Inventing Reality Editing Service

Boost book sales via backlinks to your website

Among the best ways to crank up book sales is to get your title or name as an author at the top of the search engine list. That is, if you write car maintenance guidebooks when someone Googles “car maintenance guidebooks” and your website appear in the first couple of listings – or at least in the top 10 (usually the first page of returned searches) – you’ve greatly improved your visibility and hence increased your chances of a book sale. A good way to boost your ranking on search engines is through backlinks.

Backlinks are links on other websites that send people to your website or blog. The more backlinks the better. In addition, the higher the listing of a website when an Internet search is conducted, the more valuable that backlink is in boosting your site’s ranking.

There are plenty ways to get backlinks. You might guest blog at another site. You might ask bloggers who write about topics related to your book to include a link. You might use social media such as Goodreads, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. You might be the subject of a newspaper article that appears online. In short, every effort you make to boost awareness of your book ought to include a link that brings readers back to your website’s home page and hence improves its visibility.

Be aware that obtaining backlinks must be a sustained effort in your marketing. The older the article or blog post or tweet, the less likely it is to be seen, and hence the value of that backlink falls off. If you succeed in raising your website’s visibility this month with backlinks, two months from now your site’s ranking inevitably will decline – unless you find new places to include backlinks.

One last tip: Be careful of scams promising to bring “millions of viewers to your websites” by taking care of the backlinks for you. Often those companies place those backlinks on very low quality websites that no one ever views and that actually can hurt your ranking in the search engine algorithms.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Youngstown, Ohio, or a small town like Hogshooter, Oklahoma, I can provide that second eye.

Does a self-published author need to incorporate?

When self-publishing a book, you essentially are starting a business. So should you incorporate?

Most authors will say the general answer is “no.”

After all, incorporation (such as becoming a “limited liability corporation” or LLC) provides little benefit to the author. The main reason that businesses incorporate is to protect the owner’s personal assets (such as his home, car, investments) in case the company should be sued. When authors land in court for their work, it typically is for defamation, infringement or invasion of privacy – claims that are based on your individual conduct. Hence, being a corporation provides no shield for you.

In addition, many authors find the cost of incorporation generally is far greater than revenues from a self-published book’s sales. You will need to earn several hundred dollars annually from sales or you’ll actually be spending more money on government licenses and fees than you earn from the business. There’s little economic sense in incorporating when you can run a business without doing so.

Indeed, rather than incorporating, most authors opt to be a sole proprietorship. No legal documents usually are required to say that you are in business, so long as the name of your business (if you name it at all) matches or includes your actual name.

Of course, some authors do find a benefit to incorporating. For example, if you have a series of books and annually earn thousands of dollars from their sales, incorporation might be able to save you some tax dollars. In addition, if you have formed a publishing company that does more than serve as a fictitious name for your published works – for example, it publishes other people’s books as well as your own and has employees – incorporating is a good idea.

A final note: This post merely reports the current norm in the self-publishing industry and does not constitute advice. Especially if your situation is unique, always consult an attorney and tax consultant before making a final decision.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Provo, Utah, or a small town like Dismal, Tennessee, I can provide that second eye.

Hat-trick of confusion: There vs. their vs. they’re

If this set of spelling errors could be placed anywhere, it ought to be in other people’s trash cans. Yet some writers continue to wrongly use the terms while acting as if they are correct.

There refers to place: He’s going to Los Angeles. While there, he will meet with studio executives.

Their means that more than one person owns something: Jake and Emily went to Chicago. Their itinerary includes visiting the Sears Tower.

They’re is a contraction of “they are”: Jake and Emily like to travel. They’re going to New York City for New Year’s Eve.

The phrase there are never should be written as the contraction they’re.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Charlotte, North Carolina, or a small town like Butts, Georgia, I can provide that second eye.

Rotate third-person limited to avoid issues

Sometimes writers structure their book so that the third-person limited point of view alternates from scene to scene between major characters in a book. However, within each scene, only one of those characters’ point of view is used. This literary device is known as third-person rotating limited.

I used this technique in my novel Windmill. Each scene switches to the perspective of one of the four main characters. Their stories overlap to form the larger novel, with each character akin to a windmill’s turning blades, each metal sliver catching the glint of the sun (The sun is a symbol in the book for “truth.”) in a slightly different way. Each character symbolized a unique approach to an issue, so seeing how they incrementally dealt with obstacles arising in the plot aided in the examination of the book’s theme.

Indeed, such a storytelling technique offers several advantages:
g Can get inside more than one character’s head – A story told solely in first-person, second-person, and third-person limited points of view can only be told from one character’s perspective. As with third-person omniscient, a rotating point of view allows the writer to tell the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters; unlike third-person omniscient, however, rotating the third-person limited perspective allows the writer to hyperfocus on each character.
g Lacks omniscient point of view’s disadvantages of being impersonal and implausible – Third-person limited allows writers to tell a story from a more personalized perspective, allowing the reader to better connect with the character; rotating allows for this connection to exist between the reader and multiple characters. In addition, since each of the main characters’ motivations will be better understood, some behaviors by characters won’t appear inexplicable, as they might in an omniscient narrative.
g Maintains a consistent narrative voice for each character – When using an omniscient viewpoint, many novice writers try to make the narrative’s tone imitate the character’s personality. Called the imitative fallacy, this results in a disjointed voice or rhythm to the narration. Focusing on the perspective of a single character in a scene, however, usually eliminates this problem. A rotating point of view allows each of the major character’s personalities to come out in a way that reads smoothly.

The literary device sometimes is referred to in literary circles as episodically limited third person omniscient.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Fresno, California, or a small town like Frizzleburg, Pennsylvania, I can provide that second eye.

Twist endings best avoided in storytelling

There’s a tale from the early 2000s about a group of women spelunkers who are trapped after a cave-in. Unfortunately for them, there’s a monster that’s also underground and begins picking them off one by one. Fortunately one of them through her wits and physically prowess escapes. Then, just as she enters the liberating sunshine, she wakes up. The escape has been a dream, and she’s still trapped underground.

If you let out a groan, then like most readers you’ve had it with twist endings. Also known as O. Henry endings and Twilight Zone endings, these surprise conclusions to your story are best avoided.

The reality is that twist endings rarely work except for young, novice readers who are seeing them for the first time (which may be why so many young, novice writers pen such endings!). Why don’t they work for older readers? Because the ending undermines the story’s whole premise. The writer has set up the reader for one thing but then tricks him.

No one likes having a joke played on him.

The twist ending betrays the psychology of the reader-writer relationship. After all, a writer must convince the reader that the story is worth reading in large part by presenting a stimulating character and an intriguing problem to be solved. If a reader sticks with the story, he’ll feel cheated when the author undermines those two promises, however. Take the spelunker story above. The twist ending tells the reader that the character isn’t truly stimulating because she doesn’t use her wits or physical prowess to survive; further, the problem to be solved really isn’t intriguing because the author implies that it’s unsolvable (We all know there’s no way for Bambi to defeat Godzilla, after all, so it’s not much of a story.). In short, the twist ending is the old bait-and-switch.

Of course, sometimes the twist ending does work (and even is expected, as in “The Twilight Zone” episodes). For example, the twist ending might be a contes cruels, a French term in which the ending/punchline is meant to horrify readers. This occurs in the original 1968 “Planet of the Apes” movie. As the story nears its end, the main character, astronaut George Taylor, gains his freedom from the cruel apes, thus resolving the story’s central problem. The movie could have went to credits there, but tacked onto the film is Taylor stumbling across a half-buried Statue of Liberty, horrifying the viewer into realizing that humanity destroyed itself and hence created its inferior status as a second-class animal. This serves as an anti-war statement that doesn’t alter the reader’s understanding of the character or the story’s central problem.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Denver, Colorado, or a small town like Dewey Beach, Delaware, I can provide that second eye.

Five Great Humorous Thoughts on Writing

“I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.” - Peter de Vries

“He was such a bad writer, they revoked his poetic license.” - Milton Berle

“Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.” - Fran Lebowitz

“I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.” - Stephen Wright

“Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.” - Anatole Broyard

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Chicago, Illinois, or a small town like Humptulips, Washington, I can provide that second eye.

Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree

Each idea you have for a story is like a tiny seed. Not all seeds grow into beautiful plants, and likewise not all story ideas will yield an impressive tale. Still, most seeds are capable of growing, so long as they are properly nurtured.

You plant the seed for your story the moment you commit it to paper or to your computer’s memory. But just as you wouldn’t sprinkle seeds in the ground and expect the best, so you shouldn’t believe that simply writing the story idea will lead to the next line and then the next paragraph, the next scene, and then the full tale.

Seeds need good soil to sprout. The rich dirt that helps your story spring forward are further thoughts in your head about where the tale might go – its characters, their motivations, their conflicts, the plot that plays out these conflicts, the setting upon which this all occurs. The more nutrients in the soil of your thoughts, the greater the likelihood that a story will rise from that initial seed.

Sunlight and water are necessary to keep a plant growing. You can give your story sunlight by opening your notebook or laptop and setting aside the necessary time to work on it. You water your story when you devise dialogue exchanges while standing in line at the supermarket or play out how the plot might turn as you drive your car to work and then apply those thoughts when you next work on the manuscript.

Unfortunately, sunlight and water encourages weeds to grow about your story. These ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-providing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the crowding passive voice sentences – from your tale.

Few gardens planted by novices look perfect. But with each successive year, the gardener’s knowledge and skills expand, and their flowers, vegetables, shrubs, herbs or trees grow to be like those in the perfect pictures that appear in books or online. Likewise, so long as you nurture and tend to your story, it and the future seeds you plant naturally will bloom into a beautiful creation.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Oklahoma City, or a small town like Peculiar, Missouri, I can provide that second eye.

Promote your book by hosting guest bloggers

A great way to promote your book by reducing your workload is letting others guest blog on your site.

Hosting a guest blogger offers a couple of benefits to your site. Most obviously, it frees you from having to come up with another blog entry. More importantly, though, it exposes others to your blog and website, as the guest blogger promotes his appearance on your pages. This brings new visitors to your site, and many of them probably have never heard of you or your book.

To find guest bloggers, simply invite others to take on that role. Offers can be made via your social media posts or by emailing someone who you think would write something of interest to your readers.

You may receive guest blogging requests from people you don’t know. Before letting just anyone guest blog at your site, though, you’ll want to know their credentials. They should be qualified to write for your site and should be of interest to your readers. Perhaps their credentials are being a fellow author, a publisher, a literary agent, or a book editor. Or possibly they are an expert in the area you write about, say a car designer if you wrote a book about car maintenance.

In addition, before giving them the go ahead to write their guest blog, have them pitch some topics. You might then say “no” to some, as you’ve already written about them or as they wouldn’t be of interest to your readers. Other topics you might tweak so they better fit your readers. Knowing in advance what one guest blogger will write about also means you can say “no” to that topic if a second or third guest blogger proposes it.

One guest blog submission to always say “no” to is one that has appeared elsewhere. Guest bloggers should create unique material for your site or interest in the post will be reduced. Type various phrases from the submission into a search engine to see if it has already ran or has simply been rewritten for your site.

Always let your guest blogger know that you reserve the right to edit their submission. You should edit it as well, at least to catch typos. Such editing includes the option to reduce the piece’s length (If your blog runs about 800 words, you don’t want a 3000-word entry posted.) and writing the headlines/subheads as you see best.

Also limit the number of submissions by any one guest blogger, usually to once a month at most. Some writers are prolific and can churn out a lot of material that soon crowds out your own entries. If looking to reduce your workload, opting for a variety of guest bloggers typically is better than relying on one or two writers.

Be sure to promote your guest blogger and his topic on your various social media. This can attract attention and visits from those readers who would be particularly interested in the post. It’s also another way for those interested in the guest blogger to stumble across your site as they conduct Internet searches about him.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like San Diego, California, or a small town like Eek, Arkansas, I can provide that second eye.

Pay attention to your author’s bio pic

One of the elements of a self-published book that shouldn’t be overlooked is the author’s photograph. While the photo often is a thumbnail or even smaller, it can subtly affect a reader’s decision to purchase your book. A blurry or a pixelated photo suggests (rightly or wrongly) that the rest of the book is unprofessional; a photo that makes you look mean or physically unappealing tells the reader that you’re creepy and so probably is your book. Further, the author’s bio pic can appear in a number of spots – the back cover, next to the author’s bio at the book’s end, on your website, on web pages selling or promoting your book (such as Amazon.com and Goodreads) and probably elsewhere.

Given this, you want to treat your author’s bio picture with some forethought and care. After all, this is a photo of yourself – if you’re unconcerned with what it looks like, then readers might wonder just how concerned you are with the book’s content.

Some general guidelines for the author’s bio picture include:
g Ensure it is technically of high quality – As with your book cover, make sure the picture is not pixelated or blurry. Ensure its size is large enough to be used for more than just a thumbnail (which includes making it 300 dpi). In short follow all of the rules of good photography.
g Crop appropriately – Usually a head and shoulders shot is enough. The head should fill most of the photo. You can cut a little off the crown of the head if you need to crop it to fit a photo box.
g Focus on personality – Always ask what type of readers will purchase your book and try to be like them. If you’ve written a book about horses, wear a Western shirt rather than a suit and tie; if you’ve written a novel about hikers surviving a surprise mountain blizzard, wear a sunhat like hikers would don.
g Think eyes – They truly are the proverbial “window to the soul.” They should be focused on the camera and full of energy, not appearing dead, glazed over, or bloodshot.
g Smile – You want to appear friendly and inviting. Of course, there are a wide range of smiles, from the subtle Mono Lisa to the toothpaste-selling wide, white teethy smile. Select one that’s appropriate for your book’s topic.
g Pose “naturally” – Look over other author’s pics and see how they stand. Usually the photo is not a straight-on shot, like what police would take at a line-up. The head might be canted slightly to the side, a shoulder turned toward the camera, the chin resting on a hand and so on. Appear as if the camera caught you in your natural state.
g Look clean – Your hair should be combed (Of course, hair can be styled to be mussed up.), your face washed and with the appropriate amount of makeup, and your clothes clean (even if you wrote a book about being a garbage man).

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Rochester, New York, or a small town like Beech Bottom, West Virginia, I can provide that second eye.

Editing client publishes second in crime series

A long-time editing client of mine, Steven Gross, has published his latest novel, the next installment in the Benny Steel detective series. “Divine” tells the story of Philadelphia homicide detective Benny Steel, who steps into a case from hell—a mind-boggling, terrifying, calculated string of events—and goes on a hunt for a man with an agenda, but whose motive is unclear to law enforcement. Steel is left staring into the face of evil, an evil that cuts through his soul and tests his faith in the goodness of humanity. But time is running out and this case is ready to explode. Can he stop this man before it’s too late? The book is available for purchase online.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Portland, Maine, or a small town like Papa, Hawaii, I can provide that second eye.