writing

Just Who Is Writing This?

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

So I continue to edit A Bridge To The Quiet Planet, where internet using gods, ancient orders of monster hunters, and trains on spirit-possessed tracks collide.  After the collision they exchange insurance information and complain behind each other’s back.

I found the editing felt  strange, odd.  There were parts I hated or even dreaded – which is entirely unfair to my incredible editor.  Thanks to her work this book is literally twice as better as I had created at the start.

Now you know me, I have to analyze something when I don’t understand it and figure it out.  Oh, and share it with you, my fellow creatives.

Why did I have this dread of editing?

I began analyzing these feelings and realized my basic worry was to find the book was an unsalvagable mess, that it would be impossible or too much effort to fix it.  Now my editor is all about pushing people forward – if the book had been a mess she’d still have left me enough comments to demessify it.

That’s when it struck me – my worry was that I couldn’t write it and couldn’t edit it.  In short – I had Impostor Syndrome.

I began to realize this strikes a lot of writers I see.  We’re there, writing away and are still convinced we’re not writers.  We think:

  • “My work is flawed so it’s not any good” – all work is flawed, so you keep at it and get better.
  • “No one cares about my work” – Someone will always care.  If you do, someone else will.
  • “I don’t have a specialty” – Well, fine, good, you’re broad.
  • “I’m only good at one thing” – That’s fine you, you’re a specialist.

Why is this?  I find two reasons.

First, writing is not an exact science unless your subject is very exact and like a science.  Because of this there’s no exact way to know you’re doing it right and certainly no way to know you’re doing it perfectly.  This makes it easy to imagine all the things you could do differently and never think of “right enough” – or developing your own standards.

Secondly, writers are imaginative.  We can come up with all sorts of ways to decide how bad we are.  We turn imagination on ourselves.

But a writer is someone who writes and improves.  If you do this, you’re a writer.  You’re only not a writer if you quit or stagnate.

Realizing this, I felt better. I’m going to do what I always do – forge ahead and write and get better.

 

-Steven Savage

All My Good Bad Influences

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

As I edit away on A Bridge To The Quiet Planet, my tale of a techno-magical world and an interplanetary road trip involving holy books, I am busy finding out how I mishandled my good influences.

This is not due to my own genius, this is due to my amazing editor, who I am willing to introduce to anyone who wants to pay her money to edit.  She is fantastic at pointing out flaws in my work, leaving comments, and using search-replace to highlight all my common errors.  Some pages of my book look like a vengeful highlighter achieved sentience and attacked common word combinations it had a grudge against.

Between her feedback and her markup, I began to realize that my major influences were also ones influencing my flaws.  Allow me to explain:

First, there’s a chance if you’re inspired by an author or a creator, you won’t do it quite right.

Second, you may make the same mistakes your inspiration makes – and likely being less polished than they, you’ll make them worse.

Third, your inspirations together may not sit quite right.  You need to find a way to fuse them into a whole.

So what happened with me?  Well my editor noticed passive voice (lots of was), strange asides, weird wordplay, and moments I was abstract from the characters.  Nothing unusual, but then I looked at my inspirations and realized where I’d stumbled.

My core influences are Sir Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Dave Barry.  If you read my fiction, the inspiration is obvious – I love playing with words, exploring settings, and deconstructing ideas.  Take these trends too far and you end up with infodumps and trying to be too witty.

I was also influenced by anime, with the fantastical elements, fusions of genres, and passion for characterization.  Again, you can take these things too far – it took watching My Hero Academia to realize that I too liked to do giant flashbacks that could be handled better when not animated.

Finally, I love oddball character stuff of all kinds – indeed one sub-theme of A Bridge To The Quiet planet is that it’s basically several parties of unusual personalities having an adventure and colliding with each other.  Its a tale of magic and super-science and demons, but is basically about the people in this world.  You can get distracted by the oddities and details and loose touch with the fact these are people.

So I did too much infodumping, wrong details, wrong approach, and got a bit too full of  myself.  But there’s one more thing I forgot.

I was following several styles – I was not combining them into one.  I was doing a story of intimate character portraits and giant weird worlds, of human eccentricity and complex societies.  There was a feeling of discord, of the two not blending – or of one dominating the other.

In short I took some of my inspirations too far or in the wrong direction – and forgot to find a style that fit to realize all my inspirations.

As you edit your work, look to your inspirations.  Then find out how you might be doing them wrong – or doing them right and not harmonizing them.

-Steven Savage

Steve’s Writing Advice 8/7/2018

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(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