Have people told you, “You should write a book?” It’s time to start listening to them.
Consultants, public speakers and other professionals have long understood that writing a book both helps establish their credibility as experts and sells well to readers interested in their area of expertise. But you don’t have to be a lawyer, financial advisor, or talking head to write a book targeted to a niche audience.
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Anne Lamott in her wonderful book on writing, Bird by Bird, has a chapter on “Shitty First Drafts.” She advises, “All good writers write them. That’s how they wind up with good second drafts and wonderful third drafts.”
One of the best ways to create that wonderful draft is to get feedback on what you have written. Here are three ways to do it.
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As authors grow close to finishing the writing of their book they are also often anxious to get it into print as soon as they can. The impulse is easily understandable, however rushing to publication can not only result in a book of lesser quality than the author hoped for, it may actually result in higher costs, and cause the process to take longer than it needed to. Successful self-publishing is not a process of doing multiple things simultaneously; it is a process of following a simple plan one step at a time.
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There are a lot of template based publishing sites on the net that offer one-stop shopping where you can lay out your book’s interior, create a cover, and print your book. Should you use one?
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I have recently read two excellent pieces of historical fiction. They raise some interesting questions for those of us want to write about history or family history. The first is Graham Moore’s The Last Days of Night. The second is Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon’s Moonglow.
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When you set out to self-publish a family history book you need a variety of skill sets. These skills include research and writing, but there is another there is another type of expertise that many family historians overlook – technological skill.
Let's take a look at what it takes to create a beautiful heirloom quality book.
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Who should publish your book? Every author faces the same choice. Increasingly the choice is between “assisted self-publishing” and becoming an “indie” who truly self-publishes.
Before you sign up for an all-inclusive package with a heavily advertised giant like Author House, Xlibris, or Outskirts Press it’s important to understand that when you choose one of them you will pay an inflated price for every book they print for you.
Let's see how it works.
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Writing a memoir that connects with an audience is not about telling your story. “Unless you're Bill Clinton or Mick Jagger,” said novelist and memoirist Holly Robinson, in The Huffington Post, “nobody but your best friend cares about your life story (and she might be pretending).” Writing a great memoir depends on telling your story in a way that gives readers an insight into their own lives and the human condition.
Great memoir relies on the tools of the story teller and is reflective rather than reportorial.
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Nonfiction, whatever form it may take, is built on a foundation of facts. Whether they present an account of actual events, as in family history or biography, seek to prove the validity of an argument, or demonstrate the correctness of a method of doing something, as in a how-to book, an author’s words are judged by the quality of the facts on which they are based. A nonfiction reader is likely to ask, “What’s the evidence for this?” Generally that evidence is based on documents, research, or accounts written by others and used by the author. So it behooves the nonfiction author to include references to allow the reader to know and evaluate the quality of the sources from which that evidence is drawn.
Let's look at how to do it.
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“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.”
That’s the first line of Neil Stephenson’s recent novel, a piece of speculative fiction titled Seveneves.
Wow! Quite a start. A good opening is so important. Let’s see why.
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If you’re like most of us you have had children come to you and say, “Tell me a story.” That’s a lot like the position you’re in when you set out to write a family history. You need to tell your family’s story.
That’s much different than simply recounting the information you’ve gathered about ancestors during years of careful research. You are the lens through which your reader will view your family. You need to reflect, evaluate, and make judgments about what you have discovered. What is important? What is not so important? What lessons are to be learned from the experiences of your ancestors? What might those experiences tell family members who are currently alive or in future generations about their own identities? Yours is the voice of the storyteller which draws meaning out of the experiences of those who have gone before.
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Frustrated by the lack of opportunity to display and sell her children’s books, Patti Brassard Jefferson, an award-winning independent author and illustrator, decided to change the rules of the game.
This summer she opened P.J. Boox, described by Publishers Weekly as the “first bookstore dedicated to self-published authors.”
P.J. Boox only sells books published by independent and self-published authors.
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We’re almost halfway through NaNoWriMo. How are you doing? Here are five great posts to help keep you on track and motivated as you press on to meet the NaNoWriMo challenge.
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I don’t pay much attention to celebrity memoirs. They are usually ghost-written and convey little insight into their subject.
But when Elvis Costello, a singer/songwriter I have enjoyed for years appeared at Washington D.C.'s Sixth & I to discuss his memoir Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, I went to hear what he had to say. Costello is somewhat unique among celebrities. He actually wrote his own memoir. I hoped he would talk about his writing process. I wasn’t disappointed.
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A chance discovery of a piece of family ephemera accidentally hidden in a piece of furniture for almost 70 years opens up a series of insights into my grandmothers' life and times. The experience provides a good reminder to family historians that family stories aren't always where you might be looking for them. Think about what you might find among your own family's unexamined ephemera.
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If you want to write a family history that people will want to read, it’s a good idea to think about those potential readers before you begin. What interests and inspires them?
Most genealogical researchers see their task as the pursuit of facts about their ancestors – births, deaths, marriages, children, death, occupations, and home places. Lists of facts seldom engage people. Think about history class in high school. What does engage people, even inspire them, is the drama of real people’s lives. Whether it’s portrayed in a Pulitzer Prize winning piece of historical biography like those written by David McCullough, in the avalanche of memoirs filling the New York Times Best Seller List, or less lofty prose like People Magazine or supermarket tabloids, real life drama fascinates readers.
How can you capture the drama in your own family history and share it with your readers?
If you set out to create compelling biographical sketches of your ancestors you’ll be sure to have the drama one doesn’t find in the facts of an ancestor’s pedigree chart.
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The great architect Mies van der Rohe once observed that in designing buildings, “Less is more.” It is just as true when writing a book. One of the best ways to improve the draft of a manuscript is to make some judicious cuts.
Stephen King recalls in On Writing how he learned that lesson.
"I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: ‘Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.’"
Here are some ideas on where you might find that 10%.
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Any savvy author knows that Dana Lynn Smith was absolutely correct in her post Seven Reasons Why Reviews Sell Books on the Book Buzzr Blog when she said,
Book reviews are a powerful marketing tool for books of all types. Not only do they bring books to the attention of people who might never have heard of them otherwise, but they provide “social proof” that the book is valuable, and help the reader determine if the book is a good fit for them.
The question is, how do you get good reviews on sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Good Reads, and influential blogs?
It’s as easy as 1-2-3.Here's how to do it.
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Over reliance on narrative summary is one of the surest signs that a story, whether fiction or nonfiction, is written by a novice writer. The author, often because he is concerned with making all of his plot points, sounds like a school child giving a book report. This happened, then that happened, next another thing happened, the writer tells his reader. There is not much detail in his account of the story. The author / narrator distances his reader from the events he recounts because he tells the audience what happened rather than making his readers front row spectators as drama unfolds on the page. Narrative summary is often written in the past tense, while a story that engages its readers relies on the immediacy of present tense.
Avoiding over reliance on narrative summary is relatively easy if you rely on a piece of advice from Mark Twain. “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”
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Jane Green is not someone you would think of as a self-publisher. She’s the author of New York Times best-selling novels The Beach House and Second Chance and is generally considered, along with Helen Fielding, one of the founders of the Chick Lit genre. But when Green, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, wrote Good Food, drawing on stories from her life and the food that runs through them. filled with recipes and photos, she decided to publish it herself.
The experience taught her some lessons that are important for all self-publishing authors.
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