consistent income writing fiction

Can I Make a Consistent Income Writing Fiction?

by • Business and money

I’ve seen this question crop up repeatedly. Usually, from a new writer entering a group, and it’s usually accompanied by a genre (such as “Can I make big money writing erotica?”).

What set me to answering this question here was reading one author’s answer. I won’t name the person, but I have to admit that as I read, my jaw dropped lower and lower.

Paraphrased, it ran like this: Certainly! I know many writers who make thousands of dollars a month easily. There followed the usual litany of advice, all of which is good: produce books often, be on social media, learn about your genre and good business practices, etc.

Now, the writer is certainly successful, but in my experience there were a couple of things that needed clarifying.

First, there’s no such thing as making money easily. Sure, some writers can. Let’s take Nora Roberts. In fact, she’s the prime example of what it takes to be a successful writer / businesswoman.

Roberts writes efficiently. She writes several books a year. She writes in the same genre and in a series.

Can anyone do that? Sure, if you’re a Type A personality with the energy to write a lot of words per day, don’t have serious health problems, and has a spouse who supports you (or live alone). But first and foremost, you have to have that Type A personality.

Not everyone has that.

The answering author doesn’t realize that.

The answering author also didn’t realize that even Type A authors run into hiccups that reduces their income.

Two Cases of Income Drops

For example, on his podcast, Mark Dawson mentioned that when Amazon altered its algorithms, his monthly income dropped by 40 percent.

Think about that: 40 percent.

That’s a lot of moola.

Second, on a recent Mark Dawson podcast, Suzan Tisdale told about the time Amazon changed the basis on which it paid for Kindle Unlimited reads from “reading 10 percent of a book” to “pages read,” her income collapsed.

She called it “a sphincter prolapsing drop in income.”

Both authors found ways to bounce back, and their incomes are, if anything, higher than ever. But it sure wasn’t pleasant while it was happening.

Other Reasons for Income Drops

There are more ways that authors have lost income from their writing. They can be struck with a health crisis, either their own or their family members. That interferes with their production.

I know of at least two authors, each with two best-selling books, who for reasons unknown have been unable to put out a third book. [UPDATE: One of them just dropped book #3, so hurray!].

What Should You Do?

The connection between working hard, publishing frequently, and advertising efficiently with income is sound, but never take it for granted. What you earn last month won’t mean that you’ll earn the same this month, even if you’re doing exactly the same thing that you did last month.

Remember that you are in the same position as a freelancer. Your income will go up. Your income will go down. Bad things will happen.

So plan for it. Establish how much you need every month to pay your bills and support your family. Bank the extra. Don’t buy that castle in Spain! Treat your profession like any free-lancer whose income could drop, and prepare for it.

If you prepare for trouble that doesn’t come, you’ll be in an even better position to meet it when it does.

What 50 Words a Day Did for Me

by • Writing Advice

I started writing about five years ago (has it really been that long?). I had always told myself stories, especially as I was trying to sleep, but I never wrote anything down. I don’t know why. I just didn’t. I certainly rewrote in my head the novels that I didn’t like, the movies that went the wrong way, and created new lives for characters I wanted to know more about.

But I never wrote anything down. I was married to a writer; I wasn’t. So I didn’t write on paper a single word of the novels I dictated to myself or anything about the worlds I created. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

[He, by the way, never once told me I wasn’t a writer. He didn’t know I told myself stories.]

It’s irritating now to look back on all those years of not writing anything down. If I had, I could imagine writing this from my luxurious, warm beach house in Kauai, instead of my little desk in the coldest corner of my living room in my 64-degree house. Fingerless gloves help, as do my secondhand Jack Skellington wristies, but not enough. I’ve lived in Hawai’i and no matter how carefully I decorated my house in central Pennsylvania to resemble a tropical paradise, it’s not Hawai’i.

But there’s no point in regretting the past. We can only start where we are.

Where I started was when my sister sent me a secondhand laptop. Since the kids were mostly grown, and I had time during the day when my husband was writing, I gradually started writing. I wrote blogposts for my husband’s website that became my first nonfiction book: Suburban Stockade. He needed content and we were living the lifestyle so I wrote them. I wrote blogposts that described my discovery and development of a new kind of quilt (NotQuilts). Those posts will also be turned into a book. I’ve since written plenty of other stuff as well. Nonfiction is easy.

While I was doing this, I also started writing fiction. I wrote in fits and starts, as the muse dictated, as I had the time and the inclination. I didn’t finish anything but I sure wrote a lot of words. Over the last few years, I must have written a million or more words; developing a few worlds, stories set in those worlds, vignettes and scenes and snippets and bits and pieces.

There was only one problem: I didn’t finish anything.

I was extremely inconsistent in how I wrote. I would write a paragraph or two, or I’d write a few thousand words or something in between. I’d take days off, that turned into weeks while I waited for inspiration to appear.

Let me tell you, the muse didn’t arrive promptly at my house every day at 10 a.m. I wrote like a terrier in a field full of mice and rabbits and tall grass. I was constantly distracted, constantly going off on a tangent, and constantly starting something new! exciting! distracting! unconnected to anything else!

I have to look upon all those words as practice. All those practice fictional words also taught me that nonfiction was much, much easier for me to write. I can churn out a few thousand words on keeping water out of your basement in a flash.

I got into the very bad writing habit of being inconsistent. I took a few online writing courses which did help. They would have helped more if I hadn’t used them as an excuse to avoid the tedious work of writing my own fiction. Did you know you can teach yourself the habit of never finishing what you started? It’s true. You can.

Joining CPRW

Then I joined the Central Pennsylvania Romance Writers. Soon after I joined, the group ran its “fifty words a day for fifty days” competition. Fifty words a day? I can do fifty words. I did not join the contest, but I decided to act as if I had. Gradually, very gradually, I started writing a bit every day, except on Sunday. Fifty words a day became my goal to shoot for. If I made my goal, I tried to keep writing.

I started to write more.

More than that, I started writing consistently. This was a huge step for me. I started trying to finish what I had already started instead of going down yet another rabbit hole.

Here’s another thing I learned: The belief pushed by some self-helpers that you can learn a new habit in 21 days? I can’t. I need weeks and weeks of steady, regular practice before a habit can set itself. Even then, I still have to remind myself to do it.

On the other hand, bad habits like eating all the ice cream or playing solitaire for hours on end are easy habits to learn because they’re fun and involve zero self-discipline. I can learn a bad habit in about an hour.

But after awhile, I began to accept that those 50 days were a good, solid start to writing every day, whether I felt like it or not.

Stacking Goals

Once I was fairly consistent at fifty words, I set a secondary goal of writing 385 words per day. Hitting this mark for 26 days (every day of the month except Sunday) equals 10,000 words. Ten thousand words a month equals 120,000 words in a year. That’s a large novel, two shorter novels or a whole lot of short stories.

I chose to only count “new” words, no editing or rewriting of any kind. My fifty words have to be new, a continuation of what I am already working on. Otherwise, I can endlessly rewrite a passage and never make any forward progress. Refusing to count “edited” words forces me to add new ones and get closer to “the end.”

For the same reason, I chose to not count any nonfiction or blogpost words. I can write plenty on soil management or constructing Roman shades, but that doesn’t get the novel finished. I’m not counting this post towards my word count for the day. If I did, I wouldn’t add more words to The White Elephant of Panschin. I would count my day as done and it’s not.

I do not count exactly. I always round down. If I write 59 words, I count it as 50. As with budgeting, I overestimate my costs and underestimate my income to arrive at a happy ending. With writing, I underestimate how much I write and overestimate how much I need. Then, at the end, I’ve got plenty of words to work with. It’s easier for me to tighten than it is to add.

Eventually, another “fifty words a day for fifty days” challenge appeared on the CPRW calendar. Again, I did not officially participate. But I wrote my words as if I did. I rarely wrote less than 385 words a day, other than on Sunday.

I’m now working towards a new goal: 1,000 words a day. 1,000 words a day for a year (skipping Sundays) is 313,000 words. That’s three novels! I rarely make this goal but I do usually get 500, 600, even 800 words so I’m getting closer. The key, as always, is consistency.

It’s all very well to write 1,000 words here and there and nothing in between. But those random words don’t necessarily add up to a finished piece of writing. Fifty words a day, every single day, will add up to a finished piece of writing. Fifty words a day is such a small amount, yet if you are consistent, you’ll end up with more words than if you wrote only as the muse appeared.

The muse still doesn’t show up at my house at 10am sharp. Sometimes she shows up, but more often, she doesn’t. Interestingly, when I go back and reread what I wrote, I can’t tell which days she appeared. My words all blend together, equally smooth and inspired.

As a direct result of “fifty words,” I finished and self-published my first novel. I’m plowing ahead steadily on my second novel. After it is finished, I have notes on the third one in the series. “Fifty words” is helping me to go back to my million or so words of glurge and world building and convert them into finished writing.

I’ve been a member of CPRW for about a year now. The “fifty words a day for fifty days” challenge is coming up again. This year, I will participate officially and submit my word count. If you don’t participate in “fifty words” officially, you may still want to participate on your own. “Fifty words” helped me to be more consistent and productive. It can help you too.

Basic Interior Book Design

by • Book Design

If you’re an indie author, you’ve got a lot of control over how your books look. That means, when it comes to interior book design, you can do anything you want!

If you are being published by a traditional press, you won’t have as much control. Look over your contract carefully and see what you can ask for. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

How your books look is important. A well-designed book is more visually appealing. It’s easier to read. It provides all the information a reader could want, including who you, the author, are along with ways to reach you and lists of your books.

But also, the interior book design reflects your book. It reinforces the message you want the reader to get.

You should always have print versions of your books available along with digital versions. You can’t sell cat romances at the cat show if you don’t have books in hand. Your ebooks should duplicate your trade paperbacks as much as possible, for the sake of continuity and a uniform look.

Below, we discuss various ways your book can be designed. We focus on the interior, but we also give some thought to the front and back covers, too. You won’t need to do everything that’s listed. Only you will know best. In the end, more decorative trade paperbacks look better and give more value for the money, encouraging the reader to shell out $15 for a book. More attractive ebooks that flow smoothly do the same. Your book advertises you and all your other books.

In short, make your book the best book it can be.

Let’s get started!

EXTERIOR

COORDINATING COVER DESIGN FOR A SERIES, including the spine and the back cover. Use similar colors throughout a series, plus matching, genre-appropriate fonts. If your indie company has a colophon, always place it on the spine. If you don’t have a colophon, create one. Your company colophon adds a coordinating look to the spines of your different series and may be the only design element the covers of your wildly different series will have.

Each series should also have a distinctive logo that goes on the cover of each book in the series.

BACK COVERS should include the synopsis, blurbs from authors higher up on the food chain, and the website address. If you have space, add cover pictures of other titles in the series. Don’t list the price, in case you have to change it later. Leave room for your ISBN if you use one. If you’re using a template from KDP or Ingram Spark, it will show you where the bar code will be printed. Make sure your design doesn’t cover it.

A SERIES-APPROPRIATE Title. Each title should be unique, descriptive, and if possible, not repeating ten thousand other titles. One-word titles don’t tell the reader much. Yes, big-name authors can get away with calling their titles “Desperation,” “Lust,” and “Mystery” (although I think they’re losing the chance to attract new readers to them with a distinctive title). Plus, good titles ping search engines.

ENDPAPERS, are the artwork that goes on the inside front and back covers, plus their opposite pages. It can be a design that reflects the book’s contents, a family tree, or a map. Some printers won’t let you do this (like KDP), but if your printer does, think about it. if they are available from your printer.

FORWARD MATTER

book plate example
Peschel Press’ standard book plate.

A BOOK PLATE in the front of each book, tied to the series. This is a lovely extra. Look for copyright-free artwork (Dover Publications specializes in that) or draw your own image. A book plate can be elaborate or just a simple frame with ‘This book belongs to’ inside of it. Fonts and designs should be genre-appropriate.

A LIST OF THE AUTHOR’S OTHER BOOKS. Provide a list of titles and the series they belong to at the front of the book. In years to come, this can be updated. The list doesn’t contain the book that is being published (I mean, this book, the book you’re working on.)

Half title page
An example of a half-title page.
A HALF-TITLE Page. This is a page containing just the title of the book. It is usually rendered in the same fashion as on the title page.

A COPYRIGHT Page. Each publisher has its own style of copyright. It is governed by law and tradition.

According to the law (the Copyright Act of 1989), no copyright notice needs to appear. If a book is published, it is considered copyrighted. So why do publishers do it? Paranoia, for one. Force of habit, for another. Also, it prevents anyone infringing on your copyright to claim later that they didn’t know it was copyrighted.

We recommend declaring that the work is copyrighted. It can be as simple as:

(c)2000 by [Author Name]. All rights reserved.

If you want to be more formal, look to a book such as the Chicago Manual of Style. This volume is a stylebook published by the University of Chicago Press, a major university publisher. Many publishing houses have adopted the CMS as their own stylebook, maybe with some modifications. It’s formal and rigid, and provides a lot of answers to legal and copyediting questions, so if you really want guidance, this is about as authoritative as you can find. You can’t go wrong following its dictates. (In fact, the copyright line above is taken from it, see section 1.17.)

The copyright page should have credit for the cover artwork.

title interior page design
The title page, with room for an autograph.
A TITLE PAGE. This should have the title, the subtitle, the author name, the name of anyone else that should belong there (such as the editor), the publishing house, and its location. It should also have room for an autograph. This is one of the neat things you can do as a self-publisher that a publishing house might not care to do.

A DEDICATION Page.

MAPS as appropriate.

A LIST OF CHARACTERS, each with a one or two sentence description at the beginning of the book, prior to the text. Agatha Christie has a character list like this in many of her mysteries.

A TABLE OF CONTENTS. Give your chapters titles rather than chapter one, chapter ten, etc. You’re providing the reader with an idea of the story to come, luring them in. This is especially valuable for ebooks. Readers can’t riffle through the pages as easily, but if they open the table of contents page and see a list of chapter titles, they’ll be able to find their way into the story. For non-fiction, consider using detailed, Victorian-style subtitles that describe in a few works what that chapter covers. For example, in Chapter 12 of the “Illustrated Life and Crimes of William Palmer,” published by Peschel Press, you’ll see the following:

“Some Suspected Cases of Poisoning — An Illegitimate Child — Mrs. Thornton (Palmer’s Mother-in-Law) — Bladon, the Sporting Bagman — Beau Bentley — The Chickens and the Pills — The Young Man Named Bly.”

This gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect, right?

A LIST OF PHOTOS, ARTWORK, ILLUSTRATIONS, CHARTS, FAMILY TREES, AND TABLES. If you’ve got lots of these, a list is needed.

A CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS, if you’ve got a century-spanning epic series. This can help the reader remember where the book in their hand fits into your timeline.

A SETTING OPENING, at the beginning of the book, much shorter than a prologue, set aside in fancy type if you think your series would benefit from scene setting.

INTERESTING or AMUSING QUOTES THAT ENHANCE THE NOVEL, but whose meaning may not be clear to the reader until after they’ve read the book. These can be on the dedication page or can be placed at the beginning of a chapter, after the chapter title.

A DEDICATION to your supportive spouse and family without whom you couldn’t have written this book. Or without whom, you would have written the book a lot faster.

OTHER THINGS THAT MIGHT BE NEEDED: Epigraph, foreword, preface, acknowledgements, introduction, and prologue. These tend to be seen more often in scholarly nonfiction works. Your red-hot romance won’t need them.

BOOK INTERIORS

The text should be in a legible TYPE FONT, and it should be SIZE 11 or larger. This only applies to trade paperbacks. Tiny type discourages readers who have eyesight problems. However, large-print is larger than you need. In an ebook, readers can easily change the type size.

INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS, if you want to pay for them and they seem needed.

A BORDER DESIGN AT THE TOP OF EACH PAGE is a nice flourish in the print version. Use a design that is series-appropriate and use it for each book in the series. An ebook won’t let you do this.

A DROP CAP at the beginning of each chapter, in a font suitable for the type of book. Your font can be romantic, space-age, noir, Victorian, etc. There are thousands to choose from. After the drop cap, consider putting the first half of the line in a Small Caps font style. It adds a nice decorative touch. Ebooks aren’t nearly as flexible as print books, so you might have to omit that step.

PAGE NUMBERS, BOOK TITLE or CHAPTER TITLE, and AUTHOR’S NAME in some kind of regular design, identical for each book in a series. This can be at the top of the page or the bottom as needed, to balance the design elements. Non-fiction might get the chapter title or section name. Again, ebooks won’t be as flexible.

DINGBATS OR FLEURONS TO SEPARATE SECTIONS OF TEXT within a chapter OR a design line such as a row of grass tops. Use a series-appropriate one. They should be different for each series. Ebooks won’t let you do as much a print book.

OPTIONAL MATTER

Below are several suggestions for ways to make your book stand out.

LOCATION INDICATORS AT THE START OF EACH CHAPTER. If your novel ranges all over the galaxy, you could assign a symbol to the start of each chapter indicating where the action takes place. Remember to define your symbols on an art page at the front of the book. The reader can refer back to this subtle design element to figure out where the action is taking place.

OR

LOCATION CAN BE SPELLED OUT: i.e., A coffee shop in the third-worst slum in Azmoff. This works better in ebooks than a symbol would.

In addition, you can use A TIME INDICATOR, i.e., the year, The Fall Equinox, or a weekday morning at ten a.m., if this seems appropriate.

If the book has GROUPINGS OF CHAPTERS, DEMARCATE THEM WITH AN ART PAGE, something as basic as a fancy box with a title in it like “Second Shift” to lead off the next set of chapters. Use the same fancy box for each group of chapters; only the title within the fancy box will change.

A SPEAKER’S INDICATOR SYMBOL if the voice of the narrator changes. If you’ve got multiple narrators, identifying them somehow would be helpful. Don’t make your reader guess who’s talking. Let them know.

BACK MATTER

A GLOSSARY OF UNUSUAL WORDS OR CONCEPTS at the back of the book. This is especially useful in fantasy novels.

AN EXCERPT FROM THE NEXT BOOK IN THE SERIES. Remember that the end of the book is supposed to sell the next book. One way to do that is provide the first chapter of the next book in the series, whetting the reader’s appetite to buy more of your books.

AN AUTHOR NOTE: This is the chance for you, the author, to say something personal about the book. Most people won’t read it, but for those who do, it is a chance to personally communicate something to the reader, thus giving the illusion of intimacy.

Every book needs a HOW TO REACH ME section. List your website address, any other social media sites, how to sign up for the newsletter, and the P.O. box address for those who write letters, and where your books are available.

A LEAVE A REVIEW REQUEST. Ask “If you liked the book, to leave a review at Amazon.com.” Thank the reader for helping other readers discover the book, via a positive review. Positive reviews encourage sales.

ACKNOWLEDGE BOOK DESIGNERS, COVER ARTISTS, EDITORS, KINDLEIZERS, BETA READERS, and anyone else who might be important. People do apparently read these.

AN AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY, with as much or little detail as seems appropriate. This is separate from the Author’s note. An AUTHOR PHOTO goes in this section.

A BOOK CATALOG listing all your other books with their cover images. In an ebook, the cover images can be live links. If you’ve got multiple, clashing series under different pen-names, put them here rather than confuse the reader by listing all your disparate titles under your different pen-names in the title list that goes at the front of your book.

Other pieces of back matter include: epilogue, afterward, conclusion, appendixes, notes, bibliography, works cited, and an INDEX. These items normally only show up in scholarly nonfiction, but if that’s what you write, you’ll need to include them.

Links for Feb. 11, 2019: Jane Friedman on Pinterest, and Learning about Book Covers

by • Writing Advice Links

Jane Friedman published this guest post by Christina McDonald on starting and growing an email newsletter. It has some good advice for beginners, but I’d be wary about giving away books and using Facebook to boost your posts.

What can you learn from a video discussing every Marvel movie poster? It can be a great introduction into learning how to design a dynamic book cover. Even if you’re working with a cover designer, explaining what you want will put you closer to getting a smashing cover.

Speaking of covers, BookBub has 12 Questions you should ask a book cover designer you want to hire.

See how other writers are killing it on Facebook and Pinterest. The website Social Media Just for Writers offers 14 Facebook Pages for Authors to Review as well as 20 Pinterest Accounts to Follow for Writers.

What can you learn? That Anne Lamott includes her event schedule out to May. That Mark Dawson offers videos as well as free books )on the lefthand side of the page). Nick Stephenson uses his banner to direct readers to his sign-up button. Lots of ideas to steal to improve your look.

curated advice links banner

Links for Dec. 24, 2018: Podcast Guests, Amazon Reviewers

by • Writing Advice Links

podcast guest

How to be a Good Podcast Guest contains some great ideas. I especially endorse rehearsing a week ahead of time to make sure the tech bugs are worked out.

This might not make it into the “Writers Gone Wild” sequel, but only because there’s too many stories ahead of it. “Poet” Ailey O’Toole caught plagiarizing, well, everyone.

Amy Collins at The Book Designer has discovered it’s much harder to find Amazon reviewers these days. But it’s not impossible, and here’s how she does it. Bonus: I found a new frontier for getting my face up on the Zon.

For the new year, why not improve the look of your Facebook page?

Charging clueless artist fees for public domain photos wasn’t making Alamy co-founder Mike Fischer enough money, so he’s slicing another 10 percent off photographers’ commission and pocketing the savings.

How to Inadvertently Get Your Website on the Google Front Page

by • Website Advice

With its near-monopoly power, the Google front page is the holy land for your website. Get your website there, and you’ll snag most of the people who are looking for what you have to offer.

So how can you position your website so it shows up there? By helping Google answer a question.

In my case, it was “where can I find book festivals in the mid-Atlantic area”?

As a result, when I typed into Google’s search box “mid-Atlantic book festivals,” I got this:

google front page

This is called an Answer Box. As the name implies, it provides the answer to a very specific question. You can’t apply for it. You can’t ask Google to turn your post into an answer box. They make the decision.

I didn’t intend to do that. Although I know about Search Engine Optimization and the importance of getting my pages high up on search results, I’m not an expert at it.

So achieving this result is kinda like going up against the Shaq in the finals and hitting nothing but air. It was beginner’s luck, and as the game wears on, the only ass that’s going to be handed about will be mine.

But this is also the case of making your own luck through preparation and opportunity, and that is a lesson I can share. Because I have been learning SEO techniques, and because with every post I try my best to use them, I got lucky with this particular page.

So let me break down the components of this win and see what we can learn from it.

1. I Learned About Keywords

Understanding keywords is vital to selling books (or anything) online. Amazon uses them to display your books to customers. Search engines use them to sort information and display them as results. The Facebook group 20Booksto50K asks members to list keywords at the top of their posts to make searching easier.

In short, a keyword describes the object, whether a post, a product, a photo, a meme; in short, anything you’re putting up online. It can be one word. It can be a phrase. In the case of the Amazon Kindle, when you’re setting up the publication of your ebook, where in the seven boxes Amazon provides to list your keywords, you can use phrases that don’t relate to each other, so long as they all relate to the book.

Example: For my collection of Mark Twain / Sherlock Holmes pastiches, I could use in a single keyword box “San Francisco London New York detective pastiche.” In other words, you can fill each keyword box with as many words as Amazon will let you cram in there. I think the limit is 50 characters. So they may call it a keyword, but a more accurate description would be keyphrase

In the case of my book festival post, my keyphrase was “mid-Atlantic book festivals.” And I used it in conjunction with #2.

2. I Use the Yoast SEO Plug-In

Since I have a WordPress blog, I used the Yoast SEO plug-in designed to enhance by site’s SEO powers. Yoast looks over my shoulder and advises me on how to write my post so that Google and other search engines are happy.

It uses a simple red-yellow-green traffic light to score my post for SEO juice. I type in my keyphrase, write the snippet that summarizes the contents of the post. Yoast counts how many times I use the keyphrase and gives me a green light when it’s satisfied.

For example, here’s the current status of this post, as of this sentence I’m writing:

yoast plugin post screen
All systems go!

Yoast SEO has more superpowers tucked away behind a paywall, and I plan on getting it when I have the funds. But this free basic version has already given me a leg up on the competition.

3. I Use the Keyphrase Judiciously

Thanks to Yoast, I have this down to an easy-to-remember procedure.

1. Come up with the keyphrase. It must be appropriate for the material and sound like what someone would type into a search engine.
2. Make sure it’s in the title, the url, and the first paragraph. Try not to make it sound like something a toddler would say.

That’s hard. The keyphrase for this post is “google front page.” Not “google’s front page.” Virtually no one would type that in. But they’d type in “google front page,” so I fiddled with the language until it sounds only a little awkward, not a whole lotta awkward.

(SEO rules also frown on “stop words,” which are words not related to the subject at hand, such as “the” and “and”. “Your website on Google’s front page” is an accurate keyphrase, but search engines seem to choke on the words “your” and “on” and the apostrophed Google.)

4. Use a Detailed Keyphrase with Little Competition

Here’s where I struck SEO gold. “Book festivals” is a much more competitive keyphrase than “mid-Atlantic book festivals.” The more detailed the keyphrase, the greater likelihood your post will rise to the top.

While I wish the page would rise for “book festivals,” there’s a lot of competition for that spot.

5. Organize the Material So Google Can Use It

This means I used a simple list, sorted by states. Each festival was identified by city, title, date, and a URL linking it to the organizer’s page. In a way, I made Google’s job easier by presenting it to them in a way they can quickly use.

Big-Picture Takeaway: If you want someone else’s help, do their job for them. If you’re sending out press releases, write them so that a reporter can cut and paste some of the information easily. If you’re advising someone how to do something — add page numbers in Word 2018 — write it in simple steps and walk them through the procedure.

Yes, it takes time and effort, but if you make doing their job easier, chances are they’ll accept the help and admire you for being so empathetic and helpful.

Isn’t This a Waste of Time?

As I’m writing this, when I’m not writing my latest book, I wonder “what’s the point?” And it may be that you are thinking that, too.

That’s all right. In fact, you may be right.

It all depends on your marketing strategy. If you have a website, you want people to find it. Chances are, that won’t require much in the way of SEO. If you have a unique name and unique book titles, Google should find you with no trouble.

But you should optimize your pages for SEO if you’re going to put up more. If you plan on blogging regularly, you want to align the subject of your posts with your books’ content. If you write in a particular genre, you can talk about your fellow authors and books that impress you. If your books are about a particular subject, posts about them will show off your knowledge and improve your credibility.

Since Career Indie Author is aimed at authors who want to build their business, writing about marketing and advertising will draw readers to the site.

Learning SEO is not that difficult. But you’ll find that the techniques that drive it will prove useful in other parts of your author business, whether your picking keywords for your ebooks, writing book descriptions and catalog copy, or streamlining your brand.

(If you want to learn more about Answer Boxes and how to optimize your post so that Google will pick you, reading this post from Search Engine Journal or this longer explanation from Moz.)

several ounce fillets

Hang On To Your Hyphens When Hyphenating Compound Modifiers

by • Grammar Gone Wild

Which is better: an ounce of a steak fillet, or several six-ounce fillets?

If that gets your mouth watering, I’ll satisfy your appetite in a moment. But first, let’s talk about grammar.

Grammar is a series of rules that teach us how to write with clarity. But there are rules and there are rules. Ending a sentence with a preposition is not a grammar rule, even though there are pendants who think it is. It is not.

Then there are the rules that are arguable. Language changes. New words are added, and become more familiar as time goes by.

For example, did you know that today and tomorrow were once hyphenated? As late as the 1920s, they were spelled “to-day” and “to-morrow.” People speaking Old English (roughly 650 to 1150) would say “to daege” for “on (the) day.” During the 16th century, the word came to be written with the hyphen and would stay that way until the early 20th century. The same process happened with “tomorrow,” which you will see written as “to-morrow” (from the Old English “to morgenne” for “on (the) morrow”).

The same process happened to email. Originally “electronic mail,” usage shortened it to “e-mail,” with the hyphen, until it dropped off to the now-familiar “email.” When did it happen? Over a period of years. Was there some authority that decreed it? Nope. People just started doing it. There are probably people who still spell it “e-mail”. Since the word is understandable either way, no one gets into a snit over it. Maybe they figure that tomorrow is another day, so long as it isn’t spelled to-morrow.

But there is one solid must-follow rule: Compound modifiers must be hyphenated.

But what does this have to do with steak? Read on; we’re almost there.

What Are Compound Modifiers?

What is a compound modifier? Look at the previous paragraph. “Must-follow” is one. It is two or more words that refine the definition of the word it modifies. It’s not just a rule, it’s a must-follow rule. (While rules by definition must be followed – that’s the definition of a rule — the writer added “must-follow” to emphasize this point.)

The compound hyphenation rule is an easy one to follow, and yet many writers don’t recognize it. In one book, the first 40 pages contained these unhyphenated compound modifiers (which I slightly modified to disguise the victim):

Long range lens
Cat’s eye effect
Driver’s side door
A modern day Prince Charming
All boy’s school
Hard earned dough
Once crowded kitchen
Several ounce fillets

Each of these phrases takes a hyphen because both words act upon the noun equally. It’s not a once kitchen. It’s always been there. Nor was it a crowded kitchen. It once was, but no longer. So it’s a once-crowded kitchen.

In the second example, it’s looks like the kitchen is serving several one-ounce fillets.

hyphenating compound modifiers
Chew slow. It’ll last longer.

This would make a delicious snack but a disappointing meal.

Add the hyphen, and you get several fillets that are much larger.

several ounce fillets
Dinner for one. Add a bottle of wine, and it’s a seven-course meal.

And if the kitchen is no longer crowded, that means more meat for you!

And that’s the key to figuring out, if a hyphen is needed. Apply each word to the noun and see if it makes sense. Is it an eye effect? A cat’s effect? It must be a cat’s-eye effect.

The compound modifier rule for hyphens is a simple, easy to understand rule.

I mean, an easy-to-understand rule.

apple-books

Curated Advice Links for the Week of Nov. 26, 2018

by • Writing Advice Links

This week in curated advice, I want to direct your attention to videos from the 20Booksto50K group’s convention in Las Vegas, tweaking your marketing during the holiday months, and why Amazon wants you to make only clean links.

M.K. Williams posted the first of a five-part series on YouTube to talk about how to land a lot on one and how to make it profitable. Only one vid’s up, but it’s less than 5 minutes long.

If you’re not a member of the 20Booksto50K group, nor went to their convention in Las Vegas, you’re still in luck. Most of the presentations are up on YouTube. Day One features talks by Chris Fox / Bryan Cohen, Chrishaun Keller Hanna, and Craig Martelle and Michael Anderle. Day Two has talks by Michael Laronn, Dean Wesley Smith, and more.

What are clean links and why does Amazon care that you share them? Karl Drinkwater has the answers.

Just because they keep repeating the lie doesn’t make it true: ebook fiction sales are not down, they shifting away from traditional publishers.

Using Apple’s Pages? Did you know it can now publish to Apple Books?

Indie Reader has advice for how to take advantage of the holidays next month.

Do you have an author media kit? If you don’t, here’s Bookworks with part 1 on how to make one.

Finally, it’s the end of the year, so it’s a good time to update your social media outposts.

Is fast writing good writing?

by • Writing Advice

This is probably one of the most frequent and inconsequential debates in the writing world: Can you write a good book quickly?

Writers have been arguing about the merits of turning out a book quickly since Ogg painted his story of his bear hunt on the cave wall faster than Gog’s story of his buffalo hunt. Gog responded by braining Ogg and eating his heart. Paleontologists interpret that as Gog saying, “Fast painting is crap painting.”

This is an argument that could go on forever, except that it doesn’t have too, because the answer is very simple.

First, let’s look at the arguments. 

On the “fast is fine” side stands Dean Wesley Smith. He’s the author of more books than anyone can count, and he’s the leading advocate for writing as fast as you can. He’s written a book in seven days and wrote about the process. He’s published more than 30 issues of “Smith’s Monthly,” containing 100,000 words of fiction written over the previous month. During the tail end of 2018, he’s preparing to write 10 novels over a 100 days.

Smith has also written posts and books attacking what he calls the myth of revising. He recently advised a novelist seeking advice on rewriting his book to go back to the first draft.

Ernest Hemingway

On the other side stands a number of great writers, including Ernest Hemingway.

A post from Open Culture lists Hemingway’s 7 rules for writing. These weren’t rules per se, but suggestions he made over the years.

Here’s his advice about rewriting:

If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.

The Case for Rewriting

Here are what other authors have to say about revising their work:

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

Saul Bellow

When I turn in a manuscript, I know it is the story I wanted to tell and it isn’t within my power to tell it a better way. If it is praised, I am grateful. If it is roundly criticized, I console myself by saying I did the best I could do.

Mary Higgins Clark

The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses — to secure each sentence before building on it — is that original writing fashions a form. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. Perfecting the work inch by inch, writing from the first word toward the last, displays the courage and fear this method induces. … The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen. Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.

Annie Dillard

I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.

William Faulkner

If you’ve been a journalist, the one thing you know is that everything can be fixed. I spent a year on the rewrite desk in San Antonio.Sometimes you’d get a story, and it was like deboning a fish. It’s messy work,but nothing fatal — you just had to think about it.

Laura Lippman

I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.

James Michener

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It’s out of a desire to really show what’s going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don’t want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won’t mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

Peter Straub

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.

G. M. Trevelyan

This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

Kurt Vonnegut

I write two pages of arrant nonsense after straining … Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading.

Virginia Woolf

If you work hard on something, and think about it very deeply, new ideas sort of bubble to the surface. I find that while rewriting even just retyping a page new things come in that I hadn’t thought about before. Rewriting is important. I don’t think you are finished after only one or two drafts. Rewriting is not only polishing sentences; it is also a process of searching for new things to improve your story.

Bernard Waber

Anthony Trollop and Alexander McCall Smith

But Smith is not alone. Anthony Trollop saw writing as a trade. “Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,” he said, adding cynically,  “as men have sat, or said that they have sat.”

Trollop treated writing as a job. “The surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler’s wax on my chair. … much more than the inspiration.” He set firm office hours. He wrote in the morning. He placed a watch beside him and wrote with the goal of writing 250 words every 15 minutes. A thousand words per hour. Over two and a half hours, he wrote 2,500 words, averaging 750,000 words a year. The proof is in the results: Over the 35 years of his writing career, Trollope produced 47 novels, 17 works of nonfiction, 2 plays, 44 short stories, and numerous articles, lectures, and letters.

His speed was noticed during his lifetime. The Spectator noted “He writes too fast.An average six or eight months is too short a time for the gestation and production of a first-class novel.”

Unfortunately for his literary reputation, describing his working methods damaged his literary reputation for at least a generation.

One person who does not have to worry is Alexander McCall Smith, who combines the best of both worlds, writing first-draft work that’s also wildly popular. I can summarize his position with this quote from The Globe and Mail from Canada:

All this from a man who has only been a full-time author since 2006, when, at 57, he took a three-year-leave of absence from his job as a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh. He rises before the sun each morning to tap away on his laptop in two- or three-hour bursts – much of it publication-ready.

“I do very little rewriting,” he said.When he’s in full creative flight, he can churn out 3,000 words a day while simultaneously juggling work on two or three books. He’s perpetually jotting down bits of poetry, random ideas, snippets of dialogue and observations on life in the Moleskine notebooks he carries everywhere.”

The Verdict: You Do You

It is possible to write a novel quickly, but its quality depends on your experience, your willingness to learn, and your imagination.

The act of writing requires only that you sit down and do the work.

Getting better depends on your willingness to see what you put down and learn how to do it better.

As for your imagination, that seems inherent and not something you can learn. That’s the X factor that’s built into your wiring, just like your sense of smell and taste, and your appreciation for art and music. Some have it, some don’t.

But you won’t know how well you can tell a story quickly until you sit down and do it. That’s the key takeaway: You won’t know until you try.

After all, what have you got to lose?

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