Aaron Dennis's Blog - Posts Tagged "book"
Why Doesn't America Read?
Why doesn’t America read?
Well, it isn’t a simple answer. Certainly, there are still many out there perusing internet articles for current events or scanning various sites for information, but where are all the Americans who read for entertainment?
Anyone who does actually read will claim that there are large communities of readers on sites like Goodreads, that there are plenty of places to download e-books like Smaswhords, and that the big boom in books released through Amazon and to e-readers would prove that there plenty of readers in America, but in truth, it’s a very small fraction of the country that engages in the lost art of reading.
Here’s a quick quote from the L.A. Times
The study found that overall, 72% of American adults have read a book in the past year, while the percentage for millennials, ages 18 to 29, was higher: 80%. The percentage of overall book readers dropped from the previous year, when 76% of American adults reported having read a book, either all or part of one.
Do you see? These are people who have read a book in a year, and not even a whole book; lot’s of people try to read and then give up after a few pages, but why? Furthermore, the study doesn’t discuss what kind of book was read and why; some people glance at a non-fiction book for information, but does that count as reading?
The major presses are releasing tons of books for entertainment in America and other countries, but the presses are way out of touch with today’s audience; they don’t post book releases and reviews to social media outlets, they don’t really show any commercials for new releases on television, and unless someone is already a subscriber to Reader’s Digest, there isn’t anyone out there reading magazines containing book releases, but is marketing the problem?
No, it isn’t. The problem is that today, everyone and their grandmother can sit down at their computer, type out 50,000 words, buy a cover from some photoshop artist, and release it through Amazon, Smashwords, and Lulu. These people are often called indie authors, but that’s incorrect; indie authors are published through indie presses like Baen, actual presses with editors, marketers, and printers. The correct term is self published author, and these authors release their books through POD companies like Friesen Press; it’s a flurry of unedited mush, and, all too often, self published authors also release e-books, which flood the market, through Amazon and Smashwords.
But why is that a bad thing? Is it inappropriate to write a book and release it? Would not the readers and the market decide if the author and book are worth buying? In a free trade system, yes, but these authors get together through social media and trade books with each other, so that they can all give each other 5 star reviews on book sites. The result is a poorly written, cliched, stagnant piece with 100 5 star reviews enticing readers to buy a book, and then readers purchase it to find the writer wasn’t able to string together five words, much less reveal a cogent plot, and so they feel shilled, and they give their 1 star review, but it doesn’t end there. That doesn’t solve the problem.
You see, these self published authors get together on social media and tell each other to support other self published authors because they write for a living and need to pay their bills, so they all congregate and talk about trading good reviews in order to boost their sales, and there doesn’t seem to be anybody out there trying to dissuade them from this practice, which fools unsuspecting readers into buying trash.
Now, not all self published authors are terrible writers. Some of them hire professional editors, others buy manuals to learn how to properly edit, some find beta-readers for feedback before a release, and some have degrees in literature or composition, but it’s so overly difficult to know which author has an inkling of editing when tons and tons and tons of e-books are flooding the market, and as I said, they all have hundreds of glowing reviews.
Another problem is the book reviewer industry. When a major press, or even a true, indie press, releases a book, they hire professional reviewers from companies like Kirkus to read and write a real, professional review on the book; these are paid professionals who take their careers very seriously, and they will describe in detail the good and bad points of the book. Furthermore, if the book is terrible, they will explain why and provide their rating for everyone to see. Self published authors don’t do this; they claim that paid reviews are biased, but it’s the paid reviewers that tell and post the truth!
Here’s the kicker, since these self published authors have been destroyed by real reviewers, they resort to each other for fake reviews, and they will even find blog sites and review sites to post reviews, but too often, these non-professional reviewers promise that they will NOT post a bad review. Instead, if they don’t like the book, rather than shaming the author, they opt out of posting the review, but reviews are not for authors, they are supposed to be for READERS.
So, why doesn’t America read anymore? Because every time an American tries to pick up a book and start reading, their eyes are assaulted by uninspired dialogue, unbelievable characters, convoluted, nonsensical plots, and feel so disgusted with the world of reading, that they become jaded, thinking that books are simply terrible.
What can be done?
No one is saying that people should stop writing; it’s great that so many Americans have decided to put their thoughts into words, but they should do their due diligence and make their work a professional masterpiece; it doesn’t matter if the concept within the story is any good, everybody has different tastes, what matters is the quality of the writing, and the only way to let readers know whether a book is worth reading is by posting a real review. If a book is bad, people need to say so. If a book is good, people need to say so, but what’s killing the reading industry is the masses of self published authors trading these fake reviews and these non-professional reviewers deciding NOT to post bad reviews; they must post bad reviews because reviews are for readers, not authors.
The Brian Griffins of the writing industry have been taking over. Someone needs to curtail this horrendous practice and restore reading and writing in America to its former glory.
Not only do readers deserve to know if a book is readable, but the authors deserve to hear why their book was bad, so that they can sit back and improve on their next novel. So many self-published authors write and release a book every month; there’s no way a book written that quickly is ready for release, and these clowns have no idea that they can’t write because they’re surrounded by their own ilk, raving about how amazing their book is, even though it lacks any kind of punctuation, all the characters talk the same, the plot makes no sense and wanders off like a drunken horse, and offers no lesson whatsoever.
Do you want America to start reading again? You can help to solve the problem. Before you buy a book, take a look at the reviews; look at the 5 star reviews, look at the 1 star reviews, and then, on Amazon, you can click “look inside” and actually check to see if the writer was able to keep an idea within a paragraph; there’s an art to writing; it isn’t just words on a page. Each word has to fill the sentence with life. Each paragraph has to drive the essence of the story forward. Each piece of dialogue has to sound like people conversing, and if an author fails in these concepts, readers will drop the book and walk away, enraged at the fact they just blew 2 dollars.
Please, America, read again; read reviews, good and bad, take a look inside the book, you have the opportunity, and on Smashwords, you can often download a free sample of the book.
And readers, you wonderful, American readers out there who still love finding a diamond in the rough, please review all the books you purchase; reader reviews are by far more important than professional or author reviews. If you want America to read again, give them a reason; talk about how good a book was; talk about how bad a book was; inform your fellow readers, so that all of you might band together on social media like the self published authors who are trying to trick you into buying a 50,000 word train wreck.
And be wary, be very, very wary; lots of self published authors will maliciously post negative reviews for writers if the other writer gave them an honest, bad review on their book. I’ve seen it; one author trades a book, he or she posts a review of the other author, and then, when they get their bad review in return, that author will remove their first review, and write a scathing indictment instead only to try and make themselves feel better, so it’s up to you, the American reader, to fix the book industry. If you love to read then you must review for better or worse, and you must tell your friends and family as well.
Help me make reading fun again. Please.
Well, it isn’t a simple answer. Certainly, there are still many out there perusing internet articles for current events or scanning various sites for information, but where are all the Americans who read for entertainment?
Anyone who does actually read will claim that there are large communities of readers on sites like Goodreads, that there are plenty of places to download e-books like Smaswhords, and that the big boom in books released through Amazon and to e-readers would prove that there plenty of readers in America, but in truth, it’s a very small fraction of the country that engages in the lost art of reading.
Here’s a quick quote from the L.A. Times
The study found that overall, 72% of American adults have read a book in the past year, while the percentage for millennials, ages 18 to 29, was higher: 80%. The percentage of overall book readers dropped from the previous year, when 76% of American adults reported having read a book, either all or part of one.
Do you see? These are people who have read a book in a year, and not even a whole book; lot’s of people try to read and then give up after a few pages, but why? Furthermore, the study doesn’t discuss what kind of book was read and why; some people glance at a non-fiction book for information, but does that count as reading?
The major presses are releasing tons of books for entertainment in America and other countries, but the presses are way out of touch with today’s audience; they don’t post book releases and reviews to social media outlets, they don’t really show any commercials for new releases on television, and unless someone is already a subscriber to Reader’s Digest, there isn’t anyone out there reading magazines containing book releases, but is marketing the problem?
No, it isn’t. The problem is that today, everyone and their grandmother can sit down at their computer, type out 50,000 words, buy a cover from some photoshop artist, and release it through Amazon, Smashwords, and Lulu. These people are often called indie authors, but that’s incorrect; indie authors are published through indie presses like Baen, actual presses with editors, marketers, and printers. The correct term is self published author, and these authors release their books through POD companies like Friesen Press; it’s a flurry of unedited mush, and, all too often, self published authors also release e-books, which flood the market, through Amazon and Smashwords.
But why is that a bad thing? Is it inappropriate to write a book and release it? Would not the readers and the market decide if the author and book are worth buying? In a free trade system, yes, but these authors get together through social media and trade books with each other, so that they can all give each other 5 star reviews on book sites. The result is a poorly written, cliched, stagnant piece with 100 5 star reviews enticing readers to buy a book, and then readers purchase it to find the writer wasn’t able to string together five words, much less reveal a cogent plot, and so they feel shilled, and they give their 1 star review, but it doesn’t end there. That doesn’t solve the problem.
You see, these self published authors get together on social media and tell each other to support other self published authors because they write for a living and need to pay their bills, so they all congregate and talk about trading good reviews in order to boost their sales, and there doesn’t seem to be anybody out there trying to dissuade them from this practice, which fools unsuspecting readers into buying trash.
Now, not all self published authors are terrible writers. Some of them hire professional editors, others buy manuals to learn how to properly edit, some find beta-readers for feedback before a release, and some have degrees in literature or composition, but it’s so overly difficult to know which author has an inkling of editing when tons and tons and tons of e-books are flooding the market, and as I said, they all have hundreds of glowing reviews.
Another problem is the book reviewer industry. When a major press, or even a true, indie press, releases a book, they hire professional reviewers from companies like Kirkus to read and write a real, professional review on the book; these are paid professionals who take their careers very seriously, and they will describe in detail the good and bad points of the book. Furthermore, if the book is terrible, they will explain why and provide their rating for everyone to see. Self published authors don’t do this; they claim that paid reviews are biased, but it’s the paid reviewers that tell and post the truth!
Here’s the kicker, since these self published authors have been destroyed by real reviewers, they resort to each other for fake reviews, and they will even find blog sites and review sites to post reviews, but too often, these non-professional reviewers promise that they will NOT post a bad review. Instead, if they don’t like the book, rather than shaming the author, they opt out of posting the review, but reviews are not for authors, they are supposed to be for READERS.
So, why doesn’t America read anymore? Because every time an American tries to pick up a book and start reading, their eyes are assaulted by uninspired dialogue, unbelievable characters, convoluted, nonsensical plots, and feel so disgusted with the world of reading, that they become jaded, thinking that books are simply terrible.
What can be done?
No one is saying that people should stop writing; it’s great that so many Americans have decided to put their thoughts into words, but they should do their due diligence and make their work a professional masterpiece; it doesn’t matter if the concept within the story is any good, everybody has different tastes, what matters is the quality of the writing, and the only way to let readers know whether a book is worth reading is by posting a real review. If a book is bad, people need to say so. If a book is good, people need to say so, but what’s killing the reading industry is the masses of self published authors trading these fake reviews and these non-professional reviewers deciding NOT to post bad reviews; they must post bad reviews because reviews are for readers, not authors.
The Brian Griffins of the writing industry have been taking over. Someone needs to curtail this horrendous practice and restore reading and writing in America to its former glory.
Not only do readers deserve to know if a book is readable, but the authors deserve to hear why their book was bad, so that they can sit back and improve on their next novel. So many self-published authors write and release a book every month; there’s no way a book written that quickly is ready for release, and these clowns have no idea that they can’t write because they’re surrounded by their own ilk, raving about how amazing their book is, even though it lacks any kind of punctuation, all the characters talk the same, the plot makes no sense and wanders off like a drunken horse, and offers no lesson whatsoever.
Do you want America to start reading again? You can help to solve the problem. Before you buy a book, take a look at the reviews; look at the 5 star reviews, look at the 1 star reviews, and then, on Amazon, you can click “look inside” and actually check to see if the writer was able to keep an idea within a paragraph; there’s an art to writing; it isn’t just words on a page. Each word has to fill the sentence with life. Each paragraph has to drive the essence of the story forward. Each piece of dialogue has to sound like people conversing, and if an author fails in these concepts, readers will drop the book and walk away, enraged at the fact they just blew 2 dollars.
Please, America, read again; read reviews, good and bad, take a look inside the book, you have the opportunity, and on Smashwords, you can often download a free sample of the book.
And readers, you wonderful, American readers out there who still love finding a diamond in the rough, please review all the books you purchase; reader reviews are by far more important than professional or author reviews. If you want America to read again, give them a reason; talk about how good a book was; talk about how bad a book was; inform your fellow readers, so that all of you might band together on social media like the self published authors who are trying to trick you into buying a 50,000 word train wreck.
And be wary, be very, very wary; lots of self published authors will maliciously post negative reviews for writers if the other writer gave them an honest, bad review on their book. I’ve seen it; one author trades a book, he or she posts a review of the other author, and then, when they get their bad review in return, that author will remove their first review, and write a scathing indictment instead only to try and make themselves feel better, so it’s up to you, the American reader, to fix the book industry. If you love to read then you must review for better or worse, and you must tell your friends and family as well.
Help me make reading fun again. Please.
Novel Writing Winner, Gods and Dragons
https://wildsoundfestivalreview.com/2...
By visiting the link above, you can listen to an excerpt of Gods and Dragons. The novel reading won back in August.
Gods and Dragons is the first book in The Dragon of Time fantasy adventure series.
Gods and Dragons is currently free, so grab a copy from Barnes and Noble.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-d...
In a world where Dragons pose as Gods, one man with no past unearths their lies in the ruined kingdom of Alduheim. Gods and Dragons is the story of Scar, a mercenary with amnesia, who finds himself fighting the Kulshedrans on behalf of Zoltek, leader of the Zmajans. After receiving promises of answers regarding his origin, the mercenary sets off to slay Zoltek's opposition in the territorial wars all over Tiamhaal.
After botching a mission in the country of Satrone, a general from Zoltek's army has an assassin make an attempt on the mercenary's life. When the assassin fails, and Scar flees into the desert, he is accosted by a knight in black armor claiming the he follows one of the real Gods, Mekosh, the Severe. An unseen ally helps Scar defeat the Paladin of Severity, an ally, who turns out to be a Kulshedran Captain with answers regarding Scar's forgotten past.
I'm still working on the sequel, Dragon Slayer. My goal is to release the second, fantasy, adventure book by January 1st, though I am hoping to get it out before Christmas.
Thank you for dropping by, and thanks to all those who made Gods and Dragons a winner.
By visiting the link above, you can listen to an excerpt of Gods and Dragons. The novel reading won back in August.
Gods and Dragons is the first book in The Dragon of Time fantasy adventure series.
Gods and Dragons is currently free, so grab a copy from Barnes and Noble.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-d...
In a world where Dragons pose as Gods, one man with no past unearths their lies in the ruined kingdom of Alduheim. Gods and Dragons is the story of Scar, a mercenary with amnesia, who finds himself fighting the Kulshedrans on behalf of Zoltek, leader of the Zmajans. After receiving promises of answers regarding his origin, the mercenary sets off to slay Zoltek's opposition in the territorial wars all over Tiamhaal.
After botching a mission in the country of Satrone, a general from Zoltek's army has an assassin make an attempt on the mercenary's life. When the assassin fails, and Scar flees into the desert, he is accosted by a knight in black armor claiming the he follows one of the real Gods, Mekosh, the Severe. An unseen ally helps Scar defeat the Paladin of Severity, an ally, who turns out to be a Kulshedran Captain with answers regarding Scar's forgotten past.
I'm still working on the sequel, Dragon Slayer. My goal is to release the second, fantasy, adventure book by January 1st, though I am hoping to get it out before Christmas.
Thank you for dropping by, and thanks to all those who made Gods and Dragons a winner.
The Dragon of Time 2, Dragon Slayer free for a limited time
The Dragon of Time Two, Dragon Slayer
The following is mostly an excerpt from The Dragon of Time Two, Dragon Slayer. I have worked very hard on this book, perhaps harder than anything else I have ever done. For a limited time, I am giving away Dragon Slayer, so be sure to grab your copy today. On December 24th, I will be giving it a price.
I also want to add that The Dragon of Time series has a history. I started working on the first novel, Gods and Dragons, back in 2013. At that time, I was actually writing a different book, Cayneian, a Man from Blood, but for some inexplicable reason, I was drawn to dragons.
I have always liked dragons. I recall thinking it was odd that numerous cultures all over the world had dragons, and all the dragons were vastly dissimilar, yet for the most part, they were either menaces defeated by stalwart heroes, or they were keepers of knowledge.
While thinking about the origin of dragons, I began to wonder if perhaps people were digging into the earth and discovered dinosaur bones. I can see how someone from one, two, five thousands years ago, and further back, might unearth a giant femur, a strange skull, and come to the conclusion that dragons existed, once upon a time.
Since, I’m a writer, and I enjoy doing research, I started looking into different dragons, their images, their powers, their names, and then a story came to me. I began by just imagining the dragons, and then I wrote down their names and descriptions. Then, I thought about what kind of powers they were going to have, how their realms existed, how they were going to bless their people.
That was the first time I did anything even similar to an outline, yet it wasn’t truly an outline; I just wrote a bunch of stories, and then I created a problem—the dragons were defeated, yet because people worshipped them, they still existed, but they had lost their physical forms ages ago, and now, they are trying to collect souls in order to manifest.
Then, I created a hero, an amnesiac warrior who is seeking only to learn of his origins. Because he was created by unfathomable forces, he is more than a man, and he heals quickly, kind of like Wolverine. In the end, I had thought about the story so thoroughly that I abandoned my original project to write Gods and Dragons, but then I left the story for many months to finish, edit, and publish Cayneian.
After the release of Cayneian, I began reading and tweaking Gods and Dragons, and as it turned out, there was simply no way to cram everything into one book. Now, I think it will likely be four books.
If you’re interested in the history of The Dragon of Time series, you can find a ton of information here.
https://plus.google.com/b/11170227018...
This is the Google+ brand page, and you can also grab your free copy of Dragon Slayer. If you aren’t sold yet, please read the excerpt. Thank you.
The Dragon Slayer smiled. A pile of bloody corpses were strewn about the deer pelts covering the stone floor of Zoltek’s palace. Since the guards were dead, and Zoltek had yet to show his face, Scar plunked down on the blackened, wood throne; the seat of power within the walls of Urr. He watched shadows cast by burning braziers dance along the gray stone. An eerie quietude was all that remained of the opposition. Dead men told no tales, but dead Dragons were a different story. A gust of chilly, night air brought forth sparks and crackles from the fires. Scar clicked his tongue.
“Zoltek,” he taunted.
The warrior frowned, crossed his legs, and strained to listen. Only embers chirped when more gusts circulated through the throne room. None of the guards had dared chase the Dragon Slayer into the palace, and inside Urr, Scar had already hacked to bits anyone who wasn’t fleeing for their life. Zmajans were nothing if not fearsome, but the Dragon Slayer was practically invulnerable; such was the blessing of Eternus, the Dragon of Time.
“Think of your son, Zoltek,” Scar yelled. “I killed the little brat when he tried to backstab me. What was his name? Oh, yes, Urdu.”
The fight inside the palace had lasted less than an hour. After charging in, Scar easily mowed down the dark skinned fighters. Their leather armor proved ineffective against the brute’s great sword, a blade forged by Eternus for the specific purpose of slaying Dragons. They tried to fight back with their magic weapons—swords and axes that changed into spinning blades; they were self-propelled saws. Some of the Zmajans, ones with crossbows, turned their weapons into machines that fired bolts at an unprecedented rate, yet the projectiles did little damage. Scar’s newest wounds had already healed over.
“Don’t make me hunt you down like a dog, Zoltek. You’re Zmajan. You are brave, and you are angry. You should come find me and accept my challenge rather than cower in some darkened corner!” Scar goaded. “Come prove to me that Zmaj, the All God, holds you worthy.”
A clanking of metal bled through the vaulted ceiling. Scar looked up. There were still people in there somewhere, but he wanted only to gut Zoltek, take his Dragon gem, and show Zmaj his blade. Capturing all of the Dragons’ souls was his quest, the single reason for his creation, and though Scar detested being ordered around, and by a Dragon, no less, he was still upset over the death of his lover, Ylithia. Such was his wrath, an insatiable thirst for blood.
Killing her attackers in Othnatus had not been enough. Cutting down King Gilgamesh, who commanded them, had not been sufficient, and slaying the Dragon, Kulshedra, had only whet his appetite for Dragon’s blood.
“Zoltek,” Scar called; a constricted tone revealed his intolerance. “It was less than a year ago that you promised me answers. Remember? You hired me to fight for you, to kill Kulshedrans, and in return, you were going to tell me who I was. You were going to ask Zmaj…tell me, have you asked him? Has he told you?”
After having slain Kulshedra, the mercenary’s memories flooded his mind, and so as he sat upon the negus’s throne, taunting him, he knew all too well Zoltek feared the truth. The sound of bare feet coming down stone steps drew Scar from self-reflection. He looked to his right, where a set of stairs led up to private chambers. A thin figure wearing shiny, purple and gold robes descended. Zoltek held a metal staff in his left hand. Its top was a purple gem in the shape of a diamond. Zmaj’s gem, Scar thought. At the base of the stairs, his face shrouded in shadow, the Negus of Usaj glared at the Dragon Slayer.
“I do not fear you, ghost,” Zoltek breathed. His voice was unearthly, something reminiscent of rustling leaves caught in the wind. “You are no one, nothing. Zmaj does not claim you. None of the Gods do.”
“None of the Dragons do,” Scar corrected.
“You are a fool.”
“I owe you for your betrayal,” Scar said and came to his feet.
“I did not betray you. You failed your mission. You killed my son.”
“You lied to me,” Scar growled.
“Never,” Zoltek breathed. “It is not my fault the Gods shun you.”
“Dragons.”
Zoltek struck the ground with the bottom of his staff. It made a strange sound like that of a bell. Scar smiled.
“Tell me, what manner of God speaks only to one man. What manner of God requires a gem for commune?” the Dragon Slayer demanded.
“Why do you even argue? Did you not come here to fight?”
“I need you to know just how foolish you are before you die.”
Zoltek snorted in derision, “You are the fool. You think you killed a Dragon, and now you come into my country and lay my people to waste. Tell me, ghost, you think yourself a hero?”
“No,” Scar heaved. “I think myself the Dragon Slayer.”
With that, he leapt across the room to strike at Zoltek. The Negus of Usaj stepped forwards and lunged with his staff. An arc of purple lightning exploded from the gem and sent the warrior reeling into corpses.
“All that hatred,” Zoltek breathed. “You aim it in the wrong direction, yet I hold Cabazalus, and with it, I will destroy you.”
Scar quickly recovered and attempted a slightly different tactic. First, he snatched a spear from a dead guard. He chucked it then quickly leapt at Zoltek again. Before the spear connected, a web of purple electricity arced off the staff and disintegrated the weapon. By the time Scar closed the distance, the web expanded and remained a barrier between him and his opponent. Steel and magic clashed as muscles tensed.
“Your Dragon magic won’t last,” Scar growled as he struck the barrier with his blade. “Gilgamesh thought Kulshedra would save him, too, but I made quick work of him.”
“Then, Kulshedra is weak,” Zoltek howled in a booming voice that reverberated throughout the keep. “The God of Truth is nothing compared to my God, Zmaj! The All God will reduce you to ashes!”
The web of lightning curled inwards and then wrapped around the Dragon Slayer. It was a sparking sphere of pure energy that blistered his skin and busted the antlers off his helmet. Growling and thrashing, the brute continued to hack at the magic. Realizing that such an approach was useless, he tried to run, and although the energy was bound to his form, he was able to charge his opponent. When they collided, the lightning shot off in various directions. Chunks of stone were knocked from the palace’s walls. Both men were sent to the ground.
Scar came to his feet first. Zoltek was in a crouching position, his face still hidden by his cowl. The Dragon Slayer looked over his wounds and laughed as they healed.
“Your people do nothing but kill, Zoltek. Your Dragon demands it and gives nothing in return.”
“You call this nothing?” Zoltek howled and blasted Scar again with a bolt of energy.
The arc tore through the warrior’s shoulder. He yelled out in pain, but did not falter and charged again. Zoltek stood at the same time Scar’s blade came down. He parried the slash, but it sent the old Zmajan to the ground. His hood slid back, and Scar saw that his color streaked face had been ravaged by fire, or perhaps lightning. The negus pulled the cowl back down, and started to work himself to his feet by rolling over onto hands and knees, but Scar came up behind him and kicked him hard in the backside. The blow made the Zmajan kiss the floor.
“Yes, I call it nothing,” Scar said. “You’ve spent your entire life in servitude. You bend to the wish of a Dragon, and not because you have to, and not because you want to help people, but because you wish only to kill everything around you!”
Zoltek scurried away and tried to stand once more, but the warrior swept his feet out, and the old man rolled onto his side. “Do you not see,” the negus heaved. “Do you not see that if everyone were united under the banner of one God, there would be no more fighting? Why is it wrong to pursue such a dream? Do the others not wish the same? Who made you judge?”
“You wish to unite no one,” Scar spat. “That is why you keep slaves, pillage, raze, and attack. Had Gilgamesh and Donovan not kept you cornered, you would have done worse to other countries.”
“So, where is your allegiance,” Zoltek barked.
From his back, he aimed Cabazalus at his opponent and blasted him with another bolt of lightning. It caught Scar’s sword, and the two marveled at the display. The energy swarmed about the blade like snakes. Little, violet sparks popped off and vanished, leaving thin trails of smoke. Zoltek focused his might and doubled the size of the bolt, but Scar spun and whipped his sword over his head, keeping the lightning from his skin. Once he completed a circle, he stabbed into Zoltek’s belly. The Zmajan cried out in pain, thrashed against the ground, and let go his staff. It rang like a bell again when it struck the hard floor. Wispy crackles of energy sizzled away into nothing.
Scar knelt next to the dying, old man and whispered, “You will not go to Pozoj, and be glad of it. The Dragon uses men’s souls to increase its power. They wish to walk Tiamhaal again and wreak havoc across the land. I have been sent here to stop them.”
“How? Why?” Zoltek coughed.
“Some questions do not have answers,” his tone betrayed grief.
The Dragon Slayer stood upright. He looked down at his foe, who was curling into fetal position. No doubt, his grievous wound was painful. Scar showed mercy and lopped his head off rather than leaving him to suffer. He frowned and shook his head in dismay. At least, that will quench my thirst for vengeance. The rest was just business. He was going to kill the Dragons because if he didn’t, thousands were doomed; killing Kulshedra had been an act of providence, but killing Zmaj was an act of war.
Scar took a knife from his belt, pried the gem out from the top of Cabazalus, and worked it into the second hole in his blade, above the one with Kulshedra’s Dragon gem. Vertigo immediately overtook him. When the spinning subsided, he found himself in Pozoj, the realm of destruction.
Thanks again for taking the time to read the excerpt. Please grab your copy of Dragon Slayer while it is free.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-d...
I certainly want to make money selling copies, but I do care about my fans, and I want them to have my innermost thoughts and predilections. For those of you who are not yet fans, I am trying to snag you now, and hopefully, all of us together, can bring The Dragon of Time series to life by discussing the adventures of Scar and his friends.
The following is mostly an excerpt from The Dragon of Time Two, Dragon Slayer. I have worked very hard on this book, perhaps harder than anything else I have ever done. For a limited time, I am giving away Dragon Slayer, so be sure to grab your copy today. On December 24th, I will be giving it a price.
I also want to add that The Dragon of Time series has a history. I started working on the first novel, Gods and Dragons, back in 2013. At that time, I was actually writing a different book, Cayneian, a Man from Blood, but for some inexplicable reason, I was drawn to dragons.
I have always liked dragons. I recall thinking it was odd that numerous cultures all over the world had dragons, and all the dragons were vastly dissimilar, yet for the most part, they were either menaces defeated by stalwart heroes, or they were keepers of knowledge.
While thinking about the origin of dragons, I began to wonder if perhaps people were digging into the earth and discovered dinosaur bones. I can see how someone from one, two, five thousands years ago, and further back, might unearth a giant femur, a strange skull, and come to the conclusion that dragons existed, once upon a time.
Since, I’m a writer, and I enjoy doing research, I started looking into different dragons, their images, their powers, their names, and then a story came to me. I began by just imagining the dragons, and then I wrote down their names and descriptions. Then, I thought about what kind of powers they were going to have, how their realms existed, how they were going to bless their people.
That was the first time I did anything even similar to an outline, yet it wasn’t truly an outline; I just wrote a bunch of stories, and then I created a problem—the dragons were defeated, yet because people worshipped them, they still existed, but they had lost their physical forms ages ago, and now, they are trying to collect souls in order to manifest.
Then, I created a hero, an amnesiac warrior who is seeking only to learn of his origins. Because he was created by unfathomable forces, he is more than a man, and he heals quickly, kind of like Wolverine. In the end, I had thought about the story so thoroughly that I abandoned my original project to write Gods and Dragons, but then I left the story for many months to finish, edit, and publish Cayneian.
After the release of Cayneian, I began reading and tweaking Gods and Dragons, and as it turned out, there was simply no way to cram everything into one book. Now, I think it will likely be four books.
If you’re interested in the history of The Dragon of Time series, you can find a ton of information here.
https://plus.google.com/b/11170227018...
This is the Google+ brand page, and you can also grab your free copy of Dragon Slayer. If you aren’t sold yet, please read the excerpt. Thank you.
The Dragon Slayer smiled. A pile of bloody corpses were strewn about the deer pelts covering the stone floor of Zoltek’s palace. Since the guards were dead, and Zoltek had yet to show his face, Scar plunked down on the blackened, wood throne; the seat of power within the walls of Urr. He watched shadows cast by burning braziers dance along the gray stone. An eerie quietude was all that remained of the opposition. Dead men told no tales, but dead Dragons were a different story. A gust of chilly, night air brought forth sparks and crackles from the fires. Scar clicked his tongue.
“Zoltek,” he taunted.
The warrior frowned, crossed his legs, and strained to listen. Only embers chirped when more gusts circulated through the throne room. None of the guards had dared chase the Dragon Slayer into the palace, and inside Urr, Scar had already hacked to bits anyone who wasn’t fleeing for their life. Zmajans were nothing if not fearsome, but the Dragon Slayer was practically invulnerable; such was the blessing of Eternus, the Dragon of Time.
“Think of your son, Zoltek,” Scar yelled. “I killed the little brat when he tried to backstab me. What was his name? Oh, yes, Urdu.”
The fight inside the palace had lasted less than an hour. After charging in, Scar easily mowed down the dark skinned fighters. Their leather armor proved ineffective against the brute’s great sword, a blade forged by Eternus for the specific purpose of slaying Dragons. They tried to fight back with their magic weapons—swords and axes that changed into spinning blades; they were self-propelled saws. Some of the Zmajans, ones with crossbows, turned their weapons into machines that fired bolts at an unprecedented rate, yet the projectiles did little damage. Scar’s newest wounds had already healed over.
“Don’t make me hunt you down like a dog, Zoltek. You’re Zmajan. You are brave, and you are angry. You should come find me and accept my challenge rather than cower in some darkened corner!” Scar goaded. “Come prove to me that Zmaj, the All God, holds you worthy.”
A clanking of metal bled through the vaulted ceiling. Scar looked up. There were still people in there somewhere, but he wanted only to gut Zoltek, take his Dragon gem, and show Zmaj his blade. Capturing all of the Dragons’ souls was his quest, the single reason for his creation, and though Scar detested being ordered around, and by a Dragon, no less, he was still upset over the death of his lover, Ylithia. Such was his wrath, an insatiable thirst for blood.
Killing her attackers in Othnatus had not been enough. Cutting down King Gilgamesh, who commanded them, had not been sufficient, and slaying the Dragon, Kulshedra, had only whet his appetite for Dragon’s blood.
“Zoltek,” Scar called; a constricted tone revealed his intolerance. “It was less than a year ago that you promised me answers. Remember? You hired me to fight for you, to kill Kulshedrans, and in return, you were going to tell me who I was. You were going to ask Zmaj…tell me, have you asked him? Has he told you?”
After having slain Kulshedra, the mercenary’s memories flooded his mind, and so as he sat upon the negus’s throne, taunting him, he knew all too well Zoltek feared the truth. The sound of bare feet coming down stone steps drew Scar from self-reflection. He looked to his right, where a set of stairs led up to private chambers. A thin figure wearing shiny, purple and gold robes descended. Zoltek held a metal staff in his left hand. Its top was a purple gem in the shape of a diamond. Zmaj’s gem, Scar thought. At the base of the stairs, his face shrouded in shadow, the Negus of Usaj glared at the Dragon Slayer.
“I do not fear you, ghost,” Zoltek breathed. His voice was unearthly, something reminiscent of rustling leaves caught in the wind. “You are no one, nothing. Zmaj does not claim you. None of the Gods do.”
“None of the Dragons do,” Scar corrected.
“You are a fool.”
“I owe you for your betrayal,” Scar said and came to his feet.
“I did not betray you. You failed your mission. You killed my son.”
“You lied to me,” Scar growled.
“Never,” Zoltek breathed. “It is not my fault the Gods shun you.”
“Dragons.”
Zoltek struck the ground with the bottom of his staff. It made a strange sound like that of a bell. Scar smiled.
“Tell me, what manner of God speaks only to one man. What manner of God requires a gem for commune?” the Dragon Slayer demanded.
“Why do you even argue? Did you not come here to fight?”
“I need you to know just how foolish you are before you die.”
Zoltek snorted in derision, “You are the fool. You think you killed a Dragon, and now you come into my country and lay my people to waste. Tell me, ghost, you think yourself a hero?”
“No,” Scar heaved. “I think myself the Dragon Slayer.”
With that, he leapt across the room to strike at Zoltek. The Negus of Usaj stepped forwards and lunged with his staff. An arc of purple lightning exploded from the gem and sent the warrior reeling into corpses.
“All that hatred,” Zoltek breathed. “You aim it in the wrong direction, yet I hold Cabazalus, and with it, I will destroy you.”
Scar quickly recovered and attempted a slightly different tactic. First, he snatched a spear from a dead guard. He chucked it then quickly leapt at Zoltek again. Before the spear connected, a web of purple electricity arced off the staff and disintegrated the weapon. By the time Scar closed the distance, the web expanded and remained a barrier between him and his opponent. Steel and magic clashed as muscles tensed.
“Your Dragon magic won’t last,” Scar growled as he struck the barrier with his blade. “Gilgamesh thought Kulshedra would save him, too, but I made quick work of him.”
“Then, Kulshedra is weak,” Zoltek howled in a booming voice that reverberated throughout the keep. “The God of Truth is nothing compared to my God, Zmaj! The All God will reduce you to ashes!”
The web of lightning curled inwards and then wrapped around the Dragon Slayer. It was a sparking sphere of pure energy that blistered his skin and busted the antlers off his helmet. Growling and thrashing, the brute continued to hack at the magic. Realizing that such an approach was useless, he tried to run, and although the energy was bound to his form, he was able to charge his opponent. When they collided, the lightning shot off in various directions. Chunks of stone were knocked from the palace’s walls. Both men were sent to the ground.
Scar came to his feet first. Zoltek was in a crouching position, his face still hidden by his cowl. The Dragon Slayer looked over his wounds and laughed as they healed.
“Your people do nothing but kill, Zoltek. Your Dragon demands it and gives nothing in return.”
“You call this nothing?” Zoltek howled and blasted Scar again with a bolt of energy.
The arc tore through the warrior’s shoulder. He yelled out in pain, but did not falter and charged again. Zoltek stood at the same time Scar’s blade came down. He parried the slash, but it sent the old Zmajan to the ground. His hood slid back, and Scar saw that his color streaked face had been ravaged by fire, or perhaps lightning. The negus pulled the cowl back down, and started to work himself to his feet by rolling over onto hands and knees, but Scar came up behind him and kicked him hard in the backside. The blow made the Zmajan kiss the floor.
“Yes, I call it nothing,” Scar said. “You’ve spent your entire life in servitude. You bend to the wish of a Dragon, and not because you have to, and not because you want to help people, but because you wish only to kill everything around you!”
Zoltek scurried away and tried to stand once more, but the warrior swept his feet out, and the old man rolled onto his side. “Do you not see,” the negus heaved. “Do you not see that if everyone were united under the banner of one God, there would be no more fighting? Why is it wrong to pursue such a dream? Do the others not wish the same? Who made you judge?”
“You wish to unite no one,” Scar spat. “That is why you keep slaves, pillage, raze, and attack. Had Gilgamesh and Donovan not kept you cornered, you would have done worse to other countries.”
“So, where is your allegiance,” Zoltek barked.
From his back, he aimed Cabazalus at his opponent and blasted him with another bolt of lightning. It caught Scar’s sword, and the two marveled at the display. The energy swarmed about the blade like snakes. Little, violet sparks popped off and vanished, leaving thin trails of smoke. Zoltek focused his might and doubled the size of the bolt, but Scar spun and whipped his sword over his head, keeping the lightning from his skin. Once he completed a circle, he stabbed into Zoltek’s belly. The Zmajan cried out in pain, thrashed against the ground, and let go his staff. It rang like a bell again when it struck the hard floor. Wispy crackles of energy sizzled away into nothing.
Scar knelt next to the dying, old man and whispered, “You will not go to Pozoj, and be glad of it. The Dragon uses men’s souls to increase its power. They wish to walk Tiamhaal again and wreak havoc across the land. I have been sent here to stop them.”
“How? Why?” Zoltek coughed.
“Some questions do not have answers,” his tone betrayed grief.
The Dragon Slayer stood upright. He looked down at his foe, who was curling into fetal position. No doubt, his grievous wound was painful. Scar showed mercy and lopped his head off rather than leaving him to suffer. He frowned and shook his head in dismay. At least, that will quench my thirst for vengeance. The rest was just business. He was going to kill the Dragons because if he didn’t, thousands were doomed; killing Kulshedra had been an act of providence, but killing Zmaj was an act of war.
Scar took a knife from his belt, pried the gem out from the top of Cabazalus, and worked it into the second hole in his blade, above the one with Kulshedra’s Dragon gem. Vertigo immediately overtook him. When the spinning subsided, he found himself in Pozoj, the realm of destruction.
Thanks again for taking the time to read the excerpt. Please grab your copy of Dragon Slayer while it is free.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-d...
I certainly want to make money selling copies, but I do care about my fans, and I want them to have my innermost thoughts and predilections. For those of you who are not yet fans, I am trying to snag you now, and hopefully, all of us together, can bring The Dragon of Time series to life by discussing the adventures of Scar and his friends.
So you want to be a writer part 3
Last time, we touched on short stories, and no, I will never stop harping over how important it is to write short stories, especially at the onset of your journey to living as a successful writer. This time, however, I’m going to talk about fanfiction.
https://www.fanfiction.net/
Fanfiction is very important. Fanfiction is a must for a writer. As a matter of fact, fanfiction is practically the only way a screen writer can become a working screen writer. Fanfiction is a story based on an existing world, and every writer needs to write fanfiction for a multitude of reasons, but let’s back up.
There was a time, about 20 or 30 years ago, when writers just like you were struggling to become successful, and honestly, not too much has changed. Even back then, and probably even as far back as 50 or 60 years ago, vanity presses existed, so self publishing is not the new fad the mainstream publishers are pretending it is, what has changed is the popularity and success of self publishing, but we’ll talk more about that later.
What I want to talk about is the process through which your predecessors became successful. There was a time when readers read these weird things called magazines (ma-guh-zeens), and magazines had pictures, and articles, and interviews, and ads, and short stories. Now, we see all this same stuff on Quora, Reddit, FaceBook, and other social media outlets, right? We see this stuff on websites, too. If you Google “fanfiction” all kinds of stuff will come up, right? If you Google “free short stories” all kinds of stuff will come up, right?
Well, 20 and 30 years ago, people subscribed to magazines for the same content. People don’t really subscribe to magazines anymore, but you still want to write, and you still want readers to read your stuff, right? That means you need to adapt to a changing environment, but the good news is that this environment has evolved to a stable level; enough writers have figured out how to game the system.
Last time, we talked about short stories, and they are perhaps the most important aspect of becoming a successful writer. Back in the day, writers submitted short stories to writing magazines, and they were paid pennies per word, and sometimes, they weren’t paid at all, but if the story was good enough (well edited and free of errors) it was printed in the magazine, and if readers enjoyed the story, the writer had a chance to become known, and if the writer became known and liked, the writer had a chance to submit a novel to a publisher and actually be taken seriously.
Yes, even 20 or 30 years ago, it was insanely difficult to become a published, mainstream writer. You have to go back about 100 years to reach a time when writing was easy. 100 years ago, all you had to do was be able to write a book from start to finish. Then, if you found an actual publisher, they used their editor to make sure the book was its best (hire an editor!) and the book was released to the public. 100 years ago, when half the American population didn’t know how to read, writing an entire book from start to finish was a major accomplishment, and anyone who had the time and gumption, yeah, gumption, to do so was taken seriously.
Today, practically everyone can read and write, and writing is mandatory, so writing a book from start to finish is no longer considered a big deal; everyone can do it, and actually, lots of people do do it. (Do do…but there’s no time for that now!)
Let’s get back to the present. If people aren’t really reading magazines anymore, where or what are they reading? Where were you reading before you started writing? FaceBook? Google+? LinkedIn? Maybe, you were trolling Barnes and Noble online for free material. Maybe, you were trolling Amazon for free material. Maybe, you were trolling FanFiction for free material. Maybe, you were trolling the web and stumbled onto a writer’s blog where they posted free material, so that’s where you have to post your work, and you need to post it for free, at least for now.
This is where fanfiction starts to become your key component. First and foremost, you have a favorite genre. You know what genre you enjoy, and you know what you want to write. You also know which shows, movies, books, video games, and comic books you enjoy. You want to be a successful writer, so you’re probably a nerd or a dork, and that’s okay; in fact, that’s great. Use it!
Go to where the nerds and dorks are, and give the nerds and dorks what they want. The nerds and dorks are at Wattpad, and Quotev, and especially FanFiction. Since you’re not yet trying to earn money from your novel, this also a great time to put into practice everything you learned from writing short stories.
Now, you’re going to learn the best way to structure an entire novel. You’re going to learn how to structure chapters, build suspense, slow or quicken the story’s pacing, and other integral aspects of writing. What better way than to practice with something you already know?
For one, it takes a little of the pressure off because you at least have an entire back story and cast. The problem then becomes staying true to the franchise. If you’re writing Superman fanfiction, and you make Clark Kent a popular, outgoing, ladies man, people will be turned off by your presentation. If you’re writing a Dragon Ball Z fanfiction, and you make Goku a coward, people will be very disappointed, so there is a different struggle, but if you know your subject matter inside and out, it shouldn’t be that difficult to stay true to the franchise. Then, you can focus on the technical aspects of novel writing.
At this point, you should be presenting your story as you write it (after reading what you wrote once or twice) on Wattpad, Quotev, and your blog, and sending out updates through social media.
Now, I’m gonna’ go on a bit of a detour here. Stay with me.
One of the best sites a writer can use is Goodreads. Goodreads has a blog. Readers participate in discussions. Readers and writers can join groups. Honestly, the same thing can be said for Google+ and LinkedIn, so take what I say about Goodreads, and apply it to Google+ and LinkedIn as well.
Now’s the perfect time to join groups, groups of readers, and groups of writers, and talk to the readers about what they like, and then invite them to look at your blog. Then, talk to writers about what they like, and invite them, too. Be courteous. Be respectful. Engage people as a person, not a salesman.
Post your fanfiction to Goodreads, Google+, and LinkedIn, and your personal blog, of course, and invite the people of each site to view the corresponding blog, which will also have a link back to your personal blog.
Listen to the feedback as you go along. Thank people for their time. DO NOT ENGAGE NEGATIVE PEOPLE.
Right now, If you’ve practiced writing short stories and are in the middle of writing your fanfiction, all you want to do is release something like a chapter per week to each of your blogs. It gives you something to blog about. It gives people something to read without demanding a commitment. It gives you the feeling of being a writer.
The reason you want to delay publishing your fanfiction to FanFiction is simple and important. FanFiction has some serious readers, and they expect, demand, a level of quality you may not yet be able to provide. They want their books free of errors, true to the franchise, and well structured. They want your fanfiction to be an actual book that sounds as though it was written by an actual writer, not someone who is trying to become a writer, so, for now, stick to the other sites, and get all the feedback you can get.
After your fanfiction has been written to completion, it’s time to go back and read your old short stories. You’ll have grown leaps and bounds as a writer and an editor by the time you finish your fanfiction novel. You’ll even pick up on nuances you weren’t able to grasp when you first began writing, so touch up your short stories and re-release them; it should be pretty easy to do so.
At this point, you also have something new to blog about, your journey as a writer, and you can invite people to read your updated stories. You can start getting professional covers for your short stories and your fanfiction.
It’s just as important to be a real person throughout this journey. Don’t even think about going around, telling everyone that your stuff is better than what’s out there, not yet, because right now, you want people to like you. If people like you, they will be more receptive to your posts, discussions, comments, and invitations.
Now is also a pretty good time to hire a competent editor who can teach you how to better write for an audience.
I have a style of writing that I enjoy employing, but it is not necessarily what readers enjoy reading, and it’s my job as a writer, who is charging for a product, to find a balance between what I enjoy and what my audience enjoys, hence the editing.
Regardless of what you think you know at this point, I cannot stress it enough that the best and most successful writers have the best editors. Editors are paramount. They read your work differently than you do, but you also have to be careful because until you’re published by a mainstream publisher, you’re going to have to hire your own editor. Of course, a lot of the mainstream editors are terrible anyway, I’ve written about that as well, but that’s not really the point because if you’re published by a mainstream publisher, you don’t have to spend your money, and you don’t have a say on what the book is like at the publication stage, see what I mean?
If you’re spending your money to hire an editor, you want someone who understands both the writing process and the reading process. If your publisher has an editor, which they force onto you then you have no say, no control, but their job is to sell books, and at the very least, a mainstream publisher will try to do that. This can’t be said about some of the smaller presses or hybrid presses unfortunately, but we’ll discuss different methods of publishing later on.
At any rate, once your fanfiction is polished to perfection, publish it to FanFiction. There are people—nerds, dorks, readers—trolling the site, looking specifically for stories about franchises they love; Supernatural, Twilight, The Hulk, Game of Thrones, Skyrim, and more. These readers are looking for something fresh, and new, and written by a competent fan, someone who enjoys the franchise as much as they do, and you want to be the person who supplies that fanfiction.
Why? Because if you do a good job, these dorks and nerds will become your loyal fans. These are the people who will buy your original novel. These are the people who will post a link to your work on their social media pages. These are the people who will generate buzz for your book. These are also the people who will tell you what they like and don’t like about your writing, so you will also learn what to do to please them, and you want to please them. Nerds and dorks are the foundation upon which all great writing is based. I should know; I’m one of them.
I have to add right here that I didn’t understand any of this when I started writing. I skipped so many integral steps that I really hindered my career. My only saving grace was that I had some really neat story ideas, but if I had followed the advice I’m giving now, I also would have applied these same principles to writing my original novel, and then, instead of zero sales on my quarterly reports for years, I might have actually made some money off my first books (even though they were terribly written).
Back to business now—treat your fanfiction novel as if it were your original novel. Get a professional cover made for it. Publish it to Smashwords. Be careful with copyrights, and be sure to let everyone know that the book is fanfiction and cannot be sold for a profit; for all intents and purposes, this book is your original novel, and you must use it to make a name for yourself, which also means it must be free of errors, well written, and engaging.
You may now be wondering what any of this has to do with magazines and the writers who started becoming successful 20 or 30 years ago. Well, here’s the deal. Since those magazines to which they submitted their stories don’t exist anymore, and whatever prints or digital prints there are are owned by those writers now, the mainstream publishers have purposefully built a barricade to keep out new writers.
I know, it sounds crazy, but I’m dead freaking serious. They have this special good ole’ boy club, and they have it because they are terrified. The mainstream writers have all run into a major disconnect with the fans, but this happens to every facet of the entertainment industry every decade or so.
Doesn’t music change drastically every ten years? Don’t movies and television shows change drastically every ten years? Do you know why? Because every ten to twenty years there’s a new generation of people; there’s a new culture with a new language, and a new set of goals, and the major companies can hardly keep up. The book publishers are the worst at keeping up, and that’s why they’re terrified of self publishers, but, and this is a big BUT! when they find a self published individual who is doing well, they try to swoop in and sign the writer.
This is exactly what happened to Christopher Paolini. This is kind of what happened to E. L. James.
You see, it used to be that in order to garner the attention of a literary agent, or even a publisher, one had to get published by those magazines. Now, since those magazines don’t exist, or are shutting writers out, an up and coming writer has to find a new way to break in to the world of reading, but hey, that’s exactly what I’ve been teaching you with these posts.
Right here, I want to add that it pisses me off the way The Huffington Post and other journals smear self published writing. If it’s so bad, why do the publishers and agents keep their eyes open for successful self published writers? Because self publishing is actually a great way to connect with new readers, and when a great self published writer is drawing attention, the major companies swoop in to steal, sorry, augment their success.
Well, at any rate, you want to be a writer. It’s why you’re reading this. Start by thinking about your idea. Join social media groups. Start taking part in group discussions with readers. Start reading what other up and coming writers are writing. Start your blogs now. Invite readers and writers to talk about what they like, and all the while, you can start writing your short stories.
Then, you’ll already have a network willing to look at your short stories, a network of writers and readers, which is important. Then, when the time is right, you can publish your short stories for free, and they’ll sit there, bringing you more and more fans. Next, write your fanfiction. Develop your voice, and really create a fan base. I can’t stress it enough, building a fan base before you release your debut novel is paramount, and using social media to send people to your site to buy your book doesn’t work—another topic for discussion later on.
Yes…this is going to take a great deal of effort on your part. Yes…this is going to take a long time. I know you want to write your novel today. Hell, you may have already written it and started shopping for literary agents or publishers, but without the world’s biggest rabbit’s foot, literary agents and publishers won’t take you seriously.
I’m not saying it’s impossible. In fact, it happens all the time; a first time writer writes a novel, and it gets picked up, but will that happen for you? What if it doesn’t? Shouldn’t you prepare for that possibility? Don’t you want to start off on the right foot with as many opportunities as possible?
What I’m trying to help you accomplish is the building of a solid foundation. If you follow the advice presented in these three posts, you can garner some serious attention for yourself, and then, if you want to go the mainstream route, you’ll have a better chance of being picked up by a literary agent or publisher because they want you to be marketable, they want you to bring them your fans, not the other way around. If you want to go the self publishing route, and there are numerous reasons to do so, you’ll already be setting yourself up for success in that field, too.
Now, don’t think this is the last post on how to become a successful writer. We’re only just beginning. Thanks for reading, and I implore you, if you have any kind of input; if you want to talk about your experience, your pitfalls, your successes, please share. I can’t help everyone by myself. Being an indie or self published writer doesn’t mean working alone; that’s a huge misconception. All it means is that I don’t have the backing of a major corporation, so let’s work together.
Readers, talk about what you like and don’t like. Writers, talk about your struggles and successes.
Don’t forget to check out my Editing Services. Thanks again.
http://www.storiesbydennis.com/?page_...
https://www.fanfiction.net/
Fanfiction is very important. Fanfiction is a must for a writer. As a matter of fact, fanfiction is practically the only way a screen writer can become a working screen writer. Fanfiction is a story based on an existing world, and every writer needs to write fanfiction for a multitude of reasons, but let’s back up.
There was a time, about 20 or 30 years ago, when writers just like you were struggling to become successful, and honestly, not too much has changed. Even back then, and probably even as far back as 50 or 60 years ago, vanity presses existed, so self publishing is not the new fad the mainstream publishers are pretending it is, what has changed is the popularity and success of self publishing, but we’ll talk more about that later.
What I want to talk about is the process through which your predecessors became successful. There was a time when readers read these weird things called magazines (ma-guh-zeens), and magazines had pictures, and articles, and interviews, and ads, and short stories. Now, we see all this same stuff on Quora, Reddit, FaceBook, and other social media outlets, right? We see this stuff on websites, too. If you Google “fanfiction” all kinds of stuff will come up, right? If you Google “free short stories” all kinds of stuff will come up, right?
Well, 20 and 30 years ago, people subscribed to magazines for the same content. People don’t really subscribe to magazines anymore, but you still want to write, and you still want readers to read your stuff, right? That means you need to adapt to a changing environment, but the good news is that this environment has evolved to a stable level; enough writers have figured out how to game the system.
Last time, we talked about short stories, and they are perhaps the most important aspect of becoming a successful writer. Back in the day, writers submitted short stories to writing magazines, and they were paid pennies per word, and sometimes, they weren’t paid at all, but if the story was good enough (well edited and free of errors) it was printed in the magazine, and if readers enjoyed the story, the writer had a chance to become known, and if the writer became known and liked, the writer had a chance to submit a novel to a publisher and actually be taken seriously.
Yes, even 20 or 30 years ago, it was insanely difficult to become a published, mainstream writer. You have to go back about 100 years to reach a time when writing was easy. 100 years ago, all you had to do was be able to write a book from start to finish. Then, if you found an actual publisher, they used their editor to make sure the book was its best (hire an editor!) and the book was released to the public. 100 years ago, when half the American population didn’t know how to read, writing an entire book from start to finish was a major accomplishment, and anyone who had the time and gumption, yeah, gumption, to do so was taken seriously.
Today, practically everyone can read and write, and writing is mandatory, so writing a book from start to finish is no longer considered a big deal; everyone can do it, and actually, lots of people do do it. (Do do…but there’s no time for that now!)
Let’s get back to the present. If people aren’t really reading magazines anymore, where or what are they reading? Where were you reading before you started writing? FaceBook? Google+? LinkedIn? Maybe, you were trolling Barnes and Noble online for free material. Maybe, you were trolling Amazon for free material. Maybe, you were trolling FanFiction for free material. Maybe, you were trolling the web and stumbled onto a writer’s blog where they posted free material, so that’s where you have to post your work, and you need to post it for free, at least for now.
This is where fanfiction starts to become your key component. First and foremost, you have a favorite genre. You know what genre you enjoy, and you know what you want to write. You also know which shows, movies, books, video games, and comic books you enjoy. You want to be a successful writer, so you’re probably a nerd or a dork, and that’s okay; in fact, that’s great. Use it!
Go to where the nerds and dorks are, and give the nerds and dorks what they want. The nerds and dorks are at Wattpad, and Quotev, and especially FanFiction. Since you’re not yet trying to earn money from your novel, this also a great time to put into practice everything you learned from writing short stories.
Now, you’re going to learn the best way to structure an entire novel. You’re going to learn how to structure chapters, build suspense, slow or quicken the story’s pacing, and other integral aspects of writing. What better way than to practice with something you already know?
For one, it takes a little of the pressure off because you at least have an entire back story and cast. The problem then becomes staying true to the franchise. If you’re writing Superman fanfiction, and you make Clark Kent a popular, outgoing, ladies man, people will be turned off by your presentation. If you’re writing a Dragon Ball Z fanfiction, and you make Goku a coward, people will be very disappointed, so there is a different struggle, but if you know your subject matter inside and out, it shouldn’t be that difficult to stay true to the franchise. Then, you can focus on the technical aspects of novel writing.
At this point, you should be presenting your story as you write it (after reading what you wrote once or twice) on Wattpad, Quotev, and your blog, and sending out updates through social media.
Now, I’m gonna’ go on a bit of a detour here. Stay with me.
One of the best sites a writer can use is Goodreads. Goodreads has a blog. Readers participate in discussions. Readers and writers can join groups. Honestly, the same thing can be said for Google+ and LinkedIn, so take what I say about Goodreads, and apply it to Google+ and LinkedIn as well.
Now’s the perfect time to join groups, groups of readers, and groups of writers, and talk to the readers about what they like, and then invite them to look at your blog. Then, talk to writers about what they like, and invite them, too. Be courteous. Be respectful. Engage people as a person, not a salesman.
Post your fanfiction to Goodreads, Google+, and LinkedIn, and your personal blog, of course, and invite the people of each site to view the corresponding blog, which will also have a link back to your personal blog.
Listen to the feedback as you go along. Thank people for their time. DO NOT ENGAGE NEGATIVE PEOPLE.
Right now, If you’ve practiced writing short stories and are in the middle of writing your fanfiction, all you want to do is release something like a chapter per week to each of your blogs. It gives you something to blog about. It gives people something to read without demanding a commitment. It gives you the feeling of being a writer.
The reason you want to delay publishing your fanfiction to FanFiction is simple and important. FanFiction has some serious readers, and they expect, demand, a level of quality you may not yet be able to provide. They want their books free of errors, true to the franchise, and well structured. They want your fanfiction to be an actual book that sounds as though it was written by an actual writer, not someone who is trying to become a writer, so, for now, stick to the other sites, and get all the feedback you can get.
After your fanfiction has been written to completion, it’s time to go back and read your old short stories. You’ll have grown leaps and bounds as a writer and an editor by the time you finish your fanfiction novel. You’ll even pick up on nuances you weren’t able to grasp when you first began writing, so touch up your short stories and re-release them; it should be pretty easy to do so.
At this point, you also have something new to blog about, your journey as a writer, and you can invite people to read your updated stories. You can start getting professional covers for your short stories and your fanfiction.
It’s just as important to be a real person throughout this journey. Don’t even think about going around, telling everyone that your stuff is better than what’s out there, not yet, because right now, you want people to like you. If people like you, they will be more receptive to your posts, discussions, comments, and invitations.
Now is also a pretty good time to hire a competent editor who can teach you how to better write for an audience.
I have a style of writing that I enjoy employing, but it is not necessarily what readers enjoy reading, and it’s my job as a writer, who is charging for a product, to find a balance between what I enjoy and what my audience enjoys, hence the editing.
Regardless of what you think you know at this point, I cannot stress it enough that the best and most successful writers have the best editors. Editors are paramount. They read your work differently than you do, but you also have to be careful because until you’re published by a mainstream publisher, you’re going to have to hire your own editor. Of course, a lot of the mainstream editors are terrible anyway, I’ve written about that as well, but that’s not really the point because if you’re published by a mainstream publisher, you don’t have to spend your money, and you don’t have a say on what the book is like at the publication stage, see what I mean?
If you’re spending your money to hire an editor, you want someone who understands both the writing process and the reading process. If your publisher has an editor, which they force onto you then you have no say, no control, but their job is to sell books, and at the very least, a mainstream publisher will try to do that. This can’t be said about some of the smaller presses or hybrid presses unfortunately, but we’ll discuss different methods of publishing later on.
At any rate, once your fanfiction is polished to perfection, publish it to FanFiction. There are people—nerds, dorks, readers—trolling the site, looking specifically for stories about franchises they love; Supernatural, Twilight, The Hulk, Game of Thrones, Skyrim, and more. These readers are looking for something fresh, and new, and written by a competent fan, someone who enjoys the franchise as much as they do, and you want to be the person who supplies that fanfiction.
Why? Because if you do a good job, these dorks and nerds will become your loyal fans. These are the people who will buy your original novel. These are the people who will post a link to your work on their social media pages. These are the people who will generate buzz for your book. These are also the people who will tell you what they like and don’t like about your writing, so you will also learn what to do to please them, and you want to please them. Nerds and dorks are the foundation upon which all great writing is based. I should know; I’m one of them.
I have to add right here that I didn’t understand any of this when I started writing. I skipped so many integral steps that I really hindered my career. My only saving grace was that I had some really neat story ideas, but if I had followed the advice I’m giving now, I also would have applied these same principles to writing my original novel, and then, instead of zero sales on my quarterly reports for years, I might have actually made some money off my first books (even though they were terribly written).
Back to business now—treat your fanfiction novel as if it were your original novel. Get a professional cover made for it. Publish it to Smashwords. Be careful with copyrights, and be sure to let everyone know that the book is fanfiction and cannot be sold for a profit; for all intents and purposes, this book is your original novel, and you must use it to make a name for yourself, which also means it must be free of errors, well written, and engaging.
You may now be wondering what any of this has to do with magazines and the writers who started becoming successful 20 or 30 years ago. Well, here’s the deal. Since those magazines to which they submitted their stories don’t exist anymore, and whatever prints or digital prints there are are owned by those writers now, the mainstream publishers have purposefully built a barricade to keep out new writers.
I know, it sounds crazy, but I’m dead freaking serious. They have this special good ole’ boy club, and they have it because they are terrified. The mainstream writers have all run into a major disconnect with the fans, but this happens to every facet of the entertainment industry every decade or so.
Doesn’t music change drastically every ten years? Don’t movies and television shows change drastically every ten years? Do you know why? Because every ten to twenty years there’s a new generation of people; there’s a new culture with a new language, and a new set of goals, and the major companies can hardly keep up. The book publishers are the worst at keeping up, and that’s why they’re terrified of self publishers, but, and this is a big BUT! when they find a self published individual who is doing well, they try to swoop in and sign the writer.
This is exactly what happened to Christopher Paolini. This is kind of what happened to E. L. James.
You see, it used to be that in order to garner the attention of a literary agent, or even a publisher, one had to get published by those magazines. Now, since those magazines don’t exist, or are shutting writers out, an up and coming writer has to find a new way to break in to the world of reading, but hey, that’s exactly what I’ve been teaching you with these posts.
Right here, I want to add that it pisses me off the way The Huffington Post and other journals smear self published writing. If it’s so bad, why do the publishers and agents keep their eyes open for successful self published writers? Because self publishing is actually a great way to connect with new readers, and when a great self published writer is drawing attention, the major companies swoop in to steal, sorry, augment their success.
Well, at any rate, you want to be a writer. It’s why you’re reading this. Start by thinking about your idea. Join social media groups. Start taking part in group discussions with readers. Start reading what other up and coming writers are writing. Start your blogs now. Invite readers and writers to talk about what they like, and all the while, you can start writing your short stories.
Then, you’ll already have a network willing to look at your short stories, a network of writers and readers, which is important. Then, when the time is right, you can publish your short stories for free, and they’ll sit there, bringing you more and more fans. Next, write your fanfiction. Develop your voice, and really create a fan base. I can’t stress it enough, building a fan base before you release your debut novel is paramount, and using social media to send people to your site to buy your book doesn’t work—another topic for discussion later on.
Yes…this is going to take a great deal of effort on your part. Yes…this is going to take a long time. I know you want to write your novel today. Hell, you may have already written it and started shopping for literary agents or publishers, but without the world’s biggest rabbit’s foot, literary agents and publishers won’t take you seriously.
I’m not saying it’s impossible. In fact, it happens all the time; a first time writer writes a novel, and it gets picked up, but will that happen for you? What if it doesn’t? Shouldn’t you prepare for that possibility? Don’t you want to start off on the right foot with as many opportunities as possible?
What I’m trying to help you accomplish is the building of a solid foundation. If you follow the advice presented in these three posts, you can garner some serious attention for yourself, and then, if you want to go the mainstream route, you’ll have a better chance of being picked up by a literary agent or publisher because they want you to be marketable, they want you to bring them your fans, not the other way around. If you want to go the self publishing route, and there are numerous reasons to do so, you’ll already be setting yourself up for success in that field, too.
Now, don’t think this is the last post on how to become a successful writer. We’re only just beginning. Thanks for reading, and I implore you, if you have any kind of input; if you want to talk about your experience, your pitfalls, your successes, please share. I can’t help everyone by myself. Being an indie or self published writer doesn’t mean working alone; that’s a huge misconception. All it means is that I don’t have the backing of a major corporation, so let’s work together.
Readers, talk about what you like and don’t like. Writers, talk about your struggles and successes.
Don’t forget to check out my Editing Services. Thanks again.
http://www.storiesbydennis.com/?page_...
THEY LURK AMONG US LOKIANS 2 COMING SOON
They Lurk Among Us is the sequel to Beyond the End of the World. Both titles, and a third, were at one point published by a small press. I’ve complained about that press to my satisfaction, and I’m now proud to say that with the return of rights, I will be re-releasing Lokians 2, They Lurk Among Us pretty soon.
I don’t know how soon, though, but here’s the prologue to tithe you over. Yes, it’s tithe over, not tie over. A tithe is a tax consisting of ten percent of the community’s income. When the tax collector collects the tithe, the kingdom is tithed over until the next tax collection.
Why am I telling you? I have my reasons…but back to the prologue.
They Lurk Among Us, Lokians 2
The flow of time is not a constant. The limitations of man are not concrete. What can one do once the doors behind reality are opened?
One man is blessed with a gift, burdened by a responsibility; somewhere in the reaches of space-time, he travels, seeking only to continue doing what he knows in his heart is right. Once a respected Naval Captain, now working for The Bureau, Riley O’Hara continues searching for answers.
Eight months prior, in July of 2111, Earth’s Navy surveyed a new planet, one meeting all requirements for colonization. Eon was a celestial body located in the Gemini system, a system of twin suns. For all intents and purposes, it was new Earth.
During the survey mission to Eon’s surface, Captain O’Hara and his special operations team discovered alien beacons. Soon after, Admiral Lay of Earth Navy made first contact with a race of aliens called Thewls. A detailed exchange of information transpired.
The Thewls convened on Eon with the Navy’s spec ops team. During the meet and greet, Humans came to learn that a second race of aliens called Lokians were on the prowl. This devastating force ravaged the galaxy as it destroyed civilizations to harvest technology.
Ambassador Weh of the Thewls proposed a plan. A unified front between men and Thewls was the only solution. Careful deliberations occurred behind closed doors as Admiral Lay slowly sequestered himself from the special operations team’s endeavor. Suddenly, the brash and young Captain O’Hara was in charge of the Humans’ most delicate mission in military history.
He led his team aboard a Thewlian vessel, joining their admiral, Yew, in a search throughout the galaxy for a weapon to wield against the so-called impending threat, the Lokians. Upon its discovery, the weapon was kept secret from nearly everyone on Horizon colony, including Admiral Lay’s second in command, Rear Admiral Shaw. At the end of the ordeal, the Lokian threat was curbed, but the captain did not receive a hero’s welcome. He woke up, injured from the final battle, in a hospital tent. The suns on Eon caressed his face as he looked over his commanding officer. Admiral Lay was concerned. He relayed to O’Hara what had transpired. Only recently conscious, and recovering from his wounds, the young man was shocked to learn the President of the North American Union had decided to shut down Horizon colony.
Unbeknownst to anyone, O’Hara boarded a craft with two agents from The Bureau, Adams and Franklin, whom served under the captain during the Lokian assault. Their whereabouts are currently unknown to both the Navy and President Montrose.
Thanks for reading the prologue. Obviously the Lokians series is scifi. What’s cool about this particular scifi series is the presentation. In the first Lokians book, a few aliens and a little bit of technology were introduced, but for the most part it was just a scifi, military adventure novel.
They Lurk Among Us, however, takes on a new depth. The 2nd Lokians book in the series is almost a sort of spy thriller scifi cross over. There’s a lot of intrigue, intel changing hands, all kinds of people–government officials–doing all kinds of crazy things in order to placate the aliens…but which aliens?
There’s new aliens in They Lurk Among Us. I mean, what’s the point of reading a scifi series without more aliens?
Apart from Humans, Lokians, and Thewls–the races introduced in the first Lokians book–there are Grays, Yvlekesh, and alien hybrids.
Right now, obviously, the book is written. I mean, it was released at one point, but I was never pleased with the end result, and there was nothing to be done while it was published by the small press, but since I got the rights back, and I know how to write now, I’m doing like a fifth round of editing, trying to make sure that everything is just the way I like it, just the way I think my audience will like it.
There’s the intrigue, great dialogue, a few jokes, cool action scenes, all the aliens, and it’s pretty fast paced, too. Thanks again for reading the prologue. At some point in the near future, I’ll release the first and second chapters, too.
Don’t forget to visit Lokians on Google+
https://plus.google.com/1105749711048...
I don’t know how soon, though, but here’s the prologue to tithe you over. Yes, it’s tithe over, not tie over. A tithe is a tax consisting of ten percent of the community’s income. When the tax collector collects the tithe, the kingdom is tithed over until the next tax collection.
Why am I telling you? I have my reasons…but back to the prologue.
They Lurk Among Us, Lokians 2
The flow of time is not a constant. The limitations of man are not concrete. What can one do once the doors behind reality are opened?
One man is blessed with a gift, burdened by a responsibility; somewhere in the reaches of space-time, he travels, seeking only to continue doing what he knows in his heart is right. Once a respected Naval Captain, now working for The Bureau, Riley O’Hara continues searching for answers.
Eight months prior, in July of 2111, Earth’s Navy surveyed a new planet, one meeting all requirements for colonization. Eon was a celestial body located in the Gemini system, a system of twin suns. For all intents and purposes, it was new Earth.
During the survey mission to Eon’s surface, Captain O’Hara and his special operations team discovered alien beacons. Soon after, Admiral Lay of Earth Navy made first contact with a race of aliens called Thewls. A detailed exchange of information transpired.
The Thewls convened on Eon with the Navy’s spec ops team. During the meet and greet, Humans came to learn that a second race of aliens called Lokians were on the prowl. This devastating force ravaged the galaxy as it destroyed civilizations to harvest technology.
Ambassador Weh of the Thewls proposed a plan. A unified front between men and Thewls was the only solution. Careful deliberations occurred behind closed doors as Admiral Lay slowly sequestered himself from the special operations team’s endeavor. Suddenly, the brash and young Captain O’Hara was in charge of the Humans’ most delicate mission in military history.
He led his team aboard a Thewlian vessel, joining their admiral, Yew, in a search throughout the galaxy for a weapon to wield against the so-called impending threat, the Lokians. Upon its discovery, the weapon was kept secret from nearly everyone on Horizon colony, including Admiral Lay’s second in command, Rear Admiral Shaw. At the end of the ordeal, the Lokian threat was curbed, but the captain did not receive a hero’s welcome. He woke up, injured from the final battle, in a hospital tent. The suns on Eon caressed his face as he looked over his commanding officer. Admiral Lay was concerned. He relayed to O’Hara what had transpired. Only recently conscious, and recovering from his wounds, the young man was shocked to learn the President of the North American Union had decided to shut down Horizon colony.
Unbeknownst to anyone, O’Hara boarded a craft with two agents from The Bureau, Adams and Franklin, whom served under the captain during the Lokian assault. Their whereabouts are currently unknown to both the Navy and President Montrose.
Thanks for reading the prologue. Obviously the Lokians series is scifi. What’s cool about this particular scifi series is the presentation. In the first Lokians book, a few aliens and a little bit of technology were introduced, but for the most part it was just a scifi, military adventure novel.
They Lurk Among Us, however, takes on a new depth. The 2nd Lokians book in the series is almost a sort of spy thriller scifi cross over. There’s a lot of intrigue, intel changing hands, all kinds of people–government officials–doing all kinds of crazy things in order to placate the aliens…but which aliens?
There’s new aliens in They Lurk Among Us. I mean, what’s the point of reading a scifi series without more aliens?
Apart from Humans, Lokians, and Thewls–the races introduced in the first Lokians book–there are Grays, Yvlekesh, and alien hybrids.
Right now, obviously, the book is written. I mean, it was released at one point, but I was never pleased with the end result, and there was nothing to be done while it was published by the small press, but since I got the rights back, and I know how to write now, I’m doing like a fifth round of editing, trying to make sure that everything is just the way I like it, just the way I think my audience will like it.
There’s the intrigue, great dialogue, a few jokes, cool action scenes, all the aliens, and it’s pretty fast paced, too. Thanks again for reading the prologue. At some point in the near future, I’ll release the first and second chapters, too.
Don’t forget to visit Lokians on Google+
https://plus.google.com/1105749711048...
So you want to be a writer part 4
Welcome back to this series of posts about becoming a successful writer. As always, the most important concept to consider is the consistent and continuous release of quality content, and we’ll talk about how to improve the quality of content as we progress, or if you prefer, you can just hire and an editor.
http://www.storiesbydennis.com/?page_...
At this point, I’ve presented how to come up with an idea in order to begin writing. I’ve explained why short stories are important, and how they can help you build a fan base and credibility. I’ve also talked about fanfiction, a proven method by which a new writer can become well known. Now, instead of jumping right into writing your novel, I want to take some time and explain what sells a book, or any product, really.
You see, whether or not you choose to go the self published route or the mainstream route the principles of selling are the same; so, what sells a book?
There are four components upon which everything else is built; the title of your book, the cover art, the blurb, and networking. All of these together form your brand. You are not just trying to sell your book, you are trying to connect with readers; you are trying to sell yourself, your brand.
Kanye West once said something along the lines of: people love me or people hate me, but everybody knows me. That’s a great point to make. Kanye West the person is also Kanye West the brand, and in his case, it works. Will his brand work for you? Maybe, maybe not, but a successful writer must have their brand before the eyes of the public.
George Martin is certainly a popular and hot-selling author, but what is his brand? He doesn’t really have one, does he? No, not anymore, anyway, because he is already published by a major company, so the brand being sold is the brand of Bantam, (notice the little rooster? We’ll get back to that) which is an imprint of Random House, but did you know that he began writing A Song of Ice and Fire in 1991? Did you know the first book wasn’t published until 1996? He was perfecting his craft, creating a solid fan base, and ultimately solidifying his brand, which was picked up by Bantam.
Are you following me?
Now, for just a moment, think of yourself as a reader who is looking for a new book. You already know what you like and don’t like. You already know which authors you prefer, and which ones you dislike, and maybe you’ve only ever read books released by the mainstream publishers, but how did you know a new book was released? Are you subscribed to an e-mail list? Probably not. You probably already belong to a reading group, or you are following your favorite author or publisher on social media. Maybe, you just troll Barnes and Noble online, see what’s advertised, and follow the link.
Here’s the deal; mainstream publishers, be it Random House, Simon and Schuster, Roc Books, or whomever, regardless of the specific author or title, each publisher has a specific way of doing things, and all books released by Penguin, follow the Penguin formatting rules and guidelines; those Penguin specific editors all follow certain guidelines, too, so all the books, even if the writer, title, and voice are vastly dissimilar, still share some similarities, which probably bypass you—the style of the cover art, the lettering of titles, the blurbs, the little logo on the side of the book (remember the Bantam Rooster).
If you do get picked up by a literary agent, and you are published by a mainstream publisher, they will handle all of these factors on their own, but if you decide to go the indie route, or even before you get picked up, while you’re writing your short stories, it’s imperative to brand yourself, to present some form of consistency. For example, I only use the one cover artist, so even though the covers are as different as they can be, there is a hidden consistency.
Now, before you write your novel is the time to find your voice, your brand, and present it, consistently, to your fan base. Since you have not yet written and published your novel, this is a great time to experiment.
Let’s go back to being a reader looking for a book. First and foremost, you probably have an idea of what it is you want; someone either made a recommendation, or you know your favorite publisher or author has released something, or maybe you’re just trolling for something totally fresh. The first thing that will catch your eye is the title.
Honestly, the title won’t sell you the book, but it will make you interested enough to look closely at the cover. If the book in question is one written by your favorite author or publisher, the cover won’t really make or break your decision, but if the author is unknown to you, you will scrutinize the cover, and then, if it looks interesting, you’ll read the blurb.
The blurb is what sells a book. The blurb is the reason you buy the book we’re discussing. The blurb is the little description about the book, and it should match up with the title and the cover.
If you stumble across a book entitled: Mars Raiders, and the cover shows a cow munching on green grass, you’re probably going to pass on the blurb, right? If you don’t pass, and you do read the blurb, and the blurb says something along the lines of: Farmer John Batey falls in love with a famed actress. The ravishing beauty, Helen LaMonte, just came to L.A. to make a name for herself, but ran afoul a sexually perverse agent, and she has to do nasty things to land a part in the next, big movie, Mars Raiders; you’re probably going to pass on the book, especially if you were trying to find a new sci fi to read.
Do you see where I’m going? Everything has to match up. Yes, my example is supposed to be ridiculous, but I’m trying to show you what a brand is, how it’s constructed, and why it’s important.
Now, If you see the same title: Mars Raiders, and the cover has a one-eyed, gruff-looking bandit holding a laser rifle, and he’s crouched behind a red boulder while peeking at some smoldering, alien-looking colony in the background, the title and the cover match up, right? Then, if you read the blurb, and it’s something along the lines of: Former Major Cash McManus of Earth Army has been AWOL for nearly ten years. Now, at the edge of Mars colony, he alone fends off an onslaught of slimy, worm-like aliens, but can a single man, even one so brave as McManus, save the human colony from themselves?
It’s much more interesting, right? At this point, you might check the reviews, but we’ll talk about reviews later. The truth is that reviews or no, if you’re looking for this kind of sci fi, you’re very likely to buy the book. I also have to mention that blurbs are generally longer than what I presented, at least for full length novels, and we’ll dive into blurbs a little bit more, but first I want to talk more about the title and cover art.
A catchy title is certainly helpful, and a great cover goes a long way, and these are important concepts to remember before you write your debut novel. You need to think about the titles of your short stories. You need to find a cover artist you like. You also need to make sure that the lettering of your name and title are the right colors, the right font, and there’s really no way to be sure, unfortunately, but you can go look at popular books.
Go look at Harry Potter, also look at previous editions of Harry Potter; publishers often change covers and fonts when they release new editions. Why? Because times change. People change. Tastes change, and they have to keep up. Also, as they sell more and more books by the author, or by different authors of the same genre, or new authors, they see trends in what sells. At this point, look also at the blurbs employed by the hottest selling titles.
Start comparing and contrasting, titles, covers, and blurbs. These three components are the onset of your brand, and without them, no amount of networking and tweeting please look at my book will sell a book, or even result in a free download.
The title, cover, and blurb must work in unison to provide a complete idea, the idea of your story, to your intended audience, and you’ll have to learn about your audience, and what they enjoy, but by writing short stories with proper titles, cool covers, and smashing blurbs, you will learn all of this before releasing your debut novel. It’s a growing process, and a process you must undertake now, before writing your debut novel, or you will have a devil of a time growing your fan base with a book in which no one is interested.
All of my books have a consistency, perhaps a hidden consistency, when it comes to titles, covers, and blurbs, and it’s extremely difficult to outline what that consistency is, but let’s look at these titles; Losing Human, Raising Dead, and Expedition. All three are short stories. Now, let’s look at the covers.
(not sure how well the covers look right here on goodreads)
There are some similarities, the fonts aren’t entirely different. All of the titles are both simple and mysterious, and all the covers, while exciting, aren’t overly fancy or flashy. Now, let’s look at the blurbs.
Losing Human: A man has a dream, a vision to see the world through eternal eyes. Dr. Heisler, roboticist, funds Project Human to advance the human race. After funding is diminished, he takes drastic measures and uploads a human awareness into a mobile robotic construct.
Raising Dead: An ancient necromancer seeks but one dream, the power of perfection, the power of immortality. What he finds leaves him speechless. Is he but chasing the wind?
Expedition: King Eidon of Ilteriel learns of a new island, far to the south. He sends an expedition in search of new resources, allies, and power. Jorunhaal, Ilteriel’s greatest warrior, is to lead the expedition. Upon setting foot on the island, one disaster after another occurs. The men battle small were-wolves, fall prey to a foul sickness in the air, and uncover demons….
Each of these short stories are also free. They have been free since I released them, and they have received numerous downloads, but the original blurbs were very different. The original blurbs, in fact, must have been what hindered downloads because the rate of downloads more than tripled after I changed the blurbs to what they are now. I can also tell you that these covers are not the original covers, but I didn’t see much change in reception from the new covers alone; I also had to update the blurbs.
I can tell you for fact, beyond doubt, that blurbs matter, probably more than anything else, with the exception of the story itself, of course.
In the end, the point to consider is that when people come across your work, they start to become acquainted with your brand; your titles, covers, and blurbs, and subsequently, your voice. If everything generates a download, and the reader enjoys the story, the reader is more likely to try another title, and when the reader is satisfied by the quality of most of the titles, the reader is more than willing to purchase your novels, which carry the same brand.
Now, here it is: you are not selling your book. I am not selling my book. Readers, fans, are selling our books. Fans, who are trolling sites for a new read, find something they like, and when they like something, they tell everyone. Why? Because when people find something they enjoy, it’s only natural to want to share that joy with friends and family. People want to belong, and they love to share and discuss similar topics, so fans of fantasy, who like your fantasy stories, will share those fantasy stories with friends and family, and bango; your fans sell your books, which are easily recognizable due to your brand’s consistency. This is the concept on which publishers count; they want fans to sell books. Otherwise, they would be releasing book trailers and commercials to television on a regular basis, but they aren’t, are they?
At this point, I truly wish I was able to tell you exactly how to title your story, and which cover is best for you, and what the perfect blurb should say, but that’s impossible. All of you are going to write different stories. All of you are going to have a different target audience. All of you are going to enjoy different methods, but hey, you haven’t written that debut novel yet, right? So, now is the time to experiment with titles, cover artists, and blurbs, now, while you’re writing and giving away free short stories, or perhaps even before you publish your short stories. Right now, while you’re building your brand, your fan base, and improving the quality of your product, you are selling yourself.
One thing you can do, which has been proven to lead to success is hire different cover artists to make different covers for a single title. Then, you can ask your fellow readers and writers to choose which cover they like. You can present numerous titles, varying blurbs, and ask readers and writers which they prefer for that one story.
Learn now, right now. Don’t get stuck on the idea of writing the perfect novel from start to finish without knowing, understanding, the basics, and what sells. Of course, in the end, since you are only writing short stories, you can always change the titles, covers, and blurbs even after they are published.
I changed the covers on all three of the titles I mentioned above. I changed the blurbs, too. I kept the titles for those particular stories, but I did change the title of another book.
A while back, I was published by a small press; I won’t go in to details at this point. I will say that the title I had chosen was rather poor in hindsight. It was an interesting title, but I hadn’t realized how much other stuff out there was called: Shadowman. After a return of rights, I employed my cover artist—so I changed the cover—changed the blurb, and even changed the title to: Otherside, which is much more fitting.
Now, these are things you can’t really do if you are picked up by a mainstream publisher, but then there’s no need to worry either. They throw all kinds of money into marketing—their brand into which you are signing—and they will help you along the way, but until you’re published by a major publisher, or if you decide against that route, you do have complete control over your content, however, if you release your debut novel today, and a year later you realize things aren’t working out for you, and you change everything, and you end up doing this for everything after you’ve already tried to establish your credibility as a writer, that credibility will vanish, and no one will take you seriously; you’ll be the writer who is always changing everything after publication, and that tells people that you don’t know what you’re doing. You won’t build a loyal fan base by consistently struggling to find your brand after you’ve already released books.
Learn what to do now. Learn what works and what doesn’t now, before you write your first novel. Learn while writing is just a hobby. Don’t wait to learn after trying to become a professional writer. Learn now before you start charging consumers for an actual product. Short stories are so good for this kind of practice, and if you really try to involve readers in the process, I promise; you will build a solid fan base.
In the end, when you do find your brand, the next key concept is the quality of your writing. If you’re just starting out, or if you’ve been writing for a while and other writers give you bangin’ reviews, but for some reason readers always give you bad reviews, it may because you need to hire an editor, or a better editor, and we’ll discuss editing more as we go along, but for now, you can check out my editing services.
Thanks for reading. As always, please share your thoughts.
http://www.storiesbydennis.com/?page_...
http://www.storiesbydennis.com/?page_...
At this point, I’ve presented how to come up with an idea in order to begin writing. I’ve explained why short stories are important, and how they can help you build a fan base and credibility. I’ve also talked about fanfiction, a proven method by which a new writer can become well known. Now, instead of jumping right into writing your novel, I want to take some time and explain what sells a book, or any product, really.
You see, whether or not you choose to go the self published route or the mainstream route the principles of selling are the same; so, what sells a book?
There are four components upon which everything else is built; the title of your book, the cover art, the blurb, and networking. All of these together form your brand. You are not just trying to sell your book, you are trying to connect with readers; you are trying to sell yourself, your brand.
Kanye West once said something along the lines of: people love me or people hate me, but everybody knows me. That’s a great point to make. Kanye West the person is also Kanye West the brand, and in his case, it works. Will his brand work for you? Maybe, maybe not, but a successful writer must have their brand before the eyes of the public.
George Martin is certainly a popular and hot-selling author, but what is his brand? He doesn’t really have one, does he? No, not anymore, anyway, because he is already published by a major company, so the brand being sold is the brand of Bantam, (notice the little rooster? We’ll get back to that) which is an imprint of Random House, but did you know that he began writing A Song of Ice and Fire in 1991? Did you know the first book wasn’t published until 1996? He was perfecting his craft, creating a solid fan base, and ultimately solidifying his brand, which was picked up by Bantam.
Are you following me?
Now, for just a moment, think of yourself as a reader who is looking for a new book. You already know what you like and don’t like. You already know which authors you prefer, and which ones you dislike, and maybe you’ve only ever read books released by the mainstream publishers, but how did you know a new book was released? Are you subscribed to an e-mail list? Probably not. You probably already belong to a reading group, or you are following your favorite author or publisher on social media. Maybe, you just troll Barnes and Noble online, see what’s advertised, and follow the link.
Here’s the deal; mainstream publishers, be it Random House, Simon and Schuster, Roc Books, or whomever, regardless of the specific author or title, each publisher has a specific way of doing things, and all books released by Penguin, follow the Penguin formatting rules and guidelines; those Penguin specific editors all follow certain guidelines, too, so all the books, even if the writer, title, and voice are vastly dissimilar, still share some similarities, which probably bypass you—the style of the cover art, the lettering of titles, the blurbs, the little logo on the side of the book (remember the Bantam Rooster).
If you do get picked up by a literary agent, and you are published by a mainstream publisher, they will handle all of these factors on their own, but if you decide to go the indie route, or even before you get picked up, while you’re writing your short stories, it’s imperative to brand yourself, to present some form of consistency. For example, I only use the one cover artist, so even though the covers are as different as they can be, there is a hidden consistency.
Now, before you write your novel is the time to find your voice, your brand, and present it, consistently, to your fan base. Since you have not yet written and published your novel, this is a great time to experiment.
Let’s go back to being a reader looking for a book. First and foremost, you probably have an idea of what it is you want; someone either made a recommendation, or you know your favorite publisher or author has released something, or maybe you’re just trolling for something totally fresh. The first thing that will catch your eye is the title.
Honestly, the title won’t sell you the book, but it will make you interested enough to look closely at the cover. If the book in question is one written by your favorite author or publisher, the cover won’t really make or break your decision, but if the author is unknown to you, you will scrutinize the cover, and then, if it looks interesting, you’ll read the blurb.
The blurb is what sells a book. The blurb is the reason you buy the book we’re discussing. The blurb is the little description about the book, and it should match up with the title and the cover.
If you stumble across a book entitled: Mars Raiders, and the cover shows a cow munching on green grass, you’re probably going to pass on the blurb, right? If you don’t pass, and you do read the blurb, and the blurb says something along the lines of: Farmer John Batey falls in love with a famed actress. The ravishing beauty, Helen LaMonte, just came to L.A. to make a name for herself, but ran afoul a sexually perverse agent, and she has to do nasty things to land a part in the next, big movie, Mars Raiders; you’re probably going to pass on the book, especially if you were trying to find a new sci fi to read.
Do you see where I’m going? Everything has to match up. Yes, my example is supposed to be ridiculous, but I’m trying to show you what a brand is, how it’s constructed, and why it’s important.
Now, If you see the same title: Mars Raiders, and the cover has a one-eyed, gruff-looking bandit holding a laser rifle, and he’s crouched behind a red boulder while peeking at some smoldering, alien-looking colony in the background, the title and the cover match up, right? Then, if you read the blurb, and it’s something along the lines of: Former Major Cash McManus of Earth Army has been AWOL for nearly ten years. Now, at the edge of Mars colony, he alone fends off an onslaught of slimy, worm-like aliens, but can a single man, even one so brave as McManus, save the human colony from themselves?
It’s much more interesting, right? At this point, you might check the reviews, but we’ll talk about reviews later. The truth is that reviews or no, if you’re looking for this kind of sci fi, you’re very likely to buy the book. I also have to mention that blurbs are generally longer than what I presented, at least for full length novels, and we’ll dive into blurbs a little bit more, but first I want to talk more about the title and cover art.
A catchy title is certainly helpful, and a great cover goes a long way, and these are important concepts to remember before you write your debut novel. You need to think about the titles of your short stories. You need to find a cover artist you like. You also need to make sure that the lettering of your name and title are the right colors, the right font, and there’s really no way to be sure, unfortunately, but you can go look at popular books.
Go look at Harry Potter, also look at previous editions of Harry Potter; publishers often change covers and fonts when they release new editions. Why? Because times change. People change. Tastes change, and they have to keep up. Also, as they sell more and more books by the author, or by different authors of the same genre, or new authors, they see trends in what sells. At this point, look also at the blurbs employed by the hottest selling titles.
Start comparing and contrasting, titles, covers, and blurbs. These three components are the onset of your brand, and without them, no amount of networking and tweeting please look at my book will sell a book, or even result in a free download.
The title, cover, and blurb must work in unison to provide a complete idea, the idea of your story, to your intended audience, and you’ll have to learn about your audience, and what they enjoy, but by writing short stories with proper titles, cool covers, and smashing blurbs, you will learn all of this before releasing your debut novel. It’s a growing process, and a process you must undertake now, before writing your debut novel, or you will have a devil of a time growing your fan base with a book in which no one is interested.
All of my books have a consistency, perhaps a hidden consistency, when it comes to titles, covers, and blurbs, and it’s extremely difficult to outline what that consistency is, but let’s look at these titles; Losing Human, Raising Dead, and Expedition. All three are short stories. Now, let’s look at the covers.
(not sure how well the covers look right here on goodreads)
There are some similarities, the fonts aren’t entirely different. All of the titles are both simple and mysterious, and all the covers, while exciting, aren’t overly fancy or flashy. Now, let’s look at the blurbs.
Losing Human: A man has a dream, a vision to see the world through eternal eyes. Dr. Heisler, roboticist, funds Project Human to advance the human race. After funding is diminished, he takes drastic measures and uploads a human awareness into a mobile robotic construct.
Raising Dead: An ancient necromancer seeks but one dream, the power of perfection, the power of immortality. What he finds leaves him speechless. Is he but chasing the wind?
Expedition: King Eidon of Ilteriel learns of a new island, far to the south. He sends an expedition in search of new resources, allies, and power. Jorunhaal, Ilteriel’s greatest warrior, is to lead the expedition. Upon setting foot on the island, one disaster after another occurs. The men battle small were-wolves, fall prey to a foul sickness in the air, and uncover demons….
Each of these short stories are also free. They have been free since I released them, and they have received numerous downloads, but the original blurbs were very different. The original blurbs, in fact, must have been what hindered downloads because the rate of downloads more than tripled after I changed the blurbs to what they are now. I can also tell you that these covers are not the original covers, but I didn’t see much change in reception from the new covers alone; I also had to update the blurbs.
I can tell you for fact, beyond doubt, that blurbs matter, probably more than anything else, with the exception of the story itself, of course.
In the end, the point to consider is that when people come across your work, they start to become acquainted with your brand; your titles, covers, and blurbs, and subsequently, your voice. If everything generates a download, and the reader enjoys the story, the reader is more likely to try another title, and when the reader is satisfied by the quality of most of the titles, the reader is more than willing to purchase your novels, which carry the same brand.
Now, here it is: you are not selling your book. I am not selling my book. Readers, fans, are selling our books. Fans, who are trolling sites for a new read, find something they like, and when they like something, they tell everyone. Why? Because when people find something they enjoy, it’s only natural to want to share that joy with friends and family. People want to belong, and they love to share and discuss similar topics, so fans of fantasy, who like your fantasy stories, will share those fantasy stories with friends and family, and bango; your fans sell your books, which are easily recognizable due to your brand’s consistency. This is the concept on which publishers count; they want fans to sell books. Otherwise, they would be releasing book trailers and commercials to television on a regular basis, but they aren’t, are they?
At this point, I truly wish I was able to tell you exactly how to title your story, and which cover is best for you, and what the perfect blurb should say, but that’s impossible. All of you are going to write different stories. All of you are going to have a different target audience. All of you are going to enjoy different methods, but hey, you haven’t written that debut novel yet, right? So, now is the time to experiment with titles, cover artists, and blurbs, now, while you’re writing and giving away free short stories, or perhaps even before you publish your short stories. Right now, while you’re building your brand, your fan base, and improving the quality of your product, you are selling yourself.
One thing you can do, which has been proven to lead to success is hire different cover artists to make different covers for a single title. Then, you can ask your fellow readers and writers to choose which cover they like. You can present numerous titles, varying blurbs, and ask readers and writers which they prefer for that one story.
Learn now, right now. Don’t get stuck on the idea of writing the perfect novel from start to finish without knowing, understanding, the basics, and what sells. Of course, in the end, since you are only writing short stories, you can always change the titles, covers, and blurbs even after they are published.
I changed the covers on all three of the titles I mentioned above. I changed the blurbs, too. I kept the titles for those particular stories, but I did change the title of another book.
A while back, I was published by a small press; I won’t go in to details at this point. I will say that the title I had chosen was rather poor in hindsight. It was an interesting title, but I hadn’t realized how much other stuff out there was called: Shadowman. After a return of rights, I employed my cover artist—so I changed the cover—changed the blurb, and even changed the title to: Otherside, which is much more fitting.
Now, these are things you can’t really do if you are picked up by a mainstream publisher, but then there’s no need to worry either. They throw all kinds of money into marketing—their brand into which you are signing—and they will help you along the way, but until you’re published by a major publisher, or if you decide against that route, you do have complete control over your content, however, if you release your debut novel today, and a year later you realize things aren’t working out for you, and you change everything, and you end up doing this for everything after you’ve already tried to establish your credibility as a writer, that credibility will vanish, and no one will take you seriously; you’ll be the writer who is always changing everything after publication, and that tells people that you don’t know what you’re doing. You won’t build a loyal fan base by consistently struggling to find your brand after you’ve already released books.
Learn what to do now. Learn what works and what doesn’t now, before you write your first novel. Learn while writing is just a hobby. Don’t wait to learn after trying to become a professional writer. Learn now before you start charging consumers for an actual product. Short stories are so good for this kind of practice, and if you really try to involve readers in the process, I promise; you will build a solid fan base.
In the end, when you do find your brand, the next key concept is the quality of your writing. If you’re just starting out, or if you’ve been writing for a while and other writers give you bangin’ reviews, but for some reason readers always give you bad reviews, it may because you need to hire an editor, or a better editor, and we’ll discuss editing more as we go along, but for now, you can check out my editing services.
Thanks for reading. As always, please share your thoughts.
http://www.storiesbydennis.com/?page_...
So you want to be a writer part 6
Part 6 – Writing your novel
The long awaited post…dun, dun, duuun…!
You followed my advice. You thought about an idea and found one you liked so much you wrote it down. Then, you wrote a few short stories, and all the while, you engaged people on social media. You talked about the latest action flick. You talked about what a buzzkill the latest book was. You praised the newest video game, and you told people you’re writing.
People came and peaked at your short stories. Some downloaded them. A few commented, for better or worse. You blogged, you connected, you even wrote a whole fanfiction novel. Maybe, you hired an editor or found some beta-readers. Maybe, you didn’t, but some people know you now, and some like you. Others don’t, but hey, you haven’t written that novel yet, so it’s no big deal. You even went back, and edited your earlier work, and re-released it. Maybe, you even hired a good cover artist.
Of late, all that swims through your mind is that story, that novel. You’ve even tried to get away from it, writing other, short stories, just wondering if you’re ready. You’ve asked yourself, can I do it? What is it gonna’ take? What if I can’t figure it out? What if people don’t like it?
Take a big breath and relax. Now, you are ready to write your novel. You have a feel for the process. You know you can do it because you did write, and you did release short stories. You even wrote an entire fanfiction, so yeah, you know you can do it.
You have the idea. You’ve thought about your novel so much, you can see the characters, hear the pitch of their voices. You know their mannerisms, and how they act in the world, react to the world, and interact with one another. You know the plot. You know the problems. You know the solution. Take a big breath, and start writing.
Writing is the easy part after all. Writing is just the process of transferring thoughts to paper (screen?). At this point, you know that you don’t have to worry about the fact that your beginning is shaky. You don’t need to worry that there’s no middle. You don’t need to worry that you have two or three different ideas for the ending.
At this point, you know that the only thing that matters is transferring your thoughts to paper. Write what you have. Don’t stop. Don’t fret. If you need to, go back, and read what you wrote to make certain you’re still on the same train of thought, but if you run into a roadblock, take a detour.
You have your introduction, but your dialogue is sketchy. Maybe, your dialogue is great, but you have a tough time writing action scenes; whatever the troubles are…well, they aren’t really a problem. Just write what you have, and if you need to, skip ahead. Your book is not etched in stone. It is not a published novel out for sale. Just write. Just keep writing.
Treat every chapter like a mini short story, and maybe, by the time you get to the middle, you see a different ending, but the beginning has to be changed. No biggie; you’re just writing. This is just a draft, and no one has even seen it yet.
Maybe, you can tell there isn’t much to say about the actual writing process. Contrary to what so many people believe, writing a novel is the easiest thing in the world. Nothing really matters; it’s just a draft, so draft away.
There are no rules in writing. None. There are certainly some very important rules when it comes to editing a story, but there are no rules involved in writing that story down. Did you know that you don’t even need to break a novel down into chapters? Nope, at least not until the editing process. You can just write, and write, and write until you have everything you want.
It’s a draft. It isn’t etched in stone. It isn’t a published product released to the public.
Write down absolutely everything you want to write. It doesn’t make any difference if it’s senseless, useless, crazy, boring, or even out of sequence. Just get as much down as you can. This is your time. This is the process you should be enjoying the most. While you’re writing the story, you are writing for you. You are writing something you want to read. You are unburdening your creative mind grapes and writing down all the things about your story that you want to experience.
This is certainly going to be a long process, and you will change almost everything you write by the time you’re ready to publish, so just don’t stress. Don’t worry about a routine. Nothing kills creativity like routine. Don’t turn writing your story into a job or a chore; enjoy the process. You want to write? Write! You don’t feel like writing one day? Don’t write!
Don’t ever worry about hitting a certain word goal every day. Don’t waste your time with writing exercises; they only help you do better at the exercise. That’s why you practice exercises before you write your novel. When it’s time to write your story, you just write the damned story down!
Go back. Read it. Read it again and again. You’ll see plot holes. You’ll find inconsistencies. You’ll laugh, cry, cringe, and cheer. Add everything you want to the story. Cut everything you don’t like. If it comes up short, it comes up short. If it comes out long, and it drags ass, cut the fluff out.
I’m telling you, writing the novel is the easiest part of the whole successful writer thing. All you gotta’ do is jot down what you’re thinking.
There will be times wherein you’re going to come across sections where you feel stuck. You’ll have point A and point C, but won’t know what point B is. So? Who cares? Nobody but you knows this. Just write down what you have and move on.
This is like the whole can’t see the forest for the trees thing, or maybe I have it backwards. It doesn’t matter. The point is that you cannot possibly know everything about your story until you’ve written it down.
Maybe, that sounds crazy or backwards, but I’m telling you, if you go into this process believing that you must know every, single, little, tiny detail, you’re out of your mind. You’re fooling yourself. This is precisely why people fail, or they succumb to fear; they think they must know every word, sentence, action, event, scene, whatever before writing the story.
Wrong.
Just get as much of your story down as possible, and when you get stuck, read what you have, and spend some more time thinking about the world, the characters; let the story tell itself. What you think your story is going to be is not what your story will choose for itself. If nothing comes to mind, jump ahead! Write the end then go back and re-read from the very beginning. So, you get stuck for a day, a week, a month, no big deal; go busy yourself with something else. That worked for Einstein.
I know it sounds crazy, but I’m telling you; just write. It’s that easy. It really, truly, is that simple. Anyone who writes an entire novel from start to finish in a month, two months, three, four, and then releases it is releasing crap. Now, that crap might sell. There are certainly people out there who like crap, but writing, releasing, and selling crap won’t lead to long term success.
Anyone who becomes a peddler of crap may be successful, very successful, at the onset of their career, but if they don’t begin releasing quality content, they won’t get very far, and at this point, if you’ve followed the advice in these posts, you’ve already set yourself up to sell your book, so you don’t want to release crap, and that means taking the time to write a great novel, but writing a great novel doesn’t entail doing it perfectly on your first attempt.
Again, just write what you have, what you know. Skip ahead if you must then, when you see more of your story developing, you can go back, and fill in the blanks; you can restructure, or you can even re-write the whole thing. It’s what the guy who wrote Jaws had to do. All that matters at this stage is that you have fun.
When The Godfather was submitted to the production company, the screen editors and directors thought the book was atrocious. The reviews on the Rambo books, you know the Rambo movies are based on books, right? Those reviews are pretty bad, because the books are terrible, so crap does sell, but it usually only sells after it gets turned into an awesome movie, and if it doesn’t become an awesome movie, who will buy it? What saving grace will there be?
As usual, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. You aren’t staking your entire life on one novel, but it is important to make your first novel great, not because it’s the only way to become successful, but because you want to start off the right way and save yourself the torment. You also care about your fans because they are paying you, and they are selling for you, so give them something they can enjoy.
Now, editing your novel is a totally different story, but you can’t edit or get feedback until the whole book is written, right? So get it all down then take a break because the hard part is about come up and blindside you.
Yup, before you know it, you’ve actually written down your whole novel. Yes, some parts are shaky. Yes, some transitions aren’t that great. Some of your chapters feel short and rushed. Other chapters feel long, and they tend to get boring before reaching the end. No big deal. Now, you will do one of the most important things you will ever do for your novel. You will leave it alone.
Get away from your novel. Forget all about it. Dive into something else. Write another short story. Play a new video game. Go back to playing DnD with your friends. Whatever you do, do your best to forget as much of your novel as you can. Spend at least two months away from your novel.
This is a great time to get back to everything you were doing before you wrote your novel. Get back on Google+ and Goodreads, and discuss other topics with your reader groups. Download some more short stories from Smashwords, and give ‘em a read through. Give your fans, the ones who dropped by your blog to read reviews, something new to read; a new review of a game, book, or movie.
Here’s why; you’ve been thinking, eating, breathing, living your novel for months, maybe even years. You know everything about it, all its intricacies, and you’ve done the best job you can to lay it bare for an audience, but an audience is not in your head, and there may be some thoughts, actions, or correlations that seem self evident and truthful to you, but to an audience, to a reader who has never been in your head, all of those ideas which seem logical and self evident may very well seem muddled and confusing.
This is the perfect time to do one or all three of the following:
One, post your whole book to your blogs one or two thousand words at a time two or three times a week, thus giving your fan base a chance to read it without a great commitment. Naturally, they’ll also be able to comment and discuss it. (You will eventually delete these posts before releasing the book.)
Two, kindly let people know that you are looking for beta-readers, people who are interested in reading a draft for the specific purpose of helping you better connect with your intended audience. (Assuming you are not releasing the entirety of your book to your blog. You may also do this after having released your book to your blog, gotten some feedback, edited, and then deleted those old posts.) Beta-readers are usually readers, though some are also writers, but the great thing about beta-readers is that they love rough drafts. There’s just something so much more personal, more intimate, about a draft; it’s bare; it’s the soul of the writer, but no one wants to spend money on a first draft, so do not release an unedited book to the public!
Three, hire an editor.
The first two suggestions are great, simple, easy, and free. Do not pay anyone for beta-reading. At this point, I also do not suggest peer editing with other writers anymore. This isn’t a matter of fearing intellectual theft; this is a matter of building your own, distinct voice. Teaming up with other writers is great before you write your first novel. After you’ve written it, it becomes imperative to distance yourself from other writers, so you’re better off with beta-readers, some of which will be other authors, but some are just readers and bloggers who love raw, indie work.
A lot of writers fail at this point in their careers. They’re so excited they’ve finished writing a book, and they show it to all their author buddies, and of course, being nice, supportive people, the author buddies praise the book. After all, they know the difficulty in finishing a novel, so they say it’s great, and then, the debut author releases an unedited, debut novel, and it tanks. Perhaps even worse, the book sells extremely well for two months, and then the scathing reviews come in, all of which point out the horrible typographical, grammatical, and punctuation errors—the slogging pace, the redundant information, the info dumps, the stale characters, etc. etc. Hire an editor before you release that book.
Another occurrence at this stage of the game involves the excited, debut novelist who turns to their author, support groups. Then, they get stuck trading reviews of each others’ books. That’s all well and good, but none of them are reaching readers. They’re all only reaching one another, tweeting, retweeting, or auto-tweeting, to one another. They are only promoting their books to other writers.
There are no readers in those groups. No readers, people actually looking for a new book to buy and read, have ever heard of any of those groups like ASMSG or IAN. Hundreds of thousands of indie writers have banded together, and that’s a great concept before writing your first novel, but these naïve folks have done this in an effort to find readers, but they are only finding each other. Some actually think that they can each bring a few hundred new readers to those groups, believing that if each person brings in a hundred new readers, there will be millions of people all buying the books; this is precisely what the mainstream publishers count on, but the mainstream publishers each have specific presses with specific authors with specific voices for specific genres, so yes, Penguin Random House counts on the authors published by Bantam to entice Bantam fans into buying Bantam books by other Bantam authors, but the indie, support groups aren’t following this business model. The indie groups have all kinds of writers of all qualities, genres, and voices.
It doesn’t work, not the way they’re doing it. First of all, so many of the members have no fans because they are either aspiring writers with no published books, or they are debut writers with one or two books out, and no sells or fans; they have not begun their career correctly. Second, some members write romance, others paranormal, some steam punk, so none of the steam punk readers are going to go searching for a group like ASMSG in the hopes of finding an indie, romance writer. So what happens? The group members just trade books with one another for reviews in the hopes of selling books via Amazon by way of a review bombardment. Lastly, what happens is they try to sell books to each other.
Think about it, though: if one author buys one of each book written by each author, and even if every other author does the same, in the end no money trades hands, right? If I buy all of your books, and then you buy all of mine, no money has been earned. No new fans have been found, so what do these groups do? They say stuff like: give an indie author a good review. Reviews sell books, and authors gotta’ eat, too. Well, that’s a dishonest practice.
Give a good review if the book is good. Give a bad review if the book is bad. Why? Because the review is not for the author. The review is not there to trick a reader into a buying a book. The reviews should only be given by a reader for readers. As a matter of fact, once you become a published author, you may want to stop reviewing books completely. Why? Because at that point, you’ll find yourself reviewing as a writer rather than a reader.
You know what happens then? An indie author begins racking up numerous, glowing reviews, and then a reader will buy the book only to find faults with it, and the problem then is that the skewed reviews anger the reader. They feel tricked, and so they feel compelled to provide a scathing review in order to exact vengeance, and here’s the thing; if those good reviews sell books, and the readers end up feeling shilled because of the skewed reviews, they are going to tell everyone to stay away from that book, and a book that will have started off selling well, suddenly starts losing sales, and then the writer begins to build notoriety for releasing terrible content. They lose credibility. It’s why “writers” like Gary Lindberg go around making fun of readers for posting bad reviews.
Fortunately, these posts have been designed to help you prevent such a thing. As a matter of fact, these posts are here for two reasons.
One, I personally love reading and writing so much that I want everyone with even an inkling of an idea to feel comfortable writing their idea down, and subsequently release a great book.
Two, I love readers so much that I want them to know that there is an alternative to the dreck spewed by the mainstream presses, but to that effect, what the indie writers release must not be dreck, and so it becomes imperative to teach indie writers the importance of editing, of hiring an editor, a competent editor, but indie writers must take it a step farther and start their careers off properly in order to counter act the fluff released by the mainstream press, and the fluff released by other, indie writers.
I want indie writers, or even new writers who want to go the mainstream route, to be successful, and not just sell well, but sell quality content often. It’s what the readers deserve. Are we not writing for them? Perhaps, it is more appropriate to say that we are trying to release quality content for them.
Please, please, please, even if you decide not to distance yourself from other writers, you must hire a competent editor because you are not writing and selling your books for the other writers, you are publishing for readers, and if you reach even one reader, and you turn them into a fan, they will tell others about your book, so if you’re going to find an editor, and you really do need to find one, do some work and find a competent editor, one who willingly explains and shows the editing process on a regular basis.
They are few and far between, and you might get burned once or twice, but do not let that frighten you. You need an editor, someone who understands how to read a book as a reader, someone who will look for plot holes, suspension of belief, inconsistencies, discrepancies, lack of character development, pacing issues, all kinds of stuff, and will help you to understand what those issues are and how to resolve them.
In the end, you might end up hiring a crappy editor. It happens to all writers who take the time and make the effort to hire an editor, but even a crappy editor can be helpful. If nothing else, they are a fresh pair of eyes, and when they edit your manuscript, they will pass on to you their new perspective; use it. Take what you like, and discard the rest. Then, go back, and re-read your book, and I promise, you’ll find all kinds of stuff that requires more attention.
You’ll find normal mistakes that your mind missed because it was reading what it was expecting; the mind does that; it formulates that which it already expects. You’ll find some sentences which will make you wonder just what it was that you were meaning to convey. You’ll find redundancies you hadn’t noticed before. You’ll notice that some sentences work better in a different order within the paragraph. You’ll find all kinds of stuff.
It’s very important to get away from your novel. It’s almost like making your eyes the fresh pair of eyes, and you will have to get away from your novel over and over. There should be no rush, though. As proud and excited as you are, and you should be, you must keep yourself in check. Do not release a crummy product to your audience like I did (four crummy products) because it will really hold you back.
Everything I’m telling you, no matter how crazy, I’m telling you for a reason. I absolutely want you to release a perfect product to your audience, so that they will start off loving your work. It is important to me that you are successful for a number of reasons, and you will come to understand those reasons more deeply as we progress, so you may need to step away from your novel a number of times, and you may need numerous beta-readers, and you may need to hire two or three different editors, and you may need to get away from your writer buddies, and you may well spend an arm and a leg throughout the process, but it will pay off.
Try to keep your end goal in mind. If you are striving to achieve major publication then you need to land a literary agent. To do that, you need to write a perfect query letter, and synopsis, and you can’t rush through those either; they are as important as your title, cover, and blurb. Then, if your presentation is accepted, the agent will want a part of, or the whole, manuscript. Then, if it’s up to snuff, and they think it’s marketable, they’ll help you to land a publisher. Just keep in mind that not all agents are cut from the same cloth.
If you intend to go the indie route, and you want someone like Baen or Rocking Horse Publishing to publish your work, you do not need an agent, but you still have to present your book in a professional manner. Regardless, these two avenues require a great deal of sitting, waiting around, and just going bonkers. They do not want you to submit your book to multiple publishers or agents, and they may never reply, or they may take a year to reply, and just to say, “Nah, we’re good, bruh.”
If you intend to self publish, and there are numerous reasons to do so, it’s up to you and you alone to produce a product of the highest quality. This does not mean that you cannot work with others—cover artists, proof readers, beta-readers, and editors—it just means that you are in charge of everything. The reason self publishing gets such a bad rap is because most self published authors don’t hire editors, or they hire crummy editors, and the number one complaint by readers is that the book read like a first draft.
No one wants to pay for a first draft.
This says nothing of the creativity, beauty, or complexity of the story, but you must come to understand something that’s been pointed out numerous times: if the mainstream publishers employ teams of editors to clean the works of King, Martin, and Rowling, doesn’t it stand to reason that you should also hire an editor?
Thanks for reading. I had said this was going to be the last post of this series, but I’m actually going to release one more, so stay tuned, and don’t forget to check out my Editing Services Tab.
http://www.storiesbydennis.com/?page_...
The long awaited post…dun, dun, duuun…!
You followed my advice. You thought about an idea and found one you liked so much you wrote it down. Then, you wrote a few short stories, and all the while, you engaged people on social media. You talked about the latest action flick. You talked about what a buzzkill the latest book was. You praised the newest video game, and you told people you’re writing.
People came and peaked at your short stories. Some downloaded them. A few commented, for better or worse. You blogged, you connected, you even wrote a whole fanfiction novel. Maybe, you hired an editor or found some beta-readers. Maybe, you didn’t, but some people know you now, and some like you. Others don’t, but hey, you haven’t written that novel yet, so it’s no big deal. You even went back, and edited your earlier work, and re-released it. Maybe, you even hired a good cover artist.
Of late, all that swims through your mind is that story, that novel. You’ve even tried to get away from it, writing other, short stories, just wondering if you’re ready. You’ve asked yourself, can I do it? What is it gonna’ take? What if I can’t figure it out? What if people don’t like it?
Take a big breath and relax. Now, you are ready to write your novel. You have a feel for the process. You know you can do it because you did write, and you did release short stories. You even wrote an entire fanfiction, so yeah, you know you can do it.
You have the idea. You’ve thought about your novel so much, you can see the characters, hear the pitch of their voices. You know their mannerisms, and how they act in the world, react to the world, and interact with one another. You know the plot. You know the problems. You know the solution. Take a big breath, and start writing.
Writing is the easy part after all. Writing is just the process of transferring thoughts to paper (screen?). At this point, you know that you don’t have to worry about the fact that your beginning is shaky. You don’t need to worry that there’s no middle. You don’t need to worry that you have two or three different ideas for the ending.
At this point, you know that the only thing that matters is transferring your thoughts to paper. Write what you have. Don’t stop. Don’t fret. If you need to, go back, and read what you wrote to make certain you’re still on the same train of thought, but if you run into a roadblock, take a detour.
You have your introduction, but your dialogue is sketchy. Maybe, your dialogue is great, but you have a tough time writing action scenes; whatever the troubles are…well, they aren’t really a problem. Just write what you have, and if you need to, skip ahead. Your book is not etched in stone. It is not a published novel out for sale. Just write. Just keep writing.
Treat every chapter like a mini short story, and maybe, by the time you get to the middle, you see a different ending, but the beginning has to be changed. No biggie; you’re just writing. This is just a draft, and no one has even seen it yet.
Maybe, you can tell there isn’t much to say about the actual writing process. Contrary to what so many people believe, writing a novel is the easiest thing in the world. Nothing really matters; it’s just a draft, so draft away.
There are no rules in writing. None. There are certainly some very important rules when it comes to editing a story, but there are no rules involved in writing that story down. Did you know that you don’t even need to break a novel down into chapters? Nope, at least not until the editing process. You can just write, and write, and write until you have everything you want.
It’s a draft. It isn’t etched in stone. It isn’t a published product released to the public.
Write down absolutely everything you want to write. It doesn’t make any difference if it’s senseless, useless, crazy, boring, or even out of sequence. Just get as much down as you can. This is your time. This is the process you should be enjoying the most. While you’re writing the story, you are writing for you. You are writing something you want to read. You are unburdening your creative mind grapes and writing down all the things about your story that you want to experience.
This is certainly going to be a long process, and you will change almost everything you write by the time you’re ready to publish, so just don’t stress. Don’t worry about a routine. Nothing kills creativity like routine. Don’t turn writing your story into a job or a chore; enjoy the process. You want to write? Write! You don’t feel like writing one day? Don’t write!
Don’t ever worry about hitting a certain word goal every day. Don’t waste your time with writing exercises; they only help you do better at the exercise. That’s why you practice exercises before you write your novel. When it’s time to write your story, you just write the damned story down!
Go back. Read it. Read it again and again. You’ll see plot holes. You’ll find inconsistencies. You’ll laugh, cry, cringe, and cheer. Add everything you want to the story. Cut everything you don’t like. If it comes up short, it comes up short. If it comes out long, and it drags ass, cut the fluff out.
I’m telling you, writing the novel is the easiest part of the whole successful writer thing. All you gotta’ do is jot down what you’re thinking.
There will be times wherein you’re going to come across sections where you feel stuck. You’ll have point A and point C, but won’t know what point B is. So? Who cares? Nobody but you knows this. Just write down what you have and move on.
This is like the whole can’t see the forest for the trees thing, or maybe I have it backwards. It doesn’t matter. The point is that you cannot possibly know everything about your story until you’ve written it down.
Maybe, that sounds crazy or backwards, but I’m telling you, if you go into this process believing that you must know every, single, little, tiny detail, you’re out of your mind. You’re fooling yourself. This is precisely why people fail, or they succumb to fear; they think they must know every word, sentence, action, event, scene, whatever before writing the story.
Wrong.
Just get as much of your story down as possible, and when you get stuck, read what you have, and spend some more time thinking about the world, the characters; let the story tell itself. What you think your story is going to be is not what your story will choose for itself. If nothing comes to mind, jump ahead! Write the end then go back and re-read from the very beginning. So, you get stuck for a day, a week, a month, no big deal; go busy yourself with something else. That worked for Einstein.
I know it sounds crazy, but I’m telling you; just write. It’s that easy. It really, truly, is that simple. Anyone who writes an entire novel from start to finish in a month, two months, three, four, and then releases it is releasing crap. Now, that crap might sell. There are certainly people out there who like crap, but writing, releasing, and selling crap won’t lead to long term success.
Anyone who becomes a peddler of crap may be successful, very successful, at the onset of their career, but if they don’t begin releasing quality content, they won’t get very far, and at this point, if you’ve followed the advice in these posts, you’ve already set yourself up to sell your book, so you don’t want to release crap, and that means taking the time to write a great novel, but writing a great novel doesn’t entail doing it perfectly on your first attempt.
Again, just write what you have, what you know. Skip ahead if you must then, when you see more of your story developing, you can go back, and fill in the blanks; you can restructure, or you can even re-write the whole thing. It’s what the guy who wrote Jaws had to do. All that matters at this stage is that you have fun.
When The Godfather was submitted to the production company, the screen editors and directors thought the book was atrocious. The reviews on the Rambo books, you know the Rambo movies are based on books, right? Those reviews are pretty bad, because the books are terrible, so crap does sell, but it usually only sells after it gets turned into an awesome movie, and if it doesn’t become an awesome movie, who will buy it? What saving grace will there be?
As usual, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. You aren’t staking your entire life on one novel, but it is important to make your first novel great, not because it’s the only way to become successful, but because you want to start off the right way and save yourself the torment. You also care about your fans because they are paying you, and they are selling for you, so give them something they can enjoy.
Now, editing your novel is a totally different story, but you can’t edit or get feedback until the whole book is written, right? So get it all down then take a break because the hard part is about come up and blindside you.
Yup, before you know it, you’ve actually written down your whole novel. Yes, some parts are shaky. Yes, some transitions aren’t that great. Some of your chapters feel short and rushed. Other chapters feel long, and they tend to get boring before reaching the end. No big deal. Now, you will do one of the most important things you will ever do for your novel. You will leave it alone.
Get away from your novel. Forget all about it. Dive into something else. Write another short story. Play a new video game. Go back to playing DnD with your friends. Whatever you do, do your best to forget as much of your novel as you can. Spend at least two months away from your novel.
This is a great time to get back to everything you were doing before you wrote your novel. Get back on Google+ and Goodreads, and discuss other topics with your reader groups. Download some more short stories from Smashwords, and give ‘em a read through. Give your fans, the ones who dropped by your blog to read reviews, something new to read; a new review of a game, book, or movie.
Here’s why; you’ve been thinking, eating, breathing, living your novel for months, maybe even years. You know everything about it, all its intricacies, and you’ve done the best job you can to lay it bare for an audience, but an audience is not in your head, and there may be some thoughts, actions, or correlations that seem self evident and truthful to you, but to an audience, to a reader who has never been in your head, all of those ideas which seem logical and self evident may very well seem muddled and confusing.
This is the perfect time to do one or all three of the following:
One, post your whole book to your blogs one or two thousand words at a time two or three times a week, thus giving your fan base a chance to read it without a great commitment. Naturally, they’ll also be able to comment and discuss it. (You will eventually delete these posts before releasing the book.)
Two, kindly let people know that you are looking for beta-readers, people who are interested in reading a draft for the specific purpose of helping you better connect with your intended audience. (Assuming you are not releasing the entirety of your book to your blog. You may also do this after having released your book to your blog, gotten some feedback, edited, and then deleted those old posts.) Beta-readers are usually readers, though some are also writers, but the great thing about beta-readers is that they love rough drafts. There’s just something so much more personal, more intimate, about a draft; it’s bare; it’s the soul of the writer, but no one wants to spend money on a first draft, so do not release an unedited book to the public!
Three, hire an editor.
The first two suggestions are great, simple, easy, and free. Do not pay anyone for beta-reading. At this point, I also do not suggest peer editing with other writers anymore. This isn’t a matter of fearing intellectual theft; this is a matter of building your own, distinct voice. Teaming up with other writers is great before you write your first novel. After you’ve written it, it becomes imperative to distance yourself from other writers, so you’re better off with beta-readers, some of which will be other authors, but some are just readers and bloggers who love raw, indie work.
A lot of writers fail at this point in their careers. They’re so excited they’ve finished writing a book, and they show it to all their author buddies, and of course, being nice, supportive people, the author buddies praise the book. After all, they know the difficulty in finishing a novel, so they say it’s great, and then, the debut author releases an unedited, debut novel, and it tanks. Perhaps even worse, the book sells extremely well for two months, and then the scathing reviews come in, all of which point out the horrible typographical, grammatical, and punctuation errors—the slogging pace, the redundant information, the info dumps, the stale characters, etc. etc. Hire an editor before you release that book.
Another occurrence at this stage of the game involves the excited, debut novelist who turns to their author, support groups. Then, they get stuck trading reviews of each others’ books. That’s all well and good, but none of them are reaching readers. They’re all only reaching one another, tweeting, retweeting, or auto-tweeting, to one another. They are only promoting their books to other writers.
There are no readers in those groups. No readers, people actually looking for a new book to buy and read, have ever heard of any of those groups like ASMSG or IAN. Hundreds of thousands of indie writers have banded together, and that’s a great concept before writing your first novel, but these naïve folks have done this in an effort to find readers, but they are only finding each other. Some actually think that they can each bring a few hundred new readers to those groups, believing that if each person brings in a hundred new readers, there will be millions of people all buying the books; this is precisely what the mainstream publishers count on, but the mainstream publishers each have specific presses with specific authors with specific voices for specific genres, so yes, Penguin Random House counts on the authors published by Bantam to entice Bantam fans into buying Bantam books by other Bantam authors, but the indie, support groups aren’t following this business model. The indie groups have all kinds of writers of all qualities, genres, and voices.
It doesn’t work, not the way they’re doing it. First of all, so many of the members have no fans because they are either aspiring writers with no published books, or they are debut writers with one or two books out, and no sells or fans; they have not begun their career correctly. Second, some members write romance, others paranormal, some steam punk, so none of the steam punk readers are going to go searching for a group like ASMSG in the hopes of finding an indie, romance writer. So what happens? The group members just trade books with one another for reviews in the hopes of selling books via Amazon by way of a review bombardment. Lastly, what happens is they try to sell books to each other.
Think about it, though: if one author buys one of each book written by each author, and even if every other author does the same, in the end no money trades hands, right? If I buy all of your books, and then you buy all of mine, no money has been earned. No new fans have been found, so what do these groups do? They say stuff like: give an indie author a good review. Reviews sell books, and authors gotta’ eat, too. Well, that’s a dishonest practice.
Give a good review if the book is good. Give a bad review if the book is bad. Why? Because the review is not for the author. The review is not there to trick a reader into a buying a book. The reviews should only be given by a reader for readers. As a matter of fact, once you become a published author, you may want to stop reviewing books completely. Why? Because at that point, you’ll find yourself reviewing as a writer rather than a reader.
You know what happens then? An indie author begins racking up numerous, glowing reviews, and then a reader will buy the book only to find faults with it, and the problem then is that the skewed reviews anger the reader. They feel tricked, and so they feel compelled to provide a scathing review in order to exact vengeance, and here’s the thing; if those good reviews sell books, and the readers end up feeling shilled because of the skewed reviews, they are going to tell everyone to stay away from that book, and a book that will have started off selling well, suddenly starts losing sales, and then the writer begins to build notoriety for releasing terrible content. They lose credibility. It’s why “writers” like Gary Lindberg go around making fun of readers for posting bad reviews.
Fortunately, these posts have been designed to help you prevent such a thing. As a matter of fact, these posts are here for two reasons.
One, I personally love reading and writing so much that I want everyone with even an inkling of an idea to feel comfortable writing their idea down, and subsequently release a great book.
Two, I love readers so much that I want them to know that there is an alternative to the dreck spewed by the mainstream presses, but to that effect, what the indie writers release must not be dreck, and so it becomes imperative to teach indie writers the importance of editing, of hiring an editor, a competent editor, but indie writers must take it a step farther and start their careers off properly in order to counter act the fluff released by the mainstream press, and the fluff released by other, indie writers.
I want indie writers, or even new writers who want to go the mainstream route, to be successful, and not just sell well, but sell quality content often. It’s what the readers deserve. Are we not writing for them? Perhaps, it is more appropriate to say that we are trying to release quality content for them.
Please, please, please, even if you decide not to distance yourself from other writers, you must hire a competent editor because you are not writing and selling your books for the other writers, you are publishing for readers, and if you reach even one reader, and you turn them into a fan, they will tell others about your book, so if you’re going to find an editor, and you really do need to find one, do some work and find a competent editor, one who willingly explains and shows the editing process on a regular basis.
They are few and far between, and you might get burned once or twice, but do not let that frighten you. You need an editor, someone who understands how to read a book as a reader, someone who will look for plot holes, suspension of belief, inconsistencies, discrepancies, lack of character development, pacing issues, all kinds of stuff, and will help you to understand what those issues are and how to resolve them.
In the end, you might end up hiring a crappy editor. It happens to all writers who take the time and make the effort to hire an editor, but even a crappy editor can be helpful. If nothing else, they are a fresh pair of eyes, and when they edit your manuscript, they will pass on to you their new perspective; use it. Take what you like, and discard the rest. Then, go back, and re-read your book, and I promise, you’ll find all kinds of stuff that requires more attention.
You’ll find normal mistakes that your mind missed because it was reading what it was expecting; the mind does that; it formulates that which it already expects. You’ll find some sentences which will make you wonder just what it was that you were meaning to convey. You’ll find redundancies you hadn’t noticed before. You’ll notice that some sentences work better in a different order within the paragraph. You’ll find all kinds of stuff.
It’s very important to get away from your novel. It’s almost like making your eyes the fresh pair of eyes, and you will have to get away from your novel over and over. There should be no rush, though. As proud and excited as you are, and you should be, you must keep yourself in check. Do not release a crummy product to your audience like I did (four crummy products) because it will really hold you back.
Everything I’m telling you, no matter how crazy, I’m telling you for a reason. I absolutely want you to release a perfect product to your audience, so that they will start off loving your work. It is important to me that you are successful for a number of reasons, and you will come to understand those reasons more deeply as we progress, so you may need to step away from your novel a number of times, and you may need numerous beta-readers, and you may need to hire two or three different editors, and you may need to get away from your writer buddies, and you may well spend an arm and a leg throughout the process, but it will pay off.
Try to keep your end goal in mind. If you are striving to achieve major publication then you need to land a literary agent. To do that, you need to write a perfect query letter, and synopsis, and you can’t rush through those either; they are as important as your title, cover, and blurb. Then, if your presentation is accepted, the agent will want a part of, or the whole, manuscript. Then, if it’s up to snuff, and they think it’s marketable, they’ll help you to land a publisher. Just keep in mind that not all agents are cut from the same cloth.
If you intend to go the indie route, and you want someone like Baen or Rocking Horse Publishing to publish your work, you do not need an agent, but you still have to present your book in a professional manner. Regardless, these two avenues require a great deal of sitting, waiting around, and just going bonkers. They do not want you to submit your book to multiple publishers or agents, and they may never reply, or they may take a year to reply, and just to say, “Nah, we’re good, bruh.”
If you intend to self publish, and there are numerous reasons to do so, it’s up to you and you alone to produce a product of the highest quality. This does not mean that you cannot work with others—cover artists, proof readers, beta-readers, and editors—it just means that you are in charge of everything. The reason self publishing gets such a bad rap is because most self published authors don’t hire editors, or they hire crummy editors, and the number one complaint by readers is that the book read like a first draft.
No one wants to pay for a first draft.
This says nothing of the creativity, beauty, or complexity of the story, but you must come to understand something that’s been pointed out numerous times: if the mainstream publishers employ teams of editors to clean the works of King, Martin, and Rowling, doesn’t it stand to reason that you should also hire an editor?
Thanks for reading. I had said this was going to be the last post of this series, but I’m actually going to release one more, so stay tuned, and don’t forget to check out my Editing Services Tab.
http://www.storiesbydennis.com/?page_...
So you want to be a writer part 7
It’s important to consider the types of publishing platforms before releasing your novel. Rather than diving right into the different kinds, I’m going to tell you a story; the story of my writing career, or rather how it began.
I initially tried my hand at writing a novel many years ago. I was about 18, in college, and still playing Dungeons and Dragons on the weekends with a great group of guys. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to write a story based on some of our adventures.
I set about the task, and three pages in, I hit a wall. I wanted my story to be true to the game, and I didn’t have all the manuals, and I certainly didn’t own all the novels, and since I was 18, that meant that the year was 2001, which is before the internet really blew up; I mean, there were certainly millions of people on the internet even back then, but I don’t think Wikipedia (shouldn’t it be Wikipaedia?) existed at the time, and I have no clue if WoC or TSR or whoever ran DnD at the time had a website, but it didn’t matter; I didn’t even have a dial-up connection; there wasn’t a need for it (this was the golden age of e-mail subscriber lists, though).
I talked to my buddies about the idea, but the more we talked, the more it seemed it was a useless endeavor. I didn’t really care too much about it either; I just thought it was going to be cool to write a book, but the fact of the matter was that my passion didn’t outweigh the obstacles, so I just let it go.
Ten years later, I had such an idea for a story I decided I was just going to go ahead and write it, or try to. I sat down and simply described the series of events, which became my very first short story: Eudora.
At that time, I had no idea how to use punctuation. I knew grammar well enough, and I’ve always maintained an abundant repertoire of words, and have always been a decent raconteur, so in the end, all I tried to do was chronicle the events of the story, and it worked. I had no plans, though, but Hell, I knew that since I completed one story, I was certainly capable of completing another; publishing stories, however, was the farthest thing from my mind.
I wrote four stories over the course of two or three months just for fun, and then I showed some friends and family, but I claimed that I had found the stories online and just thought they were neat. No one really seemed to care, until I wrote one more story. I called it: Shadowman.
There was an older gentleman I knew by the name of Jarrett Slavin (sorry if I misspelled it, Coach), who upon learning of my newfound passion, he asked to read the stories, and he really enjoyed Eudora and Shadowman, and he suggested I find a way to get published. Had it not been for him, all of my other titles would not even exist…what might have been….
Nevertheless, I was then left the daunting task of achieving publication, so I got on the internets, Googled “publishing”, found the addresses of a few publishers, and sent out my stories, of course they were all short stories, and no publisher wants those, but I found other methods of publication. I found Xlibris, a print on demand (POD) company, and of course, no sooner had I e-mailed them that I received a call, and man, oh, man was I pumped. I really thought I had just made it big league. (Big league, not bigly.)
All POD companies want is your money. They’ll take anything, and you’re responsible for your content, for your quality, but they’ll certainly charge you for reviews, trailers, covers, promotional packages, you name it; they’ll charge you, and honestly, if you have the world’s greatest book, they may actually be helpful because they can certainly help you get your book in the right hands, but my book, my four, short stories called Shadowman, were far from good, far from quality writing.
Regardless, as I spent more and more money, and then ran out of money, I kept writing, and when I finished my first, full length novel, Lokians, I started my search for publication all over again, but I knew POD was not for me. I needed someone else to do all the legwork for me, but I didn’t think it was fair that I had to pay for the legwork. I just wanted to write, so I set about the task of mailing and e-mailing traditional publishers, and even smaller presses like Edge, and no one was interested, so I did more research on what was required to achieve publication, and learned about literary agents, but when I contacted them, they never replied.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your outlook on life, I found a press, which labeled itself an independent press, Eternal Press. For all intents and purposes, everything looked good. Their books were available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, so I figured that it was a good start. By then, I knew that mainstream publishers were purposefully keeping writers out until those writers made a name for themselves, so I knew I just needed to work hard and make a name for myself through a small, independent press.
Well, initially, I submitted my manuscript, and the acquisitions editor was kind enough to tell me that while my story seemed interesting, there was a great deal of information dumped onto the reader right at the very beginning, so I went through a round of what I thought was editing, and figured out that rather than telling the reader everything I thought they should know before the story started, it might be better to allow the world to unfold throughout the story. Then, I resubmitted, and they accepted it, and man, oh, man did I think I had hit it big. An actual publisher with editors, and marketers, and everything was going to polish my book and sell it, and all I had to do was sit back and write.
Well, when the contracts came, everything seemed legit. All they had asked was that I also made an effort to market and sell the book, and I thought that was only fair; it was my book after all, and I certainly wanted to talk about it, so I made social media accounts and started telling no one (because I had not built a fan base) that my book was coming out.
Next, I had to write a blurb, and I didn’t know what that was, nor had I comprehended its importance, so I just wrote about what the story was. No one made an effort to correct me, so I thought I had nailed it. Then, I had to come up with a cover, and I am not really an artist; I’m not even a visual person, so I came up with some weird concept with a bunch of aliens and space ships, and they told me to try again because it was too flashy, too busy. Later, I realized the truth was that they didn’t actually employ artists, and I’ll get back to that later.
We settled on a cover, which I didn’t really like, but I was just so excited and so ready to start selling, I accepted. Then, we moved on to editing. The “editor” made very few comments, adjustments, and suggestions, and so again, I thought I had nailed it. I mean, if an editor doesn’t have much to say or change then the story must be near perfect, right? Well…not so much.
Finally, the release date came, and the book was finalized. I was invited to join some Yahoo groups and even participate in a live chat where I was to discuss my book with potential readers. It turned out that there were no readers, only other authors writing for the same press. That was a little disappointing, but I didn’t think anything of it because I knew the publisher was certainly going to sell my book. Selling books is their job, and if they don’t sell, they can’t stay in business, right?
Wrong again; they made their money by enticing their writers to purchase copies of their own books, just like a POD company, and then it became my job to go out and find places to set up and sell to people, but no one let me do such a thing. Barnes and Noble didn’t allow it. Books-a-Million didn’t allow it. There are no local bookstores where I live, so my best bet was a friend’s comic book store, which felt really awkward because his customers where there to buy comic books, and out of the hundred copies of my terribly written book, I sold three on my first attempt, and none on my second attempt.
In the meantime, my e-books were priced at nearly seven dollars. Who is going to spend seven dollars on an unheard of book by an unknown author when they can spend nine or ten dollars on Harry Potter? The answer? No one. In the three years that I was published through Eternal Press, and with the four books that I released through them, I may have earned as much as forty dollars. That meant that Eternal Press also earned about forty dollars off my sales, and about five hundred dollars off my purchasing my own, print copies. That meant that if every writer, and there were hundreds of us, each bought five hundred dollars worth of books each year, Eternal Press made some decent money, but the writers only ever spent money.
Consider that if I had sold all of my print copies at twenty dollars that’s only $2,000, and that sounds great, but then you have to subtract the $500 spent on purchasing the copies, and I think it was more than that, but we’ll keep the numbers round. That leaves a $1,500 profit, which is still nice, but then you have to factor in time, travel, gas, food, the posters I had made up, the business cards, and in the end, had I sold all of my copies, all one hundred in one day, I may have cleared $800. That’s still not terrible, but without the fan base to be able to move all hundred copies over the course of a day, a week, or even a month, that $800 not only dwindles from continuously traveling and setting up, but it starts looking worse and worse. Had I sold all hundred copies over the course of a year, which I didn’t, that’s still $800, and probably less, over the course of a year, hardly a success story, and as I stated, I didn’t sell more than three copies.
I kicked, I cried, I screamed, I complained, I begged; I wanted my prices lowered, so that the e-books would sell. I wanted to submit updated versions of my books, too, versions that didn’t have common errors and formatting errors; yeah, formatting errors. How retarded was Eternal Press? They weren’t even capable enough to format their books properly, and in the end, there was nothing to be done. The product was what the product was, and I had the option of peddling my crap and disappointing readers, or sitting idly by until the contracts expired; I mean, Eternal Press wasn’t selling anything.
During that time, I wrote a great deal more for two reasons. For one, I just really enjoyed it, and two, I felt a need to vindicate myself, or perhaps apologize to readers for having released dreck. Then, of course, I had to figure out what kind of publication I was going to try next; I certainly wasn’t going to go through Eternal Press again.
I spoke to a few, other, smaller presses, but I didn’t like what they had to say; they wanted money up front, they didn’t want to make the books available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, or anywhere apart from their site, or they wanted to keep too much off the top, so I went back through my old, short stories, cleaned ‘em up, and published free to Smashwords, entered those stories into their premium catalog, and bang! Those stories made it onto Barnes and Noble…and iBooks…and Kobo…and Nook, and you name it.
I also wrote fanfiction and published it to FanFiction.net, and with my newly released short stories, which were free, I started to build a fan base, but my titles with Eternal Press just rotted away, and I could not, in good faith, promote those titles because they were not the best of me. Finally, I hired a few editors for my new, full-length titles.
One editor, after paying for services, told me to re-write my book, and then resubmit, for another fee, of course. I did not hire them again. The second editor just re-wrote my whole book from start to finish in their own voice with their own views. I mean, it was a totally different book with different characters and different interactions at that point. I did not keep any of those changes. Then, I hired a real editor, Chuck Sambuchino, and he taught me how to edit my story for readers.
That book was released under the title The Dragon of Time, Gods and Dragons, and it has gone on to do quite well. Through CreateSpace, I made print copies available, and they are much cheaper to sell, and purchase for my own uses, than the print copies released by Eternal Press or Xlibris. I also e-published, for free, to Amazon, which I then pulled for reasons that are not yet pertinent, and since I had hired my own cover artist for five dollars through Fiverr.com, I had a banging cover, a cover that blew the covers made by Eternal Press to dust.
I also uploaded the book to Smashwords, which meant it made it to all, online retailers, and get this, I got to keep almost all of the money earned from sales, and other people can also sell my book via an affiliate link, so we all make money. I must admit, though, that I did try to use Gods and Dragons to land an agent and achieve major publication, and while numerous agents replied, and with admiration, no one felt it was “marketable”, but that isn’t accurate; the truth is that they didn’t think I had enough fans, which meant the mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch it because, remember, they want your fans, not the other way around.
This is precisely why I want you to build a fan base before writing your debut novel. Then, you can prove to the agent that you’re the real deal!
At any rate, Eternal Press wound up being purchased by another company and became Caliburn Press. No one told me for the longest time, but then an old friend from Eternal Press happened to ask me how I liked the new owners, so I went and found out that my books weren’t even available on Caliburn’s website, but they were still available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, so I got in touch with Caliburn over the discrepancy to learn that my contracts had been “lost in transition”. After some arguing, I simply stated that if that was the case, and there were no copies of my contracts, then the rights were mine, and I demanded all my titles pulled.
At this stage, while writing this very post, I have gone back and recreated all four of those books. Three are part of the Lokians series, and the fourth book was Shadowman, which has been totally overhauled, and is now titled: Otherside. I mention this to show that it has been nothing short of a long and arduous journey, and I am discussing it because I am trying to show you all the possible pitfalls of publishing. The short of this: go big or go home.
What I mean is; either do not stop trying to achieve major publication, or just go the self published route. You might get lucky with an actual, independent press like Edge Publishing, Rocking Horse Publishing, or Baen, but you had better be careful. Do your research. Look at their books on their site, on Amazon, on Barnes and Noble, on iBooks. Look at their prices, if there’s an option, look inside and read some of the titles. Don’t be shy; go and track down the authors, too, and ask them how they like being published through that press.
Now, the nitty-gritty:
If you have a fan base, if you have a bangin’ title, cover, and blurb, and if your book is expertly polished, self publishing is a fantastic way to go. Not only do you have complete control—Hell, even King self publishes some titles—but you get to keep almost all of your money, except the money Amazon will steal from you. I’m not even kidding, they will steal from you ten and twelve cents at a time, and they will often not pay you for Kindle pages read through KOLL, or KULL, or KENP, or whatever the Hell it is now. That’s why I pulled my e-titles from Amazon, but Smashwords has been a paragon of self publishing.
If your book isn’t up to snuff, though, self publishing can kill your career before it begins. Basically, the thing to note is that your book must be near perfect to land a literary agent or be taken seriously by a real, indie press, and if your book is that good and well written, you can use it to just make a name for yourself by self publishing, but self publishing requires so much friggin’ work because all of the responsibility falls on you, but then if you’ve built your fan base by following the advice from these posts, and your book is stellar, and you do self publish, and you do sell, you will be approached by agents or even publishers. Of course, if you’re already successful, for what do you need them?
That’s up to you. You may need them to help you get movie options, or you may just want them to sell for you. It’s your call, but you need to consider everything before writing your novel.
Stay away from POD companies like Friesen Press or Xlibris; everything they do, you can do, or you can hire someone to do it for you, and for a much lower price than they charge. Yes, you will have to spend some money and do some serious legwork, but even if you decide to self publish you can hire someone to turn your book into a movie, you can hire artists to turn your book into a graphic novel, you might even find some indie, game developers and sweet talk them into turning your book into a game; the possibilities are there.
Avoid hybrid presses. Some of them are obvious; they charge you upfront, or they’re really just a crowdfunding platform that charges you to use their services in the hopes that enough people will pay to publish your book; utter nonsense. While I’m against crowdfunding to publish a book, you can do it on your own without using a hybrid press. There’s also a ton of information out there on how to crowdfund successfully.
It’s just my personal opinion that charging people to publish your book is wrong since you can publish for free. You’ll only need money for a cover ($6 now on Fiverr, so it should be Sixerr) and to hire an editor, but if you shop for editors, you can probably get away with spending less than $1,000, so…crowdfund if you want to; no one is putting a gun to peoples’ head and forcing them to donate, so if you’re comfortable crowdfunding, asking people to give you money so you can produce content for which you charge…go for it.
Then, there are other, hybrid presses, like Eternal Press, Caliburn, or whatever they call themselves now. They are a bit more surreptitious in their behavior. They act like a small, independent press, but their staff is crap; their artists can’t make decent covers short of Photoshopping, they know nothing of blurbs, marketing, or selling books, they won’t help you get reviews, they want you to buy your books, so they can profit, and they won’t even edit your book properly.
I even had an argument with the previous owner about how to sell books, and she told me she had a business management degree and didn’t need my opinion. Well, I’m not stupid or uneducated. I know what a business management degree is, and it has nothing to do with economics, marketing, branding, or selling, and is obviously why she ended up selling the failing business.
So, if you stay away from hybrid presses and PODs, that only leaves major publication, really. It’s just as hard to get picked up by the real, independent presses as the major houses, so you’re better off trying to land an agent, which means learning how to query, how to write a synopsis, and knowing that you need to already be successful in order to be taken seriously by an agent…so, again, you might as well go self published for your debut novel, but don’t feel pressured to, either.
It’s up to you; go big or go home. Mainstream presses will certainly do their utmost to sell your book. There is no doubt about that, but that doesn’t mean that your book will sell. It doesn’t mean that your book will be expertly polished, either; I have written extensively about how terrible mainstream editors are nowadays, but hey, even crap sells, am I right? Not to mention that you can still hire a freelance editor —and will probably have to in order to be taken seriously by an agent.
The thing to consider when going mainstream is their modus operandi. Yes, if you get picked up, they may give you a small advance; debut advances are generally $2,000, but you will not earn a dime in royalties until said press earns back their $2,000, and you generally have only six months to achieve this, and if you don’t, they’ll release your contract, and not only are you back at step one, but you’ll need a new cover, a new editor (the press will still own the cover and their rewritten version of your book), and you’ll never get another shot at mainstream publication.
On the other hand, you may sell quite well, and then they will tell you to go ahead and buy 5,000 copies of your own book in order to fake your way onto the New York Time’s Best Seller list. Yup, not even kidding, so forget that $2,000 you earned; you’re about spend ten-plus grand, and then, they’ll want you to go out gallivanting from store to store across the country, and sell your books on your dime, and you may sell…you may not sell, so it really boils down to what kind of life you want.
Perhaps, you have always dreamed of traveling the country, visiting book stores, selling and signing copies, performing readings in front of adoring fans. There’s nothing wrong with that. If that’s your dream, follow it, do absolutely everything required to achieve mainstream publication. Avoid absolutely everything that doesn’t lead you to mainstream publication. Do understand that it may take years, and years, and years after completing your novel for you to find an agent and actually get published, so again, there’s no reason not to self publish your first title, prove you can sell, and then reach for mainstream publication with your second title.
Here’s why. Assume you finish your novel today, and it’s perfect, and edited, and whatever else. You contact an agent, and since you are not supposed to contact multiple agents at once, you wait, and you wait, and you wait, but you never get a reply, so after three months, you figure you can query another agent…but they don’t reply, so you wait another three month, query another agent, and a month later, they are kind enough to tell they are not interested. It’s a hassle, so you figure you’ll send your manuscript to Baen Books, but you are not supposed to query more than one publisher at a time, so you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and a whole year goes by, and they don’t reply, so you figure it’s safe to query Rocking Horse, and after eight months, they are kind enough to let you know that they are not interested…. It’s a lot of wasted time, right? You can certainly keep writing in the meantime, and should keep writing, but if you released your debut novel on your own, during your two or three year wait period, you could be making some sales, enjoying your life as a writer, and making a name for yourself. Of course this means self publishing the first book, and writing the second book with the goal of achieving mainstream publication.
Now, do you remember the first few posts where it was stated that success means something different to different people? Do you remember where it was stated that being a successful writer is a lifestyle? Some people don’t want to parade across the country, selling books; some people just want to sit at home and write, and self publishing is great for that, but really, there is no reason to avoid trying one or the other.
If you can achieve major publication, that’s a surefire way to build a fan base, and then you can release whatever you want on your own, and keep all the money, but beware, there are some instances in some contracts where this is not allowed, so it may better to start off self publishing, and then trying the mainstream route.
Whatever you do; learn to write, build a fan base, hire an editor, and then do your research. For more information visit my Quora blogs,
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or check out my Editing Services Tab.
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You can also flip through numerous posts right here, which will help you outline a strategy for achieving long term success through the consistent release of quality content. Thanks, I’ve been great.
I initially tried my hand at writing a novel many years ago. I was about 18, in college, and still playing Dungeons and Dragons on the weekends with a great group of guys. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to write a story based on some of our adventures.
I set about the task, and three pages in, I hit a wall. I wanted my story to be true to the game, and I didn’t have all the manuals, and I certainly didn’t own all the novels, and since I was 18, that meant that the year was 2001, which is before the internet really blew up; I mean, there were certainly millions of people on the internet even back then, but I don’t think Wikipedia (shouldn’t it be Wikipaedia?) existed at the time, and I have no clue if WoC or TSR or whoever ran DnD at the time had a website, but it didn’t matter; I didn’t even have a dial-up connection; there wasn’t a need for it (this was the golden age of e-mail subscriber lists, though).
I talked to my buddies about the idea, but the more we talked, the more it seemed it was a useless endeavor. I didn’t really care too much about it either; I just thought it was going to be cool to write a book, but the fact of the matter was that my passion didn’t outweigh the obstacles, so I just let it go.
Ten years later, I had such an idea for a story I decided I was just going to go ahead and write it, or try to. I sat down and simply described the series of events, which became my very first short story: Eudora.
At that time, I had no idea how to use punctuation. I knew grammar well enough, and I’ve always maintained an abundant repertoire of words, and have always been a decent raconteur, so in the end, all I tried to do was chronicle the events of the story, and it worked. I had no plans, though, but Hell, I knew that since I completed one story, I was certainly capable of completing another; publishing stories, however, was the farthest thing from my mind.
I wrote four stories over the course of two or three months just for fun, and then I showed some friends and family, but I claimed that I had found the stories online and just thought they were neat. No one really seemed to care, until I wrote one more story. I called it: Shadowman.
There was an older gentleman I knew by the name of Jarrett Slavin (sorry if I misspelled it, Coach), who upon learning of my newfound passion, he asked to read the stories, and he really enjoyed Eudora and Shadowman, and he suggested I find a way to get published. Had it not been for him, all of my other titles would not even exist…what might have been….
Nevertheless, I was then left the daunting task of achieving publication, so I got on the internets, Googled “publishing”, found the addresses of a few publishers, and sent out my stories, of course they were all short stories, and no publisher wants those, but I found other methods of publication. I found Xlibris, a print on demand (POD) company, and of course, no sooner had I e-mailed them that I received a call, and man, oh, man was I pumped. I really thought I had just made it big league. (Big league, not bigly.)
All POD companies want is your money. They’ll take anything, and you’re responsible for your content, for your quality, but they’ll certainly charge you for reviews, trailers, covers, promotional packages, you name it; they’ll charge you, and honestly, if you have the world’s greatest book, they may actually be helpful because they can certainly help you get your book in the right hands, but my book, my four, short stories called Shadowman, were far from good, far from quality writing.
Regardless, as I spent more and more money, and then ran out of money, I kept writing, and when I finished my first, full length novel, Lokians, I started my search for publication all over again, but I knew POD was not for me. I needed someone else to do all the legwork for me, but I didn’t think it was fair that I had to pay for the legwork. I just wanted to write, so I set about the task of mailing and e-mailing traditional publishers, and even smaller presses like Edge, and no one was interested, so I did more research on what was required to achieve publication, and learned about literary agents, but when I contacted them, they never replied.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your outlook on life, I found a press, which labeled itself an independent press, Eternal Press. For all intents and purposes, everything looked good. Their books were available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, so I figured that it was a good start. By then, I knew that mainstream publishers were purposefully keeping writers out until those writers made a name for themselves, so I knew I just needed to work hard and make a name for myself through a small, independent press.
Well, initially, I submitted my manuscript, and the acquisitions editor was kind enough to tell me that while my story seemed interesting, there was a great deal of information dumped onto the reader right at the very beginning, so I went through a round of what I thought was editing, and figured out that rather than telling the reader everything I thought they should know before the story started, it might be better to allow the world to unfold throughout the story. Then, I resubmitted, and they accepted it, and man, oh, man did I think I had hit it big. An actual publisher with editors, and marketers, and everything was going to polish my book and sell it, and all I had to do was sit back and write.
Well, when the contracts came, everything seemed legit. All they had asked was that I also made an effort to market and sell the book, and I thought that was only fair; it was my book after all, and I certainly wanted to talk about it, so I made social media accounts and started telling no one (because I had not built a fan base) that my book was coming out.
Next, I had to write a blurb, and I didn’t know what that was, nor had I comprehended its importance, so I just wrote about what the story was. No one made an effort to correct me, so I thought I had nailed it. Then, I had to come up with a cover, and I am not really an artist; I’m not even a visual person, so I came up with some weird concept with a bunch of aliens and space ships, and they told me to try again because it was too flashy, too busy. Later, I realized the truth was that they didn’t actually employ artists, and I’ll get back to that later.
We settled on a cover, which I didn’t really like, but I was just so excited and so ready to start selling, I accepted. Then, we moved on to editing. The “editor” made very few comments, adjustments, and suggestions, and so again, I thought I had nailed it. I mean, if an editor doesn’t have much to say or change then the story must be near perfect, right? Well…not so much.
Finally, the release date came, and the book was finalized. I was invited to join some Yahoo groups and even participate in a live chat where I was to discuss my book with potential readers. It turned out that there were no readers, only other authors writing for the same press. That was a little disappointing, but I didn’t think anything of it because I knew the publisher was certainly going to sell my book. Selling books is their job, and if they don’t sell, they can’t stay in business, right?
Wrong again; they made their money by enticing their writers to purchase copies of their own books, just like a POD company, and then it became my job to go out and find places to set up and sell to people, but no one let me do such a thing. Barnes and Noble didn’t allow it. Books-a-Million didn’t allow it. There are no local bookstores where I live, so my best bet was a friend’s comic book store, which felt really awkward because his customers where there to buy comic books, and out of the hundred copies of my terribly written book, I sold three on my first attempt, and none on my second attempt.
In the meantime, my e-books were priced at nearly seven dollars. Who is going to spend seven dollars on an unheard of book by an unknown author when they can spend nine or ten dollars on Harry Potter? The answer? No one. In the three years that I was published through Eternal Press, and with the four books that I released through them, I may have earned as much as forty dollars. That meant that Eternal Press also earned about forty dollars off my sales, and about five hundred dollars off my purchasing my own, print copies. That meant that if every writer, and there were hundreds of us, each bought five hundred dollars worth of books each year, Eternal Press made some decent money, but the writers only ever spent money.
Consider that if I had sold all of my print copies at twenty dollars that’s only $2,000, and that sounds great, but then you have to subtract the $500 spent on purchasing the copies, and I think it was more than that, but we’ll keep the numbers round. That leaves a $1,500 profit, which is still nice, but then you have to factor in time, travel, gas, food, the posters I had made up, the business cards, and in the end, had I sold all of my copies, all one hundred in one day, I may have cleared $800. That’s still not terrible, but without the fan base to be able to move all hundred copies over the course of a day, a week, or even a month, that $800 not only dwindles from continuously traveling and setting up, but it starts looking worse and worse. Had I sold all hundred copies over the course of a year, which I didn’t, that’s still $800, and probably less, over the course of a year, hardly a success story, and as I stated, I didn’t sell more than three copies.
I kicked, I cried, I screamed, I complained, I begged; I wanted my prices lowered, so that the e-books would sell. I wanted to submit updated versions of my books, too, versions that didn’t have common errors and formatting errors; yeah, formatting errors. How retarded was Eternal Press? They weren’t even capable enough to format their books properly, and in the end, there was nothing to be done. The product was what the product was, and I had the option of peddling my crap and disappointing readers, or sitting idly by until the contracts expired; I mean, Eternal Press wasn’t selling anything.
During that time, I wrote a great deal more for two reasons. For one, I just really enjoyed it, and two, I felt a need to vindicate myself, or perhaps apologize to readers for having released dreck. Then, of course, I had to figure out what kind of publication I was going to try next; I certainly wasn’t going to go through Eternal Press again.
I spoke to a few, other, smaller presses, but I didn’t like what they had to say; they wanted money up front, they didn’t want to make the books available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, or anywhere apart from their site, or they wanted to keep too much off the top, so I went back through my old, short stories, cleaned ‘em up, and published free to Smashwords, entered those stories into their premium catalog, and bang! Those stories made it onto Barnes and Noble…and iBooks…and Kobo…and Nook, and you name it.
I also wrote fanfiction and published it to FanFiction.net, and with my newly released short stories, which were free, I started to build a fan base, but my titles with Eternal Press just rotted away, and I could not, in good faith, promote those titles because they were not the best of me. Finally, I hired a few editors for my new, full-length titles.
One editor, after paying for services, told me to re-write my book, and then resubmit, for another fee, of course. I did not hire them again. The second editor just re-wrote my whole book from start to finish in their own voice with their own views. I mean, it was a totally different book with different characters and different interactions at that point. I did not keep any of those changes. Then, I hired a real editor, Chuck Sambuchino, and he taught me how to edit my story for readers.
That book was released under the title The Dragon of Time, Gods and Dragons, and it has gone on to do quite well. Through CreateSpace, I made print copies available, and they are much cheaper to sell, and purchase for my own uses, than the print copies released by Eternal Press or Xlibris. I also e-published, for free, to Amazon, which I then pulled for reasons that are not yet pertinent, and since I had hired my own cover artist for five dollars through Fiverr.com, I had a banging cover, a cover that blew the covers made by Eternal Press to dust.
I also uploaded the book to Smashwords, which meant it made it to all, online retailers, and get this, I got to keep almost all of the money earned from sales, and other people can also sell my book via an affiliate link, so we all make money. I must admit, though, that I did try to use Gods and Dragons to land an agent and achieve major publication, and while numerous agents replied, and with admiration, no one felt it was “marketable”, but that isn’t accurate; the truth is that they didn’t think I had enough fans, which meant the mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch it because, remember, they want your fans, not the other way around.
This is precisely why I want you to build a fan base before writing your debut novel. Then, you can prove to the agent that you’re the real deal!
At any rate, Eternal Press wound up being purchased by another company and became Caliburn Press. No one told me for the longest time, but then an old friend from Eternal Press happened to ask me how I liked the new owners, so I went and found out that my books weren’t even available on Caliburn’s website, but they were still available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, so I got in touch with Caliburn over the discrepancy to learn that my contracts had been “lost in transition”. After some arguing, I simply stated that if that was the case, and there were no copies of my contracts, then the rights were mine, and I demanded all my titles pulled.
At this stage, while writing this very post, I have gone back and recreated all four of those books. Three are part of the Lokians series, and the fourth book was Shadowman, which has been totally overhauled, and is now titled: Otherside. I mention this to show that it has been nothing short of a long and arduous journey, and I am discussing it because I am trying to show you all the possible pitfalls of publishing. The short of this: go big or go home.
What I mean is; either do not stop trying to achieve major publication, or just go the self published route. You might get lucky with an actual, independent press like Edge Publishing, Rocking Horse Publishing, or Baen, but you had better be careful. Do your research. Look at their books on their site, on Amazon, on Barnes and Noble, on iBooks. Look at their prices, if there’s an option, look inside and read some of the titles. Don’t be shy; go and track down the authors, too, and ask them how they like being published through that press.
Now, the nitty-gritty:
If you have a fan base, if you have a bangin’ title, cover, and blurb, and if your book is expertly polished, self publishing is a fantastic way to go. Not only do you have complete control—Hell, even King self publishes some titles—but you get to keep almost all of your money, except the money Amazon will steal from you. I’m not even kidding, they will steal from you ten and twelve cents at a time, and they will often not pay you for Kindle pages read through KOLL, or KULL, or KENP, or whatever the Hell it is now. That’s why I pulled my e-titles from Amazon, but Smashwords has been a paragon of self publishing.
If your book isn’t up to snuff, though, self publishing can kill your career before it begins. Basically, the thing to note is that your book must be near perfect to land a literary agent or be taken seriously by a real, indie press, and if your book is that good and well written, you can use it to just make a name for yourself by self publishing, but self publishing requires so much friggin’ work because all of the responsibility falls on you, but then if you’ve built your fan base by following the advice from these posts, and your book is stellar, and you do self publish, and you do sell, you will be approached by agents or even publishers. Of course, if you’re already successful, for what do you need them?
That’s up to you. You may need them to help you get movie options, or you may just want them to sell for you. It’s your call, but you need to consider everything before writing your novel.
Stay away from POD companies like Friesen Press or Xlibris; everything they do, you can do, or you can hire someone to do it for you, and for a much lower price than they charge. Yes, you will have to spend some money and do some serious legwork, but even if you decide to self publish you can hire someone to turn your book into a movie, you can hire artists to turn your book into a graphic novel, you might even find some indie, game developers and sweet talk them into turning your book into a game; the possibilities are there.
Avoid hybrid presses. Some of them are obvious; they charge you upfront, or they’re really just a crowdfunding platform that charges you to use their services in the hopes that enough people will pay to publish your book; utter nonsense. While I’m against crowdfunding to publish a book, you can do it on your own without using a hybrid press. There’s also a ton of information out there on how to crowdfund successfully.
It’s just my personal opinion that charging people to publish your book is wrong since you can publish for free. You’ll only need money for a cover ($6 now on Fiverr, so it should be Sixerr) and to hire an editor, but if you shop for editors, you can probably get away with spending less than $1,000, so…crowdfund if you want to; no one is putting a gun to peoples’ head and forcing them to donate, so if you’re comfortable crowdfunding, asking people to give you money so you can produce content for which you charge…go for it.
Then, there are other, hybrid presses, like Eternal Press, Caliburn, or whatever they call themselves now. They are a bit more surreptitious in their behavior. They act like a small, independent press, but their staff is crap; their artists can’t make decent covers short of Photoshopping, they know nothing of blurbs, marketing, or selling books, they won’t help you get reviews, they want you to buy your books, so they can profit, and they won’t even edit your book properly.
I even had an argument with the previous owner about how to sell books, and she told me she had a business management degree and didn’t need my opinion. Well, I’m not stupid or uneducated. I know what a business management degree is, and it has nothing to do with economics, marketing, branding, or selling, and is obviously why she ended up selling the failing business.
So, if you stay away from hybrid presses and PODs, that only leaves major publication, really. It’s just as hard to get picked up by the real, independent presses as the major houses, so you’re better off trying to land an agent, which means learning how to query, how to write a synopsis, and knowing that you need to already be successful in order to be taken seriously by an agent…so, again, you might as well go self published for your debut novel, but don’t feel pressured to, either.
It’s up to you; go big or go home. Mainstream presses will certainly do their utmost to sell your book. There is no doubt about that, but that doesn’t mean that your book will sell. It doesn’t mean that your book will be expertly polished, either; I have written extensively about how terrible mainstream editors are nowadays, but hey, even crap sells, am I right? Not to mention that you can still hire a freelance editor —and will probably have to in order to be taken seriously by an agent.
The thing to consider when going mainstream is their modus operandi. Yes, if you get picked up, they may give you a small advance; debut advances are generally $2,000, but you will not earn a dime in royalties until said press earns back their $2,000, and you generally have only six months to achieve this, and if you don’t, they’ll release your contract, and not only are you back at step one, but you’ll need a new cover, a new editor (the press will still own the cover and their rewritten version of your book), and you’ll never get another shot at mainstream publication.
On the other hand, you may sell quite well, and then they will tell you to go ahead and buy 5,000 copies of your own book in order to fake your way onto the New York Time’s Best Seller list. Yup, not even kidding, so forget that $2,000 you earned; you’re about spend ten-plus grand, and then, they’ll want you to go out gallivanting from store to store across the country, and sell your books on your dime, and you may sell…you may not sell, so it really boils down to what kind of life you want.
Perhaps, you have always dreamed of traveling the country, visiting book stores, selling and signing copies, performing readings in front of adoring fans. There’s nothing wrong with that. If that’s your dream, follow it, do absolutely everything required to achieve mainstream publication. Avoid absolutely everything that doesn’t lead you to mainstream publication. Do understand that it may take years, and years, and years after completing your novel for you to find an agent and actually get published, so again, there’s no reason not to self publish your first title, prove you can sell, and then reach for mainstream publication with your second title.
Here’s why. Assume you finish your novel today, and it’s perfect, and edited, and whatever else. You contact an agent, and since you are not supposed to contact multiple agents at once, you wait, and you wait, and you wait, but you never get a reply, so after three months, you figure you can query another agent…but they don’t reply, so you wait another three month, query another agent, and a month later, they are kind enough to tell they are not interested. It’s a hassle, so you figure you’ll send your manuscript to Baen Books, but you are not supposed to query more than one publisher at a time, so you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and a whole year goes by, and they don’t reply, so you figure it’s safe to query Rocking Horse, and after eight months, they are kind enough to let you know that they are not interested…. It’s a lot of wasted time, right? You can certainly keep writing in the meantime, and should keep writing, but if you released your debut novel on your own, during your two or three year wait period, you could be making some sales, enjoying your life as a writer, and making a name for yourself. Of course this means self publishing the first book, and writing the second book with the goal of achieving mainstream publication.
Now, do you remember the first few posts where it was stated that success means something different to different people? Do you remember where it was stated that being a successful writer is a lifestyle? Some people don’t want to parade across the country, selling books; some people just want to sit at home and write, and self publishing is great for that, but really, there is no reason to avoid trying one or the other.
If you can achieve major publication, that’s a surefire way to build a fan base, and then you can release whatever you want on your own, and keep all the money, but beware, there are some instances in some contracts where this is not allowed, so it may better to start off self publishing, and then trying the mainstream route.
Whatever you do; learn to write, build a fan base, hire an editor, and then do your research. For more information visit my Quora blogs,
https://www.quora.com/profile/Aaron-D...
or check out my Editing Services Tab.
http://www.storiesbydennis.com/?page_...
You can also flip through numerous posts right here, which will help you outline a strategy for achieving long term success through the consistent release of quality content. Thanks, I’ve been great.
Audiobooks
As a self published author, it's always been a real hassle to create audiobooks, but recently, Smashwords has begun to work with a company called Findaway Voices.
A few weeks ago I began converting Cayneian: A Man from Blood Cayneian: A Man from Blood and the process has been super simple and a lot of fun.
Fortunately, Findaway Voices doesn't only hook me up with great narrators, but on completion of the audio files, they also produce and distribute the audiobook, so Cayneian is not only available in e-book and print formats, but will also be available in audio format and through all retailers.
Until it is available in audiobook format, you can snag the e-copy for $4.99 US
A man stands resolved. Dysart, clan Bloodhammer, has returned to the island of Volgunther to purge it of the evil called Salamandrus. He has given his tongue, so that he may speak no contracts. He has given his manhood, so that he may not know his power as a man. He has given his mind, so that no God may take pity upon him.
Wielding the forbidden power of Sang Daemanus, Dysart imbibes the blood of Daemons to cast his spells, to grow his strength, to fuel his powers, but will he be able to stave off the bloodlust before the evils upon the island claim him?
Check it out!
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
A few weeks ago I began converting Cayneian: A Man from Blood Cayneian: A Man from Blood and the process has been super simple and a lot of fun.
Fortunately, Findaway Voices doesn't only hook me up with great narrators, but on completion of the audio files, they also produce and distribute the audiobook, so Cayneian is not only available in e-book and print formats, but will also be available in audio format and through all retailers.
Until it is available in audiobook format, you can snag the e-copy for $4.99 US
A man stands resolved. Dysart, clan Bloodhammer, has returned to the island of Volgunther to purge it of the evil called Salamandrus. He has given his tongue, so that he may speak no contracts. He has given his manhood, so that he may not know his power as a man. He has given his mind, so that no God may take pity upon him.
Wielding the forbidden power of Sang Daemanus, Dysart imbibes the blood of Daemons to cast his spells, to grow his strength, to fuel his powers, but will he be able to stave off the bloodlust before the evils upon the island claim him?
Check it out!
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
Cayneian audiobook now available
A man stands resolved. Dysart, clan Bloodhammer, has returned to the island of Volgunther to purge it of the evil called Salamandrus. He has given his tongue, so that he may speak no contracts. He has given his manhood, so that he may not know his power as a man. He has given his mind, so that no God may take pity upon him.
Wielding the forbidden power of Sang Daemanus, Dysart imbibes the blood of Daemons to cast his spells, to grow his strength, to fuel his powers, but will he be able to stave off the bloodlust before the evils upon the island claim him?
Check out this Kirkus review on Cayneian, A Man from Blood:
This series opener sees a warrior determined to free an island from a Daemon’s grasp.
Dysart of clan Bloodhammer has lost his sloop and is now washed ashore on the island of Volgunther. He’s immediately
set upon by savages, but thankfully a man named Talbot saves Dysart with his bow and arrows. At his nearby cabin,
Talbot learns that his guest has no tongue. Then Dysart draws a rune in hog’s blood on his throat, which allows him to
speak. He explains that his people, the Cayne, once inhabited the island. They also woke a Daemon called Salamandrus,
making a pact with the entity for power that involved the ritual of Sang Daemanus. Later, they sealed the Daemon away,
but “instead of ending their service to Salamandrus, they departed from this place, hoping to retain their power.” Dysart
has come to end his people’s accord and make Volgunther a hospitable island once more. After obtaining an axe and
other supplies from Talbot, he travels east toward a settlement. He saves a pyromancer named Randall from wolf men
and drinks their blood to receive heightened senses and healing abilities. But Dysart concludes that his rune for speech
will fade without the esper oil derived from a plant somewhere on the island. Randall joins him, and they head for Etmire
Abbey, where they encounter the Order of the Cross. Dysart will need every ally he can find as he battles through
monstrous hordes toward Salamandrus’ lair in Castle Golvundehr.
Dennis (War and Glory, 2017, etc.) squeezes all the gore he can from his muscular imagination to enhance his novel,
which recalls the viscera-strewn adventures of fantasy icons like Conan and Elric. Readers learn early on about Dysart’s
magic: “Animal blood is effective, if weak. Human blood is potent, if unsavory…but Daemon’s blood makes us
unstoppable.” This results in a marathon of grisly dispatches—encounters with frog men, murderous plants, zombies,
and worse—that propel the hero but also fuel his addiction to power. While the plot is somewhat linear, the gruesome
premise shines blackly throughout. Dysart not only needs blood, but he’s also traded his tongue, his testicles (“that we
might not realize our own power as humans”), and his mind as an initiate of Sang Daemanus. Fighting at his side are
characters like Pattius, a thief; Marcus, a knight; and Reman, a young orphan. The author often fleshes out these warriors
just enough to draw from readers a meaningful wince as he sacrifices them to Dysart’s cause. A dreadful ambience
hovers even in quieter moments, as in the line “Only darkened hills loomed in the distance. Everything else was flat
grassland molded by gusts of wind.” The dialogue during combat scenes is appropriately maniacal (“Blast you, croakers!
Fall to the wrath of Randall!”), yet Dysart is capable of speaking beautifully. In cautioning Talbot, whose family is dead,
he says: “Hold their memory dearly, and do not rush to see them.” Though the violence grows monotonous, a finale
bristling with invention redeems the work.
A bloodbath that should impress readers of the grimmest fantasy tales.
This review is attributed to “Kirkus Reviews”, and you can follow the link to my review on their site.
For now, the Cayneian audiobook is available through a couple of retailers. More retailers will be making the audiobook available over the next few weeks.
Buy Cayneian on Google Play
Buy Cayneian on Scribd
Buy Cayneian on Nook Audiobooks
You can still download the ebook for free until January 1st, 2019 via Smashwords
Finally, I have 30 giveaway codes for the new audiobook! If you already have an Authors Direct account, the book will simply appear instantly in your library, ready to play. If you don’t have an account, visit authors-direct.com/redeem to enter your giveaway Code and email address. They’ll automatically create an account and send a link to download the Authors Direct app, where the audiobook will be waiting in your library.
Since I only have 30 giveaway codes, I can only give them to the first 30 people who email me, asking for a code, so don’t be shy! Email me right now dennis@storiesbydennis.com and ask for a Cayneian giveaway code.
Wielding the forbidden power of Sang Daemanus, Dysart imbibes the blood of Daemons to cast his spells, to grow his strength, to fuel his powers, but will he be able to stave off the bloodlust before the evils upon the island claim him?
Check out this Kirkus review on Cayneian, A Man from Blood:
This series opener sees a warrior determined to free an island from a Daemon’s grasp.
Dysart of clan Bloodhammer has lost his sloop and is now washed ashore on the island of Volgunther. He’s immediately
set upon by savages, but thankfully a man named Talbot saves Dysart with his bow and arrows. At his nearby cabin,
Talbot learns that his guest has no tongue. Then Dysart draws a rune in hog’s blood on his throat, which allows him to
speak. He explains that his people, the Cayne, once inhabited the island. They also woke a Daemon called Salamandrus,
making a pact with the entity for power that involved the ritual of Sang Daemanus. Later, they sealed the Daemon away,
but “instead of ending their service to Salamandrus, they departed from this place, hoping to retain their power.” Dysart
has come to end his people’s accord and make Volgunther a hospitable island once more. After obtaining an axe and
other supplies from Talbot, he travels east toward a settlement. He saves a pyromancer named Randall from wolf men
and drinks their blood to receive heightened senses and healing abilities. But Dysart concludes that his rune for speech
will fade without the esper oil derived from a plant somewhere on the island. Randall joins him, and they head for Etmire
Abbey, where they encounter the Order of the Cross. Dysart will need every ally he can find as he battles through
monstrous hordes toward Salamandrus’ lair in Castle Golvundehr.
Dennis (War and Glory, 2017, etc.) squeezes all the gore he can from his muscular imagination to enhance his novel,
which recalls the viscera-strewn adventures of fantasy icons like Conan and Elric. Readers learn early on about Dysart’s
magic: “Animal blood is effective, if weak. Human blood is potent, if unsavory…but Daemon’s blood makes us
unstoppable.” This results in a marathon of grisly dispatches—encounters with frog men, murderous plants, zombies,
and worse—that propel the hero but also fuel his addiction to power. While the plot is somewhat linear, the gruesome
premise shines blackly throughout. Dysart not only needs blood, but he’s also traded his tongue, his testicles (“that we
might not realize our own power as humans”), and his mind as an initiate of Sang Daemanus. Fighting at his side are
characters like Pattius, a thief; Marcus, a knight; and Reman, a young orphan. The author often fleshes out these warriors
just enough to draw from readers a meaningful wince as he sacrifices them to Dysart’s cause. A dreadful ambience
hovers even in quieter moments, as in the line “Only darkened hills loomed in the distance. Everything else was flat
grassland molded by gusts of wind.” The dialogue during combat scenes is appropriately maniacal (“Blast you, croakers!
Fall to the wrath of Randall!”), yet Dysart is capable of speaking beautifully. In cautioning Talbot, whose family is dead,
he says: “Hold their memory dearly, and do not rush to see them.” Though the violence grows monotonous, a finale
bristling with invention redeems the work.
A bloodbath that should impress readers of the grimmest fantasy tales.
This review is attributed to “Kirkus Reviews”, and you can follow the link to my review on their site.
For now, the Cayneian audiobook is available through a couple of retailers. More retailers will be making the audiobook available over the next few weeks.
Buy Cayneian on Google Play
Buy Cayneian on Scribd
Buy Cayneian on Nook Audiobooks
You can still download the ebook for free until January 1st, 2019 via Smashwords
Finally, I have 30 giveaway codes for the new audiobook! If you already have an Authors Direct account, the book will simply appear instantly in your library, ready to play. If you don’t have an account, visit authors-direct.com/redeem to enter your giveaway Code and email address. They’ll automatically create an account and send a link to download the Authors Direct app, where the audiobook will be waiting in your library.
Since I only have 30 giveaway codes, I can only give them to the first 30 people who email me, asking for a code, so don’t be shy! Email me right now dennis@storiesbydennis.com and ask for a Cayneian giveaway code.
