Leon’s Comments (group member since Aug 12, 2014)

Leon’s comments from the Authors' Helpline group.

I asked the bot to check the first paragraph of my book Rituals for spelling and grammer. It made a few changes, but nothing substantial.
Here is the text
The monk held the lamp high, walking along a passage through the catacombs, between walls of bones, the final, holy resting place of millions of humans, their bones stacked neatly against the walls. Outside, full-moon was approaching. It had been the monk’s turn to perform the ritual to strengthen the seal on this one of the portals known as the Doors of the Dead. The ritual was complicated, the monk was tired, yet even so he noticed something was wrong.

However, just for fun I then asked it to change to text to sound as if Terry Prattchet had written it. This is what it came up with. This bot is scary, I worry that if writers start doing this kind of thing, writing as an art may die.

(Me) Can you re-write that so that is sounds as if Terry Prattchet wrote it?

(Bot) Sure, I'll give it a shot! Here's a re-write with a Terry Pratchett-inspired style:

"The monk held aloft his flickering lamp as he made his way through the catacombs, a labyrinthine resting place for millions of holy bones, neatly stacked in their final repose. Beyond the walls, the full moon was drawing nigh, casting eerie shadows in its wake. It was the monk's duty to perform the ritual that would strengthen the seal on the Door of the Dead, but the task was daunting, and weariness crept into his bones. Yet, even in his exhaustion, the monk detected a sense of unease - something was amiss, and he knew he must act with haste."

//
So, having done that, I asked the bot to go a bit further.
(Me) What about changing the original text to sound like JK Rowling wrote it?


(Bot) Sure, here's a re-write of the original text with a JK Rowling-inspired style:
"The monk held the lamp aloft, the passage through the catacombs stretching endlessly before him, the walls of bones a sacred resting place for millions of souls. Neatly stacked, the bones lent a solemn air to the surroundings. As the full moon loomed outside, it was the monk's turn to perform the complicated ritual to strengthen the seal on the portal, one of the Doors of the Dead. Despite his weariness, the monk was vigilant, and something caught his attention. An uneasy feeling pervaded him, an inkling that something was amiss. He knew he must be on high alert."
I hope that re-write captures a bit of the magical and suspenseful tone that JK Rowling is known for. Let me know if you need anything else!

//
If the bot can be so good, I really fear for our art, it is now much too easy to write anything and have a bot such as this turn it into a work of art.
What do you people think?

Leon wrote: "If English is not your first language but you still write in English, you might have become as frustrated as I have with the language. I make many mistakes, simply because I do not always know the ..."

Now all I have to do is figure out which bits are American English and which bits are British English, and then decide which one to choose, and then try to stick to one. Sigh.

I hope you guys have been using the lockdown to get your heads down and finish some writing.
I finished the first rewrite of my latest novel, now I am waiting for my proofreader to finish reading it so I can start polishing it.
Massive task, but it brought my publishing date ahead by about a year.

Serenity
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SGSVV0Q

To give the first posters something to share, I will post two of my books.
:)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N664WIH
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1980863237?...

Sharing is Caring!
This is the place where we share each others work to our friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.
The rule is that you are only allowed to post an advert for one of your books here once you have shared the links in two other posts by other authors. (Please do not use the Facebook and Twitter buttons on the page, that creates a link that refers right back to Goodreads)
Once you have shared the links in two adverts by other authors, you may post an advert for your book, website or whatever. When sharing, try to share those books that have the least shares, not just the ones you like, even if it's not a genre you would normally read. In that way, everybody benefits.
Rules
Each book or webpage may only be posted once every 24 hours.
No adult content!
Normal group rules will apply.
I cannot be here constantly to moderate, so if you have a problem, send me an email to leondekock@hotmail.com
When you have shared an advert, tell us so by replying 'Shared' to the thread.
You must share the links to the other author's works publicly.
Only links to books and author websites are allowed.

Message sent

I have just found a great Facebook group called Author's Circle
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fb...
The idea of the group is that you must share two of the adverts posted to the group publicly, then you are allowed to post an add. In this way, your book is shared by other authors.

Is your website even alive?
My website is a couple of years old, but the only way I have ever been able to see if the website has any views was by the ‘like’ facebook feature built into it. After five years, I can proudly say that I have had three likes. 3. After 5 years!
Well that wasn’t working for me, because I was sure that my website was great, I mean, I coded the thing myself.
So I decided to get crafty, I enlisted the help of a totally free tool named ‘Google Analytics’. This tool tells you how often your website gets accessed, which pages are checked, how long visitors are staying and, very important for me, where they are from.
This tool was a major breakthrough for me because it showed me, after a mere two weeks, that my website was in fact getting zero views. Yes, my website was dead in the water, drifting in the ocean miles away from anything alive.
I’ve since made more changes, but not so much to the website itself. The changes were made to how I get people to go to this website, and this has worked well. If it will improve sales remains to be seen, but I’ve had days where up to 45 people view my website. That is forty five more than zero.
So the long and short of this post is: If you don’t know if your website is alive, get some tool to find out, you might need to do a bit of work there!

One of the weird things about books is how they get dated to an era.
Imagine, you innocently, and without much thought, use a word in your book, and without realising it you have dated your book to a specific era. I made this mistake in Hordes, when I made my characters watch a video tape.
Yep, you got it, a video tape, which is something a lot of kids have never even heard about. Fortunately, I could rectify that mistake by a bit of editing and uploading new versions to the online sales stores, but it’s not always that easy. Stephen King, for example, had characters using what was obviously a landline telephone. Even JK Rowling had a landline telephone in the Dursley’s house to which poor Ronald Weasly made a bit of a messy call, and that scene would be almost impossible to rewrite to get rid of the telephone and pull the book out of that forgotten era.
I don’t think it’s quite possible to get rid of that problem. How many books have been written about cars, and the fact that they need petrol?
Sometimes, of course, these things can be used to great effect, such as when you want to set your book in an era, and you don’t have cars, but horse drawn carriages instead. That makes it a bit easier, but it does add the danger that you could accidentally add in things from a wrong, much later, era. Imagine, your 1915 character setting the alarm on his wristwatch.
And this, really, is just another thing that I will have to add to my list of things to check next time I’m editing one of my manuscripts.

If English is not your first language but you still write in English, you might have become as frustrated as I have with the language. I make many mistakes, simply because I do not always know the differences between correct English and my own home language.
Well, the good news is that I have found what promises to be the start of the solution to the problem in the form of a book.
The book is called ‘Teach Yourself Correct English’.
So far, it is one of the first books to get down to the good stuff without losing me in a mire of technical language terms. (Although there are some!).
If you know of similar books, please leave a note here, us non-English people appreciate all the help we can get.
Leon

I've just read a good article which I feel is worth sharing, detailling 9 things that indie authors can do if their book sales are not what they would like it to be.
Check it out at https://www.amarketingexpert.com/help...

Some good advice there.

A couple of people who I interact with have had remarks to make about my writing. As I know I haven't targeted them in my advertising, I wondered how they came to know that I write, and then I found the answer.
I included both my web addresses as part of the signature of my email. This means that every time I send an email, the recipient sees the addresses. Whether they follow it or not I cannot help, but it sure is a good way of getting everybody to notice your website.
I now want to expand it to include a small picture, like I've seen in many emails, but I want his picture professionally done, as many of the emails that reach me have such large pictures that it is blatantly and advert, and that kind of thing puts me off, and I'm sure it will put other people off as well. I rather want something small but tasteful.
Better get my artist working on it!
If you haven't got a signature with a link to your website yet, I suggest you get one ASAP!

Usually, when I run a free giveaway on Amazon Kindle, I let everybody know about it, as far and wide as I can, using facebook, goodreads and various other social media outlets.
So I decided it was time for an experiment. I ran a free book giveaway for a weekend, but this time I did not tell anybody. The result?
I got just less than half the downloads I usually get. To put this in perspective, last time I ran a giveaway I got thirty six (36) downloads. I also got one book sale and 260 pages read on KNP.
This time, I got 15 downloads. No book sales etc yet, but that might come.
Seeing as my downloads and sales are steadily increasing, I think that the result proves that social media does work.
But which one works best? I plan on continuing the experiment by advertising free book giveaways on specific media. So I'll use Facebook once to advertise such a giveaway, then another outlet, etc, to try and find which one brings the best results.

To be an author means to be self-employed, that is a simple inescapable truth. That means you are a business owner, and you have to run your business as any other business owner runs his business. You are, of course, self-employed, and you probably don’t have any employees working for you.

That leaves you to do the product creation, the research and development, marketing, sales, bookkeeping, after sales service, advertising, wait wait stop I’m a Writer I didn’t sign up for all of this!

Well, the simple truth is that unless you can afford to enlist the services of people to do all of that for you, you will have to do it all yourself.

Not all of that need to take up a lot of time. Break it down, and you will find that things like bookkeeping only takes a few hours of your time a month. Doing backups of your work and keeping your office running smoothly will help your writing in the long run.

Product creation and the associated research is of course the fun part, it is what we are here for.

The part that most of us hate is Marketing and Advertising. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, that is the part that most business owners hate. It costs money, and the results are often not directly tangible. But for any business to be successful, people have to know about the business, and what services it offers. Get out there and target your market, let them know that you exist.

What all this is trying to say is that being professional about your career as a writer will take you much further than simply trying to wing it. Spend an hour or two every day running your writing business, buy a book and learn about business, join an Internet community or do whatever it takes, but be professional.

In the end, it will pay off.

OK, here is the first of the character essays I wrote,
The old man
What a quarrelsome old man he was. When he had been drinking, which was often, he would disagree with anything you, the cat and the neighbour said just because he could. Also, nobody could ever say he was not a hard worker, but that came with its own difficulties, for no matter what he was asked to do, he would do in such a way as to infuriate even the most mild-mannered of people. If he mowed the lawn it would be so short as to be dead, he would be having his first beer at around the time he took the mower out of the store and the lawnmower would be broken by the time he was done.
His fingers were huge and callused, he was formidably strong for his age and he refused to let things lie. He also rarely got sick, while a lifetime of drinking seemed to have only marginally slowed him down.
As all old folk are fond of doing, he loved to sit in front of the television in his bedroom in the afternoons, where he would talk to those people on screen as if they could hear every word he said. A never ending litany and grumbling would emanate from his bedroom, instructing actors to ‘Take that,’ or telling himself ‘What a punch that was!’ Rising from the television only occasionally to make coffee, he would tell all and sundry in the house about what he had just seen, and what a mad bunch of people those on the telly were.
But if his work and television was a pain to those around him, it was as nothing to his religion. A devout Jehovah’s Witness, he would get up and be out of the house every morning at dawn, no matter what the season, or what the weather. Out he would go, to taxi ranks and train stations, shopping malls and anywhere where people would congregate, and there he would preach the Word. From this he would return at around eleven in the morning in his clapped-out little car, have a coffee and then, in all likelihood, have to fix something on said car.
Of course, we all have something that irks us, and for him it came in the form of his ex wife. She would phone him every day, and every day she would demand money off him. He, living off a state pension, could ill afford her all too many requests, yet almost every day he could be heard quarrelling with her over the phone, and at least once a week he would get grumbling into his car to deposit some money into her bank account.
Not that he had much want for money, as he was well cared for by his family. It was thus that the money he did not give to his wife, and any money he could make from piece work around the neighbourhood, was all spent on the one thing that made his life worth living, an ice cold beer.

Unfortunately reviews will probably only come with time and sales. There are miles of threads here on goodreads about getting reviews, but I'm afraid they all say the same thing, that reviews are hard to come by.
Reviews can also be a double edged knife, as you might get an unfavourable review, which may do a lot of harm.
I have five books out there, and a total of two reviews. This all since 2011, which goes to show how hard it is to get reviews.
But ask yourself this, have you bought an indie book and then left a favourible review afterwards? If you haven't it might be something to try, because it will at least give you an insight into the mind of someone who has just read an indie book. (Even if that mind is your own).
Good luck with your books!

Madeline, that must be one of the hardest questions to answer.
Although I have made use of character worksheets, I find that the worksheets cover the physical appearance of characters more than their actual character.
You have given me a good idea though, and it might help you to create characters that your readers will believe in.
I am going to write a short essay, let's say about 500 words, on at least ten people I know. I won't use people that I know well, because I think I use characteristics of these people in my characters in any way. Instead I'll write about people that are only acquaintences. The essay will only do a short physical description of the person, but will be more about how I perceive this person. What does he/she like/dislike? Why do I like/dislike this person? Is he/she honest/dishonest? Etc, etc. I will try to make this person as individual as I can. Hopefully this will help me in the future, to create highly individual characters, each with traits that readers can latch onto.

Apart from that, I do think it's important that characters should be consistant, unless they have hidden characteristics that you are hiding from your readers to reveal later. (Or if the person is consistently inconsistant, like some polititions).

Here's a nice article I found on why books don't sell, and what to do about it.

https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/w...

How often do you name things around you after objects or people in books?

Those that follow my Facebook page will know that I woke up yesterday to the sight of a huge rain spider against the ceiling above my bed. The spider was promptly named Aragog, after the monstrous spider in the Harry Potter series.

Similarly, friends of mine recently adopted a little black cat which they had to nurse after the kitten’s mother rejected him. He’s as dark as the night, and was named Nox, which is the spell that switches off the light of a wizard’s wand.

Another one which I have heard over and over again in the past few years in Binky, the name given to any horse if the owner is a Terry Pratchett fan.

Share your pet names derived from books, and tell us what characteristics made these names so endearing to you.