Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 51

Writer Dilemma: Private Life vs. Public Figures

Much has been made of the next generation’s expectation of privacy. If kids grow up putting their whole life on Facebook (or whatever comes next), if they record (and share!) everything with cellphone cameras, will privacy become meaningless?

For the rest of us, we often still struggle with maintaining a sense of privacy. Maybe we need the quiet of private, unshared thoughts to figure out who we are and what we want. Maybe we’re introverts who can feel like we’re giving away pieces of oursel...

Author Newsletters: 6 Tips for Smart Strategies

Approximately seventy bajillion new books are released every day (give or take a few bajillion *smile*). That means our newly released books might have a hard time being noticed on retailers’ sites, such as Amazon, Kobo, or iBooks.

We often have to fight hard for every reader. We might blog, tweet, post on Facebook, pay for advertising, participate in blog tours or other promo, etc. But only a handful of that audience will take the step to check out our book.

So the last thing we want to do...

Writer Sanity: Recognizing Takers & Setting Boundaries

Last week, I challenged writers to think about how they’re giving back to the writing community. The writing community, whether on our blogs, writing forums, social media, or elsewhere, is great and wonderful—it can be the difference between sanity and despair in a solitary job like writing—but it needs our help to thrive.

The writing community requires us togiveand take, not just take. If everyone only took from others, no one would be left to give, and the community would die.

Yet no matte...

Self Publishing? What’s Your Pricing Plan? — Part Two

It’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. We’ve been walking through the process of making choices for what path we want for our indie publishing career.

My series about Indie Publishing Paths at Fiction University has been highlighting some of the choices we have to make and giving us a few guidelines for figuring out how to make the best decisions for us.

We started off talkingabout knowing our goals.There’s no end to the conflicting advice o...

Writer Karma: Don’t Be a Taker

Everyone who knows me and follows my blog knows I love to help others. I’ve even gone so far as calling myself “pathologically helpful.” It’s a compulsion for me.*smile*

I have almost 575 writing-related posts on this blog—for free (and I don’t have advertising here, so I don’t make money off my blog either). I regularly answer questions on Facebook, Twitter, or off my Contact page—for free. I offer beat sheets, Scrivener templates, and other writing worksheets—for free. I don’t even require...

Happy New Year! Let’s Talk (Story) Beginnings

We’re almost to the new year, and that means we’re inundated with year-end posts wrapping up what we’ve learned or experienced. Lists abound with the best stories and posts of the year, and I’ve already seen several retrospectives analyzing what we can learn from what succeeded and what failed over the past year.

But I want to do something different with this post. While we’re in the mood to talk about New Year’s Resolutions and new beginnings, let’s take those thoughts over to our stories.

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Do You Struggle with the Learning Curve?

Have you ever noticed that when we first start a big project with a huge learning curve, our struggle often gets harder at first rather than easier? The situation is so common that it’s almost a cliché to say,“If I only knew how hard it would be, I’m not sure I would have gone through with it.”

Learning the craft of writing is one of those big projects. Writing requires a humongous learning curve. I know several writers who have admitted they might not have stuck with writing if they knew ho...

Merry Christmas! A Gift for You…

I’ll be mostly offline for the restof this week, but I wanted to leave you with a gift before I disappear.I’m a huge fan of Christmas, but I interrupted my Christmas to-do list to put together a worksheet based on the Essential Elements list I covered in my last post.

If you’ve ever wondered if a completed story had good “bones,” hopefully this worksheet will help. So sit back, enjoy, and have a cookie.

(Seriously, have a cookie. Every year, I bake hundreds of cookies to share with my neighb...

Does Our Story Have Everything It Needs?

Whether we’ve recently finished NaNoWriMo, or we have a completed story that we’re not sure works, we might struggle with deciding what to do next. Especially if we worry our story is a hot mess, we might be tempted to just shove it under the metaphorical bed and forget about it.

If we don’t mind that we spent time writing a story condemned to the dust bunnies, “trunking” a story is a valid choice. Just the process of writing and working through a story can teach us a lot, so the time isn’t...

Does Our Personality Affect Our Writing Process?

Over the last couple of posts, we’ve been talking about how everyone’s writing process will be unique and how there’s no “one right way” to write. All that matters is that we discover a process that helps us reach “The End” for our book.

Those posts reminded me of an article I came across a few months ago. The gist of the article was that our personalities—as measured by the Myers-Briggs test—shape us as writers. For fun, the post’s author took a guess at what the test results of several fam...