Rob Bignell's Blog, page 290

Writing Prompt: Make the impossible happen

Suffering from writer���s block or need to add some spunk to your writing? The problem may be that you need to change up your routine.

To that end, try this tip: ���Impossible��� is merely a state of mind. The only reason something is ���impossible��� is because we lack the knowledge or experience of how to do it (Remember that a little more than a century ago, human flight was deemed ���impossible.���). As a writer, you are tasked with explaining why something is possible (How does warp drive work? How were some Jews smuggled out of wartime Nazi Germany?). List five things that are widely considered ���impossible��� then write about how they could occur.

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

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Three ebook formatting tips, part VII

Ebooks follow different formatting rules than books printed on paper. That���s because a book made of ink on paper is a different platform for presenting information than a book made of digital bits on an electronic screen. Even though the same content (your book) is being presented, the platforms will need to be handled differently, just as certainly different production methods are used for a play presented on stage and on a television screen.

Because of that, there are a number of things you might do when formatting a paperback but never would do when constructing an ebook. Following are three tips about what to differently.

Pasted text
Whenever copying and pasting text from another document ��� whether it be a website, an email, or another file even in the same word processing program ��� always first strip it of any formatting. Not doing so will introduce new formatting into your document, and some of those instructions can be read in odd ways in your ebook, even if you manually change the font and font size to how you want it to appear. Later locating these odd instructions (aka ���corruption���) to correct them in a published ebook can be impossible. Fortunately, stripping the text of formatting is easy to do. Simply paste the copied text into a program such as Notepad (on computers using Windows) or TextEdit (in Mac). Then copy and paste that text to your word processing program. Be sure to read the passage at this step, as any italics, boldface lettering, and underlines will be stripped from it and so missing in your ebook.

Quotation marks
A common problem that can sneak into your manuscript when self-publishing is a mix of quotation styles. That���s because some software programs use smart quotes, or those that are curved (e.g. ������), while others use dumb quotes, or those that are straight (e.g. "). Typographically, smart quotes (also referred to as curly quotes) are preferred over dumb quotes (also known as keyboard quotes). When self-publishing an ebook, you can use either style, but you want to be consistent and exclusively use one. If you have a mix of styles, simply do a global search and find, and replace all of the quotation marks and apostrophes with one style. In Microsoft Word, to replace dumb quotes with smart quotes, first make highlight a copy a smart quote in the text (You may have to type one). Then highlight a dumb quote and in the command ribbon under the Home tab, hit ���Replace���. A screen should pop up with the dumb quote in the ���Find what��� box. Paste the smart quote in the ���Replace with��� box and hit ���Replace all���. This will replace both the opening and the ending quotation mark throughout the document.

Spacing after end marks
In ebooks, only one space is needed after an end mark (period, question mark, exclamation point). When typewriters dominated, each typed letter generally took up the same amount of space on a line (called monospace), so two spaces were needed after an end mark so that the paper did not look cluttered. Computers (including ereaders and tablets), however, usually use proportional fonts so that each letter takes up a different amount of space on a screen, so two spaces after an end mark appear too spaced out.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Little Rock, Arkansas, or a small town like No Name, Colorado, I can provide that second eye.

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Five Great Quotations Answering ���Why Write?���

���A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.��� - Roald Dahl

���Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.��� - Tennessee Williams

���Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.��� - Walter Benjamin

���The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.��� - John Mason Brown

���Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane.��� - Hope Edelman

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

 

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Writing Inspiration: Overcoming obstacles

Think about another project that you started but didn���t finish. Why were you unable to finish? Are those same obstacles the reason(s) you���re not writing regularly? During your writing session, jot down some ways that you might avoid or overcome these obstacles.

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

 

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How to best use hashtags on Pinterest

When promoting your books, you definitely want to find a way to market them using Pinterest, the social media network that is sort of like a virtual bulletin board. Pinterest boards rank well on Google search engines, and its users as of spring 2015 number well over 70 million.

Whether you should bother using hashtags with those pins on Pinterest, however, is open to debate.

First, there are a few reasons to save yourself some time and forgo hashtags on Pinterest.

Hashtags don���t really offer the same search benefit on Pinterest as they do on Twitter. If you click on a hashtag in a pin or type it into Pinterest���s search engine, you���ll get any pin with the hashtag���s keyword in it, not just those pins using only that keyword. In short, #hiking lands you any pin with the word hiking in it; if you just wanted to find some trails to backpack, you���ll also be inundated with pins about governments hiking fees and fashion tips for hiking up one���s hemline.

Further, Pinterest hashtags don't work on mobile apps. With mobile devices increasingly the primary way people connect on the Internet, hashtags suddenly seem of limited value when they don���t work for many of your online readers.

Also, unlike Twitter, a hashtag at Pinterest is only clickable in a pin description. Because of this, there���s no need to put them in your username, about section, or board titles. This in turn limits the usefulness of any hashtag.

There are some pro���s, of course, to using hashtags on Pinterest.

The first depends upon you maximizing the effectiveness of a Pinterest hashtag by creating one that is unique to your books. To keep people coming to pins mainly about your books, a unique hashtag rather than a general one achieves that. Indeed, a general hashtag very likely will lead them away from your pins.

One benefit of using hashtags on Pinterest has nothing to do with Pinterest itself. You can tweet your pins from Pinterest as well as post them on Facebook, so adding hashtags to a pin can save you posting time ��� and while a general hashtag isn���t very effective on Pinterest, it can be on Twitter.

A final note: Should you opt to include hashtags with you your pins, don���t overdo it. The social norms of Pinterest users are such that overusing hashtags is considered bad manners. Besides that your pin appear like a spam post, a bunch of hashtags just makes your pin look cluttered on a mobile device. Three hashtags are more than enough.

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

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Use link shortneers for tidier promotions

When promoting your books, of course you want to include links to your website, blog and various social media platforms. Sometimes ��� such as with a paperback ��� you have to write out those links. Often those links have really long addresses or you end up with a list of links that looks like alphabet and number soup.

The solution is to use a link shortener.

A link shortener creates a new, briefer URL for your page. Several link shortener services ���including Triberr, Google, TinyURL, Ow.ly, Bit.ly ��� exist.

The link shortener page is a simple to use. Once you call up the web page for the link shortener service, simply past the long URL into a box that is given. It then will generate a shorter URL that you can copy and paste. For example, using Google���s service, an Amazon.com page for one of my books (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B51QJA8/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_1Cufvb17YJ0FR) became http://goo.gl/h0jQ0A. 

Shortening an URL can serve a lot of other purposes than appearing on your paperbacks or business cards. They can be used at Twitter; indeed, they often are shorter than Twitter links generated at your book���s Amazon.com page (as the above example shows). Further, if using social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, your shortened link will show pictures from your book���s web page rather than a generic Amazon.com photo or page. Finally, many of the link shortener services provide analytics services so that you can see how many hits your link receives as well as where those hits comes from.

If you shorten a lot of links, be sure to create a file listing what those links are. This will save you the trouble of shortening links when you���ve previously done so, and having a single list of them will make copying and pasting them easier on future projects you do.

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

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Writing Inspiration: What are your goals?

For novice and unpublished writers, questions often are more important than answers. What are your writing goals? What skills do you need to achieve that goal? How can you learn those skills you don���t have?

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

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Narrowing definitions: Aisle vs. isle

Oh what a difference a mere letter makes! The difference between these two words are oceans apart.

An aisle is the spacing in which one can between two other objects, such as shelves or pews. Hence, The aisles in Los Angeles supermarkets are wider than those in Boston grocery stores, he thought.

An isle is a shortened version of island. To wit, Alcatraz is an isle off the San Francisco coast. In addition, an isle also can refer to items analogous to an island, such as a kitchen isle.

Just remember: Mix up these words, and your readers may leave your book stranded on an isle, like Robinson Crusoe.

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

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Writing Prompt: Go down another road

Suffering from writer���s block or need to add some spunk to your writing? The problem may be that you need to change up your routine.

To that end, try this tip: Should you find your story at a dead end, maybe you need to back up and go down another road. Rather than asking yourself what sentence should come next, think of what other sentence could be written in its place. Does this lead you to other roads?

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

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Three ebook formatting tips, part VI

Ebooks follow different formatting rules than books printed on paper. That���s because a book made of ink on paper is a different platform for presenting information than a book made of digital bits on an electronic screen. Even though the same content (your book) is being presented, the platforms will need to be handled differently, just as certainly different production methods are used for a play presented on stage and on a television screen.

Because of that, there are a number of things you might do when formatting a paperback but never would do when constructing an ebook. Following are three tips about what to differently.

Page breaks
Adding a page break at the end of each chapter makes your book more readable. When formatting, though, always place the page break on the very next line after a chapter���s last word. Add blank lines between the chapter���s last line and the page break sometimes can result in a blank screen for a page in the published ebook; besides looking unprofessional, the blank page can confuse readers about where they are in the ebook.

Photographs
Limit the size of photographs appearing in your ebook. Most ebook publishers restrict the size of the manuscript that is uploaded, and large photos will quickly push you over that watermark, leading to rejection. Since photographs need not be larger than most ereader or tablet screens, it never should be more than five inches wide by five inches deep in actual size (and probably can be even smaller, depending on who you are publishing your book with). Make sure the photo���s resolution is in 300 dpi. In addition, the image quality usually can be reduced to a six on a scale of 1-12.

Page numbers
There���s no need to add page numbers to your ebook. Since readers can customize the text���s font and font size to their preference, page numbers quickly would become meaningless in an ebook. Instead, most ereaders provide a ���location��� that acts as a sort of a page number for readers.

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

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