Rob Bignell's Blog, page 307

Fresh, original website content is vital

There are more than 350 million websites on the planet. To get readers to stay on yours and to return, you need to offer what nobody else does – or at least in a way that no one else does. That’s a challenge certainly, but it can be done. Simply follow some basic principles of website text.

Your website text should be:
g Unique – Rather than be a copycat of a competitor’s site, you need to present your business by using original wording and descriptions. You may sell the exact same products and even offer the exact same services, but your website is an opportunity to distinguish your business from the rest.
g Useful – Readers come to your site to obtain information. You must then provide the information that the majority of them want so that they’ll stick around, increasing the chances that they’ll then purchase your products or services. Rather than offer vague wording (such as a lot of superlatives), tell them exactly what you offer and why it’s better than the rest. Think about this wording from your readers’ point of view. What do they want to know? Figure that out then provide it.
g Updated – If your website was created even a few months ago, you may need to update it, whether it is because there are new employees whose pictures need to be posted or because prices have changed. Providing outdated information to people makes your business look bad, causing potential customers to think you’re scamming them or less than competent.
g Fresh – Among the worst mistakes businesses make is creating a static website. To keep potential customers coming back to your site and to convince them that you can provide the best services or product, you’ll want to regularly provide new information that demonstrates your expertise and knowledge of the field. A blog with posts two or three times a week is a great way to do this.

In addition, sites that are purely meta-lists, meaning they only provide links to other sites, aren’t a great idea. Despite being easy to build, they offer no original, unique content. Of course, meta-lists can be useful as a component of your website; for example, if your site reviews hiking gear, perhaps you’d provide a list, with links, to businesses that sell backpacks, trekking poles and boots as one of your pages. But if your site primarily is a series of links to other sites, once the reader discovers a great webpage via your meta-list, they may decide not to go back to yours.

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 Jacksonville, Florida, or a small town like Dinkytown, Minnesota, I can provide that second eye.

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Editing client publishes his first anthology

A recent editing client of mine, Michael C. Ahn, has published his first anthology of short stories, “Comeuppance: Stories from the 1960s.” The collection examines a variety of that turbulent period’s issues – racism, the changing roles of women in society, the questioning of authority – that still permeate today, a half-century later. Each of the stories occur in a college setting, and four of them were previously published in literary journals. “Comeuppance” is 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 Louisville, Kentucky, or a small town like Lodge Pole, Montana, I can provide that second eye.

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A block of better grammar: Chock vs. choke

You’ve probably gagged if you’ve ever seen these two words mixed up.

To choke is to obstruct or slow something: People choked on the city’s foul stench or The closed lanes created a choke point for traffic.

A chock typically refers to a wedge or a block that prevents something from moving: The cement block placed in front of the tire effectively kept the car from rolling down the hill.

An easy trick to for remembering them is a chock stops but a choke slows.

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 Seattle, Washington, or a small town like Uncertain, Texas, I can provide that second eye.

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Writing prompt: Go some place new

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: Spend an hour in a place that you would not normally go to but have always wanted to visit. Write down what you see, hear and smell there. Are there any interesting tastes or textures that you can add to your notes?

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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Use journaling to develop plots for stories

One good way to come up with plot ideas is to journal about your personal problem.

While journaling about an issue is a worthy writing exercise simply for catharsis, modifying how you journal later can offer the side benefit of plot generator. That’s because as a human being you’re doing exactly what a character does: faces a dilemma and seeks to solve it.

To do this, when journaling start with self-exploration aimed at defining or pinpointing the core problem. For example, if you just broke up with your significant other, the problem isn’t really that you miss him/her; that’s just a symptom of something deeper. At the core, the issue may be that you need to feel validated by the presence of another person, which your boyfriend/girlfriend despite his or her foibles, sort of did. Recognizing and accepting an inner flaw or need often is a key aspect of a character wending through a plot.

As the days pass, list and describe solutions you have for dealing with this core problem. One possibility might be landing a new boyfriend/girlfriend to find validation. Another solution might be to reconnect with old friends and family to ease the loneliness. A third solution could be to participate in an activity you’ve always wanted to do – say skydiving – to gain inner confidence.

Not all of these solutions are equal, as you’ll probably discover in real life. So also journal about which ones succeed and fail, and of why each did so. You likely found that quickly jumping into a new relationship initially provided a good feeling but in the end only left you with the same issues that you had with your ex. Reconnecting with friends and family probably helped in the healing process, as you surprisingly found others considered you a worthy person, but it still may have left you feeling lonely for a special someone to spend your free time with. Engaging in a new activity, however, likely left you feeling stronger about yourself and even believing, if only briefly, that true validation always must arise from within and not be bestowed upon you.

The result? By journaling in real life you found clarity and grew emotionally. Months or years later, when you’re a slightly different person, the experience you worked through can be the basis for a fictional character who faces the same problem and arrives at the same solution as did.

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 Hampton Roads, Virginia, or a small town like Crappo, Maryland, I can provide that second eye.

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Five Great Quotations about What is a Writer

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.” – Marianne Moore

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.” – Ernest Hemingway

“The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its supreme purpose through him.” – Carl Jung

“Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you.” – Santha Rama Rau

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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Writing Inspiration: Replace your old books with the books you’ve always wanted to write

Your love of writing probably arises from a love of reading. Books and the stories in them – whether it be Dr. Seuss’ rhymes, the adventures of teen vampires in a YA novel, or a stunning piece of French literature taught in college – brought you great pleasure and left you dreaming of similar tales to be told.

Indeed, authors write the books they’ve always wanted to read, as another has so eloquently stated.

Your writing skills, after all, are the sum of all that you’ve learned from writers you’ve read and that you’ve been taught via school and guidebooks. While teachers and writing guides mostly shaped your ability to handle mechanics, such as punctuation and a simile, the fiction you’ve read molded your sense of how to plot a story, of how to introduce characters, of the dialogue between them, of how to present descriptions, and so on.

In addition, everything you’ve ever read serves as a template for your storytelling. You use the characters you’ve met and the universes you’ve explored via other books as models for protagonists and settings in your own stories. Or perhaps you synthesize the players and worlds from various books. Usually, all this is done without you even realizing it.

What you’ve read often is a springboard for your stories. As you contemplate the characters’ decisions and the themes of your favorite books, you might extend that discussion through your own stories. Or you might wonder what happens next to the characters in those stories (The juvenilia you wrote probably is just that – a sequel to the stories you loved.).

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the old saying goes. Rather than copy, though, why not continue the examination of a subject that your favorite books began (Actually, that author probably continued the discussion as well!)? Today, begin to replace the old books in your personal library with new books that you’ve written.

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 Detroit, Michigan, or a small town like Carefree, Arizona, I can provide that second eye.

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Thinking up a title that sells your nonfiction book

With nonfiction books, you’ll want to select a title that helps rather than hinders sales. A good title ensures that your book will be easy to find as it pops up in search engine queries; a bad title ensures other books will appear in such searches even though yours is better written.

A good first step to coming up with a title is to see what others are using for their books. Look for a pattern in their wording (e.g. “10 Minutes a Day to a Slimmer Body”; “9 Minutes a Day to a Healthier You”) and the words selected (e.g. diet, weight loss, healthy, fast, safe). This can be done simply by going to Amazon.com and looking at the bestselling books on the topic you’re writing about. Jot down these patterns and words.

Next, see if you can mimic these patterns but give it a new twist. This has the benefit of appearing familiar to readers, yet the twist causes the potential reader’s eyes to linger a little longer and maybe take the next step of clicking on your book. For example, a common strategy in weight-loss books is to name a diet; meanwhile, “cookies” and “weight loss” contradict one another yet your book is about baking healthy cookies that provides all the nutrition you need but none of the calories. So your book could be titled “The Cookie Diet”.

Next, always give the benefit of reading the book as part of the title; incorporate the commonly used words that you wrote down earlier. Usually, the benefit appears in the subtitle (e.g. “The Cookie Diet: A Fast, Safe Weight-Loss Plan to a Healthy You”). Sometimes this benefit involves making a promise, such as “read this book and you will safely lose weight and be healthier” of the last example. It also might provide a solution (e.g. “The Cookie Diet: Rid Your Body of Fat Forever”). The benefit/promise also might be stated in a way that it answers readers’ concerns (e.g. “The Sweet Tooth Diet: Lose Weight without Giving up Your Favorite Foods”).

A corollary to the benefit/promise is to directly state what the book offers readers. This works particularly well for how-to and guidebooks (“Danish Crawl: A Guide to Denmark’s Best Bakeries”; “How to Bake Low-Cal Pies that Taste Incredible”).

Numbers also can be a useful element in a title (e.g. “40 Brownie Recipes to Help You Lose Weight”; “10 Days to a Slimmer You”). When using numbers, make sure it is memorable number, which usually means a number divisible by 10 or one over it (e.g. “50 Pie Recipes to Help You Lose Weight”; “101 Awesome Cookie Recipes”). Also, use digits (1, 2, 10, 100) rather than spelling out the word (one, two, ten, hundred).

If your book is aimed at a specific age group, be sure to get that into the title as well (“Cupcakes for Preschoolers: Yummy yet Healthy Recipes”).

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 Raleigh, North Carolina, or a small town like Strong, Maine, I can provide that second eye.

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Common questions about publishing ebooks

As a book editor, I get a number of questions about publishing ebooks, especially since this is such a new field. Here are the answers to a few that have been asked a lot of me during the past few weeks.

Q: Are page numbers required in the table of contents?
A: No page numbers are required in the table of contents since ebooks don't use them. Instead, hyperlink the chapter titles in the table of contents to the first page of that chapter in the text.

Q: Can text, such as a title page, be squeezed so it only shows up on a single screen?
A: In ebooks, you can't squeeze information onto single pages without doing some coding. In any case, most ebook readers find such coded books annoying – one of the advantages of an ereader is each reader can select the font and the font size tht best matches his or her perference.

Q: Does an ebook need a back cover?
A: There's no back cover on an ebook. The front cover of your paperback version of the book can be used as the ebook’s cover. All of the back cover info for the paperback (e.g. book blurb, author’s bio) would appear on the web page where the book can be purchased.

Q: Should I advertise to promote my ebook?
A: Don’t spend money on advertising your book unless you were a nationally recognizable name. The ROI simply isn't there. Social media is the way to get out info about the book – and other than your time it's free.

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 Nashville, Tennessee, or a small town like Turkey Creek, Louisiana, I can provide that second eye.

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History says no apostrophe on ‘pros and cons’

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using an apostrophe in the phrase pros and cons?

The pros are that many readers will think it looks right while others won’t care at all if it is because they’re more interested in your content.

The cons are that a good number of readers still will realize that the apostrophes are wrong, and those others who didn’t care in the pros example still won’t.

Pros and cons comes from the Latin phrase pro et contra, meaning “for and against”. Like most Latin phrases that Renaissance writers fell in love with, it has been abbreviated as pros and cons (no apostrophes) since the 1500s. Given this well-established history of no apostrophes, I advise sticking with history.

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 Corpus Christi, Texas, or a small town like Hell, Michigan, I can provide that second eye.

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