Month: November 2014

7 Things to Do When NaNoWriMo Is Over

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This post by Joe Bunting originally appeared on The Write Practice.

For those of you who have held strong this November, you’re almost there! Only two days left in November. Regardless of whether or not you’ve won, the fact that you have made writing a priority this month is a huge accomplishment.

Now that November and NaNoWriMo is almost over, here are seven things you can do afterward.

 

1. Mourn

If you feel defeated or frustrated, that’s okay. After November, take some time to mourn your month, your novel, and how far you fell short of your dreams.

Creating never goes as we want it to. There are always sentences that don’t sound right, plot points that don’t fit, characters who aren’t real enough, and far too many moments when you just couldn’t find the right words.

Before you start writing again, deal with those emotions. Mourn. Grieve. Then, let it go and move on.

 

2. Take a Retreat

You may not have had time for anything but writing this month. Take a weekend or a week to catch up on all those things you missed out on during November. Go for a run or a hike, watch some TV, go to bed early, hang out with friends and family, and do it all without feeling guilty that you should be writing (for a little while, anyway).

The real danger here is that you might binge on cheap pleasures that don’t actually give you rest. Instead, focus on resting your body and mind. Get yourself into a healthy place so you can refocus on your creativity.

 

Read the full post on The Write Practice.

 

How The Strand Bookstore Keeps Going in the Age of Amazon

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This post by Christopher Bonanos originally appeared on Slate on 11/28/14.

Walk into the Strand Book Store, at East 12th and Broadway, and the retail experience you’ll have is unexpectedly contemporary. The walls are white, the lighting bright; crisp red signage is visible at every turn. The main floor is bustling, and the store now employs merchandising experts to refine its traffic flow and make sure that prime display space goes to stuff that’s selling. Whereas you can leave a Barnes & Noble feeling numbed, particularly if a clerk directs you to Gardening when you ask for Leaves of Grass, the Strand is simply a warmer place for readers.

In the middle of the room, though, is a big concrete column holding up the building, and it looks … wrong. It’s painted gray, and not a soft designer gray but some dead color like you’d see on a basement floor. Crudely stenciled signs reading BOOKS SHIPPED ANYWHERE are tacked to it. Bookcases surround the column, and they’re beat to hell, their finish nearly black with age.

This tableau was left intact when the store was renovated in 2003. Until then, the Strand had been a beloved, indispensable, and physically grim place. Like a lot of businesses that had hung on through the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD years, it looked broken-down and patched-up. The bathroom was even dirtier than the one in the Astor Place subway. You got the feeling that a lot of books had been on the shelves for years. The ceiling was dark with the exhalations from a million Chesterfields. There were mice. People arriving with review copies to sell received an escort to the basement after a guard’s bellow: “Books to go down!” It was an experience that, once you adjusted to its sourness, you might appreciate and even enjoy. Maybe.

That New York is mostly gone, replaced by a cleaner and more efficient city—not to mention a cleaner and more efficient Strand.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

Publetariat Observes Thanksgiving

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Publetariat staff are off the rest of this week to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.

We will resume our normal posting schedule on the evening of Sunday, 11/30/14.

A safe and happy holiday to all of those who will be celebrating, and a peaceful, productive weekend to the rest!

The DBW Writers’ Survey

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 11/19/14.

The annual DBW Writers’ Survey is up!

Please consider participating and sharing. The more respondents, the more meaningful the results.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see how those results are analyzed. In the past, the outcome of publishing paths has been the main focus of this survey, which does not help authors make decisions with their manuscripts. There is an implied assumption in those past results that authors can simply choose whether to traditionally publish or self-publish. And so aspiring authors who have not yet managed to get traditionally published do not have their $0 income factored in, while all self-published authors are counted.

Compounding the problem, hybrid authors (those who have published both ways) have been treated as a special case in the past. This is odd considering that the vast majority of hybrids have either been picked up because of success with self-publishing, or found success self-publishing a backlist that did poorly enough with a traditional publisher for the rights to revert. In both cases, it was the decision to self-publish that was heavily rewarded.

These issues can be handled in the analysis. One way would be to compare hybrids with those who have been traditionally published, as both groups represent the top fraction of two different freely made decisions: the decision to either query an agent/publisher or to self-publish. These two groups also have in common the ability to draw the interest of a publishing house, whether out of a slush pile or out of the pool of self-published titles.

 

Read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

Eight Secrets Which Writers Won’t Tell You

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This post by Ali Luke originally appeared on her Aliventures site on 4/12/11.

A few years ago, I’d look at published writers and think that they were somehow different from me. After all, their books were gripping and fluent – unlike my stumbling attempts at first drafts. Their blogs had hundreds or thousands of readers.

They were real writers. And, deep down, I was afraid that I could never really become one of them.

But as I’ve taken more and more steps into the writing world, I’ve realised that my perception just doesn’t match up to the reality. Writers – at all levels – have just the same struggles as you and me.

I’m going to go through eight secrets. Eight things which all writers know – but which you might never hear them admit.

 

Secret #1: Writing is Hard

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. (Gene Fowler)

There’s a myth – not just in the writing world – that if you’re good at something, it’ll be easy. And established writers, me included, do have writing sessions where the words flow smoothly.

The truth is, though, that writing is hard. Some types of writing are tougher than others – I’ve written before about Why Fiction is So Hard to Write. But almost any type of writing will cause some sort of resistance – getting started is never easy. And very few writers, however experienced, can turn out a great draft first time.

Use It: Getting started is nearly always tough. There’s nothing wrong with you if you find it hard to sit down and write. But like exercise, once you get going, it gets easier.

 

Secret #2: We All Struggle With Procrastination

 

Read the full post on Aliventures.

 

Editors’ Post-NaNo Tips for Revising Your Novel

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This post by Corina Koch MacLeod and Carla Douglas originally appeared on Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer on 11/19/14.

It’s National Novel Writing Month, and if you’re participating in the festivities, you’re chained to your computer in an effort to blast out a 50,000-word first draft. Thanks for coming up for air to read this post!

When your draft is completed, you’ll need to revise it. And how you revise your writing will depend on

– your prewriting and planning style
– the kind of book you’re writing

But first, an explanation of what we mean by revise.

 

What is Revising?

The prefix “re” means again. To revise is to re-vision—to look at your writing again, hopefully from the perspective of a reader. To bring something new to your writing, you need to give it time to breathe. Revision involves waiting.

In How to Make a Living as a Writer, James Scott Bell recommends airing your writing for three weeks. That means sticking your NaNo draft in a drawer on November 30, and vowing not to look at it again until the winter solstice. If you take Stephen King’s advice, you’ll be pulling out that first draft on Valentine’s Day.

After the recommended period of rest, you’re ready to work on your first draft.

 

What’s Involved in Revising

 

Read the full post on The Book Designer.

 

1 of N does not equal N And Never Complain, Never Explain

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write On The River site on 11/21/14.

Arrghhh. Math. Sorry, but it’s the best way I can explain this concept. What this formula means is that just because you can go to the bookstore and buy a best-selling book written by so-and-so, the famous writer, that does not mean you can write a similar book and get it published. What I’m talking about is those people who sit there and complain that their book is just as good as such and such and, damn it, they should not only be published but have a bestseller. Also, those people who look at book number 5 from a best-selling author and complain about how bad it is. Yes, there are many book number 5’s from best-selling authors that if they were book number 1 from a new author, would not get published. But the primary thing that sells a book is author’s name. I’ve always said Stephen King could write a book about doing his laundry and it would be on the bestseller list. Stephen King earned being Stephen King and to misquote a vice-presidential debate, I’ve read Stephen King and you ain’t no Stephen King. Neither am I.

Another thing people do is they see a technique used in a novel and use the same technique, and then get upset when told it doesn’t work. They angrily point to the published book that has the same technique and say, “SEE.” Unfortunately, what they don’t see is that that technique is part of the overall structure of the novel. It all ties together.

 

Read the full post on Write On The River.

 

10 TIPS FOR NANOWRIMO – Good Habits & Motivation

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This post by Dee White originally appeared on her Dee Scribewriting Blog on 11/8/11.

Last year when I did NaNo, I got off to a flying start and had around 20,000 words written in the first week.

I was driven by the pressure of getting those words down. My mind was full of the writer’s greatest question, What if? But in this case, my “What ifs” had nothing to do with the story I was writing. I worried, What if I got sick and didn’t feel like writing for a week? What if my hands got too sore from typing and I couldn’t type anymore? What if I ran out of ideas? What if something happened to my computer?

So I felt like I needed to get it all done upfront just in case. It meant long hours, not much sleep, less family time and too much stress.

This year I decided to pace myself – to take the risk that something might come up, that I might have a bad week, that for some reason I might spend a couple of days writing nothing,

And I have to say it’s all working better for me. The ideas are flowing easier because the brain isn’t under so much stress, the body feels better because I’m not using caffeine to keep it upright. And although I’ve written way fewer words than last year I feel calmer and more positive that I will reach my goal of 50,000 words.

 

10 TIPS FOR NANOWRIMO

So what are my 10 tips for NaNo so far?

 

1. Set yourself realistic goals. Don’t go for ‘pie in the sky’. If there’s no way you can write 2000 words in a day then don’t expect it of yourself.

 

Read the full post on the Dee Scribewriting Blog.

 

Don't Pay to Self-Publish

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing on 11/23/14.

My name is Joe Konrath, and I write fiction.

I’ve sold over a million books by self-publishing.

You probably were searching for “how to self-publish” or something similar and my blog came up.

This post for all newbie writers considering self-publishing. While it would be extremely helpful to you to take a week and read my entire blog to get a full understanding of how the publishing industry works, here’s the most important thing you need to know:

DON’T PAY ANYONE TO PUBLISH YOU.

Now you can certainly pay people to help you publish. Freelancers such as editors, cover artists, book formatters, proofreaders, and so on.

But when you hire a freelancer to assist you, you keep your rights.

That’s very important.

When you write something, you own the copyright. That’s automatic, even if you don’t register with the copyright office.

Copyright means exactly that; you have the right to copy it, to distribute it, to give it away, to sell it. You own those rights.

But if you pay someone to publish you, you GIVE THEM YOUR RIGHTS.

NEVER GIVE ANYONE YOUR RIGHTS.

There are many publishers, called vanity presses, that exist to prey on writers who don’t know any better. These presses are sometimes part of big, recognizable publishers, and it’s easy to be tricked into thinking that if you pay hundreds, or thousands, of dollars, you’ll be published by a major press.

The truth is, major presses PAY THE AUTHOR, not the other way around.

I have sold books to major publishers, and was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then I had to hire lawyers to get those books back so I could self-publish them. Because I make 10x as much money self-publishing as I did by selling my rights to publishers.

If you are looking to get a publisher, do your research.

Check out David Gaughran, Writer Beware, and Preditors & Editors. They have a lot of information about publishers you should avoid.

Learn all you can about vanity presses. Don’t get suckered in.

Ask questions. Seek answers. And DON’T PAY ANYONE TO PUBLISH YOU.

Now some Q&A.

Q: I saw an ad for a publisher. Are they legit?

 

Read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

The Three Kinds of Scenes, According to Mike Nichols

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This post by Dana Stevens originally appeared on Slate on 11/20/14.

“There are only three kinds of scenes: a fight, a seduction or a negotiation,” the protean director Mike Nichols, who died yesterday at age 83, liked to say. It was an idea he often returned to in interviews, often appending as a coda this bit of advice from his former comedy partner Elaine May: “When in doubt, seduce.” It seems an astonishingly simple formulation on which to base a six-decade career spent moving effortlessly from stand-up comedy to theater to film and back to theater again, racking up landmark achievements in every field while always somehow keeping a finger on the pulse of what America was ready to see, needed to see, at that political and cultural moment: the sexual frankness and chilly suburban satire of The Graduate, the impassioned labor activism of Silkwood, the anguished vision of HIV-ravaged gay culture and Reagan-era indifference in Angels in America.

The best scenes from Mike Nichols’ films are seductions, negotiations, and fights all at once. He delighted in moments of high theatricality, intricately blocked verbal showdowns between characters with multiple clashing agendas unknown to each other and sometimes to themselves. But he also excelled at framing such moments cinematically, making the camera movement and music and editing all matter as much as the (always excellent, often world-class) acting.

 

Read the full post, which includes illustrative video clips, on Slate.

 

Ebook Publishing Gets More Difficult from Here – Here's How to Succeed

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords Blog on 11/19/14.

First the good news.

For indie (self-published) authors, there’s never been a better time to publish an ebook. Thanks to an ever-growing global market for your ebooks, your books are a couple clicks away from over one billion potential readers on smart phones, tablets and e-readers.

As a Smashwords author, you have access to tools, distribution and best practices knowledge to publish ebooks faster, smarter and less expensively than the large publishers can. In the world of ebooks, the playing field is tilted to the indie author’s advantage.

Now the bad news.

Everything gets more difficult from here. You face an uphill battle. With a couple exceptions – namely Scribd and Oyster – most major ebook retailers have suffered anemic or declining sales over the last 12-18 months.

The gravy train of exponential sales growth is over. Indies have hit a brick wall and are scrambling to make sense of it. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve heard a number of indie authors report that their sales at Amazon dropped significantly since July when Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited (I might write about Kindle Unlimited in a future blog post). Some authors are considering quitting. It’s heartbreaking to hear this, but I’m not surprised either. When authors hit hard times, sometimes the reasons to quit seem to outnumber the reasons to power on. Often these voices come from friends and family who admire our authorship but question the financial sensibility of it all.

The writer’s life is not an easy one, especially when you’re measuring your success in dollars. If you’re relying on your earnings to put food on your family’s table, a career as an indie author feels all the more precarious.

At times like this, it’s important for all writers to take a deep breath, find their grounding, remember why they became an author in the first place, and make important decisions about their future. It’s times like this that test an author.

Don’t fail the test.

Back in December, in my annual publishing predictions for 2014, I speculated that growth in the ebook market would stall out in 2014. I wrote that after a decade of exponential growth in ebooks with indies partying like it was 1999, growth was slowing.

I wrote that the hazard of fast-growing markets – the hazard of the rapid rise of ebooks – is that rapid growth can mask flaws in business models. It can cause players to misinterpret the reasons for their success, and the assumptions upon which they build and execute their publishing strategy. Who are these players? I’m talking about authors, publishers, retailers, distributors and service providers – all of us. It’s easy to succeed when everything’s growing like gangbusters. It’s when things slow down that your beliefs and underlying assumptions are tested.

I urged authors to embrace the coming shakeout rather than fear it. Let it spur you on to become a better, more competitive player in the months and years ahead. Players who survive shakeouts usually emerge stronger out the other end.

 

What’s causing the slowdown?

While every individual author’s results will differ from the aggregate, I think there are several drivers shaping the current environment.

 

Read the full, lengthy post, which includes further analysis and specific action items, on the Smashwords Blog.

 

What If Novels Were Treated Like Business Books?

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This post by Roger Tagholm originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 11/13/14.

After attending the FT Business Book of the Year ceremony in London, Roger Tagholm wonders “what if novels had subtitles like business books do?”

You could call it an overdraft of words. There seems to be an unwritten rule that business books have to have lengthy subtitles that seek to explain what the book is about. The shortlist for this week’s Financial Times McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year Award, which was won by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century on Tuesday night at a dinner at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, afforded some perfect examples (though admittedly, not the winner). Deep breath. Here goes:

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Suveillance by Julia Angwin (Times Books)

House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi (University of Chicago Press)

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (Norton)

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace (Bantam Press)

If novels were treated like this, we might see:

Atonement: How Making up Stories Can Make Amends for Past Wrongs and Be a Force for Healing by Ian McEwan (Vintage)

 

Read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Magical Thinking: Talent and the Cult of Craft

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This post by Michael Bourne originally appeared on The Millions on 11/18/14.

In August 1954, just months after he graduated from Harvard, John Updike had his first story accepted by The New Yorker. He was 22 years old. Three years after that, having spent a year studying drawing in England and two years as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Updike gave up his office job and set out his shingle as a freelance writer. For the next half century, he pumped out a steady stream of award-winning novels, poetry, criticism, and stories, often averaging more than a book a year.

Updike was an excellent student — all A’s from 7th to twelfth grade, summa cum laude from Harvard — and a ferociously hard worker, but he had little formal training in the craft of writing. In fact, as Adam Begley notes in his recent biography, Updike, the future two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner was rejected, twice, in his bid to take English S, Harvard’s most prestigious creative writing class taught by Archibald MacLeish. Yet from 1957, when he left the staff at The New Yorker until his death in 2009, Updike supported four children through two marriages without ever holding down a job other than writer.

Interestingly, Updike’s mother, Linda, was also a writer. Like her son, Linda dedicated her life to the craft of fiction, spending 25 years revising Dear Juan, a ponderous historical novel about the Spanish explorer Ponce de Léon, which remains unpublished to this day. She did eventually publish 10 stories in The New Yorker, along with two story collections (one posthumously), but Begley goes to some length to assure readers that without her famous son’s help rescuing her stories from the slush pile, they likely never would have been published. “I had only a little gift,” Linda once told an interviewer, “but it was the only one I got.”

 

Read the full post on The Millions.

 

Writing a Book? What if HOW You Tell the Story is More Important Than The Story Itself?

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This post by Ash Ambirge originally appeared on The Middle Finger Project.

I know your dirty little secret. (Not that one. God forbid anyone on the internet finds that one out.)

You want to write a book.

This means three things:

You’re paralyzed with fear that it’ll suck.
It’ll suck so bad that the entire world will snub you and right after that, they’ll revoke your social security number and put you on display as an example of what NOT to do as a human.

You’ve gotten really good at procrastination.
“I should really potpourri that one cupboard underneath the sink in the powder room in preparation for the guests we might have over for New Year’s 2015. Better now than never!“

You worry—like 24 hours a day worry—that no one will care what you have to say.
You don’t even feel important enough to sit in the dunk tank down at the local fair, let alone write a book and have anybody care.

The good news? People look in the medicine cabinet, not in the cupboard underneath the sink. Duh.

The bad news? You will always feel this way…no matter how many things you’ve written, and how many people have loved it.

 

Read the full post on The Middle Finger Project.

 

I Am Not For Everyone (And Neither Are You)

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This post by Jessica Lawlor originally appeared on her site on 11/17/14.

You know what can really hurt sometimes?

Getting negative feedback about something you’ve created. Losing followers online. Unsubscribes from your newsletter. Hearing that someone has said something mean or untrue about you.

Here’s an example: last week I crafted my first-ever Get Gutsy blog community survey. For the most part, the results have been fantastic. I’m learning A TON about what you want, what you enjoy and what could make the Get Gutsy experience even better for you.

However, on the flip side, there have been just a handful of comments that made me stop in my tracks and go “HUH?!” But after that initial sting and singing “Hater’s gonna hate, hate, hate” in my head a couple of times, I tell myself to get over it.

I remind myself of the following:

I am not for everyone.

As much as I’d love for everyone to like me and my blog, it’s simply not the case.

We cannot let the opinions of others’ define our worth.

You are not for everyone, too.

 

Read the full post on Jessica Lawlor’s site.