RSS
 

Been reading Free eBooks on Kindle Touch

20 Jan

Created a category in the Kindle Touch called “Free eBooks I have READ”.

These books I have mostly found through the following two sites:

  • http://www.pixelofink.com
  • http://ereadernewstoday.com/category/free-kindle-books/

 

I’ve found that mysteries, particularly thrillers, read better than other categories on the Kindle.

The Good: 

  • one can change the size of the font… if you have bad eyesight this is a big plus.
  • you can carry  a lot of books at one time without hurting your back

The Bad:

  • Organizing of books on the Kindle is minimal and doesn’t hold across all the apps on which you might read them.  The effect of this is that you really won’t like to have hundreds of books on your Kindle.
  • You can’t have multiple books open at once for comparison.
  • You don’t really own the books so you can’t resell them.
 
No Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

 

Larry Brooks: Nail Your NaNoWriMo #5: Don’t Forget to Fall In Love

05 Oct
 
No Comments

Posted in National Novel Writing Month

 

Larry Brooks on storyfix.com: Nail Your NaNoWriMo #4: Tell Your Story in Context to… ‘Something’

04 Oct

Day four of Larry Brooks’ October NaNo planning marathon:

http://storyfix.com/nail-your-nanowrimo-4-tell-your-story-in-context-to-something

 
No Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

 

October NaNo ramp-up from Storyfix.com …

02 Oct

To read the whole post from Larry Brooks,  visit http://storyfix.com 

by Larry on October 1, 2011

I hate to admit it, but NaNoWrMo is different than the normal, reasonable experience of writing a novel. 

Time is of the essence.  Normally this could easily compromise one of the core competencies (of the six, in case you’re new here) that will, at some point, need to be sparkling and compelling in your story.

Here’s a little trick to cut a ton of time out the process and get it right from square one.  Which, in context to NaNoWrMo, is like bailing water out of a life raft with a bucket instead of a spoon.

The Toughest Core Competency

For me it’s character. Even when you plan your hero down to the fingernails, the persona, the effect of the backstory and the general nature and energy of the character doesn’t fully emerge until you bring him/her alive in your pages.

Unless…

… the hero is you.

If you allow yourself to star in your NaNoWrMo story — I highly advise changing the name — you’ll find yourself knowing more about your hero than you ever will otherwise.  Literally put yourself into the skin of your hero and vicariously experience — and then translate into words — the journey you’ve created.

 

 
3 Comments

Posted in Writing ideas

 

November comes early for fiction writers

02 Oct

November is National Novel Writing Month and it always arrives sooner than it should for writers. There is much to do during the next few weeks for NaNo participants.

Get Over It

NaNo was invented to motivate wanna-be writers to start writing their novels, instead of creating lists of reasons why they aren’t writing. So many people become truly enthused by the notion of writing a novel but, invite them to participate in NaNo, and they will give the same comical excuse.

“I work.”

Get over it. Almost every single one of the 30,000 people who successfully wrote the minimum 50,000 words required last year, work also. Most of them work full-time. Many of them also have children, pets, hobbies, aging parents, health concerns, social commitments, poor typing skills and all the other alibis wanna-be’s use. Yet, they did it.

Get over it.

Your excuse doesn’t count. Writers write.

How To Get Started

First, to truly participate, you should register with the NaNoWriMo site. It is not a requirement, but it is fun. You get to create your own page. If you churn out 50,000 words during November, you get a winner badge to post on that page. And it is free. Even if you don’t register, you can still play along. You are not required to register.

Gearing Up

According to the rules, writers can do prep work. They just can’t write a single complete sentence of their novel prior to November 1. Technically, that means you can begin at 12:01 a.m. on Halloween Night.

Prep work means you can outline your story, create profiles of your characters and settings, and read up on how to be a better writer. Holly Lisle’s workshops on writing are among the favorites. The “Snowflake Method” is one I find interesting.

I personally recommend working with spreadsheets. I use them to map out my character profiles, settings, and just about anything else. I plan my chapters, by title or general description, with spreadsheets whether I am writing fiction or non-fiction. They are so easy to rearrange to create the sequence I need. In fact, I use spreadsheets for just about everything I write, not just for NaNoWriMo.

I also use a spreadsheet to calculate how I’m going to find the time to write 50,000 in one month. Most people who fail, don’t plan out how they are going to find the time to write 50,000 words. Which is, of course, why they don’t write the other eleven months out of the year.

I calculated that a long time ago by using a timer. Most people use timers wrong. The goal is not to see how fast you can hack out a few paragraphs. The purpose of timed writing should be to recognize how long it takes you to write a certain number of words. And, we’re talking about writing, and not just typing words. There is “thinking time” involved, as well.

Don’t use your timer like a stopwatch. Instead, start the timer and then start writing. After you have written a considerable number of paragraphs, check the timer to see how long they took to write. One timing won’t do it. Time yourself at least half a dozen times while you concentrate on writing well.

The first two or three times, you will rush. Everyone does. By about the sixth timing, you will find yourself writing without even thinking about the timer. You will be less likely to rush and you will finally have an accurate idea of how fast you write.

Remember that you don’t need to write the same number of words each day, as long as you reach the 50,000 words by midnight on November 30. Use your spreadsheet to count up how many hours you are likely to actually write during the month of November. Divide that time up to figure out how many hours it will take YOU personally to write 50,000 words.

The words don’t have to be good, but the story should really be coherent. You’ll go back later and finish it and revise it.

If it looks like you will fall short, then eliminate a few things. Skip three tv shows and catch them on hulu.com. Take a vacation day from work. Whatever it takes. Think of it as an investment in yourself.

Don’t quit. If you fall short and life keeps you from putting in two hours of writing on November 5, like you had anticipated, figure out how to spread those two hours out throughout the rest of the month so you hit your goal. Again, you don’t have to write the same number of words each day. Experiment. Pick four days throughout the rest of the month when you can plan on writing an extra 30 minutes each to make up for the two hours lost.

Unless you really write well under pressure and in a noisy coffeehouse, then skip the parties. A lot of NaNoWriMo groups do write-ins where they gather in a coffeehouse to encourage each other to write. It apparently works really well for some people. I hate it.

I keep thinking about the 30 minutes I could have been writing instead of loading my laptop into the car, driving to the coffeehouse, ordering a coffee, chatting with the other NaNo’s, booting up, figuring out where I left off…and then finally writing. Then I have to pack up and haul everything back home.

Then there is the lovely sound of the cappuccino machine grinding away, while I am trying to write. There is the distraction of other customers.

I’ve done the write-in thing and, like I said, some people thrive on it. I don’t anticipate ever doing it again. It just doesn’t work for me.

It can be encouraging to register with NaNo and post the number of words you have written. You get a free personal web page with a counter you can update as often as you like. It can be thrilling to see the number of words other people have written.

Other participants have told me that they find it to be demotivating to waste time watching someone whip through 30,000 words while you are stuck on 9,527 words and have psyched yourself into writer’s block. I can well imagine. So, don’t watch other people!

But that’s part of what you will learn from NaNoWriMo: how fast do you write a coherent story? where do you write best? how do you plan out your story so that it has continuity?

I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo this year. I probably won’t do it ever again. Because I learned so much from being a two-time NaNoWriMo winner that I no longer wait until November to write.

And that, my dear readers, is the goal.

If you can write 50,000 during one of the shortest months of the year, with what often turns into a four-day holiday with perhaps even an out-of-town trip or a Black Friday adventure with friends and relatives while recovering from the feast that is Thanksgiving, there is no reason why you aren’t writing any given month of the year.

So, after you gorge on your Trick-or-Treat haul, sit down at that keyboard and get your 50,000 words on.

 

 
No Comments

Posted in National Novel Writing Month, Writing for Profit, Writing ideas

 

The audacity of self-publishing

21 Sep

The wealth of books that find their way into the marketplace, thanks to self-publishing, is remarakble. Unfortunately, they often bring with them the foibles that traditional publishing eliminated.

I have long been a reader of self-published works. I feel absolutely confident in say that the largest number of self-published books can be found on the shelves of genealogical and historical societies. Few families have ever convinced a traditional publishing house to print their family history.

With the arrival of the digital publishing age, I am seeing a proliferation of the same sins found among self-published histories. The origin is even the same. The lack of an editor.

This is truly a pet peeve of mine. I discuss it often. And, always I hear the same objection.

“But, I ran the spell checker!”

Unfortunately, the spell checker cannot differentiate between, “I road into town,” and “I rode into town.” Yes, that editor will gladly allow you to embarrass yourself.

“Oh, my [fill in the blank] edits all my work.”

The [fill in the blank] part is really interesting. Writers who most diligently spin their words into truly good writing, will settle for [fill in the blank]:

  • my mother
  • my aunt
  • my best friend
  • my high school English teacher

 

The problem here is that, almost without exception, none of these people have the skill necessary to edit, not even an English teacher. An editor has very special training and sensitivities. Not just anyone can be an editor.

Traditional publishing houses knew that. They didn’t have a secretary in the editorial department editing books by famous writers. They hired editors to do the editing.

Editing is so much more than making sure words are spelled correctly, punctuation is used appropriately, and sentences are complete. An editor has the skill necessary to recognize that Chapter Seven should really be Chapter One and, in order to make it segue properly, Chapter Eight should be moved before the original Chapter Two.

An editor will move paragraphs, delete paragraphs, and ask that paragraphs be added. An editor will rearrange sentences within a paragraph. An editor may even recognize that Chapter Twelve is nothing but fluff in the current story and should be deleted. But, perhaps that chapter could become a short story or even another book.

An editor will check your facts, even if you are writing fiction. An editor will make sure that the various story lines are consistent. She will even remember that your minor character in Chapter Seventeen had green eyes back in Chapter Eight—but now she has blue eyes.

Good writers love editors because a good editor makes even a great writer greater. A good editor loves  a good writer even more than the writer does. Once a novice writer recovers from the trauma of their first experience of having an editor change so much as a syllable, they learn to respect editors.

Self-publishing requires no editing. Frankly, you don’t even need to run a spell check. Anyone can publish characters in the requisite font accepted by the self-publishing outlet of choice.

It’s sad. I read so many self-published works that could have been so much better after an editor polished them.

Unfortunately, self-publishing exists because it is affordable and accessible. It costs nothing to upload text and call it a book. It doesn’t need to be good. It certainly doesn’t need to be edited. And self-publishers accept everyone. No one is turned away. Everyone participates.

Self-publishers rarely hire editors—real editors, not their wife or their mother—because editors cost money. What self-publishers don’t realize is that editors are worth the money.

A woman who teaches writing workshops has published some of her fiction on Amazon. She is someone who is enamored of self-publishing and, as far as I know, has never published anything through a traditional publishing house.

She has never been edited.

I took a peek at the preview pages of her fiction on Amazon. I was horrified. I am not an editor but I have learned, from being published-for-money, what an editor expects. This is not it.

 ”My lords! This is my property! I demand you turn it over to me immediately! I have work to do – -”

This is a complete and stand alone bit of dialog. Anyone who knows me can guess how offended I was that she would use the double-dash instead of an em dash, and that she would put a space before the double-dash since anyone who can read should know that there is never a space before an em dash. But, what I find truly offensive to the entire world of readers is the lack of proper writing. She never says who is speaking or how they spoke. Did they say this jokingly? angrily? fearfully? tearfully? fretfully?

Self-publishing should not be an excuse for irresponsible writing. The writer could hear the conversation in her head, along with who spoke those words and the nature of their inflection. The reader should not be left wondering about those things. This is incomplete and irresponsible writing. It reads like a draft. If she did just one more rewrite, perhaps she would have been ready to publish.

As writers, we focus too much on the injustice of belonging to that vast majority of writers who are overlooked in favor of the dozen or so writers who get published by major publishing houses this year, in print as well as in digital format. What we should be indignant over is allowing our work to published without being kindly, yet perhaps a little ruthlessly, edited.

An editor is your friend. And she is so much more than the F7 key.

 

 

 

 
1 Comment

Posted in Digital Publishing, Writing for Profit

 

What is a page?

12 Sep

The digital publishing age has introduced an entirely new concept: pages no longer exist. Chapters are optional, but pages are gone.

Putting page numbers on a digital book is more than pointless. It is irritating at best. At worst, it is confusing.

A digital page is a different length, according to the customer’s reading device. A page is no longer a page. Gone are the days when every paperback is a single width and height. No longer is every hardcover book the same small array of sizes.

So skip the page number. Forget about headers or footers.

Just write….

Your readers will thank you for you and you will will enjoy the prestige of publishing professional quality digital books.

 
No Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

 

Serial Writing

12 Sep

A few years ago, I stumbled onto a money-making idea for multiplying the profits from a single non-fiction article. Turn it into a series. I have done this several times and it works beautifully—but make sure your editor is on board before you do it.

Come up with a story idea that can be broken into multiple sections of about 1,000 to 1,500 words apiece, or whatever fits your publication’s requirements. Split the story up and write each piece as a separate entity—but write each one in a way that segues naturally from the previous story and into the next.
An example of how I did for Tell Peoria is online. I did the same thing for a series I wrote for a genealogy publication about how to create a complete database of genealogical information. I split the story up, with each section explaining what to include in each of ten fields in a common database such as Family Tree Maker or Legacy.  Normally the publication pays $27.50 for an article of about 1,000 words, but they grant a lot of leeway when it comes to the number of words per article. I still kept to a minimum of 1,000 words per article.

I identified what my separate articles would be and asked my editor if I could write ten articles instead of one extremely long one. She agreed and I started writing.

It was a huge payoff for me. Normally my editor published one of my articles each month—but it was for a weekly magazine. Since, the articles were part of a series, my editor ran them weekly. She didn’t want the readers to forget about what I wrote the previous month.

Instead of $27.50 per month, I garnered $110 each month until the series ended ($55 for the last month).
I did another series about the genealogy of communities, explaining how to conduct genealogical research on specific communities. The first article explained what the following ten articles would be about:

  • The Genealogy of Communities
  • Genealogy of Communities: Fishing Camps
  • Genealogy of Communities: Logging Camps
  • Genealogy of Communities: Seminaries and Other Educational Communities
  • Genealogy of Communities: Indian Reservations
  • Genealogy of Communities: Prisons
  • Genealogy of Communities: Asylums, Hospitals, and Sanitariums
  • Genealogy of Communities: Prostitution
  • Genealogy of Communities: Faith-Based Communities
  • Genealogy of Communities: The Utopias
  • Genealogy of Communities: Intentional Community in the Next Century

 

The end result was $302.50 from what could have been a mere $27.50 for the initial article. An even bigger reward was that these series generated a paid readership. Readers would subscribe, or renew subscriptions, in order to follow the series. My editor really liked that!

Many topics can be broken down into smaller installments. Don’t try to pass off fluff, in order to stretch a couple of paragraphs into an article. Provide real content. But, don’t be shy about coming up with a series. Enjoy your profits!

 
No Comments

Posted in Uncategorized, Writing for Profit

 

Learn Digital Layout

12 Sep

I should revise the name of this blog to read “ThinkFast::WriteFast… Learn Digital Layout.”

For the last three years, I earned monthly royalties off several titles I published through Holly Lisle’s “33 Mistakes Writers Make…” series. I certainly never earned a living from the several titles I published, but they did create a consistent monthly revenue stream.

Here is how it worked. Holly Lisle is a successful “traditional” writer—her work has been published in paper books through what Holly calls “big publishing” such as Harper Voyager. She has taught writing clinics.
She is a very successful writer and I have read—and use—some of her writing techniques. So, when she came up with the “33 Mistakes Writers Make…” idea, I was quick to jump on board.

Holly created a list of topics that a writer would need to know in-depth before writing about—or they should, anyway. Otherwise, a reader who was familiar with, let’s say, grooming horses, would scoff at the writer’s misconceptions about how their character might go about grooming a horse. Worse yet, the reader would stop reading and never buy another sentence that writer might offer.

It made sense. The original list of topics was huge. I mean huge. There were dozens of topics eager writers like myself offered to write.

Holly offered a good program. She provided a template and created a book cover. The books were available exclusively as digital books. Writers retained all copyrights. Holly kept a percentage of the sale of each book and paid royalties monthly via PayPal to the writers.

I never expected to sell millions of copies. But, the sales were lackluster, to say the least. I suspect there were a number of reasons. Thirty-three reasons sound simple enough until it comes time to nail them down.

But, I suspect the biggest problem was the skill needed to create the layout. I am a Microsoft Certified Office Specialist and I struggled to make the template behave. But, I persevered.

Holly hired someone to create the final digital book. I was horrified. Anyone who has ever read a book knows that one should never, under any circumstances, put a page number on the cover of a book. Or, on the inside page. Or, on the table of contents page.

Nevertheless, sight unseen, loyal followers continued to buy my titles from Holly Lisle’s shop every month. I don’t recall that I missed a single month of royalties. However, I should point out that four of the dozen or so titles that actually were published were all mine:

  • The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Disappearing in the U.S.
  • The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Early American History
  • The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Genealogy & Family History
  • The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Hostelling

So, I’m guessing that something like 1/3 of her sales were my work.

Holly paid royalties—but I never received (nor was I promised) any stats indicating which titles sold. It would have been useful to have seen the ranking of my titles.But, then life got in the way. Holly Lisle, with her following of thousands (I don’t exaggerate), relocated to another state without mentioning it until she was unpacking even though she was blogging the whole time. Who DOES that?

Then, my husband and I moved.

Then, Holly Lisle’s website was hacked. Severely and savagely.

Then, Holly announced that she was abandoning the “33 Mistakes Writers Make…” project. Entirely. Granted, three years is a long time to wait for the rest of the writers to pony up with their writing. But, rather than simply stop promoting the project, she took the entire series offline.

My titles are no longer available. Period.

I was able to earn extra pennies by selling my own writing in Holly’s online shop, as an affiliate. So I earned the regular royalty plus, if anyone linked in from my own website and made a purchase from Holly’s site, I garnered a few extra pennies.

Within days of the announcement, my writing was removed from Holly’s site—and no longer available. At all. Not even the affiliate pennies.

Fortunately—and I use that word with caution—I retain the copyright on that material. That means I can continue to sell it, any way that I want.

I received an invitation to upload my original Word files, publication-ready, to another site that wanted to function like Holly’s online shop did. But, again, there would be no metrics and that shop was also going to “digitize” my Word files.

I was already dismayed at the way that were digitized previously and this new online shop had far less potential for traffic than Holly Lisle’s shop did. At least, people search for Holly Lisle and hang on her every word and recommendation because she is a successful published writer.

After mulling it over and doing days and days of research, I concluded that a better solution would be to digitize my files on my own and sell them via Amazon. Even Holly Lisle doesn’t begin to compare to Amazon.

What seemed like a simple idea turned into a month-long nightmare. It didn’t help that two of my own websites vanished. It took more than a week to get them both online.

Then, I began the simple process of digitizing for Kindle, so I could sell on Amazon. Since the files had already been published, it should have been a cinch.

It was not.

Lest you think otherwise, let me explain that I know web design. I know html. I know text conversion. I keenly understand digital documents.

I thought…I was gonna…die.

The first problem I ran into was the Word template I had used for creating these documents. It had to be eliminated. It should seem simple enough to delete all those headers and footers. But, it wasn’t.

The files were still rife with code. Tons of it. Code that gives Kindle fits.

I copied the text into Notepad. Then I pasted it into a Seamonkey composer file.

That wasn’t good enough. I had never realized how often I use em dashes. A former editor once told me that em dashes were her favorite form of punctuation. I never intended to follow suit—but there they were. Em dashes everywhere.

If you don’t know what an em dash is, you are not ready to be a writer.

A proper em dash—such as the one I am using before and after this statement–has a beginning and end, or ends in a period (and no second or, more properly, an en dash).

If you are still using the dash symbol to create this effect, you are not ready to write.

If you are a good writer who understands how to use the em and en dash, beware. The Word version is a code that gives Kindle fits. The same is probably true for other word processors and other readers.

I discovered that I had two choices. The simple choice was to eliminate every single em and en dash. I didn’t like that solution. It mean doing a lot of rewriting.

The second choice was to figure out how to create the html version of em dashes and en dashes. There actually is a code for each one and, as any writer should know, there is a distinct difference.

But, even Seamonkey wouldn’t fix the code. I could type an em dash or an en dash to my heart’s content. They would even look acceptable in Seamonkey. But, as soon as the digital book was uploaded, Kindle went berserk.

The only solution was to go into the html code and manually insert the code equivalent in place of every em dash and en dash. Plus, Seamonkey’s find command failed to recognize the difference between an em dash and a dash. If you have ever read html code, you will realize quickly how dizzying that can be.

After a solid eight-hour day of recoding, I still did not have a digital version of even one of my four titles that could be read on Kindle. None.

I gave up and my husband decided he could make it legible. He ran the first document through BBedit and zapped all the gremlins. Those of you who know BBedit realize that is actually a command and gremlins are real. We’ve used BBEdit for a long time. I literally even have the t-shirt.

Even he gave up.

I momentarily considered publishing the file as a PDF—only without the offending page numbers on the cover. (I am still mortified over that!) But, the attraction of selling on Amazon was just too tempting.

It took about three days to actually get one Word file edited for Kindle. It started as a beautiful Word file. Unfortunately, it had a lot of bulleted items. Word bullets are on a different planet from html <li>.

The Word file had a 33-point hyperlinked table of contents. Unfortunately, each item was so long it wrapped once, sometimes even twice. The TOC was virtually unreadable once it was Kindle-d. (Is that a word yet?) I also discovered that Kindle intensely dislikes italics.

After considerable manipulation and some 30 attempts on day three (after jumping through all the other hoops), I finally had one of the “33 Mistakes Writers Make…” files ready for Kindle.

I uploaded it.

I was informed that it would be another 24 hours before it would be live.

Okay.

So, I had three more Word files to wrangle. It took three days to make the layout comply with Kindle, followed by 24 hours before it would become live. Surely it wouldn’t take four days apiece for the next three titles!

It didn’t. It took only one day to Kindle-ize the layout for the second title.

While I was at it, I Kindle-ized my novel, “Byproduct.” At present, “Byproduct,” along with “The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Disappearing in the U.S.” and “The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Genealogy & Family History” are available for sale on Amazon’s Kindle.

I am a member of the Amazon affiliate program, so I can collect my affiliate pennies again. I share the royalties with Amazon now, instead of Holly. I have a much wider audience. And, I have access to metrics.

If you are hoping that I will tell you how to digitize your documents for Kindle, the answer is no. I will, however, digitize documents for you for a price.

In the meantime, learn digital layout. It has become a vital part of writing today.

 
No Comments

Posted in Digital Publishing

 

Byproduct

12 Sep

The first novel in The G’s Series is now available in print and in ebook format. I was scanning around for ways to promote it and discovered such sad disinformation.

Several exuberant but miserably misguided sources advise asking a newspaper for a press release. I have no idea how such a foolish concept got started but let me explain to you what a press release is and how a press kit works.

Anyone who asks a newspaper for a press release will deeply embarrass themselves. You do not ask for a press release — you offer one! In fact, you write it, or pay someone to write it, and then distribute it to media outlets. Like newspapers.

Unless your goal is make editors laugh, please don’t ever ask a newspaper for a press release.

So what is a press release? It is a few paragraphs you write in the hopes that the media will write about you. Don’t be fooled. No newspaper, or other media outlet, will ever print a press release. Ever.

An editor will read (at least part) of your press release and decide if it is newsworthy. If it is, they will assign a reporter who will contact you and ask some questions about whatever you wrote in your press release. Then, they will ask more questions and write a story.

If you’re good with the press, you’ll be ready with some interesting chatter for the reporter. Be ready to expound on what you write in the press release. Add new information. Keep the reporter talking.

A press kit consists of a press release and some photos. Don’t leave it up to the media to shoot their own photos. A good press photographer will make you look like a rock star. But, if it is a busy day and a part-time freelancer tags along to take your picture, you may not be happy with the results. So, include a nice professional photograph with your press release. Better yet, make it two: one in color and one in black-and-white. And don’t offer up littl 72 dpi web pix. Provide beautiful 300 dpi photographs that will reproduce beautifully in any medium.

 
No Comments

Posted in Byproduct, G's Series, Press Release