My NaNoWriMo 2011 Experience

Posted on November 30, 2011 by mike

For the last three years, I’ve participated in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge run by The Office of Letters and Light. And for the third time, I’ve managed to win by creating 50,000 words of original fiction between November 1 and November 30.

In 2009, the story I chose to tell was one that I found myself initially excited about. I sat down in September and October and began working out the characters in the story, the major conflicts the characters faced, some information about their world, and a very vague story line. When November 1 rolled around, I began writing furiously. Well before November 30, I had over 50,000 words written. When I looked back over what I had written, I realized that what I didn’t have was a coherent story. I had plot ideas I dropped in as I wrote, then later forgot about or abandoned. I had situations I had set up to happen that, when I got them, didn’t feel right anymore and went in a completely different direction. It was a mess.

In 2010, I started a different story based on the same character as 2009′s story. This time, I started out with Dramatica Pro, and did a better job fleshing out the characters, their interactions, the conflicts, etc. Before I sat down on November 1, I had created in Scrivener for Mac OS X a file containing every major scene I could envision for the story. Each time I sat down to write, I filled in one of those scenes. Before I’d completed all of them, I had hit my 50,000 words. Exhausted from the effort, I stopped before finishing it. I’m hoping to gather the strength to go back and revise it in the future.

This year, I was having a lot of trouble coming up with a story to tell. A co-worker suggested creating an unusual situation and tossing some characters based on people I knew into it. About 600 words into that tale, I realized I had no desire to continue. I spent another few days trying to decide what I would write instead. Then, I settled on an idea I’d thought about doing ages ago, based on reincarnation. That idea had enough traction with me that I could plot out a story line and drop it into Scrivener for Windows. An interesting thing began to happen, though. The word count chart below shows it:

My NaNoWriMo Stats for 2011

Early in the month, I had trouble motivating myself. It took a couple of weeks to understand the reason why. The stories I had done in 2009 and 2010 were stories I started out caring about, and then lost interest in. Somehow, that lack of interest translated into the ability to crank out a story anyway. My output those years was a lot more consistent, and I was finished a few days early on each one.

This year’s story was different. This was a story I cared about. It’s one I’d wanted to write for years, but didn’t think I had the craft or the skills to do it. It was a story I might actually want to publish. That paralyzed me for a couple of weeks until I realized it. Part of me knew that the 2009 and 2010 stories weren’t good, but that didn’t matter because I didn’t really care that much about them. This year’s story, though, I wanted to do well. And that desire to do it right caused me not to want to do it at all. I began listening to that little voice in the back of my head telling me that I wasn’t ready yet, that my writing wasn’t good enough. Once I realized that was the problem, it took some time and effort to tell myself “Hey, Hemingway himself always said the first draft of a story is crap. If he felt that way about his work, it’s OK if I feel that way about mine. Even if this story turns out to be bad, no one has to read it but me and I can take as long as I need to revise it.” That helped. It also helped to recall the words of Michael A. Stackpole, the New York Times bestselling novelist: “You’re the author, suck it up and write!” (I actually had that put onto a t-shirt to wear when I write, back in August.) Once I got past that block, I began to crank out a lot more words. I managed as many as 6,000-7,000 in a single day in some cases. I ended up writing over 35,000 words in two weeks.

The professional novelists I’ve had the opportunity to learn from (Aaron Allston, Timothy Zahn, and Michael Stackpole) tell a similar story. The author plans for a character to do a specific thing in a specific scene. When they write the story up to that point, sometimes a character will (metaphorically) turn to the author and say “No. I wouldn’t do that, not in a million years. Here’s what I’d do instead…” The author usually ends up listening to the character and writing the scene that way. Twice during this story, I had that happen. At one point, the main character has been acting very strangely. It’s worrying him and his girlfriend. I had planned for the girlfriend to hear about a trip he was planning to take and say something like “That’s the last straw. You’ve totally lost it. I’m leaving you.” When I got to that point, she turned to the main character and said, “I’m worried about, and I’m going with you to help you settle this thing. You might need me.” I was surprised.

A bit later in the story, the main character is confronted with a group of people who are doing something pretty nasty. It runs counter to everything he believes in. In my original outline, he was going to take the opportunity to kill them, so that it would destroy their evil little organization. As I was writing that scene, I could see it in my head like a movie. When we got to the “now I’m going to kill you all” part, the character turns to me and says “Are you nuts? I don’t kill people. There’s a whole other way out of this mess.” I watched the new scene unfold in my head and thought, “Wow… you’re right. Not only is this more in character with you, but it actually sets things up so we can do some really cool stuff later.” That one little detour made the story become more interesting to me, and the next 20,000 or so words flew by.

After the new year, I plan to pull this story out of mothballs and have a look at it. I figure it will take several passes over it to turn it into a story I would actually show someone, but that’s my ultimate goal with this one. That’s something new from last year.

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Review: Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cleaver

Posted on September 21, 2011 by mike

Jerry Cleaver is the creator of Chicago’s most successful writers’ workshop, the Writers’ Loft, and has been teaching writing for many years. His Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course is an inexpensive, portable version of what he teaches on his Immediate Fiction web site. In fact, this book is part of what that $2,000+ course gives you.

Cleaver explains that the need to hear and share stories is one of the deepest human social needs. We’ll even tell stories that put our safety and freedom at risk (such as when bank robbers can’t resist sharing tales of their exploits which eventually get them arrested). A “story” in this sense is defined as a narrative that contains conflict, action, and resolution. Conflict occurs when a character or characters in a story want something, but there is an obstacle in their way. To get what they want, characters must take action. The action they take reveals something about them. In the end, they’ll get what they’re after or fail (which is “resolution”). In fact, Cleaver says that “if the characters are having a good time, the reader is not. If it’s going well, it’s going nowhere.”

Fixing a Story That’s Not Working

When you’re looking at a scene or story that just isn’t working, you should ask yourself these questions and make sure you have the answers:

Who wants what?
What’s the obstacle?
What’s the character doing to overcome the obstacle?
How does that turn out?

It’s not necessarily one character in a scene who wants something. If characters have opposing “wants”, it can lead to a more interesting story. For example, a detective in a mystery may want clues from a witness that would help unravel the case. The witness may want to tell the detective what he saw, but fears doing so because it would expose an affair he was having. While these two characters are verbally “battling” in the story, the reader learns more about both of them. Revealing character, according to Cleaver, is the writer’s primary purpose at all times.

Other Tidbits from Immediate Fiction

Some other interesting points made in the book:

Cleaver encourages writers to think about emotion as they write. Writers are encouraged to “look for all the emotions that the character could possibly be feeling at one time. If he could be feeling it, he should be feeling it.”
Remember that no matter how strangely a character or person is behaving, what they’re doing makes perfect sense to them and would make sense to you if you understood how they see the world. The key is to understand what would make you act that way and reflect that in the character.
Readers experience a story through the characters, and share the experience the character is having.
If you have exposition to share with the reader, spread it out across the scene rather than doing a “dreaded info dump”.
When you’re trying to decide what a character will do in a situation, ask yourself what is more dramatic and what will reveal more character, and do that.
Pretty much every writer’s first draft of a novel is bad. The successful novelist is the one who sticks with that bad novel and keeps polishing it until it’s good.

Cleaver’s description of the writer’s subconscious is excellent: “It’s like having a trusted friend who helps you with everything, whom you must depend on to get anything done, but who every so often without warning and for no reason decides to clobber you.” When you’re on a roll, the subconscious is helping you keep in the flow. But sometimes it pops up and tells you that your writing is awful, that you should quit, etc.

In addition to advice on writing fiction, Cleaver also covers overcoming writer’s block, the difference between scriptwriting and fiction writing, and marketing your work.

As you read through the book, the constant reminders to refer back to want, action, obstacle, resolution, and emotion feel incredibly redundant. But these are important concepts Cleaver is trying to pound into the reader’s brain. It’s written in a very conversational style, and manages to be both informative and fun to read.

In my opinion, this book should be on every fiction writer’s bookshelf. It’s one I refer to again and again.

Review of WhiteSmoke 2011

Posted on September 17, 2011 by mike

WhiteSmoke 2011 is described on the vendor’s web site as “World-Leading English Writing Software.” It contains tools for spelling, grammar checking, punctuation, style, and structure. For reasons that aren’t quite clear, it also contains full-text translation capabilities and a multilingual dictionary. (It is, after all, “world-leading ENGLISH writing software” isn’t it?) I first learned about WhiteSmoke while compiling my Writing Resources list for MikeSalsbury.com. I was pleased to find that the GiveawayOfTheDay.com site recently offered it to visitors for free. I downloaded and installed it to see what this $99.95+ software package could do for my writing. While WhiteSmoke is a decent product overall, and delivers on most of the vendor’s promises, I do have some significant concerns about it.

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How to Write an Essay Easily

Posted on August 15, 2011 by mike

Writing, in general, is something many people find difficult. Stringing together words and sentences is something they struggle with. Writing an essay can seem like a difficult task. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to write an essay on any subject easily, provide evidence that supports your point of view, and flows smoothly from beginning to end.

Why Write an Essay?

An essay is an attempt to prove a point. Perhaps you’re arguing against a change in your school’s rules, or trying to convince readers that Fringe is the best television show ever, or simply persuade your parents to let you borrow the car Saturday night. Regardless of the point you’re making, a well-written essay can help you convince your reader to see things your way.

What Makes a Well-Written Essay?

What does a well-written essay look like? One of my high school teachers provided this diagram:

What does this diagram mean? It means that you begin to write your essay with an introduction which starts from a general subject area and narrows down to a specific point. (That’s why the first shape is a triangle that comes to a point at the bottom.) Once you’ve made that point, you provide three or more paragraphs that each contain an observation or fact that supports your point. When you feel you’ve provided enough evidence to support your point, you re-state the point in your conclusion, briefly summarize your evidence, and end with a general statement about your general subject area.

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Posted in Writing Tips | Tagged essay diagram, essay structure, essay writing, write an essay, writing essays | Comments Off

Apple’s Effect on Book Publishing

Posted on August 14, 2011 by mike

Apple and five leading publishers have been served with a lawsuit alleging that they have conspired to keep electronic book (eBook) pricing artificially high, and that they used their power to prevent Amazon from establishing “pro-consumer” eBook pricing. According to the UK’s Guardian News, Amazon tried to establish lower eBook pricing for its Kindle customers. Apple worked with publishers to “force Amazon to abandon its discount pricing and adhere to a new agency model. The article claims that eBook prices are, in some cases, 50% higher than they were before Apple and the publishers conspired to raise them.

Author Michael A. Stackpole mentions in his recent post “Price isn’t the point” that there seem to be three major schools of pricing for eBooks. The first says that 99 cents is “the” price to use. The second says that $2.99, which is the lowest price at which retailers will pay 70% royalty to the author, is the best price. The third school says that eBook pricing should be from $5 up to the price of a mass market’s paperback. Stackpole argues that “the main comparison point for sales is not the price of other ebooks, but the price of the equivalent book in print.” Note that none of Stackpole’s price models indicates that an eBook should be priced at or above that of a physical book. That seems to be how things are since the alleged collusion took place.

As a consumer, I think there is something to both these arguments. Pricing electronic books at or above the price of physical books is unreasonable. Electronic books cost much less to keep “in inventory”, require very little money to duplicate and ship, and are only accessible as long as your reading device has power. Physical books are expensive to reproduce, weigh more (in bulk) than eBooks, and require (generally speaking) more storage space. Their greatest advantages are that they don’t require electricity, may be easier to read outdoors in daylight, and can be more readily loaned or re-sold when you’re finished with them.

On the other hand, authors deserve to receive a reasonable royalty for their work. Having written a couple of novels, I know that it isn’t easy to do. It takes many hours, and a lot of effort. It’s not necessarily “fun” work, but there is a degree of satisfaction when it’s finished. If the compensation for that work isn’t appropriate, authors will not be encouraged to write books for us. By the same token, if eBook prices are too high, readers will not be as inclined to purchase them. It seems like there should be a happy medium here. Unfortunately, if book publishers are controlling the minimum price, I doubt that is going to happen.

This is yet another reason I suggest that smart authors will be investigating self-publishing, at least in the short term. Self-publishing allows you to set a reasonable price for your electronic and print books, without interference from the publishers and media deliverers like Apple.

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SEO for Authors

Posted on August 13, 2011 by mike

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of helping search engines like Google or Bing identify what the content on your site is about, so that people searching for the kind of information you’re offering will see your web site in their search results. It is not about “fooling” the search engine or “tricking” users into visiting your site, but about ensuring that your site appears in search results for which the content is appropriate.

For example, let’s say that you sell motorcycle accessories. People refer to motorcycles by a number of different phrases. One person might search for “chopper accessories” while another looks for “motorbike saddlebags” and another wants “Harley jackets”. If you want to draw as many visitors to your site as possible, you’ll hopefully include all these phrases somewhere on your site (and with enough frequency) that a search engine associates those terms with your site.

There is a lot more to SEO than just plopping lots of phrases on your site. We’ll cover the more critical points in this article. The rest I plan to offer later in an eBook.

Why Should Authors Care About SEO?

If you’re a million-selling author with legions of dedicated readers, you may not need to care about SEO. After all, anything you write is likely finding its audience and publishers are clamoring for your work. Bit if you’re not one of those fortunate few, you’re probably experiencing some pressure caused by changes in the traditional publishing industry. Advances are smaller. Books go out of print faster. Publishers take longer to pay. Royalties on eBooks are declining.

Many authors are sitting on novels, short stories, and other writing that could be earning them money, but isn’t. Self-publishing that content is one way to make money with it. Another is to share that content on the Internet and use advertising to monetize it. Regardless of the technique you use, you want to help readers find the content you’re offering. If they can’t find your work, they can’t read it, and they can’t pay you for it. SEO for authors is a tool you can use to ensure that when your readers look for you (or “something like” the content you’re offering) they will find your work.

Knowing how to optimize your content for search engine indexing will help you. Knowing what NOT to do will help you as well. I’m going to discuss what search engines look for, how you can write and structure your content to make it easier for search engines to index your material, and warn you about mistakes that could hurt your search engine ranking. Although it may sound complicated, much of search engine optimization for writers and authors is based on creating good content that is accessible to your readers, which is something you hopefully already strive for.

What Do Search Engines Look For?

Search engines aren’t all that difficult to fathom. They use programs referred to as “spiders” which scan the web looking for pages to index in their massive databases. When they find a new page, they begin looking at different items on that page in order to decide how to index it:

What words and phrases appear on the page? Which ones appear most often?
What words and phrases appear in title tags, bold type, italics, etc.?
What words and phrases appear in image (photo, picture) tags?
What words and phrases appear in HTML links to other pages (on this site or others)?
What other sites link to this one, and what text do they use to do it?
How often does the content on this site get updated?

All the above items are under your control, with the exception of sites linking to yours. You can encourage that, and do some of it yourself, but largely that is under the control of others.

The most important element in SEO, however, doesn’t appear on that list: quality content. Fortunately, as an author, you should have everything you need to provide good content for your readers. How does a search engine decide that the content on your page is “quality” content? They use human beings.

There are individuals employed by the search engines to review web pages for quality content. These people actually go out and read the web pages found for a given search result. They rate it based on relevance, and their input goes into the indexing algorithm.

According to a Google search engine patent application I read years ago, they use another trick to “punish” deceptive sites. Specifically, they watch how long you stay on a given web page before hitting the “back” button in your browser to look at the search results and pick another page. How does this work?

Imagine that you’ve just searched for “mystery novels” in Google. A list of results appears. You click the first link in the list. When you get to that page, you find that it’s nothing but a crappy page filled with advertisements and no usable information on mystery novels. You hit the back button almost instantly and go back to the search results. You try the next page in the results. This time, it looks pretty good. You stay and read for a few minutes. You hit the back button to look at more sites. Since you stayed on the first site for only a couple of seconds, but spent minutes on the second site, that tells the Google database something… The second site on the list must be more relevant, or have better content, than the first. They’ll record a sort of electronic “vote” that the second site is better than the first. Over time, the first site (the one with lots of ads and crappy content) will start dropping down the list of search results. The second site will move up. The humans using Google actually help it improve the quality of search results.

Google does a lot more than the above, including things I’m sure we’ll probably never know about. Because of the human review element, it’s important that you don’t try to “scam” or “spam” the search engines with your content. Doing that is the quickest way to move to the bottom of the search results.

How Should I Prepare Content for SEO?

Here are some basic guidelines for improving the ranking of your content in search engines:

Write good content. This is the most critical piece. If your content is terrible, no amount of SEO will help keep it high in search results for long. The human element in search engine use will see to that.
Include words and phrases people would use to find your content. Remember the motorcycle example earlier? When writing your content, try to imagine the various words and phrases a reader might use if they were looking for what you are offering. As best you can, weave those words and phrases into the text on your page. Don’t overdo it or you’ll run the risk of alienating readers or tripping the “spam” detectors.
Include important words and phrases in HTML title tags, bold face text, and italic text. Search engines, like human readers, recognize that we tend to highlight the key words and phrases in our text. Careful use of these things will help the search engine to recognize what’s relevant in your content.
Include good links, with key words and phrases in the link text. For example, your short mystery story should probably have links to your other mystery stories. Those links should probably include the phrase “mystery story” (as in “here is another mystery storyI wrote” where the underlined words are linked). Remember it’s the actual linked words that matter here. Ideally, the links should appear within the normal flow of the text, not in lists of links, as some search engines reduce the value of links presented that way.
If you use images or photos, add “alt” and “title” attributes that contain descriptive phrases with your key words. Search engines, much like readers, will find articles with useful images more relevant or interesting than articles without images. If your page includes images, you can help show the search engine those images are relevant by using the “alt” and “title” attributes in your HTML image tags. Only do this if the image really is related to the keywords you’re putting in the tag.
Make sure the title and heading tags on your page contain descriptive text. For a short story, your HTML title tag might contain the phrase “Short mystery story – Murder at Midnight by John Doe”. This helps a search engine to recognize that this page is a short story, a mystery, and is by John Doe. Often, these title tags become the heading in search results. Use them to help readers find your content.
Use appropriate headings (H1, H2, etc. tags) in your content. Notice how I’ve used HTML headings (large bold tags) for phrases like “What is SEO?” on this article? That’s intentional. Those headings help readers quickly see what parts of this article are about. They also help the search engine identify phrases that are relevant to the content I’m presenting. To the extent you can, you should do the same.
Make it easy for readers and search engines to identify related content. One way to do this, as mentioned earlier, is to ensure you link related pages on your site together. If you post a short story, for example, linking to some of your other short stories from it will help. Having a “My Short Stories” page, which acts as a sort of central menu to your library, will also help.
Phrase the same thought different ways in your text. Going back to the motorcycle example, brainstorm the various ways you might phrase a given thought. To the extent that you can naturally weave these various phrases into your content, do so. Use them multiple times if you can do so without hurting readability. Use them in link text, bold type, italics, heading tags, etc. This will all help the search engine (and the reader).
Encourage people to link to your content. You can do this by opening asking in your content, by including links to Facebook/Twitter/Digg/etc. You can do it yourself by participating in online forums and linking back to your content where it is appropriate and relevant to do so (i.e., linking to your mystery story from a Chevy Corvette forum isn’t appropriate or relevant and may hurt your ranking).

All of the above suggestions will improve your page’s appearance in search engine results. To the extent that you can incorporate the above suggestions in your web site, you should. But if they hamper readability for humans, make your content look cluttered, etc., you should ignore them. (You may also want to read Google’s Starter Guide to Search Engine Optimization.)

What You SHOULD NOT Do in SEO

Just as it is important for an author to do certain things in order to improve his or her search engine visibility, there are lots of things you should NOT do as well. Doing these will hamper your positioning in search engine results and could result in your site being blacklisted from the search engine (or being ranked very low in spite of really good content).

Adding text strictly for search engines. Suppose you’re posting an article on your site about writing fiction. You want to be sure that search engines figure that out. Should you put a blob of text at the end of that article which is nothing more than dozens of repeated phrases like “writing fiction, fiction writing, how to write fiction, write fiction, write stories” and so on? No. It may initially raise your ranking in search results, but humans will likely start penalizing you for that “paragraph of nonsense”. (By the way, making the content invisible to readers by changing the text color to blend into the page background will get you banned very quickly.)
Overdoing the bold, italic, and heading text. This will alienate readers and search engines alike. Depending on the length of the content, you don’t want to do this more than once or twice per 500 words.
Stuffing your content with key words. It’s perfectly appropriate to use different phrasings for a thought in your content as long as it flows naturally. What you don’t want to do is stuff those phrases into the content to the point that it hurts your readability. This makes you look like a terrible writer and will inevitably hurt your search engine ranking.
Acquiring a lot of irrelevant links to your site. While having 300 pages link to your short story will generally help it in the search engine results, if those 300 links are from cooking sites, trading card collector sites, etc., they can hurt you. You can’t control who links to your site, but if you’re creating your own links, be sure they’re coming from relevant sources and using relevant link text (i.e., “click herefor my content” is not a relevant bit of link text).
Duplicate your content. While it’s true that having 20 short stories on your web site will help it rank higher for the term “short story”, putting 20 copies of a single short story on your site will hurt you. This is a trick used by a lot of search engine spammers, and will quickly get you blacklisted.

Google’s rules change frequently, primarily because people try to “game” or abuse the system. It is recommended that you regularly check Google’s recommendations to ensure that you don’t run afoul of them.

SEO for Authors/Writers

I would encourage you to worry first about your content. Write the blog post, short story, novella, etc., in the manner you normally would. Don’t think about SEO. When you’re ready to post the material online, walk through the following steps.

Brainstorm the phrases and terms that readers might search for when seeking the content you’ve just written. For works of fiction, you probably can’t do much with the actual text. But you can incorporate an introduction or “about the author” section on the same page which does include key words and phrases.
Where appropriate, bold or italicize important words and phrases. Again, within a work of fiction this may not be appropriate. But within the introduction or other text, it is.
Where appropriate, link to other pages on your site from within your text. For example, at the first mention of a character name, you might link to a description of that character or a list of other stories you’ve written which include that character.
Provide “hub” or “index” pages that gather similar content together on your site. A bulleted list linking to all your short stores, or all your mystery stories, etc., will help the search engine recognize the importance of those terms on your site. It will also help readers find your other works.
If your work contains related photos or graphics, make sure the image tags contain descriptive text that includes relevant keywords.
Where appropriate, add HTML heading tags that contain keywords.
Include encouragement for others to link to your content. For works of fiction, you might include a paragraph at the end which says “I hope you’ve enjoyed this story. If you have, please support my work by sharing a link to this page with others who might appreciate it.”
Promote your content. Do this with Twitter posts, Facebook posts, links in appropriate online forums, and comments posted on other sites.

Remember that SEO is part art, and part science. It is also not something that works instantaneously. Over time, though, a well-written, properly-optimized page will tend to rank well in search engines.

Other SEO References for Authors

Following are some of the sites I’ve found helpful in learning to optimize my content for search engine ranking:

Posted in Writing Tips | Tagged search engine optimization for writers, SEO for authors, SEO for writers | Comments Off

Why Self-Publish?

Posted on July 24, 2011 by mike

A heated debate is raging in the community of professional authors on whether self-publishing is a good idea. On one side are authors who have always worked through traditional publishers to offer their works. On the other side are authors who are earning a living by self-publishing (and may or may not also be working with traditional publishers).

Those on the traditional agent/publisher side of the debate feel that self-publishing diminishes the overall quality of books in the marketplace. Their fear is that unskilled amateur authors will flood the market with badly-written books that will discourage readers from buying any books. These authors feel that the traditional agent/publisher system acts as a gatekeeper that stops bad books from getting to market. There is some merit to this viewpoint, in that anyone can digitally publish a book regardless of its quality. It is also quite reasonable to believe that if a traditional publisher turns a book down it is unlikely that book will ever be a bestseller.

Authors who engage in self-publishing have found that it increases their income. Their backlist titles, which may not sell enough to warrant a small print run, can be offered digitally or through print-on-demand services. The authors can offer books that appeal only to a niche group of readers, a group small enough not to interest a publisher but large enough to yield a profit for the author. Self-publishers also have more creative freedom, telling the stories they want to tell – without agents, editors, or publishers demanding changes the author disagrees with. Perhaps best of all, self-publishers collect a much greater royalty from the sale of their books (and usually collect it much sooner than with traditional publishers). On the other hand, in order to ensure a quality product, self-publishers must be sure to invest in a reliable editor to review the work and commission an artist to provide a professional cover for it. These services would normally be provided by a publisher.

Chris Anderson published an article in Wired magazine in 2004 that (while not talking about self-publishing in particular) explains why authors should offer their works digitally themselves, even when a traditional publisher isn’t interested in them. I would encourage any creative artist to read that article and the book on the subject (The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More). In a nutshell, Anderson says that a “hit” and a “miss” are on equal economic footing today. A book that might sell only a few hundred copies appears (electronically) alongside a million-copy bestseller. He presents a number of real-world examples where books, movies, and music that wasn’t selling through the traditional publishing world is generating regular income for the creators in the digital marketplace.

One of Anderson’s examples is the story of Joe Simpson’s book Touching the Void. Simpson’s book received good reviews but generated only modest sales. A decade later, John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, a similarly-themed book, became a sensation. Touching the Void began selling again, and soon overtook Into Thin Air. Anderson asks, “What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller’s software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, write rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in. Particularly notable is that when Krakauer’s book hit the shelves, Simpson’s was nearly out of print.”

Amazon doesn’t distinguish between product categories in its recommendations (nor do other retailers, generally speaking). An eBook could be recommended alongside a hardcover or paperback (or a blender, for that matter). If an author’s backlist, out-of-print titles are available on Amazon, they’ll still sell long after a traditional publisher has decided they’re not worth printing anymore. Someone buying an author’s new book will see recommendations about backlist titles. Someone buying a book by one author will receive recommendations about similar books from other authors. All of this results in more sales for all the authors, which is a good thing.

Will self-publishing allow anyone to put a book on the market regardless of its quality? Yes. But will that result in financial harm for those authors who put out quality books? Of course not. Good books, whether self-published or traditionally published, will get positive reviews on sites like Amazon. Lousy books will likewise get skewered in the reviews. People will steer clear of the bad books, and spend their money on the good ones. Mediocre authors will be forced to step up their game or get out of the market.

Ultimately, it’s all about getting your work in front of the people who will appreciate it. If traditional publishers want your book, there’s nothing wrong with publishing through them. But if they aren’t interested or decide not to reprint it, can there be any harm in publishing a digital version yourself? I don’t think so.

Posted in Writing Tips | Tagged digital publishing, self-publishing, the long tail | Comments Off

Has the World Changed or Have I Changed?

Posted on July 16, 2011 by mike

It’s no secret to those who know me that I’m a fan of the singer Morrissey and his former band, The Smiths. In the song “The Queen is Dead“, Morrissey (or his alter-ego) claims to have learned that he is “the eighteenth pale descendent of some old queen or other”. For a guy who has seem himself as something of a rebel and has railed against the establishment, finding out that he’s related to the establishment comes as a bit of a shock. The world doesn’t feel quite the same anymore.

He then asks the question “Has the world changed or have I changed?” As many times as I’ve listened to that song over the years, I never really pondered the lyrics until very recently. I’ve realized that the answer is “Neither. What has changed is your perspective of the world and your role within it.” Morrissey’s world is certainly no different for the discovery that he is related to royalty, nor has that discovery (at least at the moment of realization) changed him. But learning that he is a descendent of royalty has changed how he views himself and his role in the world. The question of course becomes what he does with that knowledge.

I think the reason this lyric has finally started to resonate with me is a similar kind of realization in my own life. When I was a teenager, I found that I really enjoyed writing. Not only did I enjoy it, but I had teachers who seemed to think I was doing quite well at it and rewarded my hard work with high grades. I thought I’d be a professional writer. Well-meaning friends, acquaintances, and relatives told me that few people make a living as writers. I’d better find something more practical to do than writing. I listened to them, and focused on my second love, computers. Since it was the beginning of the personal computer revolution (late 1980s), it seemed like a good choice. The decision has served me well.

I’ve been in the high-technology world since 1987. I’ve worked for a mainframe software company, a consulting outfit, and now a company that makes information available to scientists around the world. Even doing this work, I never really abandoned writing. My day job from 1987 to 1996 involved writing software documentation. Since then, it’s included writing reports, presentations, and procedure documentation. Creative, artistic writing barely found a place in my life apart from a few poems and an aborted attempt at a novel.

Then, a few short years ago, I was at a game convention (a place where people play traditional board games). I wasn’t finding any games I wanted to play on day, but did see a writing seminar on “The Rules of Writing”. It woke up that part of me that wanted to be a writer back in high school, so I plopped down my $8 and sat down for the seminar. As New York Times bestselling author Michael A. Stackpole shared his experience and advice, I began to realize that my teenage dream of writing novels and poetry didn’t have to be just a dream. There was no reason I couldn’t at least try it. The bills were paid. The kids were about to go off to college. The cats didn’t need a lot maintenance. Why not?

In the months after that, I learned of the National Novel Writing Month project (NaNoWriMo). In that effort, ordinary folks like me were committing to create 50,000 words or more of original fiction in the month of November. Many of them were successful. In 2009, I took a stab at it and was successful. I’d written over 50,000 words in a month. Were they publishable? No. Were they good? In places, yes. Overall, they were at best mediocre. But I’d done it. For one month, I was a writer! I was a novelist, even.

I kept reading and learning in 2010, and managed to complete NaNoWriMo a second time. This time, I went into the effort with a more coherent plan. The result was something better than I’d managed in 2009. This was a complete novel, with a consistent story. It was nothing I could (or would try to) publish, but I’d written a novel. I was still the same guy I had been a few weeks or years earlier. But something had changed.

What changed? I still looked and acted like I had before, so I hadn’t changed in any visible way. And certainly the world was the same old place it had been. My perception of myself had changed, and my perception of the world as a place where I couldn’t write had changed. I realized that I’m not just “a guy who works in IT” but “a writer” and even… a novelist. It couldn’t have been any less surprising than Morrissey’s discovery of a royal bloodline.

It’s now 2011. Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to take part in several hours worth of seminars given by some of the best writers working today. Michael Stackpole, mentioned earlier, has taught me a lot. Aaron Allston has shared much as well. Timothy Zahn helped explain why stories should be internally consistent and based (to the extent possible) on fact, even though they’re fictional. I’m confident my next novel will be better than the last three attempts thanks to their advice. Will the next one be publishable? I don’t know. But I know there will be a next one, and that’s a very liberating thought for someone who told himself for 20 years or more that he shouldn’t or couldn’t do it.

So perhaps the world hasn’t changed. And you could certainly argue that I haven’t either. I still look the same. I still have the same job, the same friends, the same clothes, and habits. I still drive the same car I did in 2002. If anything has changed, it’s my perception of myself. I may be “a guy who works in IT” but I know that I’m also a novelist… and I won’t let that change again. I can do this. I’ve seen me do it. And I know me well enough to know I’ll keep getting better at it.

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Review: The Writer’s Little Helper

Posted on July 10, 2011 by mike

James V. Smith, Jr.’s The Writer’s Little Helper is a great little reference book for writers. It consists primarily of short (most under 4 pages) discussions of problems and situations that novelists face, along with easy to understand suggestions for getting past them. It’s one of those books that you can sit down and read for hours if you have the time, or (owing to the brevity of the sections) just a few minutes.

In the section entitled “Imagery Versus Description”, Smith begins by saying “My advice: Never write description. Description implies stopping the story to write colorful stuff. Instead, create powerful imagery which suggests keeping the story in motion using those images to pump up the action, conflict, and dialogue.” He then shows examples of how to do this, by weaving the description into the action, incorporating images into the action, seeing through the character’s eyes, using tiny but telling details, choosing action-bearing verbs and non-verbs, inventing fresh viewpoints, and creating an image without saying so. He not only provides examples of how to do these things, but explains afterward how the technique was used in the example.

His suggestion in “How to Write a Bestseller” is an interesting one. He tells you to take your favorite bestselling author’s novel, and copy it word-for-word by hand on paper. Why? Doing this, Smith says, can teach you simple mechanics like punctuating dialogue. It can help you see more clearly how the author uses imagery, describes action, and writes dialogue. You may even begin to see how “every word serves a purpose in a best-seller, carrying the freight without detours. In short, you learn how not to waste your own time and words.” Smith suggests taking notes as you copy, to jot down the lessons you learn from the author’s work. You should also stop periodically and try to write a similar scene yourself, using what you’ve learned.

The other sections of the book cover characterization, editing, beginnings and endings, point of view, word choice, dialogue, pacing, plot, writer’s block, and getting your work published. Depending on where you are as a writer, you’ll find some topics more helpful than others. You may find some to be completely useless, and others to be eye-openers. Personally, I found most of the book to be filled with easily-digested, useful ideas and “things to ponder”.

The Writer’s Little Helper would make a great gift for a friend who is thinking about writing a novel, or someone who’s struggling with some part of their story. It’s also a great reference to flip through occasionally, just to remind yourself of techniques you’ve mastered and to get you to think about those you may not have mastered. It’s also a relatively inexpensive book, which is a bit unusual for a modern hardcover.

Posted in Books | Tagged how to write, James V. Smith, Writer's Little Helper, writing book | Comments Off

Open Source and Free Writing Software

Posted on May 1, 2011 by mike

I’ve noticed a lot of interest recently in writing software that is free and/or open source. There are some excellent, free tools that writers can use to both create and improve their work. This article will discuss some of these and provide links to sites where the software can be downloaded.

Note that the appearance of an open source product on the list below is neither an endorsement or recommendation. The purpose of this list is to make it easier for writers to locate and try various free and open source writing tools to see if any of them are suitable for that writer’s creative processes. I have not intentionally left any open source or free tools off the list below, and do not claim that this is an all-inclusive list.

If you are interested in commercial (i.e., paid for) software for fiction writers, I have a list of fiction writing software available, too.

Open Source Word Processing Software

Many of the following, and some commercial products, are compared on Wikipedia.

AbiWord: A free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word.
Document.Editor: A multi-tab .NET/Ribbon based word processor for Windows XP, Vista, and 7.
EZ Word: A free word processor that is part of the “Andrew User Interface System”.
Feng Office: An open source online office suite package similar to Microsoft Office Live.
Fiction: A free word processor for Windows.
iWriter: A free Visual Basic 6 based open source word processor for Windows.
KWord: Part of the KOffice open source office suite, KWord is a word processor and desktop publishing application. Primarily for Linux, there are “preliminary” Mac and Windows versions.
LyX: A “document processor” which encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents and not simply their appearance. Runs on UNIX, Linux, Mac, and Windows.
OpenOffice.org: This open source application is comparable to Microsoft Office. It includes Writer (which is similar to Word), Calc (similar to Excel), Impress (like PowerPoint), Draw (similar to the drawing tools in Office), and Base (like Access).
Pathetic Writer: An open-source GUI word processor.
Ted: A free word processor running under X Windows on Linux.
Ultra-Pad: An open source word processor for Windows 95 and later. Contains advanced features like spell checking and a skinnable interface.
WordGrinder: A “unicode aware character cell word processor that runs in a terminal or Windows console window.

Open Source Fiction/Screenwriting Tools:

While there are plenty of “novel writing” software projects listed on SourceForge (an open source software repository), few have any actual code available to download. Those listed below have actual software available that you can download.

Celtx: Described as “the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production system”, Celtx includes a wide variety of features including autocomplete, scene management, embedded notes, spellchecker, and more.
StorYBook: Open source novel writing software which helps the author manage characters, locations, chapters, parts, ideas, background information, task lists, and storyboards. It can also display charts showing the appearance of characters by scene/date, occurrence of locations, etc. (This tool has a number of similarities to my personal tool of choice, Scrivener.)
Kabikaboo: A tree-based note pad designed to help you plan a book or complex project.
NaNoWriTool: A text editor specifically geared toward NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. It features the ability to edit text files, a real-time word counter that uses the same algorithm as the NaNoWriMo site, and other features.
The Writer’s Forge: A suite of free software tools for writers of fiction.
Dramatis Personae 2: A Macintosh app designed to track the personalities and information used by authors in writing fiction.
WordIt: A word processor designed to be more reliable than Microsoft Word and smaller than Word or OpenOffice.
Amaya: A web-based word processor and authoring tool.
Scribus: An open source page layout and desktop publishing tool.
NeoOffice: A free office suite for Mac OS X that includes a word processor.

Free Word Processing Tools:

The following word processing tools are free of charge but are not (to my knowledge) open source:

Bean: A small, easy-to-use word prcessor for Mac OS X.
Dark Room: A full-screen, distraction-free writing environment for Windows. The Mac version, Write Room, is a licensed product that must be purchased.
IBM Lotus Symphony: Free-of-charge office suite from IBM.
Jarte: A word processor for Windows that is based on the WordPad engine.
LedIt!: A free, cross-platform, multi-lingual unicode word processor with features such as subscript, superscript, full undo, word wrapping, and the ability to be embedded into other apps.
PolyEdit Lite: A free word processor designed to be lightweight, reliable, easy to use, and fast.
Q10: A full-screen, minimal distraction writing tool.
QJot: A small USB portable alternative rich text (RTF) editor that is meant to serve as a WordPad replacement.
RoughDraft: A donationware word processor designed for writers.
SoftMaker Office 2006: Windows suite that describes itself as “so easy to use that you will wonder why you bothered with Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org for so long”.
TED Notepad: A freeware Notepad replacement for Windows.

Other Open Source Tools Useful for Writers:

Awesome Name Generator: A simple generator for names for fictional characters.
FreeMind: An open source mind-mapping tool written in Java and usable on most platforms.
Graviax: A grammar checker for the English language.
Jarnal: An open source Java note taker and PDF annotator
PDF Creator: Open Source PDF creation tools.
Research Assistant: A multi-platform tool for researchers to organize their work.
Style and Diction: Two standard UNIX commands. Diction identifies wordy and commonly misused phrases while Style analyzes the surface characteristics of a document such as word length and readability measures.
WikidPad: A wiki-style notepad to keep ideas and notes in a single place and allow cross-referencing.
Writer’s Tools for OpenOffice/LibreOffice: This set of utilities is designed to help OpenOffice perform a number of useful functions for writers, including looking up words, translating to other languages, and more.

Other Free Tools for Novelists and Writers

Bibus: A bibliographic database that is helpful for citing sources correctly.
EverNote: A cloud-based tool that allows you to capture ideas and information and store it for later use. Items stored in the cloud are accessible via computer, tablet, cell phone, etc.
LitLift: An online novel writing application.
SAMM: Submission tracking for Windows, Mac, and DOS.
Sonar: Tool to help writers track their manuscript submissions.
TiddlyWiki: A “reusable non-linear personal web notebook”
TreePad: An award-winning personal information manager for Windows and Linux/Wine. It can be used to store, edit, search, organize, and browse any type of textual information.
WordNet: A “large lexical database of English…nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms, each expressing a distinct concept.” Available online and as an application you can run on your computer.
WordWeb: A dictionary and thesaurus.
WriterPadFree: The free version of WriterPad, described as a “no-nonsense tool that lets you organize, outline, and write the way you want to.”
yWriter: From SpaceJock software, this tool is designed specifically for novelists, by a novelist. It helps break the novel down into chapters and scenes, and provides other useful features like word counts, automatic backups, a storyboard view, drag-and-drop scene/chapter reordering, etc.

Posted in Writing Software | Tagged free novel writing software, free writing software, open source novel writing software, open source writing software, writing software, writing tools | Comments Off