Publetariat

Saying “No” to NaNoWriMo

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This post, by Steven Ramirez, originally appeared on his blog.

As I write this there are thousands of other writers around the world, madly slaving away at their novel in honor of NaNoWriMo. For those of you who are not in the writing trade, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Here is an excerpt from the “About” page on their site:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000-word (approximately 175-page) novel by 11:59:59 PM on November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

So that’s fifty thousand words in thirty days or 1,666.666666666667 words per day. Yeehaw! Well, guess what. I’m not having it.

That’s right. I refuse to participate. Why? It’s not because I don’t respect anyone who has the discipline to write nearly seventeen hundred words a day for thirty days straight. And it’s not because it wouldn’t be fun to see if I could create a story from start to finish in that time. And it’s certainly not because I wouldn’t be able to boast in some future tense that I created my bestselling masterpiece in thirty days. No, my reason is much more prosaic. I don’t have time.

It’s All About Priorities
I actually considered participating in this year’s contest. I’m a member of several writers groups which give out daily encouragement to those foolhardy enough to attempt this Herculean task. But you see the thing is, I am into the second draft of my zombie novel and at seventy-five thousand words it really isn’t long enough to begin with, which is a never-ending source of agita. In addition I have committed to posting regularly on this blog and am doing my best to market my published works via Twitter and Facebook. On top of that I regularly offer my time to other writers for anything from marketing and social media advice to written critiques of their works in progress.

Not that I’m complaining! I love what I do.

Looking at the problem practically, however, I would essentially have to put everything on hold for thirty days in order to participate in this contest. But if I want my book ready for publishing in the spring—or let’s face it, summer— I simply can’t afford to take a month off.

What Happens on December 1st?

 

Read the rest of the post on Steven Ramirez’ blog.

Indie Author Marketing – Get a Blog, Right? Wrong…

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This post, by Renee Pawlish, originally appeared on her Master Wordsmith blog.

Did that title get your attention?  Let’s face it, indie author marketing is tough work (indie author marketing success even more so).  And so many indie authors will tell you that you need a blog for effective marketing.  Well, yes and no.  I’m actually all for having a blog, ifyou are doing this for the right reasons, and you are avoiding some key mistakes. 

Having a poorly designed blog or one with little content can do just as much damage as good for you as an author, so you must think about why you have a blog in the first place.  I’ve touched on some of these points before, and I’ve added some new things here as well…

Indie Author Marketing – Reasons To Have A Blog

The primary purpose of blogging, for indie authors, is to help you sell books (unless you’re running a blog like this one that focuses on helping indie authors with writing and marketing).  Here are some of the things a blog can do for you:

  • it can connect you with potential readers
  • it can build your audience
  • it can showcase your writing skills
  • it can generate book sales
  • it can position you as an expert in your genre
  • it can generate traffic to your author website
  • it can give you credibility as an author (great if you want to get an agent)
  • and more…

Okay, you’ve probably heard of all of those and could add to the list.  And you may be asking yourself, I do these, so why isn’t it working?

Indie Author Marketing – Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Working

As I meet more and more indie authors, I see numerous things that they do with their blogs that actually harm their blogging efforts:

  • having a poorly designed blog
  • spelling or grammatical errors
  • blogging inconsistently (this doesn’t encourage people to come back because they see you’re inactive)
  • only blogging about your books (and saying buy my books all the time)
  • little or no book information
  • not linking your books directly to Amazon or other selling sites
  • not having a niche (you have to target your audience and write to them)
  • sharing your posts with those that aren’t in your target audience (I see this on Triberr a lot)

Now that we know the good and bad about our blogs, what can we do to correct things?

Indie Author Marketing – The Big Key – Your Blog Design 

 

Read the rest of the post, which gives further detail on each of the above bullet items, on Renee Pawlish’s Master Wordsmith blog. 

Am I a “Real” Author If I Only Publish Ebooks?

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This post, by Jim Edwards, originally appeared on Dvorah Lansky‘s Book Marketing Made Easy.

For some authors this is a real concern. They write books to gain credibility and readership as much or more than they do to make money. Being perceived by others as a “real” author is very important to them, and for good reason. However, the world of “books” has changed dramatically in the last decade. What made you a “real” author just a few short years ago may not represent what can actually make you a legitimate author today.

What is a book?

A book is a unique publication with a beginning, middle and end aimed at a specific target audience. Length can range anywhere from a few dozen pages to over a thousand. Readers can enjoy real books either in physical (print) format, or in electronic format on any of the hundreds-of-millions of ebook readers, iPads, and computers in the world. Real authors publish their work as ebooks and don’t even think twice about it.

What counts as a “published” author?

In the “old” days, a published author had a traditional publishing house and everything that went along with that (including tying up your rights for eternity, doing all your own marketing, and earning a pittance on each sale). NOW, a published author is someone who has their book for sale where people can find it and buy it (online or offline).

Amazon Changed The Game

I got my first taste that the world of publishing had changed in the late 1990’s when I was still selling real estate. I’d written and self-published a book about how to sell your house yourself, and was using it to help build my business. A home seller in the area told me “Selling Your Home Alone” wasn’t a real book, not because I didn’t have a publisher, but because she couldn’t find it for sale on Amazon!

 

Read the rest of the post on Book Marketing Made Easy.

More Thoughts On Libraries And Ebook Lending

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files on 10/31/12.

On Thursday of this week, I’ll be at the Charleston Conference appearing in a conversation organized by Anthony Watkinson that includes me and Peter Brantley. Brantley and Watkinson both have extensive backgrounds in the library and academic worlds, which are the milieux of most attendees at this conference. I don’t. I am being brought in as a representative of the trade publishing community. Watkinson believes that “the changes in the consumer area will break through into academic publishing and librarianship.” I am not so sure of that.

 

I am imagining that what creates interest, and concern, among all librarians about trade publishing has been the well-publicized tentativeness of trade publishers to serve the public libraries with ebooks in the relaxed and unconcerned manner with which they have historically been happy to sell them printed books. Big publishers have expressed their discomfort with ebook library lending in a variety of ways. Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, up to this writing, have declined to make ebooks available to libraries at all. HarperCollins instituted a 26-loan limit for ebooks with libraries a little over a year ago. They received apparently widespread — certainly loud — criticism when they announced the policy, but it seems now to have been accepted. Penguin and Hachette delivered ebooks for lending and then stopped. Now both are putting toes back in the water with experiments. And Random House raised their prices substantially for ebooks delivered to libraries for lending.

So, six for six, the major publishers have struggled publicly to establish a policy for ebook availability in libraries.

The concern, as I’m sure my conversation-mate Peter Brantley will point out, extends to what rights libraries have when they obtain ebooks. I’ve expressed my belief before that all ebook transactions are actually use-licenses for a transfer of computer code, not “sales” in the sense that we buy physical books. When Random House declared the opposite in the last fortnight — that they believed they sold their ebooks to libraries — it only took Brantley a wee bit of investigation to find that Random House’s definition of “sale” didn’t line up with his.

Of course, his doesn’t line up with mine. I believe (he’ll correct me on stage in Charleston, if not in the comments section here, if I’m wrong) Brantley accepts the one-file-transferred, one-loan-at-a-time limitation that has been part of the standard terms for libraries since OverDrive pioneered this distribution over a decade ago. That control enabled ebook practices to imitate print practices (except for the “books wear out” part, which Harper was addressing with its cap on loans). Without it, one ebook file transfer would be all that a library — or worse, a library system — would need of any ebook to satisfy any level of demand. The acceptance on all sides of that limitation says clearly to me, without resort to any other information or logic, that there is an agreement — a license — that the library recipient of an ebook file accepts in order to obtain it.

People who spend a lot of time with libraries and library patrons are quite certain that the patrons who borrow books and ebooks often also buy books and ebooks. (Library Journal offers patron data that supports that idea.) Although library services are many-faceted and not primarily designed to serve as marketing arms for publishers, the libraries themselves see the ways in which they aid discovery by their patrons.

And they also see the patrons that couldn’t afford to buy the books or ebooks they borrow and therefore wouldn’t and couldn’t read them if they weren’t available in the library. Since these patrons become part of a book’s word-of-mouth network by virtue of being able to read it, it looks like this behavior by publishers is not only anti-poor and anti-public, but also counter to the interests of the author and the publisher itself. (In fact, most publishers acknowledge the importance of libraries to the viability and marketing of the midlist although that, until very recently, was adequately addressed with print alone.)

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

The Smartest Thing In Publishing Is To Be Flexible

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This post, by Kassia Krozser, originally appeared on the fortykey publishing blog on 11/5/12.

The only certain thing in publishing nowadays is that everything moves really fast. If you should describe the actual situation with three adjectives, which ones would you pick and why?

I’m not so great with adjectives, but here are three words I think describe the current state of publishing:

 

Uncertain. Nobody knows what the next year will bring, much less the next ten years. In 2007, people were brushing off digital as "less than 1% of our business". Or, it wasn’t something that needed serious attention. Today, trade publishers (U.S., particularly) are seeing approximately 20% of their business coming from digital sales. The thing is, the changes in the print/digital selling mix are uneven.

On top of that, *nobody* really knows how big the digital marketplace is. If you poke around outside traditional publishing, you know self-publishing is seeing huge gains. But what only gets attention is a small portion of that self-publishing market. Beyond the stories that make the headlines (or invite scoffs and skepticism among certain ranks of publishing insiders), there is a a massive marketplace. Now maybe most of those people aren’t making a fortune, but they are disrupting traditional publishing channels.

Exciting. Technology is making it possible for us to reimagine storytelling. It’s also allowing us to get books and other things we read (the list is so long) into the hands of more people than ever before. Right now, I am particularly interested in how innovation plays out in the world of education. The State of California is making a huge push toward open source digital textbooks. This is going to encourage new entrants into the marketplace, and, if history holds true, they won’t be thinking of textbooks in the same way established players do.

Entrenched. One major problem I see across all types of traditional publishers is a desire to maintain business as usual. This is completely understandable — this digital thing is so new, so uncertain, and, frankly, the print model is still working very, very well for most publishers. But, as you note, everything moves really fast these days, and if anyone is stuck in the mode of "that’s how we’ve always done it", they will be left behind.

That sounds harsh, but the publishing industry (as we know it) doesn’t control "publishing" the way it once did. Or maybe it never did, but it seemed that way. Either way, there are smart innovators out there ready and able to fill voids left by publishers who are too busy standing in place to take advantage of how this market is changing every day.

Could you point out an example of innovation in publishing that is worth to look at in the next future?

 

Read the rest of the post on the fortykey publishing blog.

Want To Be Read 100 Years From Now? Here’s How.

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This post, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, originally appeared on her The Business Rusch.

 

So, you want to be an artist. You want to be one of those writers everyone has read, even though you’re long dead. You want your work in libraries, on bookstore shelves, and in digital format. You want professors to assign your work, or kids to sneak that “crap” that everyone decries but everyone loves.

There are two very simple ways to do this:

 

 

1. Write a lot of good stories. Not beautiful words. Good stories. Remember, fiction gets translated into a variety of languages, and in those languages, your original words get lost. Only stories get translated, stories with great characters, great plots, and unforgettable moments. I wrote a lot about this over the summer. Start with my post titled, “Perfection.”

2. Establish Your Estate Long Before You Die. Your copyrights will outlive you. That’s how they’re designed. If you don’t know what I mean by this, then get yourself a copy of The Copyright Handbook, and start reading it now. You don’t sell fiction; you license copyright. Learn what that means, and learn how it will impact your estate, your heirs, and your legacy.

You’d be surprised how much of the entertainment news you consume is about estates. You’d be surprised how much of the books, movies, games, and television you consume exists because someone handled an estate well or someone handled it poorly.

Or didn’t have an estate at all.

Don’t be like our friend Bill Trojan who, long before he died, would say about his (considerable) estate, “I don’t care what you do with it. I’ll be dead.”

My husband Dean Wesley Smith fought Bill for years to get a will, because Bill had some very collectible books and extremely rare pulp magazines, things that had only one or two copies left in existence. Dean thought it a crime for those copies to die with Bill, and badgered Bill into getting a will.

Bill finally executed one, an annoyingly inadequate one, that caused us a lot of legal problems just to get validated. Dean blogged about this entire saga (including the legal issues) earlier this year. If you want a scare story about estates and what you might leave your heirs with, read this.

 

 

Read the rest of the post on The Business Rusch.

Non-Writing Spouses

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This post, by Kaitlin Ward, originally appeared on YA Highway.

If you’re here reading this blog, odds are high that writing is a major part of your life. For many of us, writing is a thing we do whenever possible, something that makes us happy, that we love, that is a massive, important part of our lives.

But writing might not be something that matters to the people we marry (or date). Every couple has at least some interests that don’t overlap, and that’s okay. It’s good, really. You need things that are just for you, whether it’s writing or something else. But sometimes it can be weird when your spouse just cannot fathom how writing could possibly be fun, and when you want them to be able to be part of this thing that matters so much to you. As a person whose spouse is completely uninterested in writing–and in fiction in general–I have navigated these waters, so I thought that I would share some things I have learned.


1. It’s okay that they don’t care about writing–or even reading. Really, it is. Unless they have an actual interest, there’s no reason to try to force them to understand the wonder that is writing. They have their own hobbies, and it doesn’t lessen their quality as a partner if they don’t care about active sentences and the beauty of a carefully crafted book.



2. You don’t have to tell them everything about your writing, but you should tell them something. I don’t remember exactly when I told my husband that writing was something I did a lot, but I know it was fairly early in our relationship. I couldn’t exactly hide the dozens of notebooks that I have always had in storage bins, drawers, and all over the floor. But the point is, even if they can’t relate to it, your significant other should know about the things that you love, especially a hobby as time consuming and (often) emotionally trying as writing.



3. They will listen if you need them to.

 

Read the rest of the post on YA Highway.

25 Twitter Accounts to Help You Get Published

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This post originally appeared on Online Education Database (OEDB).

We here at the ol’ Online Education Database can’t promise that following these Twitter feeds by periodicals, bloggers, agents, editors, and writers will score you a coveted publishing contract. But we can promise that you’ll more than likely find at least one of them extremely useful when researching the five Ws (and one H) of getting your name out there as an author. And if these don’t work, chances are they link up to a microblog that does. And if that doesn’t work, then the blame probably sits with you.

 

  1. Writer’s Digest:

    One of the best routinely released resources for authors provides updated information about the state of the publishing industry, generating ideas, self-editing, and everything else they need to know.

  2. Publishers Weekly:

    Follow this absolutely essential Twitter feed for all the latest news and trends regarding the publishing world; after all, knowing how it works is half the battle (Disclaimer: It might be a little more or a little less than half).

  3. GalleyCat:

    Media Bistro’s GalleyCat blog (and, of course, accompanying Twitter) focuses on delivering the headlining stories about publishing today and tomorrow. Also probably the next day and the day after that.

  4. Carole Blake:

    She didn’t write THE book on how to get published, but this literary agent wrote A book on how to get published. Head to her Twitter for expert advice regarding the writing and submission process.

  5. Kevin Smokler:

    Publishing and other media collide in one illuminating resource for writers and wannabe writers trying to make it in the business as it transitions fully into the digital age.

  6. Victoria Strauss:

    As the co-founder of Writer Beware, this veteran writer knows what her fellow artists need to look out for to prevent being preyed upon by publishing scams.

  7. SPR:

    The Self-Publishing Review posts up advice, reviews, and other resources devoted to helping writers launch their careers autonomously.

  8. New Pages:

    New Pages catalogs literary journals looking for submissions, so it would behoove every short-form writer out there to check them out regularly and see what new opportunities pop up.

  9. FreelanceWritingJobs:

    Like the name says, this is one of the top resources where writers head to find themselves some gigs to launch their careers. It might not be about publishing what they want, but it still provides links to numerous opportunities as well as advice.

  10. Writers Write:

    Another fully fab resource where writers turn to for advice and publishing news as well as information about what relevant jobs are currently available around the United States.

 

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 15 more Twitter accounts for writers and authors to follow, on OEDB.

The 5 Essentials Of A Powerful Book Introduction

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Introduction

Your book’s introduction is a quick way for you, the author, to explain how your book is going to help the reader. This explanation is what will make your introduction a powerful sales tool for you to use to hook the reader into buying your book and reading it. Buyers of your book don’t care why you wrote this book. They just want to know how your book can help them improve their life. Your book’s introduction gives you an opportunity to convince the buyer that your book is the best one out there that can help them. To do this you should include the following five parts in your book’s introduction.

1. The Hook – Why Should They Buy Your Book?

Answer this question properly, and you will sell more books. Here you must compel your potential buyer to read more of your book, so they will want to buy it. To do this you must grab the reader’s attention. Grab them with a telling snipped from your book, or a shocking news headline, or dramatic facts and statistics, or a famous quote. What are their concerns or challenges that your book will help them solve? Put yourself into their shoes, and explain why they should buy your book.

2. The Connection – Describe Your Reader’s Problem

Here you must make an emotional connection with your reader. You wrote the book, so you must really understand the challenges, problems, and risks, etc., that have caused your audience to seek out your book. Why is your audience having these issues? Why haven’t they been able to solve them? Why are these issues so hard to fix or solve? Explain to your audience why and how you know about these questions. Convince them that you are the one with the answers and that you want to share this information with them.

3. The Benefits – How Will Your Book Help The Reader?

The benefits to the reader are what will sell your book, so include several of your most important benefits. The reader is only considering buying your book and reading it because of the benefits that the reader will gain. Include some general benefits, and several specific benefits to reading your book. Keep explaining why they should buy your book. For example, “You will learn how to . . .”; Discover ways to . . .”; "You will improve your . . .".

4. The Format – What Will Happen In The Coming Chapters?

Here you will give the reader a quick idea about how your book is arranged. Your book’s table of contents has already given the reader a quick glimpse of how your book is arranged and what it will discuss. But here you will tell the reader about some of the other features that are not reflected in the table of contents. For example, tell the reader about the side-bars, tips, facts, stories, interviews, quotes, pictures, diagrams, appendix, etc., that you use to illustrate or enhance your chapters.

5. The Invitation – Entice The Reader To Read On

This is the conclusion to your introduction. Just like in a standard conclusion to an essay, quickly summarize what you have been saying in your introduction. Then close the paragraph quickly and enthusiastically with a very short invitation to turn the page and keep reading your book.  For example, “Turn the page and let’s get started”; “Onto chapter one”; “Let’s get started”; “Turn the page and let our journey begin”.

Conclusion

If you don’t use these simple sections in your book’s introduction, you may never achieve the level of sales that you and your book deserve. On the other hand, write a simple and straight-forward introduction with these five sections, and readers will want to buy your book.

This article was written by Joseph C. Kunz, Jr. and originally posted on KunzOnPublishing.com

 

The Preface: Share Your Inner Passion And Inspiration For Better Book Sales

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What Is The Purpose Of The Preface?

The book preface (PREF-iss, not PRE-face) is a short explanation about why you wrote your book. The book introduction, on the other hand, is all about the benefits the reader will get from reading your book. The preface is about you, and the introduction is about the reader. But never forget, both should be written by the book’s author, and that both must show your passion and thereby make an emotional connection with the reader. In contrast to the preface and introduction, the book’s foreword is not written by the book’s author. It is written by a guest author, generally a person that is well know within a certain industry, that can bring third-party credibility to you, the book’s author.

What Is The Structure Of The Preface?

The preface discusses the story of how your book came into being, or how the idea for your book was developed by you, the author. In order to be a successful marketing tool, it must be written to show your passion for the subject matter, and your inspiration for writing the book. Here is your chance to infect the reader with your passion for the topic you have written about. Show the reader that you are a kindred spirit and have a passion in common. Here your aim is to make the readers empathize with you and identify your genuineness in writing the book. Answer questions such as “How was the concept of the book born?”; “How did you think of writing the book?”; “What are you trying to achieve by writing this book?”; “What are your qualifications to write this book?”; “What other books have you written?” The explanation to these questions can be autobiographical. You can tell the background, the context, and the circumstances in which brought you to write this book. The bottom line must be, “Why did you write this book?”. Be very clear and honest about this. And always write in the first-person, and in a friendly manner. Also, use your own voice when writing this way, and speak directly to your audience.

How Do I Close The Preface?

The main body of the preface is followed by a statement of thanks and acknowledgments to people who were helpful to the author during the writing of the book. If the list of acknowledgements is too long, a separate section should be created just for the acknowledgements. Alternatively, some authors use both sections within the same book, and use the acknowledgements page for the most special contributions – and the lesser contributors are kept in the preface. Another alternative that some authors use it to combine the preface and the introduction into one section and label it as the introduction. And finally, the book preface is  signed by the book’s author, along with the date and place of writing. Fini.

 

This article was written by Joseph C. Kunz, Jr. and originally posted on KunzOnPublishing.com

 

 

Questions To Ask Yourself Before Writing Your Book’s Introduction

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Introduction

Your book’s introduction is a quick way for you, the author, to explain how your book is going to help the reader. This explanation is what will make your introduction a powerful sales tool for you to use to hook the reader into buying your book and reading it. You must understand that buyers of your book don’t care why you wrote this book. They just want to know how your book can help them improve their life. Your book’s introduction gives you an opportunity to convince the buyer that your book is the best one out there that can help them. To do this you should include the following five parts in your book’s introduction.

1. The Hook – Why Should They Buy Your Book?

Answer this question properly, and you will sell more books. Here you must compel your potential buyer to read more of your book, so they will want to buy it. To do this you must grab the reader’s attention. Grab them with a telling snipped from your book, or a shocking news headline, or dramatic facts and statistics, or a famous quote. What are their concerns or challenges that your book will help them solve? Put yourself into their shoes, and explain why they should buy your book.

2. The Connection – Describe Your Reader’s Problem

Here you must make an emotional connection with your reader. You wrote the book, so you must really understand the challenges, problems, and risks, etc., that have caused your audience to seek out your book. Why is your audience having these issues? Why haven’t they been able to solve them? Why are these issues so hard to fix or solve? Explain to your audience why and how you know about these questions. Convince them that you are the one with the answers and that you want to share this information with them.

3. The Benefits – How Will Your Book Help The Reader?

The benefits to the reader are what will sell your book, so include several of your most important benefits. The reader is only considering buying your book and reading it because of the benefits that the reader will gain. Include some general benefits, and several specific benefits to reading your book. Keep explaining why they should buy your book. For example, “You will learn how to . . .”; Discover ways to . . .”; “You will improve your . . .”.

4. The Format – What Will Happen In The Coming Chapters?

Here you will give the reader a quick idea about how your book is arranged. Your book’s table of contents has already given the reader a quick glimpse of how your book is arranged and what it will discuss. But here you will tell the reader about some of the other features that are not reflected in the table of contents. For example, tell the reader about the side-bars, tips, facts, stories, interviews, quotes, pictures, diagrams, appendix, etc., that you use to illustrate or enhance your chapters.

5. The Invitation – Entice The Reader To Read On

This is the conclusion to your introduction. Just like in a standard conclusion to an essay, quickly summarize what you have been saying in your introduction. Then close the paragraph quickly and enthusiastically with a very short invitation to turn the page and keep reading your book.  For example, “Turn the page and let’s get started”; “Onto chapter one”; “Let’s get started”; “Turn the page and let our journey begin”.

Conclusion

If you don’t use these simple sections in your book’s introduction, you may never achieve the level of sales that you and your book deserve. On the other hand, write a simple and straight-forward introduction with these five sections, and readers will want to buy your book.

 

This article was written by Joseph C. Kunz, Jr. and originally posted on KunzOnPublishing.com

 

 

 

5 Ways To Get Your First Draft Material Out Of Your Head And Onto The Page

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This month, thousands of people will write 50,000 words, but these will not be fully formed books, for this is an outpouring of first draft creative material and that is a hugely important distinction.

First draft material is allowed to be crap, and often is and it’s meant to be so.

So don’t worry! A perfect sentence does not appear fully formed on the page, and it is not followed by another one, and another, to create a perfect story in one go. That’s not how writing works – but it is the myth of writing which we must dispel.

“Writing is rewriting,” as the great Michael Crichton said. Remember that, and then go write 50,000 words of first draft material that you can shape into something marvelous later.

So how do you get your first draft material from your head onto the page? Here are some of my tips.

(1) Set a word count goal

This is why NaNoWriMo works so well for people, as you have to write around 1700 words per day in order to ‘win’. Many pro-authors, like Stephen King, have a goal of 2000 per day, even birthdays and Christmas.

If you don’t have some kind of goal, you won’t achieve anything. I really believe that. It also breaks the work down into manageable chunks.

For a full length novel, say 80,000 words @2000 words per day = 40 days of consistent writing

For a novella, say 30,000 words @2000 words per day = 15 days of consistent writing

Of course, you have the editing process after that, but you can’t edit a blank page. So set your word count goal, and get writing.

[Personally, I always use word count goals in the first draft writing phase, but I don’t do that many fiction words every day of the year.]

(2) Write Or Die

write or die This awesome software at WriteOrDie.com is a way to burst through the internal editor that snipes at you as you write a load of crap in your first draft phase.

The software allows you to set a goal in time or word count. I started with 20 minutes, and then you have to keep typing or it will play some psycho violin music, or the screen will start turning red, or in kamikaze mode, your words start disappearing. At the end of the session when you reach your goal, trumpets sound and you can save the text.

I highly recommend this if you are struggling. This is how I wrote 20,000 words in my first NaNoWriMo and created the core of Pentecost. Maybe 2000 words survived the culling/editing but you have to write a lot of crap to shape it into something good (at least when you’re starting out anyway!)

(3) Scrivener

project targets

Scrivener Project Targets

I wax lyrical about Scrivener all the time, but it has some cool productivity tools. You can set Project Targets, so 50,000 words for example, and you can also set Session Targets, so mine is set at 2000 words. Every time you sit down to write, you can have those targets floating by your work and the progress bar moves so you can see how its going. Very motivating.

I also like to put as many scenes in as possible before I start writing, so I have somewhere to start each day. So right now, I have 11 one-line scene descriptions that I can fill in as I go along. I will change them, add to them etc but it means that whenever I sit down for a writing session, I can start filling in the blanks if I don’t know what else to do.

There’s also a Compose mode so you can fill the whole screen with a blank piece of paper. Keeps you focused:)

(4) Set a timer for focus sessions, and use Freedom or other software to turn the internet off

As part of my daily productivity tools, I set my (iphone) timer for 90 minutes and then I write, or edit, or work on a specific project for that long. But you can start with 10 mins or 15 or whatever you can manage.

The important thing is not to get distracted in that time, and DO NOT check the internet or twitter or your email or make a cup of tea or anything. You can use software like Freedom to stop you accessing the ‘net if you really can’t resist without help.

(5) Get up really early and work while your brain is still half asleep

sunriseWhen I wrote my first novel, Pentecost, while working full time, I used to get up at 5am and write for an hour before work.

Johnny B. Truant recently did this to write 2 novellas in 2 months (although he started at 4am some days – ouch.)

I think the early morning helps because your brain isn’t polluted by everything that has happened in the day, and your internal editor is still asleep. However, this totally depends on whether you’re a night-owl and your family situation etc etc … so find your own groove, but the point is, you need to schedule some time that you don’t have normally to get stuff done.

[Here’s another productivity tip. I got rid of the TV nearly 5 years ago, about the time that I started writing, blogging and changing my life – there’s some correlation there!]

Trust the process of emergence

I heard this in an interview with Brene Brown on Jonathan Fields’ Goodlife Project, and it is totally true.

Even if you plot your books, sometimes you won’t know what is coming until the words appear on the page. Something happens when you commit to the page, to the word count goal and you write through the frustration and the annoyance and the self-criticism.

Creativity emerges. Ideas emerge. Original thought emerges.

Something happens – but only if you trust emergence.

You can see the process work itself through by checking out the journey of my first novel. It starts in NaNoWriMo 2009 with my first draft material and ends with 40,000 books sold nearly 2 years later. The core idea completely changed :)   but I hope it will encourage you to see that first drafts are just the beginning.

If you don’t force yourself to get the first draft material down, you will never have anything to work with. So fight resistance and get it done.

How do you get your first draft material written? Please leave a comment below. 

 

Image top: Bigstock Shakespeare, Flickr CC Sunrise by Pilottage 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Self-Publishers Aren’t Killing The Industry, They’re Saving It

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This post, by Ed Robertson, originally appeared on David Gaughran’s Let’s Get Digital site.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment that cheap books are destroying the industry.

In traditional publishing circles especially, fingers are being pointed at self-publishers (and their chief enablers, Amazon), who stand accused of encouraging a race to the bottom, of devaluing books, and training readers to pay ever-cheaper amounts – making the whole book business unsustainable.

Today, I have a guest post from Ed Robertson – author of Breakers and Melt Down – which takes issue with that view. His logic is compelling, based on a historical look at book prices. This is really worth the read: 

Self-Publishers Aren’t Killing The Industry, They’re Saving It

I’m a self-publisher. An indie author. Whatever you want to call me. I’ve read many articles about how self-publishers are killing the book industry. I’ve heard it from big publishing houses. From the president of the Author’s Guild. From traditionally published novelists and agents and even other self-publishers. If I want, I bet I can find a new one of these articles every single day.

But I won’t, because I no longer believe them.

Self-publishers don’t have the power to kill the publishing industry. I don’t think anyone does. But we do have the power to change it. We already have – and paradoxically, this change isn’t a change at all. And instead of killing books, this change has helped resurrect them.

We aren’t the first to be accused of killing the industry. In 1939, Robert de Graff threatened to kill publishing, too. At the tail end of the Great Depression, when hardcovers regularly sold for between $2.50-$3.00, he started selling paperback Pocket Books for $0.25.

To put that in 2012 dollars, hardcovers cost roughly $40-50. The new paperbacks, the first of their kind in American markets, cost the equivalent of $4.16. In modern terms, a book that once cost as much as a coffee maker now cost as little as a cup of coffee. A book that once cost as much as a full tank of gas now cost as little as a gallon.

In just over five years from that 1939 launch date, Pocket Books sold 100 million paperbacks.

But it wasn’t all high fives around the burgeoning paperback business. One publisher at Penguin was so aghast at the tawdry covers on his books he wound up selling off the entire line. Others worried openly about the death of the hardcover industry. On the concept of skipping hardcovers entirely and printing straight to paperback, even Pocket Books’ own VP Freeman Lewis said, “Successful authors are not interested in original publishing at 25 cents.”

But they were, of course. Particularly genre writers who didn’t care if this new format was disgraceful. Because it sold. Readers bought their books by the millions. As the format was being denounced as the playground of hacks, authors like William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick got their start with bargain-priced paperback-only prints (specifically, with Ace Doubles that sold two novels bundled for $0.35). The history of the era is fascinating – a short yet rich article recaps it here – but what is most interesting to me is that initial $0.25 price.

 

Read the rest of the post on Let’s Get Digital.

Indie Author vs. Indie Entrepreneur

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As you may have noticed, it’s been a LONG time since I’ve posted here. There are good reasons for that, like the fact that my former house was foreclosed in August and I had to move on short notice, plus some divorce-related challenges that I can’t really detail for you here. 

But I’ve been thinking about this post for weeks now, and I’m sorry to tell you that it won’t come as a welcome insight to everyone. Still, judging by the recent blog posts or inactivity of many of my online writer friends, I don’t think it will come as a huge surprise to very many of you, either.

I’ve said all along that in order to really make a go of earning a living as an indie author, one must approach it with all the verve, dedication and business acumen of an entrepreneur. I stand by that to this day, but here’s what’s new: maybe not all of us need to be, nor even want to be, indie entrepreneurs.

This new paradigm of indie author-entrepreneur (I’ll abbreviate it to IAE in this post) is totally different from what the idealized picture of being a Published Author was just a few short years ago. While the IAE has much greater control over her work and career, with that control comes greater responsibility, too.

You’ve got to SELL, SELL, SELL. You’ve got to PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE. You’ve got to LEARN, LEARN, LEARN. You’ve also got to WRITE, WRITE, WRITE, because having a large published catalog is one of the commonalities among indie authors who are truly making a living at it. And once you get that momentum ball rolling, you can’t stop pushing it, EVER. Not if you want to continue selling, that is.

So making it as a fulltime author means working at it, fulltime. It also means coping with the same stresses and uncertainties as any entrepreneur: unpredictable income, all the administrative duties and headaches that come with running a small business, the constant pressure to produce and promote, et cetera.

A few years into it, many indie authors are stopping to reassess. The initial rush of excitement over being able to call our own shots and write our own tickets is over, and now we’re wallowing in the morning-after hangover realization that being a successful IAE means spending at least as much time on the business and promotion side of things as on writing. 

All those years we spent daydreaming about being a Published Author never included scenes of bookkeeping, coming up with promotional campaigns, buying our own ISBNs, boning up on ebook tech, strategizing over our books’ prices, and so on. We weren’t daydreaming about running a small business, but unless we’re willing to go back to the old ways of querying agents and praying for a mainstream publishing contract, that’s exactly what we have to do.

Those who are trying to transition to being a fulltime IAE while working a fulltime job to pay the bills are finding it very difficult, if not impossible, to manage. It was never easy finding the time to write, let alone query agents, enter contests and so on; being an IAE adds many, many more hours of work to the authorship equation.

I’ve concluded that for me, it’s just not worth it. 

I’m not willing to give up so much of my life to this effort, even if I knew for a certainty that I’d be a Joe Konrath at the end of it: making a comfortable living as a fulltime IAE. I’m not willing to trade years of stress and 80-100 hour workweeks to achieve that particular goal, then continue working 60-hour workweeks to maintain it. Considering that I was never in it for the money anyway, I guess this is not a difficult decision for me to make. For those who are struggling with it, consider this:

Being the next Konrath may not be realistically possible for most of us indies, anyway. Remember, Konrath went in with the advantage of already having a large back catalog of mainstream-published books (plus the royalties that go with them), and he was already a fulltime author before he went indie too. His journey to fulltime IAE was much shorter and less difficult than what the rest of us are facing.

At the outset, my goal for my novels was to get them published and know they’d reached an appreciative readership. My hope as an indie author overall was to see indie authorship go mainstream and become a respectable alternative to mainstream publishing within my lifetime. I’ve achieved the first goal, and seen my hopes for indie authorship realized far beyond my original notions, and much more quickly.

I have a ‘day job’ I love that’s steeped in books and media (Editor in Chief of Kindle Fire on Kindle Nation Daily). I’ve come out of a marriage of over 18 years, and I’m facing the happy prospect of building a new life for myself, exactly how I want it to be. I’m also thoroughly enjoying these regrettably short years of remaining time before my kids are grown and out on their own.

So while I’ll still write and publish, I’ll continue to run Publetariat, and I’ll remain active in the publishing and indie author communities, I’m not working toward the goal of becoming a fulltime IAE, and I guess I never really was. Anyone reading this who DOES want to be a successful IAE, you have my admiration and I support your choice completely. I’m certainly not making any kind of value judgment, or trying to imply there’s something better about my choice in this.

All I’m saying is, if you have decided, like me, that being a successful IAE isn’t really your dream after all, that’s okay. Choosing a different path does not make you a failure. Just be glad that as indie authors, we now have the flexibility to design our own career trajectories. As with pretty much everything else in indie authorship, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. 

 

This is a reprint from Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

When Do You Need A Little Ritual? When You Want To Do Some Magic

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So… I am someone who has long scorned the idea of “having a set of writing rituals before starting to write.” I didn’t like the idea of having these little OCD things I had to do before writing. Or these “stalling techniques”, however one chooses to look at them. But I’m thinking perhaps I was looking at the situation all wrong. Sure it ‘could’ become a little OCD. It ‘could’ be a form of procrastination. But it also ‘could’ be a way of training your brain to get you into the right frame of mind to write.

This is a little bit related to the question of ‘where to write’. I never considered that very important either. Have laptop, will travel. Anywhere and everywhere was “where to write”. But I’m beginning to look at that differently as well. Especially given my tendency to go long stretches of “working all the time” and then long stretches of “barely working at all” (which doesn’t balance out to optimum productivity in case you thought it did). I have no balance.

The benefit and the problem of working for yourself from home is that you can do anything you want. It’s a benefit for obvious reasons but it’s a problem because it can become this unstructured free-for-all where you don’t know where your work ends and your life begins or vice versa. And maybe these walls are all artificial anyway and unnecessary. That’s what I thought for awhile, until I started feeling like I was in constant limbo. While working I wanted to be or could be “not working”. While not working I wanted to be or could be “working”.

It started to become impossible to be in the moment of what I was doing because there were no boundaries. I’ve worked in nearly every room of my house at all sorts of wacky hours of the day, to the point that everything has blurred together and my home is my workplace. Not in the sense of: “it’s where I work”, but in the sense of seeing it more like a workplace than like a home. It would be like living in the back office of Amazon or something. Does Amazon even have a back office? They probably have 500 of them.

Anyway. So I was thinking… what I really need is some routine and structure in my life and a clear separation of work and home. So I thought about renting an office. Not like traditional commercial rental but a single SMALL office for one person to sit in with a desk and work. Or some kind of “coworking” situation where there are multiple cubicles and you’re only renting one of them. It would basically force me to get up and be up during normal work hours that other humans work, get ready, get out of the house, and “go to work”. Very clear separation.

I mean it’s not perfect. There is the tedium of getting ready and commuting and eating up time and gas money. And then the ongoing office expense. But it’s definitely a clear work/home separation and more mentally healthy than what I’ve been doing.

I called a few places that had the sort of thing I was looking for and talked to them but one of the places had no vacancies, and the other one only had large offices currently available (translation: expensive!) or a coworking situation but there weren’t even cubicles. And really… honestly… I need a door, or some sort of subdivided semi-private space in which to work.

I’m sure I could sublet some cubicle in some back corner or some small closet of an office somewhere. I’m sure there are plenty of businesses that have more space than they actually need/use and they wouldn’t mind someone subletting a little of that space from them for a few hundred bucks a month. But, I DO have a spare bedroom in my house.

I haven’t turned it into an office yet because at first I thought I didn’t really NEED a dedicated office because I can “work anywhere”. And then, once it became clear to me the perils involved in that… I thought that just setting up a home office surely wouldn’t/couldn’t be enough. But Tom says I’ll be surprised if I am consistent and don’t play in the office or work in any other part of the house and keep consistent office hours. (This is based on his personal experience going through what I’m going through and then having his own office when he worked from home for himself in the past.) Sure, this doesn’t get me out of the house, but if I can keep the routine and the separation, then I can shave off the time I’d spend commuting and be finished with work faster and have a bit longer free time for the rest of the day… time during which I can leave my house and interact with others.

So I’m going to try the home office thing first. I’ve got a great room that is literally a blank canvas with nothing in it. I’m going to set it up in a way where it is functional and has a ‘professional’ feeling but also where it has a creative feeling so that it’s a place I want to go to work and create. I’m going to spend a little on this because otherwise I was going to spend a lot spread out over indefinite months to rent space that I’d probably still want to spruce up a bit.

I’m going to try to be consistent with the room being specifically for work and not bringing work out into the rest of my life or the rest of my life into work, and keeping sane, consistent work hours. If I do these things, it may be enough structure/separation. If not, I could look into an off-site option. But I was also thinking about the kind of specific environment I want to create in, and the truth is that I have a lot more freedom to create that environment in space that is truly my own than in a rented cubicle or nook.

And then I got to thinking about how I’ll probably have my own coffee maker in my office so during work time I’m spending my time mainly “in my office” and not wandering all over the house in various procrastination exercises… like hot beverages. That was what led me to the idea of rituals and how I’ve poo pooed both the idea of pre-writing rituals and a specific space/room for writing.

But structure and routines are important both to make life feel more organized and manageable and also to get into the mindset you want to be in for various activities. So I’m going to try this space and ritual thing to see if that helps me to create the kind of structure and routine that I need to keep my writing sanity.

I’ve always felt writing was a form of magic. Why wouldn’t one have ritual and significant space for that? 

 

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters.