Terri Lynn Main's Blog, page 5

Writing is a lonely profession - NOT!!

When I was in college journalism classes, you learned to write by being herded into a typing (yes, I'm that old, and they were manual typewriters) room, given some facts for a news story, given a 30 minute deadline and set to work. Later
photo by Amy Guthworking on newspapers and in radio stations, and eventually in academia, the collegiality of those social writing environments were both stimulating intellectually and comforting emotionally.

You could bounce ideas off each other, ask for help, or take a break and catch up on the office gossip, which sometimes was oddly refreshing. Just the knowledge of these other writers working around you made you feel not so much alone in this great endeavor to share words and ideas with the world.

I sometimes wonder why it is that I can produce 50,000+ words of fiction during National Novel Writing Month and barely get half that done any other time. But I know why. It's the knowledge that any time I sit down at the keyboard and begin that wrestling match with my characters and plot that there are thousands of other people doing the same. And they aren't just nameless, faceless people. I get burnt out or tired or need some inspiration or a question answered, I can click over to the discussion board and take part in a "word war" or give a suggestion or two about names in the future or philosophize about whether dystopic fiction is depressing or hopeful, or just share the frustration of the writing life.

One would think with all those digressions, that productivity would wane. Yet, the opposite is true. Just as that short gossip break in the middle of covering a big story or working on that course outline in a face-to-face setting can be the refreshing break you need to push through, seeing that "wordwarrior1978" didn't quite hit your high score for the day, or simply answering the question, "What is your character doing right now?" can help me get that second wind to push through to my daily writing goal in a way working alone cannot.

So, where is all this leading? Modern internet technology, what has been called Web 2.0, has created tools for us to move away from the isolation many of us can feel as writers. We are in a position to encourage one another, hold each other accountable, motivate, inspire, stimulate, assist and even provide those "water cooler" moments of diversion that refresh.

While social networking like Twitter, Facebook, Shoutlife, Linked in and MySpace, not to mention more traditional networking like discussion boards and email discussion lists can become a time sink if restraint is not exercised, they also can provide the writer, especially the writer who works at home, with a social support network.

For instance, say you are on Twitter with a lot of other writers in your own area of expertise. You need some piece of information. You post your question. It may just sit there. Or someone might "tweet" back with an answer. Or while you are writing, a tweet comes through telling you a friend just sold the article they have been working on, and you have been following their progress. That is an encouragement for you to keep writing.

So, here is a proposal. Begin to build your own writing support network. Start with your Facebook account. You probably have writing friends, create a list of just those friends. Then periodically when things are going well (or not so well) post status updates that only other writers can understand.

You can also use hashtags on Twitter such as #amwriting, #amediting and #nanowrimo during November.

You can also declare a "word war" on one of your social media sites. Set a time and encourage everyone to compete to see how many words you can write in say 30 minutes. Compare results and even share favorite paragraphs on your main newsfeed or possibly in a private group you can form such as a video hangout on Google plus or a Facebook Group.

You don't have to be all alone in your writing. Support can help

Motivation? Inspiration? The Muse? Forget them all.

Another short tip. Don't sit around and wait to become motivated or inspired to work. If you want to be a pro, you don't wait until you feel like working. Back when I was teaching, I couldn't call in and say to my dean, "I'm not coming in today. I just don't feel inspired." He would have suggested that if I didn't get inspired quickly, I would have many more days that I didn't have to show up to work.

Discipline is more important than inspiration. Many times I find that my "inspiration" or "motivation" doesn't appear until after I've been writing for some time and not before.

Set a schedule for writing. It doesn't have to be a long time. It can be ten-minutes a day if that's all the time you have. It can be at different types during the day if you work a variable shift, but put it down in your calendar just like an appointment and treat it with as much respect as you have for a business meeting or a family outing.

Be realistic. If you can't do an hour a day, don't set that as your goal. It is better to do 10 minutes a day every day than an hour once every ten days.

There was a sign up at an insurance agency where I worked breifly many years ago. It read, "Plan your Work, then Work your Plan." Set up a plan to write on a regular basis and even if you just type random words, do so. The muse will visit more often, when you create a nice work environment for her daily.

Short Tips: How to Find just about Anything Online

I'm going to start posting short tips. These won't be like the longer articles I post and will likely be not as well edited, but I'm hoping to build up some readership and they say posting more often helps. By the way, if you follow this blog and enjoy these posts, I would appreciate it if you click the little buttons in the margins to post them to Facebook and Twitter.

Anyway, this tip has to do with using search engines effectively. Frequently, people will ask me a question about something like grammar, writing or technology. It takes me ten minutes or so to come up with an answer. Usually, all I have to do is type in one search into the search engines. So, how do we use them more effectively.

First, go for the "long tail" search. That means type in an entire sentence or phrase instead of just one or two words. Search engines are much smarter now than in the past. You can search most in normal language. For instance, today I needed some information about sales tax in California. I just typed into Google: "What are the sales tax requirements in the state of California for home businesses on the internet?"

The top result was a listing of pages from the State Board of Equalization (the sales tax people). One click on one page and there was a publication about selling over the internet.

Second, go to the source. Okay, I've got a blog. But don't take everything I say as gospel without checking it out for yourself. Anyone can create a blog or a webpage. So, when you look something up online, see who is putting it out. If you want to know about sales tax, your best bet is to go to the state agency that governs sales tax and not a blog by someone who may or may not know what they are talking about.

Finally, compare results. When the question is something for which there may be a variety of possible answers, compare them and look for both similarities and variabilities. For instance, I'm constantly looking up stuff about punctuation and grammar. Some "old school" sites may give the traditional answer, but they may not recognize that even language changes over time. So, by comparing a number of sites you can see what is the most common use which may or may not be the traditional favorite.

I hope these tips help.

Terri

Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Marketing and Time Management for the Writer

I find myself reading with interest all the "must haves" the "experts" say every author should have. They "must" write a blog at least three times a week. (Yeah, it's been three weeks or more since I posted here. Failed there.) They "must" have a Facebook page and post to it at least five times a day. They must do the same on Twitter. They "must" have a website and update it frequently. They "must".... They "must".... They "must"....

And many of us gleefully go along with all this because, well, it means I can feel
Photo by Moyan Brennlike I'm doing something for my writing career when I'm not actually writing. This type of writing is simple. It's easy. It doesn't involve editing, tweaking the language or really putting yourself out for rejection or bad reviews.

However, there is, as I have said before, only one absolute rule for writers. They must write.

But, you say, what about the "experts" and what they say. Shouldn't we be doing those things?

Maybe, and I will discuss some time management approaches to that a bit later, but remember, those "experts" are usually full time in the publishing industry. They don't have a day job which they juggle with home responsibilities, church, social obligations and the like. They have a full 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day to work on their writing careers. And, if they ever were, juggling the day job and the writing career, that has been a long time ago.

Currently, I'm fortunate to be retired with a decent income, so I can write "full-time." However, health issues mean that I have only about five really healthy productive hours a day in which to take care of business, do marketing, teach my online classes, answer email and, yes, write.  So, I understand a bit about having a  limited amount of time to work.

So, how do we handle the demands of marketing and those of writing? The same way we handle any other time management issue - prioritizing.

Is your first priority writing your blog entry or working on your novel? Okay, some days, it will be the blog or the website. Today, I'm revamping my author's website that I've been putting off (ironically, because I've been doing websites for others). So, that will take precedence today. But the question applies to your overall time usage. I have to admit that recently, I've probably spent more time promoting than writing. Like a pastor of mine once said, "God always preaches the sermon to me before I preach it to you." I'm getting this message now and will be revising my priorities over the next several weeks so that writing and my classes will always be number one.

But we do have to consider marketing or we won't get our books in front of readers. What do we do? Again, prioritize. In order to do this well, you will need to do a bit of analysis. First, determine the numbers.

How many followers do you have on your blog? What are the average number of views of each blog post. Right now, I have about 20 followers, and I get about three times that seeing each blog post.

How many Facebook friends do you have on your friend feed? How many likes do you have on your Author page? How many followers do you have on Twitter? How many followers on Pinterest, Google Plus, Linked In, Goodreads, etc.

Start by placing them in order of number of followers. If you are like most of us, Facebook will have the highest number followed by either Twitter or Google Plus and the blog will be at the bottom of the list. Your results, though, may be different.

There are some changes to Facebook, you should also take into account. Unlike Twitter, which has always allowed searching of all public tweets, Facebook search was limited to the names of people, pages and groups. Now, all posts marked as public can be searched. (Not posts set to friends only, but those designated public) That means that you can actually optimize your posts like you can a webpage making it searchable by the 1.15 Billion monthly Facebook users.

So, between Twitter and Facebook, you have a potential pool of people searching for your topics of close to one and a half billion people. Let's say you have a topic that is only of interest to say one percent of the population, that's still 10 million potential readers. Even if only one percent of those actively searched for that topic that's 100,000 potential searchers.

What does all this number crunching do for us? It's part of the process of determining priorities. I have a blog with maybe 100 monthly readers and a Facebook page with 1000 friends (and the search potential of 1000 times that). On the basis of the numbers alone, I have a longer reach on Facebook than I do on my blog.

Of course, numbers aren't the only criteria for prioritizing. We also need to think about the quality of those numbers. I have fewer readers of this blog than I do my Facebook friend page, but they are nearly all writers. So, I am building up relationships with other writers here that can help me in networking as well as promoting online writing classes and books on writing.

So, leading up to the release of a book on writing or a new course launch, spending more time blogging makes sense. However, leading up to the release of a fiction book, time spent on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads may be more worthwhile.

Know both the numbers and the type of people in each of your venues so you can "work smarter and not harder."

Don't try to do everything. Find out what works best for you an focus on that. Don't let the pronouncements of "experts" override what you see that works for you, and what does not work for you. Many very successful authors do not have facebook pages, blogs or twitter accounts. Others do. Some lose visibility by not having them others do not. You have to figure things out for yourself. But don't try to do it all. Identify 2-3 venues you consider your best choices.

Next, budget your time according to the priorities. This blog post will take me about an hour to write, edit, post and promote. It will reach maybe 100 people at the most. In that same time, I could post an interesting link to an article about space exploration (I write science fiction), a comment about working on my new website, post a Facebook update about a new class and a link to one of my Bible studies available on Kindle and reach a primary audience of 1000 people with at least a few of them sharing my links with others expanding that to about 5000 people.

So, I'm writing this for reasons other than promotion. I'm writing it because first, I enjoy writing things like this. Secondly, it's my way of giving back. I have my own little class of writing students who follow these posts and maybe they learn something. That makes me feel good. But I don't add blogging into my marketing mix or time.

Now, someone else might have 1000 blog followers but only a few hundred Facebook friends. Their priorities would be different. Go where the people are.

Finally, set a limit on your marketing effort. If you get to the end of the day and have done three hours of marketing and now find you don't have any time left for writing, you are doing it wrong. Aim for at least 50-50 but preferable 3-1 with the three being writing and the one being marketing.

No, I'm not there yet. But I'm getting there. As another pastor of mine once said: Always keep the Main Thing The Main Thing. And for the writer, the Main Thing, is writing.

Mining an Old Claim

Several years ago, I was researching a story on modern day gold prospectors. One thing I discovered was that many of them that panned for gold or used sluice boxes would investigate old claims that expired years ago that nobody renewed because they thought the claim was played out.

According to my expert, it can take years for the gold to work its way out of the mountains and down
Photo By Marcin Chadythe river, but it will usually settle in the same places. So, it made sense to work an old claim.

As a writer, sometimes it helps to work an old claim. I'm thinking about this now because I ran across a manuscript I was working on several years ago. At the time my day job got in the way of me completing it. I looked it over and it's pretty good. So, I've put it in the queue of things to edit and publish. But it started me thinking. How many articles have I written over the years that could be updated and slanted for different publications. How many blog posts do I have of value? I'm considering collecting many of them into a book of essays on writing. I wrote a daily devotion for close to 10 years. Maybe a collection of devotions would be in order.

Then I have plot outlines, story ideas, pages of research for articles, novels and stories I never got around to writing. Some of them didn't take off because they simply weren't very good ideas. Some, however, I simply got sidetracked from and didn't get back to.

What's sitting unfinished in your files? What things have you written that could be repurposed in some way. Have a backlisted book that your publisher no longer carries? Why not get the ebook rights back and upload the file to Kindle yourself. Are there blog posts that could be collected into a book?

What old claim can you reactivate? There just might be publishing gold in them thar files.

Observations on Bicycle Book Publisher and a Career Consultant

Back in the 1980s. Maybe even in the late 70s a book came out calledWhat Color is your Parachute? I think it is now in it's 30th edition or something. I ran across my old copy of the book, and was reminded of the story about its publication. 
The interesting thing about this book is not that it was rejected many times before
Photo by Jay Phaganbeing picked up for publication. We all know those stories. Wouldn't you have loved to be the editor that rejected Fodor's travel guides saying something like "Travel guides never sell." 
No, the interesting thing about this story is who finally published the book - a little company called Ten Speed Press. It was based in San Francisco and it published books about bicycles. That was it's whole catalog. That was its "brand." 
Of course, they took on the project for some reason I can't remember now, and the rest is history to use a tired yet accurate cliche. It became the best selling book of all time on Job search and made both them and the author many, many boatloads of money. 
But if you think about it, both the company and the author did everything "wrong." The company was well known as a bicycle book publisher. Their books typically sold in catalogs or to bike shops. They didn't have a distribution system for traditional bookstores. Besides, as a small publisher, they should have stayed in their "niche" and not defocus the brand.

Likewise, Bolles should have "known" that a company publishing books about "bicycles" couldn't do his book justice. 
Today, Bolles is a well known consultant on job search and his book is still in print 30+ years later. And 10-Speed press was acquired by Crown Publishing a division of Random house and publishes books about everything from cooking to sports and yes has some books about bicycles. 
The lesson is that it is okay to step outside your niche. Your niche is not your brand. The quality of your writing or publishing is your brand. Indeed, in order to grow, I dare say you must do something different. 

What Kind of Writer Are You: Planner, Pioneer or Pathfinder

If there is one common link between most writing teachers, it is the absolute belief in the one and only, absolute best way to write. Unfortunately, the other common link is that none of them agree on what that is.

Just look at plotting. Snowflakes, wagon wheels, heroes journeys, mountains to be climbed, formulas
to be followed. Act one, Act two, Act three, or is it five acts? I forget, and I've taught many of these myself. Most of them are useful. They are taught because they work. Just not all the time, and not for all people.

No, I'm not going to talk about plot. What I'm going talk about is something bigger than a single facet for writing. I'm going to talk about personality styles.

First, I'm oversimplifying. That cannot be helped. Do not think these are completely distinct. Within each category there will be overlaps. Some of us represent one style at one time and another at other times. I tend to be a planner for nonfiction writing and a pioneer or pathfinder for fiction. However, a bit of understanding of your own style may help you play to your strengths.

PlannerMaybe to understand these three styles. Let's think about what happens when you go on a long road trip. How do you approach that trip? Well, the planner, gets out all the maps and guidebooks, gets brochures from the Chamber of Commerce in each town they might pass through, checks on hotels in each city, reads the reviews of restaurants and attractions, figures out how much time it will take to drive from one town to the next, makes a daily itinerary, even makes the hotel reservations a month in advance. 
This person will approach writing the same way. They will do their research trying to anticipate every factual detail they will need to address in the book, article, or story. They will make detailed outlines of what happens in each scene or chapter. They will make up complete character dossiers, sketch floor plans for the buildings, maybe even take pictures out of magazines of people who look like their characters or scenes that look like settings from their books. 
This person will not start writing the first draft until they have nailed down every detail. Indeed, by that point the writing is almost an anticlimax. 
The strength of this approach is that they rarely suffer writer's block. They know what they need to write next. They also need less content editing. They have anticipated the plot holes and dead end subplots. They don't need to do a lot a fact checking later because they did it up front. 
However, planners can find themselves caught up in the planning stage so much that they don't get around to the actual writing. They may think there is just one more fact they need to find or they need to adjust the outline of a certain scene once again. 
Also, they are less likely to deviate from their outline even if the writing itself is feeling forced and the characters are acting out of character. Once written, the outline can take over the actual writing. 
Pioneer Sometimes called the Pantser or "Seat of the Pants" writer. This person approaches each writing project as a journey of discovery. It's not that they don't do planning. It's just that their first draft is their planning document. They are not the sort to fly over a region and take pictures of the area first. They want to be on the ground. Having a character surprise them or discover a plot twist while writing is what they live for. 
This person often takes several dead end roads while writing, but that's part of the fun figuring out what does and does not work. Since, they have no specific plan in front of them, they are more likely to have difficulty recovering from writer's block. The planner can look at the plot outline and plug on even if they don't feel they are writing very well. The pioneer just has to stop or explore a different road if they can't figure out what the character is going to do next.

Pioneers need to be prepared for this and be willing to brainstorm many different approaches in order to move on. They also can benefit from jumping around in a story. Since pioneers go more on intuition than linear reasoning, it may be you are blocked on one scene because  your subconscious wants to write another.

PathfindersPathfinders fall in the middle between pioneers and planners. They don't have detailed outlines, but they do have a general plan. They know where the story starts and ends. They know that there are certain intermediate destinations they need to reach on their journey. They may or may not write these down, but they have thought them out before they start writing. They like being surprised by the characters and minor changes in plot and are perfectly willing to depart from the plan if that looks like it will work better. However, they don't like being totally unprepared for the journey. They know where they are going and the general path they will take to get there, but they work out the details on the road.

This person's strength is that they combine spontaneity with forethought. Thus, they have the benefits of each. However, likewise, they share the pitfalls of both. They can become so locked into reaching a certain "destination" point that they don't listen to their characters to change course. However, without a detailed plan, they have less to help them when they get stuck in a certain scene.

Admittedly, this paradigm is oversimplified. Some people might be planners when it comes to creating characters but pioneers with plot. They may do more planning with nonfiction and less with fiction or the other way around. Sometimes people have a very detailed plot "outline," but it is not written down, they simply see it in their minds eye. So, they may look like a pioneer, but they carefully planned the story in advance, they just didn't make a written outline.

However, this might help you understand a bit of your own writing style. If you don't do it the way the latest book says it should be done, don't worry. Your style may be different, but that doesn't make it worse.

I'll be exploring these styles in depth in my Writing YOUR Novel YOUR  Way course launching Monday. August 26. The course is just $10 for 15 self-paced lessons. For more information click here. 

The One and Only Absolute Rule for Writers

I end up mentoring a lot of new and beginning writers. Frequently, they approach me about some "rule" for writing - no passive voice, no head hopping, floating body parts, and the list goes on. I can nearly always find exceptions to each of these "rules." That makes them suggestions or guidelines and not rules. Even the "rules" of spelling, punctuation and grammar can be artfully ignored. Consider the work of James Joyce and e.e. cummings.
Photo by Eduardo
However, their is one absolute rule for writers. Ready to jot this down? It's very profound, very subtle, very esoteric. It is not something you might think of yourself. Ready?

Writers Must WriteI told you it was profound. I remember being at a writer's conference several years ago where the keynote speaker began by looking out over the audience and saying, "Why aren't you all home writing?" 
It was a good question. Writer's today have a lot of non-writing things to do. Marketing, personal appearances, book signings, social media, and the list goes on. Today, the writers I mentor are as likely to be asking about how to build a Facebook page or what to put in their blogs as how to build a story. 
At some point, though, we have to get back to basics. What is taking up most of our time? Is it blogging, Facebooking, Tweeting, speaking, pinning or is it writing? 
I can hear the objections now. "But you have to be doing all these things to sell books." To a certain extent that is true, but you have to be realistic about some things. Take blogging, for example. Average conversion rate for any type of social media per book release is about 1 percent. So, even if you have 1000 people following your blog (which is pretty high for most bloggers), that means you are going to sell maybe 10 copies of each book from your blog followers. 
Let's say your average blog post is 500 words and you do three a week. That's 75,000 words a year or a short novel. With virtually no promotion, if you self-published a novel of 75,000 words and kept the price reasonable, you could expect to sell 5 copies a month. Or 60 copies a year.
In other words, you would have to release six novels a year and announce them on your blog to match that in terms of sales. 
I'm using the most visble example and most easily quantified. However, consider how much time is spent on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and others. Yes, we need that presence. (I'm not so sure blogs are that important to marketing for my reasons you can see a previous post. Is Blogging Necessary. ) However, you need to keep your priorities straight. You can have a great wonderful platform, but if you don't turn out the copy, you won't have anything to sell.

And, as a writer, you cannot get obsessed with one book. You need to have volume. I don't mean becoming a hack, but it is important to have out a number of titles. I made this mistake with my first novel. I spent hundreds of hours promoting it, going on blog tours, guesting on websites and podcasts, plugging it on social media. So much so, I didn't have time to write the second book in the series which came out almost three years later. I had lost much of the momentum and still didn't sell as many books as I did just putting the book up on Amazon and optimizing for the Kindle search.

One author suggested you not publish your first book until you have two more to publish. I don't know that I would go so far as that, but you can't think only in terms of the book you have just released. You have to thing about the next three books. If someone likes that book, what are they going to buy next? There is a relatively finite audience for that first book immediately after publication. It continues but at a lower pace after that, but to build up an income base, you need several books producing lower sales over an extended period of time as well as new releases coming out on a regular schedule. If you are spending all your time promoting one book, you won't be writing the next one. 
So, what are we to do? We do have to be out there promoting our books. Certainly, indie writers more than traditional ones. Although, having been traditionally published, I know that if you are not a "name" writer, the promotional backing of the publishing company is minimal at best. 
I'm not saying forget promotion. However, we need to be work smarter. Watch your analytics on websites, browsers and facebook. How many people are you actually reaching through those venues. How does that compare to the time you spend on each? If you have 500 people following you on facebook, 700 on Twitter and 100 on your blog, then maybe you need to split up your time accordingly. Instead of three blog post a week, one every two weeks might suffice. Maybe you need to do more on Facebook and Twitter. 
Secondly, set a limit. How much time are you going to spend on marketing activities during a week? Start with how many hours you have to work on writing related stuff. Maybe it's 10 hours a week. Then I would say spend no more than two and a half hours or about 25%. If you look at your schedule and you find you are doing more, then you might have to cut down. I find setting a timer works for me. 
Third, just say "no." You will receive all sorts of "promotional opportunities." People will want you to guest on their blogs. Visit their blogs. See how many followers they actually have. If it is less than a few hundred, then you might want to turn them down. Sure you might sell one or two books, but if that takes away from you writing your next book, is that really a good economy. Any chess player knows you sacrifice the pawns to protect your queen. 
So, back to the beginning. The one rule for writers - Write!

Art and Business

We've been engaged in a discussion about book covers on one writer's email discussion list. The consensus is that the cover is super-duper important because people won't click on your link or read your book if it isn't wonderful.

Being the iconoclast (and realist) that I am I suggest that maybe it takes more than a good cover to sell a book, and that there is a point of diminishing returns. By that I mean that a poor quality cover
certainly is going to not attract readers and may well discourage them from reading your book. However, on the other hand, the assumption that you need to spend lots of money on a "high quality" (read: expensive) cover to be successful, probably isn't the truth either. There is a point between good and great cover design where the sales do not justify the expense. In other words, good covers do sell more books than bad ones, but great covers do not sell a significantly higher number of books than good ones. 
Of course, this raises the obvious question: How are we defining good? While many give lip service to marketing features like title and representation of content, in practical terms, most are defining it as artistically attractive. Of course, most book cover designers plying their trade on the internet today are not marketing specialists, they are artists. They think like artists and think in terms first and foremost of symmetry, balance, color wheels, composition and design. Nothing wrong with that. However, a well designed graphic on it's own sells nothing. From a marketing perspective, the cover must not only be attractive, but must communicate enough of the content of the book to cause the reader to click through to the sales page. A less pretty book cover that communicates the content of the book is going to generate more click throughs than one that is beautiful, but does not. 
Good art does not necessarily translate into good business. Unfortunately, when you say something like that, the critics of indie publishing and even many in the field think you are talking about poor quality covers that are just thrown together. That's not the point at all. The point is that a very create, very beautiful, very expensive cover design is not necessarily a good sales tool if it's only value is beauty. 
The Kindle (or Nook or Sony or Smashwords) search engine is not an art gallery. People are not browsing in order to simply see pretty pictures. They are browsing to find something to read. And if it is an ebook, after they purchase it, they will rarely see the cover any larger than about an inch square on their reader. So, what is the value of the cover? 
The value is in it's message. A cover that has fewer artistically skilled design components, but which clearly communicates to the reader a reason to buy the book or at least read the sample is going to be more effective than a pretty cover that does none of these. 
So, from a marketing perspective what should be on the cover. 
1. A simple, but bold graphic. This graphic should not be complicated. Avoid collages. Avoid pictures with too much ghosting. By that I mean a semi-transparent figure in the background. That is a common, romance novel technique that comes from the days of selling print novels in brick and mortar stores. But as a thumbnail, those subtleties are lost.
2. A graphic that communicates the substance of the book. You know what I hate? It's book covers that have two young people on the cover, but when you get into the book, you find the main characters are middle aged. Sometimes a cover can be beautiful, but misleading. Find a graphic that communicates the substance of the book. 
3. A clear, descriptive or evocative title. For nonfiction this is easier. You have a topic and you want your title to reflect that. For instance, my next Bible study will be called "Troubled on Every Side: On Being God's People in Difficult Times." The main title will be in large letters. Someone is searching for a Bible study they will see that in big letters. In smaller, but still readable letters will be the explanatory subtitle. Nevertheless, Just "Troubled on Every Side" gives a good solid idea of the general topic to be covered. 
For fiction, it is harder. But it can suggest the theme. For instance, Stephen King's epic, The Stand, doesn't tell us everything about the book, but it gives the central idea. These people are going to take a stand. Lillian Jackson Braun's Cat Who mysteries. Always include a clue to the basic plot of the book. The Cat Who Sniffed Glue let's us know that glue will have something to do with the story. 
4. Clear Readable Fonts. Some people want to play games with fonts. They are looking for something clever and then the reader ends up trying to decode the title. Remember someone is likely to spend a second or less looking at your book cover, that title needs to stand out. 
Yes, you want an attractive design, but if it doesn't sell what's inside, it is pretty useless. 

Some Observations upon Completion of my Last Private Commission

I rarely use this space for purely personal observations. I have done the occasional rant, but it's mostly about "out there." However, I decided to return to the original use of blogs as public versions of personal journals just to work through a few feelings.

About a half hour ago, I completed work on a web design project for a client. I helped him format and publish his ebook and then set up a webpage for him. I still have to upload his new website to the webhost, but that's just mopping up stuff.

What makes this important to me is that it is my last private client. When I retired a  year ago, I thought I would probably be teaching part time at my former college , writing books and doing a lot of private advertising work. Well, it turned out
that my college had to cut just about all adjunct faculty positions in my department. But I did have several private jobs. Seemed like a plan.

Along the way, I started publishing a lot of my own materials including novels, books on writing and Bible study guides. But I never seemed to have enough time because of the private projects. In February, I took a weekend retreat. I got a hotel away from all distractions and went into prayer. I got a very clear direction from God about what I should be doing. It wasn't advertising, PR or web design for other people. That had been a corner stone of my business. I didn't have any clients at the time, but a few weeks later, my hair stylist was striking out on her own and needed a website and I got an email from an author in Hong Kong who needed help with putting his novel on Kindle.

I took the jobs, but I kept getting behind. My health is not what it used to be. I have a bad back and bad asthma. If I have to go out into the outside air where I live, it can take me a couple of days to recover at certain times of the year. Also, colds and flu bugs get to me. I don't have the stamina I used to have either.

Unfortunately, I kept falling behind on my projects. But I also felt so guilty that I didn't put up new projects or wrote much on my own novels and books. I just couldn't when I had those hanging over my head.

But, I had only myself to blame. I went against what I believe sincerely God showed me. That money looked good. But interestingly enough, during that same time, I made more money from my indie publishing than I did from the big jobs. It was just delivered to me monthly and not in a lump sum at the end of the project.

I know this is the end of doing the private work. I am looking forward to working on my own projects. I want to do more self-paced online courses. I want to get back to my novels and Bible studies. I've fallen behind. I should have about 30 up by now and I only have about 20.

But I also feel guilty. I turned down an inquiry the other day. It was hard to do. But I had to be true. Also, it isn't right to the client because I can't set a reasonable deadline and meet it anymore. Still, that money came in handy and I have some obligations that don't only involve me, but also other people.

I remember something Henry Blackaby said in one of his books. "Doing the will of God is costly to you and those around you." I do believe this is the will of God and I am really willing to pay the price, but it hurts when that price is shared at least temporarily by others.

And there is a bit of sadness. I do enjoy doing that type of work. But more specifically, I'm sad because once again my health has taken something from me. I retired early because of my health. I have to figure that going shopping is going to land me in bed for a couple of days if the air quality is "moderate" or below. I know part of this is a consequence of getting older. I accept that, and in light of the alternative, I'll happily take it. Still, it is a passage that I was forced to take.

I hope this hasn't sounded too rambling. Maybe some of you have been facing your own transitions and have conflicted feelings. Feel free to share them below.