C.L.R. Dougherty's Blog, page 8

Let's remove the Stigma attached to Indie Authors.

Almost every day, I see an article online about the need for editing in self-published works.  Not quite as often, but still frequently, I see counterarguments about the declining quality of professionally edited, traditionally published works.  I agree with  both of these positions.  The solution that is most often offered is that Indie authors need to hire editors.  That doesn't address the problem of declining quality among the editorial ranks.  Good editors, like good writers, are hard to find.  Encouraging a poor  writer to hire a questionable editor may not remove the stigma.

So, what's the solution?  It's multifaceted, but it's not complicated. As a first step, I think Indie authors need to cultivate critical readers and listen to their feedback.  When you find such  gems, don't give them the book until you are certain it's ready to publish.  Ask for comments on the story structure, the ease of reading, and the pacing.  Try to get the reader to zero in on specific examples to illustrate any criticism, but don't expect that they will point to the precise problem.  These folks are hard to find, but they're there.  If you're depending on a relative,  be sure to explain that the purpose of their feedback is to keep you from embarrassing yourself in public, not to make you feel good right now.  Although my wife is fond of me and likes to say nice things to me, she won't let me go out on the town with my shirt on inside out.  I've tried it.  There are some others who help me, as well, and when some or all of them tell me that there's something wrong, I know there's something wrong.  They may all point at different things, but that doesn't matter.  It's my job to find the specific problems and fix them.    
As a second step, if grammar and punctuation get in the way of the story, the writer (or editor, in some cases) needs to go back to school or find a different outlet for creative urges.  An editor should be correcting oversights and mistakes, not picking through the fruits of ignorance.  There is a difference between an editor and a ghost writer.  Let's not confuse the two.
The third step, and the one that all of us who are serious about removing the stigma attached to Indie authors should embrace, is to give honest, direct feedback, as opposed to "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" reviews.  That's best done with some degree of privacy, as opposed to posting a critique for the world to see.  If you read a lot of Indie books, as I do, you've encountered some that have egregious errors in the first few pages.  Take a minute to write to the author and suggest that, while the story might be interesting, it's obscured by the poor grammar and punctuation.  Don't give it 3, 4, or 5 stars and hope for the same in return.  That's where the stigma comes from.
Is there a place for paid editors, cover designers, and blurb writers in this world?  Certainly, there is.  The good ones earn their money, as do good writers, and their work stands out for the same reasons.  Let's all focus on the quality of our collective product, and the stigma will go away. 

When the Smoke Gets Out of the Box

Those who keep up with me on Twitter and Facebook will already know that I started writing Bluewater Vengeance, my next novel, just a few days ago.  I'll take a moment to explain that I actually started working on it a few months ago.  I suspect that those of you who write will understand the difference between "working on it,"  and "writing it."  I'll try to expand on this a bit, in case those terms don't conjure up the phases that we go through when we start any creative project.  I can even draw parallels to the steps I went through in replacing the engine in our sailboat last year, but that's on the sailing blog.

I started working on Bluewater Vengeance last summer, when I was writing Bluewater Killer.  I knew that I wanted to write a series of books about some of the same characters.  I get attached to certain characters, you see, and it's hard to put them away when their role in a given work is finished.  Of course, some of them die, and that's hard.  I grieve for them, but I know they aren't really dead, any more than actors who die on stage are dead.  They're just out of the spotlight for a while.  There are some of those characters still hanging around from Deception in Savannah, in fact.  Their essence may breath life into future characters, who probably won't share their names,  but I'll know who they are just the same. 
So, I had some characters who resonated in Bluewater Killer, even though they didn't have big roles.  One of those was Dani Berger.  She was a fascinating person to me.  A beautiful, capable young woman, she was, but all she did was get herself whacked on the head and tossed overboard.  Well, okay, she also did a few other things, but her role in the book was passive.
That was frustrating for her, and for me.  Dani just isn't a passive person.  In order to get her to play the part that I needed for her to play in Bluewater Killer, I made a deal with her.  If she behaved fairly well, she could have the run of the place in Bluewater Vengeance.  She's holding me to the deal.  We're five chapters into Bluewater Vengeance at this point, and she's definitely center stage.  Nothing passive about the gal now, and she is making this story her own. 
There were a couple of other women who played somewhat larger roles in Bluewater Killer who also caught my attention.  One of them died, but the other one, well, we don't know for sure, but several people have asked what happened to Liz.  She died.  Or did she?  I don't want to spoil Bluewater Killer if you haven't read it yet. 
Then there's Phillip's girlfriend, Sandrine, who had a small but entertaining role in Bluewater Killer.  One reader has expressed some frustration with the unresolved relationship that she had with Phillip.  I could go on, character by character, but the point here is to let you know that while I was writing Bluewater Killer, I was laying the groundwork for the next book.
I published Bluewater Killer in mid-November, and I didn't start writing Bluewater Vengeance until a few days ago.  In the interim, my wife and I finished our sailing trip to St. Martin, arriving here in early December from St; Lucia, where we were when I published Bluewater Killer.  We've frittered away our time working on the boat and visiting with friends, getting settled into St. Martin for the winter.
Not long after we got here, we learned that the drawbridge that allows access to the lagoon from the French side of the island was broken.  The man who announced this on the morning radio network explained that the problem came about when a maintenance crew painting the bridge took the cover off of a control box to paint it.  When they took the cover off, the smoke came out of the box and escaped.  He said the bridge surely wouldn't work again until they put some fresh smoke into the box. They had it on order, but in typical island fashion, it was delayed in shipment.  
I liked the story, and as I mulled it over, I realized that it was a lot like what happens when I finally start writing, after months of turning the story over in my head.  When I start writing, the smoke that's been swirling around in confusion comes out of the box in a nice, smooth stream, right onto the screen of my computer.  The challenge is to stoke the fires at just the right rate to keep enough smoke in the box.  If it all gets out at once, it disperses before it gets to the computer, and the drawbridge between the story in my head and the story in the reader's head won't function.
 
Thanks for reading.  I have to get back to Dani.  She's trying to let more smoke out of the box.

Write to an Author This Year

This time last year, I had just published Deception in Savannah, my first novel.  I was excited as I waited for the sales to start climbing.  Now, with three more works published, I'm still excited, and still waiting for the sales figures to climb.  I've sold enough books and gotten enough feedback now to make me think that writing is a worthwhile pursuit.  After all, my main goal was to share my writing, and that's certainly happening, thanks to the help, patience, and support of lots of generous people.  I offer a heartfelt thanks to all of you who have invested your time in buying and reading my books, and especially to those who took the time to let me know what you thought of them.

I have read thousands of books over the years, but until this past year, I never wrote to an author.  It seemed somehow presumptuous to think that my opinion, good or bad, would matter.  I know better, now.
When I bare my thoughts in a book or a blog post, I always wonder what my readers think.  I know that people read the material, because I can see sales numbers, downloads, and page visits, but writing is a solitary endeavor.  I spend a lot of time staring at my computer screen, stringing words together in an effort to communicate my thoughts.  Unlike conversing, either face-to-face, or by letter, or email, there's no real-time feedback to let me know how effective my efforts are.  Whether my goal is to entertain, inform, or persuade, I often worry that I'm missing the mark.  It's only in this last year, since I've begun to follow and correspond with other writers, that I've come to realize that most of us have a bit of this insecurity, and that we welcome the reassurance of readers' reactions.
Positive reactions are nice, but negative ones have value as well.  To me, the worst reaction is silence.  Rationally, I understand that most people read and react without commenting to the author, but emotionally, the little kid deep down inside wanting approval frets that my work missed whatever mark I had hoped to hit.
Since I've had this realization, I have started to write to people when I read their books.  It's quick and easy in this era of instant communications, and I've discovered that I enjoy the book on a different level when I open a communication channel with the author.  Most respond; some don't; but I know they got something out of my feedback either way.  So, if you read a book and the author has included an email address, make your reaction known.
I wish you all a happy and prosperous new year.  

"What's your book about?"

I've gotten better at answering that question in the last year, since I published Deception in Savannah.  I remember well the struggle to come up with a description of the book for the online eBook stores.  It was far more difficult than writing the book.  A year later, with two more books and a short story published, it's not as hard for me to come up with a cogent answer, but I still struggle. 

Other writers may not have the same problem that I have, but I suspect that I'm not alone.  This doubtless seems odd to someone who hasn't spent months or years putting together a work of fiction.  The problem stems from the fact that most books are about a number of things, depending on the perspective of the reader.  Not all of those things may be obvious to the writer.  That's what makes fiction fun for both parties. 
I first began to grasp this when I wrote and published my second book, Dungda de Islan', which is non-fiction.  At least it's as close as I could come to a factual recounting of  a couple of years of life aboard our boat, as my wife and I explored the Eastern Caribbean for the first time.  See how easy it was to describe that book?  I  had no trouble with the descriptions when I published it.  I thought I had gotten smarter. 
Then I wrote and published The Lost Tourist Franchise, part of the back story of one of my favorite characters from Deception in Savannah.  It's a short story, about 12,000 words long.  How hard could it be to describe it?  Once again, I had trouble.  My early readers all liked it, but their descriptions reminded me of the story of the blind men describing an elephant.  I wrote a number of short descriptions before I settled on the one that's on The Lost Tourist Franchise page here.  I'm still not happy with my description, and I certainly haven't gotten smarter. 
For Bluewater Killer, I used a different approach.  I didn't try to describe it; I just offered a few brief sketches.  I hope they capture something of the flavor of the book, without biasing the reader.  I don't want to shape the reader's view of the story to match mine; what's important to me is that the reader should enjoy the story.  Fiction is supposed to be fun.  The message content varies based on what the reader brings to the book. 
I haven't gotten smarter, but as I have figured out how to get potential readers to look at the book descriptions on this site, it occurs to me that I'm not constrained to describe my books in a format that fits the booksellers' generic requirements.  I just realized that I can provide alternative descriptions, and let the reader choose.  My first effort at this will be for Deception in Savannah.  I'll try it out over the next few days.  
I'm curious to know what you think my books are about.  If  you would like to describe one of my books, please click the link to the Facebook fan page for the book (the little cover image right next to the "like" button above the big cover image on the book page) and write your description on the wall.  While you're there, click the "like" button on the Facebook fan page, so that you will see the other responses as they're posted.  If I use your description, I'll send you a free eBook version of  Bluewater Vengeance, which should be out early next year.  Wonder what it will be about?

Facebook and Twitter: The Social Marketing Maze

I've enjoyed a brief respite from my writing regimen as we move the boat north from Grenada to St. Martin.  We've had some great sailing, and I've had a bit of time to think about Bluewater Vengeance, my current project.  When we have had the luxury of Internet access in our occasional anchorages, I've spent some fragmented time trying to work my way through the social marketing maze.  While I write for the pure pleasure of it, it adds to the satisfaction to have people read my work, so I'm looking for ways to expand my audience. 

Every time I think I understand how Facebook works, it starts behaving differently.  I use it to stay in touch with friends and family, anyhow, so I don't really want to bombard them with promotional messages about my books.  I figure they know about the books, and the folks who are interested have bought them or will buy them in their own good time.  There's a small universe of potential readers there, and it's not expanding rapidly.  In an effort to separate my personal Facebook activity from selling books, I've set up fan pages, one for each book, and one for myself.  The challenge now is to get some exposure for those pages, but I'm expecting that will come slowly, from links in the eBooks themselves. 
I've invested some time in Twitter over the past few weeks.  To me, it appears much more commercially oriented, and I'm less reluctant to keep pumping advertising Tweets out.  It's interesting to see how many of my fellow writers are doing the same.  There are also some useful links that pop up on Twitter from time to time.  I've learned a good bit since I've been watching, and Twitter allows me to share what I've learned with folks who have interests similar to mine. 
I've discovered that I can generate traffic to my links using Twitter, as well.  Traffic on this blog has increased from around 100 visits per month to around 600 in the last 3 weeks, and it's still growing.  So far, I can't see a corresponding increase in downloads of my books, but visibility is the first step.  Now that I know people actually follow the links in my Tweets, I've begun to direct some traffic straight to links for the online bookstores.  That gives interested folks a shorter path to reading the book.  If they stop here first, they have to decide which online store to visit.  I'm not sure which is preferable to potential readers, so I'm experimenting with a mix to see what happens. 
Once we settle in our favorite St. Martin anchorage in a few days, I'll get back to the pleasure of writing Bluewater Vengeance, and watch what happens to my social marketing experiments.   

Self-Publishing and Quality

There's been a lot of press lately about the impact of self-publishing on the traditional publishing industry, and there's been some commentary on the quality of self-published material.  Some of the comments, particularly those that originate with those involved in the traditional publishing industry, are damning.  As an avid reader for nearly 60 years, a person who has made a good living by depending on the written word to convey complex information, and, recently, a self-published author, I have to join the fray.
In my opinion, the quality of recent publications in general has declined, regardless of medium.  I think that this is a result of a decline in the quality of primary and secondary education, as well as the impact of the broadcast media.  People who should know better now speak television-quality English.  Then, those who would write without first acquiring a solid foundation in grammar and usage begin to promulgate what they hear by writing it down.
One of the most common and grating results of this is the struggle for life of the objective case of the first person personal pronoun.  You know the one I mean, don't you?  The perfectly good, grammatically correct use of the word "me" is being systematically trampled by the pseudo literate, including many of those who edit traditionally published material.  Nothing annoys me and other careful writers more than to see the beginning of this sentence become "other careful writers and I."  I offer that as an example; investigation and proof are left to the reader. 
Some make the argument that English is a living language, and that it needs to change with the times.  I'm certain that it's living; I hear it scream every time somebody tortures it to make it change its behavior to accommodate laziness on the part of a would-be writer or editor.  Change should be for improvement; not because of carelessness or ignorance.  The results of reducing our language to its lowest form are sometimes comical, sometimes pitiful, but they rarely convey the writer's precise meaning.  No matter how emphatic and engaging such works may be, carefully parsing what was written often yields ambiguous results.  That's unfortunate, because written English offers the writer a degree of precision that is difficult to achieve in other forms of communication. 
What does this have to do with self-published works versus traditionally published works?  I have developed a preference for self-published authors over the last couple of years, for a couple of reasons.  The biggest one for me is the breadth of material that's self published.  There is something for every taste, for every mood.  Nobody screens out works that don't have enough market appeal.  Writers are free to write about what interests them without worrying about catching the attention of an agent.  Does this mean that there is a lot of poorly written material available?  It certainly does.  Do you have to read it?  No.  You can download and read a substantial sample and decide for yourself whether to buy the work and invest your time in it.  If the writing is atrocious, it only takes a few seconds to delete the offending file and move on.  There are a lot of gems to be found in the swill, for those who take the time to look.  The gems are often works that wouldn't make it through the screen of the traditional publishing industry, not because they are poorly written, but just because they have different characteristics than those that have sold well in the past.
I don't believe the traditional publishing industry is evil or nefarious in its selection process.  I believe the industry is using a business model that has worked well for commodity products in the past, but which penalizes writers who don't already have a following.  That's not bad; it's good business, if you are a traditional publisher.  They want to publish what will sell.  The weakness in this business model is that it discourages innovation.  When an innovative writer comes long and builds a following, the publishing industry is there to help, except that at that point, their added value is purely in warehousing and distribution.
Attempting to justify their existence as gatekeepers for quality is a losing proposition.  It didn't work for any of the recently dismantled monopolies, and it won't work in this market, either.  What do you think?

Bluewater Killer is Published!

To get your copy, click on the Bluewater Killer cover on the right side of this page to find the links to your favorite source.  Thanks.

Bluewater Killer is Finished

Bluewater Killer is finished, after only six major rewrites and innumerable tedious editing sessions.  I owe my wife, Leslie, and her folks, Alan and Carol Rea, a great deal for their patience and determination in helping me root out all of the gremlins that plague a freshly written work.  Without their help, the story would not have been told with the degree of clarity that you will find when you read it.  Thank you, Leslie, Carol, and Alan.  Without you to guide me, I would still be stuck in an endless loop of writing and rewriting.  With no external reference, I have trouble knowing when to quit.

Now the hard part begins.  I have to take the word processor files and convert them to the required formats for uploading to the eBook outlets, and get the layout done for the paper version.  That will take a few days, depending on how fat my fingers are and how poor my memory is, but as the folks down here in the islands say, "the book soon come."
Just for the fun of it, I tried writing this book in the first person.  I've never tried writing fiction in the first person before.  It was fun, but I thought it was quite difficult to carry forward.  I had trouble sticking to the perspective of a single person all the way through, and I finally decided to go back to the style with which I was comfortable.  I learned a lot from writing the first few chapters in the first person.  For one thing, I have new respect for those folks who write that way.  It may look easy, but I didn't find it to be so.
After a week or so of frustration, I rewrote everything in my normal style.  The initial effort was not wasted; I gained real insight into the character who started out telling the story in the first person version.  He's deranged, and listening to him describe his situation was of great value as I developed his character in the final version.  Maybe I'll clean up some of that first person effort and publish it as a short story.  Let me know what you think.
Look for Bluewater Killer on Amazon and Smashwords at first, with other outlets soon to follow.  If you would like personal notification when it's available, let me know.  I hope you enjoy Bluewater Killer.

Writing a New Book - What's it Like?

I'm 45,000 words into my next novel, which I'm calling Bluewater Killer.  It's the tale of a deranged man, cruising the Caribbean on his sailboat, leaving havoc in his wake.  It is not -- NOT -- autobiographical.  I may be deranged, but…

I'm having a lot of fun writing my first thriller.  It's quite a contrast to my experience writing Deception in Savannah, not that I didn't have a good time with that one.  It's radically different from Dungda de Islan', my second book and first non-fiction effort.  Making up a story from scratch really keeps my brain engaged, on several levels.  There's the obvious, the creative exercise itself, and the less obvious, but more taxing element of capturing the story and telling it coherently.


The stimulus of writing a thriller has been a bit of a surprise for me.  It's exciting in a whole different way, over and above the  excitement of watching characters come to life.  That's a thrill in itself, almost like watching your children grow up.  In the case of Bluewater Killer, I'm experiencing the fascination of watching a character unravel, and I'm trying to display that from his own perspective, as well as through the eyes of the other characters.


Writing with the manifest goal of generating and sustaining an increasing level of suspense is draining.  I feel wrung out at the end of every writing session, exhausted by the effort of typing fast enough to keep pace with the story.  When I stop for the day, I can't disengage my mind from what's happening in the world I just left when I closed the notebook.  I have the urge, every time I pass the computer, to boot it up and see what's happened since I was there last.

The iPod Touch has changed the way I write.

I recently posted to our sailing blog, Voyage of the Play Actor, a description of how I became a convert to eBooks, which I read on an iPod Touch.  As I wrote that post, I realized how much the iPod Touch has improved  my productivity as a writer.


For the reasons I described in that post, I now read almost everything on an iPod Touch, which also contains  a large amount of reference material, as well as apps  for taking and organizing notes.  Ideas that are stimulated by whatever I happen to be reading are now readily recorded and easily found later.  These often relate to some aspect of a writing project, and in a paper world, were often lost, just because recording them was awkward and distracting.  If I did stop reading long enough to record my thoughts, I had retrieval problems when I got ready to write again.  Now, I just switch from what I'm reading to an app that uses on screen handwriting recognition to record my note, and switch back to my book without losing my place, all within seconds.  It's also simple to copy a few words that provoked the thought and move them into the note, if that's appropriate.  When I next sit down at the computer to write, I transfer my notes from the iPod to the PC, and I'm ready to incorporate the notes into my writing.  If something I'm reading raises a question as to fact, I can usually answer it by switching to the offline encyclopedia, the CIA Fact Book, or any of dozens of other references, all right in the palm of my hand


I've also discovered that the iPod is an invaluable tool for editing what I've written.  After a writing session, I print what I've just written to a PDF file and transfer it to the iPod Touch.  I can then read the file as an eBook.  This change in presentation makes it easier for me to spot errors or opportunities for improvement.  If I'm reading the file on the computer screen, it's much harder for me to step back and get an objective perspective than it is if I'm looking at it as if it were an eBook I'm reading.  As I read it on the iPod, I can highlight and annotate the PDF.  When I'm done, I transfer the annotated file to the PC, and I'm ready to edit.