me, perhaps I will be done with them.
But friends are a different thing. With sites like Facebook, we throw the word friend around a little too much. My wife has some 300 plus “friends” on Facebook, but I bet she really only knows about 15-25% of them. The same is true of me. Though I only have a 150 or so. Even fewer are actually my friends. I doubt again that I would get rid of any of them because they don’t actively support my writing. Though I actively seek their approval, I’ve also come to realize they likely won’t give it. By recognizing that and trying to move on from it, I lose the negative without getting rid of the person. Same is true of family.
But those that are actually dragging you down are a different story. The ones that don’t support you are one thing. But the ones that drag you down, bash you, and down right don’t care. Get rid of them. You don’t need them around you. I don’t care if they are friends or family. If they are dragging me down, they are not really good at being a friend or family.
Rise Up
The artists of the world are what have kept books around, entrain us with movies, provide us with stunning photographs, and mesmerize the world with their drawings. You need to ignore that fact that society seems to shun artists, because in fact they need us. If the artist disappeared tomorrow, there would be nothing on TV. There would be nothing to read. Music would fall silent. The corporate world would have no one to design their ads, write their jingles, and they wouldn’t be able to sell. All the people would have is sleep and the corporate life. And the corporate world wouldn’t last long. The world needs us, even if they don’t see it.
Take a moment to remember that. Take a moment to see the art that is all around you and such a instrumental part of your lives. Look deeper and you will see the arts all around you. That means someone else ignored what everyone had to say and rose up. They succeeded and so can you. When the negative seems to eat you up, focus on the positive.
I’m a pessimist at heart. I always see the negative first. But I can’t let people drag me down. You can’t either. Sometimes all it takes is a slight adjustment of how you view the world to set you back on track.
Self Editing and What are Beta Readers
I’ve mentioned this several times, but my work goes through a process before I set it up for publication. A quick summary:
I write it.
I self edit it.
I send it to Beta Readers.
I self edit it (again).
I send it to a professional editor.
I fix it.
I have it published.
When I list it all out like this it seems very simple. But anyone who has ever put words on paper knows it isn’t so simple. Most writers understand the first part. Write it. And most writers are capable of sending it to a professional editor and changing what they mark up. But many writers miss the middle parts. And, like a sandwich, the meaty parts are in the middle.
Self Editing
If you’re going to send this off to professional editor, why is self editing so important? Well, two things. Editors are humans too, they won’t catch everything. Especially if your manuscript is error plagued. Second, you will quickly find that you discover a lot about what doesn’t work in your story’s plot by doing a self edit.
When I self edit, I find that I still miss a lot. So I learned a little trick, and tried it out for the first time with the Volition Agent manuscript. I printed the entire manuscript and went over it, using a red pen to mark up what changes I needed. I use the red pen because it stands out. So when I went back to make changes, I could find them quickly and fix them quickly. I print it out because it gives me a chance to read my words in a different way than I did on a computer screen. When you look at your words in a different way, things stick out that you would otherwise miss.
When I self edit, I look for the following things:
Grammar mistakes. This is the first thing I look for, though I am also the first to admit I am very bad at catching them. Though I did find that having the manuscript printed in front of me (versus on my computer screen) was much easier at seeing these things. But still, I recognize that grammar is not my strong suit so I do my best with checking for this stuff.
Punctuation errors. For me, this is most often missing punctuation. No period. Using a period when I meant for a question mark. The other thing that I have a habit of doing is putting a quotation mark at the end of the paragraphs during multiple paragraph dialogue (by one speaker). So I have to remove those.
Typos. I type at 60 words a minute with no errors. But when I write my stories, I typed at 80-90 words per minute with a lot of errors. Some have told me to just slow down. But when I type from my mind, my mind goes much faster then 60 words a minute. Probably much faster then 90 words per minute. So I often find a lot of typos, missing words, or added words. Easy to fix, and really easy to spot when you read it.
Plot Errors. I’m not an outline writer, so I ofter find things in the early chapters that I missed or didn’t need to continue the story for the later chapters. I’d say 90% of my red marks on my manuscript this time around were for plot and prose issues. Either to remove something or to add something. In fact, I reworked the entire ending and will be going back to add 5 new chapters throughout the book. Some will say this is why outlines work. But I also know many outline writers. They too say the bulk of their self editing goes to the plot. The most important part of your story is the plot, followed by how you tell it. Remember this doesn’t just include missing or extra plot points. This includes all aspects of your story not related to the above topics.
Said Tag. English teachers love to tell you about the 1,000 different way to say ‘said’ or now I think they want to make it a million ways. It is all a bunch of bull. It is made up by English teachers (just like the author’s message). Said is the simplest (and most over looked) word to describe dialogue. Since I write a lot of official reports at work, I am am trained to write “stated” on most dialogue in my reports. So I often find my stories are loaded with “stated” instead of “said”. So I have to fix those. But the best way to break up dialogue is not with “said” but with some type of action. For example: “I’m writing my blog,” Richard didn’t even look away from what he was doing. His fingers still clicked on the keyboard. “I’ll take care of the garbage when I am done.” So where applicable, I avoid using any dialogue tag and use action.
Repeated words. My characters like to look at each other a lot. They also love to smile. So I often over use those two words. Repeated words are not always bad, sometimes it is required to make a point. But overuse of any word will be noticed by a reader and can become jarring. So I look for those. I also look for repeated phrases and dialogue points through out my story.
What are Beta Readers?
I’m having a heck of a time finding beta readers for Volition Agent. I think this is largely because people don’t understand what a beta reader is. If you know video games, beta testers get their hands on an early copy (not finished) of a game. They get to play it and in return they provide feedback to the game developer. They let them know about glitches in the game, issues with game play, story elements that seem out of place, and an overall opinion of the game. The developers take that information consider it all and then make changes where they think they should.
Beta readers do the same thing. They get an early copy of the book. They read over it, point out mistakes, things that confused them, story issues, grammar mistakes, and provide an overall opinion of the story. The writer takes all this information and uses it to make the book better. Just as a developer won’t change everything the testers complain about, an author won’t change everything. But they will make the story better as a result of the Beta Readers’ input.
Authors need a cross section of beta readers. I recommend you get a few who don’t read your genre. I recommend a few that are writers. Also a few that are editors. And then a few that are just readers of your genre. Can you have too many beta readers? Yes. If you get overloaded with information it won’t do you any good. But if you have too few readers, then you won’t get a good sampling for your book. The number is up to you. Somewhere between not enough and too much is what I recommend.
Beta Reading shouldn’t be confused with Advanced Reader Copies (ARC). Typically ARCs are finished. They are handed out to reviewers in exchange to get review quotes to hopefully use on the book itself. That’s how all those review quotes wind up on the book the day it is published. Sometimes review quotes are gathered from Beta copies, but that isn’t the purpose of a beta reader. The beta reader is there to improve the work so the author can put out the best story possible. Advanced Readers are there so the author can better market their work.
Why self edit again?
If you took all the information from beta readers, and did nothing with it. Well that would be a complete waste of everyone’s time. While you might not change everything the beta readers point out. If the majority of them say that a certain scene doesn’t work. It would be best if you made it work. Once you make significant changes you need to review those changes for yourself, the same way you did the first time. That will involve a whole rereading. But it is worth it to put out the best book you can.
Once you’ve got the meat together in you sandwich, it’s time for the top piece of bread. Get a professional editor and have them review it. Then your sandwich, um I mean story, will be ready for the masses.
Dissolution of Peace Blog Tour
Dissolution of Peace Spring Blog Tour is official!
I am going on a blog book tour with Dissolution of Peace. The book and I will be traveling through the virtual world to attend various blogs to spread the word about my book. I’m excited about this since it will allow me to share a little bit about me and the book with a new audience. You can visit these blogs and see interviews, guest posts, and book reviews. I will be on tour from April 8th until May 13th this year!
Dates:
As I mentioned above I will be traveling blog to blog from April 8th until May 13th. There are still a number of dates available so if you would like to get in on the tour, it isn’t too late. There are still several open dates available. If you want one, just go here (link) and pick a date. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see “Would you like to host this author on your blog?“ Click the link and sign up.
The folks over at Orangeberry Book Tours are hosting this tour for me. They’ve taken a ton of the work out of it so I just get to hang out at various blogs. While I will try to keep the listed dates below updated, for the most current dates and locations visit my Tour page.
While I hope you will go check out each blog host before and after my posts, I will be posting links to blog tour posts throughout the tour on my Facebook and Twitter pages. So if you don’t follow me there, please do.
Terms:
Book Feature: A quick feature just announcing the basics about Dissolution of Peace
Twitter View: A interview with me over Twitter. I’ll be off work so I am going to do my best to answer these questions live.
Twitter Blast: A collection of book quotes sent out via Twitter. Please RT the heck out of those. 
Book Review: Just that, a review of Dissolution of Peace
Author Interview: An interview with me, posted on their blog.
Guest Post: This is a post I write for their blog, as a guest.
Tour Dates and Locations:
8th April – Book Feature at Peace from Pieces
9th April – Twitter View with OB Book Tours
10th April – Twitter Blast with OB Book Tours
11th April – Author Interview at Mommy Adventures
12th April - Guest Post at The Bunny’s Review
13th April - Twitter Blast with OB Book Tours
14th April - Book Feature & Author Interview at The Reading Cat
15th April - Guest Post at Blog-A-Licious Authors
16th April - Book Feature & Author Interview at Author’s Friend
17th April – Guest Post at Kindle Nook Books
18th April – Book Feature at Paws on Books
19th April – Guest Post & Book Feature at Anya Breton‘s blog
20th April – Book Feature at Book Professor
21st April – Author Interview & Book Feature at Michael R McDuffee‘s blog
22nd April – Guest Post at Books Are Magic
23rd April – Author Interview & Book Review at Pages 2 Pages
24th April – Guest Post at Disincentive Reviews
25th April – Book Feature at Book Professor
26th April – Guest Post at Quality Reads
27th April – Author Interview at Fantasy Books
28th April – Book Feature at eInk Reviews
29th April – Book Feature at My Love for Books
30th April -Book Feature at Brainy Reads
1st May – Book Feature at Pages to Chapters
2nd May – Book Feature at Living for Books
3rd May – Orangeberry Pick of the Week & Sidebar
3rd May – Guest Post, Author Interview & Book Feature at Talisman Book Publishing
4th May – Book Feature at Gentleman Reads
5th May – Book Feature at Working For Books
6th May – Book Feature at My Love for Books
7th May – Book Feature at Aspiring Book Reviews
8th May – Book Feature at Reading My Addiction
9th May – Book Feature at Imagination in Books
10th May - Orangeberry Book of the Day – Gentleman Reads – Excerpt /
11th May – Author Interview at Up In Smoke
12th May – Guest Post at Richard Stephenson‘s blog
13th May – End of Tour Celebration post! at Flores Factor.
Blog Tour Giveaway!
This book tour will include the largest giveaway I’ve done to date. There will be some great prizes including: Signed Paperbacks, Free Paperbacks, Free eBooks, and an Amazon Gift card. This is hosted by Rafflecopter and there are multiple ways to enter. The giveaway will end on May 19th. Check back with the giveaway often because as more blogs post, more entries will be possible. In fact, you get five entries just by entering this GIVEAWAY CODE: “E.S.S. Australia”
You can find the Giveaway on my Facebook page: CLICK HERE FOR A DIRECT LINK
I can’t wait to see you all on the tour!
You Can’t Please Everyone
I’ve talked a lot about getting used to rejection. But, most of the time I am referring to the rejection letters from editors who don’t want to publish your work. I’ve always found that rejection from editors is easy to accept. That is a personal thing. I just have always braced myself to hear “No” from an editor.
Rejection from readers, well I hadn’t really prepared myself for that. Sure, I had heard about it from other authors. Sometimes readers won’t like what you do. They won’t like what you write. They just won’t enjoy the stories you have to tell. Rejection makes it sound harsher than that. I’m certain people have read my stories and not liked them.
But the other day I got my first real hate email. I use the term hate, because it wasn’t my story they hated, it was one aspect. A small part of the story really. Truthfully, I hadn’t even given much thought to the element of the story. It was just there.
This person wrote me an email, roughly three pages long, insulting me because one of the main characters in Dissolution of Peace is a homosexual. If you haven’t read the book, you might not know what I am talking about. But one of the main characters discovers she is a lesbian through the course of the novel. The email writer went on to call me the “devil” and that I was a “demon” at several points. She clearly read the whole book, as she referenced parts from throughout the novel, but she just wasn’t happy it included a lesbian couple. She told me, “I can’t believe you ruined this excellent story by putting homosexuals into it.” and “You could have just as easily made one of those characters male and kept the book clean.” and “You just used this story to push your pro gay agenda.”
Frankly, the email shocked me. It shocked me for several reasons. First, I never gave a second thought to Janice’s relationship with Willard. Second, I just never had anyone so upset with something I had wrote. And the best part, she never even mentioned the scene in which Carlson walked in on Willard and Janice during sex.
Typically I don’t respond to negative comments about my work, but since many will see this blog as a form of response, I must say a few things. First, I am very happy to hear that this person thought my story was “excellent”. Several times she told me how great the book was, in between the other points she had to make. I have no “pro gay agenda”. I am not opposed to homosexual relationships, and I am not opposed to gay marriage. But, Dissolution of Peace is not about that. If you only find a “pro gay” message in that book, well each reader will see the message that calls to them. Finally, I couldn’t have made Willard or Janice a male character, because that is not who they are. Writer’s know that their characters become real people. Janice became who she became, regardless of what I wanted (or didn’t want) her to be. I couldn’t have changed her any more than I could change the person who emailed me’s mind.
As a writer, you may never want to put a homosexual person in your stories simply to play it safe. But where do you draw the line? Will you never have any discussion or mention of politics? What about feminism, social commentary, or even humor? If you sterilize your writing to try to keep everyone happy, you will wind up with a story that few will want to read. Even if you can write an excellent story that walks the line and avoids hot button issues, someone won’t like it because of your style, plot, or for no real reason at all. We are a vast and diverse world. It is a beautiful thing. But is also means that eventually someone will read something written and simply not like it.
Should you go out of your way to offend? No. Shock value rarely works either. Write the story you want to write with the characters, world, and plot that you want. Writers want people to enjoy their stories. But not everyone will. You just can’t please everyone. Don’t try to. Just write the story you want to tell and let the chips fall where they may.
And for the readers out there, please understand something about writers. To build worlds and create believable elements we must include people of all types regardless of our personal beliefs. Writers have to include murders, corrupt people, evil people, and bigots in our worlds. Why? These people exist and will likely exist for all time. I don’t condone murder, but the antagonist of Dissolution of Peace is a murder. A writer might write a racist character, that doesn’t mean the writer has an “agenda” against a particular race. Most readers know this, and see a story for what it means to them.
I appreciate the readers, and the feedback. Even the negative feedback helps me as a writer (even the feedback I don’t agree with).
Novel Announcement: Volition Agent
If you follow me on Facebook and Twitter, you’ve undoubtedly seen a few teasing posts about my next novel project. I’ve teased with a few hints, surprises, and more. Well the teasing can come to an end, I have decided to finally let the cat out of the bag.
My next novel, titled Volition Agent, is a fast paced SciFi Thriller set in the near future. The highly secretive Agency has a Volition program. They take everyday people who are physically fit and recruit them as Volition Agents. They are implanted with a control chip so that a highly trained “handler” can control their every action. If a Agent is captured the loss to the Agency in minimal. Agents are sent on missions from intelligence gatherings to assassinations. Volition Agent followed Lexia, one of the agents.
Here is a tentative blurb:
Lexia Santarelli is part of a top secret group of Volition Agents. These untrained, unremarkable, everyday people are recruited by the agency to be literally controlled by their “handler” through a device implanted in their necks. It is an exciting life, and despite some of the annoyances, Lexia enjoys it.
That is until the Agency decides to let Lexia take the fall for a mission gone wrong. Her link with her handler, Lance is severed. Suddenly Lexia finds herself alone, unprepared, and hunted by the very people she trusted.
With few clues, minimal training, and an unlikely ally Lexia sets out to discover what really happened on that botched assignment. Determined to set right the wrong she created, nothing can stand in her way. Not even the Agency itself.
I have some great cover art for this novel, and I can’t wait to share it with you all. So here it is:
Copyright 2013 Kristin Irons Photography
The cover art is shot and designed by Kristin Irons (website). I’ve worked with Kristin before, she designed the logo for Plasma Spyglass Press. Kristin is a very talented photographer and when I explained what I was looking for she said she had an idea. The next week was a bit of a whirlwind. Kristin found a model, the very beautiful and talented Joy Anna, to play Lexia in a photo shoot. She then teased me relentlessly with images from that photo shoot before showing me the image she had in mind for the cover art. I am a very picky and hard to work with person when it comes to cover art, but she kept taking my ideas and reworking them until we came up with the cover above. And I couldn’t be more thrilled by it.
Let me tell you why this cover is so special to me. This is the first time I’ve had anyone “play” one of my character in any way. Joy Anna, whose modeling pictures I had only seen briefly before this, jumped into this project head first. I understand they captured a ton of images and I’ve only seen a few of them. As a writer, I was excited to see what might come from this. I’ve never met, or even talked to Joy Anna but I thank her for her time because the results are absolutely amazing.
A big heartfelt thanks to Joy Anna, Kristin, and her assistant William Harris. So many folks use stock art, or stock photos to make custom cover art. But I have a real custom cover for this novel. Please take a moment to check out the people that helped with this cover, give them a like, follow, or whatever else to show them some support. Kristin Irons: Facebook, Twitter, Website Joy Anna: Facebook William Harris: Flickr
This is the first story I have written where it had a title before I ever wrote it. The whole idea came from hearing the word volition and it’s meaning; the ability to make a choice or decision. So Volition Agent was an easy enough title for me to come up with. I think it works well given the themes in this novel.
So when is the release date for Volition Agent? One hasn’t been set just yet. But I have a deadline of the first week of June 2013. So expect to see it no later than this. I hope to have it out a little sooner, but you can’t rush these things. I’ll be sending it out for Beta Readers in the first two weeks of April. Then my editor will get this. I’ll be working with a new editor this time, since Robert is booked up for the foreseeable future. As always, watch this blog, my Twitter and Facebook for updates.
I’ll leave you with a few other images from the photo shoot:
Copyright 2013 Kristin Irons
Copyright 2013 Kristin Irons
Copyright 2013 Kristin Irons
Richard, Where Are You?
I’ve not been around much. And those of you on Twitter, Facebook and here have probably started to wonder where I have been. I assure you I am fine. I have just been very busy. And a bit sidetracked with other things to get my weekly posts done. As far as Facebook and Twitter go. I guess I have just been quiet. So here is what I have been doing:
Working.
Oh how I love and hate my day job at the same time. The last two weeks I worked sixteen hours of overtime. They have decided to unveil a new system at work, and I was chosen to be one of the trainers on this new system. While the system will make one aspect of our job so much easier, it takes time to teach everyone. Work already takes over 40 hours a week of my life. It would be great to make my writing and editing my day job.
Plasma Frequency.
Now here is one project I love to do. But let me tell you how much work it takes. Issue 4 has been one of our best and most highly read issues to date. That is great news. But the talent submitting to us has become so good that picking just eight to ten stories every two months has become very difficult. Even my earlier reading editors are finding it harder to reject stories. I think it is great to see so much talent coming to our magazine. As a writer, I love to see other writers succeed. As a business man, I love to see some of these big names seeing my publication as worthy of their work. As an editor, well my work has become a lot harder. For issue five I had to narrow down 25 great stories to just the eight that would fit in our issue. That is hard work, and very time consuming. I debated for a long time on many of those stories.
Speaking of Business.
I had two magazines approach my company, Plasma Spyglass, and ask if we would be interested in taking over their magazine’s production. I won’t name the magazines, but I will say I think they are great publications. So I had to make some tough business choices over the last few weeks. While Plasma Spyglass does have every intention of putting out more magazines, I had not expected to do it so soon. Plasma Frequency is not even one year old yet. And for the time being we are going to focus on growing that publication first. We still have the goal of advancing our pay rates to pro-rates, and I want to follow through on that. Plus we have our year one anthology coming soon. And we will be announcing more about that in Issue 5. So much is going on, or about to go on, with Plasma Frequency that I had to pass on these other two great offers. But don’t count us out. I think Plasma Spyglass will be publishing a number of different publications by 2014. And by 2018, I suspect we will be doing very well in the short fiction market place.
We do have plans for a charitable anthology coming soon. Once I have heard back from the charitable organization, more details will come. We are also considering many other great things. So, needless to say business has taken up a lot of my time outside of work.
Writing.
Just last week I finally got more written into my next novel. I plan to make an announcement on that one very soon. The first draft should be completed by next week (fingers crossed). After which I will begin rereading and editing. And, I plan to contact a cover artist soon. So I am thinking that I will announce the release date with the cover art in April. Get ready for this one, it promises to be a great one.
Speaking of great books, the sales for Dissolution of Peace have faltered a bit. I think this is because all of my great followers now own a copy. So it is time I branch out and reach some new followers. I am planning on doing a blog tour. Perhaps in May? Maybe sooner. I would really love one in April. But scheduling these things takes time (as I am am learning). So I plan to get that underway soon. Watch for more details on that. Make sure to share some love with those blogs that host my tour.
Chores.
I thought I was a grown up now and work was my chore. Well the front and back lawns seem to disagree. There is a ton of yard work to do around here, and I get stuck doing it. Some people love that stuff. Time in the yard pulling weeds, mowing the grass, that is fun for them. For me, not so much. I’d much prefer to hire a landscaper and just admire how great it looks when they are done. But writers can’t afford landscapers, and besides my wife would insist we got a maid first.
Family time.
My family and I don’t see each other much right now. My wife works on the days I am off, and I work when she is off. My hours don’t lend well to having school age kids, as I am at work all afternoon and evening when they are home. When I get home, they are in bed. So I have been trying to make some extra time for them around all this other madness. I took my kids to their first professional hockey game, actually their first ever hockey game. My middle child was so overly excited, it was a great thing to see. Besides that, I try to make some time for TV, movies, and other activities with them. Family is important. More important than everything else I’ve listed here. So I make time for them and I hope someday my kids will really appreciate the fact that their dad pursued his dream to publish novels. I also hope that one day, I’ll make just enough money on my dream that I don’t have to “work” any more. Ah, the good life.
Characters: Are you doing it right?
One of the number one compliments that Dissolution of Peace has received, has to do with the characters. I even started receiving emails through this page from people asking how I made my characters so enjoyable. That was a really tough question for me to answer, I just created them. I didn’t set out to have excellent characters. Let me rephrase that. Every writer wants believable characters with a strong presence in their story. Not all stories are character driven, but without believable characters the story always seem to fall flat. So when I say I didn’t set out to have excellent characters, I simply mean that I didn’t actively sit down and think about how to make people love and/or hate my characters. I just developed them into “real” people and told their story.
Character Types
You essentially have three types of character types in story. There are the protagonists, in most stories this would be your Main Character (often abbreviated MC). Next you have your antagonists, these are the adversary to your MC. Finally you have you ancillary characters. These are the other characters that support your MC quest. Some might argue that you have a forth group her, the background character, the extras if you will. But, if a character is not in support of the story, I find it best to eliminate them. If you have a bustling market in a movie, there needs to be extras. But if you describe the market in your novel, the reader’s brain provides the background characters.
Antagonist and Protagonist
The Antagonist and Protagonist are often confused with villain and hero respectively. But this is not true. In some stories, your protagonist is the bad guy (though they may not think so). And his adversary, or antagonist, would be the man in the cape. And in some stories, the label of good and evil is not so cut and dry. In this case your MC (protagonist) might be a poor, underprivileged track star who must overcome a leg amputation to win a race again his rich, well to do, rival (antagonist).
It is better to think of your Protagonist as the main star of the show. The person whom we might spend most of our time with. The person who is trying to overcome some obstacle and achieve the goal that is your story. Essentially your novel is the protagonist’s story. You can certainly have more than one protagonist in a novel. I feel my novel has three, and perhaps four, protagonists. But they are also all trying to overcome different obstacles. Ask yourself whose story you are telling. The character you choose is your protagonist.
Think of the antagonist as the person in the way. The person who must be “defeated” in order for the protagonist to advance. In Dissolution of Peace, there is one clear cut antagonist, but I would argue there are at least two more. But in many stories, there is no clear cut bad guy. I’ve read some great stories where the antagonist is a faceless group. Ask yourself who stands in the way of my protagonist and his/her goals. The answer is your antagonist.
Ancillary Characters
These are the people that help tell the story. They could be the protagonist’s friends, family, and allies. They can be related to the antagonists desire to stop the protagonist. Or, they can be other characters that provide help, inspiration, or motivation for the MC. They can also provide despair, discouragement, and other negative emotional impacts for the MC. These are the characters your MC meets along his journey one way or another, and propel the story further in some way.
Character Development
So you know what the characters are, now what? Well now it is time to make them real. Real characters are what people want. Readers enjoy character they can relate too, are comfortable with, and feel like the are real people. That is where the real challenge comes. Anyone can take a character, plop him into a story, and name him George. But real characters are a lot harder to craft. And they do take some work. That is where character development comes into play.
You may be an outline writer, where you need to outline the specific structure of a story on paper. Or you could be like me, and just let the story take on a life through your fingers on the keyboard. But no matter what way you plan a story out, you need to develop the characters. You can do that in your head or on paper but always put some thought into your characters.
Description
What does your character look like? You may not write out this description in your story, but I find it helps to have a mental picture of my character in place before I start working with the character. Of course, many argue that leaving your character’s description vague in a story allows to a reader to better relate with a character. The logic is that they can imagine a person who fits within their comfort zone. Again, you may not describe the character outright in the text, but you should have some idea of the basics of your character. If you have trouble with getting a mental picture, look at ads and other images and see if you find a picture that suits your characters just fine. (Note: I do not suggest using that image as anything more that a mental building block. Using the image for promotional purposes such as book covers can get you into trouble.)
Name: It may seem obvious that your character needs a name, but this is often the hardest part. I find I like more unique names, and I always struggle with male character names. Just imagine the struggle my wife and I had naming our three boys. Find a name that works for you. I disagree with the idea that it is okay to put any name in place and then change it when you think of one. This is because I believe a name is an identity. And a character with no identity is lost. I suggest Behind the Name to search for all types of fist names for your character.
Descriptors: Think how the police describe a subject: Ethnicity, gender, age. Those are a great start. How about height, weight, build, and clothing they like to wear. Are they even human? These are all important attributes for you to understand your character better. Again, you might not write these out in a text of the story, but they are important. Besides a name, this is the second way we recognize someone. Think of it this way, you ask a friend if they know Greg and they say they’re not sure. What is the next thing you might say? “You know Greg, the really tall white guy. He always wears a tank top. You know, with the really big arms.”
Personality
You character has to have a personality. Everyone in real life does. They may be outgoing, they may be a fitness nut, they may be afraid of confrontation. Even someone who seemingly has no personality, does. You just have to know them better. So get to know your characters better.
Likes and Dislikes: What does your character like? What does s/he hate? Do they have a fear of spiders? Do they love to work out? If your character wasn’t stuck in the story you gave them, what might they do for fun? What activities would they avoid? Not only does this build a character’s personality, but it might give you an idea to create a little tension for them at some point down the line. Put me in a room full of spiders and tell me to go get the million dollars on the other side, and I might well wonder how important money is.
Traits: Does your character love to talk? Are they just chatty or very charismatic? Would your character prefer to be left alone? Are they well spoken or more the type to drop an f-bomb? These are all traits readers of one type or another can relate to. Figure out what it is about your character that makes them far more unique than every other five-eleven woman, who likes to work out, but loves chocolate more. Dig deeper and deeper until you’ve created a monster, or a hero, or even better… an unlikely hero.
Biography
Now it is time to really make this character into someone. Make them more than just a person in a book. Make them someone real. Give them a bio.
Friends: Who does the character hang out with? What are their friends like? Why would your character choose these people as friends?
Partner: Romance may not be a theme in your story. Though my editor of Dissolution of Peace pointed out that he felt it was the romantic tension in my novel that would sell copies. But not every story needs it. But I do think it is important to take a moment to think about who your character would choose for a mate. It may even be determined that your character has no interest in romance of any type. But why? If they wouldn’t choose a partner, then explain to yourself why.
Family: Where where they born? Who are their parents? Where is their family now? Siblings? Cousins? I know some authors that have an entire family tree for their characters. But also think about how this character relates to his/her family. Remember you can choose your friends and your spouse, but not your family. Your character might be the black sheep of the family, or they could be the family matriarch. Regardless of how we feel about our families, our relationship with our family relates to how we are as a person. The same will be true of your character’s family.
The Past: Consider your character’s past. Where have they worked? Schooling? Did your character witness something that changed them forever? Did they always want a certain job, but they could never have it because of some reason or another? To know where your character is going, you have to know where they came from.
The setting: Consider where your story is taking place. Military and police are all unique individuals, but there are common traits among these people. Same with regions of the world. Where this character is at now is just as important as the past.
Growth: Your characters, especially the MC, need to grow as the story progresses. We all grow as our own lives progress and major events sculpt who we are. They same should be true of your characters. They should grow as they go through the life changing event you have set out to tell. The growth of a your character through the story is just as important as the development you do before the story.
Tips and Tricks:
Walking Cliche: Avoid making your character a walking cliche. The villain who was never loved by his family. The hero who was born to be one. The tall, dark, and handsome MC. They nerd in glasses and a lab coat. I could go on forever with this. There is a world of cliche characters. And I would dare to say there is a bit of cliche in all of us. But, the walking cliche is not going to relate with readers.
Find Examples: Take a look and some of the books you’ve read. What are some characters you really enjoyed? For me, more recently, I love Kara in S. M. Boyce’s Lichgates, Sonata in Beyond the Cell by Sara Tribble, Guile and Kip in Brent Weeks’s The Black Prism, Katnis in The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and Hank in Robert S. Wilson’s Shining in Crimson are all very strong characters for me (I could list so many more). I rooted for them, felt for them, prayed for them, and wanted desperately to see them succeed. These are the kinds of characters that I enjoy and so when I write characters they are likely to possess some of the same traits as the characters I mentioned. Please don’t take a Gandalf and drop him into you novel, but only call him Ron instead. People will notice that. But if there was something about Gandalf that you really held on to, a character trait of his you admire, then you might put that is Ron the wizard.
These examples don’t have to just come from fiction either. I have an old supervisor of mine that has always stuck in my head. There are traits about him that I think are great, and I use them in my characters. When I look to create romantic chemistry between characters, I draw from real life romantic situations I have seen or been in. In fact, I bet most of our larger than life characters came from traits real people have shown an author.
Characters Talk: One of the big benefits, in my opinion, of not being an outline writer is that I simply let my characters tell the story. I know where the end game is, but I let the character take over the keyboard for me. I let them tell their story through my fingers. I know that sounds like a multiple personality disorder, or at the least the rambling cliches of a writer. But the truth is, when I am writing in a character’s viewpoint, I simply have to become that character. I have to let them talk. I am telling their story, if I don’t listen to them they won’t talk to me anymore. The bottom line here is that if you want to have a believable character you have to treat them like a real person.
Even if you do write outlines. Don’t be so rigid with it. If your characters tell you they want to go on a side quest, perhaps you should let them. I have often found that my characters know a lot more about where my stories are going than I do. And they teach me something new about themselves all the time.
Overly Evil: We often associate the antagonist with evil. This is because if many stories they are the bad guy. But don’t over do it. I’ve heard it said many times, in a variety of ways, so I’ll repeat it: Readers should love to hate your antagonist. They should be able to connect with him on some level. S/he has to be a believable character. They may even be convinced they are doing the right thing. If evil is an element in your antagonist, keep it in line. An overly evil antagonist can be believable, after all there are some incredibly evil people in real life, but too much will turn off a reader. Use the same advice above for creating an antagonist and you will find you can create one with just as much “punch” and the diehard villain, and they will be better for it.
Summary
When you go through all these steps you will get great characters. Add some great story telling and you will have characters that are memorable, and worth every moment of the readers time. Each character is different, and their roll in the story will determine just how deep you go into the development of them. But the more you make them real before you start writing, the stronger they will be in the readers head.
If you are looking for more on the topic of character, I strongly suggest you check out Elements of Fiction Writing – Characters and View Point by Orson Scott Card. I learned a lot from that book and reread it often.
Validation
Deep down I think we all seek some type of validation. It could be with a loved one, in our careers, and in our friendship. It can also be with parking. We all need it. I have a confession though, I self doubt a lot. That is to say that I am constantly needing validation that my choices are the right ones. This is true of my writing career as well.
But I think writers are a group that need a special type of validation. There are a lot of people out there that want to be writers. There are even a lot of people out there who say they are writers and really don’t know what they mean when they say that. But deep down we writers want to be validated as authors. Unfortunately validation doesn’t always come.
So at what point are you valid in claiming you are an author. Well, that is a bar that we set for ourselves. Some set the bar really high, claiming they can only be an author when they get that first professional sale. Some claim that they can be called an author simply because they say they are.
But what really validates the claim to that title of author? Well for me it is the recognition of my peers, my readers, and friends.
Last year I felt really good when I took 2nd place in the science fiction and fantasy short story category of the 2011 Preditors and Editors readers poll for “Death Watch”. I felt even better at all the nice comments I received. I even felt validated as a short story author. The sale of my first two short stories in a matter of months helped a lot, but being recognized in that poll was special to me.
But what I really wanted to do was sell novels. So in 2012, I didn’t work on many short story projects. I put my work towards publishing my first novel, and I did it. My goal was to get a lot of new readers, and I did that. My goal was to get a lot of reviews and praise, but that has not really happened. I’ve had 8 reviews on Amazon US and 2 on UK. Don’t get me wrong, I am very pleased with those reviews. But one of my roll models, the person that inspired me to get Dissolution of Peace out, seemed to get a lot of reviews very quickly. Even a lot of editorial reviews (of which I’ve only had two). It is my opinion that he made a big splash in the Horror scene, while I seem to have made only a slight ripple (like a pebble dropped into the ocean) in the Sci-Fi scene.
So, I started to question the validity of my claim to be a novelist. Some of my role models in the independent scene, including the person above, have not even shared (to my knowledge) the work I have done. I think perhaps I expected too much from those I thought would return the favor. But the point is that I began to question if I was any good at what I was setting out to do. This is that self doubt I was talking about.
The problem not feeling validated, is that you tend to slump. And I did a significant slump. But then the readers poll came around again. I was nominated for best Science Fiction and Fantasy novel. There were also 85 other novels nominated. In the end I took another top ten finish, coming in 5th for the 2012 poll.
There were some great comments in there too. I take great pride in how much people love my work and my characters. I was ecstatic to see some of these things, they mean a lot to me.
I think the important thing that this post should point out. If you are a reader, like I am, you need to set out to review ALL the books you read but especially the ones you enjoyed. You need to make sure to share that with everyone. Because if you want to see writers continue to write, they need to feel validated. And for many of us, your reviews, purchases, and kind comments validates our purpose. I think this is more important than a professional sale, and or even a large book deal, though those all help. After all, it isn’t about who publishes what we write, but about who enjoys what we write.
So to those who continue to buy my books, vote for my books, comment on my books, review my books, and share my stories: I thank you. You fuel my my writing career and make it that much more likely that I will someday reach all my writing goals.
As for the parking, I think I will just pay for it. That is a validation that can be impossible to get.
The Submission Grinder (A Duotrope Replacement)
I rarely do two blog posts in a week, let alone in a day. But I was just extremely excited that I couldn’t wait to share this with you.
I have made it no secret that I didn’t like how Duotrope handled their new business plan. It seems there is a new alternative that arrived today.
The folks over at Diabolical Plots made an announcement today:
We have been actively working on creating a Duotrope replacement for which we will never require a subscription fee. Anthony Sullivan has been our technical expert, as our resident web guru. I have been the monkey with the wrench that hits things to see if I can break them, as well as market data entry. The Submissions Grinder is already running and ready to go, though we have some work to do yet updating the market listings.
I was really excited to hear this. I knew someone would put forth the effort to try to replace the void that Duotrope has left. David Steffen appears to have had some of the same frustrations I had. And a lot of his came from the same places mine did. I just didn’t like how it was being handled. And while many of us took to the blogging world to say we didn’t like it. Steffen and his colleague Anthony Sullivan have put together The Submission Grinder.
I’ve already registered because I liked the idea and I know the folks at Diabolical Plots put out quality product. And I will tell you what, I absolutely love it. It is simple. But what do you really need? There is a market search, a submission tracker, and pieces manager. In fact, those of us who are used to Duotrope will find the user interface and information to be virtually identical in most ways.
If you downloaded your Duotrope data from the site, you can upload that Excel CSV file right into their site. I did that today and now all my submission data is saved right onto The Grinder’s “my submissions” section. Best of all, your submissions will create a rapidly growing market listing on that site. I’ve already pledged my support to these folks, if nothing else for the fact that they have proven that they care about writers. Plasma Frequency will also happily do what it can to support these guys.
So please go check out the hard work these guys put into this. Be patient with the bugs, as any new (and even veteran site) has them. But I think you will see that this will quickly become everything you needed when Duotrope went paid.
Grammar Sensitivity
Recently I had my first three star review for Dissolution of Peace. There are many who believe that writers should avoid reading reviews of their work. Of course, as a new writer that can be tough. There is a certain quest for validity when you are first starting out. This is especially true of independent writers, those not publishing through one of the big house publishers. But you also have to have a certain level of thick skin when it comes to reading reviews. It is the same thick skin you have to develop when you get those first critiques back from beta readers. I think I am fairly good at taking a bad review or critique. I am willing to admit that my writing isn’t for everyone. I don’t think every story is for everyone. In fact, I don’t think there is one story that is for everyone. Tastes vary, and I can appreciate that.
But there is one chink in my review armor, an Achilles heal of bad reviews, and that is grammar. Nothing makes me feel more incredibly horrible as a writer, or even as a human being, then when someone points out bad grammar. The worst part is so many people feel compelled to do so. I have a friend who doesn’t even like to read who will point out just about every grammar mistake I make on social media. My sister-in-law loves to do it as well. My wife, she can do it all the time. She especially loves to point out bad grammar in my speech. My mom even pointed out that she thought I had a bad editor, because of the mistakes she saw in my writing. I found this even more disheartening because I thought my Editor did a great job helping me polish this out. So my first thought was how horrible the original could have been without his help.
Every time someone points it out, I feel like a hack. I have an insecurity when it comes to my grammar. This includes my spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. Really any of it gets me down. So while a three star review is decent, the text of his review got me down. Down to the point that I nearly scrapped my current novel in progress and packed up the keyboard. Nothing makes me feel more like a want-a-be writer than when I get hit with grammar points.
But like any Achilles heal, I’ve had to learn to deal with it. There are two reasons I never pursued my original dream career, one of them was a mentor of mine who repeatedly pointed out my horrible spelling skills. I don’t think she ever called them horrible, but that is what I heard. So when the second thing came along, I never bothered to overcome it because deep down I was self conscious of my ability to deal with spelling. I can’t let that become the stumbling block for my dream to write.
If it wasn’t for spell check, my spelling would be worse. But one can not rely on spell check alone. It isn’t a perfect system. Sure, I could resort to blaming others. But that really isn’t fair either. In fact, I really haven’t found a trick to dealing with this. I try my damnedest to learn everything I can about grammar, and do my best to catch it all. I hire an editor to make sure my grammar is on point. And I listen to those grammar complaints from everyone who points them out, even when it gets me beyond angry.
I also try to remember that I am not the only one. I know others that have had, or continue to have grammar difficulties. So here are some tips I use to help me deal with my Grammar Sensitivity:
1. Not everyone knows what they are talking about.
Frankly, many don’t know what they are talking about. There have been a lot of people to point out grammar mistakes for me to spend time looking up only to find they were the ones that are wrong. But, just because they are wrong doesn’t mean I didn’t learn a little more about grammar.
2. Learn what you can about grammar.
If you are like me, you hate learning about grammar. I don’t like it at all. But if you have the dream of being a writer, it is something you have to deal with. When someone points out a grammar mistake, look it up. And when you are not sure, look it up. There are many ways to look it up. A fellow author shared this site with me: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ It has helped me out a lot. But if grammar is your stumbling block, learning it may not be so easy. But you could also be making it harder of yourself.
3. Don’t over think grammar.
Once of the biggest draw backs to constantly studying grammar has been that I am now constantly second guessing myself. I don’t know how many articles I have read on then versus than. Yet, I still make the mistake. And 95% of the time, I make the mistake because I spent so much time over thinking the way I was using it. And spending too much time thinking over the grammar only slows down your progress on the story.
4. Grammar can be fixed
I believe I have said this before. But grammar can be fixed while the ability to tell the story generally can not. Story is much harder and sometimes impossible to fix, but changing a semicolon to a period is easy. But only if you can catch your mistakes.
5. Hire someone to catch those mistakes
Hire a grammar cop to edit your stories. If you know grammar is your weakest link, get a grammar strong editor. Get grammar strong beta readers too. And don’t restrict them from pointing out grammar issues, especially in later readings. I’ve made this mistake before. I’ve been very restrictive on grammar comments from beta readers and in the long run it only shoots me in the foot.
6. Have a safe zone.
My friends tend to make this impossible. But I used to use social media as my reprieve from grammar. That is why I have made it one of the rules on my blog that there be no Grammar policing on my site. This is my break. But, my mom still feels compelled to point it out. While there is no real safe zone from grammar cops, you can do your best to make some sort of buffer area. It is why I get so angry with my friends on social media when they get grammar crazy. It just isn’t the place for it.
7. Grammar mistakes are not a stopping point.
Grammar mistakes should not be something that stops you from realizing your dreams. I wish I understood that ten years ago. Grammar mistakes can actually be a starting point. They can be a spring board for you to learn from. You can make yourself a better writer by getting these mistakes brought to light. And then learning about them.
8. Watch out for the ones that point out grammar too much.
Yes, there can be too much grammar. Those that expect perfect grammar in dialogue for example. But it has also been my experience that many who are absolutely crazy about grammar are not exactly good with story. I know some people are going to go nuts over that comment. But it is still my firm belief that when you are writing a story, you should be obsessed with the story not the grammar. If you have people around you that drag you down over grammar, they may not be the type you want to have around. But that ones that want to build you up by helping you with grammar, those are the keepers.
Here is a trick to tell which type of person they are: It is all in how they point it out. If they point it out with a rude comment, then it is obvious they are the “drag you down” type. But sometimes it isn’t so cut and dry. The sarcastic joke, the laughing at you (even an LOL or a 
count as laughing at you) for your mistake, and the constant pestering of you for your grammar. Those are all signs of the “drag you down” type of person. And most of the time, the “drag you down” person is jealous of some other aspect of your writing, such as your story telling ability.
But the person who wants you to succeed will point out resources for you to learn. They will explain the grammar error to you. They will do their best to tell you how to fix it, how to learn more about that mistake, and how to keep from making it again. That is a person that wants you succeed. They are happy that you have all the talents for writing that you do have, and they want to help you make grammar another one of those talents.
9. Once it is published, it is published.
Don’t get me wrong. If you don’t think a work is acceptable and you are self publishing it. You can pull it down. But, if you have been following some of my other tips and tricks, you likely did all you could to make it the best possible work you could put out at the time it was published. Going back and changing something after every review that points out a mistake, will only lead to an inability to move on and progress as a writer.
10. Push on.
I mentioned above that I was ready to give up on writing over the grammar review I got. It hurt. But I also had to recognize that it is also their opinion. And, I think it is a bit exaggerated. But even if it isn’t exaggerated, the point of Amazon reviews is for a person to give their honest opinion of the product. Even if it gets all one star reviews, you have to move on. You have to move on and start on that next project. You have to keep pushing for that dream. Giving up on it now will only cause regret later. I still kick myself for giving up on my career goals. Giving up on my writing dreams will not work.
If you are going to be a writer, you will have to deal with grammar. Even worse, you will have to deal with grammar critics. If you have a sensitivity to grammar correction, like I do, you will have to learn to work around it. I hope with a few of my tips you can at least manage to keep writing.
Curse Words in Writing
I really have never addressed this topic. It is funny that I have not talked about it since I quite simply love to curse. There is little else that makes certain type of point than a well placed “fuck” or a perfectly timed “bullshit.” And in the work I do, I am certainly well adjusted to hearing swear words, including some very nasty ones directed at me personally.
So when it came to swearing in writing, I never really gave in much thought. I like to write stories with believable characters, and we live in a world where people curse. But when it comes to telling a story, cursing can be off putting to some readers, and there has to be a balance. There are many things to consider when you type that first swear in your fiction. Let’s take a look at some:
Audience
Who is this book intended for? It might be most obvious to eliminate, or at the least tone down, cursing in a Young Adult novel. You will likely have none in Middle Grade. And I am certain your children’s book will be swear free. But it is more then just the category of your novel. Are you writing to diehard Sci-Fi readers? Grandmas? Church goers? Parents of young kids? Military readers? and on and on. Each of these needs a consideration as well. If this group of readers will be easily offended by the content of your novel, including swearing, you either need to change your audience or remove the words.
Is it Fitting?
Does the curse words fit the story, the world, and the context it is used in? If you are writing a book about an alien world who have never met humans, I highly doubt they would use the word “shit” in any way. If you are writing about a character that is getting shot at, I can almost be certain they will swear. If you are writing a military or police novel, they swear. Do they all swear? No. But I’ve been around enough of both to know that when things get ugly, a swear might slip out. You have to find out if the swear belongs in the world, the environment, and the type of story you are telling.
Characters
I touched on this a bit above. If you are writing about the military, there may be curse words. But if your Main Character is a very mild mannered person who was drafted into the army, s/he might not be prone to swearing. If you are writing about a priest who is trying to help a teenager get out of a bad situation, he is unlikely to swear. But then again, he might slip in a minor curse word if the teenager has just pushed the priest too far. Or the priest feels that is the only way to get through to the kid. Think about each of your characters. As you are developing your character, did you ever think of them as the type to swear a lot? If not, then it might be best to leave them out. Consider the character’s background. Growing up rich with a lot of servants and proper etiquette might yield a different swear result than the inner-city bully.
Vulgarity
To some the word “fuck” is vulgar in itself. I am sure if that is the case they stopped reading my blog a long time ago. But to others, the way it is used determines the level of vulgarity. There is a big difference between yelling out “fuck” in an adrenaline rush situation and saying you will “fuck” someone. The vulgarity of the use of a swear ties in to the character, the suitability of the use, and your target audience. I swear a lot, but there are certain words, when used a certain way, that even I take offense to. In the end if you are going for shock value, it should be removed. Shocking your audience in a vulgar way, will likely knock them right out of your story. Sometimes to the point they won’t keep reading.
Is the word distracting/excessive?
When you read the text, is the word distracting to the action? Do you, or your beta readers, seem to notice the word more than the actions of the overall scene? If so, it probably doesn’t belong. Have your characters done nothing but curse the entire novel? If so, you may be taking away from the character and that will only hurt the story. The most obvious test is if you notice. The second test will come from beta readers.
Excessive is hard to define. You can’t say that a certain number of curse words is the limit in any novel. You have to test it with a sample audience, the beta readers. See what they say. See what your editor says. Consider all of it to decide if it works for your novel. In Dissolution of Peace, we have a military setting, with aggressive and stressed out characters, in a world on the brink of war. I can tell you that there is cursing in the novel. My friend asked me if the novel would be appropriate for a 14 and 9 year old. Before I could message him back and say, “Probably not.” He told me that he searched the novel. The word “Fuck” came up fifteen times and “shit” twenty plus times. When I first saw that, I was surprised. I hadn’t thought it was so much. And that really does seem like a lot. But not one beta readers, or my editor, made a single comment on the cursing. The fact that neither myself or my beta readers noticed proves the fact that it is not excessive.
Of course, others might consider it very excessive. That goes back to audience. So far, in both editorial reviews and customer reviews, there has been no mention of the cursing. So far, it seems, that no one considers it excessive. As I go back and read the novel, the curse words fit the situations they are used in. You almost don’t notice them.
To curse or not to curse. The debate.
Curse words are a big debate in the writing community. I’ve not noticed forum discussion on the topic that did not have strong opinions on both sides of the debate. Many have argued that if the right way to use a curse word is to leave it unnoticed, than what it the point of using it anyway? I often argue that sometimes not using a curse word can be more distracting. I read a detective novel, very well written, but I just couldn’t see this detective yelling out “dang!” when he got shot at. To me that was deliberate censorship and it stood out far more than a “shit” or a “damn it” would have. If the author was against cursing, simply leaving it off might have been better.
And that sort of sums up the use of curse words in a novel. They will never make or break a story. I’ve seen excellent novels based in various settings that both use and didn’t use curse words. But even in those that used the curse words, it wasn’t the curse words you remembered. You remembered the story. Curse words are like many other character and story accents. If used correctly, no one will remember them but they will love your characters and story.
Swears are a lot like sex scenes. In many cases the story will work just fine without either. So the choice is entirely up to the author. But when used correctly, swears are no big deal either. Only the writer can decide if they belong or not.
Shame on You Duotrope
For well over a year, perhaps closer to a year and a half I have been very openly supportive of Duotrope. They have offered a great service that was 100% free for users, and all they asked in return was for donations to help keep the site running. Unfortunately, according to Duotrope, only 10% of the users donate. As a result they feel compelled to begin charging users a subscription fee for use of their services starting January 1st.
As a business owner, I understand needing to cover your expenses. I can’t even blame them if they want to make a profit (though they have never said they want to do this), but I can blame them for a lot of bad business choices they are making by passing this cost on to users. Especially at the crazy price of $50 a year.
It is my prediction that this move will ultimately lead to the downfall for Duotrope. Not because of this choice to charge, but because of how they have implemented it. I don’t think they really have given much thought to this. Recently they posted on Facebook that they did consider this for some time, but this has all the markings of a hastily made decision rather than a carefully thought out one.
Here is why I say “Shame on You, Duotrope.”
You didn’t consult your users for their thoughts:
The users are the life blood of a service such as Duotrope. You need their submission stats to get the information other users come to your site to gather. And you spit in their face by not even offering a simple survey of your users to see what options they would prefer to keep the site running. Ads on the website, subscriptions fees, multilevel publication listings, and much more are all options that could have been put on a survey to see what your users would prefer. It would have also given us more time to prepare for the idea of Duotrope charging.
You gave us no time to get acquainted to this idea:
The first announcements came December 1st. Giving us one month to be prepared for this idea. Past posts on Facebook gave no hints to this plan. There was nothing in the newsletters to prepare us. You sprung this on us with one month’s notice. This is where the above idea would have benefited us all. If you had told us three months ago that donations were down and in order to keep the site up, Duotrope was considering other options to make money. Then if you offered a survey for user ideas, we would have known something like this was coming.
You’ll become another service trying to take advantage of writers:
Let’s face it. Duotrope offers little more than you can already track yourself. After all the most valuable feature to the writer, is the submission tracker. To be honest, all you have to do is make an excel spreadsheet to do that. I admit that the response stats, acceptance rates, and “Top Market” lists are fun. But you really don’t need any of that information to be an author. And if you want to find markets, Google works for free. Ralan.com is also free. And all the writer’s groups you are in are also free. They can tell you about markets. The main appeal of Duotrope was that is was convenient and free.
Writer’s don’t make a lot of money. Lets put this is perspective here. $50 a year means selling 5,000 words a year at one cent per word. Not to bad, if you are a good writer. But if you are like me, who has a lot of other projects going on at one time. I don’t always get 5,000 words sold in short stories each year. And considering the bulk of Duotrope’s listings don’t pay anything, there is not much chance of making any money on your $50 investment.
This puts Duotrope right in line with other rip off services, such as markets that charge you to submit to them. There is no value in the $50 a year you will spend. You get nothing of real value from it that isn’t free elsewhere. They are doing nothing more than tricking you into paying for something you can get for free. That is the definition of a scam.
There are better ways to make money:
There are a lot of better ways, but they take work. I admit that charging users is the simplest and easiest answer to their funding problem. But there are ways that are better for their users and Duotrope in the long run. This includes selling advertising space on their website, charging markets to list on their site, and multilevel listings. I like the multilevel listing and website ads options best. As the owner of a publishing company, I would gladly spend a little extra to be a “featured listing” on Duotrope. I’d pay $50 a year to do that or even $100 a year depending on what I got for the money. As a writer, I’d pay to have my book get an ad on the website. The traffic I am sure Duotrope currently generates would make advertising with them a worthwhile investment.
I’m sure that if they really put their minds to it, they would find these would make far better choices than charging users.
They won’t make anymore money from this:
The reasoning behind this choice was to make enough money to run the website. The problem is that simply won’t happen. Read the comments on the Facebook announcements. You will see that most of those that say they will pay, say they already donated anyway. Many say they donated more than $50 a year. I suspect that 10% of users that donate, will likely stay the same. That is, I think only 10% of the current users will subscribe. And if many of them donated more that $50 a year, then Duotrope will actually lose money from this. Even if 15% of current users subscribe, they won’t make that much more than the donations. And by the time they reverse the decision and try something else, the damage will be done.
Statistics will no longer be reliable:
If the number of users decreases by even just 50%, the statistics they collect will be damaged significantly. I suspect the users will decrease by 90% or more. This will destroy the integrity of the Duotrope’s statistics. So even if you plan to subscribe because you like the stats, you won’t get what your think your paying for.
Currently Duotrope.com represent around 30% of the actual submission to Plasma Frequency. And that is high. Other editors are reporting that Duotrope’s stats are only reflective of 10% of their submissions. Imagine how much lower this is going to drop when Duotrope’s user pool shrinks by 90%.
This will change what Duotrope is all about:
Duotrope has been free for seven years. For seven years Duotrope has been about helping writers find markets for their writing. Duotrope now wants to be about making money. Don’t let them fool you into thinking that $50 a year goes to running the site. Because it doesn’t cost a lot to run a website. I run two of them right now. Let’s look at this by using costs from Go Daddy:
Domain name: $14.99 a year, unlimited disk space hosting is $179.88 per year. Now, assuming they build their own website (and they now have the templates all in place for every new listing). That is all the real cost associated with running this site. $194.87 per year, if they didn’t take advantage of any of Go Daddy’s regular sales.
What they (the owners of the site) want to be paid for is their time. Does this make them evil? No. Business needs to make money. And clearly Duotrope wants to be a business now. That completely changes the dynamic of the site. This will now be about paying for them to do the work required to run the site. Something they already admit to doing part-time. But if four users can pay the operating expenses of the site itself for one year, how much are the owners going to take in for their time? A lot.
I don’t pretend to know all their costs. And they refuse to tell us (see below). Even when they did donations, it was just blind percentages. There was no defined dollar amount to run Duotrope. So now they plan to charge writers so they can make some money, rather than continue to be a valuable resource for writers. Once again, this goes back to the fact that I feel they are simply trying to take advantage of writers.
Duotrope doesn’t care about the user:
This is the part that inflamed me the most. They could care less about writers. They’ve made that clear by everything above. And they have practically said so. The overwhelming majority of comments on Facebook are against this, yet they just continued to repeatedly post the same generic announcement. This morning they finally posted something more, and it angered me. You can read the whole thing if you want, but I’ll just address what made me mad:
“The decision to become a paid service was not made lightly; many, if not all, of the suggestions mentioned on social media were considered, but in the end our current subscription model is what we determined to be the best compromise all-around. I know some of you want specifics on our numbers, our decision process, etc. While we understand your desire to know the inner workings of Duotrope, we are a private company, and our internal data is not public domain.”
Why can’t you share your operation costs with us? User numbers? The amount of money you are losing each month? Is it because, as I showed above, the real costs are not all that much? I think so. Do they have to share this information with us? No, they don’t. Should they? Considering the outcry from users, yes they should. It is my opinion that they should give us some idea of why this has to be the way it is and why it has to happen in January.
“We knew going in that many of you would be terribly upset over the upcoming change. We are extremely sorry that this has caused you anger, sadness, and the like. However, the decision has been made, and while we are certainly not inflexible about adjusting to upcoming challenges, our subscription model needs to be allowed the opportunity to go into effect before it can be evaluated fairly. Time will tell what the future holds, but time will be allowed to pass before any changes, if any, are made to the way Duotrope plans to operated as of 2013.”
If many of your customers will be upset, and you know it, then it is not the right choice for your business. The problem with putting something out there and evaluating it on the fly, is that the damage will be done. If I leave, Duotrope, I won’t come back. Even if they go back to free. It took seven years to build Duotrope, they can destroy it in 30 days.
“This is the basic principle of quantity v. quality. As just one oversimplified example, many casual users (and we do mean many!) will report a new submission to a market and then never follow-up on it, leaving that entry as a sort of orphan in the overall data. That is the type of data problem we predict will be reduced significantly under the new model, increasing the accuracy of the statistics on listed markets. We know this is not specific enough for some of you, but we hope that over the many years Duotrope has offered its services for free we have managed to earn at least a little bit of your trust.”
When it comes to statistics you need quantity. As I mentioned above. A smaller statistical sample will not mean a better result. The writers that can afford this will be writers who are accepted more often than others. Therefore the statistics will become skewed to only experienced writers who sell a lot. Right now, it is reflective of a broad range of writers.
And don’t even get me started on trust. We trusted you, and you are expecting us to keep trusting you. Trust is a two-way street. You want us to share money and trust you with it, but you don’t want to show us where the value is. You won’t explain in depth why seven years of free service no longer works. Trust me, I am a Nigerian Prince who wants to give you ten million dollars, just send me $5000 to facilitate the transfer of funds. Come on.
“We have always known this decision meant parting ways with some of our users. If you will not be joining us, then we thank you for all the support, promotion and participation over the last seven years, and for helping grow Duotrope from an experiment into a mature company and service.”
A business that makes a choice knowing that users will likely leave, is making a foolish choice. And thank you for acknowledging that you used us to grow your company into a money-making venture and then tossed us aside for the people who can pay you.
My summary:
Duotrope is moving in the wrong direction. I can no longer recommend anyone use them. They need to take a pause, listen to the users, and postpone this going paid idea. They need to really evaluate the priorities of Duotrope and make choices that better follow the goals of the company. But if the goals are to make money, at the expense of writers, which is exactly what this will be doing, I will want no part in this. I still firmly believe that money should flow in the direction of the writer. We writers already make so little, we don’t need this new scam sucking money from us.
Go to Duotrope, back up your data. And track your submissions the old fashion way, with an excel spread sheet. Then join the countless writers groups on Facebook, Twitter, and online to find new markets. Go check out Ralan.com for market listings. It may take a bit longer, but it will save you $50 a year you likely can’t afford to spend.
Cyber Monday! – Free eBooks!
Today is Cyber Monday. That means that you are likely out looking for good deals on various gifts for others, and maybe even yourself.
What is a better deal then free?
For today only Dissolution of Peace will be free on your Kindle! You can pick up your free copy here: LINK
Veterans Day – Free eBooks!
One of the biggest reasons I enjoy writing and reading military science fiction is because I admire the things our troops do do keep me free to write and read whatever I want. It is easy to forget sometimes just how good we really have it.
Our troops go to places around the world, most of us would never visit. They have to see and deal with things most of us have never been a part of. They spend months and years away from their families. They do it all for minimal pay, and they do it all for us.
Dissolution of Peace, my debut novel, is centered around the military of the future. And to honor our troops, I have made the Kindle Version of Dissolution of Peace free for today only. Get one for yourself, send one to a loved one over seas, and share the link with the troops you know. The least I can do is give them a little entertainment while the serve their country.
Thank you to all the service men and women serving around the world for this country.
Ten Reasons Why I Won’t be Doing NaNoWriMo
Every one in my writing communities is asking me if I will be doing NaNoWriMo this year. For those that don’t know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you start, and complete a novel in November. It is actually a great idea. Especially if you need a quick kick in the ass to get writing that novel you’ve been telling yourself you’d write for years.
I won’t be participating this year. When I tell my fellow authors that, they all want to know: Why? I can even hear some of them looking down upon me for my choice to exclude myself. So I put together my ten reasons why I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo. You may call them “excuses” but the word “reasons” makes me feel better about myself. Besides, every now and then I like to put something together that is a little tongue in cheek.
1. November is a production month for Plasma Frequency:
Yep, that is right. I run this magazine and Issue 3 has to be ready December 5th. That means that I will be spending much of my non-day job hours working on getting Plasma Frequency laid out and ready for print. Not to mention designing ads for the issue (you should get an ad to advertise the novel you finish during NaNoWriMo). And since I likely will be paying for most or all of Plasma Frequency‘s stories and artwork out of my own pocket, I’ll also need to pick up some extra hours at my day job.
2. I have to work my day job.
Believe it or not my writing doesn’t pay all my bills. I have to work a day job to try to pay my bills. A day job that doesn’t even pay enough to pay my monthly rent. So that also means I will be needing to pick up any extra hours I can. Since I have to pay my rent, phone, internet, power, water, and Plasma Frequency‘s running costs. In all, I have to put up a lot of hours at work to try to make ends meet. Those extra hours are all hours I normally reserve for writing, editing, and family time.
3. My family needs me too.
Yep, I am throwing them under the bus here. But it is true. And there are a lot of family events happening in November. My birthday and Thanksgiving being two of them. These are often all day events in my family so that means two more lost days in the tight schedule.
And since my birthday is in November, I don’t have to do NaNoWriMo. I think it is in the rules. If it isn’t in the rules, than I am adding it to my own personal NaNoWriMo rules.
4. I have volunteer commitments
I volunteer on the Board of Directors for my local soccer league. And, I coach in that league. And, two of my three boys play in that league. The season ends in November. So there are two year end parties to attend. And there is one weekend ate up to the end of season tournament. So there are four more days that NaNoWriMo can’t have.
5. I already started a Novel.
I have already started a novel. My second novel is already in the works. And in NaNoWriMo you are supposed to start and finish in November. So if I participated, I would be cheating. And no one likes cheaters. I could start the sequel for Dissolution of Peace, but I am not a person that can write two novels at once. I can edit one and write another. I can even write a short story while doing a novel. But I just can’t do two novels at once. It is my writing style.
6. I didn’t participate last year.
I didn’t do NaNoWriMo last year, in fact I have never done it. I don’t need to explain myself for past years, those are past years. But, I am far to busy to start something new in November.
7. I don’t want to sacrifice quality for speed.
I get that you don’t have to have a print ready manuscript by the end of November. The point is to have the first draft done. But the first draft is the foundation for that final manuscript. You have to have something to work with or the story is lost. At least that is my opinion. And as you can see I already have a lot of things taking up my time. I bet I probably could still throw 50,000 words down in the time I have left, but I don’t think they would be worth the paper, or disk space, they are written on. I would feel like I am sacrificing quality just to get it done on time because of my crowded schedule.
8. I don’t want to be another blogger spending all of November blogging about NaNoWriMo.
Every year the writing blogs fill up with constant talk about NaNoWriMo. Or even worse, they virtually shut down for a month. Both, I don’t wish to do. Sometimes my schedule is so crowded that these posts are the only writing I get done for weeks or months. And I don’t want to take a break for writing my novel, to tell you about how NaNoWriMo is going. I’d prefer to be the destination my followers can come to read a post or two that is away from the topic of NaNoWriMo. Don’t get me wrong, if you participate in NaNoWriMo, you may want to read about the progress of others. I just don’t feel like blogging about it, and/or not blogging for a month.
“But Richard,” you say. “You are blogging about NaNo right now.” To those people I say, this doesn’t count. It is still October.
9. I have a current novel to promote
We have established that my schedule is tight. Well, Dissolution of Peace needs to sell. And it won’t sell with out someone marketing it. That someone is me. My October sales have slowed drastically, and I hope to kick it into high gear for November and December. That means more free time used to find reviewers, advertising, and self marketing. Maybe even trying to set up a book signing or two. That all takes time. So rather then starting a third novel (just yet), I need to market the first one.
10. I have nothing to wear.
You heard me correctly. No one wants to see me sitting around naked in my office writing a novel. What does one wear to a virtual writing gathering anyway? Is it a virtual black tie? Or is virtual business casual okay? Perhaps a virtual suit is sufficient. That’s the thing, I simply don’t know. And to save myself the embarrassment, I simply won’t attend. Besides, I heard it was a Sadie Hawkins event and no one has asked me.
NaNoWriMo is a good thing
Sure, I am not attending. But NaNoWriMo is a great event. And perhaps one year I will be able to do it. But that year is not 2012. If you have time and want to do it, I suggest you check out the website. There is no better way to stimulate your writing glands and put together something great. If you are stalling to start writing, but just haven’t done it, NaNoWriMo is a great way to jump in. At the very least, check it out. Every year I do. And as I said before, one year I will do it.
Perhaps I will have my own personal NaNoWriMo. Who says November has to be the only month you write a novel in? If you are like me, perhaps you make January your month, or even July. And even though I joked about the NaNoWriMo related blogs, I tend to learn a lot more about writing when NaNo is going on than I do other times of year. Authors are always willing to help each other out. So even if you don’t participate, you are bound to learn something this November.
Second Review of Dissolution of Peace
“I left my soft chair and became a love-crossed, beautiful captain of a starship”
My Second book review is up. That is two in two days! This one comes from SciFi Book Review. Please take a moment to follow Sheron, the reviewer, on Twitter and Facebook by clicking those links. And of course, please leave a positive comment on the review.
SciFi Book Review’s post on Dissolution of Peace
Dissolution of Peace is available on Kindle and in Paperback on Amazon.com
Spreading the Word
So I have been trying to sell copies of Dissolution of Peace now for almost two weeks. And I am discovering a few things that I didn’t expect to discover along the way. I know I have touched on some of this before when I wrote “Is Anybody Out There?” but that was more about making a plan for marketing. This is more about what I am learning that may surprise some of you.
I’ll go ahead and start with common questions about marketing books and give you my answer two weeks in.
Do giveaways work?
The short answer is that I don’t know yet. I’ve done a giveaway on Goodreads for Daddy is Tired. I did it at the recommendation of another who told me it really worked for him. So far, I’ve not seen any boost in sales. In fact I think I’ve sold one copy total since that give away ended at the end of September. So I am not sure how it “works” but it didn’t for a children’s picture book.
I’m run
ning two giveaways for Dissolution of Peace. One ends at the end of October, the other ends at the end of November. Surprisingly the one on Goodreads seems to be getting a lot less reaction than the one on my Facebook page. There is one advantage to the Facebook Page give away. Both my Twitter and Facebook followers have gone up significantly. Though that hasn’t translated into sales. We will see what happens come the end of the giveaways.
I did two other giveaways. I gave away fifteen free copies of Dissolution of Peace for Kindle on Twitter, of which only one was ever claimed. I did the same on Facebook, giving away ten copies. Two were claimed. Not exactly a very strong presence there. My hope was to get twenty-five copies of my book out there and hopefully get ten reviews on Amazon and/or Goodreads. I’ve not had any reviews (from the giveaway) on either one.
Based on these numbers, you might think that giveaways don’t work. To be honest no one has ever really told me how they work to get sales. They just tell me it works. So Perhaps by the end of the year I will see an increase in sales. The giveaways don’t cost me anything. The eBooks are free. And the signed paperbacks will cost me less than $20 when I factor in the shipping charges. So when you consider how little it costs, it is worth a shot. But if you try something, like my eBook social media give away, and it doesn’t work. Don’t repeat failure. Even if it cost you nothing monetarily, it will cost you your time.
The good thing about Raffle Copter (which I am using to give away one signed paperback) and Goodreads giveaways, is that it doesn’t cost you but a few minutes of time. And, like I said, I am getting new followers as result. That may be of significant value later.
Does Posting to Facebook or Twitter work?
I suppose this is the new form of word of mouth. Word of mouth advertising does work. But only if it is done correctly. But I will clue you in on some surprises I learned.
First, don’t count on people to share it. All the people I thought were certain to share it, some who were even instrumental in helping create it, have not shared it once. Many of these people are fellow authors, whom I have promoted heavily myself. Of course, I didn’t promote them expecting them to do the same. Though I did kind of hope they might. Most of them I promoted well before my novel came out. There are some I have even promoted their business (they are not authors) and they haven’t shared my book either.
But, there is an upside to this. I have had complete strangers share my book, mostly on Twitter. These are people who recently jumped on and followed me. In fact, one person who follows me retweeted it and then five or six people who don’t follow me also retweeted it. Facebook on the other hand has been all shares from family or friends. I appreciate everyone who shares it, and I try to help them out when I can. But remember, just because you help someone else out, don’t expect it in return. The deal here is that you should share what you want and other will share what they want. Even though it is disappointing when family and friends don’t.
Facebook groups are another way of spreading the word. Two things to remember. First, don’t break the groups rules. Your post will just get deleted. Two, don’t expect much from it. I belong to several writing Facebook groups. The problem is, all of them are so flooded with self promotional posts, that mine rarely stay within a readable number of posts for more than an hour. Also, I’m not sure how many people are actually reading what others post there, versus just posting themselves. Some even seem to post every hour or so. Which is bullshit if you ask me. They are spamming the feeds just to keep their book on top. I’ll get more on spamming later.
Okay, I’ll talk about spamming now. If all you post on Twitter or Facebook is your novel. You won’t get anywhere. It doesn’t take long before people tune you out and/or unfollow you. Personally I only post about my book a few times a day. And lately it has been cut back to just once. I post about other topics: Jokes only I think are funny, blog posts that helped me, Plasma Frequency, the NHL lockout, and more. I also comment on other people’s posts, try to answer comments on mine, reply to tweets, and retweet things that I liked. All of these things make me a human being. Not a constantly tweeting about my book robot. I think that is equally important as getting the word out about your books. After all, if you lose followers, what is the point of tweeting to an empty room.
Think of it this way. If every time one of your coworkers, friends, or even family members saw you, all you said was “Buy my book. It is on Amazon.com and it is great.” How long before you wouldn’t see them again? Of course you will tell your friends about your book, but I am sure you talk about other things. The same should be the case on Facebook or Twitter. Be a real person and you might wind up with more results and more help for your followers.
What to you thing about Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising?
First of all, PPC advertising works on a the principle that a site puts up an advertisement and when someone clicks on it you pay a per click fee. Many places let you bid on the per click rate. Lower bids mean you are not shown as often as larger bids. You can usually choose who you target and even set up limits per month.
Right now I am using Goodreads. From all the research I have done, Goodreads is supposed to be better at targeting readers than Facebook or Google PPC ads. I have three ads. One for the Paperback targeting US readers of Science Fiction 16 or older. One for the Kindle Version targeting US readers of eBooks and Science Fiction 16 or older. Last, I have a Paperback/Kindle ad targeting UK readers of science fiction 16 or older. All three ads are in one campaign. I pay 20 cents a click for one, the other two I pay 10 cents per click. I started the ad on the 16th in the evening. So in about four days I have had 3,500 views. Views just mean it came up on the page, it doesn’t mean anyone actually saw it. Of all those views I have had two (2) clicks, both in the UK. And both UK clicks resulted in zero new UK sales.
The good news is you can change your ads any way you want until you find one that gets you more clicks. I recommend you send the clicks to Amazon or Barnes and Noble for sales. This is because it eliminates extra steps to get your book sold. The real trick if making an ad that really catches readers attentions. Though part of this falls on Goodreads. Frankly they put the ads in a terrible spot. That even on my large screen, I have to scroll down to see them.
The bad news is, I dumped $90 into this PPC campaign based on recommendations from others that Goodreads PPC ads really jump started their book sales for the first 30 days. At this rate, it will take me a long time to burn up $90. So learn from my mistake and start with a smaller number. Then once you find an ad that gets you a lot of clicks, you can increase. Another tip: Keep in mind how much you make in profit on each sale. If you make $0.30 per eBook sale and you bid $0.30 cents per click. Someone would have to buy on every click just to break even. $0.10 is the lowest you can bid on good reads. So if you book is less than $1.99 you’re expecting a lot for the ad.
Here is the thing, I think PPC can work. But you have to stay on top of it. You have to find an ad that works, and that means watching the numbers and changing the ad until you get clicks. And then hopefully clicks will turn into sales.
What about website advertising?
I don’t know. I haven’t tried it yet. I contacted one site that had a really good deal with a few questions. That was a week ago and they never answered me. So I’ll continue to look around. The think on website advertising is you want to find a site that attracts readers of your genre.
What about print/magazine advertising?
Although I have not tried it. I know this works. If you put your book in a fiction magazine for your genre you will get the word out there about your book. The readership numbers matter. This is why if you want to advertise in some of the bigger science fiction magazines, you will pay a lot for it. Smaller presses charge less, but you get less readers.
Book Reviews / Author Interviews?
I’m in the process of getting a few book reviews. But finding sites to do it is a lot harder than I ever thought. Many have “closed” because of overload. Many more have lengthy lead times. One who has accepted my book has already told me it could be 8-12 weeks. Another is reading it now, and two more have put me on “the list”. But these book review sites have readers. I don’t agree with paying for a review. The most I am willing to do is provide a free book.
Author Interviews. I have not done any of these yet. And it seems that the only places I have found that do them, charge for them. So I don’t know.
It the end, blog reviews and author interviews are another form of word of mouth. Word of mouth works, it is proven in multiple industries.
Amazon or Goodreads reviews. The thing with these is to be prepared to have to beg for them. Just getting people to like the book or add it to a shelf has been nearly impossible. Then asking people to do the Tags thing on Amazon has been impossible. Over all it has been a nightmare. But the truth is, people don’t buy things on Amazon that haven’t been reviewed. And the more reviews you can get the better people will feel about paying for your book. But it takes time. People have to read your book. And after they read the book they have to feel the need to go back to Amazon (or Goodreads) and rate it. Many readers aren’t that motivated to do all that. If they are active on Goodreads, that site does a good job of integrating at least a star rating into the experience of the reading progress. But there is nothing to encourage someone to go to Amazon.com and review your item. The encouragement could be that the book was so good they have to say something or it could be it was so bad they had to say something. More often they have to be encouraged by someone to do it. That someone being you.
So does marketing work?
Many authors will tell you that they have seen no benefit in marketing. This is because, like me, they have a preconceived notion that buying an ad automatically equals sales. Or that all their friends and family will share their book. Or that giving a few books away will mean that everyone who didn’t win will go buy it. The truth is far less. Advertising takes a tone of work and it takes a lot of time before it really takes off. The truth is most of us are not marketing geniuses and advertising becomes a trial and error. And since books vary as much as their authors, it is also possible that what you try won’t work for you but will work for me.
The best thing to do is to keep at it. Spend just a little money until you know what works. Invest your money wisely. As I learn more about what works for me, I’ll share it with you all.
Form Rejections
When I started out as a writer, I went to work with short stories. There are tons of markets to share my stories with. When I got my first form letter rejection, I wasn’t surprised. I’d known rejection was part of the game and I had been warned that most markets use the Form Letter for rejections. The question no one could really answer clearly was: Why?
I’d first been told it was because of the sheer volume of submissions. Which I wasn’t sure about since I didn’t think it took but two seconds more to tell me why I was rejected.
I was told it has to do with editor policy. Which is true, but doesn’t really answer the why.
I was told it was just the industry standard. Again true, but not really why.
The point is, every writer danced around the topic because frankly none really knew why. We just accepted it as the way of the writing world, and went with it. After all there really isn’t anything any of us can do to change it, unless we all just stopped sending in submissions. But I’m not going to stop sending in submissions over the type of rejection I get.
I’ve been running Plasma Frequency now for five months and we’ve put out two issues. And up until yesterday we offered personal rejections on every submission. Even as our large volume of submission came in, we continued to provide personal rejection letters. Why did we do that? I thought that was what writers wanted. They wanted to be told why their story was rejected. They wanted to learn from the rejections. They wanted to know if the editor even finished manuscript. And if not, why. So I thought, lets tell them.
The problem is this. Authors don’t really want to know. Not truly. When they find out from the editor that the opening was boring, it upsets them more than the form letter did. When an editor say the manuscript wasn’t formatted and submitted correctly, they get aggravated they were rejected on a technicality. When the editor says the story was great but doesn’t fit the publication, they get mad that the publication doesn’t accept “great” stories.
I realize this is an over generalization. I get upset at personal rejection from time to time, but I really appreciate that they took the time to tell me why. And in the end, like most writers, I just move on. I fix the problem, or don’t, and send it off to the next place.
The problem is that there are a significant number of authors who are not professional enough to move on. They have to say something back. Those authors should read my blog post, “Inside an Editor’s Mind (Tips for Writers)”. The problem is they are rarely correct in their anger, and it is almost always misplaced.
My staff and I have been threatened, cursed at, CAP LOCKED, and cyber bullied. I already nearly lost one editor because of it. Here are some of the things we’ve gotten back from authors.
“Well you would know about “overly sexual” you whore.”
“I will find everything any of you have ever written and I will ensure everyone I know rates it as poorly as possible.”
“You can suck my dick!”
“I consider myself above your petty opinions.”
“You must be sleeping with the Lead Editor to get your job.”
“I will tell everyone about your lack of professionalism.”
“YOU CAN ALL EAT SHIT!”
“You are by far one of the UGLIEST people I’ve seen.”
“I will find you and you will regret rejecting ME.”
Your first thought might be that we are doing something wrong. That we are rude in our personal rejection. But I discovered I am not the only one getting this behavior, we just rarely talk about it.
John Joseph Adams, editor for Lightspeed, and in my opinion one of the better editors in the business recently tweeted: “This week, have been both called a “tool” for rejecting someone & had a writer reply “FUCK YOU!!!” Still so surprising when people do this.”
While he is one of the only ones I know to publicly say so, many other editors have privately shared the same types of stories. Writers who complain about how unprofessional we are, while writing to us in an unprofessional manner. Frankly it is embarrassing to writers as a whole, and if we editors wanted to be truly unprofessional we’d share with you their names so you could rise up against them. Because the fact remains that the main reason editors stop providing personal rejections is because of the abuse that writers like these give us.
The problem here is the professional divide. There are many websites warning writers of bad editors. Editors that take advantage of writers. There should be. There are also plenty of people who take to the internet in persecution of an editor or a company simply because of a rejection letter. That is not right. I personally have yet to find a website that warns editors of unprofessional writers. Writers who say things that I’ve mentioned above.
Why? We have to take the high road. We have to be professional and accept that is is part of our job. We are trying to give our opinions to help you understand why your story didn’t make the cut. They are our opinions. We are then persecuted, bullied, and abused for giving those opinions. We just wanted to help. It makes many editors quit. And as their boss, I can’t really allow it to happen. We can take limited steps to protect ourselves, such as switching to form rejection. That is why we, at Plasma Frequency, stopped providing personal rejections to first read rejections. We hope to continue to provide them to second and third read rejections. Hopefully the writers at that level can handle our opinions.
Once again, I recognize that most writers don’t behave this way. This might come off as a bit of rant. And in a way it is.But the point is, it is my opinion that many publications use form letters simply because of the abuse the get if they used personal rejections.
Of course, as an editor I still very much respect writers. I am thankful for the submissions we get. I couldn’t run my magazine with out them. I’ll likely still send out a few personal rejections to those who might appreciate the opinion.
Distinguishing Yourself from the “Steaming Piles of Crap”
On of the members of the writer’s group I belong to, and a person I follow on Google+, recently released her first eBook. I offered my congratulations and she mentioned that anyone can put up an eBook, “…from Stephen King to steaming pile of crap.”
And truthfully she is right. Anyone can do it. They can go on Smashwords, KDP, or even PubIt and throw together an eBook and sell it in about ten minutes. I just got done setting up Dissolution of Peace for eBook sales on KDP and was surprised just how quick it was. I was set up and done in about an hour. And I spent some time debating the price and royalties options. On the other hand, the print version has taken almost a week now to get set up and it still isn’t done. But even that is only because they review the file for “print-ability” but not for content.
So one might wonder how they separate themselves from the crap. The simple answer is not to be crap.
If you wrote a book in a week, and published it the next week. Chances are your story is going to be garbage. You simply miss way to much when you spend so little time on a project. I’ve talked a lot about the steps you have to take to get your work ready for publication. If you start cutting corners, it will show. All told, I will have spent nine years (or more) working on Dissolution of Peace. From the original manuscript written in 2003-2004 to the final product you will all see October 16th.
Do I recommend taking nine years? No, not necessarily. From the time I made up my mind to finish, and see published, Dissolution of Peace it took almost exactly one year. In that year, I spent most of that time editing.
The rewrite of the manuscript cut out 30,000 words of pure crap. Words I might have missed if I didn’t reread the original manuscript. Next, I read it again. I corrected the mistakes I found, and read it again. Then I sent it off to a few beta readers. They made their comments. I fixed some things, and read it again. Then it went to a professional editor. He sent me back a boat load of suggestions. I fixed those, rewrote some passages, corrected the plot holes and confusing information. Then, you guessed it, I read it again. I fixed a few things and put it in format for publication. Then I ordered a proof.
ALWAYS ORDER A PROOF. I know many people who skip this step. They figure they have caught everything by this point. They look at the digital proof for format errors and then approve it. They never hold a proof copy in their hands. Well I ordered a proof. And I read it cover to cover. There were exactly ZERO formatting error. However, there were twenty-two other errors. Missing words, typo words, and other things. Things four beta readers, an editor, and five of my own readings missed. All of which were just things your eyes miss. When you see a word in its context you might not notice that “closest friend” was typed “closet friend” in the book. The fact remains that as I read it in book format, these things came out because it was the first time I had read it as an actual book. In print. Not on a computer screen. I saw my novel in a new way.
And now, as I get ready to approve the final draft I am confident it is ready to be read. Will I miss something? I will almost bet money I did. But even the professionals miss something. It is one of the ways book experts can detect what edition many books are. They know of certain misprints, typos, ect in each edition. The point to this is not to spend forever making the novel absolutely perfect. The point is to spend enough time with it to make it the best you can possible put out.
I read my story six times in this last year. If you are not reading your book multiple times to prepare it for publishing, how can you expect buyers to read it once? If you wrote it and you find it boring to read more than once, it may not belong in the steaming pile, but you should figure out what needs to be fixed to make it readable.
I will also say this. Grammar and punctuation do not make a book readable but they can may a book unreadable. If your book is overly riddled with grammar mistakes, they can distract a reader. However, you can have a grammatical masterpiece, not one grammatical error in the entire manuscript, and still have a steaming pile on your hands.
You need a plot. A story that starts where the real story starts. You need a conflict of some type. You need a resolution to the conflict. And you need a satisfying ending. You have to be able to tell a story. A story readers want to read. A story with characters people love (or hate for the right reasons). You need a world for this to all take place in. Once you master that, you can go back and fix the grammar.
The point is you need to take time with you works. He who publishes the most books, does not win.
You need to put together a quality novel before you submit it for publication. If you do that, your work will stand out for the steaming piles of crap that come out. But also remember that some people will simply not like your novel for their own reasons. While others may love it. You can’t please everyone. We’ve all bought a book we thought would be good only to be disappointed. But if you take your time to put your best work forward, you will find a following of readers who will love your story.
Dissolution of Peace – Updates, Pre-Order, Giveaways, and more
As Dissolution of Peace gets closer and closer to being released, I find myself with an odd mixture of pride, fear, and anticipation. But all the hard work is worth something in the end. As I see the finished project coming along, I can’t help but be happy to see so much work coming together for this project.
UPDATES
I wrote my acknowledgements section the other day. It is certainly an optional part of a novel. I’ve read plenty of novels that don’t have one. But with this being by first novel, I had to write one. I always enjoy reading other authors’ acknowledgements, and it only felt right that I put one in. It came from my heart, so hopefully it doesn’t come across as too much. Either way, I am happy to thank those people that helped me get this book together.
I dedicated the book to my three boys. They are a huge part of why I followed this dream all the way to the end. I already know who I’ll be dedicating my second novel to.
The Official Book Trailer is getting a lot more views than I expected, considering how little I have shared it. So I assume that must mean a few of you have shared it. Thank you. So far those who have talked to me about it, like it. Please make sure to hit that thumbs up button and leave a comment if you enjoyed it.
PRE-ORDER
The good news is that you don’t have to wait until October 16th to order your copy of Dissolution of Peace. You can pre-order online right now. Best of all you will save 25-50% off the list price. But, this will only last during the pre-sale period. I’ll also be signing all pre-order copies of my book. You will see I have added a “Buy” tab to this site. This will be a place to buy copies of my book. If you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you should. I’ll be sharing discount codes with my followers there through out the pre-sale period. You can order here: LINK
GIVEAWAYS
I also have two giveaways starting:
First, if you visit my Facebook Page, and click on the giveaway icon (see the picture right). You can enter into a raffle giving away one signed copy of my book. The number of raffle entries you have is based on the tasks you chose to complete. If you complete them all, you can be entered twenty times. That raffle ends on November 1st (12:01am Eastern), so hurry to get your entries in now. If a lot of people enter this raffle, I’m sure to do another one. Oh, and you’ll want this giveaway code: Carlson. It is worth one entry into the raffle. Enter the Raffle here: LINK
The second giveaway is on Goodreads. This one runs until November 30th. As of writing this post, it is still awaiting approval from Goodreads administrative staff. So if the link doesn’t work, please try again. Enter the Goodreads Giveaway here: LINK
Another reason to follow me on Twitter or Facebook is because I will likely be announcing more giveaways on there as soon as I come up with more idea.
ATTENTION BOOK REVIEWERS
If you write book reviews on your blog/website or magazine, or know someone who does, get in touch with me. This is another great way to get a free copy of the Kindle version of my book. I will not pay for a review. So if you charge for your reviews, I’ll pass. You can go to the contact me section to contact me about a book review. Just let me know a little about your site, and send me a link.
INTERVIEWS AND EVENTS
If you would like to interview me about my book, and other topics, you can contact me. I’ll be happy to schedule something with you. I’m open for newspapers, blogs, journals, magazines, Television, Radio, Podcasts, and I’m sure many other types of interviews.
If you own a Bookstore, you can contact me for a book signing. I am already working on scheduling a couple of them to be announced soon.
PLUGGING AWAY
I want to thank everyone who is helping, and I am sure about to help, plug my book. I really appreciate the word of mouth advertising. I’ll keep everyone updated as the book releases.
Is Anybody Out There?
Marketing for Writers
Over this last week, Plasma Frequency announced a 50% off sale on all advertising. For as little as $9.50, anyone could have advertised in a magazine with a worldwide audience. Exactly zero people took the offer. An offer that was presented to many self published and traditional published authors. It was also presented to several independent publishers. I was truly stunned by it. I couldn’t believe that not one person took this offer. But, as I thought about it. I am not so sure it is really that shocking of a thing.
Many authors think that they can put their novel on Amazon.com, and it will simply fly right off the shelves. Maybe a few hundred Twitter and Facebook posts, and BAM! Instant success. Who knows maybe that has even worked for a few authors. But if it has, I’ve not heard of it. I’m down playing the value of Social Media in your marketing strategy. It is an important part of it. But it is just a part of it. And the only plan many authors have, is to continue to shout out on Facebook, “Buy my book! Buy it!” But I speak from experience when I say that soon you will be wondering, Is anybody out there? Is anyone paying attention to these posts.
Marketing strategy is the key words of the paragraph above. You need to lay out a plan to get your book noticed. It should be a detailed plan starting with “pre-promotion”, moving next to “release promotion”, and moving along with “continued promotion.” You need a balance of promotional strategies in order to make your book successful.
Many of you may be stopping here. You might be thinking that you don’t need to market your book because you plan to go through a traditional publisher. You expect that they will handle all the promotional problems for you. You’d be wrong. Most of these places have a limited marketing budget. They will use that money on promoting the books most likely to bring them the most money. And even if they will be promoting your book, that should only be another part of your own promotional strategy. You should be doing some marketing of your own.
Marketing Plan, some easy tips.
First, you should start making a marketing plan as soon as you are sure you are ready to see this book published. For me, as a self publisher, that was as soon as I sent the manuscript to my editor. Notice I didn’t wait until I had a release date in mind to start planning. Some may even start thinking of marketing strategies right after they write “The End.” If you are going the more traditional publishing route, you may wait until you get accepted. Or you may wait until you know the marketing and promotional ideas of the publisher. Either way, find a time that is right for you and start planning. You can always modify the plan, change it, and work to start it later.
Pre-premotion
I’ll start with the first thing. It is also the most over looked in my opinion. That is “pre-promotion.” This is your plan to promote your book before it is released, to create a “buzz” so to speak. This is likely one of the best ways to get a title to stick in potential readers heads. You want to get people thinking about, talking about, and perhaps even to preorder (see below). Here are some things you might put on your Pre-promotion plan:
Mention your book whenever you can. You may have noticed that I mention, and use as an example, my novel Dissolution of Peace when needed around this blog. See, I just did it again there. Most of the time I don’t even realize I did it. Of course you can over do it. I like to think that I only mention it when it is applicable to the situation. I’ve seen some that simply drop the name everywhere all the time, or every blog post they write is about the book in some way. It just doesn’t work for me. I tend to stop reading those blogs that are solely devoted to ramming a particular product down my throat. But I certainly don’t mind, or even notice in most cases, a little self promotion when I am reading a post that has meaning to me. So if, like me, you blog about writing tips, daily muses, and other topics of interest to people, don’t be afraid to mention it where it applies.
Get some marketing materials together and share them with your followers. I’ve noticed many of my blog, Twitter, and Facebook followers enjoy a little sneak peak before something goes live. Marketing materials include cover art, after all that is how readers will recognize you book, it is the brand of your book. But there are other marketing materials that can come in handy. For example, my Facebook page has a new cover photo. That photo pops up every time someone hovers their over my name. You may make a few different photos to use around the different media platforms. Another great thing is a book trailer. There are also book plates, bookmarks, and other items you can get at a low cost and hand out free.
Many of you may be thinking: I’m not good at graphic design or video editing. You may have already dropped a pretty penny on the cover art. Book trailers can cost a lot of money. One self publishing company charges over $1,000 minimum just for a thirty second book trailer. Bookmarks, post card ads, ect all will cost. But I challenge you to look around. First, you might have a friend that will do it for you. Plasma Spyglass Press’s logo was designed by a friend of mine. I love it, and it cost me nothing. Even if you don’t have a friends that can do it, they may know someone who can give you a deal. A friend of mine recommended my cover artist, and I only paid $35 for it. I got lucky with the other art, I did it myself. I even did the book trailer myself. But, if all else fails you can shop around for businesses that can help you. Plasma Spyglass Press is thinking of revamping our business plan to include services for the self published author. One last tip, don’t spend a lot of money on promotional materials or over do it. Order just what you need.
Book reviews are great. There are some places that you can pay to have a book review written. I won’t waste my time or money on those. You can if you wish, but I won’t. There are a lot of free review sites out there. Sites that will only ask for a free copy of your book. In return they will provide you with an honest review. Sure, you take the risk of a bad review. And you may get some even if you don’t ask for reviews. I put this under pre-marketing because you often have to start setting these things up in advance. Whether it be through a blog, or a magazine, or through another outlet. Most are very cooperative and will agree to wait a reasonable amount of time if your release date is coming soon. ALWAYS send a finished product for review.
Offer a preorder special. Unfortunately Createspace still won’t allow you the chance to pick a future release date, thus creating a preorder page on Amazon. There are ways around this though. First, have people preorder through you. They can go to your website and preorder. Offer a better price than the list price. Perhaps even offer signed copies if you preorder through you. Then when you release your book you can order that number of copies and ship them out to your new readers. If you already have an Amazon Partner Store site (or whatever it is called), I understand that there is a way to do a preorder with that. I am not familiar with it.
Don’t take out advertising before your book has been released. Unless of course you have preorder information. Many people will see an ad and click to buy at that moment, making an impulse purchase. So paying for a advertisement on Facebook, in a magazine, or on any other platform is wasted money unless people can buy. But, keep in mind a magazine’s production time. That ad may not be live until after your book is released. So you may have advertising paid for and drawn up, but it won’t be seen until after your novel is released.
Release Promotion
Release day has come. Your book is now available to purchase. The common practice here is to kick it into overdrive. Either blowing a lot of time and money into marketing the book for a week, or by trying to schedule events around the clock. I think this comes from the common practice in the typical business world. Grand Opening sales, Hurry while supplies last, and so on down the line. Even most traditional publishers will kick in to high gear for a big release and then when that is over, they will kick into high gear for the next author’s release.
I say slow down a second. First, have a plan in place before release day. Once again, ramming your book down everyone’s throats will not increase sales. Does that mean you shouldn’t come out of the gate hard and fast? No, you still want to have a “grand opening” celebration. Tell the world your book is out now. Spend the whole day telling them if wish. But what will you do once you have posted to Facebook, Twitter, and your blog only to find you sold four copies? This is where you need to expand your marketing plan. Release Promotion should last several months or more.
Continue to try to find those book review outlets. Talk to fellow writers and check out the magazines for your genre. Contact them and still arrange for reviews. The more you get the more potential readers you reach.
Look around for those local book stores. They often love to have local writers come out and have a book signing. They may even wish to carry your book on their shelves. Some may want a small portion of sales. Others may buy a bulk amount of your books for a near wholesale price and just keep whatever they sell them for. Others may just like the idea of bringing customers into their store and won’t care that you sell your books there. But either way, you need to work that out with them. Believe it or not the local book store isn’t dead. And these type of events are what keeps them going strong.
Book signings don’t have to just take place at book stores either. Maybe you get a table at the local street fair. Or maybe your local library would be interested. Be creative, readers attend a lot of different events. If you do think about renting tables at a fair or event, consider sharing the table with other local writers and splitting the cost. For one, a fan of one local writer may see your book on the same table and check it out. It will allow you to draw a bigger crowd while reducing your cost. Plus you fill a table with different books, rather than a big table with just a stack of your one book.
Write a press release. Local newspapers, magazines, and even local blogs love a story about a local resident doing well. You can even tie a press release with a book signing event you are having. Writing an engaging press release is a whole different ball game than writing a novel. So I strongly suggest you read up on how to write a good release. There are a lot of sites that will help you with a simple Google search. Once you have a good press release, send it out to every newspaper, magazine, and blog in or about your local area. Of course if you are in a smaller town you stand a better chance of being in that paper rather than the paper of a large metropolitan area. But it doesn’t hurt to try.
Make yourself available for interviews and other engagements. But also don’t be afraid to ask people either. If your local library is having a local writers event, don’t be afraid to ask somebody if you can join. You never know when the newspaper, local TV stations, or magazines might call and ask you if you would mind discussing your new book. But rather than just waiting for them to call, be proactive and find them. Press releases is one way. But there are plenty of other ways to reach out. Don’t be afraid to ask friends of friends to help.
Advertising. It doesn’t have to cost as much as you think. As I mentioned above, my magazine charges very little. We even offer a discount for multiple issues and a discount for self published authors. We design the ad at no extra charge too. You will find that this is common with many markets. Of course if you want to put an advertisement in Fantasy & Science Fiction, expect to pay a good price. But there are a lot of markets out there that survive solely on advertising and don’t expect a lot for it. You can even use social media ads to help you out. These are effective at targeting an audience suited for your book. The price is often adjustable based on your monthly budget. Talk to your friends too. See if they will put an advertisement on their website or blog.
The key with advertising is knowing your target audience. An ad for my novel in Better Homes and Gardens probably won’t bring me a lot of sales. But an advertisement in a science fiction publication will likely attract readers. But, I might not want to put an ad in a hard science fiction magazine because that is not my target audience either. The best thing you can do is find out the publication’s (or website’s) target audience. If it matches yours then go for it.
Promotional offers. Have special offers where you can. You may have a discount or you may put two of your novels together for a package price. I understand there are limits to this. Clearly you want to make money of the sale, to some degree. But everyone likes to feel like they got a deal too.
Continued Promotion
Your book has been out now for a little while now. You may have had a huge influx of sales, or you may have had a steady stream of sales. But after the first few months, we authors have a habit of moving on to our next project. After all we didn’t stop writing because our latest novel was released. But you can’t stop promotions now. You may have scaled back, but don’t stop.
You may have ran a number of ads for your novel on release, but now you may want to scale it back to one ad. But remember to figure out what ad worked the best for you. Maybe change up the artwork to get a fresh look. But keep something running to get peoples attention. Unless everyone has bought your book, there are still potential readers out there that may not have heard of your book yet.
Still schedule those book signings. Maybe even spend one day on your next vacation (assuming you get vacations) signing books at the local bookstore of your vacation destination. You may not do an event every weekend but still keep the options open.
Cross promotion is excellent. When you are out promoting the next newest book, don’t forget to bring some copies of your other works. I’m surprised how often I see writers with six novels out, but they only have the one novel with them when they buy that table at the fair. Tell people about all your books when you are out promoting the newest one. Don’t forget to mention your other books in your newest book. You see this all the time in novels: Other works by..
Selling your books is the same as a business
If you are selling your books you are in business, your business is writing and selling your books. You will not make money by approving the proof and then sitting on you butt and waiting for the cash to roll in. You have to get out there and let people know about your book. You don’t have to spend a lot. But expect to spend something. Even a free book review will cost you a copy of your book. The more you spend advertising won’t necessarily bring you more sales. But spending your money wisely will get you more readers. You can spend $50 a month wisely and get 20 times more readers than the person that throws away $1,000.
The point is simple. You need a plan in place. Every good business has a marketing plan and budget. Your book needs to have the same thing. The plan is fluid and you change it as you find out what works and what doesn’t. But you must have a road map. Hopefully I’ve provided you with some powerful tips. Now go make your plan and get that book sold.
Dissolution of Peace — Announcements
I present to you, the cover for Dissolution of Peace.
As many of you know, I have been waiting on a lot of things before I officially make any announcements about Dissolution of Peace. Some of you may have even been following along as I took each step.
This journey to publishing a novel really started with my first acceptance letter, in August 2011. Followed by my second. After selling two short stories, I decided to open up my original manuscript for the then untitled novel. Perhaps I felt validated as a writer, or perhaps I simply the timing was right. Either way the much needed rewrites began.
My New Years Resolution was to write more. I rewrote the entire manuscript from scratch. And by February I was finished. I sent it out to several beta readers, made changes. And then let it rest for a bit.
I struggled long and hard for a tittle. The original title was going to be: Serenity. This was back when I wrote the first manuscript. But, this certain movie came out a short time later, and of course I had to change it. After some time, and using multiple different random title generators. I came up with Dissolution of Peace. After a good night sleep, I fell in love with the new title. And I feel it describes the novel well.
In May I hired Robert S. Wilson to do my editing after giving it a look over for some time. I followed that by hiring Neil Jackson to do the cover art. And after waiting (rather impatiently I might add) I got both a marked up manuscript and a cover art sample.
I was ready to announce a release date that day. But when I began to work on my edits, I was overwhelmed by it. I was afraid and I had no idea how long it would take.
I got the final cover art. I whittled down those edits. And while there are still edits to be done, I can confidently announce a release date:
October 16th, 2012.
Of course that bars anything else crazy going on. But it will be out and ready before the end of October. After all, you will want to give this as a Christmas present.
Now many of you expected to see my cover art and a release date. But I have another surprise for my blog followers. I have attached the Official Trailer!
Dissolution of Peace will be available on Amazon.com for Kindle and in Print. And I will be announcing a Pre-order sale soon. You will be able to order a signed print copy right from my blog. Details will come on that soon.
Description:
When Earth Navy Captain Christina Serenity is brutally attacked by a traitor, her life is saved by Security Forces Corporal Michael Carlson. On the heels of her recovery, her ship is attacked by terrorists, and she is thrown into a difficult assignment. She must chase after the only clue they have, a Martian ship called the Phobos, and find out what secrets it hides. To make matters worse, someone still wants her dead.
Her ship, E.S.S. Australia embarks on a mission that leads Serenity on journey of discovery, friendship, betrayal, and revenge. She quickly learns the only thing harder to prevent than war, is love.
Now Serenity must trust her protection crew to keep her alive long enough to solve this puzzle while trying to prevent an interplanetary war.
The line has been drawn… Who will cross first?
So with out further ramblings from me, I present the trailer for Dissolution of Peace:
Overwhelmed
I have broken one of my most important rules: To blog every week. In fact, I haven’t even posted a blog post in August and it is a third of the way through now. The reason for this is simple: I’m overwhelmed.
August marks a lot of positive milestones for me. It marks one year of this blog. I’ve posted 57 blog posts. So I suppose I averaged out to one a week. But I’ll work to keep this updated. I have a lot of news to share in the coming weeks and months. Lately there has been a lot going on in my life and I have had to give my attention in a lot of directions.
Another milestone for me is that August marks one year since I was first published. My short story “Death Watch” in Liquid Imagination Online and “Dream Job” in Cygnus Journal of Speculative Fiction were released this time last year. I find it hard to believe it has been a year already. I’ve been focusing so much on my novel length projects, that I have only written two short stories in this year. One, “Miles from the Future” is slated to be published on Infective Ink this month. Of course, I’ll have a link up as soon as it goes live. My other story has been with one publication for a while, so I can only hope I get good news soon.
The lack of short stories is not a reflection that I’ve given up on short works. The ideas I have right now are just turning out to be novel length. When a short story idea hits me again, rest assured I will be back at it. But frankly the world of my soon to be released novel Dissolution of Peace and my current novel in progress have consumed me.
On the topic of Dissolution of Peace, I got my editor mark ups. That alone has been very overwhelming. So much so that I haven’t started any corrections yet. I don’t know where to start, and frankly it was a bit of a “I don’t think I am cut out for this” moment. It has only been a few days since I got them. And I have every intention of breaking it down to small chunks. I think I will start with the simplest corrections. The grammar, punctuation, and other errors.. I will then tackle the more demanding issues. I’ll get it done, and hopefully in time for a September release. But, the official release date will be announced when I share the cover art with all of you.
The first issue of Plasma Frequency has gone up. You can get your copy here. Of course you would think that would be less overwhelming, but there is still Issue 2 and Issue 3 in the works. Issue 2 is about ready to go to layout and will be out October 5th. Issue 3 is still in the early readings and we have not yet accepted any stories. I really love publishing great stories for everyone to read. I love sending the acceptance letters, seeing the new art work, and getting great books to read for reviews. But it is an overwhelming task to publish a bimonthly magazine. And the real issue is that I have been doing most all of it myself. There are plans to look for people to assist me with this publication. Those details will be put up on our website and Twitter. The other big task is finding advertisers. I need advertisers to pay my artists and writers. Only getting advertisers is a full time job itself. And the task is very overwhelming.
All that being said, have no worry. Plasma Frequency will push forward and I have faith that it will become easier with time. Once a system is in place, things will run smooth. But like any business, starting up is always the hardest and most overwhelming part. The support from the writers and the readers is excellent and I can’t thank everyone who submits to us enough.
My work and personal life has been no different. My job is a a dynamic one, and it can go from absolute boredom to “crazy-nuts” is a matter of minutes. But, I need the day job. My wife is still struggling to find any work. The people that are hiring don’t wish to hire her. They seem to feel she is over qualified to work in retail or fast food. Over qualified is something I’ve never understood. But as it stands, I am still working to to just barely cover rent. It is very overwhelming to try to balance a budget with so little left over after rent. I’m forced to pick and choose which bills I pay each month. That is a tough way to live.
I’ll admit my life holds many blessings. I know there are many who share my financial woes, or are even in a worse spot than I am. But I am still overwhelmed by it and it keeps me very stressed out. My health (and my weight) have been effected by the stress. But I push forward because I have to for myself and my family.
Of course, since I didn’t have enough going on already, I agreed to coach my middle son’s soccer team. I don’t regret that choice. For the most part it has been a great escape from some of the other stress factors. But, I already serve on the Soccer League’s Board of Directors, and it is one more thing on the pile of stuff to do. But, these kids are great and they all have a passion to learn the game and have fun with it. They are a source of motivation and stress relief in my packed tight life. We start our games on Saturday, and that promises to be even more fun.
So overall, I have a lot going on. It is overwhelming and I find it hard at times. Hopefully I can get some time back for myself. Time will only tell.
Making SOME Money in Writing
I briefly touched on this in an early blog post. Writing is really about more than making money. If you are a short fiction writer you’d have to do a lot of work to make a good salary.
Where you live will depend on how much you need to survive. But lets assume you’d be happy with $35,000 a year. Out in California that is a small amount of money and barely scraping by. But, if I was doing it as a writer, I’d be happy to scrape by. If you stuck to short fiction, you would need to sell 700,000 words a year at pro rates (5 cents a word). That is a lot of words. And that is words to sell, not write. You’d have to write roughly 1,900 words a day that are publishable, with no days off.
Most of us don’t put something on paper and it is instantly publishable. We need to spend time editing. We need to send it out to and listen to our Beta Readers. Now back to editing. And there is always the time it sits on submissions. But, lets assume you work part time at it. Say three hours a day, five days a week, for a year. Or 780 hours a year. And you manage to get an average of 5,000 words a month published at pro rates. You’d make roughly $3.85 an hour. Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
You might argue that if you really did spent 15 hours a week on writing, they could put out more that just 5,000 words published each month. But the truth is you won’t make a lot of money publishing short stories. You will get paid in a different way. You will get paid with recognition, reader enjoyment, positive feedback, and much more. This is why I fail to understand writers who believe anything less than 5 cents a word is beneath them.
They are measuring the payment of writing in dollars and it really needs to be measured in other ways. And, in many ways the payments you gets from writing can’t be measured. Reader enjoyment is hands down my favorite method of payment. Each time a reader comments on my story, enjoys a plot point, or loves a character I feel like I have been paid again for that story. Each time some one clicks the like button for this blog, I feel like I got another payment. And when someone says they have heard of me and my writing, I feel like I hit the lotto.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a pay check too. But I don’t write for the money, I write for the enjoyment. So I wonder how can we make some money in writing. The trick is that it is a process. Just like most jobs, you start at the bottom and work your way up.
I still strongly urge anyone who writes to start with short stories. Even if you have a novel in the works, starting with short stories really puts a feather in your cap. It gets your name out there to a community of readers both before your novel hits the shelf, and after.
Now, lets talk about novels. When I release Dissolution of Peace, I have no intentions of making millions in the first release. Let us say that I sell my novel for $2.99 on Kindle. And, I doubt I would start there. But lets say that I do. I get 70% of most sales. So I would need 16,750 downloads in a year to hit that $35,000. That may not sound like a lot, 17,000 downloads, but when you are trying to market that book by yourself, it really is a lofty goal. And lets not forget that you might be more inclined to start your novel off at $0.99 or $1.99 because you may be lesser known.
But, lets consider something a bit more realistic here. Lets say you really buckle down and dedicate yourself. I don’t believe it is impossible to turn out two novels in a year and six short stories sold. I work full time, run a magazine, and volunteer a bunch of hours to Youth Soccer, but that is my goal. A goal I won’t achieve in 2012, but only because I just made it this month.
Let me assume that I sell $300 in short stories (5,000 word average at 1 cent a word for six stories). And, in those sales I get to make a quick blurb about my novels and this website. I think realistically I could expect 3,000 downloads a year per novel at $0.99 price point. So I’d get $4,200 there. For a total of $4,500 a year not counting other expenses such as marketing. So, I may not be making millions as a writer. But I think that is a good goal for 2013. And $4,500 a year to do something I love isn’t bad considering the other things I love to do, watching hockey and playing video games, don’t make me a cent.
And, if you keep building from there, soon you have more sales and more works in circulation. It is a slow process, but I do believe that eventually it can be possible to make a decent amount of money as a writer. The process takes time, you have to build a readership. But remember all the other rewards you get for your writing. The ones that can’t be measured in dollars and cents.
Now some might say that I sound like I am trying to dissuade you from writing. This is not true. Don’t be discouraged by this post. If you sole goal in writing was to make money, you might want to try your hand at different types of writing. But if you have bigger dreams than money, carry on with the craft. I firmly believe that if you write for the love of story telling, the rewards (and even the money) will follow.
