Lawyer and Writer

Here we go! The course is live and ready to go, and you can get it here.

I had originally intended to give a 30% discount initially, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to ensure that you all had the best deal I could really give you, as thanks for being the first to support me and help me on what will obviously be a very big and long-term project.

So for this week only, the course is only $9.99, which is a 50% discount from the price I ultimately intend to offer it at.

For only ten bucks you're getting:

1. The course, with all worksheets included, in an electronic, easily printable format.

2. BONUS THE FIRST: an already-formatted spreadsheet for tracking your writing work, so you don't have to make one of your own.

3. BONUS THE SECOND: My personal availability by email for answering any questions you might have, and for personalized coaching. This is a commitment I am making to you, as a purchaser of my course, that I will do what I can to help out with simple questions. I WILL NOT WRITE YOUR BOOK FOR YOU. But if you have any questions about the course, or a particular situation that the course doesn't seem to cover, I invite you to email me and I'll see what advice I can offer.

4. BONUS THE THIRD: Access to a LOCKED AND EXCLUSIVE Dreamwidth writing community, so that all of the students of my courses can share ideas, offer help to each other, find beta readers and support. This community was originally started as a writing group for me, but has inactive pretty much since the beginning. I'm resurrecting it, specifically for you. Only purchasers of my courses will receive an invite to the Turn Write community.

VERY VERY IMPORTANT DO NOT MISS STEP - after you complete your purchase, you will need to send me your email address. This will make it easier for me to send you the course, and also allow me to send you an invite to the community. DON'T JUST CLOSE OUT THE WINDOW WHEN YOU'RE DONE.

Whew, that was a lot of capslock. I hope you're as excited as I am to get rolling, so here, once again, is the link to the course.

If you have any questions or problems whatsoever, just go ahead and comment or PM me and I will make it all better!

You already know that you want to be a writer. But do you see yourself AS a writer? Do you know what that looks like?

By the time you finish the Motivation course that's coming out at the end of this week, you'll not only know how to conquer the fears you have, but my intention is that you'll have a clear vision for where you're going.

If you don't know where you're going, how can you get there? I'll tell you: You can't.

Think about it now.

Close your eyes and picture what your life will be like when you achieve your goal. Think about where you'll live, in what sort of place, what you will do on a daily basis, where you will work, what clothes you'll wear. Picture it until you know it as well as you know your own life right now.

Pick one thing you can do today that will move you forward, even if it's just the tiniest bit, towards that goal.

I can't do this for you. Only you can make the decision to take those steps forward. I'm not saying that this course will do it for you, either. But what I can say, is that I've done my best to gather together every technique I've found over a lifetime of learning this stuff, into one easy place for your benefit.

If only one exercise teaches you something new, if you spend just a small amount of money and spent a few hours on this, and only move just a little bit closer to where you want to be, isn't that worth it?

I think it is, and that's how I live my own life. Using the techniques like the one above, I have written four full novels, published one, and begun making actual money each month from my writing.

You can do it, too. I can't wait to see you achieving.

Hey everyone! I just wanted to let you all know that Smashwords is running a promotion this week. All of my stories are at least 50% off - most of them are free! If you were thinking about checking out my books but hadn't gotten around to it yet, now is a great time to do it.

You can see my books here:
Books under my own name
Books under my pseudonym

Even if you're not interested in my books, I highly encourage you to look into the promotion. There's a full catalogue of the authors who are participating in the promotion, which can be found here.

Happy browsing!

Everyone knows that a story needs to have conflict. In fact, every single scene in your story should have conflict. Conflict is the main point of a story, and if there's no conflict in a story, then there's no story.

But knowing that, if you're like me, then you have a hard time sometimes figuring what constitutes conflict.

Conflict isn't just about having a fight on every page. If your book is filled with scene after scene of people arguing with each other, it'll get boring. Conflict is about your character overcoming an obstacle in their path.

Conflict is when a rainstorm stands between a lover and their date, and they don't have an umbrella.

Conflict is when a character desperately needs money to achieve their goal, but doesn't know where to get any.

Conflict is when a character is tempted to do something they know is wrong, but it'll help them to accomplish something great.

Conflict can be internal or external. It can be with other characters, or with natural forces, or with their own conscience.

A good shoot-em-up battle is fun, too.

---

Listen to my interview on Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing! I talk mostly about Mortis Unbound, and Star Trek.

I'm doing the Blogging from A-Z Challenge and I've decided that to achieve this goal of blogging every day (except Sundays) for a month, I will do a bit of a theme - short and sweet writing tips.

Today's writing tip is extremely relevant to my life this past weekend.

When submitting completed work for publication, it's extremely important to read the submission instructions carefully! A small mistake (such as missing a deadline or failing to include a required piece of information) can instantly disqualify you from consideration.

I think the simplest reason for this is simply that people who read through submissions are extremely busy and get hundreds, sometimes thousands of submissions for any given publication spot. They are looking for easy ways to cull down the list of things they have to read. Failing to include something they request makes it easy to drop yours off the list. They're looking for the cream that rises to the top, not offering a lot of hand holding.

So don't ever do what I just did! When someone says that the deadline for submissions to their anthology is March 30, 2013 don't write down March 31, 2013 and wait for the last day to submit, only to realize that you missed it.

Don't be me, internet. Don't be me.

In related news, I have a homeless short story I'm going to be submitting around. Oh well.

Well! After two days of gruelling reformatting, I have uploaded Mortis Unbound to Smashwords, which takes care of my Barnes & Noble problem (thank you clare_dragonfly for the tip in my last post!) as well as putting my novel in a bunch of other markets that I hadn't intended to bother with because they're relatively small. Still, nice to know it'll be there.

I actually uploaded the original file I uploaded to Amazon and Kobo, without delving into the Smashwords style guide, just to see what would happen. Just in that time three people downloaded the sample. I consider that a good recommendation for Smashwords, since I hadn't told anyone about it.

So, if you use iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, or Sony, you'll be able to find my book there within a week or so.

I've been meaning to do an in-depth post like this for a long time, and now I've had a couple of requests, so I'm going to bite the bullet and try to put my thoughts into order about this topic. I've done a tonne of research over the last couple of years, and there are many reasons why I've decided to self-publish, some financial, some not. I very much welcome discussion about this topic. It's a hugely timely issue for writers, as well as readers, and I think a lot of people don't really grasp the enormity of the issue.

My reasons break down into several categories, which can probably be summarized as: money, career planning, control, and trends. ( Read on for my reasons )

I've been listening to a lot of interviews lately and a similar theme keeps popping up amongst the various authors - how is the internet, and in particular, the popularity of ebooks, going to affect the publishing industry going forward?

There are a couple of things that come up over and over, which I'm going to summarize for you here really quickly (basically because the point of this article isn't really about what the impact will be, but what in heck are the best ways to deal with it).

Firstly, the publishing industry as a whole is not really geared to protect the author. This isn't that surprising, even if it is disheartening. Despite the fact that no one in the industry would have a job if it weren't for authors spending a lot of time and hard work writing books, authors only get perhaps 10% of the revenue from the books they write. If they're lucky.

Even though there are many aspects of how publishing works that at best fail to support the success of authors - or at worst, actively sabotage them - the author has little to no say in how a book is marketed by the publishing industry. Authors take on nearly all the risk of the sale of a book (if a book tanks, you can basically kiss your career goodbye while everyone else gets to keep their job), but they can do little to actually improve their own chances. Authors are expected to do all of their own marketing, even though they have no resources in particular and publishing companies are large. Authors are expected to wait years for portions of their royalties because book stores are permitted to return any books not sold with no penalty and no time limit.

I imagine the reason for this is that the publishing company figures, I guess, that for every author that they let go because their trilogy didn't sell as well as they hoped, there are hundreds of people who are eager to take their place. Why spend money helping your existing people to succeed when there are so many others around who might be the next J.K. Rowling? Even though the one you actually have might be that person, if you just helped them along a little.

Secondly, it appears that the publishing industry as a whole is not really prepared to embrace the ebook industry. They are treating it as an adjunct, an additional, but comparatively unimportant part of their market, while they flail around madly trying to prop up flagging sales figures on paper books. The price of paper books is skyrocketing, major chains and independent book sellers are going out of business, and I am given to understand that Amazon now sells more ebooks than paper books.

But despite all this, we have seen little change that I'm aware of in the publishing industry's business model. They're still focused on selling paper books, and they're selling ebooks for as much as the paper books (at least the paperbacks, thankfully I haven't run across any $20+ ebooks in my searches so far). And their sales figures continue to be uncertain.

And no matter how much most of us might love paper books, no matter how fearful some might be that they will become extinct and we will never be able to curl up in bed with a paper book in our hands (a future I honestly doubt we will ever see) ebooks are the future. They are hugely popular and growing in popularity. They are convenient, and if the people in charge of getting books to readers don't embrace the technology and figure out how to maximize their usage of it, it is those people who will become obsolete and disappear - not the ebooks.

It is this lack of certainty and the resistance to change which causes even more uncertainty for the authors. Because authors take on all the risk and have no control, if the publishing industry fails, it is the author who suffers first.

And since I'm an author, this is something that's been weighing on my mind as I listen to these interviews - if I know that even if I break in and sell a first novel that is no guarantee of success or even fair treatment, how do I try to increase my own odds and take control of my own future?

Well, there are a couple of ideas.

Idea 1: Direct E-book Sales

Michael A. Stackpole (whom I wrote about last week) has started selling ebooks directly. All it really takes is a website, a Pay-Pal button (and/or an Amazon seller's account), Microsoft Word, and persistence.

The obvious advantage is complete control. Your overhead is basically nil, and for every book you sell, you get 100% of the profit. If you've got a following already, you're pretty much golden. Otherwise you've got to work at it, and work hard at it.

One big disadvantage is the lack of gatekeeping. Just because you might want to write books doesn't mean you're actually any good at it. The traditional function of the publishing industry has been to fill this role, though they haven't always done a very good job at it (Twilight anyone?). Still, people tend to assume if you're good enough that the book is published, they're safe to read it. But if you're just some random Joe on the web, they're not going to pay for your unedited drivel unless they know it's good.

There are two ways around this that I can see, and both are pretty easy.

One is to include free samples of your work on your website. They may be whole stories that you're willing to give out for free, or they may be first chapters of novels that you're selling.

The second is to get editing help, from people who know what they're doing. They may be other authors, and you can pay for their assistance by editing their work. The bonus of this is that you can promote each other's books and cross-pollinate your fan-bases. If none of you are traditionally published authors, this could be a situation of the blind leading the blind, but it might work well. Or you can even hire the same freelance editors that the publishing industry uses, though I have no idea how much they charge and you should be extremely wary of scams.

I would suggest a combination of these two - get editing help and then show people a sample of what they're buying so they know it's good. You can't go wrong with that.

In his podcast, The Secrets (which I reviewed last week), Mr. Stackpole suggests a pricing scheme as follows:

$2.00 for a short story (less than 10,000 words)
$3.00 for a novella (10,000 - 40,000 words)
$4.00 - $5.00 for a novel depending on the length

That's a heck of a lot cheaper than most books on the market, and he gets all of the money immediately instead of a 10% or less royalty he may not see for 15 months. One can make a good living even if you're actually making far fewer sales at this rate, I would say.

Idea 2: Small print runs

Tracy Hickman said in an interview that I recently listened to, (and I'm paraphrasing because I couldn't find the exact wording if I tried now,) a book is just a souvenir of the story that you read and loved.

Not every book you read is going to be a keeper. I don't know about you, but I have bookshelves and bookshelves crammed with paper books, and I haven't even purchased that many books in the last ten-plus years since I moved out of my parents' house and had to start paying for my own books. (Thanks, Mom and Dad)

Going forward, in the age of the ebook, the books you really want to actually have in your hands are the ones which are truly important to you. The ones that changed your life. The ones that you will go to for comfort and want to curl up with like an old friend. Other books you may read and enjoy and never really want to have that book to keep on your shelf and remember forever the experience you had with those characters.

Once a person has read your ebook they may want to buy your actual book, but they may not want to pay full price twice. You could have them pay the difference to get the full copy of the book, reduce your profit margin a little, but get a loyal fan who isn't turned off by the lack of a print option. You could even do limited runs of signed copies. There are several services which allow anyone to self-publish small runs. If you could sell enough copies, paying for Lulu would be worth it.

Idea 3: Serialization

Some of you may have heard of Dragons Bard, which is a series by Tracy and Laura Hickman. They are selling the experience of a story in a far different way than normal. People who buy in to this book get the chapters week by week as they are being written. They get access to forums where they can discuss the book as they go, and receive access to special additional content (I presume maps and little tidbits about the world). And at the end of the whole process they get a signed, limited edition copy of the book to keep.

I would presume that you would pay a bit more for this than you would for the average ebook or paperback, but I think the experience would be well worth it, if it's a book you enjoy. And you do get the book at the end, as your souvenir.

Serialization doesn't appeal to everyone. I know when I was talking to Miko about these ideas that she said she wasn't interested in a serialization model because she reads too much and would get frustrated waiting for the next instalment to come out. She prefers to wait until a whole series is out (even when we're talking about a series of novels!) before buying the whole set.

Thank goodness not everyone is like Miko or we wouldn't have any series.

Serialization is a tried and true, traditional model, and not everyone minds waiting. The anticipation can be exciting, and many successful art forms continue to work with this model, such as comic books. It wouldn't be difficult to build a community of subscribers who pay an ongoing fee to get chapters of your books, if you can keep them on the edge of their seat and continually put out good stuff.

Idea 4: Adding Extras

What if your e-book had pictures? Animation? Music?

What if fans of your book could pay a small fee to get a membership to your website, and gain access to essays about the magic system, about the technology, about bits of the world they wouldn't normally get to see?

What if they could buy short side stories that add to the richness of your main story?

These are things that the publishing industry has really never touched to my knowledge, but which could really deepen and expand the experience of reading your book, making it memorable, and making it more likely that fans will remember and return to buy again.

Idea 5: Traditional Publishing

Obviously I'm not discounting this! Traditional publishing still works for many people, and could work for me. Going this route doesn't preclude also supplementing income and creating security by using some of these other ideas.

In fact, none of these ideas are mutually exclusive, in my opinion. I could see application for doing all of these, or some combination.

I'd like to get some discussion going, so here are some questions:

1. What do you think of these different ideas I've outlined?



2. Any other ideas that I haven't touched on or potential implications of each idea that I haven't mentioned?



3. Do you think that the prices quoted for direct sales are fair?



4. Is there anything in particular that really captures your attention and you want to talk about?