Adam Croft's Blog, page 23

There are always times in a writing career where the ideas just won’t come. No matter how hard you try, there’s just nothing there. Your brain might as well be empty for all the inspiration you have. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. It happens to most writers at some point, but often all it takes is one idea to get things back on track. In the spirit of helping out, here are some quick ideas to get your writing flowing again.

Imagine someone else is struggling with their writing. What would you tell them? Take your own advice.
Look in the back of your wardrobe. Find an item of clothing you’ve not worn for years. Use it as a starting point.
Stand in the middle of the room and close your eyes. Turn around three times. Open your eyes. Take the first thing you see and use it as a starting point for your writing.
You know how when you tell people you don’t know what to write and they then give you ideas that you always ignore? Next time, take their idea and run with it, no matter how banal or ridiculous it seems.
Find a story you wrote when you were a child. Re-write it from your adult point of view.
Write about how you don’t know what to write. All of a sudden, you’ve got something to write about. Funny that.
Find some perfume and spray some in the air. Write about what the smell reminds you of.

 

It is often said that one of the benefits of independent publishing is that fact you get to keep control of the whole process. But what does that control actually mean, and why is it such a good thing? Let’s take a look.

Decide what gets published

One of the biggest benefits of controlling everything about your publishing experience is that you decide what gets published in the first place. There’s no need to feel under pressure to produce a book a year – unless you want to, of course. Equally, you don’t have to worry about anyone else’s opinions or requirements when publishing your own work. You make all of the creative decisions.

Control and shape your image

It also means that you make all of the decisions over your image and your brand as an author. This might sound obvious, but it’s definitely a valuable point. For instance, let’s say you’ve written a book that falls into the rather broadly defined category of “women’s fiction.” The tendency of some traditional publishers might be to put it in a girly jacket, even if that’s really not what you want, or what the content of the book would lead you to imagine. With the control of self-publishing you can create exactly the image you want for you book, and for yourself.

The money thing

It’s not massively British to talk about money, so we’ll keep this one brief. Even though self-publishing does not by any means mean that you’ll definitely make money, it does mean that what you make, you generally get to keep, or at least decide what to do with. That matters.

Commission only what you want

It also means that you only have to commission the services that you want. You could decide to hire someone to manage the entire publishing process for you, while still maintaining creative control, or you might only want them to take care of a few things, such as cover design. Whatever you decide, you’ll still have the ultimate control over the project.

What do you like best about the control that independent publishing gives you?

If you are an independent publisher who is continuing to focus exclusively on print and ignore e-books, well, why? Unless, perhaps, you are self-publishing books that have to be printed rather than made available digitally (children’s picture books, for instance), e-books are definitely something to be embraced.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make use of print books as a self-publisher, but it does mean that e-books are vital, and should not be ignored. Here are some of the best reasons all independent publishers should publish their work on e-books, and why they should love them.

Instant access for readers

There is no getting away from the fact that buying books online, rather than in a bookshop, is becoming the norm. When you consider this, it makes sense to self-publish your work as an e-book. After all, if you order a print book online, it takes time to arrive, and readers don’t always want to wait. By contrast, if you order an e-book, it will be on your e-reader within seconds. In a highly competitive industry, that instant access to books for readers counts for a lot.

Access to readers who read a lot

Also, many readers who read e-books read a lot. That means that they buy a lot. You don’t want to miss out on potential sales because you decided not to publish your work as an e-book.

Supply free samples

Another benefit of selling e-books on sites such as Amazon is that it gives readers the chance to download a free sample of the work before they buy the rest. It’s often said that the best marketing tool you have for your book is the book itself. With this in mind, making e-book samples available can be very beneficial. Just make sure the sample is as good as you can possibly make it so that people want to carry on reading.

Take advantage of impulse buys

The other big thing about e-books is that they are highly conducive to impulse buying. That might sound a bit blunt, but authors have to think carefully about where their sales are coming from. If someone can buy your book in a single click online and be reading it on their e-reader a minute later, that’s a definite advantage for you.

Length doesn’t matter

A big plus for e-books is that length doesn’t matter. This can be especially good for independent publishers who publish work of varying lengths. While a small number of readers might be put off buying a print book if it looked to be too long or too short, this isn’t such an issue with e-books. You can make your work as long or short as you like – as long as it is just the right length for you.

Get everything in one place

There is another benefit to be had with e-books. If you look for print books in bookshops or libraries, as wonderful as they both undoubtedly are, there’s no guarantee that they’ll have everything in stock. Your e-book, by contrast, will always be in stock. And so will all of your other e-books, with all of them available to be bought from the same place, which can be very useful if you’re hoping readers will move on to your back catalogue too.

There is a certain school of thought that suggests independent publishing is the easy option, used by people who either can’t get a traditional publisher or those who want to get their book out there with only the smallest amount of effort.

To some extent, independent publishing isn’t that hard. Hitting the ‘publish’ button is easy. Some aspects of the publishing process might be new, but they’re not all hard. They’re often something you can learn.

But whether or not certain skills and processes are considered to be ‘hard’ to learn and master, what we can’t deny is that independent publishing involves hard work.

Independent publishing might look like an easy route to some, but if you are really serious about a career as an author – as so many of us independent publishers are – it definitely is not the easy option.

First, there’s the task of writing a really good book that people actually want to read. Then there’s the task of learning how to self-publish a book. There’s the editing and the proofreading and the formatting and the cover design and the pricing and the marketing. There’s the challenge of learning how to work with freelancers and companies on various aspects of your work, of learning how to be a project manager and creative director, of budgeting both time and money to make everything work.

Then, it’s the easy bit. You press publish and the book is out there.

But then the easy bit ends. Then comes the marketing, the social media management, the online reviews, the blogs, the never-ending quest to find readers, hoping that they’ll like the book and worried that they won’t. There’s the issue of sorting out finances and working out what to do if sales aren’t as great as first hoped.

There’s the whole issue of writing another book.

Don’t get me wrong, none of this is a complaint. Independent publishing might be hard work, but it’s still great. It’s excellent fun and it’s worth every second of effort. The rewards can be excellent and there is nothing quite like the satisfaction of achieving a goal and knowing that it’s all because of your own hard work. It’s wonderful.

But it’s not an easy option.

It’s a question that I am sure intrigues many of us who love to write: can you learn to be good at writing?

In many ways, it’s an impossible question to answer. The main reason for this is that it’s almost impossible to define exactly what we mean by ‘good’. For some people, good writing might only need to be grammatically correct and have a story without any whopping plot holes. For others, it might be those things, but more on top – a cracking plot, mesmerising characters, and the quality of the prose, which can be so hard to define and yet is undoubtedly so important.

So maybe the question needs to be re-written slightly. We shouldn’t wonder whether it’s possible to learn to be a good writer, but rather whether it’s possible to become a much better writer than when just starting out.

The answer to that must surely be yes. If you have been writing for any length of time – even just a few weeks – you will no doubt be aware of an improvement in your own work. Sometimes the improvement isn’t always immediately obvious, but eventually you will come to realise, that yes, you are better now than you once were.

That is one of the benefits of continuing to write over a long period of time – you should, more than likely, get better at the mechanics of writing. The process of it should, hopefully, become easier and you’ll find yourself writing readable, quality content on a regular basis.

The really hard bit is that ‘flair’ we associate with excellent writers. For some writers, it’s something that just comes naturally, and trying to explain what we mean by a flair for writing is hard. It’s just something that is. For other writers, it’s something that comes later, once the basics have been covered. An original voice starts to develop and a sense that the work is good quality emerges.

But for some, that magic quality that makes effective writing great never materialises. So perhaps the conclusion to the question is that you can sometimes learn to be a ‘good’ writer, but not always, and it depends on what we mean by ‘good’. What is true for everyone though, is that with enough effort and time, we can all learn to be the best writers we can possibly be.

There is something a little bit weird about writing a crime novel. If, for instance, you were to commit a crime in real life (please don’t), that would be the only role you play. Everything else would be done by someone else – the investigating, the impact of the action and so on.

Yet when you are writing a crime novel, you have to play all of the roles at once. You have to inveigle yourself into the mind of the antagonist to set up and execute the crime around which the novel centres. You have to see things from the point of view of the investigating protagonist(s) to work out how they solve the crime, the steps they take along the way and the challenges they face. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the people around the victim, portraying the impact of the crime and what it does to people.

It can be an immensely satisfying role to play as a writer, creating a puzzle and then picking your way through it to solve it. But there is no denying that it is also a challenge. Seeing things from the point of view of multiple people always is, and it is made that much more challenging in crime fiction when issues of motivation and morality come into play.

It means that the crime author has to be able to inhabit a range of different parts, and be comfortable going to many different areas of the psyche. Whereas in real life, we tend to only see crime from one point of view – our own, whichever role we play in the scheme of things – in crime fiction, we are everyone’s point of view.

It’s a difficult rope to walk at times, but when it all starts to come together and the puzzle starts to make sense, it definitely makes it all worth it.

 

Unless you are one of those people who find it impossible to write when there is any noise at all in the near vicinity, listening to music while you write can be very helpful. This blog takes a look at five reasons why writers might like to listen to music while they work…

Find inspiration

It’s a little bit of a cliché, but there is a huge amount of inspiration to be found in music. Whether it’s a gorgeous harmony in a symphony or a catchy lyric in a pop song, it can all provide fuel for the writing fire.

Immerse yourself in another time

Listening to music that is relevant to what you are writing can also be a good way to help you get into the spirit of things. For instance, if you’re writing something set in the mid to late 1700s, a bit of Mozart on the stereo could help take you back to that time. This can work particularly well with more modern music – the rapidly changing styles of pop music are still, usually, specific to their time and can be a great way of lending a sense of something to your writing.

Evoke a mood

As well as giving you a sense of place, music can help you with your writing more generally, such as through creating a particular mood or atmosphere. Giving yourself a few minutes to just listen to music before beginning to write while it continues to play in the background, for example, can set up your frame of mind and help you make your writing much more compelling and believable.

Block out other distractions

Even if you prefer to work in silence as a general rule, often music is much less distracting than all those other things that can so easily put us off our writing – people talking in another room, builders working nearby, cars on the road outside. It might not be perfect, but at least it offers a constant background of noise that you can get used to, enabling you to block out the rest.

Focus

The above point links to the idea of focus. There is something about music that can sometimes be very good at helping a person focus. It can effectively create a little invisible wall or bubble around you while you write. After a while, you might not even notice that it’s there, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t help.

What do you think? Do you like to listen to music while you write?

It isn’t something that we like to think about when we’re first self-publishing our books and are in those lovely, heady days when anything (preferably anything wonderful) could happen: what should you do if your book flops?

It might not be nice to think about, but the truth is that we never know what is going to happen when we publish a book. It could go swimmingly. It could sink without trace. It could rubbished in reviews. It’s worth, therefore, having an idea of what you might do if the unthinkable does happen, and your book flops. Here are some ideas, and do feel free to add your own in the comments box.

Decide whether to give it another go

One of the big decisions you need to make when your book isn’t doing as well as you might have hoped is whether you’re just going to let it go, or whether you’re going to have a stab at reversing its fortunes. If the latter, how are you going to do this? How will you step up your marketing efforts to get your book known and encourage people to buy it? More of the same, or some new tactics entirely?

Evaluate the book’s weaknesses

Even though it might hurt, it’s also important to take stock of the book itself. Re-read it with an objective, critical eye. If you’ve had some negative reviews for it, why do you think that those reviewers said what they did? The answers might not fill you with joy, but they’ll certainly help you to learn a lot so you can improve things for next time round.

Evaluate the weaknesses of your publishing plan

As well as looking at the book again, you should also take a look at your publishing plan. Did you execute it as well as you could? Was there something missing from your strategy? Why didn’t your marketing plan work as well as you had hoped? All of this can provide valuable food for thought that will help to increase your skills and give you the tools you need to make a better job of things in the future.

Write another book

Finally, write another book. Sometimes we just have to accept that our book wasn’t the success that we wanted it to be – but that doesn’t mean it will be the same with the next book. Another book is one of the most powerful weapons we have, so focus on making your follow-up as great as it can possibly be, and apply everything you have learned to give it the best possible chance of succeeding.

There is a view – admittedly not as prolific as it once was – that independent publishing is also ‘vanity’ publishing; writers who self-publish couldn’t get published in the traditional way and so turn to self-publishing as a vain option to get their work out there in any way that they can.

I think this is wrong. Independent publishing isn’t vanity publishing at all. OK, so it might be slightly vain, but all publishing is slightly vain. Independent or traditional, it involves writers deciding that they want to publish their books and have people read them. It means that the writer has to be vain enough to think that the book is worth reading in the first place, and to think that people might want to read it.

That isn’t unique to independent publishing.

Plus, independent publishing is hard work. If publishing a book was merely an exercise in vanity, I doubt so many self-publishers would work so hard to make what they do a success. It isn’t an easy option. It involves skill and time and effort, often without reward. This isn’t a matter of vanity: it’s a vocation.

It also adds variety to the range of books that are out there for people to read. In a way, we could argue that traditional publishing is far more vain about things; far more choosy about what it puts out there and allows to be published in the first place – its vanity causing it to steer away from books that could well go on to be very popular, if they were ever give a chance. Self-publishing doesn’t do that; anything can be published, and is.

It gives people more choice, and it is an increasingly important, profitable and respectable part of the industry. Maybe independent publishing was once something of a vanity option for authors, but no longer. Now, it’s part of the mainstream.

The popularity of independent publishing is growing and it is now where many authors’ thoughts turn when they are deciding which route to go down when looking to publish their next novel. Still, it is a big decision to make and will have a radical impact on your writing career, so it’s something to think about carefully.

Here are seven questions to ask yourself when considering independent publishing.

Why is it the right option for you?

First of all, why do you want to do it in the first place? There are quite a few other options for writers: traditional publishing, publishing for free on the internet, sharing work among family and friends only, or saving it only for yourself. Why are you drawn to self-publishing more than any of the other options?

What do you want to achieve through it?

This is another important issue to think about – what is your goal with independent publishing? Going for self-publishing so you can share your work with people you know is different to doing it because you want to have a career as a writer, so it’s worth thinking about how you’d actually make it work for what you want to achieve.

Are you committed to the hard work involved?

An important one, this: are you up for the work? There is no getting away from the fact that self-publishing is hard work. There is a lot to learn and it can take some time to get it right. If you’re not committed to doing it properly, it might not be the best option for you.

Do you want to do it all yourself?

Independent publishing implies that you have to do everything yourself – and indeed, many independent publishers do just that. However, you might like to consider where you might like other people to support you, such as in editing or design roles, or marketing support.

Are you aware of the responsibilities?

Self-publishing is, in many ways, a business like any other. It might not be the fun bit, but it’s important to know about things such as self-employment, accounts and other vital stuff of a financial and administrative nature.

How will you manage your time?

Ah, yes. Time. Independent publishing takes up quite a bit of it, and you’ve got the whole business of writing to fit in on top of that. And possibly another job on top of that. And that whole ‘life’ thing. It can require you to make some changes to fit it all in, so it’s not something to jump into lightly.

Do you enjoy the writing life?

It might sound obvious, but if you don’t enjoy writing and everything that goes with it, you might struggle with self-publishing. If you don’t find it fun, it will be a chore, and you won’t do it as well as you could. A passion for writing is probably the most important tool you’ll need when it comes to achieving success in independent publishing.