Month: June 2010

9 Ways For Self-Publishers to Get Unstuck

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Publishing a book can take quite a bit of time. Sometimes you finish a manuscript after months or years of work, and you feel like you’re ready to go.

But then you realize you need to hire an editor, and it’s back to “hurry up and wait” while another editorial process takes place.
 
Or your book might be done, but you’re not sure what to do next, so you spend all your time researching. You’ve got 120 blogs on your feed reader, you know the names of all the print on demand companies, but you have no book.
And then sometimes you’ve already finished the manuscript, printed your book, and now you realize you need a plan—or something—to know what to do next.

 
Never fear, there are always a few ways to get off the dime and back on track.
 
So no matter where you are in the process, here are some ideas to help out.
 
 
9 Things You Can Do Right Now to Get Unstuck
  • If you haven’t finished your book
    1. Get some other opinions, circulate parts of the manuscript to friends or sympathetic readers. Whether you agree with their assessment or not, you’ll have a new perspective on your material.
       
    2. Think about hiring an editor to help put your manuscript in order. Editors can be incredibly skillful at helping authors shape their manuscripts. More experienced authors know this and use editors to help their process.
       
    3. Visit writer forums for referrals, advice, community of others in the same situation. Hey, you’re online anyway, join a couple of active writer’s forums and you’ll find a sympathetic community of other writers.
       
  • If your manuscript’s done, but you’re not sure what to do next
    1. Sit down and decide how to self-publish to meet your goals. Will it be private, just circulated to friends and family, or for a fundraiser? On sale? Or will you try to compete actively in the marketplace? Each path has its own requirements that will help orient you.
       
    2. Look into hiring a publishing consultant, a book shepherd or a book designer to help you establish schedules, budgets and priorities. Use their experience to move you to the next step.
       
    3. Go back and make sure you have the infrastructure in place to establish your publishing enterprise. Have you acquired your ISBNs? Filled out directory listings for your publishing company? These details can be overlooked in the beginning.
       
  • If your book’s been published, now what?
    1. If you haven’t done so, register the domain of your book’s name. Get a blog attached to the domain and start writing about the topic of your book. Don’t try to sell the book, just work on finding an audience with common interests.
       
    2. Go over and set up a Facebook Fan page for your book. It only takes a few minutes, and you can let all your friends and followers know about it right away.
       
    3. If you know other people with websites or blogs in your field, offer to write free articles for them. It will introduce you to groups of new readers every time.
There’s No Substitute for a Plan
All of these suggestions will get you moving again, and that’s a good thing. But what self-publishers really need in order to stay on track is a realistic and orderly plan. Your plan should include all three of these phases of publication, finishing your manuscript, planning for publication, and long-term marketing.
 
With a plan in hand, you know where you are, and you know where you have to go. Without a plan it’s just too easy to get bogged down in detail and lose sight of the larger picture.
 
Book publishing can require lots of decisions and lots of different actions over a period of months. Be a smart publisher: get your plan together first.
 
And did you notice what all these actions have in common?
 
Takeaway: When self-publishers plan their book, their publication and their marketing, they rarely get stuck. But when they do, here are some suggestions on how to get unstuck and back on track.

 

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

Who do You think is Good?

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Hello, I am Sarie Mackay.  Coming out with my second self-published historical novel very soon.  First one:  Lodestar; new one:  Fair Game.  I’ve been invited by my alma mater to come back and speak on self-publishing.  I’m honored but I have to confess I have not read THAT MANY other self-published authors.  Can anyone out there tell me whom they believe to be some of the more talented self-published authors?   I certainly don’t want to go and blab only about myself.   I suspect whoever is reading this feels the same sense of cause celebre  that I do about working very hard on a creative task for a long time….and I would like to represent all of us. 

Check me out at sariemackay.com.  Thanks.

Writing Grief

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For the past year or two I have been living with two impending deaths. One was natural, merciful and literal. The other was unnatural, tortured and figurative. Both have both come to pass.

I have been alive long enough to know that there is no way to anticipate or speed the grieving process. There is no way to shed grief but to endure it and to respect the truth of it. I am also aware that the trend these days is to encourage people to move on with their lives, or to otherwise ignore or distract themselves from grief — advice that is often proffered by friends and family who do not want to embrace the totality of loss, or the inevitability of mortality, in their own lives.
 
As I have watched myself move through this process in two instances, I have noticed that as a writer I do not have the tools to accurately describe what I am thinking and feeling. Were I authoring these events I would struggle greatly to communicate the totality of what I feel as a character. 
 
The lesson here — the fiction writing lesson — is that this cannot be done. The craft of the writer is as much about reconnecting readers with vistas already observed as it is about describing vistas that have never been seen. (And in this is the difficulty of writing about life for young readers. Because they have so little of life’s experience to draw on, there is little that can be evoked.)
 
If there is a common core to every writer’s work, it is found in the intersection between what the author wants to express and what the author can evoke. This is true of love, of loss, of madness and of resolve. It can only truly be communicated if the reader already speaks the language.
 
I don’t know if I will ever write about my grief. I don’t know if I ever want to, or if in doing so I would have anything more to communicate than adding my voice to the human scream.
 
What I do know is that I know how. As I tread water and look for landmarks by which to orient myself, I find my craft sustaining me in ways I did not anticipate.
 
Writing is inextricably a part of who I am. It has always been my way of seeing and being.
And it is a constant reminder to go to the truth not simply in my work, but in my life. Even if that truth is grief.

 

This is a cross-posting from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

Lightning Source – Reviewed

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Lightning Source (LSI 268.40) has become synonymous with authors pursuing what is described as ‘true self-publishing—whereby an author sets up their own imprint, purchases a block of ISBN’s and uses Lightning Source’s global print and fulfilment services to publish and make their books available for distribution.

 

“Lightning Source, an Ingram Content Group company, is the leader in providing a comprehensive suite of inventory-free on-demand print and distribution services for books to the publishing industry. Lightning Source gives the publishing community options to print books in any quantity, one to 10,000 (POD or offset print runs), and provides its customers access to the most comprehensive bookselling channel in the industry in both the United States and the United Kingdom.”

Founded in 1997, with its headquarters in La Vergne, Tennessee, Lightning Source is a subsidiary of Ingram Industries Inc., and a sister company of U.S. book wholesaler, Ingram Book Group. Lightning Source quickly established itself as the global leader for print-on-demand book printing and fulfilment services with massive operations in their La Vergne base and their plant in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. The Lightning Source digital library database holds over 750,000 books and has built lasting partnerships with Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Gardners. LSI’s strength is the flexibility to print and ship a single copy of a print-on-demand book or several thousand copies.

LSI has become so synonymous with POD (print-on-demand) that authors often lump the global print solutions provider in with so-called self-publishing companies like Lulu and CreateSpace. LSI is neither a POD publisher nor an author solutions service. They are a global digital printer for the publishing industry, but due to the explosion in self-publishing, they now deal directly with authors wishing to utilize their services. However, dealing with LSI directly requires a new account holder to verify that they have registered blocks of ISBN’s under a publishing imprint name and they provide an accessible bank account and sign a commercial contract with them.

Working with LSI as a publisher or author does require a reasonable hands-on knowledge of book creation software and the proficiency to provide and load-up print ready files to industry print standards directly to their website. This is not a service that should be used by the faint-hearted or novice author and I would strongly suggest that previous experience in self-publishing and book design is required, or contracted out to a professional prior to attempting to submit a book file to LSI’s database. My own experience with LSI reveals a company laden with online tutorials and guidance, a strong commercial customer focus, but a professionalism that means they are not available for hand-holding. This is one of the reasons their website is packed with the necessary information an author might need; from technical book specifications, a spine width calculator, and a step-by-step manual. The actual process of loading up a book file to LSI can be mastered with a degree of study, patience and attention to detail—by no means beyond any computer-savvy author.

https://www.lightningsource.com/covergenerator.aspx
https://www.lightningsource.com/spinecalc.aspx
https://www.lightningsource.com/tutorials/tutorials_title_set_up.aspx
https://www.lightningsource.com/ops/files/pod/LSI_FileCreationGuide.pdf
 

“Thank you for your interest in Lightning Source.

If you are a publisher…

… and want to become a customer please proceed to our New Account page.

Please note that Lightning Source does not provide design, file work, editorial, promotional or marketing services. These are solely the responsibility of the publisher.


If you are not a publisher…

… and require publisher services, like design, editorial and marketing services, please contact an author services company.”

 
Lightning Source, in the following benefit section, explain the Print to Order and Print to Publish programs they offer – meaning the author or small press operator has the option to utilize LSI’s print and distribution services or simply use their print facilities.

Print to Order

With this service the publisher sets the retail price, wholesale discount and return policy.

We send the data out to our Distribution partners (including leading distributors such as Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com and others).

They capture the demand from booksellers, libraries and consumers and we print to fill the order.

We collect the wholesale price, deduct the print cost and pay the publisher the balance.

The price for this service is $12.00 a year per title. Just one dollar a month.

B&N purchases through Ingram Book Group.

As you know Lightning Source titles are listed in the Print-to-Order program – an exclusive service that allows Ingram to display 100 copies on hand at all times. As part of this arrangement, and to avoid book buyers from having to backorder, we at Lightning Source guarantee books ordered by Ingram will be printed and returned to their shipping dock within 8 – 12 hours, generally in time to be included in the book buyer’s regular order.

Print to Publisher
 
With this program we fill orders placed by the publisher and ship them in any quantity to any location. That can be one book to a reviewer or 5,000 to a warehouse.

As part of that service we offer Offset printing on paperback quantities of over 2,000 or hardback quantities of over 750.

Turn around time on digital printing is days, turn around time of offset is about 7-10 days depending on the books specifics.

Offset printing
 
Offset printing isn’t a component of Print to Order.
 
We also offer traditional printing services for titles that require large print orders.

In effect, dealing directly with LSI, is simply cutting out the middle-man—or in this case the author solutions services who use LSI, like Lulu, Outskirts Press, Xulon, Xlibris, and hundreds of others. The difference is—the author will pay $75 for title set-up ($37.50 each for interior and cover files). You are also required to purchase a proof copy and you are charged $12 per year to keep the title in LSI’s database. One important detail authors should be wary of is the LSI submission load-up fee of $40. This does not apply to the first submission load-up, but does apply on any subsequent file revisions after the proof is delivered. This is why I believe LSI is really only for the seasoned self-publisher, familiar with working with print ready PDF files. Print charges for POD books are set out below, and taking our normal 200 page colour cover and black and white interior as an example, her is how it plays out:
 

PRINT CHARGE EXAMPLE

$0.90 per unit $0.90
+ 200 pages x $0.013 per page $2.60
Total print charge per unit $3.50
 
Authors buying copies of their book directly from LSI only pay for the book at print cost—there are no mark-ups or built in fees imposed by LSI. The author, when setting up a title, decides what retail discount should be given, but LSI advises not to go below 20%. However, some retailers may expect far more discount (up to 55% – Amazon) before they will even consider stocking your book.
 
In light of the above costs – pause for a moment – and just consider what fees other POD publishers/printers will try to charge authors. Yes, sometimes the fees charged by other author solutions services can be in the thousands, and often, the author is getting little more than a printed book made available online.
 
When it comes to royalties—LSI don’t do a ‘Mill City Press’. You really do get 100% profit following the subtraction of print cost and retailer discount.
Returns Program
The decision to make a book returnable lies with the author/publisher, and significantly, LSI do not charge a fee for this service. Why should they? Returned books will be subtracted off author/publisher payments. This is one area which should really highlight to authors using author solutions services, and paying anything up to $500 for a returns program, just how much authors can be gouged on profits when the POD publishing middle-men muscle in on the business of publishing.
 
Online Distribution and Availability
Provided an author ensures their book is listed with Nielsens Books in Print, using LSI, who are owned by Ingram in the US, you are, for the most part, getting exactly the same promised distribution that you get with Lulu, CreateSpace’s Pro-Plan or AuthorHouse (AUH 222.38), or most other POD author solutions services.
 
Yes, you will have to look after all the promotion and marketing of your book, but the reality is, many POD publishers actually use their affiliation with LSI/Ingram as if that in itself was the gateway to heaven. It is not—but it is no more or no less than you as an author are getting from most other author solutions services.
 
Lightning Source may be a bridge too far for some authors, unfamiliar with preparing book files for a printer, but for the charges and gouging practices engaged by some author solutions services, it may actually be worth the effort to pause and contemplate crossing that bridge.
 
Frankly, LSI’s reputation as a digital printer and fulfilment service is not in question—they are also used by the world’s leading mainstream publishers just as much by author solutions service providers. Bluntly, if you are not using a service like LSI, Lulu (LUL 244.75) or CreateSpace (CSP 256.21) for printing and making your book available—you must think beyond the production of your book—and ask what exactly it is any other company is providing you with, beyond what the above companies do economically.
 
RATING: 8.5/10
 

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney‘s POD, Self-Publishing and Independent Publishing.

Penguin Group Declares War on Kindle Owners…

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…with Bizarre Array of Exorbitant and Nonsensical Kindle Store Prices; Some Are 200-300% Higher; Many Exceed Paperback Prices

The long-delayed march of the Penguins? It wasn’t worth the wait.

After its agency price-fixing model co-conspirators came quickly to agreements with Amazon so that their ebook titles would remain in the Kindle Store right through the April Fool’s Day transition date, the Penguin Publishing Group held readers hostage for about 8 weeks before finally reaching the end of the impasse, reported here moments before it was announced last week.

Penguin has a terrific backlist and plenty of popular bestselling authors, and Kindle owners were waiting impatiently for an opportunity to purchase and download various among about 150 of the company’s new releases that had been withheld from the Kindle Store since April 1. We knew that, as with other agency model publishers, Penguin’s new releases would likely be priced in the $12.99 to $14.99 range, at least temporarily, when released. But Kindle owners have proven that they are among the world’s greatest readers, and many have shown a willingness to pay those prices even while others have promoted the idea of a boycott of ebooks priced over $9.99.

That would have sorted itself out, but since being allowed back into the Kindle Store Penguin has taken the agency pricing model to new extremes. Not only does the company now sport the highest average prices for bestsellers and other frontlist titles in the Kindle Store, but it has also doubled and tripled its previous prices on backlist titles such Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead ($27.99 each) and numerous classics that are now priced at $12.99 and up, higher than their paperback editions. There are too many examples to start listing them here, and of course we have no interest in mentioning or linking to many of these high-priced titles lest we inadvertently drive traffic toward them.

But several things stand out and begin to suggest a pattern of collusion and favored treatment between Penguin and Apple, the company that made the agency price-fixing model possible in the first place by pandering to the Big Six publishers with its offer to turn its back on consumers and create a high-priced ebook outlet with the iBooks Store. To the extent that publishers believed the iBooks App could lure customers away from the Kindle Store, it provided them with an alternative to play off against Amazon in order to jack prices up. Only Random House, the largest of the Big Six, took a "thanks but no thanks" stance toward the price-fixing collusion, one that may have been both principled and profitable.

It now seems likely that someone inside Penguin was responsible for the "anonymized information from an unknown number of large Agency publishers" that publisher mouthpieces  Michael Cader of the Publishers’ Lunch website and Michael Shatzkin to play pick-and-roll in spinning a mid-May "story" that April iBooks sales were already 12 to 15 percent of that same "unknown number of large Agency publishers" total ebook sales. While Apple’s iBooks store generally has the kind of ebook selection that one might associate with the book or music section at a WalMart or Target, and may be suffering from lackluster overall paid book sales, the one publisher that is sure to have done better at iBooks than Kindle in April was Penguin, since it was withholding its bestsellers from the Kindle Store. Surely Cader and Shatzkin know that using selective or slanted information to promote the idea that the iBooks Store is doing better than it is, or that it might have been challenging the Kindle Store’s ebook market share right out of the gate, could be a self-fulfilling prophecy that plays into the hands of the agency model publishers.

Now, Penguin is taking things one step further and standing on Apple’s shoulders to sabotage Amazon and attack Kindle Store customers by dictating that Amazon charge high prices for several of its bestselling titles while offering those same books through iBooks at $9.99 and below: 

  • Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller The Help, which for months did very well in the Kindle Store at price points below $9.99, is now priced (by Penguin imprint Putnam) at $12.99 in the Kindle Store, but it is still listed at only $9.99 at iBooks.
     
  • Similar pricing discrepancies exist for Eat Pray Love, although the best price for that book is $8.25 for the paperback in Amazon’s main store.
     
  • For Harlan Coben’s Caught, the discrepancy is even greater: it’s $14.95 in the Kindle Store, $8.98 in the iBooks Store, and $11.95 for the hardcover in Amazon’s main store.

We’ve never been told exactly what the controversy was that kept Penguin and Amazon at loggerheads for the past couple of months? Was it that Penguin wanted to give "most favored nation" status to the iBooks Store and deny it to the Kindle Store?

In any case, let’s be clear. This is not a case of Penguin declaring war on ebooks. What Penguin has done is declared war on Kindle owners, and on Amazon.

One wonders if Penguin’s strategies will succeed, or if the company even has a strategy. Amazon is by far the world’s largest bookseller of English-language books, and Kindle customers are Amazon’s most prolific book buyers. Past surveys of the citizens of Kindle Nation make it clear that, while Kindle owners may generally be well-heeled, we are also savvy and price-conscious. While Penguin’s pricing tactics are certainly tantamount to the kind of negative branding experienced recently by Toyota or BP, it would be surprising if they did not take a toll on the company’s book sales.

Nor are Penguin’s minders at Pearson PLC likely to be thrilled with Penguin’s bizarre behavior. Penguin Group is the world’s second largest book publisher (behind Random House) and Pearson also owns venerable media outlets such as The Economist and the Financial Times. But the UK company has lost about $2 billion in market capitalization (to $11.35 billion) as its PSO share price has fallen from $16.37 to under $14 since mid-May while Penguin has pursued its anti-reader tactics.

As one Kindle Nation citizen sized things up in a blog comment this week, "Wait until the contracts expire next April for all those publishers who happily crawled into bed with Apple…. By this time next year, I predict that heads will roll at the Agency 5."

I have too much respect and appreciation for the individual makeup of Kindle Nation citizens to suggest some sort of collective boycott here. We should all be free to read what we want to read. But I do hope that whenever possible we can all pay attention to the behavior of publishers as companies, and act with the empowering understanding that what we buy and the prices at which we buy it can send powerful economic signals to those doing the pricing.

Amazon is to be applauded for moving aggressively to expand the Kindle Store catalog in recent weeks, and about 80% of the added titles are now priced between $5 and $9.98, which gives Kindle customers more affordable prices than ever. In the coming weeks we will continue not only to alert you to free Kindle promotional titles but also to highlight other books of interest in the $2.99 to $4.99 range. We would also welcome a move by Amazon to do more to highlight non-agency model titles in its bestseller and store architecture.

For those who prefer to buy books from more reader-friendly sources, the following is a listing of Penguin Group imprints in the US:

* Ace   
* Alpha   
* Avery   
* Berkley   
* Dutton   
* Gotham   
* G. P. Putnam’s Sons   
* HP Books   
* Hudson Street Press   
* Jeremy P. Tarcher   
* Jove   
* NAL   
* Penguin   
* Penguin Press   
* Perigee   
* Plume   
* Portfolio   
* Prentice Hall Press   
* Riverhead   
* Sentinel   
* Viking  Children’s Division    
* Dial   
* Dutton   
* Firebird  
* Frederick Warne   
* G. P. Putnam’s Sons   
* Grosset & Dunlap   
* Philomel   
* Price Stern Sloan   
* Puffin Books   
* Razorbill   
* Speak   
* Viking

 

This is a cross-posting from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.

My Kindle Books

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I’ve decided to give Amazon’s Kindle book buyers a try with my Amish books. At first, I didn’t think I wanted to take less royalty. Admittedly, I usually take my time to think about a change. Finally, I decided the people that have a Kindle aren’t buying paperback books anyway so why not give this a try. After all it’s one more way to get people to see my name as an author. Once they try my books, readers usually want another one.

I’d already submitted to Kindle the first of my mystery series, Neighbor Watchers, awhile back. This time I added to the Kindle list my western The Dark Wind Howls Over Mary and two of my Amish books – Christmas Traditions-An Amish Love Story, and A Promise Is A Promise-Nurse Hal Among The Amish – book one.

Using the different communities on Amazon is a good way to advertise. I entered posts about my books being [available] in Kindle [format]. Even started new discussions to make sure my posts would be noticed since if the discussions are popular ones, a post can soon get buried. I checked the boxes to let me know if there was a response to my posts. Later in the afternoon, I found three responses. Seems I got in a hurry when I posted. Three people wanted to buy my kindle books already and the link only went to my paperback books. I had to reply to each post that it takes two days for Amazon to get the kindle entries ready so be patient and try again. If there seems to be interest in my books on Kindle I will have to enter one now and then and do the posts just to keep my name noticed.

This morning I was delighted to see I had more posts to answer. One was going to her local library to see if she could get my books. My thought is probably not, but I posted that she can ask. I’ve been told if someone is interested in a book and asks, the library will get it for the patron. Another post was a reader was a comment I’ve heard before. The poster didn’t like the writing style of one of the better known Amish authors because there isn’t enough in the story about the Amish farm life. The stories concentrate too much on the serious and often not a very complimentary problem concerning the Amish. So I left a post that was an excerpt from one of my books A Promise Is A Promise. Nurse Hal is trying to help the Lapp brothers catch some pigs that escaped from their pen. She caught one. The pig squealed. The cry got the attention of the protective sow. She rushed at Nurse Hal to protect her baby. The boys were yelling. The dog was barking. Can you picture the scene? Something similar happened to me once. One of those moments when I was running for the fence that I won’t forget.

What I have tried to do with my Nurse Hal books is concentrate on Nurse Hal’s human faults and her learning about what it takes to be Amish. Dealing with every day life on the farm is part of her experience. As I’ve said before farming experiences are something that’s easy for me to write about since I’ve lived it and still do with our few head of livestock. Writing the books with that in mind, I hope I don’t put the Amish in a bad light. The whole point of the stories for me are to be entertaining and fun with characters that the readers want to continue to get to know.

I joined a website called Book Marketing Network. It’s looks interesting as a helpful place to get author information with many groups to join. The site is used by publishers which might be a good thing. Other businesses are offering to do editing and ghostwriting among other services. Emails have already started so I will pick and choose which members I want to hear from and stop the other emails while I explore the site. I did find a person that does free book reviews by book or PDF. I can send a copy of my book and the review will be on Amazon and B&N. That is the reason that I’m sending one of my Amish books. None of the readers leave a review to let others know how they liked the books. I know they must like my books, because the second one in the Nurse Hal series came out in March and has been selling. I wager that the buyers of my other two Amish books came back for The Rainbow’s End.
 

This excerpt is a reprint from Fay Risner‘s Booksbyfay blog.

The Secret to Plot in Your Novel

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With this post, Publetariat welcomes indie author C. Patrick Shulze as a regular site Contributor.

Listen to a PODCAST of this article.
 
What makes for good fiction? Is it character, PLOT, story, setting, voice, dialogue or some other component of your novel? The answer is  PLOT; the story of what happens. Think of it this way: you can find millions of different characters, tens of thousands of settings and about a dozen stories. But as Jim Thompson says, “There is only one plot—things are not as they seem.” What makes your novel stand out is its plot, that series of causes and effects found within your story.of this article.

To create a meaningful plot, you need at least one main character who suffers some level of conflict, that inability to achieve what it is he wants. This conflict, his emotional reactions to the obstacles placed before him, is the crux of your plot. It is this inexorable series of obstacles your hero faces, and how he overcomes them, that hooks your readers.

The secret to plot is that it flows from your characters.

When you write a story, you create a sequence of events that move the hero toward what it is he wants. However, your greatest effort should be in your introduction of conflict, those ever-larger obstacles and the increasing resistance your hero experiences. You first give him a goal to surpass, then once he completes this task, deny him his desire. Then you have him master a more difficult challenge, then deny him yet again. Do this over, and over, and over again. Of course, the hero will at some point reach his goal, but you must keep it from him as long as the story, and your word count, allow. This constant battle between upheaval and triumph is what develops your plot and engrosses your readers.

Your character’s conflict, and thus the plot, may derive from either internal or external sources. Regardless, they thwart his progress until the very end of your novel. We all know external conflict can be exciting, but what can place your novel above others is your hero’s internal struggles. Consider this basic storyline: your hero has a burning desire to become a surgeon, but faints at the sight of blood. Which is the most moving aspect to the character’s goals? Is it the struggle to become a doctor or the sight of blood issue? His struggles to master his fear will have the most power with your readers.

In addition to plot, you have a wonderful tool you may employ called "SUBPLOT." That is, each major character is haunted by some minor conflict that further hinders him. This, too, can be internal or external in nature but if used effectively, can give a great deal of life to your novel.

The basis of this is your hero’s desire for something beyond all else that is kept from him. This ever-rising tension and conflict, or your character’s hardships, are what make up your plot.

Now for some quotes about plot from those famous among us.

"’The King died and the Queen died’ is a story. ‘The King died and the Queen died of grief’ is a plot." E.M. Forster

“Plots are what the writer sees with.” Eudora Welty

“Plot is structuring the events of the story.” Aristotle

“Character, of course, is the heart of fiction. Plot is there to give the characters something to do.” John Dufresne

“When a character does something, he becomes that character; and it’s the character’s act of doing that becomes your plot.” Henry James

Until we meet again, know I wish for you only best-sellers.

 

This is a reprint from C. Patrick Shulze‘s Author of Born to be Brothers blog.

Sandwich Critiquing

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You’ve been asked to read a friend’s manuscript. After dutifully plowing through 100 pages of less-than-perfect, sometimes entertaining, but often difficult to understand prose you’re left with one question: how do you tell your friend her manuscript needs a lot of work?

Unless you really don’t care about hurting your friend’s feelings and possibly losing a friend, this can be a very tricky situation. I know several writers who refuse to read other people’s unpublished works for just that reason. Yet, it seems crueler to me to let a friend send an unpolished manuscript out knowing you could have helped.

Enter the sandwich method. I don’t know who first came up with the idea, but I say, “God bless ‘em,” because it makes giving (and receiving) constructive criticism a lot easier on the old ego. Simply put, the sandwich method gives the criticism “sandwiched” between bits of praise.
 
I can hear my husband saying, “So I can say ‘I like your hair. Your characters stink, but those jeans are really slimming on you.’”
 
Uh, no. The praise has to come from something in the manuscript.
 
“But, Virginia,” you may be whining, “it’s nothing but sentimental drivel and inane cliches!”
 
That may be; however, as Brenda Ueland says in If You Want to Write, even in the worst writing there is something of value. You may have to look hard, but it is there.
 
As for the actual criticism, it’s always best to be specific. Telling someone their story didn’t hold your attention doesn’t cut it. Why didn’t it “hold your attention?” Was there too much description? Were the characters two-dimensional and uninteresting? Perhaps the sentences were too long and rambling. Be specific.
 
Last of all, be sure to end with some more praise. I like to point out something good in the work I didn’t mention before. Sometimes all you can do, though, is reiterate the praise (using different words, of course) that you already gave. Either way, I tell the manuscript’s author that it has potential because I honestly believe everything has potential. Some things just need a lot (and I’m talking about a whole overhaul) of work.
 
It’s the process of growing one’s work from potential to published through the use of helpful constructive criticism that makes it worthwhile to travel The Road to Writing.

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

1950's Decoration Day Memories

by

 Last week, we drove seven miles from where we live to the cemetery. It didn’t take long to put flowers on the graves and come back home, but the doing of it once a year always brings back memories about when I was a kid. Perhaps the reminders are due to the fact that my mother bought their stone with a vase on either end and gave me instructions to put red roses on Dad’s side and any spring flowers on her side.

 
Decoration Day is now Memorial Day. The holiday started after the Civil War to remember fallen soldiers on both sides.  It’s still the day to pay amage to the brave military that give their lives to keep the rest of us free.  My family didn’t think of the day as the start of the summer holidays, because we seldom went far from home and never took vacations.  That day was just what the name implied.  A day to decorate the graves of family and friends which for my parents, my brother, John, and me was an all day process.
 
I think I’ve probably told you some of this before but here goes again.  When I was a kid we lived on an 80 farm in southern Missouri.  Times were economically tough for farmers. Mom and Dad were always trying to think of ways to supplement their income. They sold flower baskets to take to cemeteries.  So several months before Decoration Day while we listened to The Lone Ranger and Cisco Kid on the radio in the evening, John and I put together pink, blue and white carnations from Puff tissues. That’s when Puffs were perfumed. Mom put together various colors of crape paper roses. Help the roses last longer in the elements, Mom melted paraffin wax in a pan and dunked the roses to coat them.  This was before plastic and then silk flowers.  While we worked on flowers, Dad gathered sticks, dried them and constructed log cabin baskets in different sizes and wreaths. Mom did the flower arrangements.  After all the customers had bought theirs, we were left with assortment of baskets left hanging from the nails on the back porch wall. If what was left wasn’t enough, we made up more for our use.
 
Decoration day dawned sticky hot. John and I had baskets wedged between us in the seat and around our feet on floor of our 1935 Chevy. The red country roads to all the cemeteries consisted of natural rock and potholes. We didn’t have to look at the rising red cloud behind our car to know the road was dusty. We watched the dust settle on everything in the car, because we had the windows cranked down. The car didn’t have air.
 
Since we would be gone all day, Mom fixed a picnic lunch of bologna sandwiches, cookies, a jar of coffee for Dad and Mom and a jar of cool aide for my brother and me.  The bologna was the good kind. The grocery store sliced the meat off a large roll in a red wrapper. We just needed enough food for lunch, because we had to be home in time for my parents to milk cows at night.
 
Some of the old cemeteries were not well care for so my parents spent a little time at each place, cleaning around the graves.  John and I made a pass around the cemetery, looking at the old tombstones. Dad always cautioned us not to step on the graves. Out of respect sure, but since the wooden coffins deteriorated long ago, we might find ourselves sinking along with collapsing soil in the middle of the graves. Mom’s worry was the poisonous snakes lurking in the shaggy grass – copperheads and timber rattlers. "Watch where you step," she admonished at each cemetery.
 
Each year, my brother and I were given a history lesson about relatives that died before we were born.  We saw them through the eyes of our parents. We had to walk a quarter mile to get to Montevallo Cemetery. The timber lined path led down a steep embankment and through a shallow creek. Dad stopped the car.  We waded the creek, stepping on rocks as much as possible, walked through a pasture to the cemetery gate where amid Confederate soldiers and bushwhackers my father’s two grandfathers were laid to rest, both Union soldiers buried with wives and offspring. One grandfather was a farmer and the other a druggist back in the day when plants gathered from the timber were turned into potions and compounds. This civic minded grandfather was a justice of the peace and on the school board.
 
His son, my grandfather, was, on the other hand, a partier. He became a druggist after his schooling to become a doctor was cut short by the death of Great Grandfather at 54 in the 1800’s. He took over the family drugstore from his mother who kept the business going until he came home. Grandpa only made it to 50. In all fairness, a hereditary heart condition was the cause of death but this fun loving, good natured man’s life style may have hastened his demise. He didn’t miss a town celebration and most towns had them in those days complete with parades and games.  This was our musically talented Grandpa. He played the trumpet for a Woodsman band in the parades.
 
Not far down the road, we visited Mom’s two baby sisters graves at Olive Branch Cemetery.  One baby was stillborn in 1919. The other died from measles in 1929. In the early 1900’s, Mom was born the oldest in a family of eleven in times when babies had a tough time surviving, and all but those two lived long lives.
 
In Virgil City Cemetery is the graves of Mom’s great grandparents on her father’s side  She was sent to live with them when she was 16 and stayed two years to care for them. Great Grandma passed away, and Great Grandpa moved in with Mom’s grandparents, ending Mom’s responsibilities. Everyone took care of their elderly relatives in those days until they died. Mom remembered her Great Grandfather as a gentle soul. Great Grandma had the title Blind Grandma tacked on her for future generations to differentiate her from others. Grandma went blind when she stepped out of the outhouse one day you know which toped my list of why I preferred not to use outhouses as a kid.
 
Mom’s grandmother was known as Indian Grandma within the family. This was not a matter for discussion with other people. Not even us kids. She was young when Grandpa Luther brought her home from Kansas. They became a well respected couple. Though people suspected Indian Grandma’s lineage no one pried. This grandma I knew well. When we’d go visit her after Grandpa died, she’d come spend a couple days with us. Grandma slept with me.  During the day, her salt and pepper braided hair crowned her head.  Before she went to bed, she’d unbraid her hair and brush it.
 
About ten years ago and a couple years before she passed away, we took my mother back to Missouri. It was a going back in time trip as we traveled all those dusty roads again. We took plenty of flowers so Mom could decorate all the graves just like in the fifties. Mom enjoyed herself on that trip. After ten long years of taking care of my father who had Alzheimer’s, she needed to go home and connect with the past which held pleasant memories for our whole family. Hopefully, this last journey home was a comfort to her after so many difficult years taking care of Dad.  Also, she had the peace of mind that she taught her daughter well a life lesson years ago.  Remember and honor those that came and went before you, because they had a hand in shaping who you are.