Paula R.C. Readman's Blog, page 23

Scam Emails

A little email has just dropped into my inbox. Now you would think I would be excited, but I’m not. Why? A quick google search tells me it’s a scam. Plus, I know I haven’t sent anything to them, and why would I be searching for an agent when I already work with three publishers?

This email is a scam,

Always do your homework and check out all publishers, agents and marketing companies before submitting your books to them. Here’s the link to the best site I know: Writers Beware 

Keep your work safe. Remember, there are lots of scammers out there looking to make money out of your dreams.

Keep writing, and stay positive.

Little Life Lessons

My hard learnt lesson for today. Paula, so you’re not as popular as you think.
Oh hmm, wasn’t the most popular girl in school either And, We all know what happened to King’s Carrie.

We all want to do our best to have some recognition for the effort we put into our writing. If anything, I keep telling myself, Rise above it, Paula and move on. It’s the only thing I’m good at, motivating myself. If you don’t try, you can’t succeed. One step at a time, and keep moving forward.

Yesterday, and for the last week, I’ve been busy editing my next book. It got me wondering if computers can think outside the box and be as creative in the same way as humans. I managed to spot a plot hole in my latest book yesterday evening, thank goodness. I didn’t spot it before, but once that piece of the puzzle dropped into place, I started focusing on what else I might have missed. It’s the reason I don’t like to rush my books or work under pressure. It’s too easy to overlook something that could spark a new idea or finish an important thread. 

Two of my books have recently received two-star ratings. It’s tough when that happens. My insecurities kicked in, causing me to question my ability to write rather than whether the reader didn’t like other elements of the books. Maybe, it had nothing to do with my ability to write itself. It might have been the plot, the characters. One reader said they didn’t like the ending of one of my books because it wasn’t how they thought it would finish. (Well, they didn’t write it) It might not have been the right time for them to read the books, and they rushed to finish them, skipping pages rather than reading every word.

Right, have a great day, everyone. I’m off to finish my editing.

Easy Money From Our Dreams!

Yesterday, a notification popped up on my blog saying, 5/5 Brilliant book. I did enjoy it. My heart leapt. I was so pleased that a reader of Seeking the Dark had messaged me on my blog. As I read on, their comment continued, If I help you by voting on your book will you help me? My heart froze. It was spam. Not a real reader, but a link to a marketing website. Nothing to do with books, readers or the publishing industry. 

When I was a child, my mother always asked me, ‘Have you done your homework?‘ My message to all new writers is to do your homework. Before submitting your work anywhere, google the name of the publisher first. There’s a website called Writers Beware. Lucky for me, I discovered the site early in my writing career. I always check on the site before submitting my work to any publisher. Writer Beware site give you information from people who’ve had problems with publishers, agents etc. You can also learn about the issues other writers have suffered after signing contracts. You must read the fine print before signing on the dotted line. 

There are eight types of publishers in the publishing industry.

Traditional Publishers: These pay royalties to the author from the sales of the books:Large Publishers: These work with the author and the author’s agent, they pay royalties along with advances. Mid-sized Publishers: These pay royalties and may accept submissions with or without agents.Small Publishers: These pay royalties and accept submissions straight from the author. They may provide limited marketing after publishing the book.

The next three publishers will publish your books for a price. It will include the book cover, but the design might be a cheap illustration. The most expensive and time-consuming element of writing a novel is proofreading. Non-traditional publishers aren’t interested in the quality of the books. You’ve already paid them, so there’s no worry for them recuperating their investment in the sales simply because they have none. The marketing of the book is down to you. All they’re offering you is to print your book. The editorial side, typos, grammar, etc is down to you.

New writers need to tread carefully, with their eyes wide open. Again, let me say read your contract. Make sure you are not signing away the rights to your book. Remember, the publisher pays you, not you pay the publisher. If you are happy with the deal offered, sign on the dotted line but check the small print carefully first.

Non Traditional Publishers: subsidised by the author or Do-It-Yourself publishing. Hybrid Publishers: Author & Publishers share the cost. Higher royalties and potential distribution.Vanity Presses: Provide publishing service all cost borne by the author.

Finally, the last option is an author can Self-publish where you do everything yourself. If you use a self-publishing service then check them on this link. The choice is yours. If you have all information and are not under pressure to get published, you can make the right choice for your book. If you sign the contract too soon, you might sign away the rights to your book and you’ll find it will cost you even more to get it back.

The problem with writers is we are our own worse enemies. We are so passionate about seeing our work in print and our name on the cover. While we dream of fame and fortune, wanting to be on the number one bestseller’s list, doing book tours and signings, and seeing our characters make it to the silver screen and made into a Hollywood blockbuster, others are dreaming about making money too. The trouble is we get blindsided while caught up in our dreaming so we don’t recognise when others see us as easy pickings.

The publishing world is like any other career. It doesn’t happen overnight. Fame and fortune aren’t waiting in the wings. It’s like any other job; you have to work hard to make it successful. It all takes time to build a career, book by book. You might have to write ten or thirty before you get a sniff at stardust. It’s all fleeting, too. One bestselling novel doesn’t mean the next will do as well. It’s why you must be careful of anyone offering an easy route to success. Check out publishers, agents and promoting and marketing companies. Never spend large sums of money you can’t afford on your dream because there’s no guarantee you will get it back.

Don’t give up on your dream, just be a little wary.

I hope you found this post helpful.

Chat again soon.

Book Of The Month

Please can you help me by voting on my novel Seeking the Dark It has been selected for Book of the Month by Readfreely

Now all I need is lots of lovely voters to click and vote for it. Please can you help? Thank you.

Here’s the link https://www.readfree.ly/help-choose-our-next-book-of-the-month/

Thank you so much for your support.

“Brutality! Seediness! Controversy!” – THE PHOENIX HOUR by Paula R.C. Readman reviewed

The blurb: In 2055, humanity is on the brink of extinction after the misuse of an Intellectual Improvement drug. Doctor Louise Brimstone is facing …

“Brutality! Seediness! Controversy!” – THE PHOENIX HOUR by Paula R.C. Readman reviewed

Please click on the link above to check out Richard’s review of my book. Thank You.

Richard’s review helped The Phoenix Hour leap up the Amazon Charts today.

New Age for Writers

It’s awful what’s happening in the publishing world in this new age. Unfortunately, since the birth of Al, the publishing market has become flooded with bots knuckling down to try to outdo us, human writers. The bots have caused the Clarkesworld Magazine editor to stopped accepting submissions while dealing with the growing problem of sorting out bots’ submissions from human ones. To read the article click on this link. Clarkesworld isn’t the only publishing company with the problem. The small press are in the same situation of trying to sort out the genuine submission from the bots. 

As a writer of short stories, I’ve seen a steady increase in places I can submit my work. There has been a marked increase in payments for the short story recently. It’s been nice to know our work has some value even though the amount paid is small. It makes you wonder whether the increase in payments is the driving force behind the bot’s interest in writing.

Image by kiquebg from Pixabay

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less.

Marie Curie

Do writers have a cause to worry with this sudden flood of submissions from bots?

I’m surprised to learn that bots have so much free time that they wish to take up creative writing. If we look at the bigger picture, maybe we can find some answers to this growing interest by our bot brothers and sisters (plus 70 other lifeforms)

Let’s put the joking aside and look at the serious problem created by bot writers. Is it a case of human nature? You know, one of the seven deadly sins. Good old fashion greed driving them to compete with us human writers?

Most are aware that writing a novel or creating a prize-winning short story takes time. It takes plenty of energy, dedication, and imagination plus a bucketload of blood, sweat and tears. It can take months of editing, rewrites, more editing and more rewrites until you’ve finished. Then there are the rounds of submitting and resubmitting after many rejections. It can drive you crazy, bitter and angry to the point where you want to give up.
Writing a book isn’t for the faint-hearted. Once you’ve completed your first novel, found a publisher and had your book published. It’s time to start planning the next book, so the hard work starts again with new characters and ideas. (Time to forget about the glamorous book launches, TV appearances and fat checks they won’t appear yet.)
So would you, if someone offered you a way to cut a few corners and churn out a best-selling novel with a click of a key, would you take it?

For the last twenty years, I have been honing my writing skills. It involved reading many ‘how-to books, studying the publishing market, and submitting and suffering rejections. I found it time-consuming and frustrating but rewarding, too. No large sums of money yet, but I’ve made some supportive friends along the way. Winning writing competitions and having short stories accepted helped build my confidence. Yes, it’s been a long haul and I would love to have reached this point while I was still young. The trouble with cutting corners means I would’ve missed out on learning the things for myself. Experience brings wisdom. Having a bot doing everything for you means you will never grow as an author. The bot’s ideas are not your ideas. Your ideas come from your human experiences which allows you to add life to your characters. While honing your writing skills, you develop your style of writing, which becomes your trade mark.

No bot will write just like you or come up with the ideas you would create. No matter what genre, if you wrote the novel without the aid of a bot, it would be uniquely yours. Like all humans, we are one of a kind, which means someone can teach you the basic skills needed to write a novel, but once you begin the process, the characters take over, and the magic begins. Writing novels is so much more than just about making money. If the readers don’t enjoy your bot-written book, they won’t buy the next one.

Best sellers don’t happen overnight. Yes, all authors would love to make a bucketload of money with their first novel, but it rarely happens. A publisher needs more than just one book from you to make their investment worth it. Normally, the first one sells well because friends and family are supportive. Your second book might not do as well. To really start making any money from your writing, you need to produce about ten books before you have a bestseller, or at least a book that catches the imagination of your readers, if you have a following. Of course, if you’re using a bot to write your books, you need to create a bucketload of lies to answer all the questions from readers during any talks you might give while building your writing career.

I guess it’s down to how honest you want to be, especially with your writing.

Thank you for dropping by and reading my blog post.

Have a great weekend.

Welcome to the New Age.

I love editing. I love how changing a single word can make you see a sentence in a new light. I’m back reading and editing a short story I wrote last year. A good writing friend of mine told me she uses Grammarly. I’ve always been unsure whether my grammar was correct, so you would think I would jump at the chance to use something which would tell me if I got it right. My problem is my driving need to know how something works and why you do something in a certain way. Having a better understanding of the basics helps you improve.

I always believed you had to pay for Grammarly, so I never checked it out. My friend Dawn explained that the basic program was free, so I googled it. Grammarly has me hooked now. It’s like having a teacher leaning over your shoulder, pointing at different areas, saying, ‘Somethings not right there, Paula, can you see what it is?’ The basic program doesn’t always tell you exactly what you’ve got wrong but highlights areas which need checking. There’s a list of hints as to what the problems might be, too. I like taxing my brain to solve problems rather than having someone tell me the answer. The program allows you to rewrite these areas until you get it right and the highlighted areas disappear. Exercising our brains is like exercising our bodies for them to remain healthy; we need to do it every day.

William Shakespeare

So now I’m using Grammarly every day and it is pushing me to work harder at my writing. Okay, so some might say paying for the complete program means you can write more quickly as you will know straightaway what the problem is, and this is true, but I might miss out on the inspiration that comes when you have to rethink what you’re trying to say.

Some might argue that all these different forms of proofreading programs and Al will have us all writing the same. In the past, authors scribbled down their ideas in notebooks and continued editing them until they were satisfied with the final version. We have access to the writing progress of many of the world’s greatest writers, from William Shakespeare to Jane Austen. Will there be any notebooks or paperwork available from this generation to study how the writers developed their storylines or plots if you can have your first draft proofread and corrected straightaway?

Right, it’s time for me to get back to my editing. Or should I say exercising my brain? Have a great day. Tomorrow is my writing group. It’s great to meet up with the members about books and writing.

Thank you for leaving your comment on whether we will all be writing in the same style in the future.

Bye for now.

The Beauty of Books

I must have been born with a book in my hand. My earliest memory is sitting in a mud-baked back garden with a pile of old books the neighbour had given my brother and me. At that time, I couldn’t read. My brother (four years older than me) explained that the patterns in the books were words and that these told a story. Books fascinated me. If only I could break their magic code, it would unlock the door to their secret kingdom. I became hooked on books instantly that day.

My next memory was of being dragged out of a library by my mother. My mother, in today’s world, would’ve been diagnosed as autistic as her social skills and ability to read and write were poor. Mum had taken me into the newly opened library to borrow some books. She told me to select which books I wanted. Excitedly, I gathered an armful of brightly coloured children’s books and turned to Mum. A lady came over and spoke to us, saying Mum needed to fill in a form before we could take them. Mum panicked and made me put them back, and we left. I was heartbroken. It felt as though the books were still beyond my reach.

After my parents were divorced, I used to visit my father and his new family. My father had always been a bit of a reader, and often on an evening when he lived with us, I would see him with a book. During my visits, my father would share his books with me. I wasn’t very keen on the westerns, but I did enjoy the sci-fi. At sixteen, when I started work, I read romances on the bus to and from work. Then I got hooked on Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. At the mill, we had a small collection of books. I used to read encyclopaedias believing if I read them, I would become knowledgeable on every subject.

Never in a million years would I have believed that one day I would write books. My school days were frustrating as a slow writer struggling with being unable to say what I wanted on paper because of my poor spelling. As long as I checked the meanings of the words in a dictionary, I found reading far easier by deciphering the patterns of words even though I might not be able to pronounce or spell them.

The other day on eBay, I saw two of my books for sale, Stone Angels and The Funeral Birds. I bought them, adding them to my stock of books in case anyone asks to borrow one. Most people assume we writers get free copies from our publishers. In reality, we have to pay for them. I have given out copies to people who have asked to borrow them on the understanding the book would be paid for later or returned, but neither has happened. Having a few rough copies means I can hand these out instead, and hopefully if they enjoy my writing, they will buy future books. The new books are for readers happy to pay the asking price.

When the copies of my books arrived from The World of Books, I noticed the stickers on them showed they were from two charity shops (Thrift Shops). I wondered what journey my books made and whether the readers enjoyed them. As all the top writers’ works land up in second-hand bookshops at some point in their life, I’m not disappointed that mine did. 

https://mybook.to/thefuneralbirds https://mybook.to/stoneangels

What’s your earliest memory of books?

It’s been lovely chatting. I’ll catch up again with you soon.

Less is More

The secret to good writing is less is most definitely more. You can do this by sharpening your prose and focusing on writing concisely. Keeping your sentence short keeps the pace of your book flowing, especially if you’re writing action scenes. Longer sentences slows the pace. But what else can a writer do to improve the readers’ enjoyment of their books or short stories?

Hunting out all unnecessary words will help the flow of your writing. You will be surprised by how many words we used that reinforce what we are already saying. Things like I’m starving to death. The word starve means to die of hunger. If you are starving, you’re close to death. So it is best to say I’m dying or starving here, the reader will know you’re dead.

Let’s empty our manuscript of pleonasms. Empty modifiers sap power from your words. Did you spot the one in my opening statement? It was a bit ridiculous So what are the empty modifiers:

Veryalmostextremelygenerallyusuallyawfullykind ofrathermore or lessfor the most partas a rulesomewhat

I’m sure you’ll know of a few more. Here’s something you can delete from your dialogue. Never use Um, hmm as hesitate or delay in speech. Yes, I know it’s something we all do when we speak, but when you’re writing dialogue, you could say: Julie hesitated before continuing. ‘Well, I guess I should’ve known that.’

When you’re editing, check the construction of your sentences and then think about what you’re trying to convey or the meaning you want your reader to understand. If we shorten this statement, We arrived at a decision to We decided. It has the same meaning with fewer words. A piece of advice I received a few years ago, which I always keep in mind while editing, is to remove two words from the front of a sentence and one from the end. Wordiness weakens the impact of your writing. 

It’s good to keep in mind and not to go overboard with eliminating words. Try replacing weak words with stronger ones or even turning your sentence around. i.e. Give your writing energy becomes Energise your writing. 

A question to keep in mind while editing is something your reader might ask, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Check your manuscript for areas where you might be information dumping. Are you over describing things your reader knows? Does your reader need a blow-by-blow account of your character walking along or crossing the road unless it’s vital to the plot?.

Lose phrases such as ‘needless to say, as you know, obviously, of course, and especially, it goes without saying.

There’s a list of words we use together, when you only need one.

Absolutely certain. Let’s just say sure Add up. Just Addadvance notice / Warningbalance out / balanceBlended together / you can use both these words on their own. brief moment / both these words mean the same thing. cancel out/ cancel close down/ Closecompletely engulf/ Engulffall down/ Fallfatal suicide/ SuicideEmpty space/ Emptyend result / Resultdeadly killer/ Killerexact same / Samedrop down/ both these words mean the same thing. Later on / LaterKneel down/ Kneel Known fact/ Fact Sit down/ Sitlift up/ Lift

These are just a few examples, I’m sure you can think of more, if not then check out William Brohaugh’s book Write Tight it’s a brilliant book for explaining how to keep your prose sharp, focused and concise. I consumed it when setting out on my writing journey.

Great chatting with you.

Mapping Martha’s World

Do you create visual aids to help you when developing a world for your characters to move within, and just how much detail do you add to it before you start writing your story?

Remember, all novels are a work of fiction, so less is more when writing them. You are not writing a Master’s Thesis, so don’t show off just how much research you have done as you don’t want to stop the flow of the story to give any history lessons. What you’re trying to create is a believable façade to carry your readers into the world of your novel, so you don’t need to convince them that you’re an expert.

The novel I’m writing is set in and around the area where I live.  I’ve created a map to keep track of all the historical buildings, which will be used as the drama unfolds. As my storyline covers three timelines, I needed to keep a detailed record of the different buildings’ ages as they appear in the novel. I know I’m not writing a historical tale, and it may seem like a lot of trouble just for this book, but I’m hoping that it is the first in a series set in the area.

Click on the photo to enlarge

I’ve created the map to help with my plotting as my main characters uncover the crimes through the series. The map will help me keep track of where they’ve solved cases in the different books. Of course, I can add fictional buildings as and when needed. The area I’m writing about has a long history too, so I do know of several buildings, which have disappeared over the years I can reinstate to use in my storyline.

I’ve changed the name of the village where I live, not just to protect the innocent, but because it gives me the freedom to create murder, mystery and mayhem in it. My village has quite a short history as it was built in 1926 by a follower of the Garden Village Movement, though, just recently it has doubled in size due to the sudden increase of new housing.

Martha’s World ( Click on photo to enlarge)

It’s a case of getting the right balance between fact and fiction when writing about a real place. There are plenty of interesting historical events well-documented for me to weave into my plot, even if I might be bending the facts just a little. In my story, I have two characters who are local historians to pass on any historical information needed by the main characters during their investigations.

Still plenty to think about as I work on my plot.

Chat again soon.