Eric Dontigney's Blog, page 10

Book Signing Event with Me – Monday, September 2

Okay folks, here’s the skinny. On Monday, Sept. 2, 2013, I will be doing a signing at Fatman Comics and Games from 5pm to 8pm. I will definitely sign things. Preferably things I wrote, but I’m not picky. I might also do a reading, if people seem eager or masochistic about the idea.

There will be a limited number of copies of my books on hand for purchasing/signing, but they will be sold on a first come, first serve basis. No reservations. As such, I advice ordering a copy in advance if you want to make sure you’ll have one for signing.

You can order a copy of Falls here.

You can order a copy of Turns here.

I will also be generally hanging out and chatting with whoever shows up. You should all turn out for this event, hang out, and buy loads of cool comic and games stuff at the store. They’re good folks, a local business, and if that’s not enough…I repeat, COMICS and GAMES.

There’s an event page over on Facebook here where, I think, you can sign up and let me know you’re coming. Excitement and adventure await…or you can come spend time with me.  :)

3 Tips for Avoiding Formatting Hell

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As the default word processor for most writers, Microsoft’s Word program does a lot. In point of fact, it does so much that most people only use a tiny little fraction of the available functionality. Ironically, the thing it doesn’t do, isn’t particularly good at, and often makes more difficult is preparing a manuscript for publication.

While signed authors can simply turn over a file or hard copy to their publisher, who no doubt employs someone whose sole job it is to take that formatting nightmare and turn it into something that can be printed, indie authors must do this work themselves. More often than not, it is only at the end of the process that these authors discover that all that fiddling they did with fonts, spacing, title adjustments and so forth has created a monster. So here are three tips to help you avoid formatting hell

Forget that the TAB key exists – Years ago, when I was taking a touch typing class, I was actually trained to use the TAB key to create indents for paragraphs. This training has caused me more problems than I care to mention in the formatting process. TAB does awful stuff beneath the visible layer of the document and can cause utter havoc in a PDF conversion process. If you need an indent for sanity (I do), set a left indent in the page layout tab that automatically inserts one when you hit enter.
Avoid the Styles option – Word allows you to do all kinds of neat things with Styles, like create fancy chapter headings. You will need to do this eventually for some publishing outlets, but you don’t want to be going through trying to manually change Style Options for 30 or 40 chapter headings. Trust me on this, I’ve done it.
Create Master Files – It might seem obvious, but you should have a master file. In fact, you should have 2 master files. One master file should be a copy of your original completed manuscript (for later reference) and the other should be a final version with all edits and changes in it. Once you have these two files, you should never alter them. Copy and paste the entire text into a new file to do outlet specific formatting.

While there are lots of other things you can do to avoid formatting hell, these three should save you a lot of mental anguish in the long run.

Paid Book Marketing, Is It Worth It? (Link Roundup)

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Authors of all stripes confront an inevitable question at some point: Should I use paid book marketing? It’s a serious question with a lot of unclear answers. While I’ll leave it to the links below to let you explore the bigger, public conversation on this topic, I’ll offer a few thoughts.

Marketing is complicated and, most of the time, cookie cutter “systems” can’t deliver on their promises. By nature, systems function on churning out sameness and the best marketing leverages uniqueness. No marketer can ever guarantee a fixed number or percentage increase of sales. Any marketer that does make these kinds of guarantees is lying to himself or herself, lying to you, or filled with a dangerous kind of hubris. Never spend money on marketing that you can’t afford to lose, because most marketing takes time to show a return on investment (if it ever does show a return on investment.) With that said, on to the link roundup.

Should Indie Authors Pay for Book Reviews?

Book Marketing Services, Are They Worth It?

Book Marketing Using Paid Promotions: Targeted Email Lists

Paid Book Marketing: Should Authors Bother?

Book Marketing Methods That Don’t Work

Paid Book Promotion – Yes It’s Necessary, But Beware

Please leave a comment to share your thoughts on or experiences with paid book marketing.

The Necessity of Downtime

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Productivity seems to be both the biggest challenge and biggest goal of just everyone these days. Without question, a not insignificant number of people have made fortunes teaching or, minimally, claiming to show people how to squeeze every ounce of productivity possible out of any given day. Yet, despite a little lip-service, typically in a short, breezy afterward or tucked away in an appendix, not much talk is given to downtime.

Downtime, it seems, is anathema to our current social situation. When people admit to taking time off, it’s often done furtively or with an explanation about how a child or spouse requires their presence. Writers, I think, come under more pressure than many to justify their downtime and often feel the pressure to be productive all the time. After all, lots of writers work at home. How stressful can it actually be?

The reality is that writing, even when you love it, even when the thing you’re writing at the moment may not be particularly hard, still demands a fairly intensive mental effort. You may not be driving to an office somewhere, but you still staring at computer all day, subject to deadlines and the majority of other stressors that accompany other professions. So, many writers wind up putting in time writing every single day, even when they know they need to take a break.

I’m no exception to this and I learned a hard lesson from it. I worked 14 straight days recently. I was productive. I made money. I made progress, albeit less than I wanted, on my novel. I did some research to find new outlets where I might place my writing. I read articles about writing and read books about the craft and business of writing. I was on, in one fashion or another, all the time.

Even when I wasn’t physically sitting in front of the keyboard, I was thinking about writing, or the things I would be writing, or analyzing the writing in the things I was watching on the TV. My theoretical downtime was becoming an extension of my working time. This might sound good, in theory, but not in practice. I paid a price for this.

This past weekend, instead of putting in some serious time on my novel, or working on the cover for that novel, or reading a novel, or any of the other things I had imagined I would do, I spent most of the weekend fighting a losing battle with a crippling headache and then recuperating from that headache. I accomplished next to nothing.

The point brave readers and fellow writers is this: downtime matters! Your body will revolt. It will punish you. It’s not just about getting enough rest or a balanced diet. I was sleeping 7-8 hours a night for the last week and eating plenty of the right stuff. The problem was that I never disengaged from the work. That’s the kind of downtime you need to take from time to time. It’s important and necessary. Don’t feel bad about that and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise…not even yourself.

Embrace Stress

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Everywhere you look today you see another admonishment to reduce stress because stress kills! Sure, stress kills. So does drinking water, eating food, working out and virtually every other activity human beings engage in, when they taken to extremes. Yet, maybe writers should be embracing stress.

Stress Isn’t Bad

Stress isn’t bad. Chronic stress is bad. What’s the difference? Stress is basically the body gearing up to deal with an external problem. Among other things, the adrenal glands start to produce adrenaline, which constricts blood vessels and focuses the mind. Remember how hyper-aware you were the last time you got startled badly. That was body reacting to stress.

At a moderate level, stress can actually enhance your performance in most activities.

Chronic stress, on the other hand, occurs when you’ve been under stress continually for an extended period of time. The constant stress leads to, among other things, a suppressed or compromised immune system, adrenal fatigue, mental impairment and some people fall into substance abuse. If you want a thorough overview, check out this article. If you’re experiencing these problems, then please do take a vacation, switch jobs or do whatever you need to do to de-stress for a while. Otherwise…

Stop Stressing About Stress

The idea of stress can become its own kind of stress. Anything you spend a lot of time worrying about contributes to the problem. Here is the good news. Unless your doctor is worried about your stress levels or you have symptoms of chronic stress, you can stop stressing about stress. (I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Just saying…you know, for legal reasons.)

The media at large has a vested interest in doom-saying, flashy headlines. Things like “Stress Kills” makes for a headline everyone wants to read, because we’re afraid of things that might kill us. In the end, though, that headline is probably doing more to stress you out than the things in your life you should experience stress over.

Embrace that Stress

I say to forget the imaginary stress the world seems to want to fill you with and embrace the stress that helps you out. Use that amped up, focus-enhancing stress and make it work for you, rather than against you. Pour that stress into your writing. Or, better yet, make that stress the subject of your writing. After all, good fiction requires conflict. Then call it a day, have a beer, and relax.

The Entrepreneurial Writer

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The words “writer” and “entrepreneur” don’t appear together all that often. In fact, they almost never appear together. This failure to pair up those two words is unfortunate because, witting or otherwise, writers are entrepreneurs. They take an unknown product and must convince someone, often several people, that consumers will buy and/or read that unknown product. In writing circles, they call this querying or proposal writing or some other euphemism for what is, essentially, a pitch meeting done on paper.

For writers that produce articles, the process ends there with a rejection, a paycheck or a kill fee depending on how things go. You and the editor may hash out details or agree to a revision with a different angle, haggle over fees or bicker over the legalese in the contract, but you have effectively sold your product. The magazine or website then becomes responsible for distribution and promotion, though savvy writers do their part to try to drive readers to those articles.

For writers out there trying to get their novels and non-fiction titles into the hands of readers, the process continues into the marketing phase. Only, in writing circles, they call this touring or promoting or anything other than marketing. Whatever label gets slapped on the process, it’s still marketing, just like every other entrepreneur and start-up company engage in year after year.

Assuming you have secured a distribution channel, either through a publishing house or via self-publishing outlets, that will print and deliver physical or digital products to end users, the lion’s share of creating an audience is still on you. You must promote your product and whip people into a mouth-foaming frenzy that only your book can cure. This means, among other things, being able to turn features of your novel/non-fiction work into benefits.

Granted, non-fiction has a decided advantage here, but the principle still holds for novels. It’s not enough that a novel is in a particular genre or that it religiously follows the pattern of the monomyth (though that doesn’t hurt). You need to find that point of differentiation that convinces readers that they simply MUST have your gothic-horror romance over the thousands of other gothic-horror romance novels. Non-fiction can literally solve a problem, such as self-help books purport to do, or solve impersonal problems, such as providing the definitive analysis of X, Y, or Z subject. A publisher may devote some resources to marketing, but it is up to the writer to sell the public on the work.

If all of this sounds a lot like running a business, it should. You are the owner of a business called your career. Understanding the basics of entrepreneurship and marketing can help you see why it’s not enough to simply write well. You must also learn to sell well.

Happy 4th, Folks!

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It’s Independence Day here in the US and that means there is a good chance that more grills will be fired up today than any other day of the  year and more fireworks (legal and otherwise) fired off than any other day of the year. All of which creates a state of wild glee in the 9 year old boy still living deep beneath the grumpier man that is me. Why? I suspect it’s because all boys love barbecued food, fire and loud noises … or maybe it’s just me. In any event, this week I offer no advice, no statistics, no actionable content or even anything relevant to writing. Instead, I offer you my good wishes for a safe holiday filled with grilled deliciousness, bright lights and loud noises.

Be More Productive with Your Writing

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One of the bigger challenges for writers is how to stay productive or be more productive with their writing. All writers face similar hurdles when it comes to staying productive. Friends and family expect you to spend time with them and, sometimes, fail to appreciate that writing is actually work. In the latter case, friends and family may treat your writing time, read work time, as open season for doing other things. Writers get tired, have off days, and sometimes just don’t feel the muse. This last, though not necessarily the most aggravating, tends to be the most terrifying prospect for writers. The absence of some kind of inspiration can quickly turn into writer’s block. Fortunately, most of the hurdles faced by writers can be met and overcome with simple strategies.

Set Boundaries

Much as work expands to fill the time, family and friend demands will expand to fill whatever time they think you have free. It’s not necessarily malicious on their part, but it is destructive for you productivity. If you write for a living, it’s up to you to make it absolutely clear to the people in your life that what you do is work, that it takes real concentration, and interruptions make it a hell of a lot harder. If you treat it like a job or a career, others will follow suit.

While I also understand inspiration can strike at any time, you’ll do yourself a big favor by blocking out some part of the day that is your “official” working hours. Stick with this as a policy. If people interrupted with non-emergency calls or texts during this time, tell them that you’re working and to call back at whatever time you’re done working. This, of course, does not apply to editors or clients. Those are people who should be calling during your work hours.

The flip side of this is that you actually need to work during those hours in order to be fair to the people in your life. Once your official work time is over, you need to be available to your family and friends. You must take the calls and the answer the texts. Once you establish the boundaries, people will respect them…after the griping that will accompany the first few weeks. The lack of non-relevant interruptions will go a long way to improving your productivity.

Check Your Fantasy at the Door

Writers, even experienced writers, sometimes fall into the trap of thinking they need to create ART every time they sit down to work. First of all, only about 1% of people in any field operate at that brilliant, genius level. Maybe you’re one of them, but probably not. The more likely scenario is that on any given day you produce good work and, unless you’re on a strict deadline, you can edit the bejeezus out of your writing before submitting it.

Andrea Phillips notes in her book, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, that when looking back on her writing work a year or so after the fact, she couldn’t tell when she was having good days or bad days. Your perception of the quality of your work hinges a lot on the frame of mind you’re in on any given day. The objective quality of your writing, on other hand, hinges almost entirely on the skill set you bring to the table. Even if you feel like you’ve written nothing but drivel, there is a good chance it’s close to or even at your usual level of quality. Don’t fall into the “it-must-be-and-feel-like-ART” trap.

Freeing yourself from the shackles of the hitting the impossibly high standard all the time can help you avoid the writer’s block trap and will probably help to improve the pace of your writing as well.

Check Your Personal To-Do List at the Door

Many writers work from home and this is both a pleasure and its own kind of trap. There will always be dishes than need to be done, groceries that need to be bought, and a thousand other tasks that do not get words down on the page. When you go into your office or the space you normally do work in, leave your family life to-do list at the door. Work time is writing time and you need to create a psychological wall between your writing time/space and your personal life.

If you need to, build two separate to-do lists. One stays in your work space and you only put work related tasks on it and the other is for your personal life. Don’t store them together. Keep the personal list in the kitchen or the living room or anywhere but where you write. Keep your writer’s to-do list in the work space or your laptop case or somewhere you aren’t going to interact with it the rest of the time.

Separating your to-do lists will go a long way to keeping you focused on the work because you know you have a list for personal life. It will be there, ready to remind you of all the things you need to do when the writing is done for the day. If having two physical lists is too problematic, I recommend a web-based application called Simpleology for work-oriented list building/productivity improvement. The application works in most web browsers and offers integration with things like Chrome and Google Calendar. The program also includes a comprehensive set of built in tutorials to show you how to use the application and how to get the most out of it. You can choose either a free or paid version, but the free version is highly functional and should suffice for the vast majority of users.

I’d love to hear about any productivity improving strategies that have worked you in the comments below.

Do 1000 True Fans Make You A Living?

Lately I’ve been seeing talk about this idea that being able to make a living as an independent writer, artist, musician or insert your creative craft here _____ hinges on achieving a magical number of “true fans.” The number that crops up most often is 1000. Kevin Kelly talks about this idea pretty extensively in a Technium post here and Copyblogger’s Brian Clark also takes a swing at the idea here. The basic notion behind the hypothesis is that a true fan will buy the vast majority of what you produce directly, as well as any related merchandise, to the tune of some guesstimated figure. If you do as Kelly does and put that figure at $100 per year/per true fan, you get annual gross earnings of $100,000. In other words, you can make a living without achieving some kind superstardom.

The true fan hypothesis can be equated to ideas like micro-patronage that drive websites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and BandCamp. The runaway success of a handful of projects and the surprisingly high number of projects that at least hit minimum funding goals on these sites seems to support this idea. Yet, as Kelly details in much less frequently discussed posts here and here, there seems to be a distinct lack of real world evidence to support the 1000 true fans idea, which jives with my intuition about the hypothesis.

One of the problems I see with this idea relates a problem I discussed with the idea of essentially purchasing exposure on blogs with guest posts and giveaways here. The problem, of course, is time. True fans are fans that you interact with regularly in person, by email or via social media. Granted, you don’t interact with every fan every day, but you’re going to have to devote a lot of time to interacting with a lot of fans; a problem musician Robert Rich discusses. Time is probably the single most valuable resource creative types possess, aside from the actual skill set they use in creating. Time is also finite and not fungible.

All of this brings to mind Seth Godin’s book, We Are All Weird. In it Godin discusses how marketers have to adapt to the slow collapse of mass marketing as a strategy and he predicts future success will depend on marketing to niches. His contention seems to be that eventually, all businesses will be looking for their true fans as their primary source of income. Yet, as someone who reads and writes a fair bit about marketing, I’m inclined to think that even if Godin’s prediction pans out, the niches he discusses are not niches composed of 1000 people. I think he probably means niches composed of 100,000 or 1,000,000 people. Compared to a 6 billion-plus global population, those are tiny niches. For the purposes of marketing, though, you can’t use a true fan strategy to capture a market share that size.

Even for an individual creator looking to secure a livable annual income, I don’t think the true fan strategy can be your only or even your main strategy. I think you should make it a point to develop true fan relationships, but you should develop them with what marketers call influencers. For creative types, these are bloggers, reviewers, Facebook personalities or Twitter personalities that hold sway with the niche market you’re trying to capture. For the rank and file fans you hope to develop, those who can be more or less counted on to pick up a copy of your new book or album most of the time, you still need some level of more traditional marketing. It should be much smaller scale to reflect the smaller size of your intended market, but, in my opinion, you cannot be replaced those marketing techniques by securing 1000 true fans.

Please leave a comment and tell me what you think about the 1000 true fans approach.

Relationships versus Transactions

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Not too long ago, I wrote a blog post for another site where I set out some strategies for indie authors to improve their odds of securing reviews for their books. (You can read the post here.) One of suggestions I made was to develop relationships with reviewers. This suggestion was met with a comment that suggested authors should essentially buy space on review sites by providing books to give away, doing guest posts and so on. I should say that I am confident that this approach works, at least some of the time, but it sits wrong in my gut. I just wasn’t entirely sure why until I read Michael Port’s book, Book Yourself Solid.

While the book is aimed at service providers, Port’s entire strategy for getting booked solid is built on the foundation of developing relationships with potential clients, with other service providers, and even with your existing clients. He essentially argues that much of business relies too heavily on the idea of transactions, which are fundamentally one-time events. Relationships, on the other hand, are more likely to result in an ongoing exchange that both parties find valuable. Buying exposure on a book review site seems to me to focus too much on the transaction between reviewer and author, while dismissing the value of a relationship between reviewer and author.

I would be a little put off by someone who wanted me to write a guest post who hadn’t at least read one of my books or spent some time reading my blog first. To make a guest post a cost of entry to even consider reviewing your book strikes me as deeply counterintuitive. In the first place, if I’m effectively paying for exposure with giveaway copies or a guest post, then it only follows that the reviewer has a vested interest in giving me at least a middling, if not great, review, regardless of my skill as a writer. While this may serve me as an exposure seeker and, in the short term, the reviewer/blogger who gets a week off from content generation, it dilutes the credibility of the reviewer.

What if I wrote a bad book? What if I wrote a horrifyingly bad book? If the reviewer scores it well, people will be disappointed or angry or disgusted with the deception. If the reviewer gives it a legitimate review and says it’s awful, then I have no incentive to ever provide this person with a review copy or guest blog again. After all, why would I pay for bad exposure?

Then there are the logistical problems with the transactional model. Let’s say I submit my book to 50 reviewers and 25 accept, on the condition that I provide a guest post. Let’s say that I excel at writing quality blog posts and can write one in an hour. That still means I need to spend 25 hours writing guest posts. That may be a manageable number, but what if 50 or 100 or 150 reviewers accept on that same basis. I’ve basically gone from being a novelist to a full time guest blogger for the foreseeable future, without considering any other marketing actions at all.

The transactional approach is limited by basic time constraints and self-corrupting in its expectation setting. While it may serve a function in getting the marketing ball rolling, I don’t see how it can work as a sustained marketing effort for an indie author.