Archive for the ‘Writing Craft’ Category

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Author’s Website: But wait, there’s more!

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Whether working with a major house or self publishing, an author today must maintain a website. Having a professional online presence is as standard as having a sales sheet and a business card. But the old (that is, more than two years ago) expectation that a website can be just a glorified billboard is obsolete thinking. What can or should an author-and-book website do for an author now?

First, the site does serve as a sales tool, but only if it is a dynamic tool where reviews and endorsements are added on the fly and news about you and your book is kept current.

Your site serves as a “landing page” for all other social media and web activity. Never lose sight of the directive that all the time you spend sending email blasts, tweeting, scanning relevant blogs, and ignoring virtual games on Facebook serves one purpose only: to direct readers to your website.

You can’t fit everything want to grab people with into posts and email, or even fliers and mailers. Send your potential fans to your site, where you can wow them with rich content. In other words, include your URL on everything. Then give people good reasons to come back.

There are no finished books, only deadlines. So what to do with that great extra chapter or the appendix that got cut? You site is where you give readers something more than the material in the book. If it’s fiction, you can tell side stories about the characters or explore your world. Any nonfiction work will have updates and additional resources to provide. Often the best way to sell something is to give it away. Your site visitors will gravitate toward free excerpts and sample chapters from upcoming titles.

You will be told your website is where you can engage your readers. That sounds good, but can it really be done? Yes. People are hungry for the author-reader connection. Readership loyalty is not a thing of the past; indeed, the interactive media you are using right now has ushered in an age of reader participation never imagined before. Integrate a blog on the themes of the book and write riffs on highlights from the book, keeping it fresh in context of current event and your life. (For example, see Grace and Tranquility.) Respond to comments. Join online discussions elsewhere on the Web. Review other relevant books. Be creative with it.

If you have published several books, your site evolves into the primary stage where you tie your work together, where you integrate and relate the arc of your writing to your larger vision. If your books are an actual series, make sure your site evenly represents the whole series and always highlights the latest. (See a new one set up for more in a series: The Wine Seeker’s Guides.)

No book is a print-only instrument anymore. You are not two-dimensional, and neither is your book. You site should carry podcasts, video interviews, and candid author images. Include links to videos and other multimedia sites. Keep vigilant for content that could augment your story, then find ways to draw new readers to you with it.

More than ever, readers want—and will soon expect—to feel like they know  and are interacting with the author, or that they can in some manner participate in the book. So put a personal face on your author persona  that reveals more than just the dust-jacket copy.  Use this amazing interactive medium to let your readers feel like they are part of your story. That’s what good storytelling has always been.

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Posted in Author Audience, Book Marketing, Social Media, Storytelling | 4 Comments »

Ready to Write the Book?

Friday, January 15th, 2010

You are convinced authoring a book would be great tool for your business and boost your career. You have built up the expertise and perhaps some articles or a history of blog posts to draw from. But you are also overwhelmed by the prospect of putting a book’s worth of content together. Right?

Well, if you just want another fluffy pep talk, you’re reading the wrong article. Because I will tell you that if you do NOT feel intimidated by it, then step back for a reality check. There are no shortcuts, only techniques, skills, and resources to help. I’m starting to see writers with 5,000 words written down who want to publish an eBook. We used to call that a feature article in a magazine, not a book. To gain the caché of being the leading author in your field, you’ve got to deliver the whole package. And you can!

Right now, however, you are staring at your pile of notes, with your head full of ideas. So let’s take a look at what you’ve got in hand and what you may need as you start writing and editing.

Every story needs context. You probably don’t have to rehash the entire history of your industry or cause, but you do need to put your new contribution in contrast to what’s come before and what’s happening now. This is a piece of the puzzle you can nail down early. And this context will inform and inspire the rest of your work.

Quotes bring it to life. Get your interviews done early, so you have that grist for the writing mill. One very strong quote from a revered expert can be enough to frame an entire chapter. Likewise, sometimes a quote is so good you need to adjust the trajectory of your message to seamlessly work it in. On the other hand, you don’t want to write a section with the assumption your source will give you a quote to hold it together later. You do not have to use all of a long-winded quote, but you should always be faithful to what the speaker actually said, even if that is editorially inconvenient.

Build your case. You have a position (guilty!) and a case to be made. Don’t let it become an excuse for not writing, but get deep into the research you need at the outset. First, what you discover may surprise you and change the course of  your story. Second, writing is much easier when the characters and settings are already defined. Third, you are building your case just like an attorney before a jury, so you want to organize your argument strategically and tell the story for the best effect.

A surprise in every box. It’s the interception that makes the ball game exciting. It’s the unusual goodies in the salad that make you say “Yum.” So, is your approach honestly fresh, powerful, and creative enough to keep your readers hungry? Build surprises into your text, like plot twists, to keep your readers saying, “Hey, that’s a cool idea.” A good author knows that plot twists are never accidental (though fiction characters do often tell authors what to say) but are carefully planned. Done well, the placement and pacing of key points and take-home messages will be invisible to the readers. But you string them out for deliberate and maximum impact. To do that, you need to plan ahead in your writing.

It’s in the story. Whether you are writing an account of service work in Haiti or explaining a new piece of software, your message will get through to your readers best through stories and anecdotes. Is there a lot of human interest built into the outline of your book? It’s a solid bet you do not have enough material or a big enough concept to write an entire book on your subject if you do not start with more than enough stories that connect your ideas to your readers’ lives, extending the message well beyond your personal narrative.

The vision is to hear yourself interviewed on NPR? Hold to it! There are victories and frustrations to ride along the journey. Give us the context, share your conversations with the experts, convince us and surprise us. The world needs your story, so start writing!

Posted in Book Publishing, Editing, Storytelling, Writing Craft | No Comments »

Postcard from Pandora

Friday, January 8th, 2010

I have never smiled through an entire film, reveling in the eye-candy, the characters, the convincing fantasy world, the 3D effect, total invisibility of any line between live action and CGI, the implications of it on future cinema, and the sheer pleasure of the wow-factor. Yes, Avatar blew my socks off. And I’m a sci-fi junkie.AVATAR IMAXposterblog2 Postcard from Pandora

One of the most endearing features of this fantasy world to me is the meticulous detail built into the natural world, in most ways scientifically plausible (with a dose of suspended disbelief regarding the laws of physics and such, but that’s okay). Importantly, in this sci-fantasy the scientists are the good guys again. Grace (Sigourney Weaver) literally wrote the book. (Who is her publisher?) Flaming Liberal Hollywood rarely manages to link disciplined, ethical scientific process to what’s true and right in the world. How refreshing.

I’m being sarcastic about Liberal Hollywood because the blogosphere is ripe with criticism that the plotline of Avatar is “out of touch” with the Conservative heartland of America with a story that is anti-military and anti-development. Sorry, but I stubbornly do not believe genocide and scorched-earth strip-mining are Conservative ideals, but these evils appear in our nonfiction daily news and still need to be battled. And the heroes in Avatar are soldiers of conscience. There’s a great American tradition in that. Sure, Neytiri is an insurgent. So was Paul Revere, but he didn’t get to ride a banshee.avatarmoviephotos2 Postcard from Pandora

There is also a common argument out there that people are only going to the movie for the visual spectacle and ignoring the story. That’s quite a stretch for a film that’s already grossed over $1 billion. It is transparently the old Nature vs The Machine and white-guy-going-native story, but realized with eye-popping visual magic. (See also the anime epic Princess Mononoke for a similar theme but with an Asian ambivalence.) My only criticism is that the bad-guys in Avatar are two-dimensionally bad to the bone. It’s a three-hour movie, for heavensake: isn’t that enough time to develop some Shakespearean complexity to the antagonists?

Obviously, I come in squarely on the side of the Na’vi. Syncing with the trees does not seem far-fetched to me at all—though I don’t have the ponytail linkup. But we must not be too sanguine; one resolution for this year is to be sure Confluence Book Services participates actively in sustainable printing and publishing programs and services. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of a leonopteryx.

avatarmain22 Postcard from PandoraThe familiar storylines will always be with us, but the new storytellers are using emerging media and technologies with astounding potency. Cameron’s latest leads us to expectations of still richer feasts of imagination on screen. The $500 million in technology developed for Avatar will be readily available to other producers (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Peter Jackson have already had a chance to play with it.) and perhaps all tech-savvy mortals in a few years. Now a live actor can become anything. And even the tie-in toys are 3D and downloads. What does that mean for books in competition with multimedia? What might it lead to in eReaders and eBooks? Where will it drive reader expectations?

Well, I expect to go see Avatar in 3D again this week.

from Wikipedia:

Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora, a 224-page book in the form of a field guide to the film’s fictional setting of the planet of Pandora, was released by Harper Entertainment on November 24, 2009.[95] It is presented as a compilation of data collected by the humans about Pandora and the life on it, written by Maria Wilhelm and Dirk Mathison. HarperFestival also released Wilhelm’s 48-page James Cameron’s Avatar: The Reusable Scrapbook for children.[96] The Art of Avatar: James Cameron’s Epic Adventure was released on November 30, 2009 by Abrams Books.[97] The book features detailed production artwork from the film, including production sketches, illustrations by Lisa Fitzpatrick, and film stills. Producer John Landau wrote the foreword, Cameron wrote the epilogue, and director Peter Jackson wrote the preface.

In a 2009 interview, Cameron said that he planned to write a novel version of Avatar some time after the film released.

PPS Isn’t it worth it just for the chance to use “leonopteryx” as a post tag?

Posted in E-books, Publishing Trends, Storytelling, inspiration | 1 Comment »

You Must Tell Your Story

Friday, December 4th, 2009

You must tell your story. For that cause to which you have made a commitment, your perspective is unique; if you do not share it, the world will not have it. You alone employ the life experiences that guide your skills, making your contribution literally priceless to the rest of us.

Your voice is also yours alone. You can and should emulate heroes, learn from masters, and borrow insights to carry them forward into applications. But no one else can mix, fuse, integrate, refine, polish, and present the story the way you will. That makes it your sacred duty.

Jan Phillips, author of The Art of Original Thinking, captures the urgency succinctly, saying, “These are times to bring the inner outward, to engage our souls in every endeavor and express our meaning in the teeming marketplace.”

Bring it out with shock-and-awe evidence and soul-stirring passion. You do not have to be a world-class orator or literary master. Rather, just be clear, concise, organized. You must keep your audience in mind in every paragraph. Do not inflate flimsy material. Make sure your strongest stuff frames your central message. In short, attend to it like a successful business presentation. You are in the business of making your strategic and significant contribution.

But relax about it. This book you will write in 2010 is not your only story. It does not have to (you should not try to) say everything you want to tell everybody. Better that it say one thing honestly and well, with simple truth and open heart. Other angles on your story—fresh perspective on your experience, new voices, breathtaking world changes, personal epiphanies—will enliven your writing along the way. I promise. That’s how it works.

The urgency is real. Your days and resources are numbered. The opportunities are bubbling over right now from the heat of needed change. Use the energy of that urgency (or the energy of your fear or your anger) to get the job done and the story written. “Because everything we do and everything we are is in jeopardy, and because the peril is immediate and unremitting, every person is the right person to act and every moment is the right moment to begin,” said Jonathan Schell.

Phillips adds, “Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, there is always the chance to reveal the inner, to shed that light, to share our warmth with a shivering soul.”

Make your plans for 2010, and make them ambitious. First priority: tell your story.

You Must Tell Your Story

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Posted in Book Publishing, Leadership, Storytelling | No Comments »

Writing for Vision AND Sales

Friday, November 20th, 2009

At a recent gathering of social entrepreneurs, marketing icon Mark Victor Hansen asked how many in the audience were writing or planning to write a book. Every hand in the room went up. These folks are working for peace in the Middle East, replanting Amazon rainforests, and helping the homeless in the Southwest. They sustain these efforts through business ventures. So the books they are writing will champion their social and environmental causes with passion and compelling detail, of course—but they must also promote their products.

Are you among the social enterprise writers? Here are five writing tips for business leaders/authors balancing people, planet, and profit:

Write to your audience. (Yes, you’ve heard this from me before.) Remember, you cannot reach everybody; you are trying to sell to your Tribe, or those on the edge of the camp circle. Who are those people? Are they mostly women? Men? What age range? Identify those who may not only resonate with your mission but can also be your perfect prospects. Write to them.

Keep it personal while you relate your work to the universal themes. Your unique story, your distinct voice, will captivate your audience. An impersonal manifesto, even though well-intentioned, will only illicit a passive nod. Have faith that your audience wants to make a positive impact on the world too, and you, personally, are a role model. They will buy your product or service out of conviction and loyalty, and that defines the new economy.

Keep the old adage in mind: Facts tell but stories sell. People love to read stories. Gaining new customers and supporters to the cause is often just a matter of telling a great story.

Get endorsements. Put great effort into compiling the best possible testimonials, examples, and social validation. Be sensitive that people who may be your best supporters are constantly bombarded with green-washing and spin. They rightly fear being ripped off or over-sold. Take away their fear by proving that what you offer is solid and proven.

People love to buy, but hate to be sold. If you tell your unique story to a sympathetic audience and convince them of both the value and the service of your work, you will invoke a desire to buy. No sales pitch required; only a “please join us now,” an honest call to action.

Above all, get your thoughts written down, polish the words later, then make the commitment to share them with a world that so badly needs you.

“Don’t think it, ink it.” ~Mark Victor Hansen

Writing for Vision AND Sales

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Posted in Author Audience, Book Publishing, Leadership, Writing Craft | No Comments »

Testing Your Book Idea

Friday, October 16th, 2009

You’ve caught the fever to write a book. Great! Or at least you have set yourself the goal and you have a vision—clear or a bit fuzzy—of what your book could be. Your business or personal audience keeps suggesting that you put your message into a book, as if you hadn’t thought of that. All the consultants say you should write a book to establish yourself. You’ve had people close to you encourage you in the effort. You have done your brainstorming and scribbling and the “High Concept” has taken root in your imagination.

Now it is time to run your idea through the refiner’s fire. (Cue the sound of a furnace igniting.)

Who is your audience? Every author who has worked with me knows this is always the first question I ask. It is not a simple question to answer! Will your book idea grab the individuals and groups you want to reach? Can you identify that audience clearly enough to attach real numbers to it? Is that audience large enough to make the monstrous effort of writing a book worth the effort? Do you imagine you can reach that audience, or do your have concrete-paved access to the audience? If not, market analysis is more important than writing at this moment—it might save you months of work.

How original is the idea? As there is nothing new under the sun, how original is your approach to the idea? Is there too much writing already on the subject so that you are following a dusty trend? Is there a lot of human interest in it, connecting the idea far beyond yourself? Have you read “your” idea other places? Probably yes, so is your approach honestly fresh, powerful, and creative enough to stand on its own? This inquiry requires brutal honesty with yourself.

Can you write it? I mean, can you manage an entire book of it? Have you already written the magazine articles (certainly the blog posts) on the big ideas—with relative ease? But is the formal literature on the subject sufficient but not too arcane? Can you reach the people you will need to interview, and will you? Do you have a reliable grip on the subject so the highlights and best anecdotes already feel familiar in your hands? That is not to say getting your message onto the page won’t still be like the proverbial pulling of teeth.

Is the time right for your idea? Is it just beginning to be talked about? Or, is your approach potentially in great demand? Take care to not tie your book heavily to a current event, trend, or person. Whatever or whoever it is will be yesterday’s news before the ink dries or the pixels hit the wires. Ask yourself (and perhaps your loved ones) whether the time is right for you, personally, in your life and career. If you are reading this, good chance the answer to this one is, “yes.” But be clear about your commitment.

How important is the idea to you? Can you see yourself spending one to five years of your life obsessed with it? Is it an idea you will be able to tirelessly carry as a banner long after you’ve declared the manuscript finished? (There are ideas that need to be shared; there are also many ideas that only need to be expressed for oneself, then shelved.) Will the material fascinate you next year?

Ultimately, there may be only one burning question to answer: Is the idea so important to you that your passion for it will  overflow to your audience? In other words, must write it, no matter what?

If your idea and your fortitude survived all this, then get to work! All writers of all time stand approvingly over your shoulder blessing you with silent, steady, sacred encouragement.

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Databases for Professional Writers

Friday, September 18th, 2009

I suppose it is still possible to use 3 x 5 cards and file boxes. But databases built with versatile software such as FileMaker Pro are essential management tools for a professional writer today. Here are eighteen databases you might create for yourself to be more efficient, organized, and productive.

  1. Build a powerful address book of your business contacts: editors, proofreaders, illustrators, indexers, graphic designers, book production service, tech support, drug dealers—whatever you need
  2. Set up a prioritized list of publishers, with submission guidelines.
  3. Keep a portfolio of your magazine articles, guest blogs, book contracts, and foreign rights editions sold.
  4. Tie your portfolio database to bookkeeping/accounting functions, automatically recording your royalty and subsidiary rights payments. (This also follows the “If you build it, they will come” principle.)
  5. Track your office expenses realistically. Run the reports for tax deductions.
  6. Gather library and online references that become the bibliography of a project.
  7. Organize your interview notes with contact info, sorted by topic, date, and project.
  8. Keep a timesheet so you know what an insane amount of time you’ve really spent on that novel.
  9. Keep a secure list of all your login IDs and passwords.
  10. You don’t have to bookmark every interesting website. Capture their URLs, categorize them for quick searches. Create a button on the page that opens the web address in your browser.
  11. Catalog your own library—books and ebooks. It does not take a Dewey Decimal System; just get the basic title page info in there so you know what you’ve got and where to find it. Add a reading wish list.
  12. Working on a project with a co-author or contributors? Publish the projects’ resources privately to the web so your collaborators can access the same references and notes.
  13. Far better than a clunky spreadsheet, build marketing email lists, with bulk email blast capabilities and fields for leads, clients, sales outlets, or bookstore address and phone lists. Automate invoices and letters.
  14. Schedule and record notes about your appearances and readings.
  15. Compile a record of reviews and publicity.
  16. Of course, you need to keep a list of your favorite cafés with wifi in all the towns you visit. Maybe you can load it on your iPhone.
  17. Organize notes and backstory bios of your fictional characters and locations.
  18. Run your brainstorms into a database: make it a place to save the half-baked story ideas, with fields that may link them together over time in ways you would not have otherwise seen.

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Posted in Self-publishing, Writer Resources, Writing Craft | No Comments »

The Internet as Kiva

Friday, August 14th, 2009

I lived for three years in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I’ve explored the Southwest extensively, especially around the ancient Anasazi sites. The names alone conjure towering sandstone bluffs, hard lines and vast spaces, the mystical close by and our unforgiven but blessed little place in it: Canyon de Chelly, Betatakin, Hovenweep.

One of the central features of the ancient and modern Pueblo peoples’ communities is the kiva, an underground room used for ceremonial and communal purposes. A visitor, even a city-bred white kid, stepping into a ruin or a reconstruction of a kiva cannot help but feel the power contained in the space.

One of the unprecedented and wholly unanticipated benefits of the Internet today is its ability to serve some of the roles of a kiva for tribes scattered across lands and societies.

Find your tribe’s kiva online, and you can share your deepest insights and lightest joys with those who are intimately connected to your world, whether or not you’ve ever met or even live in the same country. As a writer, teacher, or shaman, you can tell your best stories in the smoky, digital dark.

When you gather the tribe in your kiva online—be it forum, social net, video channel, or twibe—you can re-imagine your world. The equivalent of passing down the timeless myths that hold an ancient society together, your visions, brainstorms, business plans, campaigns, and collections, especially among those raising voices about environmental and social justice, are redefining our interconnections, politics, and arts.

The kiva is a place for initiation. A traditional initiation marks a transition to a place of greater responsibility in life, knits people together, renews family, and carries an individual toward interdependence with a larger whole. When we all watch a girl die during a protest in Iran, is that not an initiation for us? To turn it around, on September 21, we will celebrate The International Day of Peace, a United Nations-sponsored global holiday to highlight efforts to end conflict and promote peace. We can expect (and help) the event/idea/news/art/celebration to roll out to millions of people through the social media web like never before, like a worldwide initiation ceremony.

This thing we call the Internet allows teachers and storytellers to connect directly with their audience in the kiva again. It brings new tribes together to redefine their world, where every member has an equal voice. And it has become a place of initiation without time or space constraints opening us to new ideas and possibilities.

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Posted in Author Audience, Social Media, Storytelling | No Comments »

5 Remedies for Writer’s Block

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Sometimes there is no hope and it is time to wash the dishes or walk the dog. (Dogs are always good for writer’s block, I hear.) However, the deadlines loom and the discipline is essential. To get the words flowing again, try these:

Re-type your previous page. Sure, this is the oldest trick in the book, but that’s because it works. Take a break, then step back a page or two and re-type your work. You use a different part of your brain to do the copy activity. Avoid stopping to edit. Editing can seduce you away from writing, too. Often, by the time you get back to where you froze-up, you’ve got your groove back and you can keep sailing along.

Freewrite. Turn off the internal editor. Hit the Pause button on the deadline. Start a new page. Start writing. Anything. Watermelon watermelon watermelon … If you are old-school at all, I recommend picking up a pen (remember those?) and freewriting by hand. Describe what is directly in front of you. Write a weather report without any punctuation. Just go! Do not write about the subject you are supposed to be writing about; that’s the only restriction. A few pages of this nonsense and usually your brain is ready for disciplined ideas again. Back to work.

Do your homework. If you are working on a nonfiction article and hit writer’s block, most often it means you have not done enough research. You may have trivia and references, but do you have the several pieces of solid support to your thesis? Did you find those few hard-hitting quotes that drive your point home? Inevitably, if you write your way around the anchor quotes, the story falls into place. If this fails, listen to your grade-school teacher and write an outline.

Interview your characters. My all-time favorite remedy when fiction writing stalls is to step out of the story and interview your character.
AU: What were you feeling at this point? I need to understand.
CHAR: Can you keep a secret? I had just realized I was falling in love.
AU: With him? I had no idea! But of course. What happened next?
CHAR: Oh, well, let me tell you …
And you are “chasing after your characters with your pencil” again. Do not be surprised to be scolded by characters you thought you were inventing.

Meditate. If you are writing where a supervisor might cruise past your cubicle any moment, this tip might be problematic. But if you are writing in a good environment, step away from that machine. You do not need to have spent years in a monastery; simply watch your breath rise and fall. Let the thoughts scream through and let them go. Twenty minutes of letting go will do the trick. And it can be considered a trick. It is likely that your monkey-mind/editor voice/inner critic will be so determined to not let you clear your thoughts that it will bubble over with a flood of brilliant ideas for the piece you are writing. In your own good time, smile to yourself and get back to work, refreshed and inspired.

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5 Questions for Writers to Ask Themselves

Friday, June 26th, 2009

From the moment we crawl out of bed in the morning, we are constantly asking ourselves questions. Which cereal to pour? Is the kid really sick, or faking it? Americano or latte? Does she want me to fix this or does she only need me to listen? Just as there are always questions to resolve to get you through the day, there are questions to ask when (or before) you sit down to write. Whether you are faced with a blog post, a feature article, a love letter, or a novel, take a deep breath and answer these five questions:

Who is your audience, exactly? This is always the first question I ask an author. “Everyone,” is never an acceptable answer. Be as specific as possible. “My blog audience.” Not so good. How well do you know them? “The technical neophytes following my blog right now.” Not bad. “The twenty-something female wannabe social-media beginner who only has 12 followers on Twitter so far.” Better. Hint: Be honest with yourself.

What’s the take-home message? In science writing, we called it the “nut graf.” It’s the kernel or core message; that single idea from which the outline and your presentation grows. It’s your thesis, the line you would choose for a pull quote. If you are writing a presentation, it’s your elevator pitch. Get this message defined as precisely and concisely as possible, and the rest of the work will flow easily.

What more do I need to know before I can present my idea clearly? Do not be afraid of research, nor be so smug to think the story you know so well never needs an update or some new sparkle. At worst, your facts may be dated. At best, a new vignette or startling example will slam your paragraphs in order for you, like having your muse whispering in your ear.

What style is most appropriate and effective? This question is not asked often enough with audience and strategy in mind. Is a clipped style best for the message? Or, considering how you want to emotionally engage your audience, capture their hearts with your insights, and exhort them to take action, perhaps a literary style suits the job better? You get the idea. Your “voice” is a tool that can build any kind of house, so chose the design before you lay the foundation.

Lastly, I recommend always asking this critical question: Did I get in, get the job done, and get out like a master thief? You want to be accurate, concise, effective, and entertaining, then make a clean escape. Stop writing when your audience has gotten enough.

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