Inventing Reality Editing Service

3 Secrets of Planning Your Writing Time

For writers, often the problem with their planning process is that it’s not being done in the most effective manner. The result? Some writers are unproductive while others give up on planning altogether, only to find they’re still unable to pen enough pages to complete a book.

You definitely want to plan how you will write your book. You need an outline of the plot and character arc, you need to set aside writing time per day, and you need to determine what part of the outline you will write during each session. Not doing so will lead to a lot of meandering, and either a mish-mash of stuff that doesn’t add up to a story or you’ll bury a good story that’ll only be found after cutting thousands of words.

Successful planning really centers on three simple principles – focusing on small doable chunks of a larger goal; doing rather than planning; and remaining flexible.

Focus on small goals
Though your end goal is to publish a book, always divide that task into small, simple doable steps. For example, a book might consist of 70,000 words. If you can write 500 words a day, make that your goal. At that rate, you will need 140 consecutive days, or just under 5 months, to complete your book. From there, move on to your next step, which might be revising 1000 words a day. You’ll have edited your first draft in just 70 consecutive days or 10 weeks.

Do rather than plan
Before starting your writing session, spend a minute or two to plan what you will tackle. It gives your mind an opportunity to focus so that your time at the keyboard or notepad will be productive. But if you have just a half-hour a day to write, and you spend 15 minutes of it planning what you’ll do, you’ve lost too much time. Think more generally about what you’ll cover in your session and limit that thought time to a mere minute or two.

In addition, some writing coaches suggest have a partner or someone else who will hold you to your goals. So once you’ve planned to pen 500 words a day, you’re going to spend a few minutes talking to someone about whether or not you’ve reached that goal. Wouldn’t you be better off spending those few minutes writing another 100 words? By doing so, you can complete that 70,000-word novel about six weeks sooner. You can hold yourself accountable; just put on your big boy or big girl pants.

Remain flexible
No plan is foolproof. You may get the flu and can’t write for a couple of those 140 consecutive days. Don’t beat yourself up over it. What are two days in a lifetime of days, after all?

Also know that any outline you’ve written for your book is merely a guide, not a narrow road you must remain on. If you come up with a better idea for a scene than what’s in your outline, change it. If you find your character arc is heading in a different direction but are satisfied with that route, then keep going that way, even if it means you need a few extra days to revise what you’ve already written. Remember, your end goal is to write a novel not follow an outline. A plan merely keeps you from standing still, wondering where to go; once on the road, sometimes you’ll discover there’s a better way to go thena your planned route.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.

Pay attention to tone on your author website

Along with achieving the right level of readability in your web text, you need to strike the appropriate tone. Tone is the author’s attitude toward a subject. It might be angry or weary or irreverent or any of a thousand other emotions and physical states.

Visitors to your author site who find your tone unbefitting almost certainly will leave. Though the desired tone varies among your website readers, we can anticipate what the average person expects.

Culturally, people have come to associate certain tones with specific genres. If your website’s tone is flirty and suggestive and you write westerns, you’ve likely misjudged your reading audience. Of course, each genre can possess a range of tones, but even then each one often is related to a subgenre.

A good strategy is for your website’s tone to match that used in your books. Readers often expect that. The website, after all, is like a book blurb. If the tone of either is humorous while the tone of your books are dead serious, the reader usually will feel jilted.

***

If you’ve written multiple books in which each has a different attitude, then your website will need to use more of a default tone that works for any genre. To achieve that, follow these four basic guidelines...

Be personable
Write as if you are speaking directly to the reader by using words like you and your. In addition, use active voice to sound less bureaucratic and formal (passive voice also unnecessarily lengthens your sentence, reducing readability). Suppose you write a travel guide to national parks; your website text might say something like, “You’re visiting a national park but don’t have a lot of time. Maybe you’re just passing by or have only one day of your vacation to stop. What should you see, and how will you find those spots?”

Be upbeat
Always be energetic rather than dull and positive rather than negative. This helps generate interest and then excitement in the reader. Writing “The books' trails are short enough that you can spend just a couple of hours on them so you can enjoy a leisurely day with plenty of time to do other stuff!” is a lot better than saying “Each trail takes about two hours to do. You’ll probably want to do a couple a day to keep the fat off.”

Be useful
If writing nonfiction, you want to show how visitors can benefit by reading your books. If writing fiction, you want to show that your books are suspenseful. Let your content or your writing style reflect this. To that end, a travel book website might include words such as “The series ensures you make the most of your limited time by focusing on the must-see wonders at our most visited national parks.”

Be descriptive
You don’t want to write long prosaic paragraphs, but you do want to sprinkle in descriptive phrasing and apt similes that connects the reader to your books’ subject matter. For example, in a travel guide to Wisconsin, you could write, “Bayfield County boasts crystal blue waters, lush green forests, and friendly Mayberry-like villages.”

***

Usually issues with tone can be resolved by fixing a couple of sentences. Be forewarned, though, that sometimes you may need to take a whole new approach to the web page and start from scratch. As you outline each of your main points that you want to make in the text, focus on delivering them in a personable, upbeat way that demonstrates your book’s usefulness.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.

When and how do I get my royalties?

After countless hours of writing and revising, wringing your hands over the cover design, and struggling with formatting glitches, you’ve finally done – you’ve self-published your book! You’re euphoric, but one nagging question remains: When and how do I get my royalties?

Technically, most self-published authors don’t receive royalties. Royalties are a publisher’s payment made to an author. Since you’re self-publishing, you’re probably the publisher. Because of this, some print on demand companies don’t pay “royalties” to their authors but use several other terms, like profit or revenue.

Of course, you’re the author, so what’s the difference, really? Royalties is simply one of those words whose definition is morphing to keep with modern realities. And it really doesn’t change the question: When and how do I get my money?

As with most corporate publishers, royalties from print on demand publishing are on a per-sale basis. Both royalties largely depend on a percentage of the retail cost. If the book sells for $10, and you receive 10 percent for royalties, then you earn a dollar for every book sold. Sell 100 books, and you’ve made a hundred bucks.

A major difference is authors with corporate publishers typically receive an advance against future sales. So once the author delivers the book to the publisher, the latter cuts the former a check. The author won’t receive any royalties, however, until total sales surpass the amount of the royalties check. So if the author receives a dollar for every book sold, and the advance is for $10,000, book sales will have to top 10,000 before royalties are received. Self-publishing, in contrast, offers no advance, and you are paid out your share of the book sales usually within 30-90 days.

In self-publishing, the amount you earn per book sale usually varies based on the retail price. Kindle Direct Publishing, for example, requires that an ebook be priced at a certain level (as of this writing, $2.99) to receive 70% of each sale; ebooks falling below that price can only receive 35% of each sale. The length of the book, the paper quality, whether or not color is used, and other factors also can affect the price, depending on which format (paperback, ebook, audiobook) you publish.

Without question, self-publishing gives you a higher return for royalties than corporate publishing. The challenge for self-publishing authors is to obtain the sales that would equal the corporate publisher’s advance. Almost all authors, even those who’ve published a couple of books, will have to promote their own titles, however, so self-publishing often is the smarter route to go.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.

7 Sets of Commonly Confused Words

• Amity vs enmity  
• Cleanup vs. clean up vs. clean-up 
• Disdain vs. distain
• Everyone’s vs. everyones’ vs. everyones 
• Loath vs. loathe
• Pled vs. plead vs. pleaded 
• Sound bite vs. sound byte

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.

How to build a story from a SF novum

You may have noticed during the past few Wednesdays this blog has posted ideas for science fiction stories based on novums – inventions or hypothetical concepts that SF writers inject in their tales to show how such an imagined world might differ from ours. The novum might be an mechanical device like robot servants, artificial intelligence, or faster-than-light spacecraft; it also can be a hypothetical idea such as “The Earth is a scientific experiment run by aliens to determine the meaning of life” or “The government outlaws books.” Science fiction stories typically arise from a novum.

Among the problems of many novice science fiction writers is instead of introducing a new novum they rely on used furniture – that is, they borrow novums from popular SF series. After all, how many novels have you read that use starships exploring the galaxy for the Earth-based Federation? Barely changing names to appear as if you are not appropriating – a starcraft seeking M-class worlds for the Earth-centered Alliance – still doesn’t cut it as original or fully using the potential that science fiction offers to examine our culture or humanity. Clearly a list of new, scientifically plausible novums are needed.

Of course, simply describing a world based on a novum is more of an essay than a story. Stories center on conflict, and a novum should generate such clashes that lead to a tale worthy of telling. A novum is the “what if” that allows you to explore humanity.

Consider the following novum – Second Brain. What if everything in the world were catalogued so that information about any item could be instantly accessed? Buy a burger and fries? The tray instantly relays information about their calories nutritional value. Pass an item in the supermarket? Up pops info about its ingredients and cost per ounce compared to other products. See a car driving down the street? The make, model, special features, miles per gallon and sticker price suddenly appear over it. Pull a book from a shelf in a library? A synopses and links to critical reviews rise from the book’s top edge. Sounds like a great universe, doesn’t it – you never need to look up information about anything! Decision-making suddenly becomes easier.

What if, however, a group of teens and young adults revolt against this info-heavy world, and like hippies of the past speaking against capitalism, claim the Second Brain mars the world’s natural beauty, is largely controlled by megacorporations and so is inaccurate and meant to cajole you into making purchases, and is information overload that disconnects us from one another and our own selves. This marks a major division in society – those who want to disconnect from the Second Brain and those who are utterly dependent upon it.

Now, what if this conflict is played out between a college-age daughter and her corporation-managing father? She leaves for the wilderness while he works to further entwine the Second Brain into our society. Of course, their conflict over the novum is merely representative of what truly separates them…she finds his love for her phony (like the Second Brain information) while he finds her ungrateful and unappreciative. How can they ever overcome this divide? That’s the story you want to tell.

The novum, meanwhile, serves as a launch pad to a discussion about our own era, in which people increasingly disconnect from one another in favor of the information and entertainment they receive via their smartphones and other electronic devices.

In short, the list of novums appearing on this blog are merely a starting point. So, when creating a story from them, follow these six simple steps:
• Select a novum you find intriguing
• Imagine how the world would be different if this novum actually existed
• Determine a conflict that might arise between people or within a person in such a world; this conflict is substantive enough that it needs to be resolved
• Create characters (especially a protagonist and an antagonist) who can fight out these conflicts in this imagined world
• Draw an analogy between this imagined world and its characters with today’s society
• Write the story

All right, let’s get started writing the next generation of great science fiction!

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.

7 Tips for Writing Dialogue in Fiction

• Place 'said' after speaker's name 
• How to make dialogue sound realistic 
• Tighten writing by deleting unneeded attribution 
• How to handle foreign accents and regional dialects in dialogue 
• How to properly punctuate dialogue 
• Avoid mime conversations in dialogue 
• Eight tips for writing interesting dialogue
• BONUS: "Write what should not be forgotten." - Isabel Allende

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.

Five Great Quotations about Poetry

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.” - John Fowles

“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.” - David Carradine

“‘Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.” - Andre Gide

“Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.” - Thom Gunn

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.

5 Tips to Motivate and Reassure Writers

• Trigger your creativity
• Stories drive a civilization to its heights
• Knead a troubled mind to peace by writing
• Write yourself out of a nightmare
• Writing: A journey toward something better 
• BONUS: Five Great Quotations for Aspiring Authors

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.

Use photos in LinkedIn status updates

Though LinkedIn really isn’t thought of as visual-oriented social media – the status update images generally are small with most people visiting the site to read resume-oriented text – photos still can be used to help boost your book sales there.

Indeed, studies show a photo with a status update can increase the number of people looking at your LinkedIn post by 11 times. If you’ve already got 100 people viewing your post, raising that number to 1100 is worth the effort of adding a photo to it.

There are plenty of people using LinkedIn, too. The social media site boasts more than 332 million members with at least two new members per second.

Of course, some photos are worth more than others in drawing LinkedIn visitors to your post. Given that, here are some quick tips for maximizing your LinkedIn photos:
• Communicate something about your books to potential buyers – Use the image to show, in no uncertain terms, what you’ve written about. This isn’t necessarily a book cover, but it might be the image used on your cover.
• Share in-the-moment photos of you as a professional author – These can be you giving a book reading, interacting with readers at a signing, and if writing nonfiction doing what you write about (such as you kayaking Lake Superior if your book is “101 Must-Do Kayaking Trips”). These photos can show you’re a popular author and that you take your book subject seriously.
• Show a writer at work – A photo of you writing – at a keyboard or with a pen and notepad – instantly tells readers that you’re an author. Add some knickknacks that show your genre, such as a model spaceship for science fiction, a Sherlock Holmes cap for detective stories, or a statue of a cowboy on a horse if you pen westerns.
• Add text to give context – An image of a gun with splotches of blood in front of the barrel needs context to show if you are a writer of mysteries or spy thrillers. Words like “Author of Bestselling Crime Fiction” solve that problem for you.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.

Print on Demand: 25 Things You Need to Know

• Write a winning blurb for your book’s back cover
• How to find a good editor or proofreader
• How to avoid copyright infringement
• Make tables readable in your self-published book
• Should you ever co-write your book? 
• Co-authors can form 'general partnership'
• BONUS: “The true writer...will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.”

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript 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. I can provide that second eye.