AUTHORPRENEUR: Why It’s No Longer Enough To Be Just a Writer

*image from Flickr Creative Commons
With the rise in indie publishing and more options available to a writer, you can no longer tell yourself that it’s okay to just write and release your work into the world and it will find an audience. Even if you go with a legacy publisher, the publicity and marketing you feel your book should get and what it actually gets are two very different things, unless you’re one of their stable of bestselling writers that they feel is a sure bet to make them money.

To survive in the publishing landscape, every writer must become a hybrid between creative and marketer, an authorpreneur that both creates and markets their work.

The romanticized notion of a writer in their creative space, laying text on the page for their readers and sending it off when it’s finished, cueing end credits on the process, is over. That image has now pivoted. Where the end credits would have rolled is now the beginning of the harder work, getting the notice of the reading public. No longer is it enough to be able to write well, you must be able to sell yourself as a writer worth noticing and your book as something worth reading.

As more and more mainstream published writers turn to publishing their own works and the whole indie/self published industry grows out of its reputation of vanity and not being good enough for legacy publishers, the landscape is going to change dramatically, making a writer’s skill at marketing themselves and their work not just a necessary skill, but an invaluable one.

Every writer should be working on honing their skill as a marketer right along with their skill as a writer. In pauses between drafts, read up on social media marketing, start following blogs that review work in your genre and start commenting on posts, start your own blog and document your journey of writing your book, network with other authors on twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Most of all, study a writer that you see working social media like a rock star. Look at what they’re doing, what ratio they’re posting social comments to promotion. Every avenue of social media has ways of tracking how many people are reading what you post, whether they’re sharing it or talking about it and what days and times most people read your posts. Use the tools, they’re free and they’ll help make it more a part of the process of getting your book out there and less of a dreaded chore.

This listing has 50 free tools, there’s something in there for everyone.:

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/03/18/50-mostly-free-social-media-tools-you-cant-live-without-in-2012/

We all have what it takes to be an authorpreneur. Start now, no matter what phase of your writing journey you’re in, it’s never too late.

The article that inspired this post can be found here:
http://jonfmerz.net/2012/06/14/rise-of-the-authorpreneur/

Knee Deep In The Edits

One thing about editing is that it always takes a bit to talk yourself into starting, but when you get going it turns into a challenge that you give yourself on how much tighter you can make your prose.

I’ve had a good few months away from the intensive writing on the first draft of this and I’m doing an editing pass before doing a second draft. The space away from it has given me a little emotional distance and that makes it easier to find the words that don’t need to be there and the parts that don’t add to the overall story arc. Very few parts are escaping being touched, as you can see from the screenshot below.

I know the font is a little odd, but I find that American Typewriter seems to be easier on my eyes than Helvetica or Times New Roman for long periods of time. The rounded curves and close together letters of them seem to bleed together a lot more the longer I’m staring at the screen.

I also find that I can’t edit if I’ve got music going with words or even a lot of tempo changes. It distracts me from what I’m doing. I’ve found the perfect editing accompaniment for me is….the sound of a spaceship idling. Really. Someone out there on the internet put up a file on you tube of the ambient engine noise off of Star Trek TNG, or as I called it to my friend Shae, a white noise machine for geeks.

I also took part in my first Google+ hangout, with a few other writers, about editing for ourselves and others. It was interesting to see and hear how others do it and I learned a few tips that will help me on my way. If you haven’t already checked out Google+, give it a try. There are a lot of authors, writers and those aspiring to be on there and you can cultivate some great circles on there of people who post great content and take part in some great discussions.

Tempus Fugit

I had the urge to write and no real desire to work on something already in progress. Instead, I looked at my surroundings and took in the sound of the town clock chiming and this is what came out.

Tempus Fugit

It’s funny how time flies.

Moving back to the city I grew up in is in equal measures familiar and alien. As much as this city changes, its core stays the same. There are reminders on every street of my past, the ghosts of remembered actions and conversations pushing themselves forward in my mind for their short moment in the forefront. Then the next street or building comes into focus and forces the ghosts back as others take their place.

I’m seated in a cafe across the street from the closest thing this city has to a central square. It’s a brick paved open area in front of the local mall, raised planter boxes sporting evergreen bushes trimmed into cotton ball shapes, tufts of wheat coloured grasses ascending with swaying stalks like tentative bursts of agricultural fireworks. Trees rise in the middle of the planters, their limbs bare and weeping towards the ground. The wind rustles them and their tips brush the ground, searching fruitlessly for the leaves they have lost

In them middle of the open, a clock is raised on a brick and concrete platform.  The centennial clock. Green and gold, it echoes the Robert frost poem. Green as the city it is celebrating, a hundred years not even a blink of an eye to the senescent cities of Europe and Asia. Gold like the years this city is heading into, the population ever aging and the city itself hemorrhaging jobs and with it the green that this city needs to renew itself.

The square’s clock is one of my ghosts. The low and mournful tones of its chimes, ringing out, carrying on the wind, making its reach arc out further than the silent sentinels of schools and theatres and playgrounds. The sound of the clock carries with it pieces of the ghost of my father.

He was involved with community groups and those have seasonal ghosts that come with them, fading as the heritage weekend, or historical re-enactment passes by in the waning days of autumn. The clock remains, a year-round reminder of both him and the time that pushes me forward on my journey and further away from the moment when his journey stopped.

Time does fly and even though the seconds, minutes,  hours, days, months, and years have stayed the same measurement of time that they always were, I’m finding as I collect more of them, the faster they, and the ghosts that live in between one measure of time and the next, come.

The ghosts used to be grudgingly accommodated, but now I find that as i collect more of them, they have lost their potency. The memories the ghosts carry with them no longer pull up regrets of past decisions, friends grown away from, or thoughts of paths not taken. Instead they serve to remind me of the journey that I’ve already travelled down and how those decisions have made me into the person, and more importantly, the writer that I am.

The writer in me is the curator of my collection of ghosts, separating those with stories to tell, from those that only serve as a milestone, remembering that point in my past, but offering nothing towards my future. The ones with stories to tell wait for me to give them away, covered in words and dressed up in names that are not their own. I will call them fiction, but my ghosts and I, we will know the truth.

New Year, New Goals

Happy New Year! mine was pretty quiet, being stuck at work until 2 a.m. and all. Today was a quiet day, thinking about the last year and thinking about goals for this new year. I don’t really make resolutions. These are just things I want to accomplish over the course of the year. I figured posting them somewhere public would keep me somewhat accountable to them. Here’s hoping that works. =)

Goals as a writer: 

1. Do Second Draft and expansion of Homecoming for submission to publisher
2. Submit Bait to Rebel Ink.
3. Finish Divergence and get that particular monkey off my back.
4. Write 5000 words a week of fiction.
5. Write at least one blog post a week and cross post it to Google plus.

Goals IRL: 

1. Keep up 4.0 GPA in coursework for Technical Writing.
2. Get house up for sale in Spring.
3. Continue paying down debt and get all paid off by end of 2012.
4. Continue growing clientele for iPad/Mac sessions.

And in case you’re wondering, this does’t count as the blog post for the week. I’m going to start weeks on Monday.

So, here are my goals. Good Luck with yours, if you’ve made any.

The strangest things come out over lunch.

I had lunch with two friends who I’ve known for about 15 years or so. Both married, happily so. We’re the type of friends that have such a comfort level with each other that we can say pretty much anything to each other. Topics ranged from a boob job that one had a few years ago, the tummy tuck the other was considering after two c-sections had left pouch in their wake. All pretty normal things.

Then things took a sexual turn and two  happily married people that I never though would be involved in something and, to my surprise, both were. They’d both gotten involved in this scene independent of each other and both of them were shocked that the other was into it and it was very interesting to be witness to disclosures like that. it was a good reminder that you never really know every facet of either a person or a couple. And because I had information on them that no one else knew, I told them something about myself that only one other person in my real life knows. I’m a good friend like that. =)

It was a good real-world lesson in character depth. That you may think you know your character, but there a facets of them that you consciously haven’t thought about and have the ability to surprise you when you work on developing that character more deeply.

And things that you may not think are mainstream are actually a lot more common that you would ever think. To bring it down to a geek level, I call it the Buffy Test myself. Yes, as in the Vampire Slayer. Bring up that show and you’d be truly stunned the people you think would never watch that show that did/do watch it  and love it.

I like it when people and characters surprise me with hidden depths. How about you?

Adventures in Networking

One thing about working and living  in one city and having a house in another is almost every time I’ve come back to the house I own for a few days of packing and organizing and fixing, I almost always have to reset my entire network here. The one utility I’ve kept here at the house, besides the essentials like water, gas and electricity, is the internet. It may seem a little odd, seeing as Im hardly ever here for more than a few days, but it’s the only way I have any sort of entertainment at night.

Tonight was the mother of all resetting though. Firmware update, removing a router from the ip phone service I disconnected and then resetting my modem, the wifi router and reconfiguring the connection on everything that was connected to it, since it only wanted to give an I.P. address to one device at a time.  All that practice at walking other people through things like this for the last four months has come in handy.

Now that I’ve gotten everything back up and going, I’m hoping I can get some writing time in along with the packing and fixing and organizing. Although.. I probably should have kept it down if I really wanted to get a lot done. I would have gone crazy, but a lot would have gotten done.

Can You Send Your Writing For Voice Lessons?

When you’re starting out as a writer, one of the hardest things to craft is your voice. Going beyond your use of narrative and tense, voice is what digs down deep inside of your writing and is always indicative that you wrote it.

When I think of literary voices that I know instantly, there are a few that come to me. Hemmingway’s machismo and guys guy way of writing. Anthony Bourdain’s unmistakable narrative voice in his shows that carries over to his writing. It’s quick, in your face, and very New York City. Just like the man himself. I have to wonder what it says that I’m having trouble recalling a female writer that has a distinct voice. Most female readers I’ve read tend to let the storyline and characters speak for them and I remember the voices of their characters, but not theirs as a writer.

When you’re first starting out , your voice is informed by what you’ve read, what you love to read and what inspired you to pick up the pen and start writing Your voice is overlaid on top of the voices that you’ve been soaking up and emulating when you decide to start to write. Writing teachers recognize this stage, it would be hard not to when you’re reading submissions that sounds like amateur versions of well known authors. They then urge novice writers to find their voice. They stress the importance of that voice, that you must find it to succeed and you must find it now.

I’m of the mind that your voice develops as your writing does and that for a lot of people, that voice has several different octaves and changes as you go through different stages of learning the craft of writing. Finding your voice can not be forced to come quickly. It comes with time and experience and it also changes with them.

I’m finding that looking over my own writing for the past year that my voice has been undergoing a change. My writing has always been detail-filled and, I’m going to admit it, wordy. Over the last few projects I’ve been working on, I’ve noticed my narrative is tightening up, I’m choosing what I’m revealing in plot points more selectively and finding ways to convey the story I want to tell with fewer words. I’ve learned that sometimes the act of finding your voice is also the act of shutting yourself up.

Have you found your own writing voice has changed over the years? What changes have you noticed?

Friday Fun!

For you lucky people that work a Monday to Friday job, something to start off your weekend on a light note. For those of us that have to work on the weekend, something to make us smile through it.

Don’t think grammer and punctuation can be interesting? I happen to have proof that Grammar is a little bit of a slut and Punctuation practices cannibalism!

*picture from http://weheartit.com *

The hussy!

And now, how Punctuation kills.

*picture from http://tawnafenske.blogspot.com/ *

Practice safe commas! The life you save may be your own!

picture from *http://tawnafenske.blogspot.com/ *

Hmmm, looks like the comma gets around too. Oh dear!

Have a great weekend!

Write What You Know and Other Bad Writing Advice

Time just keeps flying past, doesn’t it? I’d like to say I’ve been
doing nothing but writing since my last post, but life as a funny way of
looking at your plans and laughing at you.

Oh, I have gotten some writing done, let’s make that clear. Just
not as much as I’d like to have done. That might be the never ending cry of the
writer though. No matter how much you get down on paper or screen, you always
feel like you could have done more. Even with working on a writing focused
course and working full-time in one city and then spending my days off in
another city packing up my house there, I still feel like I could get more
writing done. Not sure where, but there must be some place!

I seem to falling back into education mode easily enough. I guess
with being a writer, you never really leave it. You’re researching parts of
your plot, occupations of your characters and sometimes even the geography and
neighbourhoods that your story takes place in. Sometimes it’s to refresh your
memory of it, or to gain a new understanding of somewhere you’ve never been or
something you’ve never done. To write is to never stop researching and
learning.

Which makes me think of that often pulled out instruction to
writers: “Write what you know.”

My first instinct is to roll my eyes. If all writers wrote what
they knew, the literary landscape would be a pretty damn dull place. I’m sure
that C.S. Lewis has never been to Narnia, never met a talking lion or ever
encountered a witch beyond trick-or-treaters at his door. J.R.R. Tolkien has
never been to Middle Earth, didn’t speak Elvish or ever encountered a Hobbit.
Shakespeare was never a teenaged girl, ripe with emotion and doped up on first
love and had never been cut wide open by that first love falling apart. If they
all wrote what they knew, none of the masterpieces they created would exist.

Why would anyone tell an aspiring fiction writer to ‘write what
you know’? The whole reason someone is called to put something down from their
head onto the page or screen is because in the act of making things up, they’re
escaping what they know into where they want to be. That’s what writers do.
They make things up. Granted, it’s making things up with a lot of research,
creativity, plotting and re-writes, but when you get right down to it, that’s
what we do.

What writing advice have you gotten that you instinctively cringed
at? Conversely, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

 

 

*pic by kamikaze fowler, found on weheartit.com*

About Time I Dusted Off My Blogging Boots

Wow, it’s hard to believe that I haven’t posted on here since the
middle of May.

It’s not that I haven’t been writing. I have. I’ve finished a
60,000 word manuscript in that time and a few smaller pieces as well. The
manuscript is still in its rough form right now, needing rewrite and editing,
but I’m very happy with how the first draft came out. I used the opportunity of
a Big Bang to get the idea out of my head and onto the screen and it was a
great way of exploring what parts of the plot were going to work and what were
not and now when I’m working on my second draft of this, I’ll have a better
idea what things will need to be revised and refined.

In August I accepted a new job and it’s been an interesting month
and a bit learning the ropes and remembering a lot of the technical knowledge
of a computer that I’d not used for a while. It’s been a struggle and at times
overwhelming to say the least, but I’ve finally turned the corner on it and no
longer want to stab things. Now that the major stress of settling into a new
job is ebbing, I’m slowly starting to hear mumblings from different characters
I’d sent running for the hills in all the chaos.

With September rolling around, I’ve also started taking some
classes online to get certification as a Technical Writer. I’ve been doing
various forms of it in my previous jobs for years, but I’m finally making the
time to get myself the paper that documents the skills I already have. It’s
been busy trying to fit that in with working full time in a city an hour and a
half away from my house. I stay with my mother when I’m working and on my days off
I’ve been going back into my house and packing it up. Once it’s emptied, I’ll
go through and do all the fixing that’s needed to sell and hopefully will have
more free time.

It’s been so long since I’ve had some that I practically forget
what it looks like.

Luckily my first course finishes at the end of October, so I’ll be
able to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. It was a great exercise in perseverance
and discipline last year and I’m hoping to use the month to finish up a lot of
projects that I have out there that need finishing, so I can work on new things
from here on out.

If you’ve never heard of NaNoWriMo before, you can check it out at
www.nanowrimo.org they have great
resources and are a great cheerleading team to help you reach your goal during
the month.

*picture from nanowrimo website*