Writing Resources 07 September 2013

Here you will find a selection of the best of the blogsphere from the past week. Grab your coffee, straighten the glasses or spritz those contacts and above all – enjoy.

Featured

This week I have a new find–James Clear. James is “an entrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer in 20+ countries,” and also an amazingly talented writer and motivator. He does a twice weekly inspirational newsletter that has become the cornerstone of surviving my busy weeks and now, I’d like to share him with all of you. Here are two posts to get you started. If you read nothing else on the list this week–Read These! And sign on for his newsletter, a great 5 minute investment that will pay back huge dividends.

The “Chosen Ones” Choose Themselves

“In 1994, a young woman asked for an order of restraint against her husband and filed for divorce. With no job and little money to live on, she signed up for welfare benefits so that she could afford to care for her baby daughter. Years later, she would refer to herself as “the biggest failure I knew.” However, during the five years that followed her divorce, this woman would battle through fear and depression and go from living on welfare to becoming a multi-millionaire.”

And…The Crime Your Brain Commits Against You (And What to Do About It)

Inform & Inspire

August McLaughlin: 5 Things Writers Can Learn From Models. “Modeling and writing may not seem very comparable—other than the fact that in both, one can arrive to work in PJs—but my years in fashion did prep me for writing in numerous ways. In addition to providing endless fodder for my blog posts and fiction, here are five of my favorite takeaways…”

Ali Luke: Failed to Reach Your Writing Targets? Me Too… “For the last six weeks, I’ve had a straightforward weekly writing target to meet: 3,000 words on my novel. And for two of those six weeks, I failed.”

Andrea Phillips: The Four Fears That Stop You From Writing. “Writers! Today I’d like to talk to you about one of the deep, dark secrets that unite the society of writers as one. I know this is Wendig’s house, but surprise! that dark secret isn’t bourbon, blood rituals, or sticky, crumb-infested keyboards. It’s the fact that we’re all RIDDLED WITH FEAR.”

Writing

Kristen Lamb: Tips to Make Us Stronger Authors: PART ONE // PART TWO. “Becoming a non-fiction author has a number of steps. After having written both fiction and non-fiction, I don’t think one is easier than the other. There are unique challenges to both. Yet, I will say that even novelists can benefit from the same tactics employed by good NF authors.”

Jami Gold: Writing Rule #1: There Is No “One Right Way” “Every once in a while, I come across a blog post or a workshop description that makes me want to warn newbie writers away. The problem usually lies with the author/presenter’s insistence that their way is the best way, or in some cases, the only way. The truth is that we all have to find what works best for us.”

Bonnie Randall: Writing Scenes Out of Sequence to Enliven—and Maybe Even Finish—Your Novel. ““I could never write the way you do.” I hear this. And— “How do you ever make sense of your story?” I used to feel ashamed when asked that. As a scene writer I’ve never taken a linear approach to my projects. I am middle, forward, back, and between when it comes to writing and I’ve learned to be unapologetic—because in analyzing this method I’ve come to understand why it works for me—and why it might work for you too.”

Roz Morris/K.M. Weiland: The opening act – what the reader needs to understand. “At the moment I’m taking a hard look at the set-up chapters. Of course I’ve got my own spider sense, but it’s rather fun to have a guide to remind me of what I might not be seeing. (And what I might be ignoring because, well, to change it would be inconvenient.) So I’m sharing the fun with KM Weiland’s rather useful new book Structuring Your Novel.”

Art Holcomb: Improving Your Fiction: The Relationship Chart — Part 3. “Let’s take a look at how emotions in one character can trigger emotions and/or actions in others: Start with the Hero.  Ask this question of each emotion you charted in the Rule Book.”

Editing

Sarah Kolb-Williams: 10 Ways to Fake a Professional Edit. “Before you scan this post looking for a sanction to skip editing, let me save you some time: A self-edit is not a replacement for a professional copyedit. Authors are simply too close to their own writing to see it objectively. Even with your attention dialed up to 11, there’s always the possibility that you moved a section and forgot to erase the original. And after reading that section 7,213 times, the 7,214th can slip right by you like Obi-Wan at a costume party.”

Writer Support

Jami Gold: Watching Out for Bad Advice. “In the comments of my post about the number one writing rule, we shared some of the bad advice we’ve heard. Many of the examples didn’t point out advice that’s inherently bad, but rather advice that doesn’t apply equally to all situations. The comments made clear that we’re all likely to be led astray by “bad” advice at some point. When we’re first starting off, we don’t have enough knowledge to put tips into context and realize that most advice is situation-dependent.”

Chuck Wendig: 25 Steps To Becoming A Self-Published Author. “1. Notice This List Has More Than Two Steps. If you thought the two steps of this process were STEP ONE: WRITE A BOOK, STEP TWO: CLICK “PUBLISH” ON THAT SUMBITCH, you need some deep brain rearranging.”

Lydia Sharp: 3 Ways to Simplify Your Writing Life. “Not one of us navigating this thing called authorhood can say that we aren’t stressed. Some of this stress is unavoidable, beyond our control. But some of this stress can be reduced with a few changes to our daily routine. Here are three things that can help you simplify your writing life…”

Ruth Harris: METADATA 101: A Non-Techie Does Her Best to Explain Metadata (and Why it Matters) In Plain English. “Essentially, for a writer, metadata is everything except the book we include when we upload a book: cover, title, author’s name, series name (if the book is part of a series), categories, keywords, blurb, ISBN, reviews, author bio.”

Jason Boog: Free Transcription Tools for Writers. “What’s the best app for transcribing recorded interviews, speeches, videos or other audio content? Below, I’ve rounded up a few free apps for manually transcribing long interviews.”

Writer “Legal”

Susan Spann: Originality and Fixation in Copyright Law. “As the title of this post demonstrates, the threshold for copyrightable originality is so low as to be almost nonexistent. Legally speaking, the copyright requirement for originality boils down to “the author didn’t just copy the work from somewhere else.” Independent creation is the standard, and it means that as long as the author actually created the work, brilliance is not required.”

Elizabeth S. Craig: Writing and Taxes. “The business side of writing is my least favorite part.  I struggle to keep up.  And there’s sort of a residual guilt that I’m not doing all I can do to keep my accounts organized.  But I’m trying. New as of 2013 is an accountant.”

Publishing

David Gaughran: Choosing The Right Distributor: Smashwords vs Draft2Digital. “Since I started self-publishing in 2011, Smashwords has been the overwhelming favorite for savvy self-publishers who wanted or needed a distributor to reach non-Amazon e-bookstores. However, a new competitor called Draft2Digital launched a beta version of their service earlier this year and has been gaining popularity. In July, they hit 1,000 users, 10,000 titles, and 1,000,000 books sold.”

Marketing

Jane Friedman: A Key Book Marketing Principle That Authors Must Learn (or Not Forget) “Most new authors, upon securing a book contract or planning a book launch, are advised they need to establish a Twitter account, a Facebook page, or [list social media channel here]. Why? To market their book, of course. This presents an immediate dilemma: If the author is not already active on these channels, of her own interest and volition, she now has the mindset of using these tools to “market”—and the new author may have no idea what that means beyond telling people to like their page or follow them.”

Marcia A. Richards: How To Know For Sure Who Your Audience Really Is. “If you’re a new writer, or even an author with a book or two in the marketplace, I wonder if you are certain who you are writing for. Do you know your target audience for your writing? Despite the volume of blog posts and chapters of writing manuals that TELL you HOW to find your target audience and give you some hint WHERE to find them, it still isn’t crystal clear. Is it?”

Kristen Lamb: When Is It Time to Start Building an Author Platform? “I spoke on Saturday here in Florida for the STAR folk in Melbourne, and I had a new writer comment that she couldn’t start building her platform because she had no finished books and nothing for sale. I don’t believe in Self-Help-Kitten-Glitter. I believe in hard work. But hard work needs a solid foundation or we’re no better than Skippy the Hamster running in his little wheel. We should strive to work smarter, not harder. That’s the WANA Way. WANAs also plan for success.”

Laura Gallier: Marketing for Introverts. “The introverted author is by no means an unusual creature—far from it. The introverted nature works very well within the creative fields; it often accompanies a vivid imagination and attention to detail, which are fantastic for an author. Unfortunately for introverts, traditionally, that same nature went against the idea of marketing and sales.”

David Kudler: Six Things You Should Be Including in Your EBook. “Quick: who—aside from you, your immediate family, and your dog—are the people most excited about your book, most ready to talk about it with their friends, and best equipped to talk about your book’s virtues? Anyone? Well, there are lots of possible answers for each of those questions, but when it comes to identifying the whole bunch, I’d bet it’s a group that you haven’t thought much about: The people who have just finished the last page.”

Dan Blank: Life Is More Than A Series Of Tweets. On Taking A Break From Your “Platform.” “Writers feel so much pressure to be constantly connecting with others online and off; they are encouraged to treat each new follower and “friend” as if they could be the person standing between failure and success. Like a hamster running on a little wheel, it spins and spins, never slowing down. So when do you just… stop.”

Social Media

Lisa Hall-Wilson: New Facebook Feature Spells ‘Awesome’ for Blogging. “So glad to be back here for Techie Tuesday! Facebook has made a lot of changes over the summer, but I wanted to share one with you that’s super cool. No – really, this is pure awesomesauce and bloggers everywhere are going to love it! You’ve probably heard about Facebook unleashing the ability to embed posts directly from Facebook. Ho hum – people say. What’s the big deal? How does that help me?”

Writer Beware

Victoria Strauss: More Warnings: Spectacular Productions; Balboa Press/Author Solutions. “It’s been a busy month for publisher warnings! Spectacular Productions. From author Brian Keene, a warning about a small publisher called Spectacular Productions. Authors report long publication delays, missed pub dates, lack of communication by publisher Christian Hanner, lack of payment, and work accepted but contracts never received.”

Anne R. Allen: Anthologies are Hot: How to Tell a Great Opportunity from a Pay-to-Play Scam. “Anthologies have long been one of the best ways for a new writer to get publishing credits and start building an audience. They’re also a great way for an established author to increase visibility. Collections of short personal essays do especially well, but theme anthologies that include fiction and poetry are strong sellers, too, and their popularity is growing. Unfortunately, anthologies have got themselves a bad name among a lot of savvy people in the industry, because so many vanity publishers and scammers have used them to bilk naïve writers.”

David Gaughran: Author Solutions Takes Signing Scam To Miami Book Fair. “Another day, another Author Solutions scam in my inbox. Remember the Author Solutions book signing scam planned for The Word on the Street Festival in Toronto next month? I suspected that the Word on the Street Festival wasn’t the only literary event that Author Solutions would be targeting, given that Author Solutions made $297,000 from the 2012 Word on the Street Festival. I was right.”

Fun Tech

Jason Boog: Coffitivity App Plays Coffee Shop Sounds as You Work. “Struggling to find the perfect balance of noise and silence in your workplace? The Coffitivity app will play a carefully curated collection of coffee house sounds to keep coffee house writers focused no matter where they work.”

Phi Tran: Remove Yourself From The Internet with JustDelete.Me. “URLs got you down? Feeling like you need to divorce the internet? JustDelete.Me does just that, but with much more ease and less finagling. Think: taking out the trash.”

Cool Infographic

Dianna Dilworth: How to Take the Perfect Nap: INFOGRAPHIC. “Studies have shown that taking naps can help increase your performance at work. To help  you validate the urge, especially in this post-summer-vacation week, we’ve embedded an infographic below that provides you with tips on how to take a nap.”

Resource Heaven

Laura Pepper Wu: 25+ Tools We Use to Run 30 Day Books. “Here is a list of tools and resources we use at 30 Day Books that allow us to run our business smoothly and effectively!”

Retraction

Diane Tibert: CYNTHIA MCMURRAY, BRYLER AND THREE DOGS: APOLOGY AND RETRACTION.