Publetariat

Okay. You’re going along with writing the same articles each and every month, taking some solace in the fact that your source of income was secured by fact that it was a repeat customer who seemed content with your work. You don’t see any issues with maintaining that single income source, whether it is through a service like Elance or as a member of writing team. You haven’t had any trouble getting freelancing work at all.

Then it happens.

Your source dries up.

(In this case, my source dried up.) Now, you find that all those months of focusing on that one client, have left you without a back-up plan. You get reassurances that work will come in…eventually. Yet, it doesn’t. This is no one’s fault. It’s just how the freelance writing game gets played every day. You have to remember that being a freelance writer is not a secure profession.

Freelance writing, by definite, is a mobile occupation. If you’re not literally moving, you are least traveling from one assignment to another. If you’ve become used to the idea of having someone else do the legwork of getting your projects for you this can be difficult at first. You may have inadvertantly slipped into a writing rut.

What happens then? Well, you either curl up in a little ball on the floor behind your desk or you get back to doing the work yourself and finding out what it takes to beat out the competition. (Remember, fellow writers, the competition is fierce.) Take the opportunity to really begin a plan to diversify your freelance writing sources.

What Do You Need To Do?

First, you should start looking around for new opportunities. Don’t just stick with the same old, same old. Expand yourself. Try for magazine work if you haven’t yet. Make the transition from ghostwriting to credited work. Locate new teams to join if that is your preference. The bottom line is that you need to do something. Don’t let self-pity keep you from acting.

Second, you may find that you have a lot more interests than you thought when you have the time to consider your next step. If you are on a time crunch because you still have to make ends meet, then narrow down your interests to the top five and then start finding projects that focus on those niches. Again, you have to focus on something or you will end up doing nothing. Seize any good opportunities that come your way. The idea is to keep moving.

Third, whatever you do, don’t think that since you’ve found something to close the gap in your workload that you just exchange it and stay put. No, that’s not what you’re after. If you lose focus like that you’ll likely find yourself in the same position without work a month from now. Once you have an assignment to ease the financial burden a bit, keep looking around for more sources. If you can find reoccuring ones that will allow you to maintain your other obligations, the more secure you will become. The goal is diversification.

In the end, you’ll feel better about freelancing writing, if you simply have a good selection of work to keep you fresh. A small group of writing sources will keep you from work lapses if you learn to recognize the limitations of each. Multiple streams of income are far more secure than one, believe me.

Now, get out there and keep writing! Until next time. 

 

This is a reprint from Shaun C. Kilgore‘s site.

There is no more difficult question for a writer to address than the balancing of their intended communication. Readers are not clones. Logical ReaderG may be very smart about plot nuances, while empathetic ReaderT may be intuitive about character motives.

Whether you’re writing genre fiction or literary fiction, how do you accommodate varying levels of audience taste and sophistication? There’s no easy answer here because the problem is not simply one of revelation. If you’ve written a murder mystery, and at the end of the story none of your readers knows who the murderer is, then yes, you failed. On the other hand, if you’ve written a literary piece that attempts to describe torture by means of a subtle metaphor, yet nobody has any idea that your story is about torture, then maybe you’re not showing your work to the right people.

What’s critical in both of these examples is calibration, which you should think of as an intrinsic part of your authorial intent. (It can be tempting to talk about markets in such instances, but I don’t think you should do that. Markets speak to money, not craft.) Your job as a writer is to meet your craft responsibilities, and calibrating your stories for your intended audience is one such obligation.

Again, if you’re writing a murder mystery, you want every single reader at the end of the book to know who the murderer was. To achieve that goal, you will — regardless how oblique or subtle you’ve been in other ways — write something like this: “The murderer is none other than…Mr. Blithers!” And in the mystery genre you pretty much have an obligation to be that bald in your explanation.

On the other hand, if you’re writing a literary work, you don’t want to bludgeon your readers with literal metaphors. Writing, “Each day passed like a day on the rack,” is not simply inelegant, it’s going to turn off readers who appreciate subtlety, which is a de facto definition of the literary audience. Unfortunately, calibrating your story for the sophistication of a literary audience is not only difficult, it may distort your intention as an author. Balancing these two needs — your own, and the needs of your readers — never gets easy, no matter how much experience you have.

How much should you do to explain your work to readers? How determined should you be to make sure your message gets through? There’s no easy answer. Again, you have to take feedback on a case-by-case basis, and you have to ask yourself whether any particular confused or oblivious reader is a reader you intended to speak to.

Please note, however, that this is not a license to dismiss feedback you do not like. In my experience, writers who dismiss feedback because they think a reader doesn’t understand their genius are more common than truly oblivious readers.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

The news has been plastered all over the web: Seth Godin announced his most recent book, Linchpin, will be the last to be published traditionally. He blogged about it today:

Moving On

Linchpin will be the last book I publish in a traditional way.

One of the poxes on an author’s otherwise blessed life is people who ask, "what’s your next book," even if some of them haven’t read the last one. (Jeff did, of course). To answer your question, this book is my next book. I think the ideas in Linchpin are my life’s work, and I’m going to figure out the best way to spread those ideas, in whatever form they take. I also have some new, smaller projects in the works, and no doubt some bigger ones around the corner.

A little background: For ten years or so, beginning in 1986, I was a book packager. Sort of like a movie producer, but for books. My team and I created 120 published books and pitched another 600 ideas, all of which were summarily rejected. Some of the published books were flops, others were huge bestsellers. It was a lot of fun. As a book packager, you wake up in the morning and say, "what sort of book can I invent/sell/organize/write/produce today?"

It took a year or so, but I finally figured out that my customer wasn’t the reader or the book buyer, it was the publisher. If the editor didn’t buy my book, it didn’t get published. Here’s the thing: I liked having editors as my customers. These are smart, motivated and really nice people who are happy to talk with you about what they want and what they believe. Good customers to have. (In all of those years, only one publisher stole any of my ideas, no check ever bounced, and no publisher ever broke a promise to me).

When I decided to become focused on being an author, the logical thing to do was to sell to that same group of people. And it worked. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some great editors, and my current publisher, Portfolio, has been patient, flexible and, did I mention, patient. Adrian Zackheim, who runs the imprint, is exactly what you’d hope for, even if the architecture of his industry is fundamentally broken.

Authors need publishers because they need a customer. Readers have been separated from authors by many levels–stores, distributors, media outlets, printers, publishers–there were lots of layers for many generations, and the editor with a checkbook made the process palatable to the writer. For ten years, I had a publisher as a client (with some fun self-published adventures along the way). Twelve bestsellers later, I’ve thought hard about what it means to have a traditional publisher.

Read the rest of the post on Seth Godin‘s site.

Year ago while still learning the craft of writing, I found an article on a website . After all this time, I no longer  have the name of the website or the author.   I’ve used the following list on each of my books and all my other writings. I hope you find some use for it also.

 

EDITING

After the final draft, edit using the "find" function for the words on the following list. Next, read the sentence containing the offender, and either correct it or leave it be, depending. They are all valid words, if used in moderation, but are prone to misuse, overuse and abuse.

"Fine Tooth Comb and Red Flags and Snags"

and – but (can indicate run-on sentences) that (unnecessary in most sentences)

that (when you mean "who")

just

nearly – almost

really

seem – appear

felt – feel

begin – began

would – should – could

quite

few

rather

thing

stuff

anyway

because

"ly" adverbs

so

then

even

only

down  – up (as in sit down, stand up – can be redundant)

got – get

Look for passive use:

it – is

am

are

was

were

has

had

have

been

to be

there is

there are

there was

there were

 

Okay, so most of know all this. We still have the tendency to interject them into our writing without thinking. Try this excerise  once and see if it tightens and strengthens your piece of writing. I would suggest doing it on short story first.

 

Happy writing.

 

 

I listened to a few of the moderators podcasts and thought wow, he’s on to something with the writing from different tenses. 

I started out the novel with first person present tense and well, the first chapter was great but, making the transition to having a narriator fill in the gaps is giving me a few problems. 

I don’t really know who to ask questions too b/c in my house only my eleven year old likes books as much as I do and am skeptical to share my ideas with others on line because none of my ideas are copy righted and well… to be honest I have not written a book yet.  I have tons of stuff I have written just nothing published. 

I am stuck on the tense to use and can’t seem to move forward.  It’s like I am caught in the details here banging my head against the monitor. 

I tried writing the three starting paragraphs in different tenses and letting my eleven year old read them and my husband read them. 

It’s supposed to be a childrens book and the one she liked the best was the first person one.  My hubby liked the other one where I changed it to first person past tense. 

Am gonna copy my first three Paragraphs here.  In different tenses.  If you were a ten to tween child which one would seem more understandable and appealing. 

Any feed back would be much appreciated.  Thank you!

First person past tense:

That day was like any other late summer day.  The clouds partially covered the sky the birds in the distance and me sitting at the computer contemplating the course of the day.  Garage sales, antique shows, and flea markets and other unusual thrift stores awaited.  Mom was an avid collector.  She inherited quite a fortune from my grandfather this allowed her to extend her arms into an area that before was just a hobby.

I geared myself up to go with her that day after all, it was much better than staying home and studying for midterms.  I had mastered the art of procrastination so waiting until the last minute to study was far from unusual.  Luckily college was not like high school.  Mom was more lenient and I was able to stay out a bit later than when I was younger.  Her main motto was that we should network with other important people.

Though I neglected to see how hobnobbing with the well to do crowd would help in the future.  All I could see at the time was the back stabbing and eccentric need to keep up with the neighbor next door.  It seemed like a futile endeavor compared to my own interests in clothes from the cheapest thrift store I could fine.  The outfits I choose back then looked like tattered window drapes in contrast to their lavish clothes.

First Person Present tense: 

Today was like any other late summer day.  The clouds partially covering the sky the birds in the distance and me sitting at my computer contemplating the course of the day.  Garage sales, antique shows, and flea markets surrounded the day. Mom was an avid collector so our normal events consisted of venturing out on one of these excursions.  Her recent inheritance from my grandfather now allowed her to extend her arms into an area that before was just a general interest.  So I geared myself up to go after all, it was much better than studying for my college midterm.  So much easier to just put that off until the last minute.  I had mastered the art of procrastination and cramming for the next test.  Luckily home in college was not like high school.  Mom now allowed me to stay out later and to visit more with friends from college.  Her motto was that we should network with other important people.  I neglected to see how hobnobbing with the well to do crowd  would help me in the future.  All I saw was the back stabbing and eccentric need to keep up with the Jones’ next door.  It seemed like a futile rat race where my preference in clothes from goodwill looked like tattered window drapes compared to their lavish outfits and summer get ups. 

Thanks:)

I feel like if I can figure out the tense then I will be home free.

If any of you want to see a pretty cool idea to encourage others to buy your book, and to upgrade to a hardcopy version, please see my link at

http://kck.st/cgXgnB

Cliff

‘Views from Sandhausen – Experiences from a Foreign Service Assignment” is complete. It is the story of our life in Germany. Many of you have seen bits and pieces; this is the whole story, and will be available in Hard cover, Soft cover, and e-Book formats – nearly 300 pages with photographs, beginning in November.

 

http://www.linkedin.com/in/clifffeightner

http://flaauthor.wordpress.com/

http://www.cfeightner.com

Love can be lustful,

Love can be offensive,

Love can be vulgar,

Love can be erotic.

 

 

 



Love can be lonely,

Love can be open,

Love can be virtuous,

Love can be emotional.

 

 

 



Love is liking,

Love is organic,

Love is venus,

Love is endless.

 

 

 

Love was lost,

Love was over,

love  vanished,

Love  expired.

 

 

 

Love will lure,

Love will ooze,

Love will vindicate,

Love will embrace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Love is and can be many things,

none greater than an eternal mystery.

 

 

 

 

Top 10 lists are pretty popular these days. Do we have Letterman to thank for that? Anyway, in the interests of being in with the popular crowd, here’s a Top 10 list that seems blatantly obvious to me, but might serve as a warning to others. And before anyone accuses me of being all jaded and defeatist, I prefer to look at it as arming myself with the truth in order to beat that fu**er down and prove every point on this list wrong. Wish me luck.

Top 10 Reasons Not To Be A Writer

10. For the chicks. Generally speaking, being a writer doesn’t get you chicks like being a rock star might.

9. For a sense of self-worth. Seriously, almost constant rejection is not good for self-esteem.

8. For the cool. Most people, when you say you’re a writer, will look at you with that when-are-you-going-to-get-a-real-job look.

7. For the influence. No matter how much we think we’re changing the world, people are pretty fixed in their own personal delusions. Anything we write is unlikely to affect them much.

6. For self-fulfilment. This one is slightly off-kilter. We require the self-fulfilment of writing, but most writers I know are rarely happy with what they put out there and constantly bemoan how crap they are and how they wish they were better. I’m like this. We’re all a bunch of fragile little flowers.

5. For the fame. There are a handful of uber-bestselling writers that you might recognise if you passed them in the street, but not many. Have a look along your bookshelf and think about how many of those names have a face attached in your memory banks.

4. For health. Sitting in a gloomy room hunched over a computer, spewing forth imagination from the deepest recesses of your mind. Not exactly a jog along the beach, is it.

3. For a social life. See above. I have to admit that there’s a vibrant community among genre writers in Australia, and presumbly elsewhere in the world. I’ve got some great friends that I’ve met through being a writer. We only tend to actually meet a handful of times a year, though, at conventions.

2. For the satisfaction. You’ll never be happy with what you achieve as a writer. Sell a short story? You’ll wish you could sell to a better magazine. Sell a novel? You’ll wish you got a bigger advance. Got a great big advance? You’ll wish you were higher on the bestseller lists. I’ve never met a writer yet, at any level of success, that is satisfied with their achievements. They’re all mighty happy to have got where they are, but they all want to achieve more. Every one of them.

1. For the money. Yeah, as if this needs explaining. There doesn’t appear to be any. Anywhere. This is the one thing on this list that I’d most like to prove wrong.

There are a handful of rock-star-god-emperor authors out there that prove every single one of these points wrong. People like Neil Gaiman or Stephen King. But for every Neil Gaiman, there’s a million mid-listers struggling to get by. And for every mid-lister like that there’s a million more hard working writers, wishing they had that mid-list level of success.

The truth is that there is only one reason to be a writer. Because you have to. We all do it because we have stories to tell and we can’t imagine not writing them down. If we can sell them, bloody brilliant. If we can sell them and have any kind of effect on people, fucking spectacular! But the single reason we do it is because we can’t not do it. Any other reason and you’re deluding yourself. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word blog.

As I work my way through Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, I decided to take on his earlier challenge to write a post with seven links. Since this post was originally going to be about critiquing or editing, I went with seven links on that subject. Without further ado, here they are:

1. Critters Makes for Better Writing — Don’t let the title fool you. It’s not about household pets. This post about finding someone to give you honest feedback on your fiction.


2. Sandwich Critiquing – this is perhaps my favorite post, giving you a helpful technique to use when you are asked to critique someone else’s not-so-perfect manuscript.

3. Editing With or Without a Budget — more helpful tips on how to use money to learn how to edit.

4. Blogosphere Trends + Handling High Word Counts – this is a great guest post on Problogger by Kimberly Turner on how to trim the fat in your writing.

5. When Editing & Critiquing, Check Your Personal Opinions At The Door – the title says it all. A great post by April Hamilton of Indie Author.

6. POD People Scares Me – I love this title, but that’s not the only reason I chose it. Find out why editing is possibly the most important thing you can do before sending your manuscript to the publisher or POD (print-on-demand) company.

7. The Art of Critiquing – receiving criticism is difficult, especially when the person giving it doesn’t give you helpful details you can actually use to improve your work. This post will get you thinking of specifics to address when giving criticism to someone else. 

Editing your work, giving and receiving criticism, it’s all part of the process. Knowing how to do it makes it all the easier to move on down The Road to Writing.

 

This is a cross-posting from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

I’ve been trying to earn a living. Not the best of times for watching a bank account fatten, as I’m sure you all know. We also lost our companion Obie, our best buddy for 18 years. Being cat-less and sad only lasted a month, then we adopted three shelter kittens, so I’m back to up-to-my-elbows and then some.

Meanwhile, I began actually getting some notices of royalties paid on my first book, The Red Gate, which while not really paying any bills…yet…still feels better than no sales at all.  For an all-too-brief time, my Amazon ranking rose to the mid-600Ks, then of course, pluymmeting like a stone back into the 1-2M, but it was a shining moment. I guess I’m easily amused. Then there were reviews…A few months back, I recieved a review on Amazon — about the same time my book turned up on Barnes & Noble — that rocked my world, but not in the good way. 

The reviewer gave it 5 stars, believe it or not, then told the crowds, er ah, the one or two that happened to read it, all about the typos and writing errors in it. OHMYGODNO! I checked, and sure enough, a proof had been mixed up, and a bad re-format had been approved. Such being the lot of the unwary Indie Author,  I rushed to correct it all, and got the revised copy to press in a record of late-night toothy grinding. But some damage had been done. Oddly enough, the review was closed by the reviewer stating how enjoyable the read was and that he looked forward to the sequel. Go figure.  I tried to replace all the bad copies with good new coipies, but I figure there must be some old crappy ones still out there, so if anyone buys one on Ebay, it will probably be one of the early releases before I caught the…sob…reformatting issue. 

What I have been doing, with all the extra time on my hands is write.  I’ve been writing like a demon was sitting on my back, which is what it feels like to have three Works in Progress swimming around in your brain. Simultaneously. 

To sum up, the (insert highly acclaimed, long awaited, etc.) sequel novel, The Gatekeepers — pun might be intentional — will be out towards the end of next month, and the next book after that is about 3/4 finished.  This is, of course, the best of the lot, having learned the hard way the first time around!  Sometimes, all the free and otherwise obtained advice in the world is not as good as screwing up in a big, ugly way. Having doe so, now I’m duly chastened and more diligent when it comes to my pre-publication checklist. It now includes several beta-readers of pre-Pub proofs.

 

I swear a lot. I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m the worst person to have around your kids because I swear so casually that I don’t notice I’m doing it. I do try to remember when kids are around, but even that bothers me to some degree. They’re just words.

[Editor’s note—even though it should be obvious—: strong language after the jump]

Though I do understand that little Sally turning up in a schoolyard and telling her teacher to go fuck herself is a potential parent/teacher-relation nightmare.

But they are just words. Of course, they’re words with a certain power. All words have power. Love is not a swear word but it carries enormous power. As does hate. The taboo nature of swearing gives these words added power. We can deliberately drop them like bombs. You want some attention in a loud conversation? Don’t talk any louder than everyone else, just swear more. People will sort of grind to a halt and look at you, their expressions all cautious and surprised. But you got their attention.

That’s why it really bothers me when people say, “Swearing just shows a lack of vocabulary and an inability to express yourself properly.” Fuck off, you pompous cunt. Not swearing shows an inability to use the words that would express your position most clearly.

For example, if someone is all up in your face, as the kids say these days, what expresses your real emotion more:

Go away!

or

Fuck off!

It’s not a case of lacking vocabulary. It’s a case of picking the most powerful word for the occasion – the right word. We recently visited the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh. The place was a bit underwhelming, to be honest. But while there we got a set of fridge magnets with all of Shakespeare’s best insults on them. A few choice ones include:

Cream faced loon! MacBeth

and

Thou crusty batch of nature. Troilus & Cressida

Or my personal favourite:

Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog. Richard III

But, clever and entertaining as they are, they don’t really work in today’s world for really expressing what you want to say. As I mentioned above, I can understand tempering your language around kids. Give them as much time being all sweet and innocent as possible. But don’t fear the usefullness of some quality, well placed swearing. Don’t overdo it or just swear every other word for the sake of it. That does just sound dumb. But equally, if a situation calls for a powerful word, don’t be afraid to use one.

And don’t ever tell me that swearing shows a lack of vocab or an inability to express yourself, because that’s clearly a load of bollocks.

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

 

This is a reprint from Lenox Parker’s Eat My Book.

This post, from Consulting Editor Alan Rinzler, originally appeared on his The Book Deal blog on 7/12/10.

WE WERE HUNKERED DOWN debating whether to make an offer on a self-help book written by a seemingly well-qualified psychologist.

Then one of our dogged marketing assistants dashed in, shouting “WAIT!”

She tossed us a bunch of comments she’d unearthed from an obscure online forum: jaw-dropping, scathing assessments from former patients about the author’s failures as a therapist.  Whoa. We took a big pause — and ultimately dropped the project.

Don’t let this happen to you!

Searching with a fine-toothed comb

A little-known aspect of making a book deal these days is how a publisher’s editors, marketing and sales people verify an author’s platform and reputation.  We search for anything that might compromise our investment of time, passion, energy and money. Privacy’s not what it used to be, as we all know.

If your proposal or manuscript has reached the point of serious consideration, expect careful behind-the-scenes scrutiny of everything you’ve presented about your life and work.

If this is your first book deal

Publishers like nothing better than discovering and signing up the next big thing, the unknown writer with a great first book that promises to lead to many more. Before taking such a risk, however, careful due diligence is now standard operating procedure.

Here are some of the sources publishers check routinely these days, before signing up a new author:

Read the rest of the post on Alan Rinzler’s The Book Deal blog.

This post, from Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on the Idea Logical Blog on 7/11/10.

Upton Sinclair famously said that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I keep putting facts about publishing’s commercial realities that I think most of the smart people running things accept together with forecasts for the future that I think most of the smart people running things accept and coming up with a view of where we’ll be sometime pretty soon that I find very few people will accept.

We have definitely passed what Michael Cader has dubbed “peak bookstores” in the US. Shelf space for books is probably dropping faster than the number of stores as book retailers look for other items to keep their customers more satisfied and give those items space previously devoted to books. And shelf space available for publishers who don’t own bookstores is dropping faster than that because Barnes & Noble, the leading provider of bookshelf display space, is aggressively sourcing their own product both to improve their margins and to develop proprietary product not available to their competitors.

The fate of bookstores is an existential question for today’s book publishers (not to mention today’s booksellers!) Although it isn’t often stated this starkly, the core value proposition for the biggest trade book publishers is that they can put books on shelves. All of the rest of what they do (and often do quite well) — selection, editing, development, packaging, and marketing — is fungible. And usually not scaleable.

A big publisher and an agent would add to this list the “banking” function: putting up the money in advance for the author to write the book. But I’d argue that is also fungible (there’s lots of money out there looking for investment opportunities) so the publisher’s opportunity to be that banker is also dependent on the publisher’s ability to put books on retail shelves.

Read the rest of the post on the Idea Logical Blog.