Martin Pond's Blog, page 10

Write a review, win a prize...

Reviews help fledgling authors. There, I've come out and said it, no beating around the bush. Getting a good review is hard, and often involves (e)mailing out dozens and dozens of review copies and then sitting back, all fingers crossed, waiting and hoping.

Some of my titles have been reviewed on various book blogs around the world - you can find a list of the ones I know about here - and of course there are lots of reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and the like.

But I'm greedy. I want more. And you can help.

If you've bought either Dark Steps, Turn Around Where Possible or Cold and haven't written a review yet... well, what are you waiting for? Write a review on your blog, or on Amazon or Goodreads or Lulu or wherever else, then post a link to the review in the comments for this post. Then on the 1st of February I'll pick the best (by which I mean best written, not necessarily the most glowing) new review and the writer of it will win a free ebook from yours truly, either Dark Steps, Turn Around Where Possible or Cold (winner's choice).

How does that sound? Write a review online somewhere, let me know in the comments and, come the 1st of February, you could win an ebook. What could be simpler?

Old chestnut time

Written by Frank L. Visco and originally published in the June 1986 issue of Writers' Digest.

How To Write Good

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

Avoid Alliteration. Always.Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.Avoid clichés like the plague. (They’re old hat.)Employ the vernacular.Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.Contractions aren't necessary.Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.One should never generalize.Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”Comparisons are as bad as clichés.Don't be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.Profanity sucks.Be more or less specific.Understatement is always best.Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.One word sentences? Eliminate.Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.The passive voice is to be avoided.Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.Who needs rhetorical questions?

Minus two kudos points for anyone who comments that it should be "How To Write Well". Oh, and minus five irony points too.

Halloween... and I'll scratch your back, etc

As a writer with a couple of titles enrolled in Amazon's KDP Select programme (which gives the retailer exclusivity), I am able to offer those titles for free every now and then. The idea, I guess, is that the rush to download a freebie leads to a "bump" in downloads, a momentarily higher profile and then residual sales in the aftermath. To be fair, that has been my experience, although I should point out that the law of diminishing returns certainly applies - after four or five freebie weekends it seems that pretty much everybody who wants your story on their Kindle already has it.

Having said that, I'm planning one more freebie, and am writing about it here in advance in the hope of maximising the take-up. Turn Around Where Possible, my old-school horror yarn, will be available for free on Amazon on Wednesday, 31st October. Yes, a horror story free on Halloween. I'm nothing if not original.

Anyway, since I'm not only giving you stuff for free but also giving you plenty of prior notice, can I ask a favour in return? Two of my short stories, the aforementioned Turn Around Where Possible and Cold, are eligible for Wattpad's Watty Awards 2012. No, me neither, but hey, an award for a story would be nice to win. So can you help me get in the mix? It won't take much of your time, just a few mouse clicks really.

You can vote for Cold here: http://www.wattpad.com/8276776-cold

And for Turn Around Where Possible here: http://www.wattpad.com/8276710-turn-around-where-possible

If you don't have a Wattpad account (which I'm guessing is most of you) you can use your Facebook credentials to exercise your right to vote - exercise is good for you, right? And enjoy Turn Around Where Possible for Halloween.

Books vs e-books - has the debate gone away yet?

Or will it never go away?

Newsweek produced the following comparison a couple of years ago, and whilst things have moved on a little since then it still raises some interesting points, not least that the most eco-friendly way to read a book is to walk to your local library.


The question I'm most intrigued by is the strap line - does one have to win? Just because e-readers have taken off massively, and traditional book sales are down, does the former have to spell the end for what I try (and fail) to avoid calling "proper" books?

I have a Kindle, and it's great. But I love the feel, the heft and the tangibility of real books. I have an MP3 player too, but I prefer to buy CDs. Is it just me that still prefers the physical product? Guess I'm just a cup of tea man in a latte world...

How about you?

Free as a bird, apparently

First off, two points* to anyone who identifies the film dialogue from which this post's title is taken.

Secondly, in honour of having a nice long Bank Holiday weekend, I figure you need some short stories to read. So, today and tomorrow, Turn Around Where Possible will be free over at Amazon. Then, on Sunday and Monday, Cold will be free.

Here are some links:

Turn Around Where Possible: Amazon.co.uk • Amazon.com

Cold: Amazon.co.uk • Amazon.com

And as I've said before, don't worry, you don't need a Kindle to read e-books bought from the Amazon Kindle Store.

* Points have no value but hey, you earn my respect.

Anniversary promo's... get 'em while they're hot

Tomorrow will mark a year since the publication of Dark Steps. To celebrate, I've got a couple of promotions running that might encourage you to give Dark Steps a try if you haven't already done so.

Want an ebook? Use promotional code KS35K at checkout to get 34% off the price of Dark Steps in the ebook format of your choice at Smashwords (expires 10th August).

Want a paperback? Use promotional code ASTOUND20 at checkout to get a further 20% off the price of a physical copy of Dark Steps at Lulu (expires 12th August).

Of course if you just want it for you Kindle, as most people seem to, you can find it and more here.

Cheers - happy shopping.

You mean there are rules for writing?

Well no, not really. I mean yes, of course there are tips, things that help, things that are good practice. But rules? They're all made to be broken, at some point.

Anyway, I'm not going to give you my rules - who am I, after all? But I will offer some from other authors, famous authors, successful authors. You might like them. If nothing else, this might make a nice jumping-off point for you.

Here we go.

Thirteen writing tips from Chuck Palahniuk

George Orwell’s five rules for effective writing

Jack Kerouac’s rules for spontaneous prose

Stephen King's six key rules for writing a bestseller
Stephen King's "Everything you need to know about writing successfully - in ten minutes"

And everyone else... including Elmore Leonard's famous ten rules, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Jonathan Franzen, Neil Gaiman, PD James, and more.

Time management for writers

Like a lot of writers these days, my primary bread-winning is done by something other than writing. In my case, it's IT. If I had to live on my income from writing, well, I would be skin and bones, and sleeping rough. Put it another way, my last royalty payment from Lulu was £4.54. I know. I tried hard not to spend it all at once.

So writing is a secondary activity, both in terms of time available for it and financial recompense. And if you throw a hectic family life into the mix, again something that many writers will have, then writing is further demoted, and becomes a tertiary activity.

How do you fit it in, then? How do you make time to write?

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert. I can only tell you some of the things that I do that enable me to fit some writing time in around everything else. Around life. I won't pretend it's always easy - if, for example, you have a job like mine that requires you to be in front of a PC all day then the last thing you want to do when you get home is fire up the laptop. But there's no other way of saying it - if you want to be a writer, you have to write...

Anyway, here are a couple of things that I do to make the most of the limited writing opportunities I get.

Carry a notepad and pen around. If the perfect line comes to you in the supermarket, at least you can capture it, ready to go when next you sit down in front of the keyboard. If you don't have a notepad, make use of your mobile phone - they nearly all have note-making, or even voice-recording, facilities. Equally, I use the phone's camera a lot to capture visual reminders of things I want to write about.Make sure that notepad is next to you when you go to bed. I don't know about you but quite often I wake up in the early hours and something is just there, in my head, but if I don't write it down it's gone by the time the morning, and conscious recollection, arrive. Don't lose the moment.As I've already said, it can be hard to face the PC in the evening, especially if you've spent the day looking at a work PC too. But really, that trash TV you're watching, is it worth it? I say watching but be honest, how often is the TV just on, and you're just sat in front of it for the sake? In the words of Why Don't You, maybe it's time to "switch off the television set and go out and do something less boring instead"? Bottom line? TV, much of which is junk, sucks your time. You don't need it.If you can't be writing, be reading. It's the next best thing, so always have a book to hand, even if you can only dip into it for a page or two at a time. Read something challenging. Read something you admire. Read something good. I won't say good writing is contagious, but it is inspiring...Make sure your writing space suits your writing style. If you like lots of natural light, be near a window. If you need absolute peace, close the door and turn the radio off. If you need space to spread out, sit at a proper table. There are no hard and fast rules on this, but you know what works for you, so make sure it's always available. If writing time is limited, you don't want to have to spend the first ten minutes of a precious slot setting up your work space.Consider getting up an hour earlier. You'll feel bright and energised, and chances are the day's distractions won't have started yet. Seize the moment, and get some writing done before work.And finally... writers write. Sometimes you'll be tired and lifting the laptop lid will be the last thing you want to do... but lift it you must. Yes, what you write in that frame of mind might be below par, not your best. But it's down. It's on paper. You've advanced your story. And you can improve it in the edit. Put simply, if writing time is scarce you have to take what chances come your way, however demotivated or tired you might feel at the time. If you don't, well, how serious are you about this writing lark anyway?
Some might say that the speed with which my novel-in-progress is, or rather isn't, growing suggests I should take some of my own advice. That's fair. As I said, I'm no expert, after all, and am as fundamentally flawed as the next man - I try to practice what I preach but it's not always easy, I acknowledge that readily. But anyway... these are some of the things that work, most of the time, for me. What works for you?

No Kindle? No problem! (Or, why are you doing Amazon exclusives when I don't have a Kindle?)

[image error] The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that two of my short stories, Turn Around Where Possible and Cold, are only currently available via Amazon, for Kindle. <plug class="shameless">You can get them here and here respectively.</plug>

Now some people have asked me why this is, when I've published other things using Lulu and Smashwords too. The answer is simple - Amazon run a programme called KDP Select which, in return for short-term exclusivity, offers the author promotional tools that would otherwise not be available to him or her. Like going free for a day or two here and there. And it works - at least it has for me, so far. The rush of paid Turn Around sales I've had in the last six weeks is almost entirely attributable to earlier free days.

I've heard some gripes though, along the lines of "I want to read these stories of yours but hey, mister, I don't have a Kindle." News flash - you don't need one! Because Amazon make a fine selection of entirely free Kindle reading apps with which you can consume content from the Kindle store exactly as if you had one of their increasingly-ubiquitous reading devices. If you have a smartphone (Android or iPhone), PC, Mac or a tablet (Android of iPad), there's a Kindle reading app for you. They all work a treat. And did I mention they're all free?

You can download your app, or apps, of choice here. And once you've done that, you can get some content for them here...

Coincidentally, it's also International Short Story Day

Today is International Short Story Day, apparently. What better time to launch a new short story then?

Cold is published today, exclusively available through the Amazon Kindle Store (at first, at least). It's a short, dark tale of what happens when a woman breaks her own rules about office relationships and married men. When she realises she can't get her man back she decides to get even instead. So begins her thirst for revenge... and as we all know, revenge is a dish best served cold.

Cold is available right about now, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk - please do read and enjoy!