Adam Croft's Blog, page 32

Is it easier to succeed in self-publishing?

With the ever-growing popularity of independent publishing, you might be lead to think that this form of publishing has a higher success rate than traditional publishing and is thus more attractive to authors. Or, depending on your view of independent publishing, you might instead think that it’s an easy option for authors who couldn’t get published in the traditional manner.

So which is it?

I’d suggest that it’s not really either. First of all, self-publishing – if you’re serious about giving it a good go – is definitely not the ‘easy option’ for writers who failed to get traditional deals. The fact that so many are actively turning to independent publishing suggests that it isn’t just a second choice or a fall back plan. It’s something that lots of authors clearly want to do.

But it definitely isn’t easy. A huge amount of work goes into independently publishing a book if you want to do it properly, and you have to take responsibility for everything yourself.

And there isn’t necessarily a guarantee of success, either. Of course, there have been some excellent independent publishing success stories, and I’m lucky enough to have done very well out of it myself, but just as it isn’t an easy option for writers who want to be published, so it isn’t an easy option in terms of achievement, either.

Like traditional publishing, there are plenty of factors that affect whether your book is successful or not, and the author only has control of some of them. Whether readers like your book, for instance, is not something we can ever properly predict. The fact of the matter is that while independent publishing definitely has a huge roster of benefits – from the control to the creative freedom to the fact you get to keep more of the profits from sales – if you don’t write a good book that people want to read, it will be hard to achieve success from it.

In that way, independent publishing can never be an easy option by any definition. Writing a good book – not to mention a good book that people want to read – is a very difficult thing to do. Success, if and when it comes, is wonderful, but no matter how someone chooses to publish their work, we can never forget that it won’t by any means have been easy.

4 tips to help you get to the end of the draft

There is a point in almost every single first draft of a novel where getting to the end seems impossible. This frustrating point can occur at different stages throughout the drafting process, but it seems to commonly crop up after the initial excitement of the start but before the thrill of getting towards the end. Those middle acts of your novel can be tricky to navigate, and I dread to think how many otherwise promising novels have been abandoned partway through as a result.

With this in mind, it’s worth knowing a few different tricks and tips to help you get to the end. Here are four ways to help you get to the end of the draft, and please feel free to add your own in the comments box.

Leave gaps if you need to

There’s nothing wrong with leaving a few gaps in your first draft if you need to. It might be nice to have a full draft as soon as possible, but if you’re stuck on a particular scene and can’t find a way through it no matter how much you try, it may well be more productive to just leave it for now and go onto some bits that you know you can do.

You also don’t necessarily need to write absolutely everything in full straight away, either. Another tip for those tricky scenes is to simply write a summary of what needs to go in the gap so it’s easier to work out later, when you’ve hopefully got more of an idea how to go about it anyway.

Don’t panic about the quality

It’s also worth not thinking about the quality of the draft at all. If this means that you don’t read anything back until you’ve fully completed the first draft of the novel then so be it. It can be hard to suppress our inner editor when we look back over rough work, but if we spend all our time revising what we’ve already got, we’ll never make progress with anything new. Suck it up, don’t panic, and move on.

Allow yourself time to think

Completing a first draft can also lead to the feeling that you should be writing all the time. If you find this useful, great. However, if you feel that the pressure of writing all the time is too much, give yourself a bit of space. Allowing yourself time away from the draft to think – whether it’s about your story or something else entirely – can be hugely useful and means you’ll be fresher and (hopefully) brimming with ideas when you go back to it.

Give yourself a bit of credit

Finally, give yourself some credit. Writing a novel is hard, and having the staying power to get through to the end of a draft is something you should definitely be proud of. Even if you’re only halfway through the draft at the moment, it’s still a huge achievement and more fiction than most people will write in a lifetime. So don’t be too hard on yourself. Be proud of what you’ve already done, and don’t forget to look forward to the rest.

 

7 Twitter tips all authors should know

Twitter can be a great tool for authors, whether they’re looking to promote a new book or simply engage in a little bit of procrastination. In order to get the most out of the social networking tool, it’s worth doing a bit of research to find out more about what it offers and how you might be able to use it. With this in mind, here are a few Twitter tips that all authors should know.

Choose who you follow carefully. It might be tempting just to follow back anyone who follows you, but if your aim with Twitter is to build up contacts and increase your knowledge about the publishing industry (or whatever your particular interest is), it will be harder to achieve your goals if you’re following lots of people who don’t add much in the way of value to your Twitter timeline. Be thoughtful when choosing people to follow, and create lists of different groups of people.
Don’t expect miracles. From many articles on social media, you get the impression that all you need is a Twitter account and a bit of regular Tweeting to hugely increase your book sales. In real life, this is unlikely to happen purely as a result of your newfound love of Twitter. It can definitely be useful, but it’s also useful not to set your sights too high. Don’t ignore all those other means of marketing.
People are online at different times of day. It sounds obvious, but not everyone is online at the same time, so it’s worth Tweeting at different times of day to make sure you catch as many of your followers as possible. It might be worth conducting a few time of day experiments, sending out similar Tweets at different times to see when you get the best response. You can use tools such as hootsuite.com to schedule Tweets if you can’t always manage to get online.
Don’t limit yourself. If all you do on Twitter is plug your book, it’s likely to make people switch off quite quickly. You need to make sure you’re Tweeting on a wide range of interesting subjects – you might have your specialist subjects that you focus on more than others, but mixing it up from time to time is definitely worth it.
Do some hashtag research. There are loads of Twitter hashtags that are used by authors and readers, so take a look and try out a few different ones to see which you think work best. For example, #amreading and #amwriting are popular, but you might also like to try out other options such as #selfpub or #crimefiction, depending on where your interests lie.
Be careful with what you say. Most Tweets disappear without much notice, but you never know when something you say will get picked up on, by followers or the press – particularly if you’re a little bit well-known for your writing. Before you hit that Tweet button, ask yourself if you’d be willing to be quoted on whatever it is you’re about to post. If not, it might be worth having a rethink.
An amusing photo of a cat will get you a long way on Twitter. So will comical cat YouTube videos. It’s worth having a few up your sleeve just in case.

4 ways to boost your writing productivity

Those productive writing days are brilliant. They make us remember why we love to write in the first place and, when we’ve got deadlines to meet, are utterly wonderful. However, those days when we want to be productive but simply aren’t are practically the opposite – depressing, annoying and frustrating. With this in mind, here are some ways you could boost your writing productivity.

 

Write one-line descriptions of scenes/chapters when planning your novel. This way, even if you feel stuck when you get to the bit in question, you’ll still have something to go on, which can be much more helpful than a blank page and brain freeze.
Remember that productivity doesn’t always mean you have to actually write. Some of our best progress is made when we’re not writing at all – sometimes we just need a bit of space to think things through and get plots and other issue straight in our heads. It’s still productive, and it will also help our future productivity when we actually get down to the business of writing.
Eliminate distractions. We all know about getting rid of physical distractions, such as the internet and the urge to make cups of tea every twenty minutes. However, it is often mental distractions that really hamper our writing productivity. At the start of your writing session, take five minutes to think through and/or write down everything that’s currently on your mind. Then put it all to one side and get on with your writing, free from distractions but knowing you’ll be able to come back to everything else later.
Set regular, small targets. Having one big target – ‘write book’ – is all well and good, but it can often seem hard to achieve and end up affecting your progress. By contrast, regular, smaller goals – ‘write chapter’ or ‘think up character names’ are infinitely more achievable and, as you tick goals off your checklist, you’ll see your progress and productivity increase.

The perils of over-writing

We all know how amazing a well-crafted, well-though out, well-written book can be. We also all know how frustrating books can be when they don’t quite live up to their initial promise. There could be any number of reasons a book doesn’t turn out to be quite as good as you hoped. The plot might fall apart halfway through, or the author might give up on distinctive, interesting characters and turn them all into stereotypical clichés towards the end.

Or it could be that the book is over-written. Over-writing something is a risk for all writers, and I think we all do it at some point. We all have a phase or a point in our writing career when we simply use too many words. We get caught up in beautiful descriptions, adjectives and adverbs, and spend so long poncing around with style that we forget about the story and moving it forward.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use beautiful descriptions, just that we shouldn’t overuse them, which I think can sometimes be a tendency for some writers – particularly new writers. There is sometimes a leaning towards using more words than are strictly necessary to write a story, simply because we have in mind a word count goal that we want to meet, or because – for some reason – we think longer is always better.

Of course, sometimes longer is better, but sometimes longer just leads to over-writing. It leads to overblown descriptions and unnecessary meanderings of plot that aren’t truly essential to the story. It can be hard to spot in your own writing, but it’s certainly very annoying when you spot it in someone else’s.

This is one of the reasons all writers need an editor. We need to know when we’ve gone a bit over the top with things, and what we could cut out without ruining the impact of the story. We shouldn’t be hiding things with flowery descriptions. It might be that once we’ve cut out our over-written work, we realise that the bare bones of what we have are not quite as compelling as we might have hoped.

That can be a crushing realisation – but it’s one that it’s much better to have now than when it’s too late to do anything about it.

What do you think about books that are over-written, and what are your tips for making sure other writers don’t fall into the same trap?

Why you should work on multiple projects at once

It can sometimes seem as though one writing project at a time is too much to deal with. Finding time in the day can be difficult, and the thought of adding in another project seems practically impossible. Yet there could well be benefits to working on multiple writing projects at the same time.

One is that it can help to keep your interest up. Sometimes, when you’re writing the same thing for a long stretch of time, interest in it can start to fade, particularly if whatever it is is proving itself to be a little more challenging that you originally thought it might be. Having another writing project that you can look at from time to time can make your other project seem more novel and interesting when you go back to it.

Another reason to work on two things at once is because it means you can be productive even when you’re procrastinating. You might be avoiding one project with all the might of your being, but it’s OK, because you’re working on the other one instead. You’re fulfilling your need to avoid something that’s currently difficult, but you’re also avoiding the inevitable guilt by doing something else that’s productive.

You’re also building up your repertoire; one of the best marketing tools for a novelist is another novel. If you’ve got two novels on the go at the same time, it might take you longer to get them finished, but you’ll still have two books at the end of it. And imagine the satisfaction that could bring. One project could also help with inspiration for the other, giving you more space and opportunities to be creative.

Finally, if one project goes belly-up for some reason or other, you’ll still have something to fall back on. Sometimes that safety net is just what we need to get on with business.

What do you think?

8 ways to promote your writing blog

I’m not sure how many writing blogs there are on the internet, but I’m willing to bet it’s a very high number indeed. There’s a lot of competition, and it can be hard to get noticed, especially when there are already so many well-established, quality blogs out there. Still, people are always interested to read something new and good and clever, so if you have a great idea for a writing blog – or any blog – the sheer volume of other stuff out there definitely shouldn’t put you off.

Plus, there are lots of things you can do to help promote and boost your writing blog. Here are some of them, and do feel free to add your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

Be good. A large part of creating a successful writing blog is as simple as that. Write something good, that people want to read.
Do your research. A large part of knowing what people want to read is knowing what’s already out there, and what’s popular. Do some research of different writing blogs and have a think about where yours might fit. What’s going to make people interested?
Write regularly. One of the best ways to promote your writing blog is to write your writing blog. There are plenty of other ways to promote a blog, but if there’s nothing to promote in the first place, the task will be much harder. It can be hard to find the time write 5, 6 or 7 times a week, but if you’re serious about making a go of things, it’s worth it.
Utilise social media. Probably one of the most popular ‘promotion tips’ is to use social media, and it’s popular for a reason. Facebook and Twitter can be very useful for tweeting blog links, but they can also be used to grow your profile in other ways – which, in turn, can bring people to your blog. Which brings us on to…
Don’t just promote your blog. Think about what else you have to offer – the projects you’re working on, the comments you have to make, the wider goals you have as a writer. You don’t always have to directly promote your blog; sometimes that’s just a nice by-product of other work that you do.
Don’t change it too much. It can be tempting to fiddle with the look and design of your blog, but if you change it too much, too regularly, the design will be a distraction rather than a positive feature of the blog. People like innovation and things that are different, but there’s also something to be said for consistency and a certain amount of familiarity when you’re trying to boost the popularity of something.
Target keywords. Work out the keywords you want to target in your blog – do a bit of research into SEO if necessary – and make sure you don’t forget about them when crafting your blog posts. This is something that can take time to build up, but hopefully if you’re in it for the long game, your efforts should start to pay off at some point.
Do guest posts. Writing for other blogs is a good way of getting experience and getting your own blog out there; if people like what they read, they’re more likely to visit your site in the future. And don’t forget to respond to comments. A little interaction can go a long way.

Book cover design for novices

It is generally recommended in independent publishing that if you are going to get professional help for one thing only, it should be your cover design. And your editing. And proofreading. And possibly your book formatting and your marketing. OK, so there are quite a few things it’s worth getting professional support on, but it’s definitely largely agreed that if you can’t design covers, you should probably leave the job to someone who can.

But what if getting a professional to help you really isn’t an option? After all, it isn’t out of the question that you simply won’t be able to afford a professional cover design for you first self-published outing, especially if you’ve decided to focus the resources you do have on other aspects of your book.

The cover design is still an important aspect of independent publishing, however, and I imagine we all will have seen examples of book covers that are likely to be doing their books more harm than good in the long run. This is an issue we need to get right. So what can the novice non-designer do when it comes to creating their own book cover?

Keep things simple

It almost goes without saying that if you’re designing your own book cover but don’t really know what you’re doing, keep things simple. Making the design complicated will only add to the list of things that could go wrong. Even if all you end up with for your cover is a block colour background and a bit of text, it is still likely to look better than if you went for something faffy and fancy and failed completely.

Check your alignments

One of the big mistakes new designers make is to fail to align the cover properly. For example, the title and the author name might look wonky and out of sync, or an image used might be placed at an angle that just looks plain weird. That’s not to say you can’t mess around with placements on the cover, just that you need to be careful about what you put where. You might like to split the cover into a grid while you’re designing it so you can work out what goes where and make sure anything that needs to line up does so.

Don’t be afraid of empty space

The instinct with cover design can sometimes be to fill up as much space as possible. However, this can make it look too busy and, if you haven’t put it together as well as a professional would, it can easily look unprofessional. Don’t be afraid of leaving empty space on the book cover – it can be used to good effect. You could also experiment with relatively easy design techniques, such as negative spaces, to give your cover a bit more impact.

Pretend you’re the reader

It’s also a useful exercise to put yourself in the shoes of a reader when designing your book cover. Imagine that you’ve never seen the book before – what do you think of it? Does it make you want to read it? Note where your eye is drawn to and decide whether you’re happy with the effect. You might also like to consider coming up with a killer tagline for the cover so there’s something on there that’s guaranteed to grip people for all the right reasons, even if you’re not the next great book cover designer.

What are your cover design tips for novice designers?

 

Penguin Random House merger looks set to go ahead

So it’s official. Big publishers Penguin and Random House are moving ahead with their merger plans and, once the move is complete, are set to have around a 30% share of the publishing market worldwide.

Of course, arguably the biggest missed opportunity of the deal is that they will not be calling the merged company Random Penguin as I imagine many people secretly hoped they might (imagine the great logos they could come up with for that), but it’s still a highly significant move – and one that needs to be cleared by the competition regulators before it can fully go ahead.

It has been reported that both brands will keep their editorial independence, but that there will be benefits in terms of cutting ‘back-office functions’.

To most people, the merger between the two traditional publishing giants probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. After all, people tend to buy books not because of the publisher, but because they like the author or simply like the look of a particular book. However, the move is definitely important, not least because it represents an attempt by the two companies to react to the changing publishing market and the growing dominance of those such as Amazon.

It will be interesting to see what the effect of the Penguin Random House merger actually is; it has so far attracted some criticisms from authors and others as the ‘big six’ publishers become five. However, there is a chance that it could lead to a surge in the smaller, independent presses as authors seek alternative publication options.

It will probably be some time before the full effects of the deal become clear, but it seems certain that this is a move that will affect the publishing industry for some time to come – what do you think of it?

You can read more about the Penguin Random House merger here.

What’s next?

Choosing what to read or write next is always one of those wonderful conundrums. Sometimes you know exactly what you want – something cosy, something funny, something intricate and plotty. Other times the choice available seems almost too much.

There is often something to be said for reading or writing something that is significantly different to whatever it was you read or wrote last. It’s good to change things up. It can stop you from getting bored, and especially in terms of writing, it can help to keep things fresh by posing you with a new challenge and new opportunities in terms of what you can do.

That said, there’s also something a little bit lovely in reading or writing something similar to what you’ve experienced before. In terms of reading, it can be comforting and relaxing to read things similar to what you’ve already read, and sometimes that’s all the brain really wants.

And, in terms of writing, doing things that are similar to recent projects can be a good of revisiting and refining techniques. It can help you to develop a style that you love and work out how to get more mileage of what you already know.

Whatever you decide, one thing always remains the same: in reading and writing, the question of “what’s next?” is always a wonderful one.