Adam Croft's Blog, page 9

The great Brazilian footballer Pelé once said: ‘Never think that you know everything. There is always more to learn and every day we get to know something new.’ Although he was referring to football, it’s a quote which can easily be applied to anything and, probably, everything.

Writers in particular tend to feel an overwhelming sense of inferiority and a desire to improve which I’ve not seen quite so pervasively in any other industry. It’s one of the things which makes me love writing and other writers so much. It’s easier said than done, though, so I’ve put together a few ways in which you can help improve your writing in a fairly short space of time.

Take acting classes. This is probably the most valuable way in which I’ve improved my writing recently. I’m not suggesting you enrol in stage school, but take a look at local classes and workshops. There’s bound to be some form of drama workshop available. They’re a lot of fun and get into the nitty gritty of being a character and understanding the nuances of speech and the movement of a story in ways which you just can’t get through reading and writing. It’s a great way to get the creative juices flowing.
Go to the theatre. Probably the second-best option compared to actually participating, but still one of the best ways to catch the flow of dialogue and understand the rhythms of drama. This might all sound like basic stuff, but it’s something which all writers need to be constantly looking at and refining.
Read books on the subject of writing. This comes with a caveat. There’s a lot of crap out there. It’s difficult to know what’s crap and what isn’t, but you can eventually judge for yourself. I’d suggest reading the following three books and then using what you’ve learnt from them to judge the signal:noise ratio of everything else:

2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love — Rachel Aaron. If any book is going to get you sat down and writing, it’s this one.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – Stephen King. A staple read for writers everywhere, this is only one person’s account of the industry (and a very limited section of it), but it’s still highly recommended reading if you want to take your craft seriously.
Make A Killing On Kindle (Without Blogging, Facebook Or Twitter). The Guerilla Marketer’s Guide To Selling Ebooks On Amazon — Michael Alvear. This book concentrates on the marketing aspect of writing, but it’s vital that it’s mentioned here. 99% of the advice about marketing your book is crap. This book contains the remaining 1% of pure gold.


Read a wider variety of books. Get out of your comfort zone. This is the only way in which we ever learn. Did we discover the Americas and the New World by sitting at home and doing what we’d always done? No, we did it by venturing into unknown territory and grabbing the bull by its horns. Do the complete opposite of what you usually do and see what happens. You might be surprised.
Watch more films and TV dramas. Again, this is probably a rung lower on the ladder than visiting the theatre and taking acting classes, purely because films and TV dramas tend to be a lot more polished and, as a result, slightly less real than the stage. But to get yourself into the rhythms of drama and to really get a feel for plot and character without having to venture out of your house (see point 4!) this is a good way to get those creative juices flowing.

 

If you are a self-publisher, chances are at some point you will need to format an e-book. While it would be nice if the manuscript file you’ve been working on for months would magically transfer over to e-book format and look great, it isn’t really possible. At some point, you’re going to have to do some formatting. Here are some of the key things you need to remember when it comes to e-book formatting.

E-books don’t have pages. Your book will look different on each platform. It all depends on what kind of e-reader people are using and how they’ve set it up to display the text. This means the concept of ‘proper’ pages like in a printed book goes a little bit out of the window.
Be careful with page breaks. This relates to the point above. E-books don’t have pages in the proper sense, and too many page breaks can end up looking awkward on an e-reader screen.
Make sure you make a new version of your manuscript file for formatting purposes, and keep a back-up copy. You don’t want to take the risk of turning the whole thing into a disaster if you should have a serious formatting mishap.
Don’t have your word processing programme set to ‘print layout’, as the separate pages will make it harder to determine what your e-book will actually look like.
Get rid of as much of the blank space as possible. Even though it might feel wrong not to leave blank space at some points in the book, resist the urge.
Follow the guidelines on the publishing platforms you’re using. They’re there for a reason
Check it before you publish it properly. You can use tools such as the Kindle application for PC or Mac to check your Amazon e-book, and Adobe Digital Editions for Smashwords epub files.
There are people out there who will format your e-book for you for a fee. If you have been driven insane by trying to format your e-book or really aren’t sure how to go about it, hire someone to do it for you. Whatever you do, don’t publish the book without someone formatting it first.

 

Time. We never have enough of it. We all sometimes wish that there were more hours in the day, and we all sometimes look for ways we can save time. Publishing is no different. It’s something that takes time, but when it comes to this most precious of resources, self-publishing has the definite edge of traditional publishing. Here’s why.

It lets you get on with the job

Let’s say that you’ve decided to go down the traditional publishing route. First, you’ll most likely need to get an agent. That takes time. You’ll have to spend time researching the best agents, writing letters, and waiting for replies. Even with the best book in the world, some if not most of those replies are going to be rejections. Then, once you’ve got an agent, you need to find a publisher. More time, more waiting, more rejections, and no guarantee of a publishing deal at the end of it.

Contrast this with self-publishing. Sure, it might take you time to research self-publishing, decide how you want to go about it and get your book ready to publish – but you know that it will be published. And, instead of waiting for other people to get back to you and getting disheartened by rejections and/or a lack of response, you can just get on with the business of publishing your book, your way.

You can keep your own schedule

If you go for a traditional publisher, you’re going to have to fit in with their schedule. Even after getting a deal, it can be years before your book actually hits the shelves. This can be disheartening for authors, and it can also mean the originality has gone out of your book if someone else gets there with a similar theme first.

With self-publishing, however, the only schedule you have to keep is your own. If your book is ready to publish, you can publish it without having to fit in with a traditional publisher’s preferred release date. It means that if you’ve had a top-notch original idea, you can get it out there quickly – with any luck, before anyone else thinks of the same thing.

It also means that if you want to publish two or three books in a year, you can. Your time is your own. This means that you have a responsibility to use your time wisely – it can be easy to waste time when you’re your own boss – but it also gives you flexibility and the space you need to develop your writing career the way you want to.

When it comes to our valuable time, self-publishing wins. What do you think?

 

It would be lovely if, a couple of days after hitting the publish button on your new novel, it shot to the top of the bestseller charts and you could sit back and relax from your marketing.

In reality, this happens very rarely. It does happen, sometimes, for some authors. There’s nothing in particular to say why some books do amazingly well almost straight away and yet millions of others struggle to break through. It’s the nature of self-publishing. For most of us, any success we have with self-publishing will be down to us. We make our own success.

One of the big positives of this is that no one has more invested in seeing your book succeed than you do. You’ve taken the time to write it and perfect it and publish it, and you naturally want to see it do well. The trick is knowing how to use that desire and turn it into practical steps you can take to try and sell the book.

Self-publishing isn’t easy, but there are lots of ways for authors to promote their work and give it a shot at success. Success is, of course, never guaranteed, but I believe it is possible to achieve your goals if you put the work in. It means taking advantage of platforms such as social media to get your work out there to as big an audience as possible.

It might sound a bit too obvious to say ‘use Twitter and Facebook to promote your work and achieve your self-publishing goals’ because everyone says it these days, but everyone says it because they are genuinely useful platforms for self-publishers. For one thing, they’re free, and when you’re on a budget trying to make your own success, that counts for something.

You could say that books used to sell before the days of social media and you’d be right, but that would be to miss the point, which is that things have changed – marketing has changed, readers have changed, how we publish books has changed. To ignore social media as a self-publisher is a risky strategy. You can’t just rely on luck

It also pays to look where other authors’ success comes from. Most successful self-published authors will have more than one book out, and will be actively promoting themselves and their work on a regular basis. They’ll also have written books that people really want to read.

That can be the hardest thing of all to crack – it’s hard to know what people really want to read, and trends are changing all the time. That’s one of the reasons why there is always an element of luck involved in succeeding through self-publishing, but it’s also one of the reasons why the industry is so exciting. There are so many books still waiting to be written, and once they have been written, it’s up to us to help them succeed.

Just like any other industry, there are things people believe about self-publishing that aren’t really the case at all. Misconceptions are common, and they are sometimes held by self-publishers and would-be self-publishers themselves as well as readers. In the spirit of dispelling a few myths, read on for some of the most common myths about self-publishing.

Success can happen overnight

Sometimes it might seem as though an author has come out of nowhere to have a huge hit with a novel, but in reality, there isn’t really such a thing as an overnight success. Even if a self-published writer manages to hit the top of the bestseller list with their first novel, there will have been a huge amount of work beforehand. They will have spent months – if not years – writing their novel, and then more time perfecting it ready for publication.

There’s a joke about an overnight success that actually took ten years, and there’s more truth in this than there can sometimes seem.

It’s really easy

Some people – readers and writers – think that self-publishing is the easy way of doing things. It’s not. For one thing, writing a book is never easy. Publishing a book is also not quite as straightforward as simply uploading a document to Amazon, sitting back and waiting for the rewards.

It’s really hard

The other side of the “it’s really easy” coin are those who think that self-publishing is really hard. This can sometimes be the impression new writers have when they first start investigating self-publishing and come to realise it’s about more than writing a book and having a pretty cover. It isn’t always easy, but nor is it outrageously difficult. Many of the skills authors need for self-publishing they already have, and the ones they don’t can always be bought in if necessary.

Authors only self-publish because they couldn’t get a book deal

This has to be probably the most annoying self-publishing misconception. Some authors do self-publish because they were turned down by traditional publishers, but that doesn’t mean that their book is bad. It often just means that the publishers couldn’t see how the book would fit into their business and so decided not to take the risk.

Authors self-publish for lots of reasons. Some do it because their work is within a very specific niche, while others do it because they want the control and flexibility that the self-publishing model brings. What authors need to do now is make self-publishing recognised for the high quality work that so many of them are producing. It’s not all about having a traditional book deal anymore; self-publishing is now a valid, desirable option that should be a natural choice for all sorts of authors.

 

As a self-publisher, you also effectively become a project manager, overseeing your novel from first draft to post-publication. With this in mind, I’ve put together a few thoughts and project management tips for self-publishers.

Keep control

The clue is really in the name: self-publishing. You are publishing your own book and are responsible for the entire process, so even if you bring others on board to help you with certain things, make sure you keep control over the decision-making.

Get organised

Being a good project manager means being organised about things; you need to know what needs to happen when to complete your book. You might also find yourself balancing working with a few different services at the same time, so you’ll need to work out how to juggle conflicting demands.

Know what you’re able to do yourself

The name self-publishing implies that you’ll be doing at least a fair proportion of the work yourself. It’s worth sitting down and deciding exactly what you can achieve yourself, as well as identifying gaps in your knowledge and skills that might need to be filled in by others. Self-publishing isn’t necessarily about using only your own resources; it’s more about using your resources as effectively as possible and knowing where someone else could do something more effectively than you.

Decide what you’re going to get others to do

Once you’ve decided where the gaps are, work out exactly what you’ll be asking others to help you with. For instance, do you need someone to give your book an in-depth edit, or simply someone to proofread? If you’re hiring a tech-minded person, will they need to sort out the formatting of your novel as well as the cover design?

Know your budget

You might not be able to control absolutely everything about self-publishing, but as a project manager it’s important to be on top of the finances. If you’re hiring outside help for certain aspects of the publishing process, shop around to get the best deals. It’s also worth deciding right at the beginning how much you can afford to spend as this will shape how you go about publishing your book. Self-publishing doesn’t have to cost a lot (especially not if you’re doing the vast majority of it yourself), but there are some costs you’ll need to be aware of.

Don’t scrimp on quality

As the author, self-publisher and project manager, it’s your responsibility to make sure the book you publish is as good as it can possibly be. Don’t settle for second best or something that’s probably good enough: it needs to be great. If things go wrong, fix them. If you think something could be better, make it better until you can’t make it any better. It’s your book, and while other people will undoubtedly be able to help you along the way, ultimately it’s down to you – so never scrimp on quality.

It’s so easy to spend so much time focused on the practicalities of self-publishing – what it involves and how to do it, for instance – that we can end up overlooking that rather obvious fact: most books aren’t bestsellers.

This, obviously, is something I’m sure most of us would prefer not to think about when we’re spending long nights poring over e-book formatting and trying to decide on the best pricing options for our books. We like to think that it will all end well.

Maybe it will. But, on the other hand, maybe it won’t. While it might in some ways be easier not to think about it, it is something that plenty of self-published authors will have to think about at some point.

If your book didn’t sell as well as you had hoped – now what?

Read your reviews, as they can sometimes offer an insight into at least some of the reasons your book hasn’t done too well. If many of them mention typos or gaping plot holes, for instance, you’ll know that part of the problem is down to the book itself. If your reviews are generally good but sales are poor, the issues are likely to lie elsewhere.
Review your marketing. Successful marketing isn’t just down to how much time you put into it – it’s about how well you targeted it and how much impact it had. Endlessly telling your Twitter followers to buy your book, for instance, is unlikely to work as well as engaging them with interesting content and working to make them interested in both you and your book. Not doing any marketing at all isn’t likely to help matters, either.
Remember that a lot of it is down to luck. You could do absolutely everything right – write a great book, self-publish it properly, market it well, spend lots of time and effort on it – and still not sell very many copies. Sometimes, there isn’t a logical explanation as to why one book does well while another one isn’t even noticed by readers. It’s just the way it is, and the best thing to do about it is to write another great book – because this one could be the one.

What do you think?

What if? It’s one of the most important questions for a writer, and one that we should never stop asking. No matter what stage a writer is at in their career, it’s a question that will always be relevant.

There must be very few writers out there who, when they first thought that spending lots of time putting words on a page might be a good idea, didn’t think: what if I wrote a book? And what if it did really well?

I think one of the reasons this simple question is so important is because it manages to embody so much in just a couple of small words. As well as encapsulating the hopes of many a writer, it also has plenty of uses for plot.

It’s a question that all writers will ask themselves at some point during the process of planning a novel. What if this character did that? What if I had a look at this concept in this way? What if the novel ended like this? As well as helping writers to develop plots, it also reminds us that so much of fiction writing is just asking ourselves mad questions and seeing what happens when we try to answer them.

And, increasingly, the question of ‘what if’ can be applied to other aspects of novel-writing. In particular, more and more writers are asking themselves the question: what if I self-published my book? It’s an option that, even just a few short years ago, many writers might have rejected. Now it’s a viable, desirable route to take, and an increasing number of authors are finding out for themselves what they can achieve through self-publishing.

It’s something plenty of writers have already seen the benefits of and, thanks to them asking themselves ‘what if’, they’ve helped to blaze a path that other writers can now follow with confidence.

Often when we talk about self-publishing, we talk about it as an entire thing, as a single entity. Sometimes this is a good thing – when we’re debating the respective merits of traditional and self-publishing, for instance. However, we shouldn’t forget that self-publishing has its nuances.

Just as traditional publishing has variation within it (different imprints specialising in different genres, for instance), so self-publishing is not a solid whole. There are probably as many takes on self-publishing as there are self-publishers, but broadly speaking it can be split into two main camps: professional and unprofessional self-publishing.

There’s no getting away from the fact that some self-published books are not of a professional standard, or that this is why some readers are reluctant to try books that don’t have a traditional publisher. This is partly why those of us who are committed to professional self-publishing need to be so bold about shouting its merits from the rooftops.

That’s not to say that those self-published authors who haven’t engaged with professional support or spent lots of time perfecting every single detail are necessarily doing anything wrong: you could still have a bestseller, and it can be a good way of finding out about the industry. But as self-publishing becomes more high profile, and more authors and readers are taking it seriously, it matters more and more that the books we put out there are professional.

To self-publish a book properly takes time and, if you are committed to making writing your career, it means finding the best resources to help you realise your ambition. You might be able to do it all adequately on your own, but to do everything as well as you possibly can, it’s highly likely that you’ll need to bring others on board. One of the good things about the industry at the moment is that expertise about publishing is not just locked up in traditional publishing houses; great editors, marketers and designers are increasingly going freelance and working with self-publishers.

This means it’s important to take self-publishing seriously, and to treat it like a business, not just a hobby. With more books now self-published by authors striking out on their own, it has never been more important to make sure your book is as professional as it can possibly be.

Originality is something that we all strive for as writers, and particularly in a popular, competitive genre like crime fiction, it’s important for writers to develop their own style that sets them apart from the rest. With this in mind, here are some tips for writing original crime fiction, and feel free to add your own or share your thoughts in the comments.

Use an unusual point of view. There’s no rule that says your novel has to be written from the point of view of anyone in particular. It can also be worth playing around with POV in the draft stages of your novel to work out where the interest lies in the story; you don’t have to use it all in the finished novel, but it can help to highlight where your main sources of originality can be found.
Develop your writing voice. This is something that counts for all books, not just crime fiction writing. The way you write is one of the main sources of originality: sometimes it’s not about writing a story that’s completely new, it’s about telling it in a new way.
Think about the small things. It’s often said that there are only a limited number of stories in the world and, if you think about crime fiction, there are a number of familiarities in the genre. Someone usually dies. Someone usually investigates the death. Obstacles happen. These things are in the nature of the genre, so originality is often in the smaller details of the specific book you’re writing.
Make character integral to the planning process. If all you’re worried about is the sequence of events that make up your plot, it’s unlikely that the end result will be particularly original. However, if your starting point is your characters and how they react to things, you’ll have a much better chance of coming up with something unique and interesting, because no author crime author will have the same characters as you do.
Don’t be afraid of mad concepts. If you’ve got an idea for a crime novel that sounds mad and outlandish, well, it might be. It might work. It might not, but it’s certainly worth giving it time and seeing where you can go with it.
Pay attention to location. Many of the best, most original crime novels have a very definite sense of place: think of the popularity of Scandinavian fiction with its very distinctive landscapes, or the version of Glasgow depicted in William McIlvanney’s crime novels.
Think how you can use technology. The great thing about the modern world is that originality isn’t just about the novel itself, it’s also about everything else that goes with the novel – how you publish it and promote it, and how you build on work you’ve done before. Social media, book trailers, other promotions and self-publishing can all be used to do things in a different way.