Writing

Steve’s Writing Advice 8/7/2018

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

I’ve been giving a lot of advice lately on writing, as well as processing some of my most recent experiences. So what I decided to do is write down my basic advice on what to do. I’m keeping it positive, and I hope to update it over time.

What To Write

  • Obviously you should write what you like, but you may want to target to a market.
  • There is almost inevitably a market for something you’ll want to write, but the question is how many sales you want to make (and if you cary).
  • There are inevitably other authors to learn from and study.

How To Write

  • It’s likely if you want to write you already know how. It’s just a matter of getting it into professional shape – or acceptable shape.
  • There are a lot of books on writing efficiently and effectively. Chris Fox’s books are very well regarded.
  • When possible join a writer’s group, meetup, or team to help you out.
  • There’s nothing like practicing, so keep writing!

Editing

  • Have an editor. Period. Pay them or reimburse them somehow.
  • Having beta and pre-readers helps, but an editor is hard to replace (though you may find one with betas and pre-readers)

Book Covers

  • A book cover is a great sales tool, and makes a real difference in if people buy it.
  • Different genres and audiences have different cover expectations.
  • There are various sites and tools that will help you make covers.
  • You can also get premade covers from several sources like www.goonwrite.com.
  • For major, important works you want a professional-level cover.
  • You can learn to do your own covers, but it will take effort if you don’t have much graphic experience. There are online tutorials.

Book Covers – Doing it yourself

  • You can do book covers yourself, as noted, but it takes time and effort to learn.
  • You can get good paid stock art and photos at www.canstockphoto.com and www.shutterstock.com
  • For practice (or to save money) you can get free stock art and photos at www.pixabay.com and www.unsplash.com
  • The Non-designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams is indespensible to learning good design skills. There’s other advice online.

Formats

  • Unless you have a reason (or format) not to, a book should be in ebook format no matter what others you choose.
  • Physical books may or may not interest your audience. It’ll be up to you to decide that.
  • eBooks will usually outsell physical books, but physical books are also great for gifts and holidays.

Formats – eBook

  • eBooks can be formatted by publishing sites (like www.Draft2Digital.com) or on your own.
  • The best tool to format eBooks is www.jutoh.com – it’s powerful enough to write a small book in it.
  • Your formatting will usually be mobipocket (Kindle) or ePub.

Formats – Physical books

  • Physical book formatting is more complicated than eBooks, because you have to worry about page breaks, page facing, and more.
  • Covers will also require careful formatting because of sizing and colors (hint, save in CMYK).
  • You’ll probably have to run a few copies of physical books to ensure they’re set up right.

Formats – Audiobooks

  • Audiobooks are a forgotten format – and if you can get your book into audio format, then you have an edge over others.

Publishing

  • There’s many places to publish, however you want to make sure whatever service you use you end up on www.amazon.com – for obvious reasons.
  • To easily publish on multiple sources, www.Draft2Digital.com is a mainstay.
  • Many services like the above do physical books, and www.Lulu.com

Pricing

  • Pricing affects sales, and cheaper is not always better. People will be concerned that a cheap book isn’t worth it.
  • Most smaller eBooks are best priced at $2.99.
  • Larger books seem to center around $4.99, but some go higher.
  • Physical book pricing is inevitably much higher than eBooks, and often you make more on each physical books.

Promotion – General

  • Good promotion ties into each other. Your books mention your website, your website points to your newsletter, your newsletter mentions new books, new books go on sale, etc.
  • You’ll want to read up on promotion. Though a lot of promotion advice is repetitive, that’s because a lot of it is always new to someone.

Promoting – Website

  • You will want an author’s website, period. You want your own domain, and can set up a website in wordpress.
  • If you’re on Amazon and/or Draft 2 Digital there are author pages there as well. Set them up and link your website back to them and vice versa.
  • Mention your website in all of your books.

Promoting – Social Media

  • Writers should have a Twitter, Facebook presence, and blog to establish a presence. At the very least a blog and twitter is needed.
  • You may only have so much time, so make your best call.
  • Hootsuite is a great way to manage social media.
  • Mention your social media in all of your books.

Promotion – Newsletters

  • Have a newsletter. Www.mailchimp.com is a perfect place to start.
  • Send out your newsletter at least monthly if not more (but I’d avoid more than one a week). Mention books, give samples, etc.
  • If you want to get more people on your newsletter use www.InstaFreebie.com for giveaways or giving out samples.

Marketing – General

  • Marketing is an inevitable part of book writing. You can’t avoid it – but you can outsource it.

Marketing – Amazon

  • If you’re publishing things at Amazon, use Amazon Marketing Services (AMS). It’s pretty much point and pay and (hopefully) sell.
  • If you’re amazon exclusive, you can do book sales and promotions.

Marketing – Reviews

– Steve

Writing Thoughts: The Story Is Just Part Of The Story

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

When you make a story of any kind, the beginning isn’t the beginning and the end isn’t the end. Any truly living story is just a slice of something much larger. I learned this lesson lately.

As I’ve begun the final edits of my novel, A Bridge To The Quiet Planet, I had decided to try writing short fiction on the side. I had many ideas, from using random stories to doing more in the setting of my novel. The idea seemed fun, interesting, different, and relaxing – and maybe profitable.

With my first attempt in draft form, I handed it off to some friends to edit, confident that if I could get such good reactions to my novel draft, this was sure to be of equal quality. However, one of my editors was extremely critical – he noted how it was constrained, limited, and it didn’t seem to be like my other work. How could I have gone so wrong?

At first annoyed, I sat down and analyzed his voluminous comments (this person is someone I’m trying to push towards pro writing and editing). Soon I realized that he had a point.

There wasn’t the sense of setting I usually created – I write on Worldbuilding but this world didn’t seem alive. There was little sense of extra details or of things going on around the characters. It was like a studio backlot.

I didn’t do much with character senses or feelings. The tale was limited and scriptlike, minimal on sensations. Even with the rather intellectual cast of my experiment, the focus was too literal.

Characters themselves seemed constrained – only when they really interacted were they characters. They also didn’t interact well with the setting. It was like actors wandering through a soundstage.

My story, in short, wasn’t alive. So I asked myself how did I get here – and the answer became very apparent.

I had taken a break from fiction for awhile, and returned to it with my novel. To do the novel I had used various plotting and outlining techniques, and I tried to do the same for the short story. I had produced a very detailed outlining system for short stories, ensuring I got to the point and didn’t overdo it.

I had built a skeleton for a story. However I’d put very little meat on the bones – the minimal at best. I had created a system, but not created much of a story, at least to my standards and that of my friend.

With this idea in mind, I examined some of my other short story ideas that had been incubating – and they felt much more alive. These were ideas that had been sitting around for some time, that were played with and thought over. Because of this imagining and re-imagining, they were more connected, more alive, more nuanced.

This story I had just attempted was the least thought-over and least nuanced. Too much of it was alienated from itself.

That’s when the lesson of all of this hit me like a thunderbolt – you don’t write a story, you write part of one.

A story should be a slice of your setting, a piece of the history of that setting, a small and interesting part of a much larger potential. It should have characters who are not sprung into being at the start, but are created and written so they feel like they have pasts and futures outside of your story. Everything should feel large, no matter how short the story is.

Now these things may not be immediately apparent – you may have a story idea and need to better realize the world and characters. You may only need so much detail. But you need enough for the story to be alive because it’s part of something larger, at least conceptually and imaginatively.

Based on this idea, I’m back at it. I can’t say what you may or may not see, but if you do see any short fiction from me, I think it’ll be much better.
– Steve

A Bridge To The Quiet Planet – The Reformation

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Let’s get to know more about the setting of my upcoming novel, A Bridge To The Quiet Planet.  It’s out late this fall but you can find out about the world now . . .

The Reformation

If the War that scarred Telvaren is remembered as a hideous occurrence, enshrined in history and dramas, The Reformation is viewed proudly – and at times with whimsy. Comedies set during the Reformation are not uncommon.

The Reformation is the name given to the period of time where humanity reassembled itself and civilization on Telvaren and outreach was made to the other worlds. All dates are now reckoned from the start, and thus time is often done as AR (After Reformation) and BR (before reformation).

The Reformation was a seemingly near-endless series of meetings, councils, and committees that solidified the new laws and social policies that would govern the recovering world. Humankind and the gods both took part in the proceedings over the decades.

This was an era of comparative peace, but military conflicts between the remaining smaller nations, regions fallen into chaos, and even Great Cities was not unknown. The Reformation is officially reckoned to have lasted some fifty years, though the major work was accomplished in the first decade – but smaller conflicts over land and military bases and territioes occured for over a century.

War had been shrunk down to a managable, intermittent thing, mostly when City Guard units faced off over some piece of land that people assumed were important, but couldn’t prove why.

The major achievements of the Reformation were, in very rough chronological order.

  • Establishment of a planetary government (well most of the planet – the Unaffiliated Territories weren’t invited) run by an elected Parliament, represented by population for the most part, and a Prime Minister and a set of specialist Ministers elected within the Parliament.
  • Establishing the divisions among the armed forces and peacekeepers. Constables operated within cities and were armed only if needed. City Guard operated within the City Provinces and were armed as well as working on civic works. The Military operated outside the Provinces and on any cross-Province activities – in time this also came to claim most of the Ocean and airspace.
  • Recognition of the importance of the Network and making the technical organization known as the Technmoni the keepers of The Network. Led to the establishment of the Third Network.
  • Recognition of the Bridgers and their role in establishing and maintaining the Bridges.
  • Codification of universal laws shared by all Great Cities (though agreement took decades longer)
  • Moving the Parliament of the Great Cities to Allanax, a former capital of the most powerful nation of the West. Arguably Parliament moved to a city just outside of Allanax, but that didn’t work out considering the living conditions. There was also an attempt to establish it on the Moon, but no one wanted the commute.
  • Adsorption of assorted Knightly groups, warrior cults, and monster-hunting organizations into the Military.
  • Recognition of major Guilds, unions, and other professional organizations (which also helped lend the new Government credibility).
  • Establishing a more organized set of laws and policies for interaction between humans and gods – this also resulted in the recognition of Triad True as the major center of theological activity. Encouraging Warrior cults and groups not interested in becoming part of the Military to form organized Warrior Lodges and to engage in public service. It is apparent, if ignored by many, that the goal was to make them more into sports teams than military groups – and it seems to have succeeded, especially with the product endorsements rolled in.  However it took about fifty or more years.

Within a lifetime, the world saw peace, or if not peace, at least a place where conflict was highly localized so you could call it peace if you squinted. As of moder times, in the era of roughly 250 AR, war is unknown and conflict among Cities is mostly sniping, economic, and competitive.

The reformation’s exact end is not unknown, but is assumed to be between 48 AR and 53 AR. Most people round off at 50 AR and are done with it. History records that it didn’t even get a name for a good fifteen years, and was only named after someone realized there was an ongoing process and filed a petition to name it. Even then the term didn’t on for for another three years.

Because it is so well regarded – and because there were incredible amounts of debate, arguing, negotiation, and strange goings-on – The Reformation is oftern portrayed in a humorous light in popular culture. Several notable comedies are set during the time, and almost always focus on jokes about elaborate argumentation, characters wittily putting each other down civilly, comedies of manners, and bureaucracy. “Reformation-style” comedy refers is sometimes used to refer to humor of this nature generally.

The end of the Reformation is celebrated with the Unity Festival, though for over 200 years the festival’s exact activities and date keep changing because no one quite agreed on what it should be. Fortunately, people still argue about it peaceably – which may be the best way to celebrate the rebuilding of the world.

 

– Steve