Posts Tagged ‘writing’
A Writer’s Secret Weapon: Honest Feedback
When I wrote a short story for a contest a few months ago I gave it to my wife and to a friend for feedback. They both love to read, but I hadn’t anticipated the results.
My wife felt comfortable telling me that it was terrible. My friend just said it was alright.
I thought they would both say something similar, but my wife ended up giving me the feedback I needed in order to rework my story. She was right. The original one didn’t work.
Paying $15 to enter a lousy story into a contest is not my goal.
Just about every article that passes the “wife test” is accepted by an editor or at least receives praise. One story, that passed the wife test, even received an honorable mention in a Glimmer Train contest.
I’m lucky to have such a talented reader in my home that I can trust implicitly to provide honest feedback. She is my secret weapon who has saved me a lot of disappointment and frustration in the long run.
I have read similar stories from writers who rely heavily upon one trusted reader who is sometimes a spouse and other times a member of a critique group. Keep in mind that a spouse is not always the best choice for feedback.
What to look for in a reader:
- Interest in the same subject matter.
- Attention to the details in your genre (eg. what makes for a good plot in a novel).
- Trust and comfort to tell you the truth.
No writer can catch all of his/her mistakes. If there’s a hole in an argument, a weak point in the plot, or an explanation that falls flat, oftentimes an attentive and critical reader is one of the safest bets in finding them. If you’re waiting for an editor to catch your mistakes, chances are you’ll just receive a form letter saying, “Your work does not meet our current needs.”
That could be a clue that you really need better feedback before you submit your work.
When Can You Call Yourself a “Writer”?
In speaking with many publishing hopefuls, bloggers, and other folks who dabble in writing, I often hear them question whether they can truly call themselves “a writer.”
They all write words on a page or on a computer.
Some have quite a few readers on their web sites.
And yet, they hesitate in calling themselves “writers.”
Why?
Because they haven’t published in magazines or they haven’t published books. They just think of themselves as word tinkers.
I used to think the same of myself before I published a book. At the time my only writing credit was an online magazine and a defunct humor magazine. Then someone said in an E-mail, “You’re a writer. Now you just need someone to pay you for it and some fame.”
It was a jarring comment. I’d built my identity as a writer around external sources of validation, namely money and popularity.
Here’s the thing, having published in several magazines, several books, and online over the past five years, I can just about guarantee you’ll never think you have enough money or popularity to call yourself a writer because there will always be someone with more money and more readers.
While there are good writers and writers who have a long way to go before they’re good, perhaps the matter of calling yourself a “writer” rests more with the individual. Do you personally believe you can call yourself a writer based on the work you do?
Forget money.
Forget fame.
Do you write seriously? Do you care about the words you put on the page? Is your writing an important part of who you are?
If you can answer yes to questions such as these, then you probably are a writer. Very few writers go on to make a lot of money or to become household names, so just focus on loving what you do, put your best into it, and savor every time a reader shares positive feedback about your work no matter how you publish it.
Writing is about crafting words for readers. Set goals for yourself, but never confuse legitimate writing with the side benefits of money and popularity.
What You Need to Know About Self-Publishing: Solving the Distribution Problem
One of the greatest obstacles that self-published authors will face is finding people to actually buy their books.
Think about it. No one will visit a book store and stumble upon your book. No one will find it on a publisher’s web site. No one will read about it in a catalogue. No one will want to stock in a book store because it’s self-published.
Oh, of course you can sell it online, but how will readers find it?
That is the trick. Can you assemble a realistic marketing plan that will sufficiently take into account all of the setbacks that self-publishing brings, while still connecting with readers on a scale that will ensure you sell enough copies to at least break even?
Ah, distribution is a huge problem for self-published authors. Heck, when self-publishing A Path to Publishing, I still didn’t quite grasp the amount of work ahead of me or the sheer quantity of potentials readers I needed to connect with in my niche.
Where should you start if you’re self-publishing?
For starters, check out my free online marketing guide. That gives both traditional and new ways to market your work.
However, the most important principle in selling books is to make a real connection with a potential reader and to communicate clearly why he or she may want to buy your book. Someone else may be able to do that for you by way of an endorsement or a review, but kicking it all off depends on you and you alone.
I began this series saying that “self” is the key word when it comes to “self-publishing”. If you have any hopes of selling your book, make sure you have more than Plan A and B for distributing your book. You’ll probably need to have plans that range from A to Z.
Your job is to find the communities, blogs, forums, Twitter users, Facebook users, groups, societies, and any other group of potential readers in your content niche. That is the publishing sales game in a nutshell, and it’s a tough one on your own!
What You Need to Know About Self-Publishing: Seek Opinions
In conjunction with the release of my self-published book A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a 
Nonfiction Book, I’m offering this series of posts on what you need to know about self-publishing.
When working on a self-published book you may have put together a passable first draft, and even managed to spruce up a pretty decent second draft. However, chances are your argument or story will have some significant holes in it, to say nothing of some sections that readers will find confusing.
While working on my third draft of A Path to Publishing I couldn’t think of any significant changes to make, so I sent it off to several friends and colleagues to read it. Sure enough, one reader found the same glaring flaw in two of the book’s chapters.
She very gently suggested that those two sections needed significant revision. She was absolutely right. I had a few doubts at first about those sections, but I had decided they worked fine. Thankfully she pointed out some other reasons why needed to be not only rewritten but largely deleted.
And that brings us to the challenge of editing your own book. You always need perspectives other than your own to make sure your book flows and makes sense. No matter how talented you may be as a writer or an editor, you can’t catch all of your own mistakes.
Depending on your relationship with your friends and family, you may ask them for help. However, remember that a good editor will not worry about hurting your feelings. A good editor needs to feel comfortable pointing out all of your book’s flaws. Will your friends and family be able to do that?
My friends through social media and blogging have been a tremendous help in reading drafts of my books, while several key friends and family members have helped at times as well. However, I think it’s important to choose your readers carefully and to give them deadlines that can be flexible if need be.
In addition, keep in mind that these friends may publish their own books some day. Guess who they’re going to e-mail before anyone else for help…
What You Need to Know about Self-Publishing: Know the Publishing Business
In celebration of my latest book, A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a Nonfiction Book, I will be posting a series on what you need to know about self-publishing. I chose to self-publish A Path to Publishing and discovered an enormous amount of material online, but some of it was dated. Over the coming weeks I will provide an updated guide to self-publishing today based on my latest experiences.
What Self-Publishing Involves
The most important word in self-publishing is “self,” not publishing. The publishing part is fun. The self part is not.
Of course self-published authors boast higher royalties, greater control, and many other benefits. These are all true to a certain extent, but consider what you’ll need to organize by yourself:
- Researching the market and audience for your book.
- Outlining, writing, and editing.
- Researching a publisher and comparing the various packages.
- Paying for and organizing the editing, design, printing, and distribution (which of course will vary).
- Putting together a marketing plan.
- Creating a publicity kit
- Contacting bloggers, radio producers, newspaper editors, and other media outlets about your book’s release.
- Contacting independent and chain book stores to set up book events. Many of them will not call you back because you are self-published.
- Finding conferences where you can sell your book—that is, if you pay for the space.
- Setting up book events and eating the cost if they flop.
Granted, many publishers today are quite light on the marketing end of things, especially for nonfiction books where a marketing platform is essential for new authors. That being said, at least having someone who is paid to help you send out press releases and to advise you on ideas can save you a lot of time and frustration. In other words, even the publisher who provides minimal help with marketing a book is still way better than doing everything yourself.
What You Need to Know about the Publishing Business
If all of this is new to you, then I’m guessing you’ve never commercially published a book. While self-publishing is easy to jump into from the standpoint of writing and printing a book, making it into a product that someone will actually deem worthy of $15 is quite another matter.
Here are a few things you need to know about publishing as a business:
- Most books need significant editorial development.
- It takes time to learn how to write for a specific audience.
- A bad cover and sloppy interior design can be fatal for a book.
- Distributing a book effectively will take a lot of e-mails and phone calls.
- Marketing a book is a full time job.
If you want to self-publish and to sell more than 500-1000 books, your work is cut out for you. Thankfully it can be done. In the coming days we’ll discuss the importance of a marketing platform for self-publishing.
Looking for a bit more about publishing right now? Check out A Path to Publishing. It’s available for $10 as an ebook and for $15 as a paperback.
A Path to Publishing is Now Available!
I’m happy to announce that A Path to Publishing is now available as a paperback book through Amazon and most other distributors, as well as an ebook through Lulu.
The price through Amazon is $15, while the ebook price through Lulu is $10.
So far the feedback has been really encouraging, including comments from readers who have found the book both informative and well-organized. One book publisher enthusiastically purchased a copy, and he’s someone who certainly could have taught me a thing or two about publishing! So I’m grateful to see positive responses to the book as it starts out.
If you’re interested in hosting me for an event with your writing group or book store, I offer group discounts and free publishing workshops along with my book events.
Throughout the third and fourth weeks of May a number of bloggers will be posting reviews and interviews. I hope to have the schedule up soon.
In addition, I’ll be posting a series here next week covering what I learned in the self-publishing process. If you subscribe to my e-mail newsletter (in the right column), you can also read about the inside story of self-publishing, the decisions I made throughout the process, and why I followed the course I chose.
There are a lot of decisions to make in the self-publishing process, so believe me, reading about my process will help you a great deal! I learned a ton over the past 6 months.
How to Handle Rejection as a Writer: It’s Not You, It’s Me…
Rejection is not always a reflection on you or your work. In fact, there are many good books and articles rejected each day for a variety of reason.
Good books are rejected because of similar books.
You may have a great idea and you may be an incredible writer, but if someone has written a similar book, especially for your publisher, you may be out of luck. In addition, there may be projects in a publisher’s pipeline that you could never know about unless you submitted your proposal.
That isn’t to say that different publishers will back away from your book if there are similar books. You just need to show that it has a unique message or perspective that distinguishes it from its competition.
Good books are rejected because of different focuses at a publisher.
You may have addressed an important topic, and that topic may be within the interests of a publisher, but perhaps you wrote a book that didn’t strike the right angle or genre for that publisher. One publisher may aim for literary books, while others may opt for the academic route.
Good books are rejected because of cuts or changes with editors.
Sometimes publishers may change their focus or even eliminate a line of books. With new editors come new criteria for accepting books. Editorial changes will mean a book that may have been accepted a few months ago will no longer work for a publisher. Timing and luck are huge factors when pitching book and article query letters.
Good books are rejected because editors don’t always know what they want.
While publishers have guidelines and specifications, they don’t always know what book would work best. This is something that some editors themselves have admitted. See editorial veteran Leonard Goss’ endorsement for my new book A Path to Publishing.
That doesn’t mean that all editors are fickle and indecisive, and you should never tell them what they want. Rather, they always aren’t able to know what exactly will work and what will not. There are plenty of stories of best-selling books passing through a series of rejections before finding success. The moral is that editors are human like you and me, and that publishing is not an exact science—as it should be.
Good books are rejected because of publicity concerns.
Even if you’ve written a great book, some publishers may reject your proposals because they fear they’ll be unable to market it to a particular group of people or that you aren’t popular enough to promote it. Those are big problems for writers to deal with, but at least they aren’t necessarily marks of a poorly written book.
In addition, if you are able to write a good book, you can certainly work on raising your profile and reworking your material so that it speaks more directly to an audience of readers. These are big problems, but they don’t spell doom for you as a writer.
How to Handle Rejection as a Writer
I’ve spoken to rooms full of writers and have looked into the eyes of many who fear the very real possibility of receiving a rejection letter for their novels or nonfiction works. Writing is an emotional business in which people invest heavily in very personal and meaningful ideas and characters.
Rejection is just about the worst thing a writer can imagine besides publishing a book that is hated by readers and critics. Both possibilities sound pretty terrible, but rejection is the one thing that every writer who hopes to publish a book or article has to face from the start.
Even well-known authors with a history of successful books have to sometimes face rejection. Legendary Christian writer Frederick Buechner has published shelves worth of fiction and nonfiction, but even his latest book, The Yellow Leaves, was rejected by his life-long publisher. He had to take it elsewhere before landing a book deal.
Rejection is a real issue that every writer has to deal with in one way or another.
I had intended to write this series last week, but a few other projects and a persistent head cold pushed it back to this week. Tune in tomorrow, and I’ll discuss the nature of rejection in the business of writing.
Five Things I Learned about Writing for Magazines: #2 Read the Magazines You Want to Query
If you’ve accumulated some writing credits, you’re ready to begin planning out your queries to magazines that do pay well. Don’t forget about the non-paying, high quality magazines (for example, there’s Patrol and Next-Wave in my own Christian market). They have their place in building your marketing platform if you hope to sell books or to accumulate writing credits. However, you can now broaden your scope.
I’ve heard many editors say that you need to read their magazine before sending them a query. While that makes sense, the typical writer doesn’t have time to pour over the past twelve issues for fifteen different magazines. However, most writers should be able to read at least four or five editions (if not more) of four or five magazines, especially when some of them are available online. Choose wisely as you begin, and then add to your inventory of magazines you read regularly as you query more of them.
Still, the question remains, Why? Does it really make that big of a difference if the guidelines are listed online?
In a word, yes.
Besides simply knowing what a magazine is looking for topically, reading a magazine clues you in on the kinds of stories the magazine accepts, the angle most writers take, and the expectations of readers. For example, after reading about six issues of a regional magazine I began to think of solid story ideas that one editor purchased right away.
When you’ve read a magazine the query ideas will come faster and you’ll write better queries that appeal to editors. Perhaps you could hammer out a decent query after a few hours of staring at the guidelines, but investing a similar amount of time in reading the magazine will result in better queries that are far more likely to be accepted.
Before You Publish: Set Goals
I’d like to offer a brief series of posts on things to do before trying to publish a book…
When you begin to seriously consider publishing a book your first step will be identifying your goals.
Are you hoping to write full time? Are you looking to add some credentials to your current career? Do you have one particular idea that is so important you want to publish it?
How you answer these questions will determine your next step.
Publishing a book requires a tremendous amount of time and planning. It is rarely as simple as pounding out a book and shipping it off to a publisher who then takes care of everything for you, mailing a fat royalty check each quarter.
You don’t write to become rich—it rarely happens.
In addition, if your goal is to merely share information with a wide audience, there are a lot of other avenues available today that may in fact be more effective in drawing a larger number of readers to your work. One poet I spoke with said he has reached thousands more readers through his blog than through his book. While his book lends him greater credibility in some circles, the simple act of sharing his work can be accomplished effectively outside of book publishing.
Keep in mind that as the economy contracts, so have publishers, editorial staffs, book acquisitions, and marketing dollars. The competition is a bit more fierce and the desire of publishers to stick with trusted names is greater than ever.
All that to say, it is still very possible to publish today, and with smaller presses and self-publishing options there is no reason why you can’t one day hold a bound copy of your work in hand. Nevertheless, before setting out into the challenging world of publishing, be sure to identify your goals and make sure that publishing a book will be the best way to accomplish them.
I’ll continue this series next week with a few more things to consider before you publish.
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