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Guidance & Inspiration
from authors, publishing experts, and Amazon

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Learn about character development, dialogue, plot and structure, workshopping
and editing, and how to craft a story that readers will love.

The Secret To This Romance Author’s Success? Breaking All The Rules.
By Kristen Ashley


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I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.

I can safely say that every time I’ve been asked to speak to aspiring writers,
afterward, I’ve had not one, but several come up to me and say, “I can’t believe
you did what you said you did. I was told never to do that. I was told never to
break that rule.” This does not surprise me, but it saddens me. When I started
writing, I too had a set of rules for writing romance (my genre) that I was
under the impression were unbreakable. And I wrote within the confines of those
rules.

It was only when publishing house after publishing house, agent after agent had
rejected my submissions, and I’d decided that no one was ever going to read my
books, that I threw the rules out the window. I then simply wrote what I wanted
to write, wrote how the stories came to me, was true to them and my characters.

Then I published myself … And I’ve sold more than two and a half million books.

What are the rules I broke? First, I didn’t write what I thought people wanted
to read. I didn’t research what might be popular — what might sell — and write
that. I wrote stories that felt personal to me, that I enjoyed completely from
writing to reading. The first book that I did this with was Rock Chick, and with
it and the Rock Chick series, I broke all the rules:

I wrote in first person, and at that time, romance novels in first person were
available, but not customary.

I wrote my heroine’s thoughts in a stream of consciousness. I had paragraphs —
many of them — that were just one word. I put myself, and what would eventually
be my readers, in the mind of my heroine, Indy. Not describing what she was
thinking, but thinking what she was thinking as she was thinking it. It’s
important to note that not everyone could get into that, and that’s
understandable, even expected. It’s also important to note that the ones who
did, really did.

I allowed my characters freedom of expression. This meant that if they cursed,
if the F-word was prevalent in their vocabulary, I let them use it (and cursing
was very rare in romance).

For that matter, I didn’t censor my characters or their behavior. I didn’t
think, “Oh, that might make her unlikeable, I need to switch that up, make her
perfect.” I didn’t water down my aggressive, but loving heroes. I let them be
them — real, imperfect, sometimes annoying, more times endearing (I hoped). They
were great friends and good people, but they could (and often did) do stupid
things (like we all do).

And my Rock Chicks were — and still are — hugely successful.

Once I let myself be free, my writing took off — not only in that people were
reading it, but that I felt at liberty to create how I needed to create. To be
true to what I was doing. It wasn’t about stepping out of bounds for the sake of
it. It was about opening a cage and giving myself the freedom to fly.

In other words, I broke the rules for the sake of the stories. And I didn’t play
it safe after my books started selling; I had to stay true to that process. I
needed to keep spreading my wings, doing this for me, but also to give my
readers something new and fresh, a story I was passionate about so they could
enjoy it right along with me. 

One example of this was when I wrote The Will. 

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write. 

By this time, I was already an established romance writer and had hit the
bestseller lists. But I was certain that The Will would never sell. You see, The
Will had a hero and heroine who were in their late forties. I’d already written
outside what I considered the “romance norm” by writing characters in their
thirties and even early forties. But pushing them close to their fifties and
showing them as sexual, vital, commanding, interesting, with flaws they were
learning to embrace, baggage they continued to carry, and issues they were still
working out (all of this is the case with people of any age) — I figured no one
would read it. I thought that if I didn’t have leads in their twenties or early
thirties, the book would bomb.

What’s more, romance readers expect a lot from their heroines. Give a heroine
even a tiny flaw, this often doesn’t go over well. Many women feel the need to
strive for perfection, and that makes my heart sad — that we can’t accept
ourselves for the beauty of all that we are rather than pushing ourselves to
something that is often unattainable, or even practical, much less something
that, in the end, even if we were able to achieve it, wouldn’t make us
boundlessly happy (but this is for another, far longer piece). And there I was
in this series, putting my heroines in a huge hole they had to dig themselves
out of and making my readers do that work right alongside them.

I still had to tell the story. It wouldn’t let me go. So I did. And The Will was
a Goodreads Choice nominee, hitting #7 in the overall romance vote and it hit
the bestseller lists.

When my readers engaged with me about it, those who were around the age of my
hero and heroine were delighted someone told a story that they could more easily
relate to…but it wasn’t just that. Much younger readers embraced it as well.

Another example where I broke my own rules is in The Deep End. It was a new
genre for me, but I was known for jumping genres, writing contemporary romance
as well as fantasy and paranormal. However, this was me jumping into erotica.
Although it’s not a huge leap for a romance writer, as erotica is (thankfully)
now an established, popular genre, I took a twist in what was popular in the
genre and what was considered my norm by switching up a D/s relationship so that
the dominant was a woman and the submissive was a man. An alpha male, but still
a sexual submissive.

I loved this story, was passionate about it, had wanted to write something like
this for years, but I struggled against the pull of it because I knew it would
take a giant leap of faith for many of my readers to engage with it. When sales
started out slow, I was not surprised. But word of mouth started circulating and
more people took the plunge, bought the book, and liked it. It was gorgeous and
humbling. I wrote a book I adored, communicated about it openly and honestly,
and prayed my readers would decide to take that plunge with me. So I was utterly
delighted when many did.

I’ve broken other rules, too: I’ve written books where the hero and heroine get
together with little to no drama. My vampires do not burn up in the sunlight
(my Three series). I’ve killed the dog (you’re never supposed to do that, but
don’t despair, I made up for it).

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.
And in doing that, I hope that my readers feel that need and enjoy the passion
that prompted it. 

 

One of my favorite quotes (and things to do) is “dance like no one is watching.”

You do it because you love to do it. Get down, bust your own moves, and enjoy
the heck out of it. I also like to say, “write like no one will be reading.” The
most important part of the process is to do it because you love to do it.

And when you do, bust your own moves.



A version of this article appeared at https://www.audible.com



Kristen Ashley

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3 First-Time Self-Publishing Mistakes to Avoid
By Joaquín Alberto Pineda


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Lessons learned the hard way so you don’t have to.

Finishing NaNoWriMo in 2008 felt like digging my fingers into the earth and
flipping over a mountain. I grit my teeth until they chipped and I shaved years
off my life expectancy.

Or at least that’s what it felt like, and with good reason. After twenty days of
non-stop writing I put down fifty thousand words, more than anything I’d ever
done before. The momentum was such that I wrote another sixty thousand by
December 20th and completed the first draft of my novel MUTEKI – Sendero de los
Campeones (Road of Champions). It was a suitable title for a project that almost
singlehandedly rescued me from the pits of depression. In my mind I was a
champion.

Or at least I was until I published the book and everything went to hell in a
handbasket.

The aftermath of publishing my first NaNo novel in 2011 was a nightmare, a crime
scene, a horror story. And that’s okay. I was exploring new territory, after
all. Just as I was stumbling and fumbling through those first words on November
1st, 2008, I was stumbling and fumbling again as I faced new challenges.

So what went wrong? What was so catastrophic?

Don’t worry. I made you a list.

1. I delivered unpolished work.

The people in charge of printing my book were crystal clear: you have to turn
this in ASAP or else it won’t come out on time. This shouldn’t have been an
issue. If I pitched the book that’s because it’s ready, right?

You’re forgetting that…

2. I never hired a proofreader/editor.

This is embarrassing to say even six years after the fact, but I never bothered
to look into paying an editor. Not even with “exposure”. I didn’t know one, I
was broke, and I thought I would do a pretty decent editing job. Turns out I
didn’t.

Looking back at the novel now, I’m noticing not only typos but pointless scenes,
cringe-y dialogue, characters that change names halfway through, and–worst of
all–sentences mangled by the “replace all” feature.

I promise to talk about this in depth if I ever get the chance. For now, let’s
focus on my next mistake.

3. I didn’t ask for any proof copies.

Proof copies are your best friends. Without those you can’t preview the final
product. That’s why the inside margins of my book were off and some pages came
up blank due to terrible formatting. Some of the books were even missing pages.

But hey. I had a book.

As you can see, my first publishing experience was the work of an amateur and
it’s still a source of mild embarrassment to this day. I only say “mild” instead
of “I am moving to the mountains never to be seen again” because those days were
some of the best in my entire life. I went on local TV and radio, I read at
various conventions, libraries and book stores, I shook hands and took pictures
with the mayor, they wrote about me on newspapers, and I made connections so
valuable that we still talk and work on projects to this day. And yes, I did
finally meet some editors.

Best of all, I could finally puff out my chest and feel like a writer, albeit a
terrible one. Without that confidence and passion I wouldn’t have turned all
this into a positive; you would be reading this on a subreddit for embarrassing
confessions instead. That same gusto is what helped me write five more novel
manuscripts-–three of them NaNo victories–-and around seventy short stories, all
of which are probably still crap but decidedly better than my earlier work.

You will make mistakes. Trust me. Thankfully for us this isn’t hard science.
There are no goal posts. It’s all about being in love with the worlds and the
friends and foes in your head and giving them that breathing space they’ve been
screaming for like a nest full of annoying little baby chicks.

This is indeed the “Road of Champions” not because we’re invulnerable, but
because we are Muteki–”invincible” in Japanese. We will stagger, we will fall,
but at the end of the day and come what may, we will write on and make the best
art we can.

Go on now. Get some scars. Make some mistakes.



A version of this article appeared at http://blog.nanowrimo.org/



Joaquín Alberto Pineda

Joaquín Alberto Pineda is the author of MUTEKI and the upcoming short story
collection Parables From a Stressed Out Artist, both self-published. He’s
influenced by the work of Ernest Hemingway, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Ellroy,
Juan Rulfo, and Raymond Chandler, among others. Joaquín currently resides in
Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, where he works as a high school teacher.
Visit his blog (in Spanish), Facebook (in Spanish), or Twitter (in English).

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4 Questions to Ask When Writing Diverse Characters
By Aurora Hurd


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Questions to keep in mind while creating characters different from yourself.

So, you want to write a novel and you want it to represent the world around you.
This inevitably means writing about characters who may not be like you in their
identity and/or background. Below is a list of questions to keep in mind while
creating characters different from yourself:

1. Are you using stereotypes without meaning to? 

Sometimes it is obvious if you are slipping into a stereotype, sometimes it is
not. The best way to avoid stereotypes is to write well rounded characters. If
you know your character’s greatest goal, their greatest weakness, what makes
them happy and sad, it is harder, if not impossible, to write stereotypes. But
if you are still not sure if you are falling into a problematic trope, research
is your friend. There is a lot of writing on what to watch out for when it comes
to stereotypes big and small (for example, on the long history of writing
villains as gay or gender-nonconforming—equating such traits to being evil). Use
your favorite search engine to check and use the tips from the other posts this
week to build complex characters.

2. Ask yourself, would you want someone of the background/identity you are
writing about to read your book? 

If the answer is no, then you have a huge red flag that a lot of work needs to
be done. First, make a list of why that is. Then, it is time to hit the books
(or the internet) and it is time to talk to people. Ask people in the community
you are writing about what they would like to see in characters. Ask them what
they do not want to see. Then go back to your writing.

3. Have you read books by authors of this identity? 

If not, now is a wonderful time! Not only does this support other authors, and
authors that are often overlooked by bigger publishing companies, but it is also
research, as all reading is. Reading diversely helps in writing diversely. Here
are some good places to
start: http://readdiversebooks.com/and http://weneeddiversebooks.org/.  

4. Finally, ask yourself why are you writing this character this way? 

This may be the hardest one to answer, because it may take some digging into
yourself. If your answer is that this is just who the character is, you have
answered all the above questions, and you have done your research, you are on
track. But be careful of falling into roles like that of the white savior.
Having good representation is powerful, but having people of a majority identity
write about minority characters dealing with racism, homophobia, or ableism is
not. This is because not only will it not come off as authentic, there is a high
probability of getting things wrong. This is not to say only ‘write what you
know,’ but to ‘stay in your lane’ and ‘do your homework.’

I want to finish this by thanking you for writing diverse characters! It is more
important than ever for books to represent the world and the people within it.
Representation matters, it builds understanding and acceptance which help
dismantle systems of oppression when done right.  



A version of this article appeared at http://blog.nanowrimo.org/



Aurora Hurd

Aurora Hurd is a bisexual writer of all things in the realms of the fantastic.
She is an ML for USA :: Vermont, and is currently seeking her MFA in Creative
Writing.

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Celebrating ten years of authors and KDP
By Kindle Direct Publishing


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We asked KDP authors to share the first moment they felt success as
self-published writers

Kindle Direct Publishing has turned ten, and to celebrate this milestone
anniversary we asked KDP authors to share the first moments they felt success as
self-published writers. The answers were incredibly inspiring, ranging from
becoming a bestseller to adding the title of “self-published author” to their
resume to receiving five-star reviews from international readers to hearing
about the impact of their books directly from readers.

Inspired by the stories every author shared, we selected a few authors for a
little surprise – cookies decorated with the authors’ book covers.  

Here’s a look at their stories (and some cookie photos, too!):

Leslie McAdam:

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. But whenever I’d show
anyone my writing or send a query letter, I was immediately rejected. Still, for
fifteen years, I secretly wrote: four novels, several screenplays, poetry, and
other work. After a crisis in my life, I realized that the only thing I ever
wanted to do was be a writer. I got help from a grammar coach and posted my
first novel on a website in 2015. I was so scared to have people read my
writing, because it was personal and vulnerable, but I️ also had this
overwhelming need to connect with readers. That book, The Sun and the Moon,
ended up winning a prize in the world’s largest online writing competition
(75,000 entries). After that, I released a revised and edited version and
uploaded it to KDP. I️ felt like I️ was a real author, finally, publishing it on
Amazon. Two years and seven books later, I haven’t looked back. While the
release of each book is special, posting the first one felt like success.”



Magan Vernon:

“I first published in 2011 but didn’t really feel successful until 2013. That
was the first time I watched a book sail up the Amazon charts in multiple
countries. I read reviews on amazon.de and .fr (or tried to, since you know,
language) and thought all of these people are reading a story written by a new
Mom from the Illinois cornfields. People who have never met me and don’t speak
my language. It still gives me chills.”



Nicole J Merchant:

“The first time I felt successful as an indie author wasn’t when I published my
first novel. It wasn’t when I made my first sale or ten sales. It was when I got
a message asking when the next one to my series came out. That was when I knew I
had gained a reader. That was when I felt like I had done something right.”



Annie Bellet:

“I’ve been self-publishing for over 7 years now, but the first time I felt real
success was in 2011 when $$ from my thriller novel paid our rent. Then again in
2014 when I could finally pay all my medical bills. It’s been a strange
rollercoaster.”



Eliza Knight:

“Seven years ago I took a deep breath and hit publish. Now a USA Today
bestseller and accepted to RWA’s Honor Roll! Dreams do come true!”



Barbara Appleby:

“For me it was a letter in the mail from former First Lady Barbara Bush. She was
going to read The Sock Monster to her great grandchildren. That letter hangs on
my wall today.”



Cassie Selleck:

“I published my first novel, The Pecan Man, on KDP in January 2012 and thought
the best I would do was sell to family and friends. Within two years, I was able
to quit my full-time job and live a writer’s life. I have over 3000 reviews on
Amazon, signed with a NY agent, optioned movie rights, sold foreign rights, and
have been translated into two languages. I am in public libraries across the
country and Skype with an average of one book club a week. And ALL of this has
happened because of Amazon’s amazing self-publishing tools.”



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Writing for audio made me a better writer, period
By John Scalzi


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Tips from the Hugo Award-winning narrator of Audible Studios’ “The Dispatcher”

When Audible came to me looking for an original audio-first novella, they showed
up at just the right time. I had an idea for a story I’d been rolling around in
my head for a while, and it was just about to drop: something about a world in
which people who were murdered came back immediately (and were pretty annoyed at
what had happened to them). I pitched the story that would become The Dispatcher
(they said yes), and off I went to write.

So far, so good. Except that I usually write stories for print first, and this
one was going straight to audio.

Does that make a difference?

Well, the basic storytelling is the same. You have a protagonist (in this case a
fellow named Anthony Valdez) with an interesting job (he’s a dispatcher, whose
job description is “licensed therapeutic murderer”), who finds himself in the
middle of a plot crisis (a friend of his has disappeared, and Anthony must help
find him), and there’s a ticking clock (if the missing friend’s not found soon,
things are going to get grim). Set up the pins, knock them down, and add a few
twists and turns—everyone’s happy.

This classic storytelling mode works whether the medium is print, audio, or
screen. It’s nice and hardy. Reliable, even.

But there are things unique to the audio medium that you have to pay attention
to while writing. Like the fact that the audience’s first experience with the
story will be through their ears. Which means you need to write the story to be
spoken. Which means you have to try to put yourself in the shoes of a narrator:
Is what I’m writing going to be something the narrator is actually going to be
able to read effectively?

If the narrator is having fun, there’s a good chance the listener is going to
have fun too.

Now, a moment of appreciation here for audiobook narrators. These people are
pros. No matter what you throw at them, there’s a very high chance they’ll make
it work. They’re actors; they’re used to having words put into their mouths and
then speaking them out to thrilling effect. They can take a jumble of exposition
and give it drama, which is a hell of a thing. In my career, I’ve been blessed
with excellent narrators—William Dufris, Tavia Gilbert, Wil Wheaton, and for The
Dispatcher, the awesome Zachary Quinto—and I know at times they’ve made my prose
sound better than it might otherwise.

Even so, I try not to make their lives any harder than they have to be. So I
write with speaking in mind: Naturalistic dialogue. Exposition that is
conversational. A rise and fall in story and scene so they can vary their
delivery so readers won’t get bored. And here and there, a bravura scene that
they can really have fun acting. If the narrator is having fun, there’s a good
chance the listener is going to have fun too. And it’s good for the story,
anyway. So make the narrator’s job easier, and make the narrator happy.

Another audio-first consideration: getting rid of writerly things that have the
potential to throw the listener out of the story and the flow of
narration—things like dialogue tags. In print, having “he said” and “she said”
at the end of dialogue makes good sense—it helps direct traffic and pacing.
Dialogue tags can get repetitive, but most readers eventually gloss over
them—they know the tags are there, but their brains start processing them more
like punctuation than like words. They see the tags, but they don’t sound them
out in their heads.

But in audio, every “he said” and “she said” is spoken out loud by the narrator.
I was never more aware of how much I used dialogue tags than I was while
listening to one of my audiobooks. It became so obvious to me, in fact, that
after I started regularly selling my books to audio, I started reducing dialogue
tags even in work that was going into print first. And for The Dispatcher, I
tried to keep them to an absolute minimum.

This had the effect, I think, of making my writing better overall. Dialogue tags
are useful, but they can also be a crutch. I had to find other ways of making it
clear who was talking—and a lot of that came down to making sure the voices of
all characters were well defined even before a narrator gave them separate
voices. Writing for audio improved my writing, period.

Writing for audio has specific challenges, but it put new tools in my writing
toolbox and sharpened other tools that were already there.

That, I think, is an important point. Writing for audio has specific challenges,
but it put new tools in my writing toolbox and sharpened other tools that were
already there. That’s no small thing. I’m always trying to get better at my job,
and I like it when a story I’m writing stretches my abilities or causes me to
think in a new and different way. It beats grinding out the same old, same old
every time.

The Dispatcher’s structure, while written for audio first, works equally well on
the page. I think in the future I would like to play more with the possibilities
that audio provides me, maybe write something that is truly meant to be audio
only. That’s something that excites me. I like having a new medium to play in as
a writer; I want to find out all that it can do and everything I can do in it.
What shape would that take? Would it be a single-narrator or a full-cast
endeavor? Would it be original or an adaptation of something that exists? Would
it even be a single recording or something along the lines of a series? These
are all possibilities.

I really like the idea that there is more to explore in audio and more
challenges for me in it. I hope listeners do too. We’re in this medium together.



A version of this article originally appeared at Audible Range

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Writing Insights Part Three: The Revision Process
By Hugh Howey


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It is often easier to rewrite from scratch than it is to revise

Welcome to the third entry in my four-part series on writing insights. In the
first part of this series, I listed the things I wish I’d known before aspiring
to become a writer. The second entry was all about how to get through the rough
draft. Now I’d like to discuss how to improve your rough draft to get it ready
for publication.

Many of the points in this section deal with the craft of writing. You may
wonder why these are brought up after a rough draft is complete. Shouldn’t
you learn to write before you beginwriting? I wish it worked this way, but it
doesn’t. You learn by doing, not reading about doing. Rough drafts require
skills beyond the skill of writing. They are about endurance and stamina. They
require willpower and force of habit. Many phenomenal writers can’t complete a
rough draft and never will. This is why much of the writing advice out there is
really just motivational advice to get you through that first draft. More “You
can do it!” rather than “How-to.”

This is exactly as it should be. Once you know you can write a novel, you can
learn through the revision process how to write a better novel.

Having said that, all of these insights are meant to be read at any time. If you
haven’t written your first word, I would recommend reading this entire series
before you begin. There are insights about the publication process in the next
section that may influence how you structure your rough draft. And if you’re
working on your tenth novel, there may be something in here that helps you see
the writing process in a new light. Or you may see what’s missing from this
advice and share your thoughts, which will help me and others in our writing
processes. With this series, I mostly have in mind the aspirational writer,
someone who is where I was ten years ago. So it assumes nothing and attempts to
help anyone starting from scratch.

Before we get to the revision insights, I want to start by congratulating those
of you who find yourself at this point of the writing process. It’s an amazing
accomplishment. I’ll never forget the day I finished my first rough draft. I
happened to be visiting my mother and sister at the time, and that night we went
out for a celebratory dinner. A USB thumb drive containing a backup of my work
sat on the restaurant table as we ate. I didn’t want to let that manuscript out
of my sight! I still didn’t believe it. For the next week, I had to stop myself
from telling perfect strangers that I’d written a novel. I also realized during
this week that I had no idea what to do next. I’d worked so long and so hard to
get to this point that I’d never researched the rest.

Here are the ten things I wish I’d known, sitting at that dinner table all those
years ago…

Insight #21: Don’t rush to publication.

For many writers, getting the rough draft complete is the hardest part of
writing a novel. It can feel like you’re done at this point, and you might want
to get the project out into the wild so you can start on something new, or so
you can get some feedback, or see if it’ll be the runaway bestseller that you
hope it might. These impulses lead to tragic mistakes. New authors will often
submit a manuscript to agents before it’s ready; or they’ll self-publish before
the work is truly done.

Now is not the time to waste all the effort you’ve put into your rough draft.
Now comes the fun part. The next step(s) will involve perhaps a dozen full
passes through the work. Yeah, a dozen or more! Each pass will gradually smooth
away rough spots and errors. It’s like taking a roughhewn hunk of lumber and
turning it into a polished piece of furniture. You’ll start with heavy grit
sandpaper and work your way down to wet-sanding a typo here or there.

The beauty of the revision process is that this is where you’ll learn to become
a great writer, much more so than in the rough draft stage. The techniques you
pick up as you shore up your story and polish your prose will carry over into
the next rough draft. Because of this, the writing process will get easier and
easier. The revision process will become faster and faster.

I’ve heard some writers suggest that you should step away from a rough draft for
a length of time, but I never understood the usefulness of this. When I finish a
rough draft, I celebrate for a day and then go right back to the beginning of
the novel to start the revisions. There are a handful of main things I want to
accomplish with the first pass: (1) I want to plug any missing sections (scenes
or chapters I skipped). (2) I want to make the prose more readable and improve
the flow between sections and chapters. (3) I want to give the characters and my
world more depth and detail. (4) I want to tighten the plot, add some
foreshadowing, close any logical holes.

Now is also the time to think about how you plan to publish this work, which is
the area we’ll cover in the fourth and final part of this series. If your rough
draft is a 300,000 word epic fantasy tome, and you want to publish this with a
major publishing house, your revision process is going to involve cutting that
draft up into three novels to create a trilogy. This will require some plot
restructuring. One of my keenest insights that I possess now, which I didn’t
appreciate when I started writing, is that how you publish will influence what
and how you write.

In the next section, we’ll also discuss how insanely easy it is to publish these
days, and this is why some patience is required. In the old days, you didn’t
have a choice but to be patient. It could easily take several years (if at all)
to bring your book to market. Now it takes a few hours. I want to convince you
to take longer. At least ten revision passes before you submit to agents or
self-publish. I promise you’ll be glad you took this advice.

Insight #22: It is often easier to rewrite from scratch than it is to revise.

Before we discuss revising, it’s worth pointing out the alternative: rewriting.
Yes, I hear your collective groans. We just got done writing the rough draft,
and now we have to start a scene or chapter from scratch?! From a blank page?!
Can’t we just move a few words or sentences around and be done with it?

Usually, you can. The revision process mostly involves massaging what’s already
in place. But there are times when revising actually takes a lot longer than a
rewrite. Understanding when this makes sense, and being brave enough to tackle
these challenging moments, is often the difference between success and failure.
I’ve seen entire manuscripts abandoned and/or destroyed because of this fatal
oversight.

This is especially true with the opening chapters of a manuscript, which are the
most important chapters for hooking your audience, whether that audience is an
agent, a reader, or a publisher. As you wrap up your rough draft and go back to
the beginning, now is the time to explore rewriting as well as revising. You
know your story and your characters more fully now. Your writing skills have
improved through the hours and hours you’ve invested in this project. Maybe your
opening feels a little stale. Or you wonder if the story shouldn’t start with a
different scene or a different piece of information. You can try revising, or
you can open a blank document and see what kind of opening chapter you would
write now. It’s a fun exercise. You might surprise yourself.

This technique works wonders, and it works throughout your novel. You can peel
off any scene or chapter or sentence and try it again from scratch. There have
been times when I’ll spend hours trying to get a chapter or paragraph just
right, then pound out something new in a fraction of the time that’s far cleaner
and better. Our existing words often get in the way. Learn to step around them
and try something new.

This fits well with the last insight from the previous entry in this series,
about writing lean. The beauty of writing lean is that you spend more time
adding material, and less time wrestling with the pain of deletion or the
discomfort of massaging the wrong words into a different order that isn’t much
better.

Insight #23: Great books are all about pacing

To become a better writer, it helps to understand how the delivery of words
affects a reader’s mood and their retention of information. The most important
tool in this regard is pacing. Pacing can mean different things in different
contexts. The next few insights are all about pacing in one way or another.

Let’s start with the importance of overall book pacing and construction. It can
help to consider extreme scenarios in order to arrive at more general truths.
For instance, imagine a 300 page novel with no chapters or scene breaks. I’m
sure they’ve been written or considered by people eager to break rules and
convention. I imagine they are nearly impossible to read. Why? Because our
brains are built to absorb ideas in chunks and to process those chunks
individually.

We experience things in the moment, move those experiences into short term
memory, and then perhaps to long term memory. If we get too much information all
at once, we can’t process it well (or at all). Chapters and paragraphs signal an
opportunity to file away what we just absorbed and prepare to absorb another
chunk. This is why paragraph length is critical for flow and retention. If
possible, paragraphs should be of similar length, each one containing three to
seven sentences. This can vary depending on how long or short the sentences are
(more on that in a bit). And this rule can be broken to great effect. Those
effects are diminished when the rule is ignored altogether.

Short paragraphs stand out – but only if used sparingly!

And long paragraphs have their place in our stories, especially if the desired
effect is to ease the readers brain into a somnolent state, like the sing-song
of a lullaby. Proust was a master of paragraphs like these; they went on for
pages, and were full of sentences that stretched line after line, full of
clauses and lists, huddled together between commas and semi-colons and dashes,
all with the combined effect not of conveying concrete information and facts,
but to get the reader in a certain mood, perhaps to make them wistful, to
deprogram their concrete minds so they were ready for the dream-state of
Proust’s expert meanderings; in this, the words become like music, more notes
than ideas, and the reader’s muscles themselves relax, a hypnotic trance
ensuing, perhaps at the risk of losing them to literature’s great nighttime
enemy and thief: sleep.

Practice both types of paragraph structure and pacing. Look for examples in your
own reading. Ask how the authors you admire are affecting your mood as you read
their prose, and then ask the same questions as you revise your rough draft.
Chop up that long paragraph into two or more. Be frugal with your short
declarations so you don’t rob them of their power. Treat your words like lyrics
and listen for the song they sing.

Insight #24: Find your cadence between action and reflection

The pacing in the previous insight deals with how words are lumped together.
Their physical structure, if you will. There’s a second kind of pacing, and this
one deals with the actual content and type of words used. It’s the flow between
action and reflection, and it’s especially crucial for works of fiction.

Action scenes don’t necessarily mean gunfights and car chases and alien
invasions. An action scene can be an argument between two lovers. It can be a
fierce internal struggle as a character decides to leap or step back from a
metaphorical ledge. Action scenes are anytime something major is happening in
the plot or to the characters. The reader is usually flying through these
passages at a higher rate of speed, eager to see what happens next. Most often,
these scenes have large blocks of text and less dialog, but that’s not always
the case.

Reflection is what happens after the action. It’s when characters absorb the
change that’s happened and plan what comes next. Period of reflection also give
the reader a chance to absorb what’s happened and to guess or dread what might
happen next. This is the cadence of your book, the rise and fall of action and
reflection.

Now, if an entire novel was written with nothing but action, it would make for
an exhausting read. And if a book consisted of nothing but constant reflection,
it would be difficult to wade through. In the former, you would have change in
your plot but not your characters. In the latter, you would have change in
your characters but no plot. Every book should contain some balance between the
two.

That doesn’t mean the same balance. A literary novel will typically have lots of
reflection and very brief spurts of action. A genre novel will have lots of
action and shorter pauses for reflection. I haven’t seen a definition of what
makes a work “literary” that I fully buy, but maybe this fingerprint of cadence
comes closest. It could be why many genre fans can’t read literary novels, and
why many literary fans can’t abide genre works. It doesn’t matter if the genre
works are as well-written as the literature – there’s simply too much happening.
Not enough reflection. I would argue that pace defines these books far more than
content. Which is why some great works of science fiction, like THE LEFT HAND OF
DARKNESS or THE HANDMAID’S TALE, read more like literary novels (and are often
shelved as such).

As you revise your work, look for places where the action goes on too long and
consider inserting a pause for reflection. Let the characters catch their breath
in an elevator, crack a joke or two, or tend to some wound or primal fear before
you pick up the pace again. Similarly, look for anywhere that characters are
ruminating too long and figure out how to spice things up. If you’re bored with
what you’re writing, chances are a lot of readers will be bored as well. Make a
gun go off; a car backfire; someone in the neighboring booth get the wrong order
and pitch a fit; a zombie pop up that has to be dealt with, anything. And if you
feel like you’ve gone on long enough, there’s always the em dash and a sudden
exit—

Insight #25: Don’t repeat yourself. Unless it’s deliberate. And then repeat
yourself carefully.

Alliteration and repetition are both an important part of pacing, and they both
highlight the importance of grasping reading psychology. Readers love repetition
when it is deliberate, for extra punch, for added stress. But our minds trip
over accidental repetition, as when the same words appear too near to one
another in a paragraph or chapter accidentally.

The psychology of this is strange, and it varies slightly from reader to reader.
Common words can appear throughout the same sentence or paragraph without
tripping the reader up. Uncommon words draw attention to themselves. If the
reader sees a rare word twice, part of their brain will perk up and draw
attention to the second sighting, which breaks the flow and distracts them from
the content or emotional impact of the sentence. One of the most common things
you’ll see from a good editor is similar or same words highlighted if they’re
too close to one another in a manuscript. The editor will suggest changing or
deleting one of them. This is always sound advice.

Repetition, however, can be extremely powerful if wielded appropriately. Play
around and experiment. Pay close attention as a reader to see when you trip up
and how you might have avoided that mistake in your own writing.

Insight #26: Reading is aural

I find it fascinating that we can hear ourselves think. When I was very young, I
had a hard time telling if this was indeed the case. When I read silently to
myself, am I “hearing” those words in my mind? Or am I just thinking them? What
seemed to settle the question for me was the ability to hear various accents in
my head. I could think with a British accent, or a French accent, which meant
the words didn’t just have meaning, they had pitch and inflection and all the
properties of sound.

This is why cadence is so important when it comes to writing. It’s why the long
paragraphs mentioned (and demonstrated) above have a powerful effect on us. This
is also how we can hear our characters’ voices, and why it’s important to make
those voices distinct. Common writing advice includes the importance of
observation: sit and watch crowds and make note of how they move, how they
dress, how their features look. This is great advice. But we have to observe
with our ears as well.

Some of your characters will have gravelly voices. Others will have a slight
lisp. They should have accents and vocal tics. Be sure that all of your
characters don’t have your vocal tics, or they’ll all sound the same. You want
these voices to jump out, so try to exaggerate the differences between their
voices in your own head. The common mistake is to leave them all sounding the
same.

Another mistake writers make is to leave out all the background noises that
bring a scene to life. Pay attention when background noise is done well. A great
example is the novel THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David
Mitchell. Birds and street-sweepers, mischievous monkeys, the rattling of the
wind, all of these things set the stage and help break up the dialog and
narrative passages. They also help bring the world to life and make it real.
Read this book, and you’ll become a better writer; I guarantee it.

The musicality of silent reading is why punctuation is so powerful. How much
pause do you want readers to take? This power lies almost entirely with the
choices you make. Liberal usage of commas – and there’s no hard and fast rule on
many of the comma choices we make – can change how a sentence sounds in one’s
head. The em dash (as used above) is super powerful. So are parentheticals as in
the previous sentence; the beauty here is that a parenthetical provides not just
a pause, but a hint to the reader to say these words softer, almost like an
aside. The semi-colon in the previous sentence keeps things flowing more than a
comma but less than a period. And going without punctuation as in the previous
sentence, when I could easily have added one or two commas, rushes you right
through.

The last sentence in the above paragraph could easily have been written without
the middle clause and the two commas that encase it. It wouldn’t change the
content or meaning, it just provides an example of what the sentence before
it didn’t employ. Each of these decisions is a branch; everything sounds
different depending on which one we go down. One of the most powerful skills a
writer develops over time is the ability to “hear” these various choices in
advance and choose the best one in each scenario. At first, it’ll require typing
out several versions of each to see which you like best. Read each choice both
aloud and silently. Eventually, you’ll make these choices without realizing it,
and your writing will grow stronger.

I’ll say it again: Practice. Take a chapter you aren’t thrilled with and rewrite
it from scratch, going for a more breezy style or a more punchy one. Write
scenes that don’t have anything to do with your work in progress. Athletes do
this all the time. They play a game of HORSE to improve their shooting form.
They take a hundred free throws in a row. Actors will sit in front of a mirror
and go through different moods and inflections; writers should do the same. Sit
down and write a car chase, a bar fight, a sex scene, someone losing their job,
someone getting their dream job, someone wishing they could quit their jobs. Do
these things to play with your pacing and punctuation. If you go these extra
lengths in your writing career, you’ll see dividends. I promise.

Insight #27: Zoom down into your character’s eyes.

Remember those posters that became a fad for a while, the ones that looked like
tessellations of shapes but held hidden scenes of dinosaurs and dolphins? Kiosks
in malls sold them. People would crowd around them and stare and stare, and then
bust out laughing or gasp in surprise. Because if you crossed your eyes just
right, 3D images popped out of nowhere. And then they’d disappear. You’d fight
to get them back.

When you write your fiction, do you see the words on the page, or the events
you’re describing? The chances are, you mostly see the words. I want to convince
you that you can see both. And that the more you practice, and the deeper you
fall into the flow of writing, the more often you’ll see just the action, and
the words will disappear.

When you find this flow, you’ll write with astonishing speed and clarity. This
is a truth that surprises most non-writers: On the days that I write the most, I
have to edit the least. Quantity and quality often come hand in hand. I’ve
written 10,000 words in a single day and had to edit very little of it. I’ve had
other days where I agonize over 300 words and use none of them. Some days I get
my eyes crossed just right. Other days, I’m staring at words.

The voice and tense you choose have a huge impact here, and we’ll discuss them
next. More important perhaps is the zoom level you pick. You have to
pinch-to-zoom your manuscript at times. If you are writing a fantasy novel, and
you start with a prologue, you might want to zoom way out and write with a
detached omniscience about the history of the land, the coronation and death of
kings, the foment and ravages of war. If you are writing a thriller, you might
start off your story by zooming in to write down the barrel of a gun,
deliberately leaving out-of-view the larger context (like who is pulling the
trigger). My advice is to stay as zoomed in as you possibly can. See the world
through your characters’ eyes at all times.

Video games usually come in one of two perspectives. One perspective is the
isometric view; it’s a third-person view above the action and at an angle.
Unfortunately for many writers, this is the default view we assume when we write
our first novels. I think it’s a huge mistake. We end up describing events and
scenes as they appear, rather than as they feel. We give too much context about
the layout of the scene and the action, and not enough context about the
emotions and feelings of those experiencing those actions. If you feel like
you’re seeing your story from this isometric, over-the-head view, stop writing
and zoom back in.

The other videogame view is the first-person view, and this is what we’re after
with our writing. Push down into your characters’ skulls. See the novel through
their eyes. What are they thinking? What’s going on in the background? Are they
hungry? Scared? Excited? Cold? Angry? Do they have any lingering aches? Is their
mind wandering? Did they miss-hear something and need it repeated?

Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of describing events to the reader.
Live through those events yourself and help your readers do the same.

Insight #28: Play with Tense and Voice until you find the right combo for each
work

Tense and voice are basic writing concepts, but they merit mention here. I can’t
count the number of times I’ve written a story in one tense or voice and had to
revise the entire work to a different tense or voice. It happened in the
previous entry of this series when I needed to write a quick chase scene. I
thought it might be useful to share the before and after, so you can see the
difference.

In past tense:

Marco bolted out the back door, Sarah right behind him. He could hear bar stools
and tables toppling, had that last image of Marco reaching for his gun, and now
every nerve in his body was waiting for a shot to ring out, for Sarah to cry
she’d been hit, or to feel the punch and burn of a bullet slamming into his
body. He urged Sarah ahead of him, knowing being shot would hurt less than
seeing her go down. The end of the alley was a forever away. Footsteps pounded
behind them, one of the goons yelling for them to stop or he’d shoot. Sarah
swerved left and threw her shoulder into a shut door, the wood cracking. As the
first shot rang out, Juan threw himself against her to shield her body with his.
The both of them crashed through the door and into a busy kitchen. Men and women
in white turned and gaped, but there was no time. Juan and Sarah scrambled to
their feet and kept running.

And now in present tense:

Marco bolts out the back door, Sarah right behind him. He can hear bar stools
and tables toppling, has that last image of Marco reaching for his gun, and now
every nerve in his body is waiting for a shot to ring out, for Sarah to cry
she’s been hit, or to feel the punch and burn of a bullet slam into his body. He
urges Sarah ahead of him, knowing being shot will hurt less than seeing her go
down. The end of the alley is a forever away. Footsteps pound behind them, one
of the goons yelling for them to stop or he’ll shoot. Sarah swerves left and
throws her shoulder into a shut door, the wood cracking. As the first shot rings
out, Juan hurls himself against her to shield her body. The both of them crash
through the door and into a busy kitchen. Men and women in white turn and gape,
but there is no time. Juan and Sarah scramble to their feet and keep running.

Present tense is more powerful when we want to leave the outcome in doubt. Past
tense often spoils the fact that the narrators lived to tell their story. Even
worse, past tense can lose some of the immediacy of action. Anyone who has
watched a taped sporting event versus a live sporting event can relate. Knowing
that a thing is happening right now is a powerful feeling. But there are times
that past tense just feels more apt for a particular story. Many writers are
more comfortable writing in past tense, so they default to this. Whatever you
choose, be consistent through each scene or chapter (in most cases, the entire
book). And choose deliberately.

Voice is another major decision, one that can change in the revision process.
This is a laborious amount of editing, so it’s best to think on these things
early. But don’t be afraid to try both and see which one works better. There are
myriad combinations of voice and tense. Some combinations are more off-putting
than others, but this doesn’t mean you can’t make them work. The HUNGER GAMES
books are written in first-person present tense, which many find difficult to
read. Millions of fans of the books disagree. Here’s my chase scene again, this
time in first person:

I bolt out the back door, Sarah right behind me. I can hear bar stools and
tables toppling, and I see that last image of Marco reaching for his gun. Every
nerve in my body is waiting for a shot to ring out, for Sarah to cry that she’s
been hit, or to feel the punch and burn of a bullet slam into my own body. I
urge Sarah ahead of me. Getting shot would hurt far less than seeing her go
down.

The end of the alley is a forever away. Footsteps pound behind us, one of the
goons yelling for us to stop or he’ll shoot. Sarah swerves left and throws her
shoulder into a shut door, the wood cracking. As the first shot rings out, I
hurl myself against her to shield her body. The two of us crash through the door
and into a busy kitchen. Men and women in white smocks and hairnets turn and
gape, but there is no time. Sarah and I scramble to our feet and keep running.

First-person present tense is great for reader immersion, but don’t rely on it.
The number of sentences that start with “I” can be grating to the reader, so you
have to work hard to mix it up. And the advantage with third-person perspectives
is that we can move between characters from chapter to chapter. There’s also the
nagging doubt that our narrator doesn’t survive their adventure, that the reason
it’s told in third-person is because it has to be; the protagonist doesn’t make
it. Third-person can be just as immersive if we write it zoomed in, as we
mentioned above. Give us their thoughts and perspective, and it feels almost
like we’re writing in first-person:

Juan hadn’t felt love like this since high school. Since Amanda. Turning over
his arm, he studied the scar there across his bicep, the jagged raised whelp
with the staggered row of dots to either side. She had told him to stop being a
baby, to hold still, but he’d seen the way her hands shook as she threaded the
needle. He remembered the blood on them both. There was only so much numb in the
world when thread is making its way through flesh, skin puckering up as it’s
pulled tight, the girl you love twisting her face up in concentration and worry,
and you trying your damnedest to not pass out. Only so much numb in the world …
What Juan wouldn’t do for some of that numbness right now.

In this example, we remove the reader from the POV by making it third person,
and we remove events from the present by describing something about the past,
and we write it all in past tense! Normally, these choices would create distance
and reduce immersion. But is the passage above any less immediate? It feels like
it’s through Juan’s eyes, even though it refers to him in the third person.
Details and zooming work miracles, and they balance out our decisions about
voice and tense. Speaking of details…

Insight #29: Details, details, details.

It has taken this long to mention my favorite writing technique, and now you’re
in for it! Details turn stories into works of art. Details make us believe the
stories we’re told. The number one thing that separates a serviceable writer
from a great writer is the level of detail they achieve. We’re going to go
through several examples here to kick your attention to detail up several
notches.

Before we do, I want to stress why details matter. Our brains are wired for
telling and hearing stories; there is some good research to suggest that this is
a foundational feature of the human brain. We are storytelling animals. Some of
these stories are true, and some aren’t. Some are meant to warn us of danger,
some stories are meant to just give us information, and some stories are
designed simply to entertain.

When stories are full of little details, we tend to believe them. Especially if
those details make sense, and we don’t think the person telling the story would
know to make those details up. Con men and practiced liars are great at
sprinkling in details to distract from their overall fictions. Fiction writers
should take note.

Let’s look at some common mistakes I see in early novels. These are problems you
might find in your own work. These problems arise because the author cannot see
the details of their world and their characters. The absence of these features
call attention to the fiction. They create a backdrop similar to the one in the
film THE TRUMAN SHOW, a feeling of all façade and no substance.

– The main character has no job and seems to never have had a job. You see this
in a lot of YA. The character’s job – according to the author – is to allow the
plot to happen to him or her. The character cannot possibly know about the plot
that’s going to unfold, so this bit of convenience distracts us. Our brains can
tell there’s something wrong, something missing.

– Entire branches of the protagonist’s family are missing. Anyone not central to
the plot is absent, or paper-thin. Grandparents especially. This is because many
authors don’t know how to include details without distracting from the plot.
Great writers sprinkle details in a way that make the plot easier to understand,
rather than distracting.

– Characters in poorly written novels often feel naked and empty-handed. When
most of us leave the house, we have to plan what we wear, and we hunt and
double-check that we have a handful of important items with us. In many freshmen
novels, the character only has the plot to attend to. Out the door they go,
furthering the plot along. Again, this often comes from improper zoom,
inattention to detail, and not thinking about characters while away from the
keyboard. As the author, you might know the protagonist is out the door to meet
the girl of his dreams, but he only knows he’s going grocery shopping. Have him
prepare and think accordingly.

– Food, water and their disposal. We eat, poop, and piss a lot. Characters in
fiction never seem to. You don’t have to capture every instance, but you do have
to include enough. Keep your characters hydrated! Make them stop the car and pee
in the woods, the wind causing shadows to dance on the forest floor, the sound
of something large moving through the branches, hopefully a deer. Food and its
disposal are a great chance for reflection and cadence. No one does this better
than George RR Martin, but you don’t have to take it quite so far as he.

– Give your characters scars, both physical and emotional. Too many characters
are inserted into a plot as a blank canvas on which to drape some action. Their
next love is their first love. Their next injury is their first injury. This is
because not enough time has been spent daydreaming about these characters, their
pasts, their families, their experiences. ROMEO AND JULIET starts with Romeo
pining for his last love. The pattern of his fickleness tells us depths about
him that a one-time love affair would not (and more about the Bard’s view of
love as well).

– Behind-the-scenes knowledge. I read a book recently in which a character went
on a talk show. One of the details mentioned was the choreography of cameras
dancing and weaving beyond the bright lights, and it not only painted the scene
for me, and what it must feel like to sit up there, it made me suspend disbelief
because the author was sharing a detail that I realized must be true that I
don’t often think about. Small details like this are what make it difficult to
be a great writer; you need to know a lot of things about a lot of things. This
is why a wide variety of experiences, jobs, reading, travel, and other types of
media consumption make for a better writer.

– Totems and object origins. Does the character have a favorite piece of
jewelry? Is their car a hand-me-down from a friend or relative? Is there a
secret place they keep the things dear to them hidden? The more details like
this that you sprinkle in, the more you’ll find use for them later in your plot.
Just the mention of an uncle who gave your character their beater of a car might
inspire you to bring that uncle in for a greater role down the road. This is the
amazing thing about sprinkling details throughout your novel: Each one is an
instance of pure imagination, and intricate plots are built on them. The best
part is: when you use some detail for later inspiration in your novel, you’ve
set up the original mention as a nice bit of foreshadowing.

During the revision process, I’m always looking for places to add detail. In my
chase scene from the last section, I originally didn’t have the chefs in the
kitchen wearing white smocks and hairnets. With just a few words, we can paint a
scene more vividly. In a fast paced action scene, only certain highlights might
stand out. We might not see that one of the chefs is tall and thin, another
short and squat, one holding a colander, another stirring a steaming pot. But
we’d notice they’re all dressed the same, because a group of strangers rarely
are. We might notice all are wearing hats or hairnets. Or that one is holding a
knife, because our adrenaline is pumping. Which details we choose to add are
important. Think about what would stand out to your character if you were in
their shoes.

One last example of detail, this one on how to interrupt your action. The world
does not come at us linearly. When people talk, they rarely do so in complete
sentences. They finish each other’s sentences, cut each other off once they
understand the gist of what’s being said, incorrectly hear some words and make
mistakes or have to ask for clarification. And some details interrupt the flow
of the plot. A plot on rails stands out as being inauthentic. Send characters
down dead-end alleys, literally and metaphorically. Use interruptions to
sprinkle in backstory, foreshadowing, and missing details.

For instance, your detective might be chasing the bad guy when her grandmother
calls to ask her to help with her computer. The detective doesn’t have time
right now. You never have time for your grandmother, she might hear. Oh, okay…
And she walks her through sending an attachment to another relative, all while
trying not to lose the killer. Diversions like this add depth and realism. They
wake the reader up. Make sure your story has a few.

Insight #30: Get help!

Every writer has strengths and weaknesses. You might be a whiz with dialog, but
you can’t write action scenes that feel gripping. You can build amazing worlds,
but you can’t create characters that leap off the page. There are hundreds of
small skills that add up to one great writer; no one starts off good at all of
them.

Getting many different perspectives on our works during the revision process
will not only improve the drafts, they’ll improve the writer. It’ll make
subsequent novels better, and they’ll require less editing. Join a writing group
in your area; form one if a writing group doesn’t already exist. There are
online editing groups out there as well. These groups often exchange rough
drafts, and each member makes notes to assist the author. Take this process
seriously. You’ll learn much through another author’s strengths and weaknesses.
They’ll teach you much in return.

Read about writing, especially while you’re in revision mode. One of my
favorites is EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES by Lynne Truss. It’s a hilarious book about
grammar that will clean up lots of technical mistakes, leaving room for your
editors and critique partners to comment more on story, characters, and pacing.

Find a loved one who can be an honest critic. My mother has been a wonderful
collaborator over the years. She never hesitates to tell me where I can improve
a story. It also helps to know when she’s confused, when I’ve left out too much
information, or perhaps where I added too much detail.

When the revision process gets to the last stages, and you’re reading along
looking for typos and rough edges, rope in some beta readers if possible. Some
authors employ dozens of beta readers, but this is only easy to do once you have
a following. Starting out, you might have to cajole friends into helping.
Whatever you do, don’t be worried about “giving away” your work or your ideas.
If you’re this far along in the process, you’ll know by now that execution is
the difficult part. Ideas are the cheap bits.

Those are my top ten insights on the revision process. If you’ve made ten or
twelve passes through your work, and you’ve had some editorial assistance to
find the things you missed, you should have a nicely polished draft of an
interesting story clearly told. Now what? How do you get as many readers as
possible? Or as many sales? Or win awards? Or ensure the best chances of making
a livable income?



* This is the third in a four-part series. Read the rest:

Writing Insights Part One: Becoming a Writer

Writing Insights Part Two: The Rough Draft

Writing Insights Part Four: Publishing Your Book

  A version of this article appeared at The Wayfinder.

Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde saga and the New York
Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series. The WOOL OMNIBUS won the Kindle
Book Review 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award.

Learn More


View All Write Articles

De-mystify the publishing process: prepare your manuscript, learn about
different publishing options and formats, find the right route for your book.

Working backwards to create a quality book
By KDP University


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Top 5 suggestions for book design.

The appearance of your book is important to readers. Researching, planning, and
asking the right questions will help you publish with a professional look. Check
out this video to see the top 5 suggestions for creating a quality book.  For
more visit KDP Jumpstart’s Introduction to Book Design.



 A version of this article appeared on the Amazon KDP YouTube channel.

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The Secret To This Romance Author’s Success? Breaking All The Rules.
By Kristen Ashley


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.

I can safely say that every time I’ve been asked to speak to aspiring writers,
afterward, I’ve had not one, but several come up to me and say, “I can’t believe
you did what you said you did. I was told never to do that. I was told never to
break that rule.” This does not surprise me, but it saddens me. When I started
writing, I too had a set of rules for writing romance (my genre) that I was
under the impression were unbreakable. And I wrote within the confines of those
rules.

It was only when publishing house after publishing house, agent after agent had
rejected my submissions, and I’d decided that no one was ever going to read my
books, that I threw the rules out the window. I then simply wrote what I wanted
to write, wrote how the stories came to me, was true to them and my characters.

Then I published myself … And I’ve sold more than two and a half million books.

What are the rules I broke? First, I didn’t write what I thought people wanted
to read. I didn’t research what might be popular — what might sell — and write
that. I wrote stories that felt personal to me, that I enjoyed completely from
writing to reading. The first book that I did this with was Rock Chick, and with
it and the Rock Chick series, I broke all the rules:

I wrote in first person, and at that time, romance novels in first person were
available, but not customary.

I wrote my heroine’s thoughts in a stream of consciousness. I had paragraphs —
many of them — that were just one word. I put myself, and what would eventually
be my readers, in the mind of my heroine, Indy. Not describing what she was
thinking, but thinking what she was thinking as she was thinking it. It’s
important to note that not everyone could get into that, and that’s
understandable, even expected. It’s also important to note that the ones who
did, really did.

I allowed my characters freedom of expression. This meant that if they cursed,
if the F-word was prevalent in their vocabulary, I let them use it (and cursing
was very rare in romance).

For that matter, I didn’t censor my characters or their behavior. I didn’t
think, “Oh, that might make her unlikeable, I need to switch that up, make her
perfect.” I didn’t water down my aggressive, but loving heroes. I let them be
them — real, imperfect, sometimes annoying, more times endearing (I hoped). They
were great friends and good people, but they could (and often did) do stupid
things (like we all do).

And my Rock Chicks were — and still are — hugely successful.

Once I let myself be free, my writing took off — not only in that people were
reading it, but that I felt at liberty to create how I needed to create. To be
true to what I was doing. It wasn’t about stepping out of bounds for the sake of
it. It was about opening a cage and giving myself the freedom to fly.

In other words, I broke the rules for the sake of the stories. And I didn’t play
it safe after my books started selling; I had to stay true to that process. I
needed to keep spreading my wings, doing this for me, but also to give my
readers something new and fresh, a story I was passionate about so they could
enjoy it right along with me. 

One example of this was when I wrote The Will. 

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write. 

By this time, I was already an established romance writer and had hit the
bestseller lists. But I was certain that The Will would never sell. You see, The
Will had a hero and heroine who were in their late forties. I’d already written
outside what I considered the “romance norm” by writing characters in their
thirties and even early forties. But pushing them close to their fifties and
showing them as sexual, vital, commanding, interesting, with flaws they were
learning to embrace, baggage they continued to carry, and issues they were still
working out (all of this is the case with people of any age) — I figured no one
would read it. I thought that if I didn’t have leads in their twenties or early
thirties, the book would bomb.

What’s more, romance readers expect a lot from their heroines. Give a heroine
even a tiny flaw, this often doesn’t go over well. Many women feel the need to
strive for perfection, and that makes my heart sad — that we can’t accept
ourselves for the beauty of all that we are rather than pushing ourselves to
something that is often unattainable, or even practical, much less something
that, in the end, even if we were able to achieve it, wouldn’t make us
boundlessly happy (but this is for another, far longer piece). And there I was
in this series, putting my heroines in a huge hole they had to dig themselves
out of and making my readers do that work right alongside them.

I still had to tell the story. It wouldn’t let me go. So I did. And The Will was
a Goodreads Choice nominee, hitting #7 in the overall romance vote and it hit
the bestseller lists.

When my readers engaged with me about it, those who were around the age of my
hero and heroine were delighted someone told a story that they could more easily
relate to…but it wasn’t just that. Much younger readers embraced it as well.

Another example where I broke my own rules is in The Deep End. It was a new
genre for me, but I was known for jumping genres, writing contemporary romance
as well as fantasy and paranormal. However, this was me jumping into erotica.
Although it’s not a huge leap for a romance writer, as erotica is (thankfully)
now an established, popular genre, I took a twist in what was popular in the
genre and what was considered my norm by switching up a D/s relationship so that
the dominant was a woman and the submissive was a man. An alpha male, but still
a sexual submissive.

I loved this story, was passionate about it, had wanted to write something like
this for years, but I struggled against the pull of it because I knew it would
take a giant leap of faith for many of my readers to engage with it. When sales
started out slow, I was not surprised. But word of mouth started circulating and
more people took the plunge, bought the book, and liked it. It was gorgeous and
humbling. I wrote a book I adored, communicated about it openly and honestly,
and prayed my readers would decide to take that plunge with me. So I was utterly
delighted when many did.

I’ve broken other rules, too: I’ve written books where the hero and heroine get
together with little to no drama. My vampires do not burn up in the sunlight
(my Three series). I’ve killed the dog (you’re never supposed to do that, but
don’t despair, I made up for it).

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.
And in doing that, I hope that my readers feel that need and enjoy the passion
that prompted it. 

 

One of my favorite quotes (and things to do) is “dance like no one is watching.”

You do it because you love to do it. Get down, bust your own moves, and enjoy
the heck out of it. I also like to say, “write like no one will be reading.” The
most important part of the process is to do it because you love to do it.

And when you do, bust your own moves.



A version of this article appeared at https://www.audible.com



Kristen Ashley

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3 First-Time Self-Publishing Mistakes to Avoid
By Joaquín Alberto Pineda


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Lessons learned the hard way so you don’t have to.

Finishing NaNoWriMo in 2008 felt like digging my fingers into the earth and
flipping over a mountain. I grit my teeth until they chipped and I shaved years
off my life expectancy.

Or at least that’s what it felt like, and with good reason. After twenty days of
non-stop writing I put down fifty thousand words, more than anything I’d ever
done before. The momentum was such that I wrote another sixty thousand by
December 20th and completed the first draft of my novel MUTEKI – Sendero de los
Campeones (Road of Champions). It was a suitable title for a project that almost
singlehandedly rescued me from the pits of depression. In my mind I was a
champion.

Or at least I was until I published the book and everything went to hell in a
handbasket.

The aftermath of publishing my first NaNo novel in 2011 was a nightmare, a crime
scene, a horror story. And that’s okay. I was exploring new territory, after
all. Just as I was stumbling and fumbling through those first words on November
1st, 2008, I was stumbling and fumbling again as I faced new challenges.

So what went wrong? What was so catastrophic?

Don’t worry. I made you a list.

1. I delivered unpolished work.

The people in charge of printing my book were crystal clear: you have to turn
this in ASAP or else it won’t come out on time. This shouldn’t have been an
issue. If I pitched the book that’s because it’s ready, right?

You’re forgetting that…

2. I never hired a proofreader/editor.

This is embarrassing to say even six years after the fact, but I never bothered
to look into paying an editor. Not even with “exposure”. I didn’t know one, I
was broke, and I thought I would do a pretty decent editing job. Turns out I
didn’t.

Looking back at the novel now, I’m noticing not only typos but pointless scenes,
cringe-y dialogue, characters that change names halfway through, and–worst of
all–sentences mangled by the “replace all” feature.

I promise to talk about this in depth if I ever get the chance. For now, let’s
focus on my next mistake.

3. I didn’t ask for any proof copies.

Proof copies are your best friends. Without those you can’t preview the final
product. That’s why the inside margins of my book were off and some pages came
up blank due to terrible formatting. Some of the books were even missing pages.

But hey. I had a book.

As you can see, my first publishing experience was the work of an amateur and
it’s still a source of mild embarrassment to this day. I only say “mild” instead
of “I am moving to the mountains never to be seen again” because those days were
some of the best in my entire life. I went on local TV and radio, I read at
various conventions, libraries and book stores, I shook hands and took pictures
with the mayor, they wrote about me on newspapers, and I made connections so
valuable that we still talk and work on projects to this day. And yes, I did
finally meet some editors.

Best of all, I could finally puff out my chest and feel like a writer, albeit a
terrible one. Without that confidence and passion I wouldn’t have turned all
this into a positive; you would be reading this on a subreddit for embarrassing
confessions instead. That same gusto is what helped me write five more novel
manuscripts-–three of them NaNo victories–-and around seventy short stories, all
of which are probably still crap but decidedly better than my earlier work.

You will make mistakes. Trust me. Thankfully for us this isn’t hard science.
There are no goal posts. It’s all about being in love with the worlds and the
friends and foes in your head and giving them that breathing space they’ve been
screaming for like a nest full of annoying little baby chicks.

This is indeed the “Road of Champions” not because we’re invulnerable, but
because we are Muteki–”invincible” in Japanese. We will stagger, we will fall,
but at the end of the day and come what may, we will write on and make the best
art we can.

Go on now. Get some scars. Make some mistakes.



A version of this article appeared at http://blog.nanowrimo.org/



Joaquín Alberto Pineda

Joaquín Alberto Pineda is the author of MUTEKI and the upcoming short story
collection Parables From a Stressed Out Artist, both self-published. He’s
influenced by the work of Ernest Hemingway, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Ellroy,
Juan Rulfo, and Raymond Chandler, among others. Joaquín currently resides in
Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, where he works as a high school teacher.
Visit his blog (in Spanish), Facebook (in Spanish), or Twitter (in English).

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The Life of an Audiobook Publisher
By ACX University


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Let bestselling ACX author Kym Grosso show you how she created awesome audio
editions

What really goes into publishing an audiobook? Professional narration can
transform your words into performance art, but great art starts with smart
choices. If you’re hesitating over whether to create audiobook editions of your
work, let bestselling ACX author Kym Grosso dispel the myths and dissuade your
fears.

Go behind the scenes as Kym discusses casting her books, selecting an audition
script, and setting clear schedule and timeline choices. Kym shares how she
gives constructive, clear feedback with her narrator along the way to create a
dynamic production. Lastly, she’ll shed light on how she successfully promotes
her audiobooks to her fans.




A version of this article appeared at http://www.acx.com/landing/acxu



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Understanding Your Audiobook Partner
By ACX University


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Learn how to work with audiobook producers to bring your book to life

On ACX, your audiobook producer is your creative partner, and communication is
the key to creating great working relationships. With your input, he or she will
make acting choices to bring your project to life.

In this episode of ACX University 2017, you’ll meet author Piers Platt and
producer James Fouhey: together, they’ve created nine audiobooks via ACX and
achieved a harmonious working relationship.In this panel, they’ll discuss how
Piers attracted a great partner in James through the audition process,
negotiated terms that made everyone happy, and gave constructive feedback once
the creative process began. By following their example, you’ll be on your way to
a lifelong partnership with the creative community.

A version of this article appeared at ACX University. 

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Celebrating ten years of authors and KDP
By Kindle Direct Publishing


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We asked KDP authors to share the first moment they felt success as
self-published writers

Kindle Direct Publishing has turned ten, and to celebrate this milestone
anniversary we asked KDP authors to share the first moments they felt success as
self-published writers. The answers were incredibly inspiring, ranging from
becoming a bestseller to adding the title of “self-published author” to their
resume to receiving five-star reviews from international readers to hearing
about the impact of their books directly from readers.

Inspired by the stories every author shared, we selected a few authors for a
little surprise – cookies decorated with the authors’ book covers.  

Here’s a look at their stories (and some cookie photos, too!):

Leslie McAdam:

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. But whenever I’d show
anyone my writing or send a query letter, I was immediately rejected. Still, for
fifteen years, I secretly wrote: four novels, several screenplays, poetry, and
other work. After a crisis in my life, I realized that the only thing I ever
wanted to do was be a writer. I got help from a grammar coach and posted my
first novel on a website in 2015. I was so scared to have people read my
writing, because it was personal and vulnerable, but I️ also had this
overwhelming need to connect with readers. That book, The Sun and the Moon,
ended up winning a prize in the world’s largest online writing competition
(75,000 entries). After that, I released a revised and edited version and
uploaded it to KDP. I️ felt like I️ was a real author, finally, publishing it on
Amazon. Two years and seven books later, I haven’t looked back. While the
release of each book is special, posting the first one felt like success.”



Magan Vernon:

“I first published in 2011 but didn’t really feel successful until 2013. That
was the first time I watched a book sail up the Amazon charts in multiple
countries. I read reviews on amazon.de and .fr (or tried to, since you know,
language) and thought all of these people are reading a story written by a new
Mom from the Illinois cornfields. People who have never met me and don’t speak
my language. It still gives me chills.”



Nicole J Merchant:

“The first time I felt successful as an indie author wasn’t when I published my
first novel. It wasn’t when I made my first sale or ten sales. It was when I got
a message asking when the next one to my series came out. That was when I knew I
had gained a reader. That was when I felt like I had done something right.”



Annie Bellet:

“I’ve been self-publishing for over 7 years now, but the first time I felt real
success was in 2011 when $$ from my thriller novel paid our rent. Then again in
2014 when I could finally pay all my medical bills. It’s been a strange
rollercoaster.”



Eliza Knight:

“Seven years ago I took a deep breath and hit publish. Now a USA Today
bestseller and accepted to RWA’s Honor Roll! Dreams do come true!”



Barbara Appleby:

“For me it was a letter in the mail from former First Lady Barbara Bush. She was
going to read The Sock Monster to her great grandchildren. That letter hangs on
my wall today.”



Cassie Selleck:

“I published my first novel, The Pecan Man, on KDP in January 2012 and thought
the best I would do was sell to family and friends. Within two years, I was able
to quit my full-time job and live a writer’s life. I have over 3000 reviews on
Amazon, signed with a NY agent, optioned movie rights, sold foreign rights, and
have been translated into two languages. I am in public libraries across the
country and Skype with an average of one book club a week. And ALL of this has
happened because of Amazon’s amazing self-publishing tools.”



Learn More


View All Publish Articles

Get your book in front of more people, build your brand and your audience, and
explore marketing trends and effective tactics from other authors.

Five Tips for Your Goodreads Giveaways
By Cynthia Shannon


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Make the most of running giveaways on Goodreads

Whether you have a book coming out in a few months, want to keep the momentum
going on a frontlist book, or rekindle interest in an older title, Goodreads
Giveaways can help drive discovery and reviews for your books with readers.
Goodreads Giveaways have been used in all kinds of marketing campaigns,
from breaking out a debut authorto continuing the momentum and creating a
runaway bestseller.  
 
With our new Goodreads Giveaways program, we’ve added some top-requested
marketing benefits to our program, and now have two new packages. And for the
first time, Kindle Direct Publishing authors can run giveaways for
Kindle ebooks-a feature previously only available to traditional publishers.  

To help you get the most out of your giveaway, here are five tips:  
 
1. Offer as many copies as you can in a giveaway. 

The more books you give away, the more likely you’ll get reviews. You can offer
up to 100 copies (either print book or Kindle ebook) in a Goodreads giveaway.
With our Kindle Ebook Giveaways option, you no longer have to spend time and
money mailing books to winners as Goodreads handles the distribution for you.
(The cost of the Kindle ebooks are included in the giveaways listing price.)
Another benefit is that winners immediately receive the book upon winning the
giveaway, allowing them to start reading (and talking about) the book much
sooner.  
 
2. Run multiple giveaways in advance of publication. 

To allow time for readers to read and review a book, many authors and publishers
start running giveaways as early as six months in advance of publication. The
earlier you start promoting your title, the more time you have to build up
anticipation. Each giveaway also builds an audience for you on Goodreads as your
book is automatically added to Want-to-Read shelves of readers who enter. When
you run your next giveaway, Goodreads emails those readers letting them know,
which reminds them again about your book.  

3. Get the word out about your giveaway. 

Share the link to your giveaway on your website, via your newsletter, and your
social media accounts. Link to your giveaway at the end of any excerpts you
create online. Just before the giveaway ends, promote the giveaway again so
people don’t miss their chance to win.  
 
4. Spend time crafting your giveaway description. 

You have around 150 characters to hook people in. That’s the amount of copy
shown for each giveaway on the page listing current giveaways. Think about the
words that will prove irresistible to readers and drive them to click “view
details” to learn more about your book. If this is your first giveaway, study
the descriptions of similar books and see what piques your interest.  
 
5. Complete your bio on Goodreads. 

The first few lines of your bio get pulled onto the unique landing page for your
giveaway, along with a “Follow Author” button to allow readers to stay
up-to-date on your activity on Goodreads. We recommend making your bio personal
and friendly, while still drawing attention to any previous success. For
inspiration, look up Adam Silvera, Nicola Yoon, and Michael Finkel on
Goodreads.  
 
Giveaways on Goodreads are a popular and easy way to build awareness and drive
discovery for your book. Treat a giveaway on Goodreads with the same amount of
thoughtfulness as any type of advertising campaign, and start seeing the
benefits. Click here to learn more about how Goodreads Giveaways helps you
leverage the power of word of mouth.  



A version of this article appeared at This article originally appeared on
Goodreads. 



Cynthia Shannon

Cynthia Shannon is an Author Marketing Specialist at Goodreads.

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Writing Insights Part Four: Publishing Your Book
By Hugh Howey


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


if you’re willing to do all of that hard work, the self-publishing route offers
numerous benefits

You’ve decided you want to be a writer. You’ve banged out a rough draft. After a
dozen passes, you’re starting to think any more edits will mar its perfection.
Now what?

Welcome to my fourth and final(?) part of this series on writing insights, where
I go over all the things I wish I’d known about publishing a book before I
became a writer.

Before I begin, it bears mentioning that I’ve written more on this topic than
any other. My blog is one long history of writing about publishing, and the
talks I give are usually about publishing. Attempting to consolidate my thoughts
into ten mere insights has been a task of omission.

So I cheat a little with some insights-within-insights. My goal here is to
distill all my thoughts into the most important advice I can give a writer,
wherever they are on their journey. I wish you the best on yours.
 
Insight #31: Only ONE Publishing Decision is Forever

This is by far my most important insight when it comes to your writing career:
Unless you sign away the right to make future decisions, no publishing decision
is forever.

I can’t overstress the value of this insight. All the insights that follow are
secondary, because if you make this mistake right off the bat, then none of the
rest of my advice matters. Everything is negotiable until you negotiate away
your right to negotiate.

When you sign with a publishing house, you no longer have control of your
published work. You may no longer have control over your writing career. Many
publishing contracts include no-compete clauses that preclude your ability to
publish elsewhere for fear of competing with the work they are acquiring. Some
publishers worry you’ll have too many works coming out in too many places!
Greater market penetration is incorrectly seen by these publishers as a problem.

Great agents can get harmful clauses removed, if you can land a great agent and
your work and name have enough clout to warrant the leverage. But in most cases,
signing with a publisher is the last decision you’ll get to make as a writer
other than to stop writing.

If you don’t like your cover art, you may get stuck with it. If you don’t like
the title they suggest, it may not matter. I’ve had to fight like hell with
major publishers over these decisions, and I’ve lost some of those battles even
with hard-won contracts that stipulate my final approval. The publisher will
always retain the option to drop marketing support or not publish the work at
all. They may even ask to have your advance returned to them.

Assuming you haven’t signed away the rights to your work, no decision you make
today is a final decision. You can always decide later on to sign the work over
to a publisher. This is why signing with a publisher should be the last course
of action you take, because it’s the last one you can take. Exhaust all the
other options first while they’re still available.

Let’s say you followed all the advice in this series, and you wrote twenty
books, and none of them have taken off yet. Guess what? You haven’t done your
career any harm. Nobody has heard of you. Your books haven’t been considered and
rejected by readers, agents, or publishers. They’re still brand new! First
impressions can still be made.

Maybe you’ll go back and give your early works another pass with all of your
acquired writing talents. Perhaps you change titles, or your author name, or the
cover art, or all of the above. You can make your entire oeuvre free for a
period of time to increase your chances of gaining readers. Or make some works
free, some inexpensive, and some priced higher as an experiment. The choices are
all yours. Because you’ve retained them.
Ownership is everything. Once the books are written, you now have a product you
can market and sell for the rest of your life. If you sign ownership away, a
publisher can limit your ability to market and sell your works. This doesn’t
mean signing with a publisher is always a bad choice; it just means you should
carefully consider all avenues before you pull the trigger. In the previous part
of this series I urged you to be patient when it comes to publishing your work;
now I’m urging you to be patient when it comes to how you publish.
 
Insight #32: Understand your goals as a writer

With your final manuscript in hand, you now have two major paths forward:
1) Query agents and publishers
2) Self-publish

The first path means writing query letters, which is like a pitch and a resume
all rolled into the most difficult and uncomfortable single page you’ve ever
written and edited a billion times over in your entire fucking life. You’ll then
send these query letters to dozens of agents and publishers, and hope one or
more of them asks to read a sample (or a full copy) of your work. If an agent
chooses to represent you, you’ll wait as they pitch your project to publishers
(you might have to do numerous rewrites first). If you then get signed, you’ll
work with the publisher to get your work out to market (you might have to do
numerous rewrites first).
It sounds straightforward. It’s nearly impossible.

That doesn’t mean it can’t happen to you. Thousands of books are published every
year, and quite a few of these are from new authors. If you followed all the
previous insights about outworking your peers, putting in the hours to observe
the world around you, study great writing, read voraciously, write furiously and
consistently, then your chances of being one of these authors is quite good. You
may need to write a dozen novels and leave many of them in drawers as you
improve your craft, but this is the price the successful are willing to pay. The
only person stopping you is you.

However … if you’re willing to do all of that hard work, the self-publishing
route offers numerous benefits. The major ones are that you have the creative
freedom to write whatever you like, not what agents and publishers are currently
looking for. Agents and publishers often go through phases and they chase fads;
readers, meanwhile, continue to want books in a wide variety of popular genres.
Urban fantasy and dystopia novels remain very healthy markets, but publishers
have moved on. You don’t have to.

Self-publishing also means keeping more of the proceeds. You can price your
works lower while still earning more per sale. You’re also likely to get more
overall sales due to affordable pricing. Publishing houses have a lot of
overhead and cannot compete with self-published authors on price; I often find
myself recommending a great ebook to friends who balk at paying $12.99 for a
digital book. Many of us remember when paperbacks cost half that.

Another area publishers can’t compete is the frequency of publication.
Publishing houses are glacially slow; you’ll likely be limited to one novel per
year, and your first novel will take a year or more to hit the market. Many
successful self-published authors publish several novels a year (or even more!).
Keeping readers engaged is a massive benefit. You can also follow up successful
works quickly.

Querying and self-publishing. There are other options, but these are the two
main paths open to you. You’ll notice that I left out options like: Get your
books in bookstores. Publish with a large publishing house. Publish with a small
publishing house. Sign a movie deal. Make millions of dollars. Get famous.

The reason I didn’t mention them is because those aren’t options. Those are
opportunities. The only choice you get to make is whether you do this yourself
or whether you try to squeeze through a handful of tricky gates. Which one you
choose will depend on your goals as a writer. Next up, I’ll try to lay out the
best steps forward and the pros and cons for each goal that you might have as a
writer. But first, an insight-within-an-insight:
Most mistakes writers make arise because they want it all. They want a literary
writer’s respect, a presence in bookstores, the glow a major publishing house
bestows, millions of readers, piles of money, awards, movies and TV shows, and a
phone call from Oprah. The hubris that leads us to write in the first place
comes with the kind of psychological baggage that gets overage fees and
well-deserved TSA checks at airports. Greediness leads to terrible career
decisions.

For many years, the authors who achieved all of the above went through the
querying -> agent -> major publisher route. Well, no wonder. That was the only
route at the time. But this has changed. New paths are opening up faster than
stigmas are falling. There are now just as many writers who achieve all of the
above by going it alone as those who query agents. Even with a century-long head
start, the query path is now falling behind.
Having it all is a fine dream, but dreams are things you hope might happen to
you while you’re working toward your goals. Goals are solid and achievable.
Embrace the difference. Don’t stop dreaming, and don’t stop working. Grab your
goals through diligent effort and hope that you get lucky and the rest of your
dreams come to you. This is similar to the old saying that the harder I work,
the luckier I get. Each goal drives you closer to your dreams.

The realistic approach here is to rank your goals in order of importance, and
choose the path that gives you the best chance of netting you your highest
goals. Let’s look now at a handful of goals and my advice for each:

1) Your goal is that you want lots of readers. If so, my advice is to write a
lot of works and give them away for free or on the cheap. Publish on Wattpad,
Medium, Facebook, and all the major ebook retailers. Price as low as possible.
Free has enormous benefits for obtaining a wide readership (more on this later).
Short works are also great for achieving this goal.

2) You crave awards. This is a strange goal to have, but I mention here because
it unfortunately plays into many a writer’s decision making process. The top
awards in many genres used to be unattainable for self-published authors, but
this is changing rapidly. Self-published works have now won most of the literary
awards out there. Hopefully fewer and fewer authors will make poor decisions out
of fear of passing up on acclaim from readers and their peers.

3) You want to be in bookstores. If you want to be in a lot of bookstores,
you’re going to want to go the query route. The chances are still slim, but if
you apply yourself there’s a good chance you can do it. There’s a reason I rank
this almost as low on my personal list as garnering awards, something I go over
in detail in a later insight. For now, it’s worth mentioning that most books
these days are sold online. Getting into bookstores is a vanity goal. Yes, it
can increase awareness and add to sales, but not enough to offset the revenue
lost from a lower royalty rate.

4) Your goal is to land an agent or get a deal with a major publisher. And I
don’t mean as an avenue to any of these other goals (getting readers, making it
into bookstores, making money). Some people have this as a goal, period. They
are willing to have fewer readers and make less money, because the need to feel
validated is stronger than any other goal. The problem I have with this goal is
that there is no validation more important than what you get from your readers.

5) Your goal is to become a full-time writer. When you look at these five goals
objectively, it isn’t a fair fight. If you love writing, what’s better than
having the freedom to do more of it and only it? Earning a living doing what you
love is most people’s goal in all walks of life. If you’re enjoying what you’re
doing, it isn’t work. Becoming a full-time writer means earning money with your
art. While you may think awards and bookstore shelves are a shortcut to making
money, you’d be wrong. The shortcut to both is winning over lots of readers and
being brave enough to put a price on your art. Earn a living first. That’s your
goal. The rest is dreaming.
 
Insight #33: Don’t quit your day job. Yet.

You might think writing a book is a quick path to riches. Books sell millions of
copies, right? This work of yours is genius, and everyone is going to love it,
and you only need to reach a fraction of the billions of people on the planet,
and you’re going to be rich, rich rich!

If you think this, you’re dead wrong and you’re going to be dead broke. Building
to a writing career is a long game. With your first manuscript under your belt,
now is the time to live frugally, find a day job that gives you time to work on
more stories, and keep writing!

If you do this, you stand a chance of transitioning to a full-time career as a
writer. It’s certainly easier now than at any time in human history. That’s
because more of the money readers spend on books now flows to authors rather
than middlemen like bookstores, publishing houses, and agents.
Another insight-within-an-insight here: The only two parties who matter in this
game are the writers and the readers. Everyone else needs to prove their worth.
Do not let headlines about the health of publishers, or the number of
bookstores, or what Amazon or Barnes & Noble are doing, distract you. Care about
readers. Care about writers. Demand that everyone else in the business service
these two groups, and don’t feel bad for those who don’t and go belly-up as a
result.

Readers and writers. Make this a mantra.

Lost amid all the distractions about the health of publishers and bookstores is
the fact that most bestselling authors still have day jobs. Even if you develop
a steady career with a publishing house, and they buy a book a year from you, a
great deal might provide $50,000 per book. This might last six or eight books if
you are very lucky. That’s not a great living, and it doesn’t last for long.
More common than not is what’s known as the “death spiral,” where subsequent
books do less well, so bookstores order fewer copies of the following book. so
advances go down, which means less excitement, fewer books ordered of the
following book, even lower advances, and repeat until you are dropped by your
publisher. This describes the vast majority of writing careers, among the tiny
fraction who get the opportunity in the first place.

Relying on publishing contracts is a difficult way to make a living. Many of the
successful self-published authors I know publish several works a year until they
have a dozen or several dozen titles available. Each of these titles might only
bring in a few thousand dollars apiece per annum, but those streams really add
up. Trickles become torrents. One or more of these titles will usually
outperform the others and really give flow a boost. Sometimes, it’s like a dam
bursts. I’ve seen it happen over and over to hardworking writers.

All this is possible because the cost of materials is plummeting and buying
habits are changing. Audiobooks are now more often than not delivered digitally
rather than on CDs in jewel cases. Ebooks are just electrons, which makes for
fat profit margins. The print book is the outlier, in that per-book printing
prices are worse with modern print-on-demand (or POD) technology. But this is
more than offset by no longer needing to outlay thousands of dollars for a large
batch of printed books which may not sell (or just as bad: having demand but not
enough books).

The lower cost of materials and the generous cut of the retail price provided by
online retailers means you get a tidy sum per book sold. Most retailers pay
about 70% of the list price for ebooks. That means earning over $2 on an ebook
priced at a rock-bottom $2.99! That’s as much as a publishing house pays an
author per hardback sold, if the hardback is priced at $24. You have to somehow
cajole readers into spending ten times as many reading dollars just to earn the
same income!

As a self-published author, it’s best to look at these numbers as if you are a
publisher, because that’s exactly what you are at this point. This makes for an
interesting comparison. When I worked as a bookseller, we paid publishers
roughly 55% of the retail price of their books. Basically, we were getting
anywhere from a 40% to a 50% discount when we made an order. Now I’m on the
other side of this equation; I’m the publisher, and a website like Amazon is the
bookseller. Instead of giving them 40% to 50% of the list price for helping me
make a sale, I’m only giving them 30%. I keep the other 70%, which is much more
generous than the bookstore model.

The modern online bookstore is far more democratic as well. Product pages
between various books look similar. Your book can march up the bestseller list
and be indistinguishable from the biggest names in the game. Going from a career
as a bookseller, and seeing all those spine-out books that nobody would ever
see, to seeing my books on Amazon with a very similar presence to everyone else,
was an eye-opening experience.

So how much can you expect to make as a self-published author? It depends on how
lucky you get. Luck always plays a massive role in these things. But the more
you publish, and the more you hone your craft, and the more attention you pay to
the market and your readers, the luckier you’ll get. It’s almost impossible to
publish twenty works of fiction with great cover art and book descriptions and
not make enough to pay a bill or two every month. It’s possible you’ll make more
than this. The chances here are much better than you’ll find along the querying
route, where most applications are denied before you even get to the
published-book part.

My advice to myself and others has always been to write because you love it, but
position yourself to make a living if possible. The freedoms afforded by
self-publishing allow you to do this. You can work as hard as you need and take
time off when you have to. It’s a lot like starting your own business, with the
same kinds of risks and rewards. The self-published author is his or her own
startup. That might make it sound like there’s a ton of work involved in
self-publishing, which is certainly true, but then there’s this…
 
Insight #34: You’re going to be doing most of the work either way

However you publish, you are going to be doing most of the work if you want to
have any measurable success. This was one of the things I didn’t understand when
I was just getting started. I thought if I worked really hard in the beginning
and got an agent and a publisher that I could eventually “just write.” I still
hear this from authors who shy away from self-publishing. They say they want to
just concentrate on the writing. It would be nice if it worked this way, but it
doesn’t.

When publishers began courting me for my works, some of the things they wanted
to know was how many followers I had on social media, what my plans were to
announce and market my next release, how many writing friends I knew that might
blurb the work for me. They were interested in my blog and my online presence.
Many of the things I hoped a publisher would provide were instead expected of
me.

I have New York Times bestselling author friends with major publishers who have
to pay for their own book tours, their own way to writing conferences, their
promotional material, even additional editing. You won’t hear many authors
complain about their publishers because reprisal is very real and very damaging,
but once you get through the door the chatter is everywhere. There are horror
stories.

I have plenty of horror stories of my own, and my journey has been absolutely
charmed compared to most. I’ve been lucky to work with some amazing publishers.
But painting a rosy picture is a disservice to rising authors.  And I care about
writers far more than I care about publishers. I see many ways in which
publishers can improve, and I want them to improve. I don’t think coddling them
or sucking up to them gives them incentive to make things better. The main thing
forcing publishers to compete and improve today is the explosion in
self-publishing; it’s the first real option writers have had in decades.

My advice to authors along either path – querying or self-publishing – is to
approach both paths in largely the same manner. If you want to query and land an
agent and a publisher, I suggest the same level of revisions and professional
editing that a successful self-publisher employs. Yes, I’m suggesting you hire
an editor before you query. I’m suggesting you invest in the business of
you-as-a-writer.

Working with editors is an opportunity to hone your craft. For some reason we go
bonkers over writers paying for their own editorial services, but people are
applauded for taking cooking classes for the joy of it. Invest in furthering
your education. The bonus is that if you approach the querying path with the
same rigor as a self-published author, you’re going to have a ready-for-market
work sitting right there if you don’t land an agent, or if your agent doesn’t
strike a deal you like.

For self-published authors, the advice is the same: Approach your career as if
you are going to publish with Random House or Hachette. Take your author photos,
your website, your social media presence, your email habits, just as seriously.
You never know, you might end up publishing with a major house one day. Even if
you don’t, author platforms are critical. You should want your cover art,
product pages, and personal pages to reflect the highest level of
professionalism. This doesn’t mean be stodgy. Know your audience and be
yourself. Be playful, sarcastic, sexy, juvenile, dorky, provocative, but do it
with professionalism and self-respect.

All of these things are necessary to become a successful writer, and you’re
going to be expected to do them however you publish. Working with an agent and a
publisher on the query side is similar to hiring an editor and uploading final
copies on the self-publishing route. The difference with the latter is that you
are paying one-time costs for products that you own and profit from forever.
Agents and publishers will continue costing you money, even though they largely
offer the same one-time services.
 
Insight #35: Only YOU have your best interests at heart

I don’t have much cynical advice, because I’m not a cynical guy. I’m an
optimist. That’s why this insight has been one of the biggest surprises I’ve
encountered over the years, and it’s why it’s the saddest for me to relate. But
it’s the honest truth, and your career depends on understanding it.

You will have many publishing partners over your career, and most of them will
spend most of their time assisting you in garnering more sales and readers.
These publishing partners will include fellow writers you collaborate with;
retailers you sell through; publishers you sign with; agents you employ;
assistants, editors, and cover artists you hire.
It would be nice to think that your goals will always align, but they won’t. For
instance, your agent might be asked by a publisher to send them the latest thing
in a particular genre. Your project might not be on the top of their list. This
is obvious, but it’s worth keeping in mind. When you work directly with a
retailer or a marketer, you know your work is represented to its fullest – by
you. With your agent, you need to hope this is the case. You aren’t in the room
when discussions are being made.

The far worse realization is that your own publisher often has conflicting
interests. Every publisher has “frontlist” titles. These are works that get the
highest level of promotion (they are situated early in quarterly release
catalogs, hence the name). If your work is not frontlisted, it won’t be pushed
as heavily as those that are.

Where this gets especially nasty is when you would love to discount your
published works to boost sales, but publishers will not allow it. This is
because they worry about gutting sales of current releases by making backlist
titles too inexpensive. The number one complaint I hear from authors about their
publishers is the inability to discount their works.
This is what I mean when I say the decision to publish may be the last decision
you ever make. You think all future decisions will be for your benefit, but
there are conflicts of interest. A new release from a hot new author may take
precedent over the book you released last year that didn’t do so well.
Publishers will always pin their hopes on the next new thing rather than figure
out how to give backlist titles another chance. This is a massive flaw in their
business philosophy, and one you shouldn’t expect them to fix anytime soon.

There’s also the problem of staff turnover. The editor who excitedly purchases
your manuscript may not be around for its release and marketing, or be there
when it’s time to negotiate for a sequel. You’d think this would be a rare
occurrence; it’s not. I’ve watched editors shuffle within and between publishers
like a game of three card monte. It’s not uncommon to find yourself down the
road with an editor who hasn’t read your work, or find yourself jumping between
publishing houses along with your favorite editor, which means fewer
cross-promotional opportunities. Think about this when you sign away lifetime
rights; a lifetime is a lot longer than these editors spend on any one rung of
their careers.

Having been a little cynical, let me now give you some hope. There are fantastic
agents and publishers out there; I’ve been very lucky to work with a few. The
right agent will more than make up for their 15% commission. The right publisher
can help boost your career. In both cases, however, you’re better off when you
can approach them from a position of power.

Here’s your next insight-within-an-insight:

YOU hire your agent and your publisher, not the other way around.

That’s right: they work for you! Too many writers get this the wrong way around,
and it leads them to accepting the first offer of representation they can land,
or the first publishing deal they can get. I’ve made this mistake in the past. I
was lucky in that my first attempt to query led very quickly to a publishing
contract. I was even luckier to get the rights back to that work. That work has
since won me many readers and made me a lot of money. But early on, I thought I
was the one getting hired. I had it all backwards.

Once I figured it out, I stopped looking for agents and publishers. I
concentrated on finding readers. They are my real boss; I work to keep them
entertained and informed. After amassing a lot of readers, I started getting
inquiries from agents, and now I could have my pick. This is exactly how it
should work. Agents and publishers can boost an existing career more readily
than they can create one from scratch. Hire the best. Put them to work for you.
 
Insight #36: Understand the market

Books are no longer just printed tomes. You may prefer to read print books or
ebooks, but don’t let this bias close you off to a large segment of readers.
Audiobooks are exploding in popularity. Ebooks sales have overtaken print books
in most genres. And print books still rule when it comes to book signings and
many promotional opportunities.

Each medium has its readers and its advantages. And there is plenty of
crossover. Keep the physical limitations that some readers have in mind. Not all
readers live near a bookstore, or have the eyesight for the small print of most
published books, and some have no eyesight at all. Ebooks have been a boon for
older readers, both for the large print and the weight reduction. Audiobooks
have opened up worlds for the visually impaired. Online shopping and home
delivery are the only option for millions of readers.

The point is to not assume and to not let your personal reading biases color
your professional writing decisions. Instead, treat the trifecta of book
publishing as equal sides on a triangle: Print books, ebooks, and audiobooks.
You should offer all three formats to your readers, and give all three formats
your close attention.
 
The Self-Publishing Trifecta: Ebooks, Print, and Audio

Of the three dominant book formats, Ebooks are the simplest to create, but it’s
easy to get them wrong. You can upload an edited word document right to KDP and
other ebook retailers, but automated conversion can make many mistakes. I highly
recommend using an ebook formatter like 52 Novels to create perfect ebook files.

You’ll want two types of file formats: .epub and .mobi. The former is used by a
larger number of retailers. The latter is used by Amazon, which means it’s used
by a larger number of readers. Mobi files are basically .epub files with a few
added features. A must-have tool for converting these file formats is the free
program Calibre. Consider supporting the developers of this program as you begin
to rely on it. It’s pure gold.

There are countless outlets for your ebooks, including the ability to sell them
directly through your website. In order of popularity (ie sales), the top
options are: Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform, Apple’s
iBookstore, Barnes and Noble’s Nook store, and Kobo. There are also aggregators
like Direct to Digital and Smashwords, which allow you to upload to a single
place to reach multiple outlets. But I find the control and better royalty rates
makes uploading to each site separately more than worthwhile.

I’m sure this sounds daunting, but it really isn’t. Learning how to write a
query letter and researching which agents to send them to (and keeping track of
your submissions and responses) is far more work. You can learn to publish on
Amazon’s KDP site in a single weekend, and the ebook will be available to
readers by Monday. If you have an Amazon account, you already have a KDP
account. It’s the same login and password. You just need your polished and
edited work and some cover art.
 
Print books are a little trickier to create, but not much. You’ll want to
generate a PDF of your book. (Two PDFs, actually. One will be the interior; the
other will be the full cover wrap, which includes the front, spine, and rear in
a single splay). The great thing about PDFs is that they print just how they
look. What you see on your screen is what you’ll see on the printed page. You
can use a company like the aforementioned 52 Novels to create your PDF, or you
can learn to play around with it on your own. I love and have used 52 Novels,
but I’m a huge advocate for doing it yourself. For me, the layout of my print
book is the final interface between me and my readers. How the fonts look, how
the words are spaced, which sentences end on certain pages, how hyphens are
used, all of this is as important to the reading experience as the words
themselves.

The best artists stretch their own canvases and have opinions on which way is up
when the painting is hung, how it is lit, how prints are matted and framed. The
same can and should be true of authors. If you take your career seriously,
consider learning about kerning, widows and orphans, pagination techniques,
typography, even book binding. Even if you don’t do these things yourself,
you’ll have the vocabulary and knowledge to communicate with those you hire to
do it for you. This goes back to our insight in part one of this series about
standing out from your peers by working harder than them.

The way your print books will be created and sold is different from what
self-published authors had to do in the past. Gone are the days of ordering
boxes of books that sit in your garage and that you sell out of the trunk of
your car at trade shows. Now we have print-on-demand technology. This is partly
a miracle of printing automation, but mostly a miracle of on-time production and
delivery. Soon after uploading your book in PDF form to a print-on-demand
facility, your book will go on sale. When a customer buys a copy, the book will
be printed, bound, and shipped that same day. You’ll get a percentage of the
sale in a month or two. This means your books never go out of print, and you
don’t spend money on tons of books that go unpurchased.

There are a few print-on-demand companies out there, but only two that I
recommend you look into. Lightning Source is one owned by Ingram, and they
provide a lot of options on trim size (the height and width of your book), and
binding (hardback, paperback). They can make your work easily orderable by
bookstores (though almost no bookstore will make an order unless you talk them
into it in person, or a reader goes in to order a copy rather than get it
online). The disadvantage of upfront cost at Lightning Source is partly offset
by a higher per-sale payout compared to the other option I recommend.

That other option is CreateSpace, which is owned and operated by Amazon. This is
by far my runaway choice for my own works, and it’s the one I would recommend to
most writers for most purposes. The simple fact is that most books are now
purchased on Amazon, and CreateSpace provides a tightly integrated experience
for both you and your customers (the readers). Your print books will show up on
the store more quickly, and they’ll never show a low stock quantity. They’ll
ship faster (especially to Prime members), and they’ll sometimes go on sale
while giving you the same percentage of profits. You can also order copies for
yourself directly from CreateSpace for direct sales, author events, and book
signings.
Since you own your rights, feel free to try both and compare. Or use both, one
for Amazon sales and the other to make your books available through Ingram’s
network of distributors.
 
Audiobooks are the biggest challenge, both in getting them right and affording
someone who can get them right for you. A professionally narrated audiobook can
cost a self-published author several thousand dollars. It takes a lot of sales
to earn that back.

Cheaper options exist, including narrating the work yourself. Some authors have
built a career on their podcasted auidobooks. You can also try to sell audiobook
rights to publishers based on the sales of ebooks and print books, but this can
take time and the rates won’t be as good as doing it yourself. The production
quality will likely be very high though.

The best option for high quality and low price is to go through Amazon’s ACX
platform. This is a self-publishing platform for audiobooks. The ACX platform
helps authors match up with narrators. You can pay them outright for the work
and keep the royalties for yourself, or you can share the royalties evenly with
narrators who do the work at no upfront cost. This is a great way for authors on
a budget to offer options to their readers. But my advice is to save up and pay
for great narration on your own. It’s an investment in your career, and it will
almost always pay off in the long run.
If you look at my advice above, the trifecta of book formats comes down to a
trifecta of Amazon offerings: KDP for ebooks, CreateSpace for print, and ACX for
audiobooks. This is no accident. Amazon has become by far the #1 outlet for book
sales in all formats. This is where readers are getting their stories, and
Amazon has worked hard to improve the author and customer experience at all
three platforms. I’ve used every outlet out there, and my current advice is to
focus on this trifecta. Of course, that could change in the future. Which leads
us to my next insight…
 
Insight #37: The Modern Book is Forever

One of the truths about modern publishing that’s almost impossible to fully
appreciate is that books are now on the market for the rest of time.
I list this insight very high on my reasons to self-publish, and I owe this
insight to my years as a bookseller. Part of my job at the bookstore was to
shelve all new incoming books from publishers. A less enjoyable part of my job
was to then box up unsold books and ship them right back to those very same
publishers.

The average time a book spent on a shelf was around six months. Some only lasted
three months, at which time the next batch from the quarterly catalogs arrived.
It was rare that a book spent a year on the shelf. Most books that end up on the
store shelves for longer are age-old classics or the mere handful of top
bestsellers that are destined to become classics.

This is one of the heartbreaking things to watch from the inside, especially
when you appreciate all the obstacles authors overcame to get this far. To miss
their chance to find a readership and only get a few months spine-out on a
bookstore shelf is downright depressing. Working in a bookstore and seeing this
day after day helped me lower my expectations as an author, and it made me
steadily devalue the ability to get into bookstores at all. I realized those
shelves were not a panacea for sales and readership.

You might console yourself by pointing out that these returned books are always
available online, but this is only as long as publishers keep printing them.
Unfortunately, they don’t do this forever. Not all publishers take advantage of
print-on-demand (POD) technology, so some books just disappear in paperback form
and remain as ebooks only. For the authors whose primary goal is getting into
bookstores, you may sign over lifetime ownership of your art for a mere three
months of spine-out visibility. This is why goals and dreams must be kept
separate. Careers can implode when they aren’t.

If you self-publish, your works will be available forever. This is why the long
goal of writing a dozen or more novels is viable. When one takes off, all the
other works are still fresh. The online retailer’s algorithms will make sure
readers know about your other works. Success seems to come all at once to
authors who amass a library of quality titles. The great thing about today’s
publishing tools is that if you don’t give up on yourself, the technology won’t
either.
 
Insight #38: Diversify! (And consolidate)

This insight goes against much publishing advice and a lot of common sense, but
I strongly suggest that you refrain from writing in the same world and about the
same characters over and over. The only time to do this is if your first release
has a massive amount of success. If this happens, keep striking while the iron
is hot and turn your work into a long series.

A big mistake I see from too many aspiring writers is to follow up their first
work with a sequel, and turn that into a trilogy, and write a fourth and fifth
book while they plan their sixth and seventh.

There are three reasons we fall into this trap. The first is that ex nihilo
creation is more difficult than working with something we already have, and
writers tend to be paradoxically lazy when it comes to creativity. The second is
that all writers are readers, and as readers we love revisiting beloved
characters and worlds if possible (and now that we’re the writers, it’s very
much possible). The third reason we fall into this trap is that we witness the
major successes from the publishing world, and those authors seem to release
another book in their same series year after year.

The problem with this third reason is selection bias. Publishers reinvest in
their rare first-time successes, and they ask for more of the same and heavily
promote these lucky authors. This means we naturally end up with big careers
based on book series that run out of numbers and letters for their thematic
titles. The self-published author is unlikely to have success with their first
title, but they have as a filtered example from publishers the careers of those
who were fortunate in this regard. All the authors who didn’t have this one-off
success are gone and invisible, not to be emulated.

If you fall into the trap of writing a series out of the gate, the problem
you’re creating is that you have to promote the same first book in the series
with every new release. If it hasn’t taken off yet, it might not ever. Your
writing is going to get stronger, but that first book isn’t. You’re left hoping
that readers will force their way through to where the series really takes off.
Don’t hope. Plan.

Plan on writing many great books about many awesome characters. Plan on writing
three different trilogies in three different genres. Sequels aren’t bad; in
fact, they can be critical to your success. What’s bad is only giving readers a
handful of avenues into your imagination. Give them as many onramps as possible.
Write short stories as well as novels. Write in different genres. Experiment and
adapt to your sales and any critical feedback.

This is where we can emulate publishers. Major publishers invest in a wide
variety of books, publish them all, and see what sticks. They reinvest in those
that do. You should adopt the same strategy.

At the same time that I suggest you diversify your books, I highly recommend
that you consolidate your brand. The only good reason I know of for multiple pen
names is to keep adult work separate from all-ages work. If you write in
different genres, don’t assume it’s necessary to keep up with multiple pen
names. Readers are far more adventurous and diverse than publishers give them
credit for – most of my readers read right across my various genres. All it
takes to distinguish your content is appropriate cover art and product
descriptions. Diluting your name is a huge mistake. It robs you of the advantage
of critical mass when something takes off.

While I’m on the topic of diversifying and critical mass, I should mention my
habit of serializing some of my novels. I’ve been hugely influenced by comic
books and television, both of which offer lengthy plot arcs made up of smaller
plot arclets (to coin a word). This works well if you can make each arclet a
satisfying and holistic experience. Each arclet should have its own beginning,
middle, and end. If not, you risk upsetting readers and appearing as if it’s a
ploy to maximize profits.

What serializing really does is maximize visibility. WOOL, SAND, and BEACON 23
were all originally released in five parts. This meant five times as many
impressions as readers scrolled through bestseller lists. There were other
advantages: I could price these works more affordably, which served to draw in
more readers to the first part. If I lost readers there, they save money in the
long run, and I end up with superfans by parts four and five.
But the biggest advantage is all the creative advantages. More parts means more
plot climaxes. It means nail-biting cliffhangers. It means being able to shift
the tone and perspective between entries. It means more frequent releases, so
the passion remains high both in you, the writer, as well as the reader.
Amazon’s algorithms in particular love new releases, and so serialized works
continue to tickle that beast’s digital belly.

All of this was discovered by accident when I followed up a short story, WOOL,
which was taking off on its own. I was writing a wide variety of stories, and
when I saw one gain steam, I started shoveling coal. You might discover a very
different insight through your own experimentation. The point is that you never
know what will work, so don’t limit yourself to one or two ideas. Be creative.
Experiment and adapt.
 
Insight #39: Packaging and Retail Decisions

The adaptability mentioned above is possible because of the flexibility we now
have with story packaging. The words that form our stories are important, but
how they are packaged and delivered is equally important. A great example of
this is among audiobooks, where aficionados look for their next purchase by
searching for their favorite narrator, rather than their favorite author. That’s
a packaging decision, and it can overpower every ounce of your writing efforts.

There are so many other examples. Take your print and ebooks, and the sudden
shift in philosophy behind cover art. That shift occurred the moment online
booksellers took off, and suddenly your print and ebooks had to stand out while
being seen online as a mere icon. If you can’t grab readers’ attention with your
online packaging, the story you slaved to write may never get a chance.

The size of online cover art is why typography has become so critical, far more
critical than the artwork. I urge authors to stay away from thin, cursive fonts.
They will disappear when readers see the cover on Amazon as they’re scrolling
through lists of books. Your name and the title should jump out. The biggest
mistake I see (and have made) with cover art is to think you need a fancy
illustration. After laboring over this illustration, or shelling out big bucks
for the art, the author’s name and the title shrink to the top and bottom of the
book, terrified of obscuring the artwork. This is completely backwards. Cover up
that artwork. Splay your name and title in big block letters right on top of it.
Take time once a month to scroll through the bestseller lists in your genres to
see what jumps out at you and what looks half-baked. Study these examples.
You’ll note most major publishers slap their typography right over the art. Most
successful self-published authors do the same.

Here’s a trick you can try with any of your cover art ideas or existing novels:
Bella Andre and I were at a book conference once, and she’d given a talk about
her cover art (she does her own, and it’s some of the best in the biz). That
afternoon, a young writer came up to us with a copy of her novel and asked us
what we thought of her cover. It wasn’t bad as a print book, and ten years
earlier it would’ve have affected this author’s career. But for a modern book,
it was a disaster. To show her why, I took the book and began walking away from
the author and Bella. I asked Bella to stop me when the book was “Amazon size.”

“Further,” Bella said, waving me back. “Keep going. More. Back, back. Okay,
right there.”

She turned and looked at the author who had come to us for advice. Suddenly, we
could both see that this writer no longer needed the advice. She saw what we
saw. That is, she saw what readers were going to see online. “Got it,” she said,
nodding, with the sort of can-do attitude that let us know she’d go back to
work, punch up the typography, and get a new version out there.

I’ve gone through several packaged versions of my works over the years. HALF WAY
HOME is on its third cover. The WOOL OMNIBUS has had four. My MOLLY FYDE series
has a new set of covers from one of my favorite artists. THE HURRICANE and THE
PLAGIARIST are also different from the originals. It doesn’t cost much to make
these changes. For publishers, the cost would be prohibitive. They only do this
when a book has a movie tie-in, or hits a major list or gets unreal blurbs it
wants to add. Anniversary and special editions, that sort of thing.

But you can change your covers on a whim. An unintended side effect of this? You
create collector’s items out of print-on-demand books. I’ve seen some copies of
the original WOOL novelette sell for hundreds of dollars. For a little fifty
page book! It’s not just the monetary value either. Early readers of my MOLLY
FYDE series take great pride in the original copies with the old cover art. It’s
proof and reminder of when they got into the books.

There’s so much more we can do with print-on-demand, so much untapped potential.
You could celebrate a particular month like Black History Month, or put out a
limited edition tied to a charity and give the proceeds for that month to the
cause. You could update the cover every month with a different reader’s Amazon
review blurbed on the cover, and then send the fan an offer of a free copy (this
might held encourage more reader reviews). How about including a doodle in the
book that animates as you flip through it, down in the corner of the book like
those flip-books we made in school? You could commission one of these from an
artist to celebrate an anniversary of release or a sales milestone. Show it off
to readers and offer it for a limited time.

I remember a challenge I had years ago, when I had the opportunity to speak at a
Boing Boing event and give away something in their swag bag. These were
tech-savvy folks, and I thought about a flyer with a download link for some of
my ebooks, but how boring is that? I wanted to get creative and make them feel
like they’d received something special. So I had some business-card-shaped USB
drives custom printed to look like ID badges worn in the silos of WOOL. They had
a fallout symbol on them and were made to look worn and old. I loaded the full
trilogy on the drives and included instructions on how to sideload the files to
pretty much any reading device.

The fallout USB drives were a massive hit. When my readers saw them, they wanted
to know how to get one of their own. So I had to print up another batch and sell
them direct from my website. When orders came in with requests that I sign the
drives, I realized what I’d inadvertently done: I’d given substance to
electrons. I could now sign and give away my ebooks. The packaging drove sales
and awareness.

Ebooks, audiobooks, and POD have allowed short fiction to become viable again.
As long as the price is commensurate, and the shopper is well-informed, we no
longer have to write for the very limited scope of old-school physical
packaging. But it’s not just short fiction that’s affected. One of the most
powerful tools in marketing and sales these days is the ability to delivery LOTS
of written words all at once.

Multi-author boxsets are allowing dozens of writers to hit national bestseller
lists by combining their marketing powers. It’s also possible to include every
book you write into a single product, selling this library of works at a
discount. In the old way of publishing, every page cost money. Publishers would
shrink down the font and squeeze the margins to save pennies per copy (resulting
in a worse reading experience!). And if the author sent in a manuscript that was
too short, the publishers would spread the text way out to justify the same $25
price on the hardback. There was no creativity with the containers. Bean
counters decided the package, and the authors and editors were forced to comply.

But now you can add as much content as you like to your works. Do you have a
rough draft that is wildly different from the original? Include it at the end
for a behind-the-scenes look. The reader can skip it or peruse it; their choice!
Did you cut out a lot of scenes from your epic fantasy to improve the reading
experience? Maybe punch those up and release them as short stories, or tack them
on at the end of the book! Write a blooper reel for your novel that comes after
the credits. (Has anyone done this yet? Why not!).

The point of all these ideas is that we are creatives. That’s what we’re trying
to make a living doing. So be fucking creative. There is no box to think outside
of anymore. Stand out.
 
Insight #40: The Power of Free

When I completed my first book, all I wanted was to have it read by as many
people as possible. My goal wasn’t to make a lot of money; I just wanted to see
if a full-time career might be possible. So I emailed the draft out to anyone
willing to read it, and I made a plan to serialize the book for free on my blog.
I knew of a few science fiction authors who did something similar; a couple of
them had released their books as weekly audio podcasts.
In the end, I was pressured by some early fans to submit the manuscript to
publishers. I was told that giving my book away for free would harm my career,
not kickstart it. One of the early mistakes I made as a writer was to listen to
people who weren’t having any luck along the querying route and follow their
lead. I should have trusted my gut and my observations of those who had broken
convention and had found success.

Giving away my work turned out to be a very powerful tool indeed. In the early
days of Amazon’s KDP service (their online ebook platform for self-publishing),
they provided a handful of “free days” for every 90 day enrollment period. KDP
authors soon learned that giving away their works led to more sales. The danger
in the arts is not in having your works devalued; it’s having your works
undiscovered.

Free has other advantages, ones long ago discovered by sales forces in other
industries. Free lowers the barrier to entry. It’s like an app you can download
on a whim, and if you love the demo, you can pay for more levels. My first WOOL
story has been made permanently free, with the hopes that those who enjoy it
will seek out more. When WOOL was first taking off years ago, readers joked that
I was a digital crack-dealer, giving away samples. It was a terrible analogy!

It was also a perfect analogy.

Another benefit to free is market research. People who don’t like something
offered for free are less likely to leave a bad review than those who paid a lot
of money and were dissatisfied. Reader reviews have become the single most
powerful force driving book sales. The road to going viral with your works
relies on writing a work that elicits raves from readers. Pulling this off is
harder than you can possibly imagine. Free books will help keep review averages
high, and hopefully get word-of-mouth started. I remember seeing people on
social media urge their friends to read WOOL, and part of their sales pitch to
their friends was that it was short and didn’t cost much.

Free has always been controversial. Many writers hate the idea of free, and most
publishers don’t understand its power. Neil Gaiman once fought tooth and nail
with his publisher to give away copies of his book AMERICAN GODS. It wasn’t
selling as well as he thought it should, so he wanted to just let readers enjoy
it online at no cost. His publishers balked, but Neil persisted. To humor him,
they agreed to do it for a month. During this month, paid sales of AMERICAN GODS
increased 700%! Neil was vindicated and thrilled, but his publisher had spent
the month agonizing over all the “lost sales” of each free download. At the end
of the month, they terminated the experiment. Paid sales dropped back down.
They’d somehow seen enough by not paying attention.

The new controversy is all-you-can-read services like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited.
Some authors loathe the service, and most publishers refuse to participate. It’s
the same debate I saw play out over free books years ago. Kindle Unlimited
allows readers to pay a $9.99 monthly subscription and then read as many books
as they want. This has been a boon to voracious readers, and a bonanza for the
authors who get discovered and paid through the program. The problem with Kindle
Unlimited, for an author, is that they have to make their works exclusive with
Amazon. Hence the balking from many authors.

Exclusivity is my last insight-within-an-insight, and it’s related to the
paradox of free. Just as free can lead to more paid sales, limiting the
distribution of your books can lead to more readers. This may not always be
true, but the current publishing market certainly makes this the case today.
It’s been the case for most authors over the last two years.

Let’s imagine that Barnes & Noble offers to carry your book, but you can’t make
it available anywhere else. If you agree to this, they’ll put your book in the
store window and run special promotions on your book to drive lots of in-store
sales. Most authors I know would jump at the chance, even though it meant not
being available on Amazon, or in small independent bookstores. The opportunity
to stand out and win special bookshelf placement is worth taking books out of
markets where they are practically invisible. This is how Kindle Unlimited
works. You trade exclusivity for greater visibility in the number one bookstore
in the world.

This may not always be the case as more distribution options become available.
The point here is not that Kindle Unlimited is a shortcut to success, or that if
you give your books away for free you’ll make lots of money. My point with free
and Kindle Unlimited is that some of the best decisions you make in publishing
will be illogical on their surface. You have to be brave and experiment; try
different things. The beauty of our first insight in this part of my series is
that you didn’t rush off and give away your freedom to make these decisions. You
can jack up the price of that free ebook and one day make it free again. You can
take your ebooks out of Kindle Unlimited and see if other distributors  have
upped their game. You can put them back into KU at any time.

The choices are all yours. The technology is waiting. Readers are waiting. You
are lucky, because there’s never been a better time in human history to be a
reader or a writer. And there’s never been more ways to bring these two parties
together.
 
Bonus Insight: The secret to marketing

There’s one more facet to publishing not mentioned very much in this series, and
it’s something I’m saving for a future series on book publishing, and that’s
marketing. The secret to marketing is to not market so much. Don’t spend time
marketing that you could otherwise spend writing. There is no marketing force as
powerful as another book to publish. Period. End of story. Mic drop. Please make
me stop repeating myself.

This doesn’t mean marketing isn’t important. It just means that marketing can
more easily get in the way of success as it can provide a path to it. I’ve seen
too many writers market the hell out of their first novel, or first trilogy, and
get frustrated with disappointing sales and never write the work that would’ve
gone viral on its own if they’d just kept pressing forward.

Go back to my first part of this series and you’ll see the advice I give to have
the long view, to write twenty novels before you analyze your potential to make
a career of this. I mean every word of that. This detachment from sales will
allow you to persevere. When you see a writer blaze past you on the road to
successville, understand that they are lapping you because they set out a long
time before you even laced up your writing shoes. You didn’t see them go through
the same struggles you’re going through now. You don’t know their full history
any more than they know yours. Assume those histories have much in common.

The time to start marketing is when you have lots of works to offer, or one of
your works takes off, or you land a special deal somewhere with an agent or
publisher or media outlet. Until then, the way to market is to be yourself and
to put that self out there. Get engaged in the writing community. Use your
writing to make a mark on social media and your blog. Lay a foundation on which
future marketing endeavors may rest. The goal isn’t to sell your works but to
establish yourself. Much more to come in my marketing insights series, which I’m
not even considering a part of this series, because you shouldn’t be thinking
about it.

You should be thinking about writing.

So what are you doing here?

Get to it.

Finish what you start.

Work on your craft.

I believe in you.

Believe in yourself.



* This is the fourth in a four-part series. Read the rest:

Writing Insights Part One: Becoming a Writer

Writing Insights Part Two: The Rough Draft

Writing Insights Part Three: The Revision Process

  A version of this article appeared at The Wayfinder.

Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde saga and the New York
Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series. The WOOL OMNIBUS won the Kindle
Book Review 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award.

Learn More
The power of podcasts
By Glen Tate


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Appearing on podcasts increases sales … and it’s a whole lot of fun.

Glen Tate published the ten-book 299 Days series in audio back in 2014. Since
that time he’s amassed a 4.4 rating over 5,910 reviews. One of Glen’s most
effective promotion tactics has been to regularly appear on podcasts related to
his specific “prepper” genre. Here he shares his process for booking guest spots
to discuss his books on popular podcasts.

I am not a full-time author. I’m an attorney in Olympia, Washington, who
happened to sit down and write a ten-book postapocalyptic fiction series called
299 Days. I was surprised to learn about several aspects of publishing and
marketing these books—one of which was the power of podcasts to sell books to
niche markets.

Like many ACX authors, I don’t have a large marketing budget or a team of people
getting me guest spots on media outlets. I have to do it on my own and
preferably for free.

In order to understand how podcasts can help audiobook sales, you need to
understand that my books appeal to a particular audience: people who wonder what
life would be like if normal American society disrupted. Podcasts are perfectly
suited to speak to niche audiences with specific interests. There are tens of
thousands of podcasts on everything from birdwatching to javelin throwing to
1980s heavy metal bands. As an added bonus, podcast fans are listeners, making
them the perfect audience for audiobooks.

Once I realized that podcasts could be a great venue for promoting my
audiobooks, I set about figuring out how to connect with various hosts and get
booked as a guest. Here’s how I did it…

From Author to Guest Star

I thought about the podcasts I listen to in my area of interest, and several
dozen came to mind. To determine which podcasts I wanted to be on, I looked at
my own phone and saw which ones I’d listened to in the last month. I then
searched for them in iTunes, which suggested several similar programs. I wrote
down a list on a sheet of paper. New podcasts pop up all the time, so I
periodically asked readers on my books’ Facebook page to tell me which podcasts
they listened to and added them to my master list.

At first I thought it would be hard to get onto a podcast. I was wrong. As I
learned, podcasters are dying for content. Almost all podcasts have an e-mail
address or a “contact us” web form. I simply told them who I was and included a
link to my books on Audible. This is important, because no one wants to listen
to someone who talks about “someday” publishing a book.

I started small. No podcast was too small for me. I appeared on podcasts with
two hundred downloads. But after a while, I was regularly on podcasts with a
hundred thousand or more downloads. Keep in mind that these are downloads from
people who are already interested in the narrow topic of your book. It is
perhaps the most precisely tailored marketing you can do.

Once I got on a few podcasts, I reached out to additional hosts and sent them
links to my previous appearances. This was a great way to assure them that I
could string a sentence together and was an interesting guest. This brings up an
important point: Do you need to be a dazzling speaker and have a great “radio
voice” to be on a podcast? Nope. If you can hold a conversation, you can be a
guest on a podcast. That’s all a podcast interview is: you and the host having a
conversation about your book.

It’s also important to note that you don’t need special equipment or a
computer-programming degree to appear on a podcast. A cell phone (or better yet,
a free Skype account) and a good headset with a microphone is all it takes.

The total time required to do a podcast ranged from one to two hours. The
interview took between twenty minutes and an hour, and once it was produced, I’d
get an e-mail with a link to the episode.

I also wanted to help the podcasters who had just helped me. I let them know
that I would publicize my appearance on their show to my readers and listeners.
This was as easy as posting a link to the podcast on my Facebook page and
e-mailing it to my e-mail list. Podcasters absolutely loved me promoting their
shows and often told me that they gained listeners every time I appeared as a
guest. I would then ask them to e-mail their friends with similar podcasts and
encourage them to have me on.

It worked. I have appeared on thirty-four podcasts and recorded 114 episodes.

I found that it was important to keep track of every podcast I appeared on and
put a link to each one on my books’ website. Putting each podcast on my website
showed that I was an experienced podcast guest and assured hosts that I’d
publicize their shows. Readers of my books can hear me whenever they want, while
also discovering new podcasts they might be interested in. And it helped me
quickly find an episode link and post it on Facebook or e-mail it to my list.
You can find two of my favorite appearances here and here.

I have strong anecdotal evidence that appearing on podcasts increases sales.
Direct evidence is hard to come by because I appeared on numerous podcasts each
month. However, dozens of readers have mentioned that they heard about the books
on a podcast. I’ve asked in Facebook posts how people learned of my books, and
almost everyone says via one of my podcast appearances. In fact, a total
stranger recognized my voice when I was talking to someone else in a store.

I’m no marketing wizard; if I can do this, then so can you. I can boil this down
to three takeaways. First, gather a great list of podcasts appealing to your
niche audience. Second, contact the podcasters and be persistent. Finally,
promote your appearances on your website, social media, and e-mail lists.

Oh, and all this has been a whole lot of fun. I’ve become friends with many
podcasters. Now I know these people all over the country, and when I travel on
business, I often have a friend to visit.



A version of this article appeared at ACX.

Photo by Jonathan Velasquez on Unsplash

Glen Tate

Much like the main character in his series, Glen Tate is a forty-something
resident of the capital of Washington State, Olympia, and is a very active
prepper. He grew up in the remote logging town of Forks, Washington. Glen keeps
his identity a secret so he won’t lose his job, because in his line of work,
being a prepper and questioning the motives of government are not appreciated.

Learn More
Five ways authors can use Facebook advertising
By Joanna Penn


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Take advantage of every opportunity to reach readers

I’ve got to admit that Twitter is still my favorite social network. It’s how I
connect with influencers and find podcast guests, network with other author
friends, and share information every day.

But after years of resisting, I have now come around to considering Facebook is
the most powerful advertising platform out there because of its laser-targeting
abilities and because most readers are more likely to be on Facebook than
Twitter.

I primarily use content marketing as my main form of attracting readers to my
books and writers to this website, providing useful or entertaining information
through books, blog posts, podcasts, videos, and social media. This type of
marketing takes time rather than money and is great for growing a long-term
business slowly, but if you have a budget, you can use paid advertising to get
things moving a little faster.

So in this article, I’ll go through how I’ve used Facebook Advertising, which
will hopefully give you some ideas for your own situation.

1. Grow your e-mail list

I’m currently running Lead Gen ads and target other writing sites, bloggers,
writing magazines, and authors who write about writing, so my ads appear to
people who Like those types of pages.

Lead Gen ads are entirely within Facebook, so the interested person just has to
click twice to authorize, and then you can access the person’s e-mail in a
downloadable file. You can then upload this file to your e-mail management
system. You can also set up an automation to do this for you.

This type of e-mail growth is probably the best way to spend any advertising
money, as you will be able to develop relationships with those readers over
time, and at some point, they might buy something from you.

2. Sell books directly

There is a certain type of ad based on “Clicks to a website.” That can be your
own website, or it can be a specific sales page (e.g., your book page on Amazon,
iBooks, Kobo, or other stores).

If you have an e-mail list of readers who already like your books, you can do
several cool things on Facebook that help you market your books directly:

a. Upload your list of e-mails into Facebook and create an audience from that
list, which you can then target with ads. So I will e-mail my list about the new
book, but I will also do these kinds of direct ads for a limited time.

b. Create a lookalike list from your e-mail list or your Facebook page, which
you can then advertise to. These people will have a lot in common with your
existing list, and you can further narrow it down geographically or by authors
that the readers like.

c. Advertise to a market segment—for example, women in the United Kingdom aged
twenty-eight to sixty-five-plus who like Dan Brown and read on Kindle.

It’s important to note that it can be difficult to get the right combination of
targeting, audience, and text for the ad, and people who do get it right have
usually tried multiple combinations before doing well with this kind of
advertising.

3. Promote Likes on your author page

I’ve never really been bothered about growing the audience on my fiction
Facebook page before, preferring to let it grow organically. But then I
discovered Audience Insights, which is a reporting function that allows you to
learn more about your audience based on their collective profiles, and you need
a certain number of Likes before the reporting starts to be worthwhile. I’m keen
to find out more about my readers, so this will be useful.

Also, when people Like your page, they may also sign up for your e-mail list
through the Sign Up button, plus you can use the Page Likes to create a
Lookalike Audience for other advertising.

These reasons make it worthwhile for me to grow my Likes faster with paid
traffic, which may impact book sales over time.

4. Promote webinars, summits, and other online events or courses

People don’t usually buy something the first time they hear about you, your
book, or your products. It can take several “touches” or connections before your
advertising filters through their awareness. It’s the same with advertising
online events—for example, webinars, or summits, or online training courses, or
other products.

Because of this, when I have something to promote, I will

 * e-mail my list,
 * share it on social media,
 * share the link on the podcast,
 * do a blog post (like this!), and
 * set up some Facebook advertising for my list and potentially Lookalike lists
   by country and other targeted groups.

Then people will hear about the event in multiple ways, and I will get more
sign-ups through my links. And just to be clear, I make income through affiliate
commission, which means I get a percentage of the sale if someone buys through
my link. This is a common form of online income for high-traffic sites.

5 Promote live events / book signings

When I run live events—for example, workshops on writing—then I will advertise
them on Facebook.

I usually upload my e-mail list and then use geo-targeting (e.g., display only
to people who live in the United Kingdom). If that doesn’t fill up the spaces, I
will do a wider target (e.g., people who live in Bath/Bristol who like writing).

This might be useful to you if you’re running live events and want to sign
people up. I know professional speakers who don’t bother with
blogging/podcasting these days—they just set up an Eventbrite page for their
premium event and then use Facebook ads to let people know about it. If it’s on
a topic people want, that’s all you need to get ample sign-ups.

A version of this article appeared at The Creative Penn

Joanna Penn

Joanna Penn is a NY Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author, a creative
entrepreneur, podcaster, professional speaker, and travel junkie. For more,
visit www.JFPenn.com.

Learn More
How to engage on Goodreads
By Cynthia Shannon


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Five things to remember when engaging with readers

There are many places to interact with readers on Goodreads, includnig Ask the
Author, in the newsfeed where readers post their reading updates, in book
reviews, and in group discussions. Every interaction gets amplified and helps
promote discovery of your titles, so keep in mind that all your actions are for
public consumption. As with any online community, there are some things that
work and some that don’t. Check out our author guidelines, which can help you
identify what works best. Here are some key things to remember: 

• Always practice basic online etiquette, or “netiquette.” Consider including
emoticons to help add personality to your message and set the right tone. Also,
be sure to stay on topic in a conversation and avoid writing in all caps, which
is the online equivalent to shouting. 

• Join groups that interest you. You’ll meet readers who share a common
interest, whether it’s “Cozy Mysteries” or “Biker Book Babes.” Avoid
self-promotion, as your focus should be on the topic of the group, not on
yourself. 

• Provide thoughtful, generous responses when answering questions from readers
in Ask the Author, and contribute general good content in the form of reviews or
group comments. 

• Pace yourself. Respond to one or two questions a day rather than 40 questions
in one Ask the Author sitting. Similarly, it’s easier to actively participate
regularly in two groups than two dozen. 

• Review books. Talk about the books you’re reading, not just the books you’ve
written. Write reviews of the books that most influenced you when you were first
getting started as a writer. 

• Whatever you do, don’t argue with reviewers or try to change their opinions of
your book. If the review violates our guidelines, flag it so we can check it
out. 

Taking the time to get to know readers online and connecting with them on a
personal level will help drive book discovery organically. Readers cherish your
time and attention above all, and with sincere interaction it’s possible to
build a loyal readership that will help you spread the word about your books! 



A version of this article appeared at Goodreads

Cynthia Shannon

Cynthia Shannon is an Author Marketing Specialist at Goodreads.

Learn More
Maximize your Amazon Author Page
by Honorée Corder


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Make yourself and your story easily discoverable

One of the first places I visit (or try to visit) when I discover new authors is
their Amazon Author Page. I want to know about them, their books, and how I can
connect to them on social media. And, lucky for me (and for you), Amazon has
provided a place to do just that.

Even if you don’t yet have your own author website, you can set up your page as
soon as you publish your first book. Visit authorcentral.amazon.com and click
“Join Now.” You’ll be asked to sign in to your Amazon.com customer account. From
there, you will land on the main Author Page, where you can do all sorts of
fantastic things to maximize your page.

Take note of your personal author URL. As an example, you can look at mine:
amazon.com/author/honoreecorder. To find any of your favorite authors, try
substituting their names for mine in the URL (for example:
amazon.com/author/bellaandre). You can also find their pages on Amazon.com by
searching for their names.

Six key elements of your Amazon Author Page

 * Biography: Be sure to include a bio that showcases your books and shares your
   experience, education, background, and personality.
 * Blogs: If you have a blog, you can add the external link. A short excerpt of
   your most recent post will appear on your page.
 * Events: Have a book launch, signing, presentation, or podcast interview
   coming up? Be sure to add it to your page!
 * Author Page URL: Note and share your Author Page URL, which is listed on the
   upper right-hand side of the page. You can add it to your e-mail signature,
   share it on social media, and display it proudly and prominently on your
   website.
 * Photos: Once you’re an author, you’ve got to spring for some professional
   author photos (you never know when you’re going to be featured in print, on
   television, or on the web, and you’ll need a great photo). Of course, you’ll
   want to add them to your Amazon Author Page! Your fans will want to put a
   face with your name.
 * Videos: Have videos of yourself giving a presentation or of a customer or
   reader testimonial? Don’t forget to include them.

Claim your books
When you release a new title, be sure to claim your book. From the main Author
Page, click on “Books” and then on “Add More Books.” You can search by title,
author name, or the book’s ISBN. When your book appears, you’ll see the “This Is
My Book” button underneath it. Just click on it, and very shortly thereafter,
your book will appear on your Amazon Author Page. It takes just about 30
seconds, but when readers visit your book’s detail page, they can easily visit
your Amazon Author Page by clicking on your name.

Amazon has provided authors with the opportunity to create a destination for
fans and prospective readers alike. Take 10 minutes now to set up your page, and
then share it freely.



by Honorée Corder

Honorée is the author of “You Must Write a Book,” “Prosperity for Writers,”
“Business Dating,” “The Successful Single Mom” book series, and more. She is Hal
Elrod’s business partner in “The Miracle Morning” book series. Read more at
www.HonoreeCorder.com

Learn More


View All Market Articles
Inspiration



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Learn how other authors are successfully telling their stories and finding their
readers.
The Secret To This Romance Author’s Success? Breaking All The Rules.
By Kristen Ashley


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.

I can safely say that every time I’ve been asked to speak to aspiring writers,
afterward, I’ve had not one, but several come up to me and say, “I can’t believe
you did what you said you did. I was told never to do that. I was told never to
break that rule.” This does not surprise me, but it saddens me. When I started
writing, I too had a set of rules for writing romance (my genre) that I was
under the impression were unbreakable. And I wrote within the confines of those
rules.

It was only when publishing house after publishing house, agent after agent had
rejected my submissions, and I’d decided that no one was ever going to read my
books, that I threw the rules out the window. I then simply wrote what I wanted
to write, wrote how the stories came to me, was true to them and my characters.

Then I published myself … And I’ve sold more than two and a half million books.

What are the rules I broke? First, I didn’t write what I thought people wanted
to read. I didn’t research what might be popular — what might sell — and write
that. I wrote stories that felt personal to me, that I enjoyed completely from
writing to reading. The first book that I did this with was Rock Chick, and with
it and the Rock Chick series, I broke all the rules:

I wrote in first person, and at that time, romance novels in first person were
available, but not customary.

I wrote my heroine’s thoughts in a stream of consciousness. I had paragraphs —
many of them — that were just one word. I put myself, and what would eventually
be my readers, in the mind of my heroine, Indy. Not describing what she was
thinking, but thinking what she was thinking as she was thinking it. It’s
important to note that not everyone could get into that, and that’s
understandable, even expected. It’s also important to note that the ones who
did, really did.

I allowed my characters freedom of expression. This meant that if they cursed,
if the F-word was prevalent in their vocabulary, I let them use it (and cursing
was very rare in romance).

For that matter, I didn’t censor my characters or their behavior. I didn’t
think, “Oh, that might make her unlikeable, I need to switch that up, make her
perfect.” I didn’t water down my aggressive, but loving heroes. I let them be
them — real, imperfect, sometimes annoying, more times endearing (I hoped). They
were great friends and good people, but they could (and often did) do stupid
things (like we all do).

And my Rock Chicks were — and still are — hugely successful.

Once I let myself be free, my writing took off — not only in that people were
reading it, but that I felt at liberty to create how I needed to create. To be
true to what I was doing. It wasn’t about stepping out of bounds for the sake of
it. It was about opening a cage and giving myself the freedom to fly.

In other words, I broke the rules for the sake of the stories. And I didn’t play
it safe after my books started selling; I had to stay true to that process. I
needed to keep spreading my wings, doing this for me, but also to give my
readers something new and fresh, a story I was passionate about so they could
enjoy it right along with me. 

One example of this was when I wrote The Will. 

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write. 

By this time, I was already an established romance writer and had hit the
bestseller lists. But I was certain that The Will would never sell. You see, The
Will had a hero and heroine who were in their late forties. I’d already written
outside what I considered the “romance norm” by writing characters in their
thirties and even early forties. But pushing them close to their fifties and
showing them as sexual, vital, commanding, interesting, with flaws they were
learning to embrace, baggage they continued to carry, and issues they were still
working out (all of this is the case with people of any age) — I figured no one
would read it. I thought that if I didn’t have leads in their twenties or early
thirties, the book would bomb.

What’s more, romance readers expect a lot from their heroines. Give a heroine
even a tiny flaw, this often doesn’t go over well. Many women feel the need to
strive for perfection, and that makes my heart sad — that we can’t accept
ourselves for the beauty of all that we are rather than pushing ourselves to
something that is often unattainable, or even practical, much less something
that, in the end, even if we were able to achieve it, wouldn’t make us
boundlessly happy (but this is for another, far longer piece). And there I was
in this series, putting my heroines in a huge hole they had to dig themselves
out of and making my readers do that work right alongside them.

I still had to tell the story. It wouldn’t let me go. So I did. And The Will was
a Goodreads Choice nominee, hitting #7 in the overall romance vote and it hit
the bestseller lists.

When my readers engaged with me about it, those who were around the age of my
hero and heroine were delighted someone told a story that they could more easily
relate to…but it wasn’t just that. Much younger readers embraced it as well.

Another example where I broke my own rules is in The Deep End. It was a new
genre for me, but I was known for jumping genres, writing contemporary romance
as well as fantasy and paranormal. However, this was me jumping into erotica.
Although it’s not a huge leap for a romance writer, as erotica is (thankfully)
now an established, popular genre, I took a twist in what was popular in the
genre and what was considered my norm by switching up a D/s relationship so that
the dominant was a woman and the submissive was a man. An alpha male, but still
a sexual submissive.

I loved this story, was passionate about it, had wanted to write something like
this for years, but I struggled against the pull of it because I knew it would
take a giant leap of faith for many of my readers to engage with it. When sales
started out slow, I was not surprised. But word of mouth started circulating and
more people took the plunge, bought the book, and liked it. It was gorgeous and
humbling. I wrote a book I adored, communicated about it openly and honestly,
and prayed my readers would decide to take that plunge with me. So I was utterly
delighted when many did.

I’ve broken other rules, too: I’ve written books where the hero and heroine get
together with little to no drama. My vampires do not burn up in the sunlight
(my Three series). I’ve killed the dog (you’re never supposed to do that, but
don’t despair, I made up for it).

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.
And in doing that, I hope that my readers feel that need and enjoy the passion
that prompted it. 

 

One of my favorite quotes (and things to do) is “dance like no one is watching.”

You do it because you love to do it. Get down, bust your own moves, and enjoy
the heck out of it. I also like to say, “write like no one will be reading.” The
most important part of the process is to do it because you love to do it.

And when you do, bust your own moves.



A version of this article appeared at https://www.audible.com



Kristen Ashley

The Secret To This Romance Author’s Success? Breaking All The Rules.
By Kristen Ashley


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.

I can safely say that every time I’ve been asked to speak to aspiring writers,
afterward, I’ve had not one, but several come up to me and say, “I can’t believe
you did what you said you did. I was told never to do that. I was told never to
break that rule.” This does not surprise me, but it saddens me. When I started
writing, I too had a set of rules for writing romance (my genre) that I was
under the impression were unbreakable. And I wrote within the confines of those
rules.

It was only when publishing house after publishing house, agent after agent had
rejected my submissions, and I’d decided that no one was ever going to read my
books, that I threw the rules out the window. I then simply wrote what I wanted
to write, wrote how the stories came to me, was true to them and my characters.

Then I published myself … And I’ve sold more than two and a half million books.

What are the rules I broke? First, I didn’t write what I thought people wanted
to read. I didn’t research what might be popular — what might sell — and write
that. I wrote stories that felt personal to me, that I enjoyed completely from
writing to reading. The first book that I did this with was Rock Chick, and with
it and the Rock Chick series, I broke all the rules:

I wrote in first person, and at that time, romance novels in first person were
available, but not customary.

I wrote my heroine’s thoughts in a stream of consciousness. I had paragraphs —
many of them — that were just one word. I put myself, and what would eventually
be my readers, in the mind of my heroine, Indy. Not describing what she was
thinking, but thinking what she was thinking as she was thinking it. It’s
important to note that not everyone could get into that, and that’s
understandable, even expected. It’s also important to note that the ones who
did, really did.

I allowed my characters freedom of expression. This meant that if they cursed,
if the F-word was prevalent in their vocabulary, I let them use it (and cursing
was very rare in romance).

For that matter, I didn’t censor my characters or their behavior. I didn’t
think, “Oh, that might make her unlikeable, I need to switch that up, make her
perfect.” I didn’t water down my aggressive, but loving heroes. I let them be
them — real, imperfect, sometimes annoying, more times endearing (I hoped). They
were great friends and good people, but they could (and often did) do stupid
things (like we all do).

And my Rock Chicks were — and still are — hugely successful.

Once I let myself be free, my writing took off — not only in that people were
reading it, but that I felt at liberty to create how I needed to create. To be
true to what I was doing. It wasn’t about stepping out of bounds for the sake of
it. It was about opening a cage and giving myself the freedom to fly.

In other words, I broke the rules for the sake of the stories. And I didn’t play
it safe after my books started selling; I had to stay true to that process. I
needed to keep spreading my wings, doing this for me, but also to give my
readers something new and fresh, a story I was passionate about so they could
enjoy it right along with me. 

One example of this was when I wrote The Will. 

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write. 

By this time, I was already an established romance writer and had hit the
bestseller lists. But I was certain that The Will would never sell. You see, The
Will had a hero and heroine who were in their late forties. I’d already written
outside what I considered the “romance norm” by writing characters in their
thirties and even early forties. But pushing them close to their fifties and
showing them as sexual, vital, commanding, interesting, with flaws they were
learning to embrace, baggage they continued to carry, and issues they were still
working out (all of this is the case with people of any age) — I figured no one
would read it. I thought that if I didn’t have leads in their twenties or early
thirties, the book would bomb.

What’s more, romance readers expect a lot from their heroines. Give a heroine
even a tiny flaw, this often doesn’t go over well. Many women feel the need to
strive for perfection, and that makes my heart sad — that we can’t accept
ourselves for the beauty of all that we are rather than pushing ourselves to
something that is often unattainable, or even practical, much less something
that, in the end, even if we were able to achieve it, wouldn’t make us
boundlessly happy (but this is for another, far longer piece). And there I was
in this series, putting my heroines in a huge hole they had to dig themselves
out of and making my readers do that work right alongside them.

I still had to tell the story. It wouldn’t let me go. So I did. And The Will was
a Goodreads Choice nominee, hitting #7 in the overall romance vote and it hit
the bestseller lists.

When my readers engaged with me about it, those who were around the age of my
hero and heroine were delighted someone told a story that they could more easily
relate to…but it wasn’t just that. Much younger readers embraced it as well.

Another example where I broke my own rules is in The Deep End. It was a new
genre for me, but I was known for jumping genres, writing contemporary romance
as well as fantasy and paranormal. However, this was me jumping into erotica.
Although it’s not a huge leap for a romance writer, as erotica is (thankfully)
now an established, popular genre, I took a twist in what was popular in the
genre and what was considered my norm by switching up a D/s relationship so that
the dominant was a woman and the submissive was a man. An alpha male, but still
a sexual submissive.

I loved this story, was passionate about it, had wanted to write something like
this for years, but I struggled against the pull of it because I knew it would
take a giant leap of faith for many of my readers to engage with it. When sales
started out slow, I was not surprised. But word of mouth started circulating and
more people took the plunge, bought the book, and liked it. It was gorgeous and
humbling. I wrote a book I adored, communicated about it openly and honestly,
and prayed my readers would decide to take that plunge with me. So I was utterly
delighted when many did.

I’ve broken other rules, too: I’ve written books where the hero and heroine get
together with little to no drama. My vampires do not burn up in the sunlight
(my Three series). I’ve killed the dog (you’re never supposed to do that, but
don’t despair, I made up for it).

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.
And in doing that, I hope that my readers feel that need and enjoy the passion
that prompted it. 

 

One of my favorite quotes (and things to do) is “dance like no one is watching.”

You do it because you love to do it. Get down, bust your own moves, and enjoy
the heck out of it. I also like to say, “write like no one will be reading.” The
most important part of the process is to do it because you love to do it.

And when you do, bust your own moves.



A version of this article appeared at https://www.audible.com



Kristen Ashley

Celebrating ten years of authors and KDP
By Kindle Direct Publishing


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


We asked KDP authors to share the first moment they felt success as
self-published writers

Kindle Direct Publishing has turned ten, and to celebrate this milestone
anniversary we asked KDP authors to share the first moments they felt success as
self-published writers. The answers were incredibly inspiring, ranging from
becoming a bestseller to adding the title of “self-published author” to their
resume to receiving five-star reviews from international readers to hearing
about the impact of their books directly from readers.

Inspired by the stories every author shared, we selected a few authors for a
little surprise – cookies decorated with the authors’ book covers.  

Here’s a look at their stories (and some cookie photos, too!):

Leslie McAdam:

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. But whenever I’d show
anyone my writing or send a query letter, I was immediately rejected. Still, for
fifteen years, I secretly wrote: four novels, several screenplays, poetry, and
other work. After a crisis in my life, I realized that the only thing I ever
wanted to do was be a writer. I got help from a grammar coach and posted my
first novel on a website in 2015. I was so scared to have people read my
writing, because it was personal and vulnerable, but I️ also had this
overwhelming need to connect with readers. That book, The Sun and the Moon,
ended up winning a prize in the world’s largest online writing competition
(75,000 entries). After that, I released a revised and edited version and
uploaded it to KDP. I️ felt like I️ was a real author, finally, publishing it on
Amazon. Two years and seven books later, I haven’t looked back. While the
release of each book is special, posting the first one felt like success.”



Magan Vernon:

“I first published in 2011 but didn’t really feel successful until 2013. That
was the first time I watched a book sail up the Amazon charts in multiple
countries. I read reviews on amazon.de and .fr (or tried to, since you know,
language) and thought all of these people are reading a story written by a new
Mom from the Illinois cornfields. People who have never met me and don’t speak
my language. It still gives me chills.”



Nicole J Merchant:

“The first time I felt successful as an indie author wasn’t when I published my
first novel. It wasn’t when I made my first sale or ten sales. It was when I got
a message asking when the next one to my series came out. That was when I knew I
had gained a reader. That was when I felt like I had done something right.”



Annie Bellet:

“I’ve been self-publishing for over 7 years now, but the first time I felt real
success was in 2011 when $$ from my thriller novel paid our rent. Then again in
2014 when I could finally pay all my medical bills. It’s been a strange
rollercoaster.”



Eliza Knight:

“Seven years ago I took a deep breath and hit publish. Now a USA Today
bestseller and accepted to RWA’s Honor Roll! Dreams do come true!”



Barbara Appleby:

“For me it was a letter in the mail from former First Lady Barbara Bush. She was
going to read The Sock Monster to her great grandchildren. That letter hangs on
my wall today.”



Cassie Selleck:

“I published my first novel, The Pecan Man, on KDP in January 2012 and thought
the best I would do was sell to family and friends. Within two years, I was able
to quit my full-time job and live a writer’s life. I have over 3000 reviews on
Amazon, signed with a NY agent, optioned movie rights, sold foreign rights, and
have been translated into two languages. I am in public libraries across the
country and Skype with an average of one book club a week. And ALL of this has
happened because of Amazon’s amazing self-publishing tools.”



Behind the cover: Alexandra Sokoloff
By Amazon.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Even after being published several times, author Alexandra Sokoloff decided to
step out of her comfort zone by taking the indie- publisher path. See why she
can now write her stories with a smile.



Alexandra Sokoloff is the author of the bestselling  Huntress/FBI thriller
series. Learn more at http://alexandrasokoloff.com

See more “Behind the Cover” videos here. 



Behind the cover: J.F. (Joanna) Penn
By Amazon.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


“It took me a long time to find a life that I love”

“It took me a long time to find a life that I love…” Joanna Penn left her job in
the finance industry to follow her heart and write for a living.

Watch Joanna share her fascinating journey to become a New York Times
bestselling author.



Joanna Penn is a NY Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author, a creative
entrepreneur, podcaster, professional speaker, and travel junkie. For more,
visit www.JFPenn.com.

This video originally appeared on YouTube

The art of revising by hand
By Cara Benson


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Returning to pen and paper

As a young adult, I found my own writing practice after university by scribbling
randomly on napkins or on the backs of overdue rent bills. I loved looking at
all sorts of materials as a possible canvas and feel now that these artifacts
can exist as works in and of themselves. With the digitization of, well,
everything, these handmade words exude an aura of an original, as one of our
most original cultural critics so famously put it, that Times New Roman could
never emulate.

There is a bevy of information conveyed in the representation of language by
hand that does not come through in the typed text. There’s so much character and
emotion in the loops and points. It’s almost a version of speaking. I enjoyed
writing like this so much that I came to rely on the personality my cursive or
block or inkblots carried. But it didn’t take more than a few seasons for the
mesh bags I was using as storage for my notes to overflow. So I decided it was
at last time to transcribe my writing into documents. Now I was face to face
with the nakedness of my words, laid bare in type on a utilitarian, letter-sized
page formatted for predetermined fonts. I was stripped down to the quick, I
felt. What would these symbols say without my penmanship to help them along?

It was a stunning lesson, and one I am continually learning. My writing goes off
into the world without me. I am not there to explain or amend or encourage or
detract or further its course into the reader’s mind or heart in the slightest
once it leaves my domain. I don’t say this to bully myself into writing better
(as if!), but to help me to see the letters as typed on the page in front of me
as cleanly as possible. What are my tics or hiccups that I like or need to push
to the side? What am I actually communicating?

Here’s the other thing that typing my writing does that handwriting doesn’t: I
am afforded a streamlined process for rewriting. It’s one thing to dash a ditty
interestingly on the white space of a coffee maker manual (I still relish this
hybrid form), but it’s quite another to put together one thousand words for a
column or three thousand for a story or, aesthetes forbid, sixty thousand or
more for a book specifically geared toward mechanical reproduction (although I
just heard of one writer who wrote her entire novel by hand!). For me, you
better believe I’ll be clicking on spell check, thesaurus, and “save as” at the
very minimum. For my most recent book, I’ve got almost one hundred drafts in
succession up to the current near-ready version.

But here’s where my old habits can be of use. Sometimes, to open up a paragraph
or few pages that refuse to cooperate on rewrite after rewrite, I go back to my
postcollege writing roots. I sit at the table, grab my familiar friends the pen
and the pad, and, without the excerpt I’m reworking in front of me, I literally
re-create, by hand, the troubling section through a combination of memory and
invention. This loosens everything up and shakes the words out of the bag. By
forcing me to let go of awkward sentences that I’m holding on to because they
set up ones that I love (that should also be sacrificed) and helping me smooth
out some tripped-up syntax, this process can be productive in a way that working
onscreen inhibits.

I am so grateful for this tool in my writer’s toolkit. It has liberated both me
and my texts from an overbearing approach to “getting it right.” Suddenly,
perfection matters less because the handwriting makes the process less
formalized. I get to play again, and that’s often when my better writing happens
anyway. Heck, my next book even has reproduced doodles in it! Not that that’s
the whole book. There’s a good 61,472 words that were very much not all written
out by hand. I can tell you, though, that I reworked my opening by hand one
morning, and I couldn’t be more pleased with it.

A version of this article originally appeared on GrubStreet

Cara Benson

Cara Benson is an award-winning writer whose work has been published in the New
York Times, Boston Review, Best American Poetry, and in syndication. Her online
home is carabensonwriter.com.

A combat veteran redefines bravery
By Amazon.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Bravery meant no more pretending

“If you were doing okay after what you had to see and do, you wouldn’t be
normal,” Capt. Lena Gold told her fiancé. “Normal people don’t kill without
regret. Normal people don’t bury friends and never think of them again.” Lena
and her husband-to-be, Dan Sheehan, were both US Marines. They both piloted
helicopters.

War changed Dan. He came home from Iraq and fell into using alcohol to hide from
his thoughts.

In a memoir called After Action, Dan writes about the night Lena finally called
him on his drinking and how “a bolt of fear shot through my hazy brain” when she
said, “I love you, Dan, but maybe we should put the wedding on hold until you
sort this stuff out.”

Dan’s book is the story of how he ultimately did sort things out—by rejecting
the idea that bravery meant pretending everything was normal after he’d killed
enemies and buried friends. Bravery meant the opposite: no more pretending, no
more hiding from memories. Dan wrote ten drafts of After Action as he grappled
with the war and its aftermath. When he finally got the words down right, he
knew he’d made something that could help his fellow veterans.

Dan sent After Action to literary agents, hoping someone would believe in the
book and help get it published. Most of the agents didn’t answer his queries.
“The agents that did respond usually said something along the lines of ‘Thanks
for your service, but I don’t think I can sell this,’” Dan remembers.

One small publisher showed interest. But when Dan looked at the tone of its
existing titles, he feared it “would focus on the fighting/action parts of my
book and neglect the healing parts.”

Determined to put out a book that did justice to his squadron’s combat
experience and his own struggle to heal, Dan turned to independent publishing.
He chose Amazon’s CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Dan says these
self-service platforms are perfect for books “that don’t have mass-market appeal
but matter a lot to a specific audience.”

> “There’s a larger picture than simply the bottom line. My measurement of
> success from the beginning has been to make a difference in the lives of
> veterans and military families.”

And that’s exactly what After Action is doing.

In a five-star review, an Amazon customer named Jeanne McLennan wrote about the
book’s “huge impact on our family. Our son-in-law was a Marine Cobra pilot who
was killed two years ago. In the coming together of all of his ‘brothers’ with
his wife and family during the days and weeks after his death, we could feel
their love, strength, dedication, and vulnerability. Dan Sheehan’s writing has
opened up the deeper conversations among us of what the personal impact of their
work has [been] on each of them and their families.”

After Action has earned an average of 4.7 stars from Amazon customers, a starred
review from Publishers Weekly, and a gold medal in the Independent Publisher
Book Awards. Dan has appeared on radio and TV and spoken to veterans’ groups
around the United States.

A veteran who became a police officer in civilian life and was one of the first
responders at a school shooting emailed Dan that “being a former Marine and one
of the only prior military on scene, I felt it was my duty to act unaffected.
When the truth is, being a father, the images haunt me. Reading your book kinda
opened the door for me and let me know that it’s okay to have ‘feelings’ and to
be affected by this event. Just wanted to thank you. Reading your journey helped
tremendously.”

As Dan writes in After Action, “The journey begins when the veteran admits to
him- or herself that they are carrying some sort of burden. These burdens have
been crushing souls for centuries—they are as old as war itself. There is no
shame in acknowledging them, no weakness in feeling their weight.”

For Dan, it all goes back to that night Lena insisted he start dealing with his
problems. Lena and Dan are married with two kids now. Dan’s last words in After
Action are about Lena: “Her support and love made the positive ending for this
book possible. It is through her that I have the opportunity to experience the
best that life has to offer.”

Shop Dan Sheehan’s books

A version of this article appeared at A version of this article originally
appeared at Amazon.com

How Kindle Scout changed Ned Hayes’ life
By Amazon.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Support from readers helped Hayes land a publishing deal

New characters often visit novelist Ned Hayes uninvited, so it wasn’t all that
strange a few years back when the voice of a fictional teenage boy kept
percolating in the back of his mind. Then things got more intense: “A friend of
mine took me to this amazing old-growth tree, and the first lines of the story,
where the boy saw the Eagle Tree and wanted to climb it, just rose up in me. I
had to write the story down. I felt kind of carried away by a rushing stream,
and I didn’t know where it was really taking me.

I felt like I’d given someone a voice who didn’t have one.”

The rushing stream carried Ned to The Eagle Tree, a novel unlike anything he’d
ever written. He was a published author of historical fiction, and—even though
writing novels wasn’t his full-time job, and his books had never reached massive
numbers of readers—his work had earned him representation by an established
literary agent. But far from being the historical fiction the agent
expected, The Eagle Tree was set in modern times, and that percolating voice in
Ned’s head turned out to belong to a teenage boy diagnosed with autism. In the
novel, young March Wong climbs dangerously high into Washington’s forests to
chase his passion for learning all about trees.

“When I first gave the manuscript to my agent, she read it through and said,
‘Well, this is a really different kind of book, and I’m not sure I can sell
this,’” Ned says.

Ned didn’t push. He had his own doubts. “I was concerned that maybe it was a
book that I had written just for my own pleasure and that I would be the only
reader that really enjoyed it.”

Ned knew a way to test whether the novel would ever speak to anyone but him. As
a reader, he’d been participating in Kindle Scout, where authors can submit
their never-before-published books. Readers see excerpts from each book, and
they can nominate their favorites to receive a publishing contract from Amazon.
Ned submitted The Eagle Tree and waited to see if anyone would nominate it. He
was about to be carried away by another rushing stream.

“One of the earliest comments I received,” Ned starts to say, surprising himself
by choking up, “was from somebody who had a family member who was on the autism
spectrum. They said that this book gave them insight into their family member in
a way that they never expected, and it changed their entire relationship. And I
just felt really moved by that. Because I felt like I’d given someone a voice
who didn’t have one.”

The response from Scout users was overwhelming. The Kindle Scout team also saw
serious potential in Ned’s work and shared his manuscript with Carmen Johnson,
an editor at Amazon Publishing’s Little A imprint. Carmen loved it. She worked
with Ned to release Kindle, paperback, and audiobook versions of The Eagle Tree.
Thinking back to the exciting weeks when everything came together, Ned says,
“Amazon really ended up opening a huge number of doors for me.”

More than 75,000 readers later, the character of March Wong continues to connect
with people. Steve Silberman, whose NeuroTribes appeared on many of the most
prestigious lists of the best books of 2015, praised Ned’s “gorgeously written”
book for featuring “one of the most accurate, finely drawn and memorable
autistic protagonists I’ve come across in literature.”

The success of The Eagle Tree has opened new doors for Ned. He’s collaborating
with fellow artists on a graphic novel and an independent film based on the
book. He’s also using the bulk of his book royalties to launch OLY ARTS, an arts
and culture magazine with print, online, and mobile app editions. He says he
wants to “spread the word about the wonderful artists, actors, writers and
musicians in the Olympia area who don’t have the megaphone they need to earn a
living wage for the amazing work they do.”

The first OLY ARTS issue’s 10,000 copies were supposed to last 12 weeks. “It
sold out in two and a half weeks flat,” Ned says, beaming. “So there’s a lot of
interest and excitement, and it’s fantastic to know that readers of The Eagle
Tree made this all possible.”



A version of this article appeared at Amazon.com



Who says writing can’t pay the bills?
By Maria Murnane


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


It took years of hard work and rejection, but I finally got the call I’d always
dreamed of

Maria Murnane left a successful career in public relations, boarded a plane to
Argentina for a two-week trip, and decided to pursue her dream of writing a
novel. One year later, she was living in Buenos Aires and had finished the
manuscript of Perfect on Paper: The (Mis)Adventures of Waverly Bryson, based on
the humorous real-life struggles she and her friends faced when charting their
romantic paths. She returned to the United States, found an agent who loved the
book, and began searching for a publisher to bring it to the masses. Both she
and her agent were surprised at the flood of rejections the book received. In
the end, thirteen publishers said the same thing: “Chick lit is dead.”

“After two years of rejections, I didn’t know what else to do, so I did
nothing,” says Maria. “I left the book sitting on my computer and started a
freelance writing business. Then, about six months later, my dad handed me a
book on self-publishing, along with a little plan he’d written for what I needed
to do to publish on my own. He told me he loved my book and that I couldn’t let
it go, so he was going to help me publish it myself. It nearly made me cry.”

Inspired by her father’s faith in her work, Maria went after her goals with
renewed energy and found independent publishing to be the solution she was
looking for. She decided to publish through CreateSpace, an Amazon company.
“People told me how easy it was to work with, and they were absolutely right,”
Maria said. “My goal was to prove the publishers who had turned me down wrong.
On the marketing side, I knew that reviews from Amazon customers could help my
book through word of mouth. And it worked!” Soon after self-publishing, Maria
had racked up more than one hundred positive Amazon customer reviews.

That’s when Amazon Publishing took notice of this promising new talent in the
women’s fiction genre and offered Maria the book deal she’d always wanted,
complete with editing, publicity, and distribution. “It took years of hard work
and rejection, but I finally got the call I’d always dreamed of,” said Maria,
“and it came from Amazon. They’ve been there for me every step of the way and
believed in me and my work from the start.” Less than a year after its
publication by AmazonEncore, Perfect on Paper climbed to number two on the
Kindle bestseller list.

Maria is now living her dream of writing full time. Under its Lake Union
imprint, Amazon Publishing has published three sequels to Perfect on Paper (It’s
a Waverly Life, Honey on Your Mind, and Chocolate for Two, which garnered a
starred review by Publishers Weekly), plus Katwalk, Wait for the Rain, and
Cassidy Lane, which won a 2015 International Book Award in the Chick Lit/Women’s
Lit category.

HIGHLIGHTS

 * Lives in: California
 * Maria Murnane left behind a successful career, moved to Argentina, and
   decided to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.
 * She returned to the US with a finished manuscript, but tried for years to
   find a publisher, with no success.
 * Her dad convinced her to try self-publishing with Amazon. Now she’s a
   full-time writer with Amazon.





A version of this article appeared at Amazon.com
Maria Murnane

Maria Murnane is a CreateSpace contributor and the best-selling author of
the Waverly Bryson series, Cassidy Lane, Katwalk, and Wait for the Rain. She
also provides consulting services on book publishing and marketing. For more,
visit www.mariamurnane.com

In search of the perfect writing space
By Dina Nayeri


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


My sacred writing space, the magic it unlocked, was hiding between my headphones

I’ve been searching for a suitable writing space—a place that fits my mood, that
feels sacred and creative and peaceful, that coaxes the words from my
fingers—since the day I started calling myself a writer.

After I decided to leave the business world to write professionally, the
physical space I occupied suddenly seemed important. This was, after all, no
joke; this was my job. I’d been writing essays and stories and theses and papers
since I was a kid, and never did space matter then. It wasn’t a sacred thing or
a part of the process. I wrote at my desk at home or in my dorm room or any
other place where I had a chair and a desk. If the atmosphere was noisy, I put
on music. If it was too quiet, I put on music. Usually I had some chocolate
nearby. That was it.

When I started writing more seriously, I’d take my laptop and a stack of books
to cafés around Harvard Square. The buzz of students and professors energized
me, and often I’d stop to people watch. My stories were peppered with bits of
dialogue I picked up here or there. I wasn’t yet confident in my own voice, my
memories, or the voices inside my imagination. When I moved to a tiny village
outside Paris, cafés were no longer an option, and I worked in a basement study
filled with my books. It was a cozy space but lonely, and suddenly I found
myself unable to finish a chapter. That was the first time I felt the power of
the space around me, how it can stifle creativity or unlock some magic that
makes the writing flow—I began to blame it, to give it more power. I started
driving into Paris every morning to work in a particular café that energized me.
I went every day, though I lived over an hour away. It was perfect: the ritual,
the destination, the feeling that I was driving “to work” every morning.

Moving to Amsterdam, I continued the ritual. I found a pretty café with big
wooden tables called the Koffee Salon and then a better one called Two For Joy,
where I chatted with the owner as he roasted coffee beans in a big tub. I worked
in these places day after day, thinking, “I found the magic again. It’s all
about a warm atmosphere.”

But in Iowa City, the cafés didn’t feel warm. For a while I languished, failing
to write. Soon, I found that the coffee shops were filled with other writers
whose work I knew and respected. I pushed myself simply because I saw them
clacking away at their laptops, carrying new books into the café every three
days, reading and writing at such a fast clip that I felt the need to push
myself. 

Since I moved to New York, though, the magic doesn’t come in cafés anymore, and
it doesn’t come in my apartment. This has left me baffled—maybe I’m missing
something about the kind of space I need. Should it be quieter? Better lit?
Should I turn off the Wi-Fi? At one point I joined a writing space, thinking
that what I needed was what I had in Iowa—other writers nearby. Maybe it’s my
schedule, the pace of life in New York, or something else. And yet, twice during
my life in New York, I found a kind of productivity, hunger, and excitement for
my work that I had back in those cafés in Europe.

Once was at the MacDowell Colony, where I was secluded in a cabin, looking out
onto a bronzing field. The other was in my apartment for three solitary weeks
when I shut myself away, canceling everything, to finish a draft.

It strikes me now that after all these years, searching for space, I had it
right in the beginning, during those teenage years, when I would do my work in
my room, putting on music to shut out the quiet or the noise. All that time, it
seems, my sacred writing space, the magic it unlocked, was hiding between my
headphones. And maybe that’s just how it works for everyone. There is no perfect
space, only something to say and a hunger to say it better than the last time.



A version of this article appeared at The Center for Fiction
Dina Nayeri

Dina Nayer's debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, was released in 2013 and
translated for into fourteen languages. It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great
New Writers book and long-listed for the Flaherty Dunnan first novel prize. Her
stories and essays have appeared at Marie Claire, Glamour, Granta, The Wall
Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vice, The Daily Beast, Guernica, Electric
Literature, and more. She holds a BA from Princeton, an M.Ed. and MBA from
Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

How I went from journalist to fiction writer
By Peter Heller


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


When you’re young and dumb, you often don’t know what you can’t do.

I wanted to be a fiction writer ever since my school librarian handed me a copy
of Hemingway’s In Our Time when I was eleven.  It’s that thin volume of early
stories, mostly about Nick Adams in the wild country of Upper Michigan.  I took
it home and was riveted.  I wanted to do that: I wanted to hop off a slow-moving
freight and carry my rucksack through woods and tall grass that wet my pantlegs
with dew.  I wanted to camp by the Big Two-Hearted River and make cowboy coffee
and not burn my tongue the way Nick didn’t and fish for those gorgeous trout.  I
wanted to have a beautiful girlfriend that could row and fish like a man–and
then break up with her, because Nick did.  But mostly I was transported by the
cadence of the prose and the music of the language.  I wanted to do that.  To
write stories just like that.

I read everything I could and tried to everything one needed to do to become a
great writer.  I read the dictionary and taped words I didn’t know on the wall
because I’d heard that Jack London did it.  I copied out poems and paragraphs
written by writers I admired.  I went to a good college and studied literature. 
But they didn’t tell me at the English Department at Dartmouth that you can’t
make a living writing short stories.  They probably should have.  I got out of
school, moved to Boulder, and worked construction, delivered pizza, taught
kayaking.  I was a passionate kayaker then, and paddling some crazy rivers.  On
my days off I wrote poetry and stories.

One day a friend said, Why don’t you combine your interests and write
for Outside Magazine?  When you’re young and dumb, you often don’t know what you
can’t do.  I went down to the magazine store and got an Outside and flipped to
the masthead and chose the name of a senior editor that sounded nice.  I got the
main number for the magazine and called and tried to sound confident and offhand
and said, “Laura Hohnhold, please.”  “Just a second.”  I was startled.  She
picked up.  I started talking fast.  I told her that I’d published a short story
in Harper’s, which was sort of true—it was a very short reprint of a college
piece, published in the Readings section—I said that I could paddle Class V, and
that she should send me on an expedition to the Tibetan Plateau to run a first
descent of a remote river.  Long pause.  Then she said, “We’ve heard about this
expedition and we don’t have a writer that can kayak Class V.  I’m going to take
a chance on you.”

That first story did not go the way I planned, and come to think of it, none of
them ever have.  A man died in my arms on the first day of the expedition.  A
raft flipped and he washed into a logjam, and I and another kayaker tried to
extract him and he was stuck, and the river rose over his head.  I came home
grieving and traumatized and wrote about it in a long piece called “Set Free in
China.”

It was an odd way to start my career in magazine journalism.  I knew that if I
didn’t paddle something hard again right away I might never paddle again.  So I
got an assignment from Playboy to cover a Kiwi-Russian expedition to try the
first descent of the Muk Su, “The Everest of Rivers” in the old Soviet Union. 
It was way up in the High Pamirs of Tajikistan, and the last Russian team to
attempt it had lost five of their eleven men.  I’d be one of the two kayakers
that would probe out front of the rafts and signal the way through.  It was
massive whitewater that flowed through a constricted canyon, and there were snow
leopards everywhere and wolf tracks in the sand of the beaches.  We’d get to a
hard rapid and the Russians would squat on the high bank and look grim and smoke
cigarettes; it looked in the hunch of their broad shoulders like they were
carrying the weight of history.  The Kiwis would hop along the bank hooting,
saying “She’ll be right.  Now worries, I see a line there…”  A trip for the
ages.  Seventeen days of wild whitewater and nobody died.

That began a decades-long joyful diversion away from fiction.  I wrote stories
about adventure and the environment, because that’s what I cared about, and some
of those stories turned into books of non-fiction. 

A few years ago, I thought I’d saved up enough to spend nine months writing a
novel and I thought, It’s time.  I went to my local coffee shop and sat down and
began from a first line.  I didn’t plot or outline.  In all my non-fiction I
always knew the ending, knew what was going to happen next, because it
happened.  Now I wanted to be surprised.  Just like running a river that had
never been run: I wanted to paddle around the bend of my narrative and have no
idea what would be there: a cougar drinking, a waterfall, a flight of swallows. 
I wrote a few lines and then, “My name is Hig, one name.  Big Hig if you need
another.  If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying
I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one.”  I sat up.  I listened.  I
listened for seven months straight and that became The Dog Stars.

What I realized is that all those years of writing magazine stories was the best
training.  I had learned to create a strong sense of place that would
immediately capture and immerse a reader.  To conjure characters that were alive
and authentic and jumped off the page.  To lay down a pace and cadence that kept
the reader turning the pages.  And after so many wild expeditions and trips, I
had also been studying, without really knowing it, what people do under immense
pressure.  The grace and courage, and sometimes the unraveling, the betrayals,
the meanness and fear.  What could be better for writing novels?

Celine, my new novel, was a bit different, and very special, because it is about
my mom.  She died two and half years ago, and I think I wanted to spend another
year with her.  Like the protagonist she was a crack investigator who
specialized in reuniting birth families.  Like Celine, she could shoot—the scene
in Idaho with the gun dealer when she blows seven cans and bottles off the log
is true—and she really did bring in a bank fraud perp for the FBI—after spying
on him with her opera glasses, and executing a high speed car chase in her old
Volvo.  She really was courageous and elegant, and the family backstory in
France during the war is all true.  I tried to write her as closely as I could.

The book, I guess, was a coming home for me.  As writing fiction was, after so
many years as a journalist.



A version of this article originally appeared on the Amazon Book Review.

Peter Heller

Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at
Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. He is an
award winning adventure writer, the author of four books of literary nonfiction
and three bestselling novels, including The Dog Stars and Celine. He lives in
Denver.

The Secret To This Romance Author’s Success? Breaking All The Rules.
By Kristen Ashley


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.

I can safely say that every time I’ve been asked to speak to aspiring writers,
afterward, I’ve had not one, but several come up to me and say, “I can’t believe
you did what you said you did. I was told never to do that. I was told never to
break that rule.” This does not surprise me, but it saddens me. When I started
writing, I too had a set of rules for writing romance (my genre) that I was
under the impression were unbreakable. And I wrote within the confines of those
rules.

It was only when publishing house after publishing house, agent after agent had
rejected my submissions, and I’d decided that no one was ever going to read my
books, that I threw the rules out the window. I then simply wrote what I wanted
to write, wrote how the stories came to me, was true to them and my characters.

Then I published myself … And I’ve sold more than two and a half million books.

What are the rules I broke? First, I didn’t write what I thought people wanted
to read. I didn’t research what might be popular — what might sell — and write
that. I wrote stories that felt personal to me, that I enjoyed completely from
writing to reading. The first book that I did this with was Rock Chick, and with
it and the Rock Chick series, I broke all the rules:

I wrote in first person, and at that time, romance novels in first person were
available, but not customary.

I wrote my heroine’s thoughts in a stream of consciousness. I had paragraphs —
many of them — that were just one word. I put myself, and what would eventually
be my readers, in the mind of my heroine, Indy. Not describing what she was
thinking, but thinking what she was thinking as she was thinking it. It’s
important to note that not everyone could get into that, and that’s
understandable, even expected. It’s also important to note that the ones who
did, really did.

I allowed my characters freedom of expression. This meant that if they cursed,
if the F-word was prevalent in their vocabulary, I let them use it (and cursing
was very rare in romance).

For that matter, I didn’t censor my characters or their behavior. I didn’t
think, “Oh, that might make her unlikeable, I need to switch that up, make her
perfect.” I didn’t water down my aggressive, but loving heroes. I let them be
them — real, imperfect, sometimes annoying, more times endearing (I hoped). They
were great friends and good people, but they could (and often did) do stupid
things (like we all do).

And my Rock Chicks were — and still are — hugely successful.

Once I let myself be free, my writing took off — not only in that people were
reading it, but that I felt at liberty to create how I needed to create. To be
true to what I was doing. It wasn’t about stepping out of bounds for the sake of
it. It was about opening a cage and giving myself the freedom to fly.

In other words, I broke the rules for the sake of the stories. And I didn’t play
it safe after my books started selling; I had to stay true to that process. I
needed to keep spreading my wings, doing this for me, but also to give my
readers something new and fresh, a story I was passionate about so they could
enjoy it right along with me. 

One example of this was when I wrote The Will. 

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write. 

By this time, I was already an established romance writer and had hit the
bestseller lists. But I was certain that The Will would never sell. You see, The
Will had a hero and heroine who were in their late forties. I’d already written
outside what I considered the “romance norm” by writing characters in their
thirties and even early forties. But pushing them close to their fifties and
showing them as sexual, vital, commanding, interesting, with flaws they were
learning to embrace, baggage they continued to carry, and issues they were still
working out (all of this is the case with people of any age) — I figured no one
would read it. I thought that if I didn’t have leads in their twenties or early
thirties, the book would bomb.

What’s more, romance readers expect a lot from their heroines. Give a heroine
even a tiny flaw, this often doesn’t go over well. Many women feel the need to
strive for perfection, and that makes my heart sad — that we can’t accept
ourselves for the beauty of all that we are rather than pushing ourselves to
something that is often unattainable, or even practical, much less something
that, in the end, even if we were able to achieve it, wouldn’t make us
boundlessly happy (but this is for another, far longer piece). And there I was
in this series, putting my heroines in a huge hole they had to dig themselves
out of and making my readers do that work right alongside them.

I still had to tell the story. It wouldn’t let me go. So I did. And The Will was
a Goodreads Choice nominee, hitting #7 in the overall romance vote and it hit
the bestseller lists.

When my readers engaged with me about it, those who were around the age of my
hero and heroine were delighted someone told a story that they could more easily
relate to…but it wasn’t just that. Much younger readers embraced it as well.

Another example where I broke my own rules is in The Deep End. It was a new
genre for me, but I was known for jumping genres, writing contemporary romance
as well as fantasy and paranormal. However, this was me jumping into erotica.
Although it’s not a huge leap for a romance writer, as erotica is (thankfully)
now an established, popular genre, I took a twist in what was popular in the
genre and what was considered my norm by switching up a D/s relationship so that
the dominant was a woman and the submissive was a man. An alpha male, but still
a sexual submissive.

I loved this story, was passionate about it, had wanted to write something like
this for years, but I struggled against the pull of it because I knew it would
take a giant leap of faith for many of my readers to engage with it. When sales
started out slow, I was not surprised. But word of mouth started circulating and
more people took the plunge, bought the book, and liked it. It was gorgeous and
humbling. I wrote a book I adored, communicated about it openly and honestly,
and prayed my readers would decide to take that plunge with me. So I was utterly
delighted when many did.

I’ve broken other rules, too: I’ve written books where the hero and heroine get
together with little to no drama. My vampires do not burn up in the sunlight
(my Three series). I’ve killed the dog (you’re never supposed to do that, but
don’t despair, I made up for it).

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.
And in doing that, I hope that my readers feel that need and enjoy the passion
that prompted it. 

 

One of my favorite quotes (and things to do) is “dance like no one is watching.”

You do it because you love to do it. Get down, bust your own moves, and enjoy
the heck out of it. I also like to say, “write like no one will be reading.” The
most important part of the process is to do it because you love to do it.

And when you do, bust your own moves.



A version of this article appeared at https://www.audible.com



Kristen Ashley

Celebrating ten years of authors and KDP
By Kindle Direct Publishing


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


We asked KDP authors to share the first moment they felt success as
self-published writers

Kindle Direct Publishing has turned ten, and to celebrate this milestone
anniversary we asked KDP authors to share the first moments they felt success as
self-published writers. The answers were incredibly inspiring, ranging from
becoming a bestseller to adding the title of “self-published author” to their
resume to receiving five-star reviews from international readers to hearing
about the impact of their books directly from readers.

Inspired by the stories every author shared, we selected a few authors for a
little surprise – cookies decorated with the authors’ book covers.  

Here’s a look at their stories (and some cookie photos, too!):

Leslie McAdam:

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. But whenever I’d show
anyone my writing or send a query letter, I was immediately rejected. Still, for
fifteen years, I secretly wrote: four novels, several screenplays, poetry, and
other work. After a crisis in my life, I realized that the only thing I ever
wanted to do was be a writer. I got help from a grammar coach and posted my
first novel on a website in 2015. I was so scared to have people read my
writing, because it was personal and vulnerable, but I️ also had this
overwhelming need to connect with readers. That book, The Sun and the Moon,
ended up winning a prize in the world’s largest online writing competition
(75,000 entries). After that, I released a revised and edited version and
uploaded it to KDP. I️ felt like I️ was a real author, finally, publishing it on
Amazon. Two years and seven books later, I haven’t looked back. While the
release of each book is special, posting the first one felt like success.”



Magan Vernon:

“I first published in 2011 but didn’t really feel successful until 2013. That
was the first time I watched a book sail up the Amazon charts in multiple
countries. I read reviews on amazon.de and .fr (or tried to, since you know,
language) and thought all of these people are reading a story written by a new
Mom from the Illinois cornfields. People who have never met me and don’t speak
my language. It still gives me chills.”



Nicole J Merchant:

“The first time I felt successful as an indie author wasn’t when I published my
first novel. It wasn’t when I made my first sale or ten sales. It was when I got
a message asking when the next one to my series came out. That was when I knew I
had gained a reader. That was when I felt like I had done something right.”



Annie Bellet:

“I’ve been self-publishing for over 7 years now, but the first time I felt real
success was in 2011 when $$ from my thriller novel paid our rent. Then again in
2014 when I could finally pay all my medical bills. It’s been a strange
rollercoaster.”



Eliza Knight:

“Seven years ago I took a deep breath and hit publish. Now a USA Today
bestseller and accepted to RWA’s Honor Roll! Dreams do come true!”



Barbara Appleby:

“For me it was a letter in the mail from former First Lady Barbara Bush. She was
going to read The Sock Monster to her great grandchildren. That letter hangs on
my wall today.”



Cassie Selleck:

“I published my first novel, The Pecan Man, on KDP in January 2012 and thought
the best I would do was sell to family and friends. Within two years, I was able
to quit my full-time job and live a writer’s life. I have over 3000 reviews on
Amazon, signed with a NY agent, optioned movie rights, sold foreign rights, and
have been translated into two languages. I am in public libraries across the
country and Skype with an average of one book club a week. And ALL of this has
happened because of Amazon’s amazing self-publishing tools.”



Behind the cover: Alexandra Sokoloff
By Amazon.com


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Even after being published several times, author Alexandra Sokoloff decided to
step out of her comfort zone by taking the indie- publisher path. See why she
can now write her stories with a smile.



Alexandra Sokoloff is the author of the bestselling  Huntress/FBI thriller
series. Learn more at http://alexandrasokoloff.com

See more “Behind the Cover” videos here. 



Behind the cover: J.F. (Joanna) Penn
By Amazon.com


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“It took me a long time to find a life that I love”

“It took me a long time to find a life that I love…” Joanna Penn left her job in
the finance industry to follow her heart and write for a living.

Watch Joanna share her fascinating journey to become a New York Times
bestselling author.



Joanna Penn is a NY Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author, a creative
entrepreneur, podcaster, professional speaker, and travel junkie. For more,
visit www.JFPenn.com.

This video originally appeared on YouTube

The art of revising by hand
By Cara Benson


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Returning to pen and paper

As a young adult, I found my own writing practice after university by scribbling
randomly on napkins or on the backs of overdue rent bills. I loved looking at
all sorts of materials as a possible canvas and feel now that these artifacts
can exist as works in and of themselves. With the digitization of, well,
everything, these handmade words exude an aura of an original, as one of our
most original cultural critics so famously put it, that Times New Roman could
never emulate.

There is a bevy of information conveyed in the representation of language by
hand that does not come through in the typed text. There’s so much character and
emotion in the loops and points. It’s almost a version of speaking. I enjoyed
writing like this so much that I came to rely on the personality my cursive or
block or inkblots carried. But it didn’t take more than a few seasons for the
mesh bags I was using as storage for my notes to overflow. So I decided it was
at last time to transcribe my writing into documents. Now I was face to face
with the nakedness of my words, laid bare in type on a utilitarian, letter-sized
page formatted for predetermined fonts. I was stripped down to the quick, I
felt. What would these symbols say without my penmanship to help them along?

It was a stunning lesson, and one I am continually learning. My writing goes off
into the world without me. I am not there to explain or amend or encourage or
detract or further its course into the reader’s mind or heart in the slightest
once it leaves my domain. I don’t say this to bully myself into writing better
(as if!), but to help me to see the letters as typed on the page in front of me
as cleanly as possible. What are my tics or hiccups that I like or need to push
to the side? What am I actually communicating?

Here’s the other thing that typing my writing does that handwriting doesn’t: I
am afforded a streamlined process for rewriting. It’s one thing to dash a ditty
interestingly on the white space of a coffee maker manual (I still relish this
hybrid form), but it’s quite another to put together one thousand words for a
column or three thousand for a story or, aesthetes forbid, sixty thousand or
more for a book specifically geared toward mechanical reproduction (although I
just heard of one writer who wrote her entire novel by hand!). For me, you
better believe I’ll be clicking on spell check, thesaurus, and “save as” at the
very minimum. For my most recent book, I’ve got almost one hundred drafts in
succession up to the current near-ready version.

But here’s where my old habits can be of use. Sometimes, to open up a paragraph
or few pages that refuse to cooperate on rewrite after rewrite, I go back to my
postcollege writing roots. I sit at the table, grab my familiar friends the pen
and the pad, and, without the excerpt I’m reworking in front of me, I literally
re-create, by hand, the troubling section through a combination of memory and
invention. This loosens everything up and shakes the words out of the bag. By
forcing me to let go of awkward sentences that I’m holding on to because they
set up ones that I love (that should also be sacrificed) and helping me smooth
out some tripped-up syntax, this process can be productive in a way that working
onscreen inhibits.

I am so grateful for this tool in my writer’s toolkit. It has liberated both me
and my texts from an overbearing approach to “getting it right.” Suddenly,
perfection matters less because the handwriting makes the process less
formalized. I get to play again, and that’s often when my better writing happens
anyway. Heck, my next book even has reproduced doodles in it! Not that that’s
the whole book. There’s a good 61,472 words that were very much not all written
out by hand. I can tell you, though, that I reworked my opening by hand one
morning, and I couldn’t be more pleased with it.

A version of this article originally appeared on GrubStreet

Cara Benson

Cara Benson is an award-winning writer whose work has been published in the New
York Times, Boston Review, Best American Poetry, and in syndication. Her online
home is carabensonwriter.com.

A combat veteran redefines bravery
By Amazon.com


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Bravery meant no more pretending

“If you were doing okay after what you had to see and do, you wouldn’t be
normal,” Capt. Lena Gold told her fiancé. “Normal people don’t kill without
regret. Normal people don’t bury friends and never think of them again.” Lena
and her husband-to-be, Dan Sheehan, were both US Marines. They both piloted
helicopters.

War changed Dan. He came home from Iraq and fell into using alcohol to hide from
his thoughts.

In a memoir called After Action, Dan writes about the night Lena finally called
him on his drinking and how “a bolt of fear shot through my hazy brain” when she
said, “I love you, Dan, but maybe we should put the wedding on hold until you
sort this stuff out.”

Dan’s book is the story of how he ultimately did sort things out—by rejecting
the idea that bravery meant pretending everything was normal after he’d killed
enemies and buried friends. Bravery meant the opposite: no more pretending, no
more hiding from memories. Dan wrote ten drafts of After Action as he grappled
with the war and its aftermath. When he finally got the words down right, he
knew he’d made something that could help his fellow veterans.

Dan sent After Action to literary agents, hoping someone would believe in the
book and help get it published. Most of the agents didn’t answer his queries.
“The agents that did respond usually said something along the lines of ‘Thanks
for your service, but I don’t think I can sell this,’” Dan remembers.

One small publisher showed interest. But when Dan looked at the tone of its
existing titles, he feared it “would focus on the fighting/action parts of my
book and neglect the healing parts.”

Determined to put out a book that did justice to his squadron’s combat
experience and his own struggle to heal, Dan turned to independent publishing.
He chose Amazon’s CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Dan says these
self-service platforms are perfect for books “that don’t have mass-market appeal
but matter a lot to a specific audience.”

> “There’s a larger picture than simply the bottom line. My measurement of
> success from the beginning has been to make a difference in the lives of
> veterans and military families.”

And that’s exactly what After Action is doing.

In a five-star review, an Amazon customer named Jeanne McLennan wrote about the
book’s “huge impact on our family. Our son-in-law was a Marine Cobra pilot who
was killed two years ago. In the coming together of all of his ‘brothers’ with
his wife and family during the days and weeks after his death, we could feel
their love, strength, dedication, and vulnerability. Dan Sheehan’s writing has
opened up the deeper conversations among us of what the personal impact of their
work has [been] on each of them and their families.”

After Action has earned an average of 4.7 stars from Amazon customers, a starred
review from Publishers Weekly, and a gold medal in the Independent Publisher
Book Awards. Dan has appeared on radio and TV and spoken to veterans’ groups
around the United States.

A veteran who became a police officer in civilian life and was one of the first
responders at a school shooting emailed Dan that “being a former Marine and one
of the only prior military on scene, I felt it was my duty to act unaffected.
When the truth is, being a father, the images haunt me. Reading your book kinda
opened the door for me and let me know that it’s okay to have ‘feelings’ and to
be affected by this event. Just wanted to thank you. Reading your journey helped
tremendously.”

As Dan writes in After Action, “The journey begins when the veteran admits to
him- or herself that they are carrying some sort of burden. These burdens have
been crushing souls for centuries—they are as old as war itself. There is no
shame in acknowledging them, no weakness in feeling their weight.”

For Dan, it all goes back to that night Lena insisted he start dealing with his
problems. Lena and Dan are married with two kids now. Dan’s last words in After
Action are about Lena: “Her support and love made the positive ending for this
book possible. It is through her that I have the opportunity to experience the
best that life has to offer.”

Shop Dan Sheehan’s books

A version of this article appeared at A version of this article originally
appeared at Amazon.com

How Kindle Scout changed Ned Hayes’ life
By Amazon.com


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Support from readers helped Hayes land a publishing deal

New characters often visit novelist Ned Hayes uninvited, so it wasn’t all that
strange a few years back when the voice of a fictional teenage boy kept
percolating in the back of his mind. Then things got more intense: “A friend of
mine took me to this amazing old-growth tree, and the first lines of the story,
where the boy saw the Eagle Tree and wanted to climb it, just rose up in me. I
had to write the story down. I felt kind of carried away by a rushing stream,
and I didn’t know where it was really taking me.

I felt like I’d given someone a voice who didn’t have one.”

The rushing stream carried Ned to The Eagle Tree, a novel unlike anything he’d
ever written. He was a published author of historical fiction, and—even though
writing novels wasn’t his full-time job, and his books had never reached massive
numbers of readers—his work had earned him representation by an established
literary agent. But far from being the historical fiction the agent
expected, The Eagle Tree was set in modern times, and that percolating voice in
Ned’s head turned out to belong to a teenage boy diagnosed with autism. In the
novel, young March Wong climbs dangerously high into Washington’s forests to
chase his passion for learning all about trees.

“When I first gave the manuscript to my agent, she read it through and said,
‘Well, this is a really different kind of book, and I’m not sure I can sell
this,’” Ned says.

Ned didn’t push. He had his own doubts. “I was concerned that maybe it was a
book that I had written just for my own pleasure and that I would be the only
reader that really enjoyed it.”

Ned knew a way to test whether the novel would ever speak to anyone but him. As
a reader, he’d been participating in Kindle Scout, where authors can submit
their never-before-published books. Readers see excerpts from each book, and
they can nominate their favorites to receive a publishing contract from Amazon.
Ned submitted The Eagle Tree and waited to see if anyone would nominate it. He
was about to be carried away by another rushing stream.

“One of the earliest comments I received,” Ned starts to say, surprising himself
by choking up, “was from somebody who had a family member who was on the autism
spectrum. They said that this book gave them insight into their family member in
a way that they never expected, and it changed their entire relationship. And I
just felt really moved by that. Because I felt like I’d given someone a voice
who didn’t have one.”

The response from Scout users was overwhelming. The Kindle Scout team also saw
serious potential in Ned’s work and shared his manuscript with Carmen Johnson,
an editor at Amazon Publishing’s Little A imprint. Carmen loved it. She worked
with Ned to release Kindle, paperback, and audiobook versions of The Eagle Tree.
Thinking back to the exciting weeks when everything came together, Ned says,
“Amazon really ended up opening a huge number of doors for me.”

More than 75,000 readers later, the character of March Wong continues to connect
with people. Steve Silberman, whose NeuroTribes appeared on many of the most
prestigious lists of the best books of 2015, praised Ned’s “gorgeously written”
book for featuring “one of the most accurate, finely drawn and memorable
autistic protagonists I’ve come across in literature.”

The success of The Eagle Tree has opened new doors for Ned. He’s collaborating
with fellow artists on a graphic novel and an independent film based on the
book. He’s also using the bulk of his book royalties to launch OLY ARTS, an arts
and culture magazine with print, online, and mobile app editions. He says he
wants to “spread the word about the wonderful artists, actors, writers and
musicians in the Olympia area who don’t have the megaphone they need to earn a
living wage for the amazing work they do.”

The first OLY ARTS issue’s 10,000 copies were supposed to last 12 weeks. “It
sold out in two and a half weeks flat,” Ned says, beaming. “So there’s a lot of
interest and excitement, and it’s fantastic to know that readers of The Eagle
Tree made this all possible.”



A version of this article appeared at Amazon.com



Who says writing can’t pay the bills?
By Maria Murnane


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


It took years of hard work and rejection, but I finally got the call I’d always
dreamed of

Maria Murnane left a successful career in public relations, boarded a plane to
Argentina for a two-week trip, and decided to pursue her dream of writing a
novel. One year later, she was living in Buenos Aires and had finished the
manuscript of Perfect on Paper: The (Mis)Adventures of Waverly Bryson, based on
the humorous real-life struggles she and her friends faced when charting their
romantic paths. She returned to the United States, found an agent who loved the
book, and began searching for a publisher to bring it to the masses. Both she
and her agent were surprised at the flood of rejections the book received. In
the end, thirteen publishers said the same thing: “Chick lit is dead.”

“After two years of rejections, I didn’t know what else to do, so I did
nothing,” says Maria. “I left the book sitting on my computer and started a
freelance writing business. Then, about six months later, my dad handed me a
book on self-publishing, along with a little plan he’d written for what I needed
to do to publish on my own. He told me he loved my book and that I couldn’t let
it go, so he was going to help me publish it myself. It nearly made me cry.”

Inspired by her father’s faith in her work, Maria went after her goals with
renewed energy and found independent publishing to be the solution she was
looking for. She decided to publish through CreateSpace, an Amazon company.
“People told me how easy it was to work with, and they were absolutely right,”
Maria said. “My goal was to prove the publishers who had turned me down wrong.
On the marketing side, I knew that reviews from Amazon customers could help my
book through word of mouth. And it worked!” Soon after self-publishing, Maria
had racked up more than one hundred positive Amazon customer reviews.

That’s when Amazon Publishing took notice of this promising new talent in the
women’s fiction genre and offered Maria the book deal she’d always wanted,
complete with editing, publicity, and distribution. “It took years of hard work
and rejection, but I finally got the call I’d always dreamed of,” said Maria,
“and it came from Amazon. They’ve been there for me every step of the way and
believed in me and my work from the start.” Less than a year after its
publication by AmazonEncore, Perfect on Paper climbed to number two on the
Kindle bestseller list.

Maria is now living her dream of writing full time. Under its Lake Union
imprint, Amazon Publishing has published three sequels to Perfect on Paper (It’s
a Waverly Life, Honey on Your Mind, and Chocolate for Two, which garnered a
starred review by Publishers Weekly), plus Katwalk, Wait for the Rain, and
Cassidy Lane, which won a 2015 International Book Award in the Chick Lit/Women’s
Lit category.

HIGHLIGHTS

 * Lives in: California
 * Maria Murnane left behind a successful career, moved to Argentina, and
   decided to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.
 * She returned to the US with a finished manuscript, but tried for years to
   find a publisher, with no success.
 * Her dad convinced her to try self-publishing with Amazon. Now she’s a
   full-time writer with Amazon.





A version of this article appeared at Amazon.com
Maria Murnane

Maria Murnane is a CreateSpace contributor and the best-selling author of
the Waverly Bryson series, Cassidy Lane, Katwalk, and Wait for the Rain. She
also provides consulting services on book publishing and marketing. For more,
visit www.mariamurnane.com

In search of the perfect writing space
By Dina Nayeri


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My sacred writing space, the magic it unlocked, was hiding between my headphones

I’ve been searching for a suitable writing space—a place that fits my mood, that
feels sacred and creative and peaceful, that coaxes the words from my
fingers—since the day I started calling myself a writer.

After I decided to leave the business world to write professionally, the
physical space I occupied suddenly seemed important. This was, after all, no
joke; this was my job. I’d been writing essays and stories and theses and papers
since I was a kid, and never did space matter then. It wasn’t a sacred thing or
a part of the process. I wrote at my desk at home or in my dorm room or any
other place where I had a chair and a desk. If the atmosphere was noisy, I put
on music. If it was too quiet, I put on music. Usually I had some chocolate
nearby. That was it.

When I started writing more seriously, I’d take my laptop and a stack of books
to cafés around Harvard Square. The buzz of students and professors energized
me, and often I’d stop to people watch. My stories were peppered with bits of
dialogue I picked up here or there. I wasn’t yet confident in my own voice, my
memories, or the voices inside my imagination. When I moved to a tiny village
outside Paris, cafés were no longer an option, and I worked in a basement study
filled with my books. It was a cozy space but lonely, and suddenly I found
myself unable to finish a chapter. That was the first time I felt the power of
the space around me, how it can stifle creativity or unlock some magic that
makes the writing flow—I began to blame it, to give it more power. I started
driving into Paris every morning to work in a particular café that energized me.
I went every day, though I lived over an hour away. It was perfect: the ritual,
the destination, the feeling that I was driving “to work” every morning.

Moving to Amsterdam, I continued the ritual. I found a pretty café with big
wooden tables called the Koffee Salon and then a better one called Two For Joy,
where I chatted with the owner as he roasted coffee beans in a big tub. I worked
in these places day after day, thinking, “I found the magic again. It’s all
about a warm atmosphere.”

But in Iowa City, the cafés didn’t feel warm. For a while I languished, failing
to write. Soon, I found that the coffee shops were filled with other writers
whose work I knew and respected. I pushed myself simply because I saw them
clacking away at their laptops, carrying new books into the café every three
days, reading and writing at such a fast clip that I felt the need to push
myself. 

Since I moved to New York, though, the magic doesn’t come in cafés anymore, and
it doesn’t come in my apartment. This has left me baffled—maybe I’m missing
something about the kind of space I need. Should it be quieter? Better lit?
Should I turn off the Wi-Fi? At one point I joined a writing space, thinking
that what I needed was what I had in Iowa—other writers nearby. Maybe it’s my
schedule, the pace of life in New York, or something else. And yet, twice during
my life in New York, I found a kind of productivity, hunger, and excitement for
my work that I had back in those cafés in Europe.

Once was at the MacDowell Colony, where I was secluded in a cabin, looking out
onto a bronzing field. The other was in my apartment for three solitary weeks
when I shut myself away, canceling everything, to finish a draft.

It strikes me now that after all these years, searching for space, I had it
right in the beginning, during those teenage years, when I would do my work in
my room, putting on music to shut out the quiet or the noise. All that time, it
seems, my sacred writing space, the magic it unlocked, was hiding between my
headphones. And maybe that’s just how it works for everyone. There is no perfect
space, only something to say and a hunger to say it better than the last time.



A version of this article appeared at The Center for Fiction
Dina Nayeri

Dina Nayer's debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, was released in 2013 and
translated for into fourteen languages. It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great
New Writers book and long-listed for the Flaherty Dunnan first novel prize. Her
stories and essays have appeared at Marie Claire, Glamour, Granta, The Wall
Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vice, The Daily Beast, Guernica, Electric
Literature, and more. She holds a BA from Princeton, an M.Ed. and MBA from
Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

How I went from journalist to fiction writer
By Peter Heller


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When you’re young and dumb, you often don’t know what you can’t do.

I wanted to be a fiction writer ever since my school librarian handed me a copy
of Hemingway’s In Our Time when I was eleven.  It’s that thin volume of early
stories, mostly about Nick Adams in the wild country of Upper Michigan.  I took
it home and was riveted.  I wanted to do that: I wanted to hop off a slow-moving
freight and carry my rucksack through woods and tall grass that wet my pantlegs
with dew.  I wanted to camp by the Big Two-Hearted River and make cowboy coffee
and not burn my tongue the way Nick didn’t and fish for those gorgeous trout.  I
wanted to have a beautiful girlfriend that could row and fish like a man–and
then break up with her, because Nick did.  But mostly I was transported by the
cadence of the prose and the music of the language.  I wanted to do that.  To
write stories just like that.

I read everything I could and tried to everything one needed to do to become a
great writer.  I read the dictionary and taped words I didn’t know on the wall
because I’d heard that Jack London did it.  I copied out poems and paragraphs
written by writers I admired.  I went to a good college and studied literature. 
But they didn’t tell me at the English Department at Dartmouth that you can’t
make a living writing short stories.  They probably should have.  I got out of
school, moved to Boulder, and worked construction, delivered pizza, taught
kayaking.  I was a passionate kayaker then, and paddling some crazy rivers.  On
my days off I wrote poetry and stories.

One day a friend said, Why don’t you combine your interests and write
for Outside Magazine?  When you’re young and dumb, you often don’t know what you
can’t do.  I went down to the magazine store and got an Outside and flipped to
the masthead and chose the name of a senior editor that sounded nice.  I got the
main number for the magazine and called and tried to sound confident and offhand
and said, “Laura Hohnhold, please.”  “Just a second.”  I was startled.  She
picked up.  I started talking fast.  I told her that I’d published a short story
in Harper’s, which was sort of true—it was a very short reprint of a college
piece, published in the Readings section—I said that I could paddle Class V, and
that she should send me on an expedition to the Tibetan Plateau to run a first
descent of a remote river.  Long pause.  Then she said, “We’ve heard about this
expedition and we don’t have a writer that can kayak Class V.  I’m going to take
a chance on you.”

That first story did not go the way I planned, and come to think of it, none of
them ever have.  A man died in my arms on the first day of the expedition.  A
raft flipped and he washed into a logjam, and I and another kayaker tried to
extract him and he was stuck, and the river rose over his head.  I came home
grieving and traumatized and wrote about it in a long piece called “Set Free in
China.”

It was an odd way to start my career in magazine journalism.  I knew that if I
didn’t paddle something hard again right away I might never paddle again.  So I
got an assignment from Playboy to cover a Kiwi-Russian expedition to try the
first descent of the Muk Su, “The Everest of Rivers” in the old Soviet Union. 
It was way up in the High Pamirs of Tajikistan, and the last Russian team to
attempt it had lost five of their eleven men.  I’d be one of the two kayakers
that would probe out front of the rafts and signal the way through.  It was
massive whitewater that flowed through a constricted canyon, and there were snow
leopards everywhere and wolf tracks in the sand of the beaches.  We’d get to a
hard rapid and the Russians would squat on the high bank and look grim and smoke
cigarettes; it looked in the hunch of their broad shoulders like they were
carrying the weight of history.  The Kiwis would hop along the bank hooting,
saying “She’ll be right.  Now worries, I see a line there…”  A trip for the
ages.  Seventeen days of wild whitewater and nobody died.

That began a decades-long joyful diversion away from fiction.  I wrote stories
about adventure and the environment, because that’s what I cared about, and some
of those stories turned into books of non-fiction. 

A few years ago, I thought I’d saved up enough to spend nine months writing a
novel and I thought, It’s time.  I went to my local coffee shop and sat down and
began from a first line.  I didn’t plot or outline.  In all my non-fiction I
always knew the ending, knew what was going to happen next, because it
happened.  Now I wanted to be surprised.  Just like running a river that had
never been run: I wanted to paddle around the bend of my narrative and have no
idea what would be there: a cougar drinking, a waterfall, a flight of swallows. 
I wrote a few lines and then, “My name is Hig, one name.  Big Hig if you need
another.  If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying
I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one.”  I sat up.  I listened.  I
listened for seven months straight and that became The Dog Stars.

What I realized is that all those years of writing magazine stories was the best
training.  I had learned to create a strong sense of place that would
immediately capture and immerse a reader.  To conjure characters that were alive
and authentic and jumped off the page.  To lay down a pace and cadence that kept
the reader turning the pages.  And after so many wild expeditions and trips, I
had also been studying, without really knowing it, what people do under immense
pressure.  The grace and courage, and sometimes the unraveling, the betrayals,
the meanness and fear.  What could be better for writing novels?

Celine, my new novel, was a bit different, and very special, because it is about
my mom.  She died two and half years ago, and I think I wanted to spend another
year with her.  Like the protagonist she was a crack investigator who
specialized in reuniting birth families.  Like Celine, she could shoot—the scene
in Idaho with the gun dealer when she blows seven cans and bottles off the log
is true—and she really did bring in a bank fraud perp for the FBI—after spying
on him with her opera glasses, and executing a high speed car chase in her old
Volvo.  She really was courageous and elegant, and the family backstory in
France during the war is all true.  I tried to write her as closely as I could.

The book, I guess, was a coming home for me.  As writing fiction was, after so
many years as a journalist.



A version of this article originally appeared on the Amazon Book Review.

Peter Heller

Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at
Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. He is an
award winning adventure writer, the author of four books of literary nonfiction
and three bestselling novels, including The Dog Stars and Celine. He lives in
Denver.

The Secret To This Romance Author’s Success? Breaking All The Rules.
By Kristen Ashley


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I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.

I can safely say that every time I’ve been asked to speak to aspiring writers,
afterward, I’ve had not one, but several come up to me and say, “I can’t believe
you did what you said you did. I was told never to do that. I was told never to
break that rule.” This does not surprise me, but it saddens me. When I started
writing, I too had a set of rules for writing romance (my genre) that I was
under the impression were unbreakable. And I wrote within the confines of those
rules.

It was only when publishing house after publishing house, agent after agent had
rejected my submissions, and I’d decided that no one was ever going to read my
books, that I threw the rules out the window. I then simply wrote what I wanted
to write, wrote how the stories came to me, was true to them and my characters.

Then I published myself … And I’ve sold more than two and a half million books.

What are the rules I broke? First, I didn’t write what I thought people wanted
to read. I didn’t research what might be popular — what might sell — and write
that. I wrote stories that felt personal to me, that I enjoyed completely from
writing to reading. The first book that I did this with was Rock Chick, and with
it and the Rock Chick series, I broke all the rules:

I wrote in first person, and at that time, romance novels in first person were
available, but not customary.

I wrote my heroine’s thoughts in a stream of consciousness. I had paragraphs —
many of them — that were just one word. I put myself, and what would eventually
be my readers, in the mind of my heroine, Indy. Not describing what she was
thinking, but thinking what she was thinking as she was thinking it. It’s
important to note that not everyone could get into that, and that’s
understandable, even expected. It’s also important to note that the ones who
did, really did.

I allowed my characters freedom of expression. This meant that if they cursed,
if the F-word was prevalent in their vocabulary, I let them use it (and cursing
was very rare in romance).

For that matter, I didn’t censor my characters or their behavior. I didn’t
think, “Oh, that might make her unlikeable, I need to switch that up, make her
perfect.” I didn’t water down my aggressive, but loving heroes. I let them be
them — real, imperfect, sometimes annoying, more times endearing (I hoped). They
were great friends and good people, but they could (and often did) do stupid
things (like we all do).

And my Rock Chicks were — and still are — hugely successful.

Once I let myself be free, my writing took off — not only in that people were
reading it, but that I felt at liberty to create how I needed to create. To be
true to what I was doing. It wasn’t about stepping out of bounds for the sake of
it. It was about opening a cage and giving myself the freedom to fly.

In other words, I broke the rules for the sake of the stories. And I didn’t play
it safe after my books started selling; I had to stay true to that process. I
needed to keep spreading my wings, doing this for me, but also to give my
readers something new and fresh, a story I was passionate about so they could
enjoy it right along with me. 

One example of this was when I wrote The Will. 

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write. 

By this time, I was already an established romance writer and had hit the
bestseller lists. But I was certain that The Will would never sell. You see, The
Will had a hero and heroine who were in their late forties. I’d already written
outside what I considered the “romance norm” by writing characters in their
thirties and even early forties. But pushing them close to their fifties and
showing them as sexual, vital, commanding, interesting, with flaws they were
learning to embrace, baggage they continued to carry, and issues they were still
working out (all of this is the case with people of any age) — I figured no one
would read it. I thought that if I didn’t have leads in their twenties or early
thirties, the book would bomb.

What’s more, romance readers expect a lot from their heroines. Give a heroine
even a tiny flaw, this often doesn’t go over well. Many women feel the need to
strive for perfection, and that makes my heart sad — that we can’t accept
ourselves for the beauty of all that we are rather than pushing ourselves to
something that is often unattainable, or even practical, much less something
that, in the end, even if we were able to achieve it, wouldn’t make us
boundlessly happy (but this is for another, far longer piece). And there I was
in this series, putting my heroines in a huge hole they had to dig themselves
out of and making my readers do that work right alongside them.

I still had to tell the story. It wouldn’t let me go. So I did. And The Will was
a Goodreads Choice nominee, hitting #7 in the overall romance vote and it hit
the bestseller lists.

When my readers engaged with me about it, those who were around the age of my
hero and heroine were delighted someone told a story that they could more easily
relate to…but it wasn’t just that. Much younger readers embraced it as well.

Another example where I broke my own rules is in The Deep End. It was a new
genre for me, but I was known for jumping genres, writing contemporary romance
as well as fantasy and paranormal. However, this was me jumping into erotica.
Although it’s not a huge leap for a romance writer, as erotica is (thankfully)
now an established, popular genre, I took a twist in what was popular in the
genre and what was considered my norm by switching up a D/s relationship so that
the dominant was a woman and the submissive was a man. An alpha male, but still
a sexual submissive.

I loved this story, was passionate about it, had wanted to write something like
this for years, but I struggled against the pull of it because I knew it would
take a giant leap of faith for many of my readers to engage with it. When sales
started out slow, I was not surprised. But word of mouth started circulating and
more people took the plunge, bought the book, and liked it. It was gorgeous and
humbling. I wrote a book I adored, communicated about it openly and honestly,
and prayed my readers would decide to take that plunge with me. So I was utterly
delighted when many did.

I’ve broken other rules, too: I’ve written books where the hero and heroine get
together with little to no drama. My vampires do not burn up in the sunlight
(my Three series). I’ve killed the dog (you’re never supposed to do that, but
don’t despair, I made up for it).

I don’t write the stories I want to write. I write the stories I need to write.
And in doing that, I hope that my readers feel that need and enjoy the passion
that prompted it. 

 

One of my favorite quotes (and things to do) is “dance like no one is watching.”

You do it because you love to do it. Get down, bust your own moves, and enjoy
the heck out of it. I also like to say, “write like no one will be reading.” The
most important part of the process is to do it because you love to do it.

And when you do, bust your own moves.



A version of this article appeared at https://www.audible.com



Kristen Ashley

Celebrating ten years of authors and KDP
By Kindle Direct Publishing


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We asked KDP authors to share the first moment they felt success as
self-published writers

Kindle Direct Publishing has turned ten, and to celebrate this milestone
anniversary we asked KDP authors to share the first moments they felt success as
self-published writers. The answers were incredibly inspiring, ranging from
becoming a bestseller to adding the title of “self-published author” to their
resume to receiving five-star reviews from international readers to hearing
about the impact of their books directly from readers.

Inspired by the stories every author shared, we selected a few authors for a
little surprise – cookies decorated with the authors’ book covers.  

Here’s a look at their stories (and some cookie photos, too!):

Leslie McAdam:

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. But whenever I’d show
anyone my writing or send a query letter, I was immediately rejected. Still, for
fifteen years, I secretly wrote: four novels, several screenplays, poetry, and
other work. After a crisis in my life, I realized that the only thing I ever
wanted to do was be a writer. I got help from a grammar coach and posted my
first novel on a website in 2015. I was so scared to have people read my
writing, because it was personal and vulnerable, but I️ also had this
overwhelming need to connect with readers. That book, The Sun and the Moon,
ended up winning a prize in the world’s largest online writing competition
(75,000 entries). After that, I released a revised and edited version and
uploaded it to KDP. I️ felt like I️ was a real author, finally, publishing it on
Amazon. Two years and seven books later, I haven’t looked back. While the
release of each book is special, posting the first one felt like success.”



Magan Vernon:

“I first published in 2011 but didn’t really feel successful until 2013. That
was the first time I watched a book sail up the Amazon charts in multiple
countries. I read reviews on amazon.de and .fr (or tried to, since you know,
language) and thought all of these people are reading a story written by a new
Mom from the Illinois cornfields. People who have never met me and don’t speak
my language. It still gives me chills.”



Nicole J Merchant:

“The first time I felt successful as an indie author wasn’t when I published my
first novel. It wasn’t when I made my first sale or ten sales. It was when I got
a message asking when the next one to my series came out. That was when I knew I
had gained a reader. That was when I felt like I had done something right.”



Annie Bellet:

“I’ve been self-publishing for over 7 years now, but the first time I felt real
success was in 2011 when $$ from my thriller novel paid our rent. Then again in
2014 when I could finally pay all my medical bills. It’s been a strange
rollercoaster.”



Eliza Knight:

“Seven years ago I took a deep breath and hit publish. Now a USA Today
bestseller and accepted to RWA’s Honor Roll! Dreams do come true!”



Barbara Appleby:

“For me it was a letter in the mail from former First Lady Barbara Bush. She was
going to read The Sock Monster to her great grandchildren. That letter hangs on
my wall today.”



Cassie Selleck:

“I published my first novel, The Pecan Man, on KDP in January 2012 and thought
the best I would do was sell to family and friends. Within two years, I was able
to quit my full-time job and live a writer’s life. I have over 3000 reviews on
Amazon, signed with a NY agent, optioned movie rights, sold foreign rights, and
have been translated into two languages. I am in public libraries across the
country and Skype with an average of one book club a week. And ALL of this has
happened because of Amazon’s amazing self-publishing tools.”



Behind the cover: Alexandra Sokoloff
By Amazon.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Even after being published several times, author Alexandra Sokoloff decided to
step out of her comfort zone by taking the indie- publisher path. See why she
can now write her stories with a smile.



Alexandra Sokoloff is the author of the bestselling  Huntress/FBI thriller
series. Learn more at http://alexandrasokoloff.com

See more “Behind the Cover” videos here. 



Behind the cover: J.F. (Joanna) Penn
By Amazon.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


“It took me a long time to find a life that I love”

“It took me a long time to find a life that I love…” Joanna Penn left her job in
the finance industry to follow her heart and write for a living.

Watch Joanna share her fascinating journey to become a New York Times
bestselling author.



Joanna Penn is a NY Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author, a creative
entrepreneur, podcaster, professional speaker, and travel junkie. For more,
visit www.JFPenn.com.

This video originally appeared on YouTube

The art of revising by hand
By Cara Benson


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Returning to pen and paper

As a young adult, I found my own writing practice after university by scribbling
randomly on napkins or on the backs of overdue rent bills. I loved looking at
all sorts of materials as a possible canvas and feel now that these artifacts
can exist as works in and of themselves. With the digitization of, well,
everything, these handmade words exude an aura of an original, as one of our
most original cultural critics so famously put it, that Times New Roman could
never emulate.

There is a bevy of information conveyed in the representation of language by
hand that does not come through in the typed text. There’s so much character and
emotion in the loops and points. It’s almost a version of speaking. I enjoyed
writing like this so much that I came to rely on the personality my cursive or
block or inkblots carried. But it didn’t take more than a few seasons for the
mesh bags I was using as storage for my notes to overflow. So I decided it was
at last time to transcribe my writing into documents. Now I was face to face
with the nakedness of my words, laid bare in type on a utilitarian, letter-sized
page formatted for predetermined fonts. I was stripped down to the quick, I
felt. What would these symbols say without my penmanship to help them along?

It was a stunning lesson, and one I am continually learning. My writing goes off
into the world without me. I am not there to explain or amend or encourage or
detract or further its course into the reader’s mind or heart in the slightest
once it leaves my domain. I don’t say this to bully myself into writing better
(as if!), but to help me to see the letters as typed on the page in front of me
as cleanly as possible. What are my tics or hiccups that I like or need to push
to the side? What am I actually communicating?

Here’s the other thing that typing my writing does that handwriting doesn’t: I
am afforded a streamlined process for rewriting. It’s one thing to dash a ditty
interestingly on the white space of a coffee maker manual (I still relish this
hybrid form), but it’s quite another to put together one thousand words for a
column or three thousand for a story or, aesthetes forbid, sixty thousand or
more for a book specifically geared toward mechanical reproduction (although I
just heard of one writer who wrote her entire novel by hand!). For me, you
better believe I’ll be clicking on spell check, thesaurus, and “save as” at the
very minimum. For my most recent book, I’ve got almost one hundred drafts in
succession up to the current near-ready version.

But here’s where my old habits can be of use. Sometimes, to open up a paragraph
or few pages that refuse to cooperate on rewrite after rewrite, I go back to my
postcollege writing roots. I sit at the table, grab my familiar friends the pen
and the pad, and, without the excerpt I’m reworking in front of me, I literally
re-create, by hand, the troubling section through a combination of memory and
invention. This loosens everything up and shakes the words out of the bag. By
forcing me to let go of awkward sentences that I’m holding on to because they
set up ones that I love (that should also be sacrificed) and helping me smooth
out some tripped-up syntax, this process can be productive in a way that working
onscreen inhibits.

I am so grateful for this tool in my writer’s toolkit. It has liberated both me
and my texts from an overbearing approach to “getting it right.” Suddenly,
perfection matters less because the handwriting makes the process less
formalized. I get to play again, and that’s often when my better writing happens
anyway. Heck, my next book even has reproduced doodles in it! Not that that’s
the whole book. There’s a good 61,472 words that were very much not all written
out by hand. I can tell you, though, that I reworked my opening by hand one
morning, and I couldn’t be more pleased with it.

A version of this article originally appeared on GrubStreet

Cara Benson

Cara Benson is an award-winning writer whose work has been published in the New
York Times, Boston Review, Best American Poetry, and in syndication. Her online
home is carabensonwriter.com.

A combat veteran redefines bravery
By Amazon.com


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Bravery meant no more pretending

“If you were doing okay after what you had to see and do, you wouldn’t be
normal,” Capt. Lena Gold told her fiancé. “Normal people don’t kill without
regret. Normal people don’t bury friends and never think of them again.” Lena
and her husband-to-be, Dan Sheehan, were both US Marines. They both piloted
helicopters.

War changed Dan. He came home from Iraq and fell into using alcohol to hide from
his thoughts.

In a memoir called After Action, Dan writes about the night Lena finally called
him on his drinking and how “a bolt of fear shot through my hazy brain” when she
said, “I love you, Dan, but maybe we should put the wedding on hold until you
sort this stuff out.”

Dan’s book is the story of how he ultimately did sort things out—by rejecting
the idea that bravery meant pretending everything was normal after he’d killed
enemies and buried friends. Bravery meant the opposite: no more pretending, no
more hiding from memories. Dan wrote ten drafts of After Action as he grappled
with the war and its aftermath. When he finally got the words down right, he
knew he’d made something that could help his fellow veterans.

Dan sent After Action to literary agents, hoping someone would believe in the
book and help get it published. Most of the agents didn’t answer his queries.
“The agents that did respond usually said something along the lines of ‘Thanks
for your service, but I don’t think I can sell this,’” Dan remembers.

One small publisher showed interest. But when Dan looked at the tone of its
existing titles, he feared it “would focus on the fighting/action parts of my
book and neglect the healing parts.”

Determined to put out a book that did justice to his squadron’s combat
experience and his own struggle to heal, Dan turned to independent publishing.
He chose Amazon’s CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Dan says these
self-service platforms are perfect for books “that don’t have mass-market appeal
but matter a lot to a specific audience.”

> “There’s a larger picture than simply the bottom line. My measurement of
> success from the beginning has been to make a difference in the lives of
> veterans and military families.”

And that’s exactly what After Action is doing.

In a five-star review, an Amazon customer named Jeanne McLennan wrote about the
book’s “huge impact on our family. Our son-in-law was a Marine Cobra pilot who
was killed two years ago. In the coming together of all of his ‘brothers’ with
his wife and family during the days and weeks after his death, we could feel
their love, strength, dedication, and vulnerability. Dan Sheehan’s writing has
opened up the deeper conversations among us of what the personal impact of their
work has [been] on each of them and their families.”

After Action has earned an average of 4.7 stars from Amazon customers, a starred
review from Publishers Weekly, and a gold medal in the Independent Publisher
Book Awards. Dan has appeared on radio and TV and spoken to veterans’ groups
around the United States.

A veteran who became a police officer in civilian life and was one of the first
responders at a school shooting emailed Dan that “being a former Marine and one
of the only prior military on scene, I felt it was my duty to act unaffected.
When the truth is, being a father, the images haunt me. Reading your book kinda
opened the door for me and let me know that it’s okay to have ‘feelings’ and to
be affected by this event. Just wanted to thank you. Reading your journey helped
tremendously.”

As Dan writes in After Action, “The journey begins when the veteran admits to
him- or herself that they are carrying some sort of burden. These burdens have
been crushing souls for centuries—they are as old as war itself. There is no
shame in acknowledging them, no weakness in feeling their weight.”

For Dan, it all goes back to that night Lena insisted he start dealing with his
problems. Lena and Dan are married with two kids now. Dan’s last words in After
Action are about Lena: “Her support and love made the positive ending for this
book possible. It is through her that I have the opportunity to experience the
best that life has to offer.”

Shop Dan Sheehan’s books

A version of this article appeared at A version of this article originally
appeared at Amazon.com

How Kindle Scout changed Ned Hayes’ life
By Amazon.com


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Support from readers helped Hayes land a publishing deal

New characters often visit novelist Ned Hayes uninvited, so it wasn’t all that
strange a few years back when the voice of a fictional teenage boy kept
percolating in the back of his mind. Then things got more intense: “A friend of
mine took me to this amazing old-growth tree, and the first lines of the story,
where the boy saw the Eagle Tree and wanted to climb it, just rose up in me. I
had to write the story down. I felt kind of carried away by a rushing stream,
and I didn’t know where it was really taking me.

I felt like I’d given someone a voice who didn’t have one.”

The rushing stream carried Ned to The Eagle Tree, a novel unlike anything he’d
ever written. He was a published author of historical fiction, and—even though
writing novels wasn’t his full-time job, and his books had never reached massive
numbers of readers—his work had earned him representation by an established
literary agent. But far from being the historical fiction the agent
expected, The Eagle Tree was set in modern times, and that percolating voice in
Ned’s head turned out to belong to a teenage boy diagnosed with autism. In the
novel, young March Wong climbs dangerously high into Washington’s forests to
chase his passion for learning all about trees.

“When I first gave the manuscript to my agent, she read it through and said,
‘Well, this is a really different kind of book, and I’m not sure I can sell
this,’” Ned says.

Ned didn’t push. He had his own doubts. “I was concerned that maybe it was a
book that I had written just for my own pleasure and that I would be the only
reader that really enjoyed it.”

Ned knew a way to test whether the novel would ever speak to anyone but him. As
a reader, he’d been participating in Kindle Scout, where authors can submit
their never-before-published books. Readers see excerpts from each book, and
they can nominate their favorites to receive a publishing contract from Amazon.
Ned submitted The Eagle Tree and waited to see if anyone would nominate it. He
was about to be carried away by another rushing stream.

“One of the earliest comments I received,” Ned starts to say, surprising himself
by choking up, “was from somebody who had a family member who was on the autism
spectrum. They said that this book gave them insight into their family member in
a way that they never expected, and it changed their entire relationship. And I
just felt really moved by that. Because I felt like I’d given someone a voice
who didn’t have one.”

The response from Scout users was overwhelming. The Kindle Scout team also saw
serious potential in Ned’s work and shared his manuscript with Carmen Johnson,
an editor at Amazon Publishing’s Little A imprint. Carmen loved it. She worked
with Ned to release Kindle, paperback, and audiobook versions of The Eagle Tree.
Thinking back to the exciting weeks when everything came together, Ned says,
“Amazon really ended up opening a huge number of doors for me.”

More than 75,000 readers later, the character of March Wong continues to connect
with people. Steve Silberman, whose NeuroTribes appeared on many of the most
prestigious lists of the best books of 2015, praised Ned’s “gorgeously written”
book for featuring “one of the most accurate, finely drawn and memorable
autistic protagonists I’ve come across in literature.”

The success of The Eagle Tree has opened new doors for Ned. He’s collaborating
with fellow artists on a graphic novel and an independent film based on the
book. He’s also using the bulk of his book royalties to launch OLY ARTS, an arts
and culture magazine with print, online, and mobile app editions. He says he
wants to “spread the word about the wonderful artists, actors, writers and
musicians in the Olympia area who don’t have the megaphone they need to earn a
living wage for the amazing work they do.”

The first OLY ARTS issue’s 10,000 copies were supposed to last 12 weeks. “It
sold out in two and a half weeks flat,” Ned says, beaming. “So there’s a lot of
interest and excitement, and it’s fantastic to know that readers of The Eagle
Tree made this all possible.”



A version of this article appeared at Amazon.com



Who says writing can’t pay the bills?
By Maria Murnane


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


It took years of hard work and rejection, but I finally got the call I’d always
dreamed of

Maria Murnane left a successful career in public relations, boarded a plane to
Argentina for a two-week trip, and decided to pursue her dream of writing a
novel. One year later, she was living in Buenos Aires and had finished the
manuscript of Perfect on Paper: The (Mis)Adventures of Waverly Bryson, based on
the humorous real-life struggles she and her friends faced when charting their
romantic paths. She returned to the United States, found an agent who loved the
book, and began searching for a publisher to bring it to the masses. Both she
and her agent were surprised at the flood of rejections the book received. In
the end, thirteen publishers said the same thing: “Chick lit is dead.”

“After two years of rejections, I didn’t know what else to do, so I did
nothing,” says Maria. “I left the book sitting on my computer and started a
freelance writing business. Then, about six months later, my dad handed me a
book on self-publishing, along with a little plan he’d written for what I needed
to do to publish on my own. He told me he loved my book and that I couldn’t let
it go, so he was going to help me publish it myself. It nearly made me cry.”

Inspired by her father’s faith in her work, Maria went after her goals with
renewed energy and found independent publishing to be the solution she was
looking for. She decided to publish through CreateSpace, an Amazon company.
“People told me how easy it was to work with, and they were absolutely right,”
Maria said. “My goal was to prove the publishers who had turned me down wrong.
On the marketing side, I knew that reviews from Amazon customers could help my
book through word of mouth. And it worked!” Soon after self-publishing, Maria
had racked up more than one hundred positive Amazon customer reviews.

That’s when Amazon Publishing took notice of this promising new talent in the
women’s fiction genre and offered Maria the book deal she’d always wanted,
complete with editing, publicity, and distribution. “It took years of hard work
and rejection, but I finally got the call I’d always dreamed of,” said Maria,
“and it came from Amazon. They’ve been there for me every step of the way and
believed in me and my work from the start.” Less than a year after its
publication by AmazonEncore, Perfect on Paper climbed to number two on the
Kindle bestseller list.

Maria is now living her dream of writing full time. Under its Lake Union
imprint, Amazon Publishing has published three sequels to Perfect on Paper (It’s
a Waverly Life, Honey on Your Mind, and Chocolate for Two, which garnered a
starred review by Publishers Weekly), plus Katwalk, Wait for the Rain, and
Cassidy Lane, which won a 2015 International Book Award in the Chick Lit/Women’s
Lit category.

HIGHLIGHTS

 * Lives in: California
 * Maria Murnane left behind a successful career, moved to Argentina, and
   decided to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.
 * She returned to the US with a finished manuscript, but tried for years to
   find a publisher, with no success.
 * Her dad convinced her to try self-publishing with Amazon. Now she’s a
   full-time writer with Amazon.





A version of this article appeared at Amazon.com
Maria Murnane

Maria Murnane is a CreateSpace contributor and the best-selling author of
the Waverly Bryson series, Cassidy Lane, Katwalk, and Wait for the Rain. She
also provides consulting services on book publishing and marketing. For more,
visit www.mariamurnane.com

In search of the perfect writing space
By Dina Nayeri


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


My sacred writing space, the magic it unlocked, was hiding between my headphones

I’ve been searching for a suitable writing space—a place that fits my mood, that
feels sacred and creative and peaceful, that coaxes the words from my
fingers—since the day I started calling myself a writer.

After I decided to leave the business world to write professionally, the
physical space I occupied suddenly seemed important. This was, after all, no
joke; this was my job. I’d been writing essays and stories and theses and papers
since I was a kid, and never did space matter then. It wasn’t a sacred thing or
a part of the process. I wrote at my desk at home or in my dorm room or any
other place where I had a chair and a desk. If the atmosphere was noisy, I put
on music. If it was too quiet, I put on music. Usually I had some chocolate
nearby. That was it.

When I started writing more seriously, I’d take my laptop and a stack of books
to cafés around Harvard Square. The buzz of students and professors energized
me, and often I’d stop to people watch. My stories were peppered with bits of
dialogue I picked up here or there. I wasn’t yet confident in my own voice, my
memories, or the voices inside my imagination. When I moved to a tiny village
outside Paris, cafés were no longer an option, and I worked in a basement study
filled with my books. It was a cozy space but lonely, and suddenly I found
myself unable to finish a chapter. That was the first time I felt the power of
the space around me, how it can stifle creativity or unlock some magic that
makes the writing flow—I began to blame it, to give it more power. I started
driving into Paris every morning to work in a particular café that energized me.
I went every day, though I lived over an hour away. It was perfect: the ritual,
the destination, the feeling that I was driving “to work” every morning.

Moving to Amsterdam, I continued the ritual. I found a pretty café with big
wooden tables called the Koffee Salon and then a better one called Two For Joy,
where I chatted with the owner as he roasted coffee beans in a big tub. I worked
in these places day after day, thinking, “I found the magic again. It’s all
about a warm atmosphere.”

But in Iowa City, the cafés didn’t feel warm. For a while I languished, failing
to write. Soon, I found that the coffee shops were filled with other writers
whose work I knew and respected. I pushed myself simply because I saw them
clacking away at their laptops, carrying new books into the café every three
days, reading and writing at such a fast clip that I felt the need to push
myself. 

Since I moved to New York, though, the magic doesn’t come in cafés anymore, and
it doesn’t come in my apartment. This has left me baffled—maybe I’m missing
something about the kind of space I need. Should it be quieter? Better lit?
Should I turn off the Wi-Fi? At one point I joined a writing space, thinking
that what I needed was what I had in Iowa—other writers nearby. Maybe it’s my
schedule, the pace of life in New York, or something else. And yet, twice during
my life in New York, I found a kind of productivity, hunger, and excitement for
my work that I had back in those cafés in Europe.

Once was at the MacDowell Colony, where I was secluded in a cabin, looking out
onto a bronzing field. The other was in my apartment for three solitary weeks
when I shut myself away, canceling everything, to finish a draft.

It strikes me now that after all these years, searching for space, I had it
right in the beginning, during those teenage years, when I would do my work in
my room, putting on music to shut out the quiet or the noise. All that time, it
seems, my sacred writing space, the magic it unlocked, was hiding between my
headphones. And maybe that’s just how it works for everyone. There is no perfect
space, only something to say and a hunger to say it better than the last time.



A version of this article appeared at The Center for Fiction
Dina Nayeri

Dina Nayer's debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, was released in 2013 and
translated for into fourteen languages. It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great
New Writers book and long-listed for the Flaherty Dunnan first novel prize. Her
stories and essays have appeared at Marie Claire, Glamour, Granta, The Wall
Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vice, The Daily Beast, Guernica, Electric
Literature, and more. She holds a BA from Princeton, an M.Ed. and MBA from
Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

How I went from journalist to fiction writer
By Peter Heller


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


When you’re young and dumb, you often don’t know what you can’t do.

I wanted to be a fiction writer ever since my school librarian handed me a copy
of Hemingway’s In Our Time when I was eleven.  It’s that thin volume of early
stories, mostly about Nick Adams in the wild country of Upper Michigan.  I took
it home and was riveted.  I wanted to do that: I wanted to hop off a slow-moving
freight and carry my rucksack through woods and tall grass that wet my pantlegs
with dew.  I wanted to camp by the Big Two-Hearted River and make cowboy coffee
and not burn my tongue the way Nick didn’t and fish for those gorgeous trout.  I
wanted to have a beautiful girlfriend that could row and fish like a man–and
then break up with her, because Nick did.  But mostly I was transported by the
cadence of the prose and the music of the language.  I wanted to do that.  To
write stories just like that.

I read everything I could and tried to everything one needed to do to become a
great writer.  I read the dictionary and taped words I didn’t know on the wall
because I’d heard that Jack London did it.  I copied out poems and paragraphs
written by writers I admired.  I went to a good college and studied literature. 
But they didn’t tell me at the English Department at Dartmouth that you can’t
make a living writing short stories.  They probably should have.  I got out of
school, moved to Boulder, and worked construction, delivered pizza, taught
kayaking.  I was a passionate kayaker then, and paddling some crazy rivers.  On
my days off I wrote poetry and stories.

One day a friend said, Why don’t you combine your interests and write
for Outside Magazine?  When you’re young and dumb, you often don’t know what you
can’t do.  I went down to the magazine store and got an Outside and flipped to
the masthead and chose the name of a senior editor that sounded nice.  I got the
main number for the magazine and called and tried to sound confident and offhand
and said, “Laura Hohnhold, please.”  “Just a second.”  I was startled.  She
picked up.  I started talking fast.  I told her that I’d published a short story
in Harper’s, which was sort of true—it was a very short reprint of a college
piece, published in the Readings section—I said that I could paddle Class V, and
that she should send me on an expedition to the Tibetan Plateau to run a first
descent of a remote river.  Long pause.  Then she said, “We’ve heard about this
expedition and we don’t have a writer that can kayak Class V.  I’m going to take
a chance on you.”

That first story did not go the way I planned, and come to think of it, none of
them ever have.  A man died in my arms on the first day of the expedition.  A
raft flipped and he washed into a logjam, and I and another kayaker tried to
extract him and he was stuck, and the river rose over his head.  I came home
grieving and traumatized and wrote about it in a long piece called “Set Free in
China.”

It was an odd way to start my career in magazine journalism.  I knew that if I
didn’t paddle something hard again right away I might never paddle again.  So I
got an assignment from Playboy to cover a Kiwi-Russian expedition to try the
first descent of the Muk Su, “The Everest of Rivers” in the old Soviet Union. 
It was way up in the High Pamirs of Tajikistan, and the last Russian team to
attempt it had lost five of their eleven men.  I’d be one of the two kayakers
that would probe out front of the rafts and signal the way through.  It was
massive whitewater that flowed through a constricted canyon, and there were snow
leopards everywhere and wolf tracks in the sand of the beaches.  We’d get to a
hard rapid and the Russians would squat on the high bank and look grim and smoke
cigarettes; it looked in the hunch of their broad shoulders like they were
carrying the weight of history.  The Kiwis would hop along the bank hooting,
saying “She’ll be right.  Now worries, I see a line there…”  A trip for the
ages.  Seventeen days of wild whitewater and nobody died.

That began a decades-long joyful diversion away from fiction.  I wrote stories
about adventure and the environment, because that’s what I cared about, and some
of those stories turned into books of non-fiction. 

A few years ago, I thought I’d saved up enough to spend nine months writing a
novel and I thought, It’s time.  I went to my local coffee shop and sat down and
began from a first line.  I didn’t plot or outline.  In all my non-fiction I
always knew the ending, knew what was going to happen next, because it
happened.  Now I wanted to be surprised.  Just like running a river that had
never been run: I wanted to paddle around the bend of my narrative and have no
idea what would be there: a cougar drinking, a waterfall, a flight of swallows. 
I wrote a few lines and then, “My name is Hig, one name.  Big Hig if you need
another.  If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying
I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one.”  I sat up.  I listened.  I
listened for seven months straight and that became The Dog Stars.

What I realized is that all those years of writing magazine stories was the best
training.  I had learned to create a strong sense of place that would
immediately capture and immerse a reader.  To conjure characters that were alive
and authentic and jumped off the page.  To lay down a pace and cadence that kept
the reader turning the pages.  And after so many wild expeditions and trips, I
had also been studying, without really knowing it, what people do under immense
pressure.  The grace and courage, and sometimes the unraveling, the betrayals,
the meanness and fear.  What could be better for writing novels?

Celine, my new novel, was a bit different, and very special, because it is about
my mom.  She died two and half years ago, and I think I wanted to spend another
year with her.  Like the protagonist she was a crack investigator who
specialized in reuniting birth families.  Like Celine, she could shoot—the scene
in Idaho with the gun dealer when she blows seven cans and bottles off the log
is true—and she really did bring in a bank fraud perp for the FBI—after spying
on him with her opera glasses, and executing a high speed car chase in her old
Volvo.  She really was courageous and elegant, and the family backstory in
France during the war is all true.  I tried to write her as closely as I could.

The book, I guess, was a coming home for me.  As writing fiction was, after so
many years as a journalist.



A version of this article originally appeared on the Amazon Book Review.

Peter Heller

Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at
Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. He is an
award winning adventure writer, the author of four books of literary nonfiction
and three bestselling novels, including The Dog Stars and Celine. He lives in
Denver.



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