Rob Bignell's Blog, page 291

Five Great Quotations about What is a Writer

���Writing is something you do alone. It���s a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.��� - John Green

���A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.��� - Jorge Luis Borges

���A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.��� - Richard Bach

���There is no singular thing that makes someone a writer, but there is one thing that makes someone a joke ��� talking about writing a book without doing any work.��� - Pat Walsh

���A writer is by nature, a dreamer - a conscious dreamer.��� - Carson McCullers

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 Colorado Springs, Colorado, or a small town like Big Chimney, West Virginia, I can provide that second eye.

 

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Should you have an unfinished story or chapter, begin a 15-minute writing session by revising it. After five minutes of that editing, continue writing the story or chapter where you left off.

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 Antonio, Texas, or a small town like Toad Suck, Arkansas, I can provide that second eye.

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Sell more ebooks by writing shorter ones

With ebooks making up an increasingly larger segment of all book sales, authors ought to consider writing shorter pieces that better match ebook readers��� habits.

Think of it this way: If you spent your life writing radio dramas and television suddenly came along, you couldn���t simply writer for the latter in the same way as you���ve always done. While many of the basic elements of storytelling would remain the same, different mediums require different techniques and approaches. For ebooks, that often means writing shorter pieces than you would for paperback.

Ebook readers, especially those buying nonfiction, generally want quick reads that are very focused on niche topics. The information needs to be provided concisely and in a digestible format. This means shorter books that are more tightly written. A 10,000-20,000-word range for an ebook usually is sufficient.

This actually can benefit authors by allowing them to write several books on a single general topic. Rather than write one large book that sells for 99 cents, authors can pen a dozen that each sells for 99 cents. This generally means more raw sales, and just as one of your books falls off a bestseller list you can release a follow-up and keep building your audience. In fact, such books can be marketed as a series, giving your titles more staying power.

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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Writing Inspiration: Explore then strive

Exploration is more important than striving, at least initially for a writer learning the craft. Productivity is only relevant in that you keep writing to grow and hone your skills. Once you���ve reached a certain level of competence, your short story, novel or nonfiction book will be publishable. What are the fundamental skills that a writer should possess? Do you have them? If not, how can you obtain them?

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 Phoenix, Arizona, or a small town like Last Chance, Idaho, I can provide that second eye.

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Editing client publishes Egyptian history book

A recent editing client of mine has published her most recent nonfiction book, ���Egypt: Biblical Mizraim.��� In the book, Marcella Denise Spencer explores the history of Egypt, as referenced in the Bible. The author of several nonfiction and fiction books about Egypt, Africa and Regency England, Spencer graduated from UCLA and makes her home in Northern California. Her books are available for purchase online.

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 Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or a small town like Disco, Wisconsin, I can provide that second eye.

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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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