Randy Ingermanson's Blog: Advanced Fiction Writing, page 12

The Big Marketing Hatchet Man

So you published your novel and now you’re trying to market it and it’s going slow and you suddenly realized that you hate marketing. How do you get the word out when you don’t know anything about marketing fiction?

Sharon posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

So I’ve written two books. And most of the readers who own the books have liked them. (Not all of course, none of us will write a book that every reader falls in love with.)

But still the big marketing hatchet man hovers over my head. Why does marketing have to cost more than book sales? Or does it?

And Jonna posted a similar question on the same day:

I have indie published the first three novels in a series, all available in print and for Kindle, and have gotten good reviews from readers, but my marketing skills are pretty bad. You recommend sending out review copies. I’ve seen some sites offering reviews for a fee. That seems a bit dodgy to me. My question is, to whom should I be sending review copies and should these always be print copies or can I submit digital files for review?

Thanks for all your great advice, Randy.

Randy sez: Sharon, I love that phrase, “big marketing hatchet man.” It conjures up an image that resonates with just about all fiction writers.

Jonna, your specific question is about review copies, and I can answer that very quickly. Don’t pay for reviews. Indie authors will do best by getting reviews on the online retailers–Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, etc., along with reviews on Goodreads and other social media for book-lovers. But the more general question that you’re really asking is the same as Sharon’s: How do you market fiction?

Let’s be clear, right up front, that this is a very hard question. A very big question.

It’s a little bit like asking, “How do you play chess?”

Sure, I can show you what moves each of the chess pieces is allowed to make, and once you know those, you technically know “how to play chess.” But you will play like a beginner.

This is the way people usually teach marketing. They show you how to do a tweet or how to post on Facebook or how to pin on Pinterest or how to post a blog entry or whatever. And technically, now you know how to market. But you will market like a beginner.

If you really want to learn to play chess well, then you need to get some training from somebody who knows how to play chess. Either you find a mentor or you learn from books or from software. But you need to get training.

And then you need to play chess. Lots of it. If you want to become a grandmaster, you need to put in about 10,000 hours playing chess. That’s 5 years, playing chess 8 hours per day, with a couple of weeks vacation per year. That’s a lot of chess!

Do you have to become a “marketing grandmaster?”

NO!

No, no, no, no, no.

You can do that if you want, but very few novelists ever do. I would say that James Patterson is a marketing grandmaster. And he gets the kind of results you expect from a marketing grandmaster.

But you don’t have to be a grandmaster to play a mean game of chess. You just need to master a few tactics, such as the pin, the knight fork, the skewer, the double-attack. And you also need to learn basic chess strategy, including king-side attacks, queen-side attacks, defense, and the end-game. Each time you add one of these to your arsenal, you become a strikingly better player.

Likewise, you don’t have to be a marketing grandmaster to do well as a novelist. You need to master a few basic marketing tactics. And you need a marketing strategy.

I could write a whole book on this. In fact, I am writing a whole  book on this.

I can’t possibly put everything into one blog post.

But I can tell you the essentials, and they’re pretty simple.

Let’s start by asking why you need marketing. Then we’ll ask what marketing is.

The reason you need marketing is because most people on the planet have never heard of you. (There are seven billion people on earth, and none of them knows everybody.)

Marketing means taking people through three distinct phases:

Attraction–they learn that you exist
Engagement–they learn that you write the kind of fiction they want
Conversion–they pull out their wallet and buy your book

Each phase is essential. Nobody will buy your book unless they want it. Nobody will want it unless they know it exists.

So you need a marketing strategy that will first attract people (to your web site or to the sales page on Amazon or some other retailer); then you need to engage those same people long enough to figure out whether they like your kind of fiction; finally, you need to persuade those same people to buy RIGHT NOW.

If your marketing strategy fails in any of these points, then almost nobody will buy your book.

If your marketing strategy is designed to attract one kind of person, engage a completely different kind of person, and convert a completely different kind of person, then almost nobody will buy your book.

If your marketing strategy succeeds in all three points, then a growing number of people will buy your book. Then if it’s good, they’ll talk about it and word-of-mouth will take off and your sales will grow exponentially.

Those are the essentials.

That is the big picture.

Filling in the details will take a whole book. I can’t change that fact. Marketing is complicated. The best I can do is to break it down into a series of simple tasks, and I’m working on that right now.

I don’t want to discourage either of you, Sharon and Jonna.

So let’s end on a happy note. This is critical for your long-term success, so start with this key principle:

The best marketing tool for any book is another book by the same author.

If you’ve got only one book on the market, then it’s one book out of ten million on Amazon. A few people will find it by chance and buy it, but if they like it, they’ve got nothing else to read. They might tell a friend, but that’s it.

Whereas if you’ve got 100 books on the market, then 100 times as many people will find them by chance and buy them, which means you’ve now got 100 times as many sales. If they like one, they’ll buy several, so now you’re getting several hundred times as many sales. And with each book, they’ll tell a friend, so you’re getting tons more word-of-mouth.

If you look at the successful authors, most of them have a lot of books published.

So it may very well be that the absolute best way to market your novel is to … write another novel. And another. And another.

Of course, people will tell you that you “must” be on Twitter. You “must” be on Facebook. You “must” be on Pinterest, on Goodreads, on the blogosphere. You “must” do this, that, and the other thing. You “must” be on the marketing treadmill ten hours per day.

Really? Seriously? These people know this for sure? Or do they just think it?

I’ll agree that it’s POSSIBLE that some of those things might help market your work.

But you should always ask whether they’ll help MORE than just writing another book.

If you don’t KNOW  that the answer is “yes,” then the answer is probably “no.”

There are certain things that I KNOW work. I know, because I’ve tried them and measured the results. I know when they work and why they work. I know when they don’t work.

Blogs can have value, under certain conditions. E-mail lists can have a lot of value, under certain conditions. Ditto for all the various things people do.

But here’s the thing that has the MOST value: Writing another great book.

Right now, I’m doing almost nothing to market my fiction. Instead, I’m putting my effort into getting my back-list of books back in print as e-books. That should be done fairly soon, and then I’ll have six books that I can market all together. And I’ve got another two books that are partially written–books that publishers had issues with, so they never got published traditionally. Books I believe in and plan to publish as an indie author.

My focus right now is on production, not on marketing. Most of the successful indie authors say that they started getting traction only after they had 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 books out. So that’s my goal.

Jonna and Sharon, go write some more books! This is an exciting time to be an author. Few of us will have success like James Patterson, but that’s OK.

Today, I read that there were 150 authors on Amazon’s KDP program this year who each had sales greater then 100,000 copies.

And thousands more indie authors sold thousands of copies apiece. (I was one of them, without doing much at all to market my books.)

You can too. Write more books. And stay tuned, because I’ll have more to say on how to market fiction effectively in the coming months. But I won’t be able to fit it all into a blog post.

 

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

 

The post The Big Marketing Hatchet Man appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

What If Your First Novel Fails Miserably?

What if you finally get your novel published and then it fails miserably in the market? What if it crashes and burns? Will your fiction-writing career be over?

Dale posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi, Randy. Something’s been bugging me for a while now, and people I asked have given me a bunch of different answers; I hope you’d be able to clear this thing for me and those with similar doubts.

Namely, what will it mean for my future fiction-writing career if my first published book ultimately fails (being of course my failure) to make a name for itself, or worse — is a total disaster. I assume (should I write another novel) that agents and editors would then look at my work with this presumption: “I shouldn’t even waste my time looking at a manuscript by someone who failed so gravely the last time.”

How is it? Is an author’s first failure their last? Or perhaps there is a way out to make yet a good name for oneself?

Thank you for your time.

Randy sez: Dale, your fear is every fiction writer’s fear. And with good reason.

Let’s be clear that everything I say here is my opinion only, it could be wrong, yada, yada. There will be some people who wildly disagree with me. But then, I wildly disagree with them, so that’s OK.

My opinion is that editors and agents care most about your most recent book. If it was a success, then that’s great and you’re everybody’s pal. But if it was a miserable failure, then that’s horrible and you’re damaged goods.

Generally, your agent won’t abandon you after a book crashes and burns. But he will be doing damage control when he goes to sell your next book. Your agent will make the case that your book failed because:

Your publisher gave it a lousy cover.
Your publisher failed to send out review copies.
Your publisher dropped the ball on distribution.
Your publisher screwed up on pre-sales.
Your book came out too early.
Your book came out too late.
Your publisher had a dispute with a major retailer and didn’t get copies into any of that retailer’s stores.
A thousand other excuses.

Any of these could be correct. I have seen books fail for each of these reasons. I’ve seen books fail spectacularly when several of these things happened together. I’ve seen really excellent, brilliant writers have a massive book failure because their publisher screwed up.

But none of that matters, because everybody knows it’s the author’s fault.

Yeah, that sucks, but that’s the way things are. If your book fails, you get the blame.

So what are you supposed to do about it?

I suppose you could quit the fiction writing game, but if writing is in your blood, then you’re not going to do that because you can’t. When fiction writing is in your blood, you’re going to write fiction because that’s just what you do and you can’t help yourself. Quitting is not an option.

You could accept a smaller advance from a smaller publisher and hope that your next book does well and you can rebuild your career. That’s a live option, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you have another miserable failure, then you’d have to step down to an even smaller publisher and an even smaller advance. In principle, you could circle the drain two or three times before you finally go out.

You could adopt a pseudonym and start your publishing career over, either in a new category or in the same category. There is nothing wrong with this option. In fact, you can make a case that even if your career is going great guns, you should use a pseudonym if you radically change brands. That way, you don’t confuse your readers. If you’ve been publishing serial-killer novels under the name Hack Slade, and you switch gears to writing sweet Amish romances under that same name, expect a wee little bit of astonishment and confusion from your fans.

You could bail out of the traditional publishing game altogether  and become an indie author. Then you aren’t beholden to any publisher. You don’t have to convince the gatekeepers that you’re worthy of being published. You just publish. You become your own boss. You make the decisions. You get the money and the glory if it succeeds. This is a viable option, and plenty of authors have done this. I know authors who’ve gone indie precisely for this reason.

There are people who will tell you not to worry about all this. If you’re good, then your books will just magically sell well and you’ll do just fine.

I don’t believe this, for a couple of reasons:

The publishing industry is the opposite of Lake Wobegon (where all the children are above average). In the publishing industry, MOST books sell worse than average. You might think this is statistically impossible, but it’s true, because book sales don’t follow a bell-shaped curve. If book sales followed a bell-shaped curve, then about half the books would sell better than average and half would sell worse. But the actual sales curve is horribly lopsided. The James Pattersons and Dan Browns of the world pull the average up massively. MOST books sell far below average.
Publishers are made up of humans, and humans make mistakes, and sometimes they totally screw up a book. I’ve seen it happen to brilliant authors. Odds are good that if you write more than a dozen books, one of them will tank because the publisher dropped the ball.

Let’s be clear that I’m not anti-publisher. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve met in the publishing industry are smart and decent and hard-working (with a few exceptions).

I’m not anti-publisher. I’m pro-author. And the fact is that authors have a tough time in this industry. There are a lot of reasons for that, and it’s a subject for another day, but it’s possible to write a good, solid book and have it sell poorly.

When that happens, the author always gets the blame. Always. Always. Always.

Write that down: “Always.”

Oh, did I mention that the author always gets the blame?

The solution is NOT for us to fall down weeping incoherently or to wring our hands helplessly.

Authors are not children. We don’t have complete control of our situation, but we have three things under our control:

Develop your craft as well as you can.
Develop your marketing skills as well as you can.
Take complete responsibility for your writing career.

We can’t afford to complain when things go bad. And things are almost guaranteed to go bad. Crap happens. A lot.

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: There has never been a better time to be an author. We are living in the Golden Age For Authors.

We authors have more options than ever. We can work with a traditional publisher. We can go indie. We can be hybrid authors. We can do what we want, write what we want, sell to a world-wide market at little cost and little effort.

Yes, when things go wrong, we get the blame.

But when things go right, we get the credit.

Don’t worry about what can go wrong.

Dream about what can go right.

And then go make it happen.

Dale, I hope you feel a bit better about your future. Just saying it out loud has been good for me. It’s reminded me that yeah, I’m the person driving the bus. I’m in control of my career. And you’re in control of yours.

Go to it.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

The post What If Your First Novel Fails Miserably? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Avoiding Sameness In Your Dialogue

So you’re writing a novel and it’s a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, except that all your characters talk alike. What can you do to avoid that pesky sameness in your dialogue?

Tim posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I have a issue with having my characters sound a like. I have great details on each of their personalities but other one secondary character they all seem the Sam. One is the dialogue, how do I make the sound different?

Randy sez: That’s a great question, Tim. It’s a question every novelist faces.

Let’s try to understand first WHY all your characters are sounding alike in their dialogue.

The reason is because all your characters inherit quite a bit of their personality from you. That is necessarily true. Your characters aren’t real. They spring out of your imagination. They exist because you thought them into existence.

Which means they are limited by you and your experiences. If you’re an American and have never met any Germans, it would be really hard for you to write a German character. If you’re a southerner and have never met any yankees, then you’ll have a hard time writing a yankee character.

So the solution to getting rid of the sameness in your dialogue come in two steps:

Meet more people.
Steal their voices.

Let’s look at each of those in a little more detail.

Meet More People

When I say you need to meet more people, I mean people who are different from you. Wildly different. One of the best things I ever did for my writing career was to spend six years at UC Berkeley working on my Ph.D. in physics.

While I was at Berkeley, I met an amazing assortment of people. Panhandlers. Nobel laureates. Religious nuts. Political fanatics on the far right and far left.

My classmates came from all across the US and all around the world. I spent a lot of time with people from China, India, Korea, eastern Europe.

One of my close friends was an 80-year-old woman. Another had cerebral palsy. I had friends getting degrees in history, English literature, engineering. And I was a teaching assistant for a while and wound up trying to explain physics to a lot of normal people who don’t speak math.

I’m an introvert, but in my time at Berkeley, I got a serious education in the enormous differences in how people think. Which comes out in the way they talk.

Steal Their Voices

This has been immensely valuable to me in my fiction writing, because I had a huge number of people whose voices I could steal.

In one of my novels, I needed a cranky old midwife. No problem. One of my best friends at Berkeley was an 80-year-old woman who always said exactly what she was thinking. She didn’t have an internal censor. So when I was writing dialogue for my cranky midwife, I just asked myself how my friend would say it. I’d actually hear her voice in my head and then I’d just write down what she said.

In another book, I had a minor character who was an exuberant extroverted Israeli archaeologist. He spoke English with the same charming accent as my tour guide when I visited Israel. I remember listening to that guide and memorizing the sound of his voice because I knew I was going to put him in a book someday.

Whenever I have a character who’s very different from me, I ask myself what real person I’ve known who was like that character. Then I try to imagine having a conversation with that real person, and listen to their voice. What pet words do they overuse? What slang do they use? How do they think about the world?

Don’t Copy Too Exactly

One thing you want to avoid is trying to reproduce a person’s accent too exactly. If you’ve ever read GONE WITH THE WIND, you probably struggled to understand the way-too-literal reproduction of the speech patterns of slaves from the Civil War era. Every word is misspelled the way it sounds, making it almost unreadable for modern readers. In cases like this, spell the words correctly but misuse the grammar the way the speaker actually says it. That strikes a balance that your reader can understand.

Different people tend to use different  thought patterns. Try to capture those as exactly as you can. If you have a character who isn’t very original, he might use a lot of cliches when he talks.

One thing to be wary of is capturing the exact slang-of-the-moment. That might work for a year or two, but slang tends to go out of style pretty quickly and then it sounds dated. So if you’re going to use slang, make it up. Then it can never go out of style.

Tim, I hope that answers your question. You get better at writing dialogue by writing a lot of dialogue. You get better at writing in different voices by writing in different voices.

Naked Dialogue

Here’s an exercise to force you to build your dialogue muscles: Write an entire scene in dialogue without using any tags to identify the characters. This means you can’t use “Joe said” or “Mary said” anywhere in the scene. And you can’t even use action tags, such as “Voldemort slammed his fist on the table.”

You have to write the whole scene in what I call “naked dialogue”–just the dialogue, without action or description or interior monologue or interior emotion or narrative summary or exposition.

It’s hard to do, but it forces you to learn the tricks that help distinguish between your characters’ voices.

You will rarely use naked dialogue in an actual scene of a book, but writing it as an exercise will build your skills in dialogue fast.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

 

The post Avoiding Sameness In Your Dialogue appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Are Cliches Always Wrong in Fiction Writing?

So you’re writing a novel and you’re worried that the whole idea is just a cliche. Are you automatically nailed? Should you quit that book and start another one? What if that’s also based on a cliche?

Michael posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hey Randy,

So I hope I am not overloading you with questions, but you seem to be very knowlegable. I have been consuming your blog post with the fervor of a child eating cookies, but have noticed a lack of topics pertaining to cliches. It seems to me that cliches are numerous in fiction, and can be the untimely demise of an, otherwise, great novel. On the other hand, it would seem that certain cliches can be used to my advantage.

As an example, I have always been a fan of the coming of age cliche. It started with Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time.” The young teen coming of age is a cliche that has been used countless times, but is loved by many fans. How do I differentiate between useable cliches, and the old moth-chewed cliches.

Randy sez: Hi Michael, I’m glad you like my blog. I’ve been traveling a lot this fall, and haven’t had much time to blog. In late October, I made the difficult decision to move the hosting for the blog away from Hostgator (they just couldn’t seem to handle the traffic to my web site). My web developer moved my site to WPEngine, and the site has been rock-solid ever since.

Oops, “rock-solid” was a cliche, wasn’t it? Well, it did the job, and you know what I meant, but it wasn’t the most original way to say it.

And that’s the subject of today’s blog. Are cliches always wrong in fiction?

First, let’s define what we mean by a “cliche.” I use this word to mean a pithy phrase that’s so good that other writers copy it and turn it into part of the language.

If you read Shakespeare, you’ll see loads of cliches in his writing. Not because he was lazy. Because he was the first to use hundreds of pithy phrases, which other writers then reused forever.

Cliches are shortcuts. They save time, because you don’t have to think up some new way to say something.

The problem comes when you never do any original thinking. When you rely on cliches for everything. When you have absolutely nothing new to say.

No writer should do that. A writer’s job is to come up with original ideas. OR to present old ideas in original ways.

Now there’s one place where cliches most definitely belong in your fiction: When you have a character who’s a mediocre thinker, one way to show that is to have him use too many cliches. This shows the reader what the character’s like, rather than telling the reader.

“Show, don’t tell,” is a standard cliche in the world of fiction writing.

Cliches are supposed to be bad writing, because they lack originality.

Let’s be clear that readers aren’t reading mainly for “originality.” They’re reading mainly to get a “powerful emotional experience.” There are plenty of writers out there making a good living by giving their readers powerful emotional experiences, and using loads of cliches in the process.

Now let’s look at your question. You believe that the coming of age novel is a cliche. Personally, I would just call this a design pattern for a story. “Design pattern” is a term that came originally from architecture and then was adopted by software engineers.

A design pattern is an idea that recurs frequently, but can be redone in zillions of different ways so as to allow for some original thinking each time. In architecture, a door is one example of a design pattern. Doors are needed to let people move into and out of a room. Sure, you can buy a stock door from Home Depot and that takes no real thought. Or you can design it to be amazingly original. It’s up to you. So a door can be done in a cliched way, or not, depending on the architect.

I‘d say that the coming of age idea is similar. Sure you can do it in a cliched way. But you can also do it in a new, fresh way.

What this means is that the coming of age idea is not itself a cliche. It’s a design pattern.

There just aren’t that many original ideas. In fact, you can’t copyright an idea. What you copyright is the presentation of the idea. Because there are zillions of ways to present any idea, and it’s possible to be original in the presentation.

So don’t worry too much if the category or subcategory that you’re writing is a cliche. Worry first about putting in that powerful emotion experience. And then worry about presenting your story in a new and original way.

It’s a rare writer who can invent a whole new category. Tolkien did it, when he invented the fantasy genre. Tom Clancy probably invented the technothriller subcategory.

But most writers most of the time are writing in standard categories and subcategories. Nothing wrong with that.

Good luck with your writing, Michael, and have fun!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. Of course, I can’t possibly answer all questions, but I do what I can.

 

The post Are Cliches Always Wrong in Fiction Writing? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Three Men And A Manuscript

Awhile back, my friend Larry Brooks suggested to me that he and I and Jim Bell do a joint blog post on fiction writing. Larry is the author of Story Engineering and Story Physics and runs a popular blog at StoryFix.com. Jim is the author Plot & Structure and many others, and does business at JamesScottBell.com. And I am the author of Writing Fiction for Dummies.

Between the three of us, we’ve written several of the most popular books on the craft of fiction writing. So it makes sense to do a joint blog article.

Larry was the organizer for this, so the full blog post is on his site at StoryFix.

I’m posting just the first chunk of the blog post, to give you a flavor for what we came up with. Here’s the first question we tackled:

1.  There’s so much “butt-in-chair, nothing else matters” writing advice out there, and it’s creating problems for newer writers in particular.  If, in some alternate universe, you were asked to define the Holy Grail of advice-for-fiction-writers, the context-setting, everything-stems-from-this piece of gold… and you only got to chip in one answer, what would it be?  My guess is there may be more than one answer competing for this title… so if there’s no breaking the tie, please share those candidates, too.

Jim: Every scene needs an objective housed in the mind of the point-of-view character. Vonnegut said the character must want something, even if it’s just a glass of water. And then you must put obstacles in the way of that objective, or the scene becomes boring. Finally, the outcome of the scene should put the Lead in a worse spot—or maybe give a temporary gain followed by more trouble. Trouble is our business, so we need to make it happen. If the writer uses scene objectives that relate to the overall story question, then the novel has organic unity and feels like there’s forward motion.

RANDY: Success in writing comes from the following three-part formula, which you will repeat until you die:

1) Write fiction on a regular schedule that lets you predict how long it’ll take you to create your next project.

2) Get pieces of it critiqued frequently and apply what you learned to your writing.

3) Read from the recognized experts on the craft and marketing of your work and apply what you learned to your writing.

Why is writing regularly important?  I don’t put much stock in native talent.  I’m sure it exists, but you learn to write fiction the way you learn to play tennis – by doing it.

Why is getting critiqued important?  After all, there are hazards to getting critiqued.  We all have thin skins.  There are bad critiquers out there.  Despite these hazards, every writer desperately needs an outside opinion.  You won’t get better unless you know what the problems are in your writing.  The only writers I’ve ever seen that I considered hopeless were the ones who couldn’t accept critiques of their work.

Why is studying the experts important?  Because your critiquers can tell you what’s wrong with your work, but only a good teacher can tell you how to fix it.  There is no point in reinventing the wheel.  Learn from the experts.  Write better next time.

LARRY: A great story is never just about something… a place, a time, an event, a theme.  A great story is about something happening.

Write with courage.  Jump in.  But don’t jump out of the airplane without a parachute.  One with the words Principles of Storytelling Craft printed on it, visible from all points on the ground… where the readers are.

That was the first question. If you want to read the answers to all five questions, hop on over to Larry’s blog at StoryFix.com and have fun!

The post Three Men And A Manuscript appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

What if You Had a Secret Crush on a Co-worker and Then Realized…

What if you had a secret crush on a co-worker and then realized she was probably trying to kill you?

My Loyal Blog Readers may be interested to know that I’m running a 99-cent special on my e-book Oxygen on Amazon, B&N, Apple, and Smashwords. Here’s a blurb:

Bob Kaganovski has had a secret crush on his fellow astronaut Valkerie Jansen for over a year.

Halfway to Mars, an explosion leaves their crew of four with only enough oxygen for one of them to make it the Red Planet alive.

The pilot is left in a coma.

The mission commander is coming unglued.

Valkerie is the prime suspect.

Bob has to make sense of it all, but his head and his heart are in violent disagreement. And somebody has to figure out who gets to live and who has to die in order to save the mission.

If you’ve ever dreamed about having a geeky romance on a sabotaged mission to Mars (admit it, you’ve dreamed about this millions of times), then Oxygen is for you.

My co-author and I had hoped to work in some cool controversy on science, faith, the meaning of life, the existence of God, and possibly even the Coke versus Pepsi debate. But we forgot, dang it.

Oxygen is 99 cents until midnight on Tuesday, August 27, 2013. (Please note that Amazon adds a hefty surcharge in some countries outside the US. This is way above my pay grade. Also, the Apple store may not charge the exact price-equivalent  of 99 cents outside the US, but it should be close. Smashwords seems to offer just about the same price all around the planet, and they have it in numerous formats, including Kindle, ePub, and PDF.)

Where To Buy Oxygen

Start your journey to Mars at Amazon.

Ride a rocket to glory on Barnes & Noble.

Take a deep breath of Oxygen on Smashwords.

Or search for “oxygen ingermanson” on the Apple iTunes Bookstore.

A personal note to my Loyal Blog Readers: Some of you know that this has been a difficult month for me. My dad has been suffering with emphysema for more than a decade. This summer, he began to decline rapidly, and he died on August 11. It seems horribly ironic to me now, but Oxygen was one of his favorite books.

Many people have asked how I’m doing. The answer is “better than I had expected.”

I hope to resume normal blogging soon. I’m blogging today mainly because this 99-cent special was scheduled a long time ago, as part of an ad campaign on BookBub.

The post What if You Had a Secret Crush on a Co-worker and Then Realized… appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Writing Fiction When Chaos Strikes Your Life

How do you keep writing when chaos strikes your life? When everything is suddenly different? When you feel like you’ve lost your rhythm?

Isaiah posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hello Mr. Ingermanson,

I am a junior in high school aiming to one day write a novel and hopefully make a career out of writing. I have been writing fiction since I was six years old, but really picked it up when I found your book “Writing Fiction for Dummies.”

Three years ago I came up with a really good idea for a book. Its been steeping in my head for almost four years and now I finally feel that the idea is ready to be put on paper. I’ve been writing it for about two months now, and I finished the prologue yesterday. The truth is that I have never had this much trouble writing, and here’s why I think that is. For seven years we lived in one place, and then we were forced to move, and then we moved again, and then we moved again, and were planning to move again. I can’t make a habit out of writing because my environment is constantly changing, my old desk which made me feel professional is in storage, all my books that sat on my shelf and made me feel smart are buried somewhere beneath all that furniture, and my bedroom walls that used to keep the noise away are gone. Do you have any suggestions on how I can re-kindle my old imagination and adequate ability to put it onto paper?

Randy sez: That’s a good question, Isaiah. The issue I think you’re facing here is that chaos has entered your life. You used to have stability. Now your family is constantly on the move, and that’s extremely unsettling.

You’re not alone. When major changes come up in your life, it’s going to put a crimp in your writing.

This happened to me years ago, when my kids got older and needed the room I’d been using as an office. So I went from having a nice quiet office to having a desk in the corner of the chaotic family room. And that really threw me for a while. It’s hard to focus on writing when people are interrupting or looking over your shoulder or just milling around.

And a few years later, my family and I sold our house, moved halfway across the country, rented an apartment for a few months, bought a house, and got settled in. Once again, major chaos for months and months.

So how do you deal with that?

First off, just acknowledge that a major change in your life is going to disrupt your writing. Unless you’re superhuman, it will. So you need to give yourself some slack here. At your age, a disruption of a few months may seem like forever, but in the grand scheme of things, you’ve got a long, productive life ahead of you. If you live to be 100, you’ll probably still be writing fiction then.

Second, you need to find a writing space. It sounds like you no longer have your own room. Not fun. But is it possible you can find a place outside of your home where you can write?

A lot of writers make Starbucks their office away from home. I’m not kidding. They take their laptop to Starbucks, buy the magic potion of their choice, and settle in to write.

A lot of Barnes & Noble stores have areas where you can sit quietly at a table, and I often see people with laptops there. Maybe they’re writers, maybe not, but even though it’s a public space, nobody is looking over their shoulder.

Maybe you can find a place at the school library or a public library or SOMEWHERE that isn’t home and will keep away the prying eyes and yapping mouths of family members.

Having a writing space is absolutely critical. I’m grateful to have an office with a door now in the house we moved to. I can turn on the music of my choice and get lost in my own world. You need to find your space, and this may take some creativity. But without it, writing is much harder.

Third, you need a writing tool that works with your writing space. For a lot of writers, this is a laptop, but not necessarily.

I know a lot of writers used to love their AlphaSmarts — small, dumb devices that you could type text into. They were light and practically unbreakable and you could upload your work to a computer via USB. Nowadays, a lot of my friends really love their iPads. Those are pricey, but there are other tablet devices that are cheaper.

At one point in my life, I used paper notebooks. They were the small 50-page bound notebooks that you can buy at Office Depot cheap. I used them because I needed to write away from my desk and I couldn’t afford a laptop. I called my notebooks my “laptop” and they worked just fine for getting down the words. I still have a box full of them in the garage, and they never need backups. They aren’t sexy, but they work.

The point here is to find a tool that you can work with. Fancy is not as important as portable and easy to use.

Fourth, you need writing time. You need to schedule it. This is hard. You can’t necessarily schedule the same time every day. But if you don’t schedule your writing time, then other things will crowd out your writing. It’s a law of the universe — little rocks crowd out big rocks.

Figure out when you can write and then try to make that time sacred. Professional writers do this. Amateur writers don’t. If you want to be a professional, then start acting like one, and one day you have a very good chance of being one. This is another law of the universe.

Isaiah, I hope that helps. I won’t pretend that managing your writing life is easy. It isn’t. But it’s worth doing. Good luck!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

The post Writing Fiction When Chaos Strikes Your Life appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

The Two Big Myths in Editing a Novel

“There he is—at the Genius Bar!” bellowed a familiar voice behind me. It was my plumber Sam, who had somehow tracked me to the Apple Store, an hour away from my home.

I had a sudden urge to drink rat poison. Or buy a machine gun. Or move to Sri Lanka.

Sam sidled up beside me at the Genius Bar and winked at the young blond Apple technician who was looking at my dead laptop. She had multiple piercings in her eyebrows and her name tag said “Ashley.”

Ashley ignored Sam and showed me her iPad, which displayed a series of diagnostic checks. “Sir, your machine passes all of these tests, so the next—”

“Say, Ashley, ain’t ya tried rebooting it?” Sam said.

Ashley frowned at him. “So the next step is to boot up the computer and test the hard drive.”

Sam harrumphed loudly and poked me in the ribs. “Ain’t that what I just said? Ya don’t need no high-priced Genius to know to reboot yer computer.”

Ashley held down several keys and asked me to push the power button.

I did.

“That ain’t gonna help.” Sam bent over, yanked off one of his size-15 boots, and plopped it on the Genius Bar. “No offense, but don’t be sending no girl to do a man’s job.”

“Wrong on every possible level, Sam.” I shoved his boot off the bar. “Ashley is a professional, and you aren’t, so please just—”

“It ain’t working!” Sam crowed. “Yer laptop ain’t working! And how much ya paying this perfessional genius? Way too much, I betcha.”

“Nothing,” I said. “They solve problems here for free.”

Ashley was shaking her head. “It’s not looking good, sir. Do you mind if I remove your hard drive and look at it in the back room?”

“Go right ahead.”

Sam pulled half a dozen screwdrivers and pipe wrenches out of pockets in his greasy coveralls. “Need a tool? I got everything ya could want.”

Ashley gave him a disbelieving stare and then escaped to the back room with my laptop.

“Sam, what the devil are you doing here?” I hissed.

“Ya got to talk my Ma out of some craziness,” Sam said. He waved with both arms toward the store entrance, where his mother, Minnie, stood clutching a manuscript. “Come on up here, Ma! I caught the so-called genius being stupid red-handed.”

All around the store, shoppers were staring at us.

Minnie plowed through the crowd. “Dear boy! You’ve got to edit my manuscript for me.”

I put up both hands. “Hold on here. Sam, Minnie, I thought I told you I don’t edit manuscripts. Plenty of people do, but that’s just not my—”

“There, ya see, Ma!” Sam boomed. “He don’t edit stuff. Waste of money fer him to edit it, anyway. He probably couldn’t edit his way out of a paper bag if ya spotted him two commas and a semicolonoscopy.”

“I’d be a good editor,” I huffed. “I’m just too busy, is all.”

“Oooh, too busy being hoity-toity,” Sam said. “But Ma don’t need no editor. Just run it through spell check and voom! Pack it off to Amazon. So just tell her that so she’ll stop this rat-sense about hiring some editor. Good writers don’t need no editor. They can do it theirself.”

Minnie was shaking her head. “Sammy, I’m going to do my book right.” She tugged at my arm. “Tell Sammy he’s wrong.”

I pulled out my iPad and brought up Amazon. In seconds I found the second edition of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, the classic book by Renni Browne and Dave King. “Okay, Minnie, the very first thing you need to do is get this book. It’s the best book out there on self-editing—”

“Told ya, Ma!” Sam crowed. “The truth finally comes out. Mr. Smarty Pants sez ya can edit yer book yerself.”

Minnied looked deflated. “That doesn’t make any sense. If I was going to work with a traditional publisher, I’d have an editor. I don’t want to cut corners, just because I’m going to be an indie author. I want an editor to fix my book and make it perfect for me!”

“Stop, stop, both of you!” I said. “Listen, you’re both wrong. Minnie, it’s a myth that editors will make your book perfect for you. Professional authors self-edit their novels—”

Sam hooted and started doing a victory dance, waving a pipe wrench overhead in each hand. “Woo, woo, woo!”

“But it’s a myth that an author can do all the editing for a novel,” I said. “When they’ve made it the best they possibly can, professional authors hire an editor to tell them how to improve it.”

“Told you, Sammy!” Minnie hollered.

Sam scowled. “Big waste of money. Readers is stupid. They don’t care if ya spell a few words wrong.”

Minnie had her iPhone out and hastily ordered a copy of Self-Editing For Fiction Writers. “Dear boy, if you won’t edit my book after I’m done self-editing it, then who will?”

“First let’s define what we mean by editing,” I said. “There are several different kinds of editors.”

Minnie’s eyebrows scrunched up. “Oh mercy! This is going to cost me a lot of money. How many editors am I going to have to hire?”

“I recommend you always hire a high-level editor first,” I said. “Somebody who understands your category of fiction and who can tell you what’s right and wrong with your plot and characters. Every novelist needs somebody to do that. I’ve never met an author who could do that for themselves.”

“But … it sounds like you’re saying they won’t fix it!” Minnie’s lower lip was trembling. “And if I can’t do it for myself, then who in high heaven is going to do it?”

I shook my head. “There are two steps. The editor’s job is to point out the problems. Your job is to listen carefully, decide what changes you’re going to make, and then rewrite your story to make it better. You’re the author.”

“So I need to put an ad in the paper for a ‘big-picture’ editor?”

Sam held a large-screen iMac in the air. “Here’s a big picture, Ma! How ya gonna edit that?”

“Sammy, shut up!”

I was starting to get worried that the Apple Store people would throw us out. “Some people call this kind of editing a ‘substantive edit.’ Some call it a ‘macro edit.’ Some call it a ‘content edit.’ Your best bet is to just define exactly what you want—a review of your plot and characters at a high level.”

“Oh, please, won’t you do that for me? I wouldn’t know where to find somebody like that if you won’t.”

“I can’t,” I said. “But you have a lot of options. You’ve already got one fan for your novel—that librarian we met at Barnes & Noble. It’s possible she might make a good macro editor and she’d probably read your book for free because she likes you.”

Minnie punched in a note to herself on her iPhone. “But what if she isn’t any good?”

“You could also join a critique group,” I said. “Other writers often make good editors. Of course, some of them are awful editors, but you’ll figure out who’s good and who’s bad.”

“Well, I don’t want an amateur ruining my story,” Minnie said.

“One of the best editors I know got started as an amateur reading my work for free,” I said. “Eventually, she became a professional editor and now I pay her to review my work. So I can refer you to her, but you should be aware that no editor is perfect for every author. You need to find somebody who really gets your work. You might want to look around online too. There are plenty of good editors who’ve been laid off by big publishers lately.”

“It sounds horribly complicated,” Minnie said. “Maybe I’m making a mistake not to work with a traditional publisher. If they were paying for the editing, they’d surely assign me an editor who gets my work.”

“That’s no guarantee,” I said. “The absolute worst editor I ever had was assigned to me by a traditional publisher. A major publisher who paid me  quite a decent advance. But this editor completely failed to get my writing.”

“So you’re saying that after I hire this macro editor, then I still have to rewrite my novel all over again,” Minnie said. “Then what?”

“At that point, you still need to do copy editing and line editing,” I said. “Those involve editing for clarity and flow, and then for punctuation, grammar, and syntax. That book I mentioned, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers will also help you out a lot on those. I’ve seen your work. It’s fairly clean copy, so you might be able to the job yourself. A lot of indie authors do their own copy editing and line editing. I do mine.”

Minnie looked puzzled. “What about spelling? I thought editors were there to fix my spelling, but you haven’t even said anything about that.”

“Spell check! Spell check!” Sam chanted.

“Spell check isn’t good enough,” I said. “You really need a human to proofread your novel for spelling, punctuation, and that sort of thing. That’s the last step. I do that myself, and then I hire my daughter to do the same, because my eyes just aren’t as sharp as they used to be.”

“It’s all so confusing,” Minnie said.

“Let’s just take things in order,” I said. “You’ve written the first draft of your novel, and I think you’ve polished it up a bit. Your next step is to find a macro editor to look at the high-level parts of your story.”

“Like when that Ashley cutie run that there fancy diagnostic thingie on yer laptop and told you there wasn’t a thing wrong with it,” Sam said. “But that didn’t help, did it?”

“A little bit like that,” I said. “But it did help. It told us what was working. A good macro editor needs to tell you what’s working so you won’t go trying to fix something that isn’t broken.”

“Sir?” It was Ashley’s voice, and her tone told me immediately that something was broken. Bad broken.

I spun around. “Have you got a diagnosis for me?”

She nodded. “Your hard drive is dead. I plugged it in to a different machine and I could see the hard drive exists, but … no data.”

A ghastly silence settled over the store.

“No … data?” Sam croaked. “What kinda fixit girl are you, if ya lost all his data? It was right there on the hard drive until you started messing—”

“Sam, that’ll be enough.” I stepped up to the Genius Bar. “Thanks for finding the problem, Ashley. I guess I need a new drive, right?”

She nodded. “I’ll put in a new drive but I can’t give you back your data. Do you have a backup?”

“Of course,” I said. “I use Time Machine.”

“Well then, you can take it home and restore your data from the backups and you’ll be up and running.”

“Now watch fer it,” Sam said in a stage whisper that you could hear in the next state. “She’s making him do all the work, but she’s gonna ask him fer money.”

Ashley gave him a poisonous look. “That’ll be $120 for parts and $40 for labor. And $500 for PITA unless you get your friend out of the store in sixty seconds.”

I pulled out my wallet, handed Ashley my credit card, and tugged on Sam’s arm. “Come on, Sam. You heard the lady. Let’s get you outside.”

Sam weighs about 300 pounds and he didn’t move. “I got a perfect right to be shopping in this store, which incidentally is a big ripoff and—”

“Sam, out! Now!”

“Forty-five seconds,” said Ashley.

Sam didn’t move.

Cold sweat sprang up over my entire body. “Come on, Sam, help me out here.”

“I ain’t no PITA and I demand a apology.”

“Thirty seconds.”

Panic began building in my stomach. I looked to Minnie. “If you get him out of here, I’ll macro edit your book myself.”

Minnie leaped forward, jabbed a finger in Sam’s face, and screamed, “Get out of the store right now or I’ll hide your Wookiee action figure!”

“Fifteen seconds!”

Sam’s face turned white. “You wouldn’t, Ma.”

“Would too.” Minnie shoved him toward the door. “And I’ll tell everybody here what you named her!”

Sam bolted for the door.

The crowd cleared a path before him.

“Five seconds! Four! Three! Two! One!”

Sam raced out into the mall and knocked over a huge ficus tree. Dirt spilled over the floor all the way to the Victoria’s Secret store.

“That naughty boy!” Minnie scowled. Then her face brightened. “But at least I found a nice person to do the macro edit on my novel! It’s so kind of you to volunteer.”

I mumbled something even I couldn’t understand.

Ashley handed me her iPad to sign. “Sir, we’ll have your computer back to you in a few hours, and then it’ll take you a few hours to restore your system. I’m sorry you won’t be able to work until then.”

“There’s where you’re wrong.” I took Minnie’s manuscript and shoved it savagely into my backpack. “Looks like I’ll be macro editing a novel for the next two days.”

“Well, then, everybody’s happy, sir.”

 

TO BE CONTINUED …

Randy sez: This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on self-publishing novels. Some of what we say will be useful to non-fiction writers too, but our target audience for this series is composed of novelists who want to indie publish their work.

Today’s post was prompted by the horrible experience I had this weekend when the hard drive on my laptop failed.

Getting it fixed required some work by Apple Store technicians and some work by me. (Which is why I’m a couple of days late on this blog post.)

In the same way, editing your novel will take some work by a good editor and some work by you.

It’s a myth that you can do all the editing yourself. It’s also a myth that you can hire somebody else to do it all for you.

Professional novelists find the right balance. Amateurs don’t.

Minnie now has a plan to edit her novel. While she’s waiting for her macro editor to read her manuscript, isn’t there something she could be doing? Check back next week to see what comes next.

If you’ve got friends who might be interested in becoming an indie author, feel free to let them know about this Indie Author Guidebook series.

See you next week!

The post The Two Big Myths in Editing a Novel appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

A Code Even the NSA Can’t Crack

My Loyal Blog Readers may be interested to know that I’m running a 99-cent special on my new e-book novel Double Vision for the next few days on Amazon, B&N, Apple, and Smashwords. Here’s a blurb:

There’s a code even the NSA can’t crack.

But Dillon Richard can. Dillon is a straight-arrow genius with Asperger’s syndrome. He’s never told a lie. He’s never been kissed. And he’s never had a badass quantum computer for cracking codes. Until now.

In just a few days, Dillon will finish the software to crack the “unbreakable” code that banks and terrorists use to protect their most valuable secrets.

Everybody’s going to want a piece of Dillon. The Mafia. The NSA. And his two beautiful co-workers, Rachel and Keryn.

Who’ll get him first?

Double Vision is a hilarious geeky suspense novel about a guy who has no idea how attractive he is to women. In fact, he has no idea how women think at all.

Dillon is terribly strait-laced, and he’s a bit shocked when he sees that his sexy co-worker Rachel doesn’t wear a bra. But he’s in for a bigger surprise when well-endowed Keryn shows him where she hid the quantum computer.

If you’re mad at the NSA for violating the privacy of millions of citizens, then get away from reality by joining Dillon, Rachel, and Keryn on a geeky romantic suspense high-tech adventure.

You’ll still be mad at the NSA when you get done, but you ladies are going to love dense-but-delicious Dillon and you guys get your pick of hot-wired Rachel or warm-and-cozy Keryn.

Double Vision is 99 cents until midnight on Monday, July 15, 2013. (Please note that Amazon adds a hefty surcharge in some countries outside the US. This is way above my pay grade. Also, the Apple store may not charge the exact price-equivalent  of 99 cents outside the US, but it should be close. Smashwords seems to offer just about the same price all around the planet, and they have it in numerous formats, including Kindle, ePub, and PDF.)

Where To Buy Double Vision

Spy on Dillon, Rachel, and Keryn at Amazon.

Sneak a peek at them on Barnes & Noble.

Steal an eyeful of the three bosom buddies at Smashwords.

Or search for “geeky suspense” on the Apple iTunes Bookstore.

The post A Code Even the NSA Can’t Crack appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

How To Find Your Novel’s Target Audience

“I’m going to be an indie author!” Minnie thumped her hand flat on the table. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

We were in the coffee shop at my local Barnes & Noble, and dozens of aspiring writers were watching me coach Minnie through the process of getting her novel indie published.

“Who’s your target audience?” I asked. “You can’t do anything until you know who that is.”

Minnie’s forehead creased with a dozen wrinkles. “Dear boy, I hope everybody is going to want to read my book.”

I shook my head. This is the kind of notion that sinks writers. I held up my hands for silence and waited for the room to quiet. “Okay, I want everybody in this room to think for a few seconds and then name the best book ever written. When I count down to zero, everybody shout out the name of that book.”

I counted down slowly, holding up my fingers. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Say it!”

“Lord of the Rings!”

“Gone With The Wind!”

“Ender’s Game!”

“Pride & Prejudice!”

“The Da Vinci Code!”

“The Help!”

The room echoed with dozens of titles.

“Whoa, that’s enough,” I bellowed. “We seem to have a difference of opinion. I heard Lord of the Rings, and I’d have to say it’s a great book—”

“It’s boring,” said a kid holding a skateboard. “If I hear one more time about Tom Bombadil being a merry fellow, I’m gonna puke.”

“What book do you like best?” I said.

“Ender’s Game, dude. It’s brilliant. See, there’s this Battle School—”

“I’ve read it. That’s definitely a brilliant book—”

“Well, I hate the author,” said a young woman with retro plastic glasses. “He’s a cave man in his politics. I think The Da Vinci Code was fantastic.”

Minnie shot up out of her chair. “That was a horrible, blasphemous book, and that Dan Brown boy needs to be taken over my knee and spanked.”

“Oh, Ma, lighten up,” said my plumber, Sam, who was standing with his arms crossed. “It was just a storybook with a lot of blah, blah, blah about math and history and conspirafication. Woulda been a whole lot better if there was more shooting and less quacking about that dumb Lisa woman.”

“What do you think is the best book ever written?” I asked Sam.

He grinned and rummaged around in his pockets. “Thought you wasn’t never going to ask. I just happen to have a copy here. The title is Joe Whacks Sam the Plumber, and it’s selling like ice cream. I noticed this here store is fresh out of copies.”

Silence filled the room. Dozens of pairs of eyes were giving Sam mystified looks.

I cleared my throat. “Sam, since you’re the author of this famous work of art, suppose you tell us what the target audience is for your novel.”

“Well, it’s folks that hate Joe Dunn,” Sam said. “You know—that feller that charges low rates, does a good job, and works fast.”

“Your target audience is people who hate a plumber named Joe Dunn?”

Sam nodded. “I figger that’s just about everybody.”

“Let’s take a vote,” I said. “Who hates Joe Dunn, the plumber?”

Nobody moved. As far as I could see, nobody had even heard of Joe Dunn.

“He … sounds pretty good to me,” said the woman with the plastic glasses. “Does he fix leaks in irrigation systems?”

Sam’s face turned purple. “Sure does, and he’s cheap too. Tracks down the leak with some fancy smoke gizmo in no time and gets it fixed faster than you can say Joe Dunn done it. That ain’t no way to run a business. If you folks want to leave a angry message on his voicemail, his number is 555-DUNN.”

I noticed several people scribbling notes on paper.

Sam grinned triumphantly and sat down.

“The point here is that different people like different things,” I said. “Some people are going to love your book. Some are going to hate it. So what’s the lesson to learn from that?”

Minnie shrugged. “Dear me, I suppose it means that you have to try to make everybody happy and don’t offend anyone.”

“Right, take out Tom Bombadil,” said the skateboard kid.

“But I love Tom Bombadil!” protested the woman in glasses. “If you really want to make Lord of the Rings better, take out those horrible ents who take forever to say anything.”

“Ents!” roared a middle-aged man in the back. “Treebeard is brilliant!”

In seconds, the entire room dissolved into chaos.

I rapped loudly on the table. “People! They’re going to throw us out if we can’t keep the noise down a little.”

It took a minute, but slowly the room quieted.

“You can’t make everybody happy with your book,” I said. “So you choose one group of people you’re going to make happy. That group is called your target audience. If everybody else hates your book, that’s okay. Make your target audience happy. That’s your whole goal as a novelist.”

Sam coughed. “What about putting yer competitor outta business? Shouldn’t ya care about that?”

I shook my head. “Sam, this may come as a surprise to you, but the more you talk somebody else down, the more people are going to learn about him and discover that they’re in his target audience.”

Sam gave a skeptical laugh. “Yer telling me that when I tell folks about what a rotten feller Joe Dunn is, he gets more business?”

“Amazing as that may seem, yes.”

Heads were nodding all around the room.

“That’s true.”

“He’s right.”

“I never thought of that.”

“So the point,” I said, “is that you don’t need to worry about people who hate you. If they go making a big fuss about how bad your books are, that only brings you to the attention of more people who are in your target audience. So if you write a book to give those people a great read, then you’ll do fine as an author.”

“But … how do I figure out who all those people are?” asked Minnie. “I can’t afford to take a poll.”

I sat down across the table from her. “You start with yourself. What do you like in a novel?”

“I like dragons!” Minnie said. “And sword fights. And beautiful princesses. And some romance. And a big battle scene. And some sort of evil villain.”

I was taking notes furiously as she talked. “Anything else?”

She thought for a moment. “I think that’s every—”

“She likes naughty scenes,” Sam put in helpfully.

“Sammy, hush!” Minnie’s face turned bright red. She covered her face with her hands. “Whatever will these people think of me if they know I write … kissing scenes?”

The young woman with the plastic glasses leaned forward. “Ma’am, I think all that sounds wonderful. Can I read your book?”

Minnie peeked out from between stubby fingers. “You’re not just saying that?”

“O course she’s just saying that,” Sam said.

Minnie burst into tears.

“Sam, out!” I hissed.

Sam scowled and slouched toward the door.

I turned back to Minnie. “So here’s the thing. Your target audience is the set of people who like dragons and sword fights and princesses and romance and big battle scenes and villains.”

“And naughty scenes with kissing,” said the woman in the glasses. “Lots of kissing.”

Minnie sniffed loudly. “And so … what do I do, now that I know that? It doesn’t seem like that’s very helpful.”

“It’s extremely helpful,” I said. “Write down that list and tape it above your computer. Look at it every day. Before you write a scene, remind yourself who you intend to make happy. Before you edit your scene, remind yourself who you intend to make happy. Before you build your web site, or start a blog, or get on Facebook or Twitter or whatever else you do, remind yourself who you intend to make happy.”

“But … that’s only a few people,” Minnie said. “In all this big room, there’s only this one dear girl in my target audience.”

“Yes, but in the whole world, there are many people in your target audience. And this one woman…” I pointed to her. “I’ll bet she has a few friends.”

The young woman hung her head. “I’m just a boring librarian.”

“And I’ll bet you talk about books all day long to people who like books.”

Her eyes brightened. “That’s my job, and it’s the best job in the whole world.”

“So Minnie, this young woman, if she likes your book, will tell hundreds or thousands of people about it. IF you write it with her in mind. IF you focus on making her as happy as possible with your book.”

Minnie’s eyes pooled with tears. “But … Sammy’s going to just go around running me down and telling people I write … naughty scenes.”

“And did you notice what happened when he did that?” I said. “That’s how this young woman discovered you. Because Sam was bad-mouthing you.”

“Dude, I get it now!” said the kid with the skateboard. “What you want are fans AND haters, because those are the only people who talk about you! The fans talk you up. The haters talk you down. Either way, people are talking!”

“Exactly,” I said. “The worst thing you can do is write something that tries to make everybody somewhat happy without ever offending anybody. That just turns out lukewarm. Nobody much likes it, nobody much hates it, so nobody talks about it.”

“So … what do we do?” said the middle-aged man. “How do we find our target audience?”

“Everybody take out a piece of paper, leave a couple of blank lines at the top of the page, and write down the things you love best in a novel.”

Pens scratched furiously for two minutes.

When I saw that everyone was finished, I said, “Now write at the very top of the page, ‘My Target Audience Is All The People in The World Who Like These Things:’”

More scratching on paper.

“And that’s all there is to it,” I said. “A target audience isn’t complicated. But if you want to be successful, you need to figure out your target audience first, before you do anything else.”

Minnie stood up and hugged the young woman in glasses and then beamed at me. “This is so exciting, dear boy! I’ve got my first fan and I’m on my way. What’s next?”

 

TO BE CONTINUED …

Randy sez: This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on self-publishing novels. Some of what we say will be useful to non-fiction writers too, but our target audience for this series is composed of novelists who want to indie publish their work.

Minnie now knows who’s in the target audience for her novels. What’s her next step? We’ll find out in the next episode.

If you’ve got friends who might be interested in the process, feel free to let them know about this Indie Author Guidebook series.

See you next week!

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