Mind42.com - Collaborative mind mapping in your browser. Annie Dillard, "Notes For Young Writers" After I left Chapel Hill, I thought of many things I wish I'd said to you. Here are some of them. Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow. A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. (Incidentally, he had been an illiterate little Arab boy without any schooling whatever, who had hitchhiked somewhere once when he was thirteen or fourteen.
If you have a choice, live at least a year in very different parts of the country. Never, ever, get yourself into a situation where you have nothing to do but write and read. Read for pleasure. You'll have time to read after college. Don't worry about what you do the first year after college. Learn grammar. Check the spelling; proofread. What Radiohead's 'Name Your Price' Download Experiment Means for Filmmakers. When Radiohead dropped the curtain on their "name your own price" experiment, many media commentators and music industry execs were quick to pronounce it a failure. For those who aren't Radiohead fans, or indeed, never heard about it, the experiment involved the band making available their latest album, "In Rainbows" available as a download from their web site. Fans were asked to specify the price they were prepared to pay to get the album - a price from nothing up to whatever the individual felt it was worth.
According to a report by research company comScore - disputed by Radiohead themselves, but in the absence of official figures, comScore are sticking to their guns - less than 40% of people who downloaded the album actually paid for it; most - over 60% - chose the to take it for free. Of those who did pay for it, the bulk opted to pay less than USD $4, although there were reports of some overzealous (or overgenerous?) Fans donating up to $1000 to the Radiohead cause. Novel Writing Tips & Fundamentals – Storyfix.com. Kristen Lamb's Blog. Kristen Lamb — We are Not Alone... Untitled. The Elements of Awe. Who spreads stories and why? Sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania have been studying data provided by The New York Times showing which of the paper’s articles are the most often e-mailed.
Their conclusions have some relevance for fiction writers because they reveal what it is about stories that probably generate word of mouth. This month and next I’m going to discuss these elements and show how you can apply them in your novels. The first element is one that will be obvious to most of us, so let’s cover it right away. Positive articles are e-mailed more often than negative ones. No big surprise, like I said. The next element identified by researchers is a little harder to appropriate. Stop. Not so fast. What’s the strongest emotion that your protagonist feels: anger, disgust, shame, betrayal, terror, frustration, elation, arousal, love?
Here’s the point: You can’t expect your reader to feel what your protagonist feels just because they feel it. P.S. Livia Blackburne: Author Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong, but John Locke's Figured it Out. Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments on author blogging and whether or not it’s a good use of time. If you haven't already, you might want to drop by. As a quick recap, my beef with author blogging is that writers rarely keep target audience in mind.
They’re writing fiction for kids, thriller lovers, or [insert some other reader profile], but they turn around and blog exclusively for writers. Why do writers do this? My guess is because it's hard to define a target audience in fiction, and even harder to figure out how to reach that audience with blog entries. Which was why I was intrigued to hear about a generalizable, “target audience” focused approach to blogging for fiction writers.
Locke shares several strategies for launching e-books via social media in his ebook How I Sold 1 Million Kindle Books in Five Months , but what got me was his focus on target audience. Series. I'll attempt similar workup of my own target audience here: How do I know this about my target audience? Carolyn Jewel - Author of Historical and Paranormal Romance. The "New Author Platform" - What you need to know. The author platform isn’t what it used to be. A new definition is emerging, based on the reality that in the 21st century, readers don’t depend on the Today Show or the feature pages of the New York Times to find a new book to read. Instead, they’re looking online and expecting to find a more direct path to a favorite or yet-to-be-discovered author.
The tired old model By definition, the old model of the author platform was the writer’s public visibility and reputation that the publisher’s publicity department used to promote and sell the book. During the many years I signed up authors as an acquiring editor at Simon & Schuster, Bantam, Wiley and elsewhere, I did indeed look hard at the writer’s platform, and favored authors with high gloss visibility in the national media, big buzz for recent accomplishments, an Ivy League affiliation with maybe a Nobel Prize thrown in for good measure. The new approach It’s still about visibility, but today’s approach has changed. Examples 1. 2. 3. 4.
On Thud and Blunder. Written by Poul Anderson [This essay was published some years ago and is very difficult to find now, which is why I asked Poul to let me publish it on the Web. He points out that a few things have changed since he wrote it — the essay mentions the Soviet Union, for example, but does not mention navigation satellites — and that he has had some arguments from a few readers about one detail or another.
But “there isn’t time now to go into all that,” he says, “and anyway, I never claimed infallibility. It seems to me that most of the points made are still valid.” It seems to me, too, that they are valid, and that some of them at least have a wider application than just to heroic fantasy. With one stroke of his fifty-pound sword, Gnorts the Barbarian lopped off the head of Nialliv the Wizard. Exaggerated? Today’s rising popularity of heroic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery as it is also called, is certainly a Good Thing for those of us who enjoy it. Not so! Or he might not. Lester Dent's Master Plot Formula - Moorcock's Miscellany.
Write an adventure novel in three days, the Michael Moorcock way. How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock | Wet Asphalt. This article is the first part of a series about one of my favorite writers, Michael Moorcock, which will culminate in an interview with the man himself. In the early days of Michael Moorcock's 50-plus-years career, when he was living paycheck-to-paycheck, he wrote a whole slew of action-adventure sword-and-sorcery novels very, very quickly, including his most famous books about the tortured anti-hero Elric.
In 1992, he published a collection of interviews conducted by Colin Greenland called Michael Moorcock: Death is No Obstacle, in which he discusses his writing method. In the first chapter, "Six Days to Save the World", he says those early novels were written in about "three to ten days" each, and outlines exactly how one accomplishes such fast writing. This is not the best way to write every novel, or even most novels. So all of the quotes below are from just the first chapter of the book. To be clear: This is not my advice. How to Write a Book in Three Days. E-book Endeavors » Blog Archive » Pros and Cons of Writing a Series. Posted by Lindsay | Posted in E-publishing | Posted on 18-07-2011 If you’re an author and you started out thinking you’d publish traditionally (i.e. find an agent who would then find you a huge multi-book contract with a major publisher, thus ensuring you could quit your day job and write full time for the rest of your life), you probably heard it was a bad idea to write a series.
Because, the conventional wisdom goes, if you don’t sell the first one, how on earth are you going to sell the second, third, etc.? Well, you aren’t. So they say don’t work on a series until you’re sure you have a publisher. (I know all about this wisdom, and it’s the reason I wrote Encrypted after I wrote The Emperor’s Edge — they take place in the same world, but, except for one continent-crossing assassin who appears in both, they have different characters.) If you’ve decided to forgo the traditional publishing route, however, there’s no reason to worry about what agents and publishers might want.
Pros Cons. Write to Done | Unmissable articles on writing. Moving on. Linchpin will be the last book I publish in a traditional way. One of the poxes on an author's otherwise blessed life is people who ask, "what's your next book," even if some of them haven't read the last one. (Jeff did, of course). To answer your question, this book is my next book. I think the ideas in Linchpin are my life's work, and I'm going to figure out the best way to spread those ideas, in whatever form they take. I also have some new, smaller projects in the works, and no doubt some bigger ones around the corner.
[PS the best analysis of this whole thing, particularly the punchline is by Mitch.] A little background: For ten years or so, beginning in 1986, I was a book packager. It took a year or so, but I finally figured out that my customer wasn't the reader or the book buyer, it was the publisher. When I decided to become focused on being an author, the logical thing to do was to sell to that same group of people.
Authors need publishers because they need a customer. To Self-Publish or Not to Self-Publish. Ever have that feeling that somewhere inside you is a great book, just waiting to happen? Well, this is one of those “good news, bad news” situations. On the good end of things, it has never been easier to publish; on the bad side, you might be foolish enough to go it on your own. Yes, You Can Write a Book I share the following suggestions with you, for whatever they’re worth, while recognizing that my approach to this process is likely different from than the one you’ll take. From the number of requests I’ve had for such information though, I am left with the feeling that this may prove helpful.
After writing a book, I’ve come to feel that doing so is somewhat like running a marathon, and that it maintains a special kind of status in our society. That, in my mind, is the entire challenge with a book. In spite of such observations (which are probably quite accurate) many still want to give it a whirl. About 35 Blog Posts (not) Why I Wrote and Self-Published My Book It Isn’t All Equal. 21, Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway, ca. 1939. Photograph by Lloyd Arnold You go to the races? Yes, occasionally. Then you read the Racing Form ... There you have the true art of fiction. —Conversation in a Madrid café, May 1954 Ernest Hemingway writes in the bedroom of his house in the Havana suburb of San Francisco de Paula.
The bedroom is on the ground floor and connects with the main room of the house. The room is divided into two alcoves by a pair of chest-high bookcases that stand out into the room at right angles from opposite walls. It is on the top of one of these cluttered bookcases—the one against the wall by the east window and three feet or so from his bed—that Hemingway has his “work desk”—a square foot of cramped area hemmed in by books on one side and on the other by a newspaper-covered heap of papers, manuscripts, and pamphlets. A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. Are these hours during the actual process of writing pleasurable? Very. Of course. No. Let’s talk: Agents as Publishers. – Laura Pauling. The purpose of these posts is not to advise writers whether to go traditional or indie. I am for writers being informed. We can’t afford to hide our heads in the publishing sands and expect to make decisions on our career.
Some facts: If you keep the rights then you are self published.If your agent keeps the rights then your agent is your publisher.If your agent helps you self publish, do you trust him/her to always put your interests and career first? Be informed. That’s the key. So let’s look at what different industry professionals have to say about this. Mary Kole wrote about The Agent’s Role in Today’s Digital Book World at the digital book world blog. In response, Dean Wesley Smith posted: The New World of Publishing: Agents and The Future. And my response to these articles is to point you in this direction. And here’s Agent Scott Eagan with his post: I heard agents are no longer needed. And if you’re interested here are a few other posts: So, that’s a lot to think about. The Trials And Tribulations Of The Modern Day Writer.
I’m not here to predict the future for you penmonkeys. Were I to predict such a future, I would suggest that in the next 10 years, we will all be hunted down by self-aware Verbo-Bots and Publispiders, crass automatons who seek to harvest our brains for the words they contain. The Publispiders pin us to the wall while the Verbo-Bots stomp up and trepan our skulls with a whirring drill.
We smell our hair and bone burning. When the hole is complete, the robot penetrates our brain-space with some surgical tubing, then milks our minds of our delicate fictions. Then, just to be an asshole, the Publispider plants its robot babies in our colons. You can see why I’m not allowed to predict the future. What I can do, however, is ruminate frothily on the rigors of the present, which is exactly what I’ll do now. Let us then examine the state of affairs for the Penmonkeys Of Today. Write More, Word Slave *crack of lash* Advances are down. This makes the writer both honeybee and Great White Shark. Agreed? Author's advice. 7 Platforms Changing the Future of Publishing. By Kirstin Butler Cutting out the middleman, or what the Nobel Peace Prize has to do with harnessing the potential of tablets. Depending on whom you ask, these are either the best or the worst of times for the written word. As with every other branch of traditional media, the Internet has pushed the publishing industry to a critical inflection point, something we’ve previously discussed.
Disrupting the mainstream marketplaces for journalism, literature, and the fundamental conventions of reading and writing themselves, here are seven startups that promise to reshape the way we create and consume ideas. Byliner, whose beautifully designed site officially launched last week, is easily the most ambitious of the initiatives featured here. The startup’s first original offering, Three Cups of Deceit, tells the story of the now-disgraced Nobel Peace Prize nominee and bestselling author Greg Mortenson. Bringing a crowdfunded model to books, the U.K. Read our full feature on 40K Books here. Mastering Film » Jazz, Interviews, and Penmanship: Five Tips for Successful Interviews. Photo by Marc Fuyà I’ve talked a lot about questions in both of my previous posts: the last (and most important) question you should ask in an interview, and the ongoing questions that should be with you throughout the development, production, and post of the work you’re making.
Now, it’s time to talk a bit about answers. Here are the five key principles that guide me through the interview process, be it a five-minute interview, or a five-day one. 1.) The camera is there. It’s ludicrous to try to convince your interview subject that the camera isn’t there. When I published the Multi-Hyphenate blogazine last year, I was fortunate enough to have the incredible Frederick Marx (maker of “Hoop Dreams” and the astonishing “Journey From Zanskar”) pen numerous posts for me. You’d do well to remember this. 2.) I was lucky in my musical training – I went to Berklee, and had a healthy heaping of jazz theory on top of my classical training. 3.) 4.) 5.) Related posts: Writing naked (nakeder than Orwell) StoryStarter - Telling your story in 7 steps. A Modest Proposal For Publishers and Authors.
Book Marketing and Author Platform-Building Tips From Jonathan Fields. Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors | NeuroTribes. Phrase Dictionary. Book Mentor. Bones: Screenplay Skeletons – The Script Lab. How to Write Great Fiction.
Is Penzu completely free? | General | Penzu Help | Penzu Help. Write a Book, Build Your Business : The World. Mystery Man on Film. Alan Rinzler. Why You Shouldn't Write Often. Why Stephen King Is Full of Sh*t. Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2007/2008 - Those in the Running. The 22 Best Writing Tips Ever : Writing Forward. 11 Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts With Interviews. Interviews, Writers, Quotes, Fiction, Poetry - Paris Review. Ten rules for writing fiction.