I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how I will promote my books when they get into print. I have been fortunate enough to have seen the efforts of several masters of self-promotion. I’ve also seen several wannabes who fall short. Let’s start with what won’t work, shall we? First, never expect the publisher to handle all the promotion. As it turns out, unless you are already a multi-million selling author, chances are the publisher won’t have much in the way of promotional budget. That means you, the author, must handle the heavy lifting in the promotional area. Don’t get me wrong, the publisher can help you with this, just don’t expect them to do it all. More about […]
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Writing on a Schedule
I don’t know about you but I like to schedule things. Maybe it’s because I have so much going on I need a plan to fit it all in or maybe I’m just getting absent-minded and I need the reminder. I AM busy so I’m going to go with the former rather than the later. Regardless, I’m finding that I need to start scheduling days for my blogging and my writing or it just isn’t going to get done. First, the blogging. When I was part of StartingWriteNow I was assigned a day of the week to post. There were usually five of us putting our thoughts out so it made sense to do it that way; it prevented us […]
Read moreA Strange Turn of Story
I like to plot the stories I’m writing. I know that isn’t everyone’s style, but it’s the way I typically work. I say typically because my current work in progress was not plotted. At least, not fully plotted. I had a pretty clear vision of the story line, but I hadn’t worked out all the details. So, I’m busy writing the story, taking it in the direction I wanted it to go, and then last night I realized that somewhere along the line the story got away from me. When I say that I mean, I’m not quite clear where it will go next. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it either. I had a brief ‘Now what?’ moment […]
Read moreGiving Voice to your Characters
One of the more difficult things for me to do is give my characters their own unique ‘voice’. I’m not talking dialogue here, at least, not exactly. It’s more about writing dialogue that lets the reader know who is speaking without having to put in tags to tell them. Does that make sense? Let me put it another way… in most dialogue, you get things like ‘Dan said’ or ‘Sally asked’. But what if you have several characters speaking? Or maybe you have a long session of dialogue. Do you really want to write ‘Dan said’ and ‘Sally said’ every time they actually speak? Not only that, but don’t you want to be able to have something said and have […]
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