Time to Write

An experienced writer tries the e-serial route

 I've been keeping an eye on how authors are using e-publishing and one that showed up recently is novelist, journalist and screenwriter Ray Connolly ("Stardust"). He got a nice plug in the form of a big article in The Guardian about how he's self-publishing his new novel, The Sandman, in ebook form. He is releasing it free five days a week in serial format or you can download the entire book for £4.99 (about $7.70). 

The site is a bit clunky, in that you only get the first paragraph or two of every chapter online; if you want to read the rest of the chapter you have to download it (unless I'm missing something). Also, it would have been good to be able to sign up to have each chapter emailed to you daily, which would be relatively easy to do with an autoresponder.

The serialisation is still underway, it will be interesting to find out at the end of the process--if he's willing to reveal the figures--how many people read it online and how many ordered the ebook. 

You can take a look yourself at www.rayconnolly.co.uk.

By the way, It's a great site if you are a Beatles fan--Connolly knew them and wrote about them extensively in his music journalism days and the site also lets you download his unproduced screenplay about the life of John Lennon.

Writer's block? Try this 5-minutes a day cure

 If you're stuck in your writing, here's a quick method that can help.

1. Think of something that you saw or experienced today or yesterday. Then set a timer and write about it for five minutes. This is not for publication, so write whatever comes into your head. For example, this morning I read an article about how many dogs are being abandoned these days and that reminds me of a wonderful rescue dog my brother and sister-in-law had so I'd write for five minutes about that. Don't read what you've written, just put it aside.

2. Repeat for five days. Again, just for five minutes, about whatever comes to mind.

3. At the end of the week, read what you've written. What clues does it contain about how to proceed with the project you were stuck on? Assume there's a clue in there and find it. This doesn't mean that you will literally use anything from what you've written, just that it may trigger new thoughts.

Remember, during the five minute writing exercises you're not trying to make it connect to your stuck project, that only happens afterward.

Give it a try, you may find it gets you going again.

(There are other suggestions for overcoming blocks, in my book "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.) 

The secrets of the writer's platform - part one

Publishers want to know what your platform is, by which they mean how you will reach potential buyers for your book if they publish it. It's a foreign concept for a lot of writers, so here are some tips:

1. Understand this is not an overnight process. That's why it's a good idea to start working on your platform at least six months before the book comes out, but the longer the better.

2. Create a website that is relevant to your book. If the book is funny, make the site funny. If it's a horror novel, make the site creepy or about other works of horror--e.g., reviews, observations, recommendations, interviews. You need to attract the kind of people who are into your genre. Use WordPress, it has made having a site and blog easy even for non-techies.

3. Hang out on forums and sites relevant to your genre, and take part. Let people get to know you before you have something to sell. Otherwise you will hit the sites selling and that can turn people off. But once they know you, they'll be glad to hear about your book when it comes out.

 4. Cultivate your local booksellers. Sadly, the number of independent bookshops is shrinking all the time, but there are still quite a few around. Buy at least some of your books there and chat with the employees and the manager (and in those small bookshops, often the owner is the manager and the clerk). When your book comes out, they'll be much more receptive to your proposal to put some in the window, have a signing or talk, etc.

That's part one--more to come soon!

(There are chapters on how to market your writing in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey--hey, why not ask your local independent to order it for you? More information at www.YourWritingCoach.com.)

A painter every writer should study

 Paula Rego's paintings always suggest a story--often a dark story. It was interesting to read what her daughter said about her mother's process in an article in the London Sunday Times magazine some time ago:

"Pivotal to her work was storytelling, and inspiration would come from everywhere: nursery rhymes, poetry, plays, novels..She also addressed issues that were close to her heart, like abortion and the political oppression she'd grown up with in Portugal. Her work has always been visceral, symbolic; a world where humans often end up as animals--dogs, rabbits, bears, monkeys. It's all about the joy and pain of the human condition."

Because her style was different, Rego struggled for years to get recognition. But she was compulsive about creating and eventually she broke through. Just looking at her paintings is a great stimulus for any storyteller.

(The lack of support stops or at least slows down a lot of writers and artists. For support, join my Breakthrough Strategy Program--it's 60 days of lessons, weekly group calls, and more. For full information and to sign up, go to www.BreakthroughStrategyOnline.com)

Is American Idol written?

Have you noticed that the very successful talent search shows like American Idol, America's Got Talent, and their UK counterparts are using all the elements of traditional drama to hook viewers? Admittedly, often they're doing it badly but the ratings suggest it works very well. They cast the contestants as basic archetypes:

 The Orphan  - a young contestant who has recently lost a mother, father or grandparent and is "doing this for Gran." Lots of weeping.

The Hero - the firefighter, police officer, or soldier who serves us all but has a hidden dream of becoming a star. Humility on tap.

The Animus/Anima - the masculine image in a woman's psyche or vice versa - the androgynous contestant. Lots of mascara.

The Mother - the contestant who is older than most of the others and becomes their mother figure. A dress that could have come from Sears or Marks & Spencer. 

The Trickster or Fox - the cheeky contestant who dares to talk back to Simon Cowell or another authority figure. Spiky haircut optional.

The Scarecrow - the unattractive one who turns out to have talent. Hi, Susan Boyle.

The problem is that often the stories are so unsubtle that they grate, and one of the shows, X Factor, has cut back on the sob stories. Now what they really should do is hire some better writers.

(For how to write good stories, see my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers. For more information see www.YourWritingCoach.com)

Why writers shouldn't start at the start

 If you're a reader of thrillers, you'll have seen a lot of prologues. These are short sections, often no more than one page, of a book that are designed to intrigue you and to make you patient enough to read the actual beginning of the story. 

For instance, if the plot is about a teacher who is being stalked, the prologue might be written from the point of the view of the stalker, watching the teacher and obviously having something evil in mind. Then the body of the book might be told from the teacher's viewpoint and start with her getting ready for her normal day, oblivious to the fact that someone is watching her. That section may never refer to the stalker, but the idea that he or she is out there has been implanted in our minds and keeps us interested.

Literary novels might start with a quote instead. It's much more subtle than a thriller's prologue, but the intention is similar. It plants an idea in our mind that colors what we will read after it. For example, if the quote is from the Book of Job in the Bible, that probably calls up a different set of associations than if it's a light-hearted quote from Oscar Wilde. 

(For lots more practical writing tips, see my book, "Your Writing Coach" published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers. There's more information at www.yourwritingcoach.com)

3 key ideas about your creativity

On his Book Designer blog, Joel Friedlander offered 18 thoughts about creativity. Here are my favorite 3 from his list:

• If you don’t believe in your work, support it with passion, champion it bravely, why should anyone else believe in it?
  
  
• Realize that most of the models we have of creativity are media depictions designed to appeal to our fantasies. Really being creative rarely looks the way you think it will.
  
  
• There’s nothing more common than “good ideas.” There’s nothing more satisfying than a good idea transformed from a possibility into reality in the world.

Let's take a closer look at these. First, it can be difficult to keep your confidence in your idea. Sometimes you have to fake it to get through those rough patches. Remember that acts of creativity tend to have what Seth Godin calls "the dip"--a phase where you get stuck or have to slog through a lot of obstacles and temporarily lose your self-belief. It will pass. Keep going. What was Churchill's advice? "When going through hell...keep going!"

The second point is important. When they are interviewed, successful people often make it sound like the process was easy. Usually it wasn't. Maybe we like to pretend that we're so talented that we breeze through things that others find difficult. But almost every "overnight success" had a long struggle to get there--and the few that do attain success very quickly usually have a struggle to hold on to it. 

Maybe one of the reasons I like the third point is that's what my Breakthrough Strategy Program is all about--helping you turn one of your goals into reality over a 60-day period (or, if it's a big goal, gaining the momentum you need during that period). There's more information at www.BreakthroughStrategyOnline.com. 

Don't think success (however you define it) is only for special people. Well, it is, but you're one of the special people.

The key question E. L. Doctorow asked this writer

In The Writer magazine, novelist Caroline Hwang told how she had written a hundred pages of a novel but felt they weren't right. She was taking a class from E. L. Doctorow and asked for his advice. He asked her a key question:

Was she writing something she would want to read?

She says, "It cut me to the quick, because I wasn't. I was writing something I would have read as a grad student, but my taste had changed radically. As a reader, I skim over long descriptions of dust motes swirling in the sunlight, so what was I doing writing them?"

She changed her tone to the much lighter and amusing one that characterizes her debut novel, In Full Bloom.

The origin of that novel also is interesting. She orginally wrote an essay for Newsweek about how her parents expected her to marry a Korean man. Several hundred people with similar stories responded to that article, which showed her she was on to something. She decided the  theme of her novel would be how to please your parents and still please yourself. 

(You will find many more tips on writing your book in Your Writing Coach, published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite online or offline retailer. Find out more at www.yourwritingcoach.com)

Best practices for writers

I had an email recently asking regarding what's allowable in citing or being inspired by other sources and I thought you might find it useful as well:

Q: We were wondering whether it’s all right, having read books like The Secret, to add something about positive visualisation that a character does in an attempt to become what they want to be. Is it all right to add this- what someone else has written about - and then acknowledge it in the Acknowledgements part of the novel? 

Yes, you certainly can have your character using The Secret and as long as you don't use too long an exact quote you don't even need to acknowledge it separately. It's no different from, for example, having a character eating a Mars bar or referring to them watching a particular TV show.

It's also OK to quote a few sentences exactly as they are written in the book. The rest of the time you might want to paraphrase. For instance, you might write something like, "That night, she read two more chapters of The Secret. The part that says if you want to be thin you shouldn't look at fat people worried her. Her three best friends all were overweight. Could this be the real reason she had gained two dress sizes in the last year? Maybe it had nothing to do with eating chocolate chip cookies every evening."

Q: What is the procedure if you write about a character that has some characteristic of yourself and some of a friend, but exaggerated? Is it all right to do this - to base things on people but change the details and exaggerate traits?

Yes, every author does this.

Q: Can you quote from the past, things like ancient proverbs in a fiction story or do you have to give exact details of where the character got it? 

You don't have to give details about where they got it. No problem quoting proverbs, bits of the Bible, bits of poetry or novels that are in the public domain, etc.  

Q: Can you base a character you got partly from an idea from a TV show?

Sure, as long as you change the name and it's not a 100% copy. You want to be sure that your character has several attributes that he or she doesn't share with the TV character. For instance, you might switch the gender, the age, the social status, the physical appearance, and so on. 

It gets trickier if you are basing the character on a real person and make him a villain. For instance, if you wrote a book about a property developer who showed a lot of resemblance to Donald Trump and had him killing someone, you might be in for a lawsuit. One way around this is to mention the real person in passing. So let's say my developer is named Carl. I might write, "Carl modeled himself on his idol, Donald Trump, but was willing to go further than his hero to be successful. All the way to murder." 

You might want to have a look at some of the tips on my page about protecting your material, because that goes into more detail about what can be copied or not. It's at http://timetowrite.com/protecting-your-material.

How to spend the time you save with the new Google search

 I see that Google has announced with great pride a new feature that saves you two to four seconds per search. How will you spend your new-found time? I suggest:

* blinking (keeps your eyes lubricated)

* eating a grape (one portion of your daily fruit requirement)

* checking your fingernails for cleanliness (nice)

* writing one word of your novel (applies to short words only)

This is what happens when robots write articles

I've received some emails promoting software that generates articles to be scattered around the web (in the interest of getting links). I always wondered what these articles might look like and I think I've come across one today via my Google Alert for personal productivity. It's about corporate speakers and here's a sample:

"For overdo events, veteran corporate speakers can yield the high-energy voice for your aim assembly as good as emanate prominence for your event. Good corporate speakers enlarge the odds which your aim assembly will embrace as good as recollect the dictated message."

Sounds like one of those bad translations that used to be featured for comic effect on some talk shows. 

Here's another sample from an article about dogs:

  "Who’s the great boy? Who’s the gooooood booooy? Yes, we are, approbation we is! Here we go the vast tanned hide bone usually for we as well as the vast messy dog lick for me. If we consider we baby my dog as well most we wouldn’t be wrong; Bear earns each bit of regard he gets, from his laying around   usually seeking big, to his really protecting as well as really insistant approach he has with strangers."

I don't think real writers have anything to be worried about yet.

(Make sure your writing doesn't sound like it was composed by robots--get my book,"Your Writing Coach" from Amazon or your other favorite online or offline bookseller.)

The power of being different

If you live in the US you may be blissfully unaware of Jedward, which is the name of the irish singing duo John and Edward Grimes. They came to public attention with an awful audition on the talent search show, The X Factor.

  OK, they're probably the right kind of cute to appeal to the teen girls who make up a big share of the audience, but can you guess why they stood out?

  Here's a clue:

Yes, it's the hair. They're also quite goofy and come across younger than their 18 years--again probably appealing to the teen girl audience-- but without the hair they never would have gotten past the first audition.

Ultimately they came in 6th, and their first single (featuring Vanilla Ice) went to number 2 in the UK singles charts. Sony dropped them after that, but they were picked up by Universal the next day. They've done a tour, produced an album and at the moment are in a reality series about their daily life.

What moral should we take away from this? Well, it's my old motto: "Do Something Different." The hairdo may not be the right option, but there's always a way to stand out. 

Is this dumbing down books--or just a bit of fun?

According to the Earth Times, "Book packager Writers of the Round Table has teamed up with nonfiction comics publisher SmarterComics to produce a line of comics works based on bestselling business, motivational and personal self-help titles.

The SmarterComics line of adaptations will launch in 2011 with books based on bestsellers by tough-love personal motivator Larry Winget, Latino entrepreneur Robert Renteria; sales and marketing guru Tom Hopkins, performance psychologist John Eliot and internet distribution visionary and Wiredmagazine editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson.

The books will be distributed by National Book Network. Road Table Press's founder says they are "for a generation of readers who want valuable information in quick, easy to understand bits."

I've heard worse ideas, but what startled me was the planned price: $12.95 for print, $9.95 for digital, for books that will be 60-70 pages long. Seems high, does it not?

Another quote from Blake is that the series is "revolutionary" and "perfect for busy professionals and the Twitter and Facebook Generations, all of which are inundated with information and prefer to grab meat and potatoes lessons in a quick and entertaining format."

I can't quite picture a busy professional whipping one of these out of his or her briefcase, but it'll be interesting to find out how well they do.

(A personal development strategy that I know works is to enroll in my 60-day Breakthrough Strategy Success Program. I help you set your goal and each week for 8 weeks you get helpful instructions, group phone calls, instructive videos and audios, and lots of support from me and the other participants. Find out more at www.BreakthroughStrategyOnline.com.

Would you pay to have your book reviewed?

Jody Rein is starting a new business called BlueInk Reviews that offers to write "authoritative and objective"  book reviews for a fee. Their primary target is self-published authors, and the fee will be $395 for a standard review and $495 for a Fast Track review. The reviews will run on their website and Amazon, among others. For books that get starred reviews, the organization will offer ads (for additional money, of course) and they'll give some free ads to the books that win an Editor's Choice Award. (You can read more about this at the Writer Beware Blogs.)

I have no reason to doubt Rein's sincerity or honesty, but boy do I see some problems with this!

1. Objectivity. If you pay me $395 to review your book and it sucks, am I going to feel totally free to say so? Let's face it, a lot of books, both self-published and traditionally published, do suck. Let's say for the sake of argument that the reviews are totally candid. That means the site will have (let's say) 50% negative reviews. Will authors be inclined to pay for reviews when the risk is high that they're paying for a negative one?

2. Credibility. Will reviews that come from a paid source be taken seriously? I doubt it.

3. Openness. Will the reviews that are run on other sites including Amazon be identified as paid? They should be.

I understand the self-published author's frustration at not getting reviewed. Of course the majority of traditionally published books don't get reviewed, either.

My advice would be if you have $395 or $495 to spare, spend it on getting advice from a PR person or publicist with lots of experience in promoting books, not on a paid review.

(You can get lots of tips about how to market your book in my book, "Your Writing Coach," available from Amazon or other online or offline booksellers.)

Creativity with...garbage?

I'm always interested in how innovative people can be, and here's a great example: In 2001, Justin Gignac started selling authentic garbage from New York City. He says the garbage is hand-picked and it's encased in a Lucite case that is signed, dated, and numbered. Regular cubes go for $50, while limited editions (for instance, featuring garbage from the Republican National Convention), sell for $100.

Crazy, right? Who would buy that? So far, about 1300 people. Assuming that 1000 bought the regular and 300 bought the limited editions (these are my guesses) that yields a gross of $80,000. Not bad for garbage...(Details at www.nycgarbage.com)

What I'm wondering is whether an author could do something similar, by encasing one page of his or her book in a Lucite stand, with each page signed and dated. Would it work only if it's a "name" author? The regular edition could be pages from the printed book, the special edition could be actual pages from a draft of the manuscript...

(If you're interested in learning how to innovative marketing, I have two books that might interest you: "Marketing for Entrepreneurs" published by Pearson, and "Do Something Different," published by Virgin Books with a foreword by Sir Richard Branso. Both are available from online and offline booksellers.)