So You Want To Make A Living Writing? 13 Great Truths

by

This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write on the River site on 7/6/14.

This is the flip side of my 13 Harsh Truths post of 29 April.

It’s a great life. I’m my own boss. I wear shorts and t-shirts to work, which is in my house. I sit at my desk with a great view of the TN River with a blank stare, drool running down the side of my mouth, and I’m working. Well, not really. Because no one’s paying me for my great thoughts. They’re paying for my writing. I’ve been doing it for over a quarter of a century and here are some Great Truths I’ve learned about making a living as a writer.

1. You can. You constantly hear “No one makes a living writing novels.” I’ve heard it for decades. In 2012 I was at a conference where I gave a keynote, then was listening to another keynote speaker saying “Don’t quit your day job”. And it started to worry me, until I realized my day job was writing. So I didn’t quit.

2. It’s the best time ever to be a writer. I’ve been doing it for over 25 years and have heard all sorts of gloom and doom, but I can honestly say, I don’t think there’s ever been a better time. That’s not to say it isn’t an extremely confusing time, but that’s why I’ve done other blog posts on that, including one about 99% of advice coming from 1% of authors.

3. There is more information than ever before out there. Which could be bad too, but seriously, you can garner a wealth of information about the craft and business of writing without leaving home.

4. Leave home. One of the greatest mistakes I made in my early writing career was not networking. Even in self/indie publishing, it’s key to network with people. I know you’re an introvert, but get out there and talk to people. It’s a people business. And network with a couple of other serious writers on your craft. I’m not a fan of large writers groups getting together and doing line by lines, but 2 or 3 serious writers working on story, like we do in Write on the River, is invaluable. Find better writers than you to work with.

  

Click here to read the full post on Write on the River.

 

The Struggle That Makes the Art

by

This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her blog on 6/6/14.

If there’s a frequently asked question I get which isn’t a variation on “How can a girl write boy sex?” it’s a riff on “How can I be successful as a writer?” I think I get the question a lot because I’m clearly mid-list, doing well but not even in the same zip code as people whose signing lines wrap around the building. I have the career a lot of people want, because everybody knows those megawatt stars are rare. But I’m making well more than a living wage as an author, and that seems an attainable dream. It’s just that nobody can figure out how to do it. How did I? How can others emulate me?

I can answer the question, but I’ll warn you right now a lot of people won’t like the answer, and even more won’t even hear it. Because how I did it is that I worked hard. I mean, I worked. Like a dog. Like a crazy person. Like a desperate freak. I struggled like I’ve struggled for nothing else, and I haven’t stopped. I stripped myself down and made myself understand who I was and what I could do, and then I did what I could to expand my limitations. I believe my struggle and pain, both personal and professional, define and make my art. I believe anyone, everyone, can do this too. Yet the short version of why so many people don’t make it even to a comfortable middle ground has nothing to do with the difficulties of publishing or whether or not we should all toss off publishers entirely, or the quality of the art, or whether or not Amazon is an asshole for bullying Hachette. Most people’s art doesn’t earn them a living because they cannot let go of the fantasy that all they have to do is show up with a product and the world will hand them cash. Most people cannot accept the truth that the work required to get money from art is so onerous it changes the nature of the art itself.

 

Click here to read the full post on Heidi Cullinan’s blog.

 

Reading Lessons of a Religious Upbringing Without Modern Books

by

This post by Sarah Perry originally appeared on The Guardian.

I was raised by Strict Baptists, so I was deprived of any recent literature, but blessed from very early on by a huge library of classics.

When I was eight I searched for something to read and found a white-jacketed book full of illustrations. It was about a bullied orphan who left boarding school to live in a haunted house and marry a black-haired man, and though now and then I had to ask my mother to decipher a word, I was enthralled. No one told me I was too young for Jane Eyre.

My parents are devoutly Christian, members of one of the few Strict Baptist chapels left in Essex. It’s hard to explain how it was to be brought up in that chapel and that home: often I say, laughingly, “I grew up in 1895”, because it seems the best way of evoking the Bible readings and Beethoven, the Victorian hymns and the print of Pilgrim’s Progress, and the sunday school seaside outings when we all sang grace before our sausage and chips in three-part harmony.

Though we by no means resembled an Amish cult, there was an almost complete absence of contemporary culture in the house. God’s people were to be “In the world, but not of the world”, and the difference between those two little prepositions banished television and pop music, school discos and Smash Hits, cinema and nail polish, and so many other cultural signifiers I feel no nostalgia for the 80s and 90s: they had nothing to do with me.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Guardian.

 

Why Self-Publishing Authors Must Think Like a Publisher

by

This post by Stacey Aaronson originally appeared on The Savvy Book Marketer on 3/18/14.

So many authors write for their love of writing or their desire to share their story or message, but if we want to sell books, it’s important to treat publishing like a business. In today’s guest post Stacey Aaronson discusses the mindset of thinking like a publisher.

After working with over twenty independent authors over the past two years as their editor, book designer, and publishing partner, one glaring issue has come to light:

The majority of self-publishing authors don’t realize that they can’t merely think like a writer; they must think like a publisher—if, that is, they want to sell books.

The thing is, it’s not easy for writers to shift into this mode of thinking—and I would venture to guess that most writers don’t even know they should be thinking this way before they even begin a manuscript. As a writer myself, I confess I didn’t consider the publisher’s mentality until I became a book production professional in the indie publishing realm, so I know firsthand how foreign it can seem.

But here’s the unsavory truth: the various self-publishing portals that have opened the door for would-be authors to get a book into readers’ hands are great, but many writers are running to upload all degrees of manuscripts—from the languishing and rejected, to the unedited and poorly designed—without honoring the legacy of traditional publishing. In short, thousands of substandard books are entering the literary marketplace because a multitude of writers are sadly stuck not only in ego mode, but in the belief that producing a book is somehow not a craft and an art. If we don’t want to destroy the reputation of books altogether—and if we want to reap a financial benefit as an author—this mindset has to change.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Savvy Book Marketer.

 

Amazon Speaks!

by

This post by Alex Shephard originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 7/3/14.

Amazon does not like to talk. And Amazon especially does not like to talk to the press—when the company felt it had to address its dispute with Hachette in late-May it avoided the media completely, and instead released an odd, condescending statement on its Kindle forum. In every report about its ongoing negotiations with Hachette you could expect to find one, beautiful sentence: “An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.”

That changed late Tuesday, when an Amazon representative—Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of Kindle content—did comment, to the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg. The timing was, perhaps, deliberate—Trachtenberg’s piece went up shortly before “Amazon: Business as Usual?” a panel discussion hosted by The New York Public Library began. That panel discussion featured a number of outspoken Amazon critics, including James Patterson, Bob Kohn, and Tim Wu. Amazon was clearly paying attention: it paid to fly self-publishing blogger and pro-Amazon zealot David Vandagriff to New York City to participate. (That Amazon finds Vandagriff, who does little to hide his disgust with “traditional publishing” on his blog, to be an appropriate spokesperson for the company’s aims is interesting, though it’s possible that they merely wanted to counter-balance the other panelists’ anti-Amazon views. Fight fire with fire: the Amazon way.) Once again, Amazon found the media narrative slipping away, and it decided to fight back.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.

 

Write Relatable Characters

by

This post by Ksenia Anske originally appeared on her site on 6/25/14.

Why? Is the first question you ask. Why should I write characters that are relatable? What about villains? The bad guys? The killers? The perverts? The awful awful people that do bad bad things? Well, here is the deal. Even the awfulest people are human. And by human I mean, we all simply want to be loved and to love. We may have a ton of shit piled up from the past, a ton of fear and anger, to the point when we want to kill somebody. Still. Killers feel too. They kill because they feel. Pain. A tremendous amount of pain. So much pain that they don’t know it’s pain anymore. They’re human, not robots. They have feelings. Think about the last book you read with a really evil character. Somebody so horrible, you couldn’t possibly root, but you did. I can tell you one. I read AMERICAN PSYCHO and even though I should’ve felt hate and disgust, I rooted for Patrick Bateman. Why? Because he was human. He doubted himself, he tried to find love and beauty in things, albeit, the wrong way, but you could feel it, see it, identify with it, perhaps think about that time you squished a bug to see what’s inside and realizing you killed it and feeling bad and sorry and…you know. All of us had these moments.

Because the characters are relatable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ksenia Anske’s site.

 

How Emotional Peril Keeps Readers Reading

by

This post by Janice Hardy originally appeared on the Writers in the Storm blog on 6/20/14.

Before I dive in, I’d like to say congrats and cheers to everyone at WITS on their new home! It’s hard to improve something so good, but they managed to do it. Kudos, Stormies! And thanks for letting me stop by to help you celebrate.

Okay, on to the writing tips…

When you pick up a novel, what keeps you reading?

The desire to see what happens next? The fear that something horrible will happen to your favorite character? The need to see it all turn out for the best? The need to know what happens next or what it all means? Maybe all of these at different times in the book.

No matter what hooks a reader about a book, she’s made an emotional connection. She cares, and doesn’t want to see the characters get hurt. But the wonderful things is, once you’ve made that emotional connection, “hurt” takes on a much broader definition. The emotional peril the character faces becomes just as important as physical peril. Probably more so, because readers know a major character isn’t likely to die, so they don’t worry as much about the outcome (unless it’s Game of Thrones, then all bets are off).

But you can destroy a character emotionally without physically hurting her. She can survive, yet never be the same. (and if you’re giggling in glee over the very thought, you’re my kind of writer)

 

Click here to read the full post on the Writers in the Storm blog.

 

David Farland’s Kick in the Pants—The High Cost of an Honest Critique

by

This post by Kami M. McArthur originally appeared on David Farland’s site on 6/2/14.

Before you send out a manuscript for any kind of an edit, you need to consider whether you are willing to pay the true costs of an edit.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been asked to edit several novels. For those of you who don’t know, I sometimes will edit novels for others (for a price) and try to help authors prepare them before querying agents or making a wide release.

My goal of course is to help the author become a bestseller and perhaps win awards. This means that I have to study the novel and maybe try to figure out how to broaden the audience, ramp up the tension or wonder, tweak characters, boost plot lines, make protagonists more likeable, and so on. It also requires me to give advice on how to bolster weak prose, tighten pacing, and do a host of other things.

I always approach this with a bit of trepidation. When you take on an editing job, you never quite know what you’re getting yourself into. You may have a novel that sounds great when it is summarized, but has major weaknesses.

Problems can be fixed, of course, but authors sometimes can’t be. Occasionally the author is dead-set on doing something wrong, or is hoping only for praise, not for real constructive criticism.

 

Click here to read the full post on David Farland’s site.

 

Should You Blog Your Novel?

by

This post by Nina Amir originally appeared on How To Blog A Book on 7/1/14.

Many novelists feel intrigued by the idea of blogging a book. If they seek a traditional publishing deal, however, they usually have one major concern: If I blog my novel, will a publisher be interested in the manuscript? In fact, nonfiction writers have the same concern.

No matter what type of book you blog, this is a valid concern. For novelists, it’s a larger issue, though.

 

Previously Published Nonfiction Work and Traditional Publishers

Let me discuss nonfiction first. If you blog the first draft of your nonfiction book and then submit to a traditional publisher, that manuscript will be seen as previously published work. However, you will have 25 or 30 percent new content and an edited version to submit (if you follow the plan I propose here on the blog and in How to Blog a Book), so what you present is not identical to what can be found online. That makes the manuscript enticing to a publisher.

Plus, when you submit your work you offer statistics to prove the blog posts you published successfully test marketed your idea and created a platform for yourself, which means you now have a built-in readership for the book.

For these reasons—additional content, the difference in your manuscript, great stats, platform—the majority of publishers—not all—will not be put off by the fact that your manuscript technically is previously published. If your stats are good, they should be happy to publish your nonfiction book.

 

Click here to read the full post on How To Blog A Book.

 

2014 Smashwords Survey Reveals New Opportunities for Indie Authors

by

This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 7/6/14.

Welcome to the 2014 Smashwords Survey, our third annual survey that reveals new opportunities for indie ebook authors to sell more books.

As in prior surveys (view the 2013 Smashwords Survey here and 2012 Smashwords Survey here), we examined aggregated retail and library sales data of Smashwords books and then crunched the numbers based on various quantifiable characteristics of the book.

For this year’s survey, we examined over $25 million in customer purchases  aggregated across Smashwords retailers including Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, the Smashwords.com store, Sony (now closed), Diesel (closed), Oyster, Scribd, Kobo, public libraries and others.

This year, we break new ground with more data, including survey questions that explore preorders and series, two categories of inquiry that weren’t possible in prior years.  These latter two categories were enabled by Smashwords’ introduction of ebook preorder distribution in July, 2013 and our new Smashwords Series Manager feature which allows us to capture, analyze and share the performance of series books.

The goal of the survey is to identify Viral Catalysts.  I first introduced the concept of Viral Catalyst in 2012 with the publication of my free ebook best practices book, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success.  A Viral Catalyst is anything that makes a book more discoverable and more enjoyable to readers.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Smashwords blog.

 

10 Things Writers Can Learn From Jane Eyre

by

This post by K.M. Weiland originally appeared on her Helping Writers Become Authors site on 6/25/14.

lucky ducky. Know why? Because writers can learn about storytelling just about anywhere. Life itself is a story. All we have to do is sit back and watch!

But one of the best specific places where writers can learn how to better their craft is by reading masterful books. As we approach the August 1st release date for my writing how-to book Jane Eyre: The Writer’s Digest Annotated Classic, I’d like to share ten quick lessons you can take away from this book right now. In lieu of the standard book trailer, graphic wizard Sean Brunke put together this fun little video for us.

 

Click here to watch the video on Helping Writers Become Authors. Note that a full transcript of the video is also available there.

 

Authors Behaving Badly and Authors Who Aren't

by

This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing blog on 7/3/14.

So a bunch of legacy authors–many of them smart and who should know better–just signed a letter accusing Amazon of things that simply make no sense.

Some of the usual suspects are at the forefront. James Patterson, who continues to show he has no clue about how his own industry works. Scott Turow, whose tenure as president of the Authors Guild amounted to being a shill for Big Publishing. Douglas Preston, who once supported windowing ebook titles and keeping prices high.

Preston recently said:

“If I were Jeff Bezos, the one thing I would fear most is if authors organized themselves and took broad, concerted, sustained, and dignified public action.”

Konrath replies:

“If I were Jeff Bezos, I would know that legacy authors have no power, because they signed away their rights to their publishers. Patterson, Turow, and Preston couldn’t remove their books from Amazon even if they wanted to. But, strangely, I don’t hear any of them demanding it, or even mentioning it.”

Naturally, I’m going to fisk this letter. Then I’m going to link to a different sort of letter for authors to sign. Hugh Howey and I, along with Barry Eisler and others, have been fiddling with this letter for the last 24 hours, and it explains to readers what’s really happening with the Amazon/Hachette dispute.

 

Click here to read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

A One-Man Operation

by

This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 2/4/14.

So, my publisher in Taiwan is a badass. Yes, a singular badass. Erik runs Nautilus Publishing all by himself. He designs the cover art, writes the blurbs, translates the books, answers the phone, handles email, and tugs handcarts loaded with books to his booth at the Taiwan International Book Fair Exposition.

And everything he touches turns to gold. I have no idea how any of this is possible. I’m in awe of the man. Gobsmacked and awed. The #1 bestselling work of science fiction in Taiwan was translated and published by him, and he’s only been doing this since 2010. WOOL looks poised to overtake that work. There are 50,000+ copies in print. Fifty thousand! And DUST, which he launched last week, debuted at #1 in all of Taiwan.

Seriously. How? Where’s the sales team? Where’s the marketing team? Where is the person who runs to Staples for office supplies? How does he do it?

I grilled him over dinner, eager to divine the man’s secrets. Two books a year? And they’re always bestsellers? Spill it, man.

 

Click here to read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

10 Mind-Blowing Theories That Will Change Your Perception of the World

by

This post by Anna LeMind originally appeared on The Mind Unleashed on 7/2/14. There’s some excellent fodder here for Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism and Dystopia authors.

Reality is not as obvious and simple as we like to think. Some of the things that we accept as true at face value are notoriously wrong. Scientists and philosophers have made every effort to change our common perceptions of it. The 10 examples below will show you what I mean.

1. Great glaciation.
Great glaciation is the theory of the final state that our universe is heading toward. The universe has a limited supply of energy. According to this theory, when that energy finally runs out, the universe will devolve into a frozen state. Heat energy produced by the motion of the particles, heat loss, a natural law of the universe, means that eventually this particle motion will slow down and, presumably, one day everything will stop.

 

2. Solipsism

Solipsism is a philosophical theory, which asserts that nothing exists but the individual’s consciousness. At first it seems silly – and who generally got it into his head completely deny the existence of the world around us? Except when you put your mind to it, it really is impossible to verify anything but your own consciousness.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Mind Unleashed.

 

M. Louisa Locke: From Academia to Authorship, A Dream Deferred

by

This article by Tim Knox originally appeared on Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Hey friends, welcome in to Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, another great show for you today. M. Louisa Locke is my guest, my friend Mary Lou Locke. She has quite the history. She’s a retired professor of women’s history, embarked on a second career as a historical writer and her Victorian San Francisco mystery series is based on the research she did to get her doctorate.

The series features Annie Fuller, a boarding house owner and pretend clairvoyant. The series thus far includes Maids of Misfortune, Uneasy Spirits, Bloody Lessons and the new book soon to come out, called Deadly Proof.

Now if you are interested in writing historical fiction this is an interview you don’t want to miss. Mary Lou talks about all of the work that she puts in and the research she does to make sure things are accurate. But then again she also talks about things like bringing humor into the story and the mystery and the romance.

So just a really good interview with M. Louisa Locke on this edition of Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Mary Lou, welcome to the program.

M. Louisa Locke: Well it’s very good to be here, Tim.

Tim Knox: To begin let’s hear a little bit about you. Tell us about your background.

M. Louisa Locke: Okay most of my life, career as an adult I was a college professor. I got a doctorate in history in the late 1970s, early 1980s. I spent most of my career teaching at San Diego Mesa Community College, so teaching freshman U.S. History and U.S. Women’s History. That’s what I did with most of my career but I always wanted to write historical fiction. In fact my high school yearbook when it said ‘what do you want to do with your life?’ I said I wanted to write.

I understood by college that most writers couldn’t make a living and so I decided that I would make history my profession and then the hope was that I might be able to write fiction on the side. In many ways that dream got deferred until I was in my late 50s and I was semi-retired. I thought I would give writing another shot. I’d written a rough draft of the book that became my first book years earlier. I published as a self-published independent author and it sold and I made enough money by the second year to retire completely. So I really now have a second career as a full-time writer. It’s really a dream deferred that I really did not expect to get fulfilled.

 

Click here to read the full article (or listen to the podcast) on Interviewing Authors.