Anne R. Allen's Blog, page 69

Is Your WIP in Deep Doo-Doo? 7 “Block” Busters from Ruth Harris

First, the winner of last week’s contest is PHYLLIS HUMPHREY and she chose GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY. Congratulations, Phyllis! 
For this week’s contest (there will be TWO WINNERS this week!) just put the title of Ruth’s bestselling thriller HOOKED in the comment thread.
Other news: my box set of all THE CAMILLA RANDALL MYSTERIES is now available on Amazon. Hope to have it on Nook soon (as well as FOOD OF LOVE.) Any of you who have reviewed one of the mysteries, if you had time to post your review on the box set page as well, I would be forever grateful.
Ruth has some awfully useful tips for us today. They really hit home for me, because I’m just at that stage where I’m seriously falling out of love with my WIP. So while Ruth takes the helm this week, I’m going to get out my tablet and chisel, change the love interest’s name to Bon Jovi, give the villain a tragic childhood, and maybe think about a sex change for Camilla…? These are fun ideas, and they work.

7 “BLOCK” BUSTERS FOR WRITERS IN DEEP DOO-DOOBy Ruth Harris
You’re stuck. You don’t know what you’re doing. You hate your book. You hate your characters. The plot sucks. The whole *&%^ idea sucks. And don’t even mention the title. Oh, you mean, you’ve tried a kajillion titles and they all stink, too?
You have no talent and don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. On REALLY bad days, you even hate your computer which just sits there like a bilious toad and never, not once in living history, came up with a single idea. You’re mad at your cat, your dog and whichever politician is yapping away on the TV—none of THEM ever came up with an idea, either!
We’ve all been-there-done-that, including me who’s been writing stories, novels, articles, blurbs, flap copy, and blog posts for almost four decades and still, now and then, wonder WTF I’m doing. Lost, I tell you. Beyond clueless. Out of gas, out of inspiration, out of ideas. Hopeless. Blocked.
So what do I do to keep on keeping on? What have I learned about how to bust the block?
1) The Writer’s Tool Box
Really simple but sometimes all it takes: If, as usual, I’ve been composing on a computer, I pick up a pad and pencil. Working by hand slows me down and forces me to think more carefully. Often writing a few paragraphs by hand will get me going again. I haven’t had to resort to a quill yet. Or even a stone table and chisel. But I don’t rule them out because you never know.
2) Geography
If a tool switch doesn’t work, try changing the venue. Leave your desk and go to the kitchen table, a coffee shop, a park.
Sometimes just moving around can make a difference. A short walk, once around the block: the street and sidewalk remain but the block might be gone. A run, a Pilates session, even getting up from your desk and making the bed or emptying the dishwasher can get you out of your funk. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a great idea pops up.
3) The Meh  Character
We’re talking about the character who just lies there like a blob, does nothing interesting, says nothing provocative, and drains the energy out of every scene in which s/he appears. Even you, the creator, are bored to death by this loser.
The first thing I think about when confronting the meh character is his/her name. Maybe I’ve given this character a boring name. Sue, John, Jim, and Jen might be examples; names so common, they evoke no images or associations, give me no idea of who they are or were they came from.
Another possibility is that I’ve given the character the same name as someone I’d cross town to avoid because I don’t want to hear one more version of their latest drama with their rotten boyfriend/girlfriend or yet another installment of their decades-long battle with crabgrass.
Obvious solution: change the name. Look at baby-names sites. Plug “random name generator” into a search box and you’ll find a galaxy of suggestions. Pick a name you’ve never heard of so you can start fresh. Try something ethnic that will evoke a whole background and set of experiences.
Or else: Choose a name that has a strong association: Angelina, Brad or Madonna, for example, to get you going again. You can always change the name again later with a search and replace.
4) Escalation Strategy: The Sex Change
When the name change doesn’t help, go for the nuclear option: change the character’s sex. Leave the character exactly as you’ve written him/her but try a sex change. IME, the literary sex change, although it will probably feel traumatic at first, can work magic and the character who once seemed flat & boring suddenly isn’t. Putting a female character into what was once a male POV can really shake things up. Vice versa works, too.
You can also play with gender orientation: boring straight character/clichéd gay character? Do a switch: Different person, different motives, different experiences, different goals may well be the transformation that turns the meh character into someone you and the reader will care about.
As always, if the trick works, you can always change the character back again.
5) Sympathy For The Devil
Seems easy to write the villain, doesn’t it? They’re bad. Bad, bad, bad. Not to mention horrible, awful, and absolutely vile. They evoke terror, horror, revulsion and you have plenty of ideas for scene after scene of unrelenting evil. So what could go wrong?
The answer? Plenty.
Rotten, miserable human—or supernatural—being. Blood dripping from fangs. Evil oozing from every pore. Dictator, serial murderer, assassin, malicious neighbor, vicious ex—problem is, even evil can get boring after a while. Unrelenting vengeance, torture, and/or destruction give the writer nowhere to go after a while and, sooner or later, the writer is stuck and just can’t come up with another can-you-top-this? twist.
What’s needed is nuance—and nuance can come in the form of traumatic experiences ranging from neglectful and/or over-indulgent parents to war, famine, global financial upheaval. Give the reader a glimpse of why the devil is doing whatever s/he’s doing. Let the devil speak for him/herself in terms of motivation, goals, and longings. The point is to create a character, not a check list of horrific flaws.
Hannibal Lecter, one of the most famous of all villains, was intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful. It was juxtaposition of those qualities with his lurid crimes that made him such a fascinating character. Without them, he’d be just another cannibal. Yawn.
6) Plot Problems
I’m a pantser and my best stuff comes out of character but when I face the oh-god-what-happens-next block, I try an outline. Because I’m severely outline-challenged, my outlines usually emerge in the form of a list: scenes that need to happen, plot points, character details and future cliffhangers.
The truth is, even in the form of a list, most of the time the outline just doesn’t work for me. What does help is going back to the beginning and reading slowly. Very slowly. Several times. I will frequently find that I’ve left out something crucial and I’m rewarded with the aha! moment.
You may find the opposite: that you’ve revealed too much and must take something out—a particularly juicy morsel—and save for later.
7) Code Red: The Last Resort
When all my fixes have failed, I talk out the problem—usually with my DH. What we’ve found is that often it isn’t what he says—he doesn’t know the ms. nearly as well as I do—but what I say. Turns out I’ve known the solution all along but needed to give it breath and the receptive ears of an interested listener.
Michael and I have faced and fixed each of these problems (some of them more than once) in the course of writing our thriller, HOOKED.
To celebrate, we’re giving away two copies this week. To enter, just include the title HOOKED in your comment. The winner will be chosen at random and announced next Sunday.
******* How about you, scriveners? What do you do when you and your WIP are having a spat? Have you ever tried any of these “fixes”? Do you have any suggestions to add?


INDIE CHICKS NEWS!! The ebook is now FREE for both Kindle and Nook! This week’s inspiring story is from Carol Davis Luce.

Is Your WIP in Deep Doo-Doo? 7 "Block" Busters from Ruth Harris

First, the winner of last week's contest is PHYLLIS HUMPHREY and she chose GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY. Congratulations, Phyllis! 
For this week's contest (there will be TWO WINNERS this week!) just put the title of Ruth's bestselling thriller HOOKED in the comment thread.
Other news: my box set of all THE CAMILLA RANDALL MYSTERIES is now available on Amazon. Hope to have it on Nook soon (as well as FOOD OF LOVE.) Any of you who have reviewed one of the mysteries, if you had time to post your review on the box set page as well, I would be forever grateful.
Ruth has some awfully useful tips for us today. They really hit home for me, because I'm just at that stage where I'm seriously falling out of love with my WIP. So while Ruth takes the helm this week, I'm going to get out my tablet and chisel, change the love interest's name to Bon Jovi, give the villain a tragic childhood, and maybe think about a sex change for Camilla…? These are fun ideas, and they work.

7 "BLOCK" BUSTERS FOR WRITERS IN DEEP DOO-DOOBy Ruth Harris
You're stuck. You don't know what you're doing. You hate your book. You hate your characters. The plot sucks. The whole *&%^ idea sucks. And don't even mention the title. Oh, you mean, you've tried a kajillion titles and they all stink, too?
You have no talent and don't know what you're doing or why you're doing it. On REALLY bad days, you even hate your computer which just sits there like a bilious toad and never, not once in living history, came up with a single idea. You're mad at your cat, your dog and whichever politician is yapping away on the TV—none of THEM ever came up with an idea, either!
We've all been-there-done-that, including me who's been writing stories, novels, articles, blurbs, flap copy, and blog posts for almost four decades and still, now and then, wonder WTF I'm doing. Lost, I tell you. Beyond clueless. Out of gas, out of inspiration, out of ideas. Hopeless. Blocked.
So what do I do to keep on keeping on? What have I learned about how to bust the block?
1) The Writer's Tool Box
Really simple but sometimes all it takes: If, as usual, I've been composing on a computer, I pick up a pad and pencil. Working by hand slows me down and forces me to think more carefully. Often writing a few paragraphs by hand will get me going again. I haven't had to resort to a quill yet. Or even a stone table and chisel. But I don't rule them out because you never know.
2) Geography
If a tool switch doesn't work, try changing the venue. Leave your desk and go to the kitchen table, a coffee shop, a park.
Sometimes just moving around can make a difference. A short walk, once around the block: the street and sidewalk remain but the block might be gone. A run, a Pilates session, even getting up from your desk and making the bed or emptying the dishwasher can get you out of your funk. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a great idea pops up.
3) The Meh  Character
We're talking about the character who just lies there like a blob, does nothing interesting, says nothing provocative, and drains the energy out of every scene in which s/he appears. Even you, the creator, are bored to death by this loser.
The first thing I think about when confronting the meh character is his/her name. Maybe I've given this character a boring name. Sue, John, Jim, and Jen might be examples; names so common, they evoke no images or associations, give me no idea of who they are or were they came from.
Another possibility is that I've given the character the same name as someone I'd cross town to avoid because I don't want to hear one more version of their latest drama with their rotten boyfriend/girlfriend or yet another installment of their decades-long battle with crabgrass.
Obvious solution: change the name. Look at baby-names sites. Plug "random name generator" into a search box and you'll find a galaxy of suggestions. Pick a name you've never heard of so you can start fresh. Try something ethnic that will evoke a whole background and set of experiences.
Or else: Choose a name that has a strong association: Angelina, Brad or Madonna, for example, to get you going again. You can always change the name again later with a search and replace.
4) Escalation Strategy: The Sex Change
When the name change doesn't help, go for the nuclear option: change the character's sex. Leave the character exactly as you've written him/her but try a sex change. IME, the literary sex change, although it will probably feel traumatic at first, can work magic and the character who once seemed flat & boring suddenly isn't. Putting a female character into what was once a male POV can really shake things up. Vice versa works, too.
You can also play with gender orientation: boring straight character/clichéd gay character? Do a switch: Different person, different motives, different experiences, different goals may well be the transformation that turns the meh character into someone you and the reader will care about.
As always, if the trick works, you can always change the character back again.
5) Sympathy For The Devil
Seems easy to write the villain, doesn't it? They're bad. Bad, bad, bad. Not to mention horrible, awful, and absolutely vile. They evoke terror, horror, revulsion and you have plenty of ideas for scene after scene of unrelenting evil. So what could go wrong?
The answer? Plenty.
Rotten, miserable human—or supernatural—being. Blood dripping from fangs. Evil oozing from every pore. Dictator, serial murderer, assassin, malicious neighbor, vicious ex—problem is, even evil can get boring after a while. Unrelenting vengeance, torture, and/or destruction give the writer nowhere to go after a while and, sooner or later, the writer is stuck and just can't come up with another can-you-top-this? twist.
What's needed is nuance—and nuance can come in the form of traumatic experiences ranging from neglectful and/or over-indulgent parents to war, famine, global financial upheaval. Give the reader a glimpse of why the devil is doing whatever s/he's doing. Let the devil speak for him/herself in terms of motivation, goals, and longings. The point is to create a character, not a check list of horrific flaws.
Hannibal Lecter, one of the most famous of all villains, was intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful. It was juxtaposition of those qualities with his lurid crimes that made him such a fascinating character. Without them, he'd be just another cannibal. Yawn.
6) Plot Problems
I'm a pantser and my best stuff comes out of character but when I face the oh-god-what-happens-next block, I try an outline. Because I'm severely outline-challenged, my outlines usually emerge in the form of a list: scenes that need to happen, plot points, character details and future cliffhangers.
The truth is, even in the form of a list, most of the time the outline just doesn't work for me. What does help is going back to the beginning and reading slowly. Very slowly. Several times. I will frequently find that I've left out something crucial and I'm rewarded with the aha! moment.
You may find the opposite: that you've revealed too much and must take something out—a particularly juicy morsel—and save for later.
7) Code Red: The Last Resort
When all my fixes have failed, I talk out the problem—usually with my DH. What we've found is that often it isn't what he says—he doesn't know the ms. nearly as well as I do—but what I say. Turns out I've known the solution all along but needed to give it breath and the receptive ears of an interested listener.
Michael and I have faced and fixed each of these problems (some of them more than once) in the course of writing our thriller, HOOKED.
To celebrate, we're giving away two copies this week. To enter, just include the title HOOKED in your comment. The winner will be chosen at random and announced next Sunday.
******* How about you, scriveners? What do you do when you and your WIP are having a spat? Have you ever tried any of these "fixes"? Do you have any suggestions to add?


INDIE CHICKS NEWS!! The ebook is now FREE for both Kindle and Nook! This week's inspiring story is from Carol Davis Luce.

When Should an Author Hire an Editor? How to Avoid Scams

First: This week marks the anniversary of that fateful day three years ago when I started this blog...and then promptly lost it. But luckily I found it about four months later, and this blog now gets an average of 12,000 hits a month on its four monthly posts (Slow Blogging rules!) and I have a blog partner, Ruth Harris, who is one of my favorite best-selling authors--someone I'd never have dreamed of meeting three years ago. Plus this blog got the attention of my two publishers, Popcorn Press and MWiDP. Without blogging, I'm sure my five novels would still be languishing in query hell. 


So in honor of this blogiversary, I'm giving away A FREE EBOOK to one lucky commenter--your choice. You can read descriptions of all the books on my book page. Just put your title of choice in the comment thread. All the books are available for Kindle and should all be available for Nook by the end of the week. The winner will be chosen by random.org and announced in next week's post.


Hiring an Editor: When, Who, and How to Avoid Scams
As I said in my last post: Learning to write books is hard. Earning money from books is even harder.
 So questions keep coming up:
How much money should you put into polishing a novel?How much can you reasonably expect to recoup?Should you hire an editor if you hope to get traditionally published?When should you hire an editor if you plan to self-publish?Self publishing has been a great boon to freelance book editors. But an awful lot of writers aren't totally clear about their function. 
When I was doing freelance editing, I was amazed by the people who came to me with over-inflated ideas of what an editor can do. They'd arrive with collections of raw taped interviews, notebooks full of verses and random jottings, or old letters they wanted me to make into a salable book.
There are people who do these things. They're called ghostwriters. They're going to cost a lot of money. And unless you're Justin Bieber, you'll never make back the money you put into them.
(That doesn't mean you shouldn't publish them for yourself. Sometimes a personal or family history can be a fantastic gift to your children and grandchildren—for more see my post on writing memoir.) 
The term "editor" has several meanings in the book business. The "in-house" editors at publishing companies—the ones who decide what manuscripts to publish—don't do a lot of literal "editing" these days. According to agent Jenny Bent, the amount of hands-on work they do, "varies wildly from editor to editor…because many editors simply don't have the time or desire to actually edit." You'll probably get more editing from some smaller and midsized presses than you will from the Big Six. But there, too things vary wildly from one editor to the next. I'm lucky to have had great editors at all three small presses who have published me.
But no matter what the size of the publishing house, by the time a manuscript lands on an editor's desk, it needs to be pretty close to print-ready. Agents can help you polish, but they don't have much time for nitty-gritty text-honing either, so most won't look at manuscripts that aren't carefully proofed and edited.
The truth is, the majority of professional writers learn to edit themselves, with the help of a beta reader or two.
Too many newbies hire editors when what they really need is a few basic writing classes and some knowledge of the industry.
I've seen some great posts in the blogosphere this week about how a lot of new writers are getting caught up in premature marketing frenzies and fail to learn basic craft. It's not their fault. Some very successful self-publishers are telling writers "every day your book isn't for sale you're losing money." This true for established authors with an out of print backlist, but it's very bad advice for a fledgling writer who's just finished a first novel.  
YA author Natalie Whipple wrote an amazingly candid blogpost a couple of weeks ago about what she wishes she'd done differently in her career. Here's #4 "I wish I'd spent more time studying the craft. I used to think my natural talent would get me through the gate. I would write stories without much thought to if the plot worked or not, if the characters were real or not, if the world made sense or not. I feel like I squandered my talent for a long time because I relied solely on talent instead of pushing myself to get better."
And Kristen Lamb has been hammering us this week about the importance of honing writing skills before we publish. "We aren't born knowing three-act structure or how to layer complex characters or how to infuse theme and symbol into a work spanning 60-100,000 words. All of that is learned through struggle." (Yes. Struggle. She didn't say "hiring somebody to do the hard work for us.")      
Agents have been saying the same thing for years: The number one mistake new writers make is trying to publish too early. With the self-publishing revolution, the problem has become much worse.
No amount of editing can fix a book that is seriously flawed or amateurish. I see many self-published writers who blame bad reviews on a hired editor. But I wonder how many are expecting their editors to work miracles with a flawed manuscript.
Of course, if price is no object, you can hire an editor to be your personal writing teacher. Some editors offer "writing coaching" services.
But most professional writers didn't start out wealthy, so they learned their craft through workshops, extensive reading, critique groups, and years of trial and error.
The people who benefit most from a freelance editor's work are:
Self-publishers. If you're not working with a publisher, you do need to hire an independent editor before uploading your book. Most writers are blind to typos and our own pet crutches and quirks. Experts whose primary field is not the written word. This includes self-help books by psychologists or medical professionals, specialty cookbooks, local history, etc.Memoirists who have a unique, marketable tale to tell, but are not planning a career in writing.Writers who have been requested by an interested agent or publisher to give the book a polish. Many agents will ask a writer to hire an independent editor at this stage. (Just don't hire one owned by the agency, because that can be a major conflict of interest.)Novelists who have polished their work in workshops and critique groups, but after many rejections, can't pinpoint what is keeping them in the slush pile.If you decide to hire an editor, do some research and be clear in your goals. You don't want just any out-of-work English major. If the editor doesn't have a good knowledge of the publishing industry, your money will be wasted. I've seen "professionally edited" manuscripts that are ridiculously long or too short to be considered by a contemporary publisher, or contain song lyrics (prohibitively expensive) or copyrighted characters. You want an editor who knows the business. Preferably somebody who knows what's selling now and how to write for today's marketplace.

The best way to find a good editor is by referral from satisfied clients. A lot of self-published authors will sing the praises of their editors, so visit their blogs. Or ask a favorite indie author for a recommendation. The standard pay scale for editorial services is posted by the Editorial and Freelancers Association. Plan to spend from five hundred to several thousand dollars for a book-length manuscript. 
There are also a lot of scammers out there, who just run your book through spellcheck or give you bogus advice. Check Writer Beware for in-depth advice and a list of some hair-raising editing scams. The Edit Ink scam of the late '90s bilked thousands. Here are some warning signs:  Extravagant praise and promises. Anybody who guarantees you a place on the best-seller list is either crooked or delusional.Claims that all publishers require a professionally edited ms. Not true. It's also not true that an edit will get you a read. In fact, do not say in a query that your work has been "professionally edited." Agents don't care who you've hired. They care how well YOU can write. An agent or publisher who recommends their own editing services or gives a specific referral. As I said above: beware conflicts of interest. Edit Ink scammed writers by giving agents kickbacks for referrals and even setting up fake agencies to tell all queriers they'd get representation if they used Edit Ink's expensive, useless services. One-size-fits-all. You need somebody who's familiar with your genre. I can't picture sex with elves without laughing, and torture scenes make me retch. You do NOT want my help with your paranormal erotica or horror novel. Conventions that are required in one genre, like romance, can be poison in something literary or action-oriented. Direct solicitation. Scam editors purchase mailing lists from writing magazine subscriber lists. Beware. Sales pressure. "Limited time offers" are rarely good deals.No client list on their website. You should be able to get a list of clients and a sample of the editor's work. Some editors often will offer a sample edit of a few pages before any money changes hands.There are many kinds of edits, priced differently, so be aware of what you need.Manuscript evaluation: A broad overall assessment of the book. Content editing: Help with structure and style. Line editing: Reworking text at the sentence level. Copy editing: Attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation and continuity. Proofreading: Checking for typos and other minor problems.A good editor can make the difference between a successful book and a dud. Just choose your editor carefully and wait until you have a marketable project.

And most of all, don't hire an editor too soon. Editing is polishing, not re-writing. First you have to put in those 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell says are necessary to learn a craft. That's a lot of hours. Go write.
What about you, scriveners? Have you used a freelance editor? What kind of experience did you have? Have you ever been scammed by a bogus editor?


Indie Chicks Fans: This week we have a story from another successful indie author: Christine Kelsey on why you should never give up on your dreams.

Are the Big 6 Publishers Really Dying?

Today we have a different kind of post. And yes, it's long. But our guest poster, author and publisher Mark Williams, has a lot to say. 

Mark is the co-author of the thriller Sugar and Spice —the most popular self-published book in the UK for 2011. He has also started a wildly innovative publishing business of his own, which has published three of my books. I pay attention to Mark's observations because, as a publishing professional outside of the US (he lives part time in London and part time in West Africa) he can see a bigger picture than most of us.

I asked him to write this post because I find his predictions very hopeful. I've heard from a lot of you who are still hanging onto the traditional publishing dream, and you're scared when you hear all the doom and gloom about the death of bookstores and traditional publishing.
The truth is, we have lots of reasons to be hopeful. As writers, we now have more options than ever. Self-publishing isn't going anywhere, as Nathan Bransford said in an encouraging blogpost this week. And now Mark tells us traditional publishing is learning from the ebook revolution and they're coming back—better and smarter. 
Best of all, Mark sees a role for bookstores in our future. A happy thing for readers everywhere.



THE RETURN OF THE BIG SIXby Mark Williams

First off, a disclaimer, I am not anti-Amazon. 
I'm part of a writing partnership (known as "Saffina Desforges") that owes much of its success to Amazon. We applaud the role Amazon has played in liberating writers from the shackles of the old system and look forward to their global expansion. 
So why the disclaimer? 
Because it seems that anything other than obsequious praise for "the Zon" and unadulterated glee at the widely-touted imminent demise of the "Big Six" means you must be the illegitimate child of a high-ranking CEO at Simon & Schuster, a moron with your head in the sand, or rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, depending on which day it is. 
Sadly, the debate about publishing has gradually descended into a slanging match between two opposing camps, led by vociferous and high profile minorities on both sides, who actively encourage literary apartheid among the writing classes.

1) On the one side we have the snooty gatekeepers set, the stereotype trad publishers and agents who think they know best what readers should read and writers write. You've read the rants: 
"Writers only self-publish because their work isn't good enough to be published the 'proper' way." "All indie books are crap and full of typos." "Amazon will become a monopoly and destroy culture as we know it." 
2) On the other side we have the self-appointed spokespeople of the self-publishing revolution, who are busily digging the grave for traditional publishing. You've probably read them, too. As the Grave Diggers busily hammer nails into the coffin of the Big Six, they gleefully explain how—

"Any successful trad pubbed writer could make more on their own, if only they weren't so stupid." "No trad pubbed writer who has gone indie has ever returned to the trad publishing fold." "Any indie can distribute anywhere around the globe thanks to Amazon—and get 70% royalties for doing so." 
None of the above statements are true.
Which brings us back to my opening disclaimer. As the title of this post suggests, I don't think the Big Six are facing imminent demise, and Amazon isn't going to become a monopoly.

Not that I think the old system was working. Anyone who has read my past posts over at MWi and elsewhere will know my feelings on the publishers who pay royalties as low as 7%-15%, reject perfectly good books on a whim, and have probably destroyed far more writing careers than they have created. I'm no apologist for trad publishing's many downsides. 
And yes, it's very easy to point to the books the gatekeepers rejected that became big indie successes. 
We know. We wrote one. 
We have a whole wad of rejection slips from the gatekeepers for the novel that went onto become the eleventh best-selling ebook (trad or self-pubbed) in the UK last year. 
Yes, it's easy to mock after the event, and so very tempting. Examples are plentiful, and they don't come much bigger than the gatekeepers who turned down Harry Potter. A story about wizards? In a boarding school? And how long?! Get back in that café where you belong, demented wannabe-writer. Trying serving coffee. You'll never sell this drivel. 
Of course we all love stories like that. It's what keeps us going in those dark hours when it seems the years spent slaving over a manuscript have been wasted. The countless rejection slips of John Grisham, Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are part of literary legend. 
And how we all applauded last year when J.K. walked away from her publishers to set up Pottermore and self-publish her ebooks like us mere mortals. That surely was the final nail in the coffin of trad publishing?
Not at all. 
In spite of the Grave Diggers' boast that no successful trad published author ever went indie and then returned to the trad-pub fold, that doesn't seem to be true.
1) J.K. Rowling just handed her latest book over to the gatekeepers rather than publish as an indie, because she valued their expertise and marketing abilities. I think we can safely say the size of the advance was not a major factor here. And can we hear the sound of coffin nails pinging free? 
2) Stephen Leather, multi-million selling trad published author who stormed Kindle UK in 2010-11 with his self-published titles and then announced he was giving up self-publishing because he could make more money for less effort with the gatekeepers. And yes, that link does take you to Joe Konrath's blog. 
So much for the brain-drain of top writers rushing to jump on the self-publishing wagon. Yes, many are, and some are doing very well at it. But the traffic is both ways. Advances may be down (Amanda Knox aside) but plenty of writers are signing up with the trads every day. New writers. Established writers. And lots and lots of successful indie writers.

All apparently boarding a sinking ship. As the Grave Diggers tell us at every opportunity, print sales are in decline, revenues are falling and therefore the Big Six will follow Borders into bankruptcy and Amazon will inherit the Earth.

This part is true: print sales are in decline, and they'll only get worse.

But as for the demise of the Big Six: sorry, but the Grave Diggers are hammering nails into an empty coffin. Despite the undeniable and continuing fall in demand for print books, the profits of the Big Six are up, and can only get bigger and better as digital replaces print.

Take Penguin for example. Despite the falling print sales Penguin somehow managed to make a profit last year. Penguin chairman and c.e.o. John Makinson called 2011 "the most turbulent book market that anyone can remember", but said the company's growth had been driven by "excellent publishing around the globe, demonstrated by market share growth in our three biggest markets."

Obviously this is a one-off fluke, right? After all, everyone knows the trad publishers aren't investing in digital, and they don't know what an ebook is.

But let's just catch the full statement by Makinson: …the company's growth had been driven by "excellent publishing around the globe, demonstrated by market share growth in our three biggest markets, and innovation in every aspect of our digital publishing."

A Big Six publisher? Innovation in digital publishing? Be serious! Heads in sand, remember? Deckchairs on the Titanic, right?

Consider the recent news:

Penguin e-book revenues were up 106% year on year, equalling 12% of total Penguin revenues worldwide, with 20% in the USA. Penguin have recorded 50 million apps and ebook downloads since 2008.In 2011 Penguin launched more than 100 apps and enhanced e-books and the digital-only publishing programme, Penguin Shorts. Penguin also continued investment in direct-to-consumer initiatives including aNobii in the UK and Bookish in the US, both new digital platforms for readers. In Australia Penguin acquired the retailer REDgroup's online business, and Penguin's websites and social media channels now have a global following of more than 11 million.Simon & Schuster reported a similar feat in February: they're making more money from declining print sales, and other publishers will be doing the same.Scholastic this past week announced beta trials of its new digital store. According to Publishers Weekly: "After more than 18 months of development, Scholastic has begun beta tests for Storia, its proprietary e-book platform for selling and distributing its trade titles as well as digital editions of titles from other children's houses."Note the key words "after more than 18 months of development." The idea touted by the Grave Diggers that the trads are sitting about fiddling while Rome burns may bring a smile to the face of anyone who ever received a rejection slip and now hopes whoever overlooked their masterpiece will rot in hell.
But the reality is rather different. Every major publisher is investing heavily in digital, and has been for several years.
The simple fact is, change takes time. Big ships take time to turn around. And before you rush in and say "Amazon can turn on a dime," look at the reality.
Amazon didn't suddenly produce its e-book platform overnight. Amazon has been selling books on-line for nearly two decades. It moved to ebook sales as a logical extension of an existing business, and we're all delighted it did.
But it didn't lead the way. Amazon didn't invent ebooks, e-readers, e-ink, self-publishing or even the 70% "royalty". Sony and Apple, to name but a few, were way ahead (Apple started the 70% "royalty" and Amazon price-matched).
Amazon had everything in place at the right time. The selling platform, the customer base for books, and all importantly the books themselves. The genius of the Kindle was not in the creation of the device itself, but in being able to produce an affordable e-reader and tie it to the products it was already selling – ebooks.
Suggesting that publishers didn't see digital coming rather ignores the small point of who, exactly, was producing these ebooks in the first place. It certainly wasn't you and me.
Amazon didn't invest in the Kindle and then hope that just maybe tons of unknowns would self-publish and make money for them. The fact that that's what happened is a huge bonus for Amazon but there wasn't any master-plan.
Just as there isn't any master-plan now to destroy big publishing by buying off all the trad published authors.
When a successful trad-pubbed writer signs up with an Amazon imprint it makes news precisely because it's a rare event.
Amazon may have begun as a bookseller, but books are now just one small part of its empire. Does anyone but the Grave Diggers serious believe Jeff Bezos loses sleep over indie-publishers signing with the Big Six? Or conversely that the Big Six are losing sleep over Amazon signing up the odd trad-pubbed author?
Amazon isn't a major publisher. Yes, it has a few imprints, but in publishing terms it's a small press, albeit with its own very powerful marketing and distribution network. Yes, the Amazon imprint authors are best-sellers and make serious money – on Amazon. But where are the Amazon imprints in the NYT best-sellers list, or on the international best-sellers lists?
Comparing Amazon and the Big Six is comparing apples and oranges. Amazon is a hugely successful book-seller that is now dabbling in publishing. Amazon takes proven sellers on its own platform and repackages them and gives them heavy promo, skewing the market, to make them even better sellers.
Nothing wrong with that. And wonderful for the authors lucky enough to be chosen. But it means that Amazon is no longer a level playing field for the rest.
And what Amazon is doing hardly compares with taking an unknown name from submitted manuscript through to final product with nation-wide distribution both in ebook and bricks and mortar stores, and (where rights are available) internationally across digital and bricks and mortar platforms.
Of course the Grave Diggers will shout that any indie can get world-wide digital distribution and get 70% royalties—conveniently overlooking the fact that B&N only deliver to the USA, Apple serves about twenty or so countries and the Amazon world-rights box you tick in KDP that makes you think your ebook will be available everywhere is actually meaningless.
Why?
Because Amazon blocks downloads to countless countries (I live in West Africa and am blocked from buying your or my ebooks from Amazon)Amazon also imposes a $2 surcharge per sale on countless other countries.Add to which the fabled 70% royalty suddenly becomes 35% if the sale is not from an Amazon-approved country (the Kindle countries and a selected few others).Now admittedly 35% is still better than the ebook royalties currently paid by the Big Six, although these are rising and will rise further.
But let's just examine that legendary 70% Amazon royalty more closely, it being the indie's weapon of choice in any duel.
The Amazon 70% royalty is a myth. It's not a royalty at all. It's the remainder from the sale of your ebook after Amazon have taken their cut.
If you stick a book on eBay and it sells, and eBay and Paypal take their fees and hand you the remainder, is that a royalty? Of course not.
Yet when Amazon, Apple, B&N or whoever do exactly the same thing and call it a royalty we immediately start comparing with the miserly royalties paid out by the trad publishers.
But Amazon and co. aren't our publishers. They're our distributors and vendors. It's called self-publishing for a reason!
And just a reminder here: This isn't anti-Amazon. It's just spelling out a few facts that the Grave Diggers seem intent on overlooking.
I happen to like Amazon very much. Quite apart from our own self-publishing success, I own a Kindle, carry it with me everywhere, and have only read two print books in the fifteen months I've had an e-reader. As a non-American, B&N digital is anyway off-limits to me, even in the UK.
Which is a point worth dwelling on.
Amazon is the world's biggest ebook seller. At one stage it was estimated to have 85% of the ebook market, yet most objective observers would now put that at between 60%-70%, and declining. So much for Amazon becoming the monopoly that will take over the world
Amazon's biggest rival is B&N. But B&N only sell in the US. Amazon has worldwide distribution (subject to caveats outline above). As digital reading grows worldwide so the competition will increase.
The second biggest English-language market is a case in point. Kobo have just appointed a new director of British operations and is rapidly expanding its presence in the UK, operating the ebook store for the country's second largest book retailer, W.H. Smiths.
The UK's biggest book store, Waterstone's (whose flagship Piccadilly store is the largest bookshop in Europe) have a small but significant ebook store, and it's currently being revamped as part of the new look Waterstones (sans apostrophe) with a pending partnership of some sort with B&N. Just this month B&N is holding its first ever workshop in London, as it prepares to challenge Amazon's dominance in the UK.
Important here to understand why the UK lags behind the US in terms of digital embrace. Amazon only introduced KDP to the UK in 2010, before which only US authors could self-publish with Amazon. The Kindle was unavailable in the UK until that time. When it came it was new and innovative, and a lot cheaper than the Sony option, or Apple's iPad, so it got off to a great start among those readers at ease with technology and gave Amazon predominance in the marketplace.
But Amazon is going to have to do much more than just sell cheap ebooks to maintain that position. The UK doesn't even have the KindleFire yet. Yep, UK readers are stuck with the old b&w Kindle, while Kobo, Apple and the rest are all selling multi-task colour devices, to which B&N will shortly be adding with its Waterstone's partnership.
What does this mean for the future of Amazon? Rather more then you may think.
You see, the early-adopters of the Kindle and other e-reading devices were of course those comfortable with technology. If it's shiny, new and trendy then they must have it. And once they experienced the joys of e-reading there was no turning back.
But we're past that phase now. As print declines further so more and more people will turn to e-readers. Partly because prices will continue to plummet, and also because as print declines further, readers will have little choice but to adopt, in a downward spiral that will see the demise of print books and book-stores.
So the Grave Diggers were right after all, it seems. No print books and no book-stores means the Big Six are facing oblivion and Amazon will inherit the Earth.
But hold on, how did Amazon start out? Selling print books. How does Amazon make the bulk of its book-related income now? Selling print books.
Print is still 80% of the overall book market. If the Big Six are obliterated as the Grave Diggers gleefully hope, exactly what will Amazon be selling anyway? The vast bulk of its print sales and a substantial proportion of its digital sales come from the Big Six.
Luckily for all concerned the Big Six are doing just fine. Profits are up, costs are down, and the future is rosy as they continue to invest in digital, create their own platforms, and adjust their business management to the new realties. The Grave Diggers might want to pretend that isn't happening, but the facts speak for themselves.
Regardless of this, book-stores are beyond help, right? We're already seeing it happen. Borders has gone (bizarrely this huge loss of outlets for Big Six stock doesn't seem to have hurt said Big Six profits too much…) and B&N are – Shock! Horror! – selling products other than books. As we all know, this signifies imminent doom. Although curiously when Amazon diversify into other products it's sound business sense. Hmmm.
But are book-stores really doomed? Not necessarily.
I've not been to the US recently, but I understand B&N are doing pretty well at promoting digital in-store. The Nook is on the up and up, and B&N are being pretty innovative in their approach to balancing print and digital.
Amazon soared ahead with the early adopters precisely because it had everything in place and those readers were comfortable shopping online. But that era is over. The early-adopter phase is past, and the next stage is the reticent buyers who probably never have bought from Amazon and never will.
I'm talking about the loyal book-store regulars – the ones who currently account for a vast percentage of bricks and mortar book sales, who will, when the time comes, buy the in-store e-reader and sign-up to the in-store e-reading account, not rush off and buy a Kindle.
So can book-stores survive the epublishing revolution?
Yes, they can!
You see, I have a vision of a new book-selling era where we can be digital AND have bricks and mortar book stores.
Book stores don't just sell books. Like libraries, book-stores are cultural centers, where the reading classes gravitate. There's been a lot of snark recently in the blogs about ill-informed staff in B&N offering poor customer service. No doubt it's true. But it doesn't need to be that way.
Forward looking indie book-stores and chain-stores like B&N and Waterstone's could have a vital role in book-buying in the future. 
Imagine a book-store where you can still go and browse books, settle down with a coffee or chat with intelligent staff about the latest book from your favourite author.
You'll find the cover and blurb on a book-sized case (think DVD cases) on the display shelves. Want to look inside? Just waive the barcode or implanted chip in front of your personal e-reader or smartphone, or the equipment available in-store, and you can see exactly what you'll be getting.
Not silly sample pages from the first 15% but the full book, temporarily transferred to your device for examination. If you buy, it stays there. If you choose not to it is automatically deleted as you leave the store.
Maybe even in-store printable covers so you can buy the full wrap cover around and case for your shelf back home. After all, isn't the lack of covers the big downer for digital films and music?
Book-stores can still have shelf after shelf of "books" to browse, and even plinths and window displays showing the latest releases. And yeah, those prime spots will still be bought by the Big Six for their top authors. Ah well, you can't win 'em all…
Now factor in the back-of shop storage space and overheads that will no longer be necessary - or perhaps will be used to store paper and supplies for POD, where any title you want can be printed and bound while you have the aforementioned coffee.
And the beauty of this is that the technology already exists and is improving and getting cheaper by the day. With print still riding at 80% of book sales there's plenty of time for forward thinking book-stores to embrace the digital future.
The Grave Diggers will tell you Amazon's one-click ebook buying is so simple no-one will need to shop anywhere else. No question it's a fantastic service. I love it! But Amazon also sells boots, watches, fridges, computers... Easier to list what it doesn't sell. Everyone can sit at home, go online and have these goods delivered to their door, courtesy of the Zon. Yet no-one is suggesting shops that sell these products are all going to close.
Book stores don't NEED to close. They just need to innovate. 
Rather like the Big Six are already doing.
*********
Blog news: Catherine Ryan Hyde's wonderful novel, When I Found You is FREE for Kindle this weekend, and on Friday had reached # 1 on the Free Kindle books list. Anne's piece on the "Undercover Soundtrack" that inspired her mystery The Gatsby Game is on Roz Morris's blog, Memories of a Future Life. And The Gatsby Game is now available for NOOK! (It's still review-less over there. If any of you marvellous reviewers wanted to copy and paste your Amazon or Goodreads reviews to Barnes and Noble, I'd be eternally grateful.)
INDIE CHICKS: This week's installment is from thriller writer Mel Comley, who lives an idyllic life in the French countryside.
Next Week: We'll be having another give-away. I'll be giving away one of my ebooks—your choice. 

How Do You Learn To Be a Writer?

I'm often approached by parents or grandparents of children who've shown a talent for writing. They ask how a child can learn to be a writer. Or sometimes a person going through a mid-life job change will ask my advice about going back to college to pursue a long-deferred writing dream.
I have to tell them the truth: learning to write is hard--and earning money from writing is way harder.
I'm not saying certain types of writing can't be lucrative—"content providers" can find careers in advertising and various tech fields—but that's usually not what the doting grand/parents or career-changers are thinking. They might be imagining plays or screenplays, or even journalism—fast-fading professions too—but mostly they're thinking memoir and novels.  
But writing book-length narrative is one of the toughest ways to earn a living—and it's getting tougher all the time. The average book advance is less than half of what it was ten years ago. Almost all writers need day jobs.
So the question arises: how much money should people put into educating themselves to be writers? 
Anybody who visits a lot of writing sites has probably been followed around the 'Webz by ads for college creative writing degrees. Do those give students a jumpstart or prepare them for a writing career? 
Unfortunately, they usually don't. They're often based on very old ideas of what the publishing industry is like. 
If you have the privilege of attending college, by all means take courses in creative writing. Also take courses in business management, advanced string theory or Athenian red-figure vase painting—whatever interests you. None of your time learning will be wasted, and a college education is massively helpful to any career.
But don't go to college expecting to be taught how to be a professional writer who can enter the workforce and earn back the cost of college like somebody studying accounting or medicine. It won't happen.
I'm not saying degrees in creative writing will hurt, but they're not necessary for a writing career. And they're usually expensive.
Thing is: the number one thing that's NOT necessary to any creative career is…DEBT. Debt is a prison that can keep you locked into a job you hate, living in noisy, crowded circumstances, and plagued with anxieties that are the enemy of creativity
"But, wait!" says Aspiring Young Writer, "What about an MFA? That gives you a leg up into the publishing business doesn't it?"
Um, not really.
Not with most agents and publishers (although a prestigious school can provide valuable contacts.) What an MFA will do is steer you in the direction of literary writing, which tends to be less lucrative for a publisher (and you.)
An MFA DOES qualify you to teach creative writing at the college level, and as a day job, college teaching is a pretty good one. But be aware of the implied trade-off.
Think of getting an MFA like studying ballet or learning to play classical music—you're entering a fiercely competitive field with a niche audience and not much remuneration…but a lot of prestige. For those who love it, there's also a fulfillment that can come no other way. If writing and teaching literary fiction is your bliss—follow it! The world needs you to carry on that tradition.
But if your goal is writing popular fiction, treat your education more like preparing for musical theater, playing roots music, or ballroom dancing—and take a more eclectic route in your training. (And prepare to work a day job.)
Of course you first need to learn the basics just like a literary writer: grammar, sentence structure, spelling, and word usage. If you didn't get that in high school or college, you need to take some brush-up classes. Language is your instrument, and you need to learn to play before you can get in a band.
NOTE: Don't count on some hired editor to clean up your stuff after you write it. Editors cost a bundle and they can't do it all. Good language skills are essential. You wouldn't try to be a carpenter if you couldn't pound a nail.
But once you have that down, what do you do?
There's still a whole lot to learn. Straight-A grammar skills don't help you with learning how to tell a story. You need to educate yourself on story structure, how to create compelling characters, pacing and all the rest.
For that, the best approach is to study widely. Get as much education as you can from many sources as you can find. There is no one right way. You can enroll in inexpensive classes at your local adult ed. or community college extension programs. Short online courses can be really helpful, too, especially ones that concentrate on structure and story-telling techniques. Read the classic books on writing. Go to writers' conferences, especially local ones where you don't have to pay for room and board.
Sometimes professional writers will offer workshops in person or online. A short course from a well-known author is usually worth the price, because their name will hold weight in a query and you may be lucky enough to have them mentor you.
If you live in a place where there's a local writer's club or chapter of organizations like RWA, SCBWI, or Sisters in Crime, join. Clubs like those can be amazingly valuable resources. And a good critique group can sometimes teach you as much as a college class about how to write. (But beware group-think. Critique groups are only as good as their members, and ignorant people can spread bad habits. See my post on Bad Advice to Ignore from your Critique Group ) 
And these days, a whole lot of what you need to learn is available on the Internet for free. I know people who have learned a huge amount by working with other writers in various writers' forums.
To become a professional, you need to learn the business side of publishing as well as grammar and story structure. They are equally important these days. Agent blogs are a valuable resource here. Agents like Rachelle Gardner , Kristen Nelson and Janet Reid offer mini-courses in publishing in their archives.
And you'll need to learn to use social media. It's as important to a writer today as it is to know how to use an apostrophe. I recommend Kristen Lamb's valuable blog and her book We Are Not Alone: The Author's Guide to Social Media . 
If you ask most professional writers what's the best way to learn to write, they're going to tell you two things:
1) Read 2) Write
And some will add:3) Live
Writing may not be a lucrative profession, but creating worlds out of words is still one of the most exciting ways to spend your time, so I tell those parents and grandparents and mid-life career-changers that nobody should be discouraged from following their dreams.
But I also warn them not get talked into expensive college courses they can't afford. (And people should especially beware writing degrees from for-profit colleges. Recruiters can tell a lot of half- and un-truths and provide a slick, easy path to a lifetime of debt.)
The electronic age may bring more responsibilities to writers—social media and online marketing can seem like a huge time-suck—but it also opens up hundreds of new paths to our goals, many of them inexpensive or free. So I say embrace the journey and accept the abundance of information at your fingertips.
Now I could use your help, scriveners. Tell me how you learned/are learning your craft--and how you're educating yourself in the business of writing for a living. I'd love for you to give some tips and suggestions for things that worked (or didn't work) for you.
NEWS: On Wednesday, March 7th, I'll be talking to Roz Morris at her blog Memories of a Future Life for her Undercover Soundtrack series. I'm talking about the "soundtrack" for my Fitzgerald-themed mystery, THE GATSBY GAME. This one is from another Fitzgerald: Ella. 


DECADES CONTEST: Our two winners, selected by Random.org, are Steven J. Wangsness and Martha Reynolds. Congrats! Steven and Martha, contact Ruth at rca.harris at gmail dot com for your free books. 
INDIE CHICKS: This week's amazing installment is from Barbara Silkstone, whose comic mysteries were inspired by some pretty grim real-life villains.

8 Tips for Turning "Real Life" into Bestselling Fiction

A lot of people start writing because they've got a real-life story to tell—something that happened in their own lives or the lives of friends or family members they think would make a great book. Sometimes these stories work well as memoirs, but, for a lot of very good reasons, a lot of us prefer to present the stories as fiction.
But if you decide to write your story as a novel, you have to take that raw clay of factual material and shape it into something that is your own creation. Sometimes this can end up being more work than writing a story entirely from scratch, because you have to distance yourself from the "real" characters and make them your own.
This week, Ruth Harris tells us how to do just that.
But remember, unless the real story is something that made major headlines, most readers aren't going to care what your source material is. In fact, the Query Shark, (agent Janet Reid) says: "I really don't care if it's based on a true story. If anything that makes me less likely to read on because, zut alors!, most people's lives don't have much of a plot."

Along with letting us in on her creative process here, Ruth is also offering two free ebooks of her based-on-a-true-story novel, DECADES, to our commenters. All you have to do is put "DECADES" in your comment, and you'll be eligible for our drawing. Contest goes until midnight March 3rd. Winners will be announced next Sunday, March 4th.


8 TIPS FOR TURNING "REAL LIFE" INTO BESTSELLING FICTION
Make-overs, plot twists & a search for meaning
by Ruth Harris

Writing a novel based on a real life situation is a lot more than just regurgitating a story you happen to know—even if it's a whizz-bang, humdinger of a story. The challenge is turning real people and real events into fiction. Having no guidelines at the time I wrote DECADES, I figured it out as I went along. I made plenty of mistakes along the way but had several advantages even I wasn't aware of.
1) Learn your craft.
It's basic but bears repeating: learn the nuts and bolts of creating compelling fiction. Decades was my first "big book," but prior to writing it, I had been writing professionally for over ten years—weekly articles for men's and male adventure magazines and original paperbacks, mostly Gothic romances and romantic suspense, under a variety of pseudonyms.  Publishing salaries were as lousy then as they are now and I needed the money. In the process—and hardly intending to—I learned how to write action, emotion, and sex; how to grab a reader from the first sentence and how to create a cliffhanger. That knowledge of the craft would be the invaluable underpinning of the novel.
2) Be a good listener—and don't gossip.
Coincidence—and real life—provided me with the initial inspiration for Decades, the story of a marriage in crisis. The coincidence was that I happened, quite by accident, to know each of the three main characters, two much better than the third. They were:  a successful but restless husband, the shy, rather insecure, rich girl he marries on his way up, & the glam fashion editor who is "the other woman." They told me "their" versions of what was happening because they knew they could trust me not to gossip. They didn't know—nor did I at the time—that one day I would turn their dramas into fiction.
3) Just because "it really happened" doesn't mean it's good fiction.
In writing a novel based on real life, I faced the same challenges a writer does with any novel—the need to create believable characters and  a dramatic plot—with the added twist of having to structure the formlessness, confusion, and indecision of everyday real life into the demands of a novel. Knowing the "real people" turned out to be both a blessing and a hurdle.
4) Protect the privacy of your "real life" characters.
Of course I changed names but, as I began to write, I went further and changed initials, too.  It wasn't enough to change John Doe into Jack Dawson. A radical name change—to Mark Saint Clair, for example—guaranteed JD's privacy and had the secondary effect of freeing me from any reminders of the real John Doe/Jack Dawson. I also changed the character's physical appearance, details of his childhood, and gave him military experience he never had.
5)  Help your reader relate to your story.
IRL my fashion editor friend was a stylish, never-married Manhattan single girl who led a hectic, high-profile social life. In the novel, I wanted a character more in touch with everyday experience so I left out all the glitzy fashion-world details. Instead, I portrayed a woman more characteristic of the times who marries young, has two kids, goes thru a drab, depressed, is-this-all-there-is? period. She divorces the husband who was her college boy friend & learns (the hard way) how to conduct herself in a challenging and competitive business world.
Each of the other characters got a similar makeover. I made the husband taller, handsomer and more successful than he really was and changed the nature of his business. I gave the fictional wife a talent even she didn't recognize—a talent that, in the end, rescues her.
6) Give your characters room to roam.
IRL the story took place mainly in Manhattan but I thought the setting too confining. In the novel, the characters do live in Manhattan, but I added scenes in Florida, Nantucket and the Caribbean. Using different settings helped me show how the characters behaved in different geographies and in different social milieu. Trust me, a week in the Caribbean with a wife is much different from a week in the Caribbean with a girlfriend in the middle of a steamy affair!  For the novelist, pure gold.
7) Expand the scope of your story.
Almost any "real life" story by its nature, tends to be limited to the people directly involved. (Unless your story is about a friend who happens to be President of the United States.) As I drafted the novel and its plot and characters took shape, I wanted to show how the consequences of what started out as a casual affair affected people not directly involved. I ultimately created a teen-aged daughter torn between her charming, straying father, her loyal, devastated mother, and the come-hither lure of contemporary culture, in this case, the go-go Sixties.
8)  Look for the larger significance of your story.
I don't mean you should hit your reader over the head with The Meaning Of It All. The final element that transformed real life into fiction came to me as I was halfway through the draft and paused to write what passed for an outline to the end (outlines aren't exactly my strong suit!). I realized that the age difference between the married couple, the younger "other woman" and the teen-aged daughter led naturally to portraits of three transformational, mid-20th Century decades—and to the title.
By the time I was finished with my makeovers, plot twists, and search for a more substantial framework for the story, the characters had taken on their own, fictional lives, the plot moved with its own energy to a far different conclusion from the one in real life, and I was able to portray massive cultural and social changes in an entertaining and story-appropriate way.
But coincidence wasn't finished with me. As it turned out, the main situation of the novel—a marriage in crisis and an adulterous affair—was being lived by not one, but two, prominent publishers—"This is my life," one of them told me. They competed for hard cover and mass market paperback rights, a situation my agent and the publisher's subsidiary rights director took great advantage of.
I never planned it, had no idea that my fictional affair reflected the real-life experiences of the two publishers. All I knew was that coincidence had handed me an incredible basis for a novel that combined fascinating personal dynamics set against an era of tumultuous social and cultural change, the repercussions of which we still feel today.
What about you, scriveners? Have you written a book based on a true story? Thinking about it?


Other News: Ruth also has a post at WG2E this weekend with some honest talk from bestselling authors about where they get their inspiration. Anne tells all in an interview with Catherine Ryan Hyde, and Anne got gentrified and canonized by Porter Anderson on Writing on the Ether this week. 
INDIE CHICKS: this week's installment from the anthology is from bestselling indie author Sibel Hodge "From 200 Rejections to Amazon top 200"

How to Blog Part V: 12 Dos and Don’ts for Author-Bloggers

This is the 200th post on this blog. Since I started it on Friday the 13th  in March of 2009, I’ve learned an awful lot. (The first thing I learned was that you have to actually post stuff. My second post wasn’t until late June.)
Another thing I’ve learned is there’s no wrong way to blog—BUT if you’re an author who wants to get published, you need to be professional about it. If you want to be taken seriously in the industry—and we have to remember it is an industry—you need to create a helpful, reader-friendly place that’s an easy-to-navigate hub for your online presence as a writer.

For the other parts of this series, check Part I: How to Blog, Part II: How not to Blog, Part III: What to Blog About, Part IV, Difficult Blog Visitors. 
Here are some more dos and don’ts I’ve learned along the way that might make your job easier:
1) DO post your Twitter handle somewhere prominent on your home page if you tweet. Don’t just use one of those birdy icons. Make sure you put your whole @twittername up there. I spend way too much time using Twitter’s iffy search engine (why is it so useless?) trying to find the handle for somebody I’m quoting or want to reach. If it’s right up there on your blog home page, people are much more likely to be able to tweet you or follow.
2) DO post a Facebook link, (or “badge,” or “Like” button) so people can join you on Facebook. (Unless you’ve managed to resist the pressure to venture into Zuckerland. For which I applaud all three of you.)
3) DO provide an email address. I don’t know how many blogs I visit and find no contact information. The place most people will look is on your “about me” page. So that’s a good place to put it. If you’re afraid of spambots picking it up, write it this way : “myname (at) gmail (dot) com” –but do it! Imagine an agent or editor reads that short story that won the online contest and loves it. She wants to find out if you’ve got any full length fiction (yes, this does happen) so she Googles you, finds your blog, and…no contact information. Opportunity is knocking and nobody’s home.  
4) DO post your blog schedule. Here we say “This blog is updated Sundays, usually”—six simple words that keep us disciplined and keep readers coming back. We’ve never missed a post, but if we do, that “usually” covers our derrieres—we’re not running a boot camp here. On the other hand, it’s very important to remember it’s your professional profile. When you’re trying to get published, you’re basically applying for a job. You don’t want a sloppy blog any more than you  want to show up late for an interview, wearing stained sweats and smelling like last night’s party.  
5) DO learn to write 21st century prose. Writing for the Interwebz is very, very different from what you learned in school. It’s light, punchy, and easy to skim. The vast majority of online readers are skimmers. They want:lists major points highlightedbullet pointsBoldinglots of white space See where your eye went? There are a couple of important publishing industry blogs I hardly ever read because they’re written in the dense, repetitive prose of the old paid-by-the-word, pre-electronic era. I wait for somebody else to post excerpts or summarize those posts, because sweetie, I have things to do….
6) DON’T let yourself get pressured into too many blogfests and bloghops and blog awards and other blogmania. Just because somebody gives you an award doesn’t mean you have to drop your WIP and spend a day visiting 80 blogs to tell them all the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done with a book or whatever today’s game is. Thank them politely, tell them you’re honored and do as much as you have time for. Same with invitations to blogfests. No matter how much fun it sounds, just gathering a lot of blog followers isn’t as important as getting that novel written!
7) DON’T die intestate. No matter how young and healthy and immortal you feel, appoint a blog executor. Make sure somebody besides you has the passwords to your blog so if anything dire should happen, they can attend to it and/or take it down. Yes, it’s kind of icky to think of, but stuff happens. Not just kicking the bucket. You could get in a parasailing accident while you’re on that vacation in Mazatlan. Or get stuck without power for 2 weeks in darkest Connecticut. Be attacked by angry bees. You don’t want your blog hanging unattended in cyberspace as it collects Ukranian porn and fake Viagra ads.
8) DON’T neglect your “About Me” page. Keep it updated (speaking to myself here. I’d let mine get sloppy.) Make sure it’s friendly but professional. You don’t want a resume/curriculum vitae snoozefest. But you also don’t want to use it to post pix of yourself after your tenth margarita at Señor Frog’s or photos of your puppy learning to go potty outdoors. This is about you, the author. Even if you aren’t published, you want this to be about your writer-self. Give a short bio, a list of what writing organizations you belong to, your genre if you’ve settled on one, plus links to any short pieces you’ve published, or contests you’ve won—and anything else that relates to you as a writer. Make sure you include links to all your social media pages, especially book-related ones like Goodreads, AuthorsDen or RedRoom. You can talk about your favorite books, your philosophy, or your life goals as long as it’s short and not preachy. You can mention your family, but even if you’re a devoted stay-at-home parent, don’t make this all about the kids. This is for you.
9) DON’T try to maintain too many blogs. OK, I’m kind of hammering people about this, but I see a lot of misinformation about this circulating. To me, two is too many. If you don’t have a day job, and you aren’t in a hurry to finish that WIP, maybe you can handle two—especially if the second is a group blog. Or if one is the blog for your XXX-rated erotica and the other is for your sweet Christian romances. But please, don’t try to do any more. Multiple blogs don’t only take too much of your time—they also fracture your follower count and really annoy people trying to reach you.
Do you think it’s more impressive to an editor that you have 60 followers on your Sweetie Snookums, Vampire Slayer blog, 90 on Susie’s Scribblings, 43 on Sassy Susitude and 50 on Storytime Snippets—or 243 people reading Susie Smith, Scrivener? Do you think followers want to hop around to all those blogs?? Do you think we’re going to keep searching your blogs after we’ve landed on the one that hasn’t been updated since you posted that rant about Fox canceling Firefly in 2003???
Sorry. Got carried away. As I have said many times before, a Blogger blog has 20 pages. Count them: twenty. You can have one for your vampire stories, one for your musings and scribblings, one for giving yourself pep talks, and one for writing about being a storyteller—and still have 16 to go. So don’t start another blog until you’ve filled them all, OK?
10) DON’T make commenting difficult. This is another thing I’ve been hammering on about but it’s important. I just read a new study of customer habits and discovered the #1 motivation for the contemporary customer is ease of use. They’re not so worried about fancy or special. They want things to be easy. That’s why Amazon is so successful. First they invented a way to buy books with a couple of clicks and then they offered us a way to publish them with a few more. “Quick and Easy” wins the day, hands down.
So remember those CAPTCHA word verification things do NOT make it easy to comment. You can remove robo-spam yourself if it gets through the spam filter, which is a little harder for you and a lot easier for your potential customers. And as for insisting on moderating all new comments—especially if you don’t get around to them for days—that’s pretty much saying, “I don’t need no stinking comments/customers.” Try being open to comments on new posts for a while. If you get a troll attack, by all means go back to moderating, but with a small blog following, it’s very unlikely you’ll get a troll unless you blog about politics or religion. If you moderate (I moderate older comments myself, because that’s where the spam shows up) DO check many times during the day so you don’t send people away mad. These are your potential customers. Saying "just sit there until I have time to decide if you're special enough to buy my books," isn’t going to make the sale.
Note: Blogger loves to play Big Brother. It often turns your CAPTCHA back on after you’ve turned it off. It’s happened to me. So ask a good friend to let you know if it’s on.
11) Don’t delete a blog you’ve neglected. Bring it back to life by giving it your own name (you can’t change the url, but you can change the header very easily) and post a blog schedule and keep to it.
Yes: this is a total reversal on what I used to say, but I was educated by a savvy reader,Camille LeGuire, the Daring Novelist  who left a comment letting me know the older a blog is, the higher its rating with search engines. So remember that nine-year old Firefly blog? You can delete content and change the title, but keep the url and you’ll have much better SEO.
But: if you have 42 blogs, delete all but one or two of the oldest. Seriously. Did I mention people find multiple blogs annoying?
12) Don’t let yourself be pressured into letting somebody guest blog just because they asked. Good guest posts are informative and target your audience. Somebody with a book or service to sell may approach you with what is essentially an advertisement. Even if you’re just starting out, remember your blog is about presenting yourself to the world, and if something doesn’t work with your audience, politely decline. Good guest bloggers should already have relationship with you: they should have been by to comment a few times, or know you from other blogs.
I’ll talk more about guest blog etiquette in another post.
What about you, scriveners? Do you have any other tips to add? Have you learned any of these things the hard way like I did?
Valentine Blog Hop peeps: Our winner is Elizabeth Hyatt, aka the Book Attict. Congrats, Elizabeth! Let us know which of our books you want as your prizes. You get one of Ruth's and one of Anne's. Check the BookLuvin'Babes site for the name of the big grand prize winner.
Blog news: Ruth Harris and I now have pages on this blog for our books. Ruth’s is here  and mine is here. We’ve got synopses, quotes from reviews and all the links you need to browse our extensive oeuvres. (And they’re all remarkably cheap. Even my paper books are a deal—under $10 bucks.)
Next week Ruth is going to blog on creating fiction based on factual events. And she’ll be doing a giveaway of DECADES, her own novel that is based on real incidents and historical fact.
Today, my mystery SHERWOOD, LTD. will be featured on Saffina Desforges "no bullshit" Sunday series on her SaffiScribe blog. You can find out how much of that book is fiction and how much was based on actual personal misadventures
Next Friday, Catherine Ryan Hyde will be posting an in-depth interview with me on her blog. If you haven’t stopped by her great new interview series , she runs them every Friday on her blog.
Indie Chicks: This week’s inspirational story is from Christine DeMaio-Rice. A fun one. Check it out here. 

How to Blog Part V: 12 Dos and Don'ts for Author-Bloggers

This is the 200th post on this blog. Since I started it on Friday the 13th  in March of 2009, I've learned an awful lot. (The first thing I learned was that you have to actually post stuff. My second post wasn't until late June.)
Another thing I've learned is there's no wrong way to blog—BUT if you're an author who wants to get published, you need to be professional about it. If you want to be taken seriously in the industry—and we have to remember it is an industry—you need to create a helpful, reader-friendly place that's an easy-to-navigate hub for your online presence as a writer.

For the other parts of this series, check Part I: How to Blog, Part II: How not to Blog, Part III: What to Blog About, Part IV, Difficult Blog Visitors. 
Here are some more dos and don'ts I've learned along the way that might make your job easier:
1) DO post your Twitter handle somewhere prominent on your home page if you tweet. Don't just use one of those birdy icons. Make sure you put your whole @twittername up there. I spend way too much time using Twitter's iffy search engine (why is it so useless?) trying to find the handle for somebody I'm quoting or want to reach. If it's right up there on your blog home page, people are much more likely to be able to tweet you or follow.
2) DO post a Facebook link, (or "badge," or "Like" button) so people can join you on Facebook. (Unless you've managed to resist the pressure to venture into Zuckerland. For which I applaud all three of you.)
3) DO provide an email address. I don't know how many blogs I visit and find no contact information. The place most people will look is on your "about me" page. So that's a good place to put it. If you're afraid of spambots picking it up, write it this way : "myname (at) gmail (dot) com" –but do it! Imagine an agent or editor reads that short story that won the online contest and loves it. She wants to find out if you've got any full length fiction (yes, this does happen) so she Googles you, finds your blog, and…no contact information. Opportunity is knocking and nobody's home.  
4) DO post your blog schedule. Here we say "This blog is updated Sundays, usually"—six simple words that keep us disciplined and keep readers coming back. We've never missed a post, but if we do, that "usually" covers our derrieres—we're not running a boot camp here. On the other hand, it's very important to remember it's your professional profile. When you're trying to get published, you're basically applying for a job. You don't want a sloppy blog any more than you  want to show up late for an interview, wearing stained sweats and smelling like last night's party.  
5) DO learn to write 21st century prose. Writing for the Interwebz is very, very different from what you learned in school. It's light, punchy, and easy to skim. The vast majority of online readers are skimmers. They want:lists major points highlightedbullet pointsBoldinglots of white space See where your eye went? There are a couple of important publishing industry blogs I hardly ever read because they're written in the dense, repetitive prose of the old paid-by-the-word, pre-electronic era. I wait for somebody else to post excerpts or summarize those posts, because sweetie, I have things to do….
6) DON'T let yourself get pressured into too many blogfests and bloghops and blog awards and other blogmania. Just because somebody gives you an award doesn't mean you have to drop your WIP and spend a day visiting 80 blogs to tell them all the most embarrassing thing you've ever done with a book or whatever today's game is. Thank them politely, tell them you're honored and do as much as you have time for. Same with invitations to blogfests. No matter how much fun it sounds, just gathering a lot of blog followers isn't as important as getting that novel written!
7) DON'T die intestate. No matter how young and healthy and immortal you feel, appoint a blog executor. Make sure somebody besides you has the passwords to your blog so if anything dire should happen, they can attend to it and/or take it down. Yes, it's kind of icky to think of, but stuff happens. Not just kicking the bucket. You could get in a parasailing accident while you're on that vacation in Mazatlan. Or get stuck without power for 2 weeks in darkest Connecticut. Be attacked by angry bees. You don't want your blog hanging unattended in cyberspace as it collects Ukranian porn and fake Viagra ads.
8) DON'T neglect your "About Me" page. Keep it updated (speaking to myself here. I'd let mine get sloppy.) Make sure it's friendly but professional. You don't want a resume/curriculum vitae snoozefest. But you also don't want to use it to post pix of yourself after your tenth margarita at Señor Frog's or photos of your puppy learning to go potty outdoors. This is about you, the author. Even if you aren't published, you want this to be about your writer-self. Give a short bio, a list of what writing organizations you belong to, your genre if you've settled on one, plus links to any short pieces you've published, or contests you've won—and anything else that relates to you as a writer. Make sure you include links to all your social media pages, especially book-related ones like Goodreads, AuthorsDen or RedRoom. You can talk about your favorite books, your philosophy, or your life goals as long as it's short and not preachy. You can mention your family, but even if you're a devoted stay-at-home parent, don't make this all about the kids. This is for you.
9) DON'T try to maintain too many blogs. OK, I'm kind of hammering people about this, but I see a lot of misinformation about this circulating. To me, two is too many. If you don't have a day job, and you aren't in a hurry to finish that WIP, maybe you can handle two—especially if the second is a group blog. Or if one is the blog for your XXX-rated erotica and the other is for your sweet Christian romances. But please, don't try to do any more. Multiple blogs don't only take too much of your time—they also fracture your follower count and really annoy people trying to reach you.
Do you think it's more impressive to an editor that you have 60 followers on your Sweetie Snookums, Vampire Slayer blog, 90 on Susie's Scribblings, 43 on Sassy Susitude and 50 on Storytime Snippets—or 243 people reading Susie Smith, Scrivener? Do you think followers want to hop around to all those blogs?? Do you think we're going to keep searching your blogs after we've landed on the one that hasn't been updated since you posted that rant about Fox canceling Firefly in 2003???
Sorry. Got carried away. As I have said many times before, a Blogger blog has 20 pages. Count them: twenty. You can have one for your vampire stories, one for your musings and scribblings, one for giving yourself pep talks, and one for writing about being a storyteller—and still have 16 to go. So don't start another blog until you've filled them all, OK?
10) DON'T make commenting difficult. This is another thing I've been hammering on about but it's important. I just read a new study of customer habits and discovered the #1 motivation for the contemporary customer is ease of use. They're not so worried about fancy or special. They want things to be easy. That's why Amazon is so successful. First they invented a way to buy books with a couple of clicks and then they offered us a way to publish them with a few more. "Quick and Easy" wins the day, hands down.
So remember those CAPTCHA word verification things do NOT make it easy to comment. You can remove robo-spam yourself if it gets through the spam filter, which is a little harder for you and a lot easier for your potential customers. And as for insisting on moderating all new comments—especially if you don't get around to them for days—that's pretty much saying, "I don't need no stinking comments/customers." Try being open to comments on new posts for a while. If you get a troll attack, by all means go back to moderating, but with a small blog following, it's very unlikely you'll get a troll unless you blog about politics or religion. If you moderate (I moderate older comments myself, because that's where the spam shows up) DO check many times during the day so you don't send people away mad. These are your potential customers. Saying "just sit there until I have time to decide if you're special enough to buy my books," isn't going to make the sale.
Note: Blogger loves to play Big Brother. It often turns your CAPTCHA back on after you've turned it off. It's happened to me. So ask a good friend to let you know if it's on.
11) Don't delete a blog you've neglected. Bring it back to life by giving it your own name (you can't change the url, but you can change the header very easily) and post a blog schedule and keep to it.
Yes: this is a total reversal on what I used to say, but I was educated by a savvy reader,Camille LeGuire, the Daring Novelist  who left a comment letting me know the older a blog is, the higher its rating with search engines. So remember that nine-year old Firefly blog? You can delete content and change the title, but keep the url and you'll have much better SEO.
But: if you have 42 blogs, delete all but one or two of the oldest. Seriously. Did I mention people find multiple blogs annoying?
12) Don't let yourself be pressured into letting somebody guest blog just because they asked. Good guest posts are informative and target your audience. Somebody with a book or service to sell may approach you with what is essentially an advertisement. Even if you're just starting out, remember your blog is about presenting yourself to the world, and if something doesn't work with your audience, politely decline. Good guest bloggers should already have relationship with you: they should have been by to comment a few times, or know you from other blogs.
I'll talk more about guest blog etiquette in another post.
What about you, scriveners? Do you have any other tips to add? Have you learned any of these things the hard way like I did?
Valentine Blog Hop peeps: Our winner is Elizabeth Hyatt, aka the Book Attict. Congrats, Elizabeth! Let us know which of our books you want as your prizes. You get one of Ruth's and one of Anne's. Check the BookLuvin'Babes site for the name of the big grand prize winner.
Blog news: Ruth Harris and I now have pages on this blog for our books. Ruth's is here  and mine is here. We've got synopses, quotes from reviews and all the links you need to browse our extensive oeuvres. (And they're all remarkably cheap. Even my paper books are a deal—under $10 bucks.)
Next week Ruth is going to blog on creating fiction based on factual events. And she'll be doing a giveaway of DECADES, her own novel that is based on real incidents and historical fact.
Today, my mystery SHERWOOD, LTD. will be featured on Saffina Desforges "no bullshit" Sunday series on her SaffiScribe blog. You can find out how much of that book is fiction and how much was based on actual personal misadventures
Next Friday, Catherine Ryan Hyde will be posting an in-depth interview with me on her blog. If you haven't stopped by her great new interview series , she runs them every Friday on her blog.
Indie Chicks: This week's inspirational story is from Christine DeMaio-Rice. A fun one. Check it out here. 

Trolls, Sockpuppets, and Cyberbullies—How to Blog Part IV: Dealing with Difficult Blog Visitors

Blogging is fun, and a wonderful way to network and build your author platform. But it's not always rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes a visitor may disagree with you or be confrontational in some way. Nothing wrong with that. If it's done in a friendly manner, disagreement can be an excellent way to stimulate conversation and learn to see things from another point of view. I've learned a lot from people who have pointed out my mistakes and blogging faux-pas.
But the occasional commenter crosses the line from polite disagreement to a verbal attack or full-on temper tantrum.
Starting a blog is like opening a shop. Anybody out there on the street can drop in. Most people who come by will be great. But some might be substance abusers or suffer from mental illness. Some might be looking for a fight. Others can be just plain mean.
Do remember it's your blog, and it's your responsibility to make it a safe place for your commenters, so if one of your followers is attacked, speak up. 
Problems can be compounded by the fact that online we can't see the dangerous ones coming. When you meet somebody in person, you get a lot of clues about how to interact with them. A woman wearing a tinfoil hat and muttering about the invaders from Betelgeuse probably won't be the one you choose to chat up as a new friend, and most of us aren't going to worry much whether some guy sporting racist tattoos and an Aryan Nation baldscape likes us or not.
Age is a major clue, too. When you meet somebody in her seventies, you won't expect her to have the same world view as somebody of seventeen.
But when people comment on blogs, we treat them all as peers. This can be good or bad, depending on the type of interaction.
Here's an example. This week I used the word "Luddite" in a short, friendly blog comment. Another commenter found the word highly offensive and went into a three paragraph rant against me.
(Actual Luddites were an early 19th cent. group in the English Midlands who resisted the Industrial Revolution and revered a mythical Robin-Hood type figure called King Ludd.)
When a Boomer like me uses the word, we usually mean somebody who thinks the Internet is a fad and still takes photos with the Instamatic he got in 1976. To the young woman who had the melt-down, apparently it means somebody who doesn't have the latest Kindle Fire. If she'd seen my matronly, aging self, she might not have assumed I was attacking her lack of geek-chic.
Although you can't be sure. She also might have been one of those people who surf the 'Net looking for ways to feel insulted. Insults generate self-righteous rage, which produces endorphins that some people find addictive. They will ferret out anything that can set off their anger triggers, so they'll feel justified in beating others to an emotional pulp.
Insult-Ferrets are just one of the disruptive types who might wander into your blog. I've listed some others here.
Your first instinct will be to delete an out-of-line comment, but that's not always the best solution, especially if you're dealing with Cyber-Taliban types. They may feel you haven't properly submitted to their will, so they might launch a crusade against you on other blogs and forums and the problem will escalate.
I've made suggestions on when to delete comments. Do immediately delete anything that is bigoted, libelous, or deliberately hurtful to any of your readers.
It helps to remember you can't please all of the people all of the time. Humor is subjective, and some people will feel offended by any kind of joke. There are common brain conditions that leave people unable to understand whimsy, hyperbole for comic effect, or irony of any kind, so a lot of humor is a mystery to them.

Remember people tend to judge other people by themselves. Happy, friendly people assume others are happy and friendly until proved otherwise. Angry, nasty people assume everybody else is angry and nasty, too. When they accuse you of bizarre things, they aren't saying anything about you; they're telling you what is in their own heads.
And the truth is—no matter how nice you are, some folks are just not going to like you. You have to ignore them and concentrate on the people who do.
Here are some of the disruptive people to watch out for.
1) Trolls. "Troll" is an all-encompassing term that means pretty much anybody who's looking to cause trouble and might be lurking under a cyberbridge. Trolls thrive on creating conflict for its own sake. If they happen on a Christian blog, they'll post an atheist manifesto. Then they'll go to an atheist site and tell them they're all going to Hell. Their posts are often obscene or bigoted. They're probably living in their mom's basement and haven't had work since they lost the dishwashing job at Krusty Burger in 2008. These are people who feel pretty helpless in the world, and this is how they make themselves feel powerful.
Solution: Don't feed trolls! Any engagement at all will be perceived as encouragement. They crave attention and don't care if it's negative or positive. Delete the post and try to laugh about it with offline friends. No matter how nasty the remark, remember it's not aimed at you. It's the whole world these people hate. And even if you feel sorry for them, if you're not a mental health professional hired to treat them, your best bet is to give them a wide berth.
Tip: Trolls usually post as "anonymous" so if you're hearing from them regularly, you can change your settings to require a name in order to comment.
2) Sockpuppets. On the Interwebz, "sockpuppet" means somebody using a false identity to praise himself or attack his competitors, posing as an independent third party. The term first originated in Internet communities and spread when customer reviews started gaining importance on shopping sites. Somebody using a false name might post comments praising his own product or knocking competitors. Sockpuppet reviews are sometimes offered for sale. I saw a site recently that offered positive one-line reviews on Amazon for $5, or negative ones for a competitor's book for $10. That explains why you sometimes see Amazon pages with 25 or 30 nearly identical, generic reviews. (I don't think they fool very many readers.) People also use sockpuppets for blog comments that promote their own agendas. Bogus, fee-charging agents, for instance, sometimes pose as clients to talk up their agency on writing blogs.

Solution: Use your judgment and delete as necessary. If you know the puppet's true identity, you can respond with the person's real name, and that may deflate them. If you see an obvious sock puppet review on a writer's Amazon page, report abuse.
Tip: If you have a tech-savvy friend, they can usually find the identity of a puppet visiting your blog through their IP address.
3) Insult Ferrets. These people are rage addicts looking for a fix. They're surfing the 'Net looking for things that make them feel insulted, so they can justify going on the attack. If the young woman I mentioned above is one of them, she'll have a whole list of trigger words besides "Luddite." She might go off on a blogger for using the word "Heffalump," because that's what her cheating ex-husband called her when she was in her third trimester. Or the word "blue" will send her into a wild temper tantrum because everybody says her eyes are blue, but they're really blue-green, kind of, when she wears that green blouse. Insult Ferrets tend to be narcissistic and think everything is about them.
Solution: Try to soothe ruffled feathers, but realize you've done nothing wrong. If a Ferret attacks one of your commenters, call her on it in a friendly but firm way. If you're attacked on your own blog, apologize, even if you're clearly not in the wrong, but only respond once. Don't engage in conversation. Don't delete unless the comment is seriously over the top, because that will anger the Ferret further and anger is what they feed on. They'll come back for more.
Tip: You can block addresses by reporting them as spam.
4) The Politically Correctibot. This is a version of the Insult Ferret—people who browse blogs looking for perceived insults—not to themselves, but some downtrodden demographic. They often have the linguistic sense of Spellcheck software. They might attack a blogger for using the word "fatuous," calling it an insult to fat people. Or they'll attack anybody who talks about Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi" as being unsympathetic to the Holocaust. I once got attacked for being "ageist" on this blog because I suggested that some of us Boomers have trouble learning the latest ways of the Interwebz. I can guarantee the attackers weren't Boomers, because we KNOW how hard it is to keep up with this stuff.
Solution: If they're berating you, it's probably best to simply ignore them, but if it's one of your commenters being dissed, speak up. Often you can leave an idiotic comment in place, because it doesn't harm anybody but the person who wrote it.
5) The Cyber-Taliban. These are Ferrets and Correctibots who operate as a tribe. They see themselves as the righteousness police—often enforcing a set of rules unknown outside their own niche demographic. I knew an author who had in some mysterious way stepped on the cybertoes of a fanatical online group. The day his next book came out, he got ten one-star Amazon reviews. I sent him a sympathetic tweet and immediately got flooded with DM's warning me not to associate with the "evil" author.
Solution: Report abuse. Then run. Disengage from these people in any way you can. Delete if the comment is over-the-top, but otherwise, it may be wiser to let it stand so they think they've "won." But then unfollow, block, and unfriend. There's no way to have a rational encounter with mass hysteria.
6) Cyberbullies. The fanatics above were being cyberbullies. But bullies don't need to be motivated by righteousness. Some are just mean. Destroying innocent lives and reputations is fun for them. You've seen the headlines. They often work in packs and can, in some cases, actually cause death by making vulnerable people commit suicide. Teens are especially susceptible to this, both as victims and perpetrators, but adults can be victimized too. I have personally received death threats from some Cyber-Taliban bullies. Scary stuff.
Solution. Report them and get help on the National Crime Prevention Website if you're in the US. They are breaking the laws of most countries. There is no reason to put up with criminal behavior, even if it's "only on the Internet." Delete seriously offensive comments, but you might want to leave some up if you can stand it. A self-incriminating post will catch up to the perpetrator eventually and will get you lots of support and sympathy from sane people.
If you see somebody being bullied on a blog, try to reach out to them through their own blog or other social media. They may be newbies who could end up seriously hurt.
Some bloggers are cyberbullies themselves and can cause real pain to unsuspecting people who think they're in friendly territory. Victims may think they've somehow done something to deserve the snark or personal attacks.
NOTE: If you feel you're in real, physical danger from a cyberbully who shows knowledge of where you live and work, contact local law enforcement immediately.***
The most important thing to keep in mind when dealing with blog meanies is: DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Remember it has nothing to do with you. You're just a random victim. How you should deal with them individually depends on the severity of the attack and how strongly it affects your blog and your followers. 
NOTE: That word verification 'CAPTCHA' thing does nothing to keep the meanies out. It only keeps out spam robots—the ones trying to sell Ukrainian porn and knock-off handbags. Your spam filter also works on bots, and it's usually just as good as the CAPTCHA. The rest you can delete yourself.
But CAPTCHA will keep out commenters. I highly recommend turning it off.
Monitoring your comments will keep the nasty comments from appearing on your blog, but it also prevents any type of conversation in the thread, and comes across as amateurish and paranoid, so I don't suggest monitoring comments on your newest posts unless you're under a severe meanie attack.
What about you, scriveners? Have you had any encounters with these people? How did you handle it? Do you have any disrupters to add to the list?
Next week, on February 15th, I'll be visiting Romance University, where I'll be talking about introducing your protagonist. On Sunday February 26th, Ruth Harris will be at the helm here, talking about how to write fiction based on factual events. 
VALENTINE BLOG HOP: Click the pink box on the right for our Val Hop page. You have two more days to enter for some pretty amazing prizes.
INDIE CHICKS ANTHOLOGY: This week's great episode, from Cheryl Bradshaw is here. 

How to Blog Part III: What Should You Blog About?

When I teach blogging, the most frequent question I get is "What do I blog about?" (For info on what not to blog about, see Part II of this series: How Not to Blog )
A writer starting a blog right now faces two problems:
1)     There are already, like, a trillion writers out there lecturing the blogosphere about how to write vivid characters, prop up saggy middles and avoid adverbs. A lot of them probably know more than you.
2)     If you're a writer with books to sell, you want to reach a general audience, not just other writers selling books.
So how can you be different? How do you create a blog that somebody will read—somebody besides your stalky ex-boyfriend and your mom?
The most important thing to remember with any kind of blog is you need to offer something. It should be fresh, informative, and/or entertaining.
How you approach your new blog is going to depend a whole lot on your stage in the publishing process and your immediate goals.
Stage #1: You're a developing writer.
You're working on your first or second novel, and maybe have a few stories in literary journals or a couple of contest wins. You want to be a published author sometime soon, but you're not quite ready to focus on  writing as a career.
Your goal: LEARNING THE PUBLISHING BUSINESS AND NETWORKING.
You want to make friends in the writing community for career help and mutual support. You want to learn the best writing techniques, network with publishing professionals, and educate yourself about the business.
Stage #2: You're ready for the marketplace.
You're querying agents and ready to publish. You've got a couple of books polished and ready to go. You've been to writing conferences, taken classes, and maybe hired a freelance editor. Your writing is at a professional level.
Your goal: BUILDING PLATFORM
You want to get your name out there to the general public. When you query an agent or ask for a blurb or review, you want a Google search to bring up ten pages of listings about you.
Stage #3: You're a published author
Your agent/marketing dept. says, "Get thee to the blogosphere!"
Or you realize the brilliantly blurbed oeuvre you've self-published is sitting there on Amazon with only two sales in three months (both to your spouse) because nobody has heard of it—or you.
Your goal: FINDING AND CONNECTING WITH READERS
If you're in stage #1, it's OK to blog about writing. (I know social media guru/Jedi Master Kristen Lamb says you shouldn't do this but I think her caveat is aimed more at people at stage #2 and #3.)
I'm not talking about lecturing on craft as if you're a pro when you're not. But an equal-to-equal post about something interesting you've discovered about pantsing vs.outlining, writing the dreaded synopsis, or what agents are looking for this month is just fine when you're reaching out to other writers.
Why do you want to reach other writers? Because writers help each other. (We're kind of a nice bunch, in spite of our stereotyping as depressed substance abusers.) I know a number of authors who got their agents through a referral from a fellow blogger. I found both my publishers through blogging. I'm not sure I would have made it through the darkest rejection phases if it hadn't been for the support of writer blogfriends.
When you have a writing blog, you get to participate in blog hops, flash fiction days, contests and all kinds of networking events that help you meet people who can be important in your future career.
But do make sure the blog has something interesting going for it—something that's helpful. There are all sorts of ways you can help:
Author interviews Profiles of small publishers or agents who are interested in your genre (take them from websites—you don't have to bother the agents and editors) Info on contests, giveaways and blog hopsLinks to great articles and posts in your genre or field of interest. Book reviews. If you write thoughtful, useful reviews, you'll immediately become everybody's best friend.If you're a stage #2 writer, you should heed Kristen's advice. If you're starting a blog right now with the goal of building platform, writing is definitely not the best choice of subject matter. You've got a trillion competitors and you're limiting your audience.
So try something that's related to your writing but has a unique slant. Here are a few suggestions:
Focus on your genre or subgenre (unless you're still experimenting with different genres.) You can discuss movies, videogames, TV shows, even jewelry and costumes—as long as they relate to your niche. A great example is SciFi writer Alex J. Cavanaugh's super-popular blog that specializes in all things SciFi.
Blog about your home town or state, especially if they're the setting of your novels. Travel sites that link to local landmarks and Chamber of Commerce will help you make friends locally that can be a big help later on.
Choose a writing-related subject that has a broader audience. A brand new general-interest writing blog is The Wordmonger, where YA writer C.S Perryess gives a fun, in-depth study of the etymology of one word per week. I learn something with every post.
Offer links to important information. If you're writing a memoir or fiction about certain health issues, promote organizations that help with those issues. Link to support groups and they might even link back.
Provide people with the benefit of your research. If you're writing historical fiction about a certain time period—post the research on your blog. (This is doubly useful because it will help keep you from cramming it all into the novel at the expense of story.) Have to research guns for a thriller? Poisons for a cozy? Are you basing the story on a real case? There are people who would love to read about this stuff.
Appeal to another Internet community. If that historical novel is based on a real person or your own family history, you could target readers from the genealogy blogosphere and links to historical research sites. If your heroine loves to fish, sew, or collect stuff, connect with blogs for fly fisherpersons, quilters, or collectors of floaty pens.
Provide a forum for people in your target demographic. If you write for a particular group—single urban women, Boomers, stay-at-home moms, or the just-out-of-college dazed and confused—focus on aspects of life of special interest to them.
Offer recipes or how-tos. Have a character who's an expert at something? Give readers the benefit of his expertise in the woodshop, garden or kitchen. Have some great recipes that relate to your character, time period, or region? Write about the food in your books, or food in fiction generally.
If you've reached Stage #3, you can be more eclectic. People will be coming to your blog because they want to get to know you and find out about your books—so focusing on one subject isn't as important. The blog becomes a place to showcase who you are. Think if it as your own version of Oprah magazine: not a place to toot your own horn as much as share things of interest to you that will also be of value to your readers. So you can continue whatever you've been doing in Stage #2, plus add stuff about you and your books.
Yes, you can talk about your books. I think people are silly who say you shouldn't use your blog for self-promotion. That's why you're in the blogosphere in the first place. It's fine as long as you don't use hard-sell tactics and you don't project an attitude of "I'm an author and you're not."
Each type of blog can evolve into another as your goals change. 
A few tips for the new blogger:
Make a list of topics you might like to explore before you begin, so you have a running start. If you visit other blogs regularly (and you should) you may find yourself making long comments on some subject that gets your hackles up/juices flowing. That's the stuff you should be putting in your own blog.
I STRONGLY advise against having more than one blog. It saps your energy and fragments your audience. (It also annoys the hell out of them: I hate hitting somebody's profile and finding six blogs. Unless one is clearly marked "author" I don't even try to wade through them: you've lost me.) Blogs have many pages. Use them.
Put your own name in the blog title! Yes, I'm saying it again: your name is your brand. And also, you'll find it easier to transition from Stage #1 to #2 and #3. Subtitles are easy to change. Titles, not so much. "Susie Scrivener's Blog" can go from "writing and ranting" to "Floaty Pen Collecting" if Susie decides to change the blog's focus. But "Floaty Pen Central" can't be changed to "Susie Scrivener's Amazing Books" without a lot of confusion. And you want to keep the same blog. The longer a blog exists, the higher it ranks with the Google spiders. (Thanks Camille LeGuire for cluing me in on the importance of longevity in SEO.)
Write an inviting "About Me" page with clear contact information. I'm amazed at bloggers who don't even post their names or contact information. The whole purpose of blogging is to let people know who you are and how to find you! (And don't just post your resume. Be informal and friendly.)
Don't succumb to pressure to blog more than three times a week. Posting once a week on a regularly scheduled day is better than posting often but erratically. Allow yourself time to write your books. Remember you're in this for the long haul. Quality over quantity. Slow blogging works. 
Be friendly. The way to build an audience, no matter where you are in your writing career, is to be likable and helpful. You don't have to be chirpy. Just don't project a phony or selfish tone. Kristen Lamb has a great post this week on how to be liked in the blogosphere. 
More blog advice in my blogpost How To Blog: A Beginner's Guide for Authors.
What about you, scriveners? Do you have a blog? Does it suit your stage of writing? Are you going to be able to give up those six semi-neglected blogs and concentrate on one great one? What advice would you give a new blogger? 
VALENTINE BLOG HOP:  Here's our Valentine blog hop page: All you have to do is send your email address to annerallen dot allen at gmail dot com, or leave it in the comments here, and you'll be entered to win two books from Ruth and me, as well as a $75 gift certificate or a diamond necklace AND you'll be eligible for the drawing next June for a signed, first edition of Catherine Ryan Hyde's iconic novel, Pay it Forward. For more info, click the pink box in the sidebar.
INDIE CHICKS: This week's inspirational story is from Dani Amore. She tells us why it's important to write what you love to read. Read it over on our Indie Chicks Page.