Adam Croft's Blog, page 30

With the self-publishing market on the increase, it makes sense that traditional publishers are starting to look to it for potential growth and opportunities.

A few days ago, it was revealed that publishing company Simon and Schuster have teamed up with a self-publishing company (Author Solutions Inc) to create a new imprint called Archway Publishing.

It’s definitely an interesting move, with authors signing up to the new self-publishing imprint getting support on matters such as editing and book distribution. However, it seems that for those authors hoping to self-publish their book on a budget, it might not be the best option. It has been reported that prices will start from $1599 and go up to $24999.

You can read more about the new deal here, and it will definitely be worth keeping an eye out to see how this story develops.

What do you think of the deal between Simon and Schuster and Author Solutions Inc?

Just because you’re not writing your autobiography, it doesn’t mean that you can’t find writing inspiration from your own life. You don’t necessarily have to be overt in how you use your own life to influence your writing, but it can be a wonderful source of material and help you to develop your own personal writing style thanks to your life’s unique cast of characters and your special take on things.

Here are 7 ways your life could provide inspiration for your writing.

Interesting characters. Let’s face it, we all know some ‘offbeat’ characters (if you don’t, it’s because in your group of friends, it’s you) and they can be great inspirational for fictional counterparts.
Interesting situations. It’s true when they say that fact is stranger than fiction. Odd or big events in your life can be brilliant when used as inspiration for writing.
Life’s little details. It’s often the little details that really make a piece of writing come to life; cannily observed aspects of your own live can be good for this.
A unique perspective. We all have our own views on things and our own ways of doing things, and they can be massively helpful when developing our writing ‘voice’.
Work-based drama. There’s always some drama or gossip going on at the office. It’s a fantastic source of information and inspiration (used wisely, of course!).
The things kids say. Children have a wonderful way of looking at things, and the things they say (and do) could be fab in terms of inspiration.
The things that bug you. You know how you always wonder why X is the way it is or why everyone loves Y but you just don’t get it? Write about it! Similarly, you can channel bigger frustrations – a stalled career, a stumbling friendship – into your work and explore different scenarios in the land of fiction.

Does your life inspire your writing, or do you prefer to make everything up from scratch?

 

If you’re into independent publishing in any meaningful, it is more than likely to be worth you having your own writing blog. That blog could be on almost anything related to your writing, from the process of publishing to the projects you’re currently working on. Whatever you decide, it can be a hugely useful tool to have. Here are five reasons why.

Build readership

Probably one of the most obvious reasons for having your own writing blog is that it can be a good way to build your readership. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight; it can take a long time and serious commitment to your blog (and independent publishing), but the rewards are more than worth it.

Develop writing skill

A blog is also a good place for you to develop your writing skills and techniques. This is particularly true if you find yourself in a stretch between projects where most of your time is spent on the publishing side of things rather than the writing side. Your blog gives you an opportunity to carry on writing no matter what and it can be a great place to explore new ideas.

Hone expertise and goals

You can also use your blog to develop your writing goals and your expertise. Even if you don’t know much about independent publishing when you start your blog, as you go along, you’ll undoubtedly learn much more – and your own insights will add a touch of personal style to proceedings.

Build author platform

As well as building readership, a writing blog can also help you build your author platform more generally. It can be a good place to promote your work and also to link to other platforms that you have, such as your social media presence.

Network with others

Finally, a good blog can be a brilliant networking tool. It can lead to guest blogging opportunities, as well as connections with people with influence and impact. Again, this is something that takes time to build up, but it is definitely worth putting the time and effort in to make sure you make your writing blog as good as it can possibly be.

Being criticised isn’t usually much fun but, let’s face it, it’s something that happens to all of us at some time or another. And this is especially true for writers. If you decide to try and forge a career as a writer, you will no doubt be met from time to time by criticism and/or rejection. It can be hard to take – but it can also be useful, and a great learning opportunity. Here are some of the best reasons criticism can be good for writers.

Learn what’s wrong with your work. Identifying weak spots and areas that could be improved upon is vital if you want to become a better writer.
Learn how to fix those errors. Constructive criticism can be a wonderful thing; it can not only give you pointers on how to go about fixing things that are wrong with your work, but it can also give you new  ideas and inspiration that you wouldn’t otherwise have had.
Get another point of view. Sure, rejection and criticism might hurt, but it’s still another point of view. It lets you know what someone else thinks about your work, and that can be very helpful when you’re deciding what you ought to do next.
Learn about the business. The truth is that no matter how good your writing might be, you will still experience rejection at some point. It’s not necessarily a reflection on your talent, and there’s not normally anything personal in it – that’s just the way business works sometimes.
Know what others are looking for. If you’ve had some criticism from a potential agent, for instance, it gives you an insight into what they actually want. And that is valuable information that you can use to give them just that – or, alternatively, decide that you want to go down a different route altogether.

If you decide to go down the route of independent publishing, the chances are that you want people to read your book. You wouldn’t put it out there if you didn’t. Plus, I think there is something in the vast majority of authors – even though some may deny it – that makes us hope what we write will be popular.

This can lead to us spending ages wondering whether what we’re writing will tick all the boxes. Will it be good? Will it sell? Will people like it?  It can also lead to us studying those books that are currently popular to work out what we should be doing to achieve our own success.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But one of the great things about independent publishing is that it provides authors with a chance to be different. You don’t have to fit into any moulds. You can write what you want, even if you think it won’t be popular. You never know. It might be. Different can be a very good thing indeed.

Plus, think about it this way: the things that are currently popular have been done already. The next popular book is usually something unexpected or at least different to what’s come before. Embracing your urge to do things your own way and using independent publishing to help you do just that could be the best decision you ever make.

When it comes to self-publishing, you can do it or not do it. There isn’t really a halfway house. Sure, there might be a debate about what exactly counts as self-publishing (does it count if you use a company to do it for you, for instance?), but for the most part, once you’ve decided to do it, that’s it.

But what about when it comes to deciding how to go about doing it? Once you’re in, there a few different options available to you. Let’s say you’ve decided to do as much of the process as you can by yourself, rather than handing the entire process over to someone else to do for you.

Once you’re at this stage, you can either leap in at the deep end and just go for it, or you can take your time.

Both options have their merits. There is certainly something to be said for taking your time over the self-publishing process. It helps to know as much about it as possible before you start with your own efforts, both in terms of what’s going on in the industry and the nitty gritty of how you actually self-publish a book.

But there is also the danger of spending all your time learning the theory of self-publishing and never actually getting around to the practice of it. This is similar, I think, to many writers when it comes to writing a major project for the first time; it can be all too easy to put it off, reading and writing about writing instead of just getting on and doing it.

So it is certainly worth thinking about jumping in at the deep end with self-publishing. Of course, this doesn’t mean publishing a book you’re not entirely sure about (we’ll assume for the sake of argument that you’ve finished your book and are happy with it), but rather just taking the plunge and having a go.

After all, self-publishing is a process that you really need to do to discover everything you need to know about it. Without having a go at it, you’ll never know where to look to find those good editing deals or the best place to look for cover design or copyediting, and you’ll never give yourself the chance to develop your own skills.

Maybe you’ll make a few mistakes, but that’s OK. That’s one of the beauties of self-publishing; you control everything and you don’t have to hit ‘publish’ until you’re feeling confident.

But what do you think? Are you a fan of jumping in at the deep end with self-publishing, or do you prefer a more cautious approach?

Rules can be useful, but it stands to reason that when it comes to writing, some of us find some rules more useful than others – and some just don’t work for us at all. We’re never going to find one set of rules that fits all, and yet there are some things that persist as ‘common wisdom’ or just ‘the done thing’.

With this in mind, here are seven writing rules that are made to be broken.

You must write every day

While it might be helpful for many to write every day, if only to keep the slow chug of progress moving along, having it as a strict rule can be counterproductive. Don’t want to write every day (or can’t write every day)? Then don’t.

You must do X words per session

Plenty of writers set themselves a word count goal for each writing session. Again, in some cases it can be useful, but in many other cases, this is a great rule to break. There’s often no point in forcing an arbitrary target on yourself, and it can take a lot of the fun out of writing. Unless you’ve got a looming deadline that demands 2000 words by noon, write whatever you want.

You must have the perfect writing environment

There is no doubting that the perfect writing space can be a great thing to have, but it isn’t always possible. It can be much more beneficial to chuck the idea of a perfect writing environment out the window and simply learn to write anywhere, if for no other reason than it will make those ‘perfect’ times seem better than ever.

You must never use cliché

You have probably heard/read things about how using cliché is often a sign of a lack of originality. It’s probably true that filling a whole book with things that could be construed as cliché is not a particularly good idea, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid it entirely. Sometimes you simply can’t better the classics.

You must do impeccable research

There is a definite difference between knowing what you’re writing about and pretending to know what you’re writing about. But as long as the reader believes you know what you’re on about, does it really matter if you’ve actually got no clue? Breaking the ‘research’ rule can be creatively freeing and gives you a wonderful excuse to have fun making things up. You are a fiction writer, after all.

You must make your novel X words long

There is a lot of talk along the lines of ‘it isn’t a novel if it isn’t X words long.’ Of course, there are ‘standard’ novel lengths that many books fit into, intentionally or otherwise, but that doesn’t mean you have to stick to them. This is especially true if you decide to go down the independent publishing route – you can make your book as long as you want. It’s your book.

You must write with the reader in mind

Knowing your audience is undoubtedly a good thing, but if you always write with the reader in mind, it’s unlikely that you’ll be making your work as good as it could be. Writing what you think the reader wants is often very different to writing the best story you can write.

What do you think are the best writing rules to break?

While there is probably something to be said for not reading too much into the books that make it onto the big prize shortlists, it is always interesting to see what has made the cut.

And so it is with the shortlists for the Costa Book Awards 2012.  This year is also particularly intriguing for the Awards as they feature the inaugural short story award, which is due to be voted for by the public. I’m a big fan of short stories; the best of them do so much with so few words – often achieving more in that space than a novel can do in 80,000+ words – and we don’t shout about them nearly enough. With this in mind, it’ll definitely be worth keeping an eye out for the shortlisted short stories.

In the traditional award categories (novel, first novel, children’s book, biography and poetry), quite a few big names have made the cut, including this year’s Booker Prize winner, Hilary Mantel.

You can read more about the awards here and here. And in the meantime, who do you think should win in each of the categories? And is there anyone who missed out who you think should have made the shortlists?

 

Having a writing blog is great, but there is no getting away from the fact it can sometimes be hard to think up ideas for posts. Particularly when your blog has been running for a long time, the initial inspiration that was there can start to dry up and you have to start getting more creative about what you do with it.

Still, we’re writers, and so with any luck there will always be something to write about, even if some days all you manage to post is a few brief lines. When it comes to keeping your blog ticking over, it’ll be better than nothing. Here are a few ideas to help give you inspiration for posts for your writing blog.

1)      Write about what inspired you to write in the first place.

2)      Write about what you might be doing if you weren’t a writer.

3)      Write about your worst ever writing experience – what’s the worst thing you ever wrote?

4)      Write about when you first realised you might actually be good at this writing lark.

5)      Write about why you love writing. What is it about it that gives you that warm fuzzy feeling?

6)      Write about the worst piece of writing criticism you ever got and what you did about it. Writers love to know they’re not alone when it comes to getting bad reviews or feedback.

7)      Give your blog theme weeks (or months, depending on how often you update it). For example, you could have broad themes like ‘novels’ or ‘independent publishing’, or smaller themes such as ‘things that bug me when I’m writing’ or ‘stuff I am bad at writing but wish I was good at’.

8)      Write about other writers. Which writers do you admire and why?

9)      Write about your favourite childhood books. Reread them and then write about how they compare now you’re an adult.

10)  Write updates to old posts. That post you wrote last year about how you’re still really sceptical about e-books that you’ve now completely reversed your position on? Write about it, and why you’ve changed your mind.

What are your ideas for interesting writing blog posts?

There is a lot of debate about what you ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ do in your novels. You should structure it like this, and you really shouldn’t do that. People can get quite heated about it.

Really though, for the most part, we make our own rules about what we do and don’t do with our novels. We all have different opinions, and no one is more right or wrong than anyone else. Yet that doesn’t always stop the bickering.

One thing that often comes up in debates like this is popular culture. Namely, should we reference popular culture in our novels? After all, love it or loathe it, pop culture is a pretty big thing and it’s rather hard to ignore.

On the one hand, there are those who say that there’s nothing wrong with a few pop culture references in a novel. It helps to lend a sense of time and place, and references to things that are very ‘now’ can be a good way to get some humour in there. On the other hand, there are those who say you should avoid pop culture references if at all possible. It can date your work and take away from what you’re really trying to achieve.

It seems to me that whether or not it’s a good idea to put pop culture references in your work depends on what you’re writing – and who you’re hoping will read it. There are some things that lend themselves better to a few cultural references than others, and some people who will get certain references while others won’t.

It’s probably worth picking your references carefully, though – especially if you’re hoping the book will stand the test of time. That doesn’t mean leaving popular references out entirely, but it does mean it can be a good idea to give some thought to what might still be memorable or around in thirty years’ time.

Overall though, all authors really need to do is what’s best for their story. If that means filling your novel with jokes about the popular TV shows and music of the day, go for it. If it means studiously avoiding all references to contemporary culture, fair enough. Every book is different and has different needs.

Still, this is an interesting debate that will probably keep ticking over in the background. What do you think about it?