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In this issue:
Commentary
Writing Tutorial
Favorite Web Site of The Week
Links
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For those of you living in the United States, I hope you’ve had a great Labor Day weekend. Our daughter was home from her first full week as a freshman at University of Arizona, so it was fun to hear about the first week antics of college. Listening to her, many memories came back to me of my freshman year. We’ll
just leave it at that...
We’re seeing an interesting trend already at Knowledge Download. More website traffic. More subscribers. More paid ebook website subscriptions. Summer vacation must be finally winding down. Right now, we have about 15 authors working on finishing their ebooks and building their ebook websites.
I mention this because NOW is the time to get busy finalizing your Internet distribution and marketing strategy. October marks the beginning of the fourth quarter, the largest capital spending quarter of the year for corporations and consumers. If you don’t have your ebook finished, get busy. Get your ebook website setup and rolling.
If you already have your ebook and website in production mode, get busy with selecting advertising, email and joint venture partners and suppliers. In order to cash in for the big Q4, you must be ready soon!
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Housekeeping Matter
Next week we will be migrating our Author Tips newsletter subscription list to an automated system. The quantity of new subscribers has already made the task of setting up and managing subscribers very time consuming. We will also be introducing a new free ebook to you and all new subscribers. I’ll be sure to pass along the link to you next week.
If you have any feedback for us, please send to
. Send me feedback and I’ll publish it along with your URL in the next edition. (Can you say - free publicity?)
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In this week's issue, we give you Part 2 of our professional tutorial series. This series is in 5 parts and has been written by Michael LaRocca, an English teacher, writer and consultant. Michael has a lot to say to you in his Writing Tutorial. There
are 5 total installations in this series.
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About Writing
Lesson Two -- Improving Your Writing
Michael LaRocca
When you write, be a dreamer. Go nuts. Know that you’re writing pure gold. That fire is why we write.
An author who I truly admire, Kurt Vonnegut, sweats out each individual sentence. He writes it, rewrites it, and doesn’t leave it alone until it’s perfect. Then when he’s done, he’s done.
I doubt most write like that. I don’t. I let it fly as fast as my fingers can move across the paper or keyboard, rushing to capture my ideas before they get away. Later, I change and shuffle and slice.
James Michener claims that he writes the last sentence first, then has his goal before him as he writes his way to it.
Then there’s me. No outline whatsoever. I create characters and conflict, spending days and weeks on that task, until the first chapter really leaves me wondering "How will this end?" Then my characters take over, and I’m as surprised as the reader when I finish my story.
Some authors set aside a certain number of hours every day for writing, or a certain number of words. In short, a writing schedule.
Then there’s me. No writing for three or six months, then a flurry of activity where I forget to eat, sleep, bathe, change the cat’s litter. I’m a walking stereotype. To assuage the guilt, I tell myself that my unconscious is hard at work. As
Hemingway would say, long periods of thinking and short periods of writing.
I’ve shown you the extremes in writing styles. I think most authors fall in the middle somewhere. But my point is, find out what works for you. You can read about how other writers do it, and if that works for you, great. But in the end, find your own way. That’s what writers do.
Just don’t do it halfway.
If you’re doing what I do, writing a story that entertains and moves you, then you will find readers who share your tastes. For some of us that means a niche market and for others it means regular appearances on the bestseller list.
Writing is a calling, but publishing is a business. Remember that AFTER you’ve written your manuscript. Not during.
I’ve told you how I write. For me.
The next step is self-editing. Fixing all the mistakes I made, that I can identify, in my rush to write it before my Muse took a holiday. Several rewrites. Running through it repeatedly with a fine-toothed comb.
Then what?
There are stories that get rejected because they bore the potential publisher, but far more are shot down for other reasons. Stilted dialogue. Boring descriptions. Weak characters. Underdeveloped story. Unbelievable or inconsistent plot. Sloppy writing.
That’s what you have to fix.
After my fifteen-year hiatus from writing, I started by using Free OnLine Creative Writing Workshops. What I needed most was input from strangers. After all, once you’re published, your readers will be strangers. Every publisher you submit to will be a stranger. What will they think? I was far too close to my writing to answer that.
Whenever I got some advice, I considered it. Some I just threw out as wrong, or because I couldn’t make the changes without abandoning part of what made the story special to me. Some I embraced. But the point is, I decided. It was my writing.
After a time, I didn’t feel the need for the workshops anymore. I’m fortunate enough to have a wife whose advice I will always treasure, and after a while that was all I needed. But early on, it would’ve been unfair to ask her to read my drivel. (Not that I didn’t anyway.)
I don’t know how far along you are in
your writing, but if you’ve never used a workshop, I keep
a list of them here.
Your goal when you self-edit is to get your book as close to "ready to read" as you possibly can. You want your editor to find what you overlooked, not what you didn’t know about.
To that end, I offer three more resources.
This site contains links to online quotations,
grammar and style guides, dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses,
scam warnings, writer groups, copyright stuff, etc. A must-read.
This site contains a list of the most common
mistakes I’ve seen in my years
as an editor. I still reread it from time to time just so I don’t forget. Maybe you should too.
This site compares two writing styles, Narrative
and Dialogue, and looks at how to contrast them both for maximum
effect. Inspired by a particularly difficult edit.
Your story is your story. You write it from your heart, and when it looks like something you’d enjoy reading, you set out to find a publisher who shares your tastes. What you don’t want is for that first reader to lose sight of what makes your story special because you’ve bogged it down with silly mistakes.
In Lesson One, I told you never to pay to be published, and I stand by that. Authors are paid for publication. Always. It’s just that simple.
In the next lesson, I’ll tell you where to get some free editing. The Free OnLine Creative Writing Workshops will give you a bit of that too. But there’s a limit to how much editing you can get without paying for it. I don’t know if you fall into that category because I’ve never seen your writing. But if you evaluate it honestly, I think you’ll know the answer.
As an editor, I’ve worked with some authors who simply couldn’t self-edit. A non-native English speaker, a guy who slept through English class, whatever. To them, maybe paying for editing was an option. This isn’t paying for publication. This is paying for a service, training. Just like paying to take a Creative Writing class at the local community college.
By the way, I don’t believe creativity can be taught. Writing, certainly. I took my Creative Writing class in high school, free, and treasure it. But I already had the creativity, or else it would’ve been a waste of the teacher’s time and mine.
If you hire an editor worthy of the name, you should learn from that edit how to self-edit in the future. In my case it took two tries, because the first editor was a rip-off artist charging over ten times market value.
That editor, incidentally, is named Edit Ink, and they’re listed on many of the "scam warning" sites mentioned at Useful Links For Authors. They took kickbacks from every fake agent who sent Them a client. (Fake agents are part of the next lesson.)
If you choose to hire an editor, check price and reputation. And consider that you might never make enough selling your books to get back what you pay that editor. Do you care? That’s your decision.
(I try to avoid freelance editing now because my schedule’s a mess and my energy’s fading, but I can recommend someone if you’re interested. You don’t have to believe me, because you don’t even know me. Maybe I’m taking kickbacks. But I’m at laroccamichael@hotmail.com if you care.)
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this lesson. Take as long as you need to digest it all. The first, most important step on the road to publication is to make your writing the best it can be.
If you’re sure you’ve done that, at least take a look at the last web pages I mentioned. You might learn something, or at least find some links you like.
In the next lesson, we’ll look at the various publishing mediums.
Thanks for reading.
Michael LaRocca
About The Author: Michael LaRocca's website at http://freereads.topcities.com was chosen by WRITER'S DIGEST as one of The 101 Best Websites For Writers. He's published 4 novels in 2002, works as an editor for 3 epublishers, and reviews books for INSCRIPTIONS MAGAZINE. He also teaches English in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China.
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FAVORITE WEB SITE OF THE WEEK
This segment of Author Tips covers what we hope will be a unique web resource you’ve never seen or heard of before.
Easy Conference offers a free teleconferencing for those of you micro-business owners on shoestring budgets. This service is excellent. Bring together up to 30 people on a conference "bridge", which is simply the telecom fabric that ties together lots of callers, at no cost. Actually, there is a cost - each caller pays for his or her own long distance call. That’s still cheap! Most comparable services charge up to $1.00 per minute for toll free phone conferencing services (I know since I had to use them with the F500 company I was employed by a few years ago).
Easy Conference works great for sports teams, families, and families with military members as well as for work purposes.
http://www.easyconference.com/
Be aware: the first time I used this service, I became aware of it 2 hours before I needed it. Easy Conference used to require you to schedule your calls, so check it out and sign up well ahead of your need for your first "free" conference call.
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That’s it for this week. I hope you are enjoying Author Tips. With our tutorials, the newsletter is quite a bit longer than usual. If you have any feedback, suggestions or would like some free publicity, send it to me and we’ll print your question or
comment and website or email address.
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Links
The main web site at knowledge-download
Our e-book writing articles
Learn about producing your ebook
Learn about publishing your ebook
Order your ebook website software and service
If you have any feedback for us, please send to
. Send me feedback and I’ll publish it along with your URL in the next edition. (Can you say - free publicity?)
See you next week!
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