Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 83

The Easy-to-Fix Tense Problem That Might Be Tripping Up Your Readers

Photo credit: derekbruff on Visualhunt / CC BY-NC

Today’s guest post is by author, editor and writing coach Mathina Calliope (@MathinaCalliope).

One of the most common edits I make when reading client manuscripts is changing simple past to past perfect in cases where simple past creates confusion by implying two events happened at about the same time when in fact one event happened before the other event.

Before I go any further, here’s a quick refresher:

Simple present: I speak
Present perfect: I have spoken
Simple past: I spoke
Past perfect: I had spoken

Most of us easily and automatically use past perfect in speech—and in a lot of our writing as well. We’re telling a story about something that happened in X time and we need to insert a piece of information for context, something that happened before X time.

I walked to the store to get groceries.When I arrived, I smacked my forehead.I had left my list behind.

In the story, walked, arrived, and smacked are in simple past, while had left is in past perfect.

How would the meaning change if we used simple past for sentence 3?

I walked to the store to get groceries.When I arrived, I smacked my forehead.I left my list behind.

Now the syntax communicates that I leave my list behind immediately after I arrive and smack my head. But that doesn’t make sense. Leave it behind where? In my car? Why would I do that? Leave it at the grocery store? Then why do I smack my forehead?

Past perfect helps us understand that sentence 3 explains sentence 2. It tells what happened before in order to cause me to smack my forehead.

Now, readers are smart. They know about leaving lists behind, and they know people only smack their foreheads if the list has already been left. They will figure out what the author means. They will not be deeply confused, they will not hurl the book across the room in frustration (unless they are copy editors). But for a short moment, they will sense that something is off. In this situation, that moment will last such an infinitesimally short time that they might not consciously notice it.

In writing more complex stories, however, using simple past where past perfect is called for can create more problematic confusion. Let’s say I’m writing a story about a conversation I had at home with my partner, Inti. See if you can spot the simple past that should be past perfect.

We settled in with a home-assembled cheese plate and discussed our next move.Real estate was prohibitively expensive in the neighborhoods we liked, and with one mortgage apiece already, it didn’t seem wise to take on a third.We planned to buy something, but we wondered if renting might be a better idea.

If you said planned needs to be had planned, you’re right. Why? Because readers have just learned we believe it doesn’t seem wise to take on a third mortgage. If the next sentence says we plan to buy something, they will furrow their brows. In this case, using past perfect also serves to emphasize a contrast—we had been going to do X, but we decided instead to do Y.

Even in this example, readers can probably figure out after a beat or two what the narrator means. It doesn’t make sense to plan to buy something immediately after stating that a third mortgage is unwise, so readers’ brains will do a kind of autocorrect, sort it all out and move on.

This is not a good argument for dispensing with past perfect in favor of simple present (not that I would never dispense with past perfect; more on this later). Using the clearest syntax possible is a service to your readers. As David Foster Wallace put it aptly in his 1999 Harper’s essay “Authority and American Usage,” casual misuse of the language, while not being outright deceptive or immoral, nonetheless demands of readers “at least a couple extra nanoseconds of cognitive effort, a kind of rapid sift-and-discard process, before the recipient gets it. Extra work.” 

Being as clear and unambiguous as possible, meanwhile, is “[n]ot just more considerate but more respectful somehow—both of your listener/reader and of what you’re trying to get across.”

Now. It’s true there are valid times to use simple past even when describing events that take place in a past before the main narrative past. Here are a few.

Children’s dialogue. Past perfect is pretty sophisticated, and kids don’t necessarily use it as often as adults. For your child character to say “I had left my list behind” would sound oddly formal and stiff, unless maybe she were a 19th-century eleven year old with a governess.

If the time change is otherwise marked. To go back to my first example, if sentence 3 began, “Before I went to the store,” I could very easily get away with saying “I left my list behind.” (Personally, I would still use past perfect because it “sounds right” to my ear, but it isn’t strictly necessary since readers will not be confused.)

Once we’ve settled into a lengthy story in the past-before-the-past. Let’s say you have a three-page flashback. When you start the flashback, use the past perfect to signpost a time shift. A rule of thumb is to use it two or three times. By then readers will understand when they are. Continuing to repeat the word “had” would only litter the prose with unnecessary guidance.

As with uncountable aspects of language, past perfect usage is changing over time. It’s less common on the internet, in texts and emails. The less common it becomes, the more formal it will sound when it is used, rather the way subjunctive now sounds in English. But it isn’t just a formality. It’s a signal to readers. It has a function, and without it, readers are ever so slightly more adrift in your ocean of words.

How to Put Together an Indie Author Anthology

Note: Next week, I’m hosting a class with Mark Leslie Lefebvre on how to make money from writing and selling short fiction.

Today’s post is excerpted from Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction by Matty Dalrymple (@mattydalrymple) and Mark Leslie Lefebvre (@MarkLeslie).

Anthologies—groupings of works from different authors—are one of the most powerful ways that a short fiction author can earn income and build reader connections. Because an anthology includes many authors, it can sell and connect to the fan bases of all those authors and ultimately be greater than the sum of its parts.

Anthologies are genre specific (e.g., noir, horror, romance) and/or theme specific (e.g., end of the world, vampires, Christmas). In the traditional publishing world, they are often curated and edited by a recognized name. They can feature original works, include a mixture of new and reprint stories, or be themed reprint anthologies.

Tesseracts, an annual science fiction-and fantasy-themed anthology that features Canadian writers, is an example of a traditionally published anthology. Mark served as editor for Tesseracts Sixteen and was a contributing author for Tesseracts Seventeen.

Before, During, and After, an anthology edited and published by J. Thorn and Zach Bohannan, includes Mark’s short story “Piss & Vinegar” and is an example of an independently-published anthology.

There are two different roles you may play in the construction of an anthology (or you may play both roles for a particular anthology).

Participating Author

We would all love to sit back and wait for requests to roll in to include a piece of our short fiction in an anthology, but it’s a select few authors who enjoy that position. However, don’t underestimate the opportunities created by networking; writers’ groups and conferences are great places to expand your contacts with fellow authors. Matty was invited to participate in the anthology Noir at a Bar: The Oxford Files through a writers’ group contact. Mark’s sale of a story to the Fiction River anthology series eventually led to him becoming a series editor for the ongoing projects.

You can also improve your likelihood of being invited to participate in an anthology by being a good citizen of the writing world; if you’ve helped out a fellow author, they’re more likely to think of you if they are curating an anthology, or if they know someone who is.

Once your piece of short fiction is chosen for an anthology, you have a responsibility to promote the anthology to your fans and followers in your email newsletter, on social media, and on any other platform you use to connect with your readers. Make sure your curator knows about your marketing efforts. If your curator knows that you are doing your bit to spread the word about the anthology, you increase your chances of having that curator choose your work for a future anthology.

Curator

For ultimate control over the anthology, consider acting as the curator. As the curator, you choose what work is included and from which authors, manage the cover design, and create marketing copy. You are responsible for communicating on an ongoing basis with the participating authors, providing them with the materials with which to promote the anthology (for example, images or text to use on social media or their websites), and incenting them to actively promote the work.

The role of curator also comes with the opportunity for increased income since the anthology curator generally gets a bigger share of the royalties than the participating authors to compensate him or her for this extra work.

Before deciding to take on this role, consider the time it will take (and, as always, weigh the benefits against other uses to which you might put this time, like writing). The time investment will be not just in the reading, editing, and publishing work, but in all of the additional tasks that come with overseeing an entirely new publication. Remember that unlike publishing a book that is solely your own work, you’ll be juggling a host of complex unknowns involving many other people, each with their own creative vision.

Should you choose to take on this role, here are some curatorial tips:

Determine the goal. We have categorized anthologies as an income creation strategy, but they also provide significant reader connection opportunities; consider which of these is primary because it will impact other decisions you make about your anthology.

Determine the number of participating authors. The more authors who are represented in an anthology, the more cross-promotional opportunities there are, and the more sales opportunities due to the large number of interested readers that the participating authors bring. However, a large number of authors also means that the proceeds will be split across a large number of people. Although there’s no formula to calculate the ideal number of authors to include, consider both the income creation and the reader connection goals of the anthology.

Determine the authors to approach. You may be tempted to stick to the safe path of inviting authors you know personally to participate in the anthology. However, unless at least one of those authors has an established following, you are limiting your income creation and reader connection opportunities. Consider approaching authors who are a bit ahead of you in their author careers, and consider giving them added incentive to participate, such as a higher percentage of the royalties. As always, weigh the potential benefit of enlisting a particular author to your anthology against the time needed to pursue those authors and the likelihood of them accepting your invitation. You could invest a couple of hours crafting an invitation to Stephen King to participate in your horror anthology (with, we predict, little chance of success) or spend those couple of hours approaching an established but not-currently-bestselling author (with a greater chance of success).

Communicate goals and ground rules. Share your goals for the anthology with the authors you approach to participate. They need to be able to assess whether their goals for their short fiction align with your goals for your anthology. Sharing your goals for the anthology will also ensure that the authors are willing to comply with the plan that needs to be executed to achieve those goals. For example, if your goal is to produce steady, if small, income over time, then it’s important that your participating authors are prepared to keep their piece of short fiction in the anthology for an extended period of time.

Matty once curated an anthology of first-in-series crime novels featuring female protagonists and was thrilled to enlist a well-known author in the genre. However, shortly after the anthology was published to all the major online retailers, that author’s publisher decided to make that novel exclusive to Amazon, and so that novel had to be pulled from the anthology and the entire anthology had to be unpublished. That disappointing outcome might have been avoided if Matty had been clearer about the requirement to have the work available non-exclusively for a specified period of time.

As curator, you’ll have to handle the production and publishing of the book, as well as the division of royalties from the anthology sales. Fortunately, there are a couple services to help you manage and organize this work efficiently.

StoryBundle is a service that creates ebook bundles that are available for a limited time; readers pay whatever they choose. The StoryBundle team collaborates with curators, generally writers and editors who are well-connected within the community from which stories will be solicited. For example, Dean Wesley Smith acted as a StoryBundle curator for an anthology with a “saving the world” theme, and contacted Mark asking if he had any appropriate works for the bundle.

If you’re not being approached by authors for a StoryBundle, you can also request that your work be considered for a bundle by e-mailing the StoryBundle team.

In 2019 for ebooks, StoryBundle was Mark’s largest income stream, exceeding even Amazon—this despite (or perhaps because of) StoryBundle’s philosophy that readers pay whatever they think the bundle is worth.

BundleRabbit allows you to upload short stories (as well as novels) to an online marketplace, from which independent curators (not BundleRabbit itself) can select for digital anthologies or bundles. Curators might go to the marketplace to identify a set of books that conform to a certain theme, as reflected in the story’s metadata, then request you as the author to approve your book to be included in that bundle. BundleRabbit offers the opportunity for anyone to curate a bundle.

Unlike StoryBundle, BundleRabbit bundles can be available for extended periods, and the longer the anthology is available, the longer it will continue to earn you and your anthology partners money with no additional work on your part. One of the things that can limit the money-making potential of a bundle is if one of the participating authors decides to withdraw from the bundle—for example, in order to go exclusive on Amazon. This means that the entire bundle will need to be unpublished.

Note from Jane: if you enjoyed this post, check out Matty and Mark’s book Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction.

Developing a Writing Practice, Part 3: Important

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She offers a first 50-page review on works in progress for novelists seeking direction on their next step toward publishing.

In part three of this series based on Sean D. Young’s bestselling book Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life—for Good, we’re taking a look at the I in SCIENCE, Young’s acronym for those strategies that lead to lasting change: Important.

The world is full of people who “want to write a book someday,” but few are those who manage to find the time to do so amid the myriad other commitments in their lives. What makes those people different?

In Chapter 4 of his book, Young shares the story of Suzette, a real estate agent with a busy full-time practice who nonetheless manages to find the time to write a blog on the topic of prescription drug abuse, and to lobby politicians to pass legislation that makes it harder for prescription drugs to fall into the wrong hands. She’s even working on a book about it.

How does Suzette manage to find the time to do all that? She finds the time because her son died of an opioid overdose. For her, the issue of prescription drug abuse is important.

A lot of the people who genuinely want to write a book never do so, because they never find a reason to prioritize their writing practice. That was the case with one of my book-coaching clients—until one of his sons died from cancer.

Knowing his father’s lifelong dream of being an author, his son told him before he passed, “Dad, write that book.” Ever since then, writing has been a priority for this client.

I was honored that my client trusted me with such a deeply personal story. And so I shared one in turn that’s deeply personal for me: when I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 38, I realized there were just a few things I was really upset about, and one of them was not having published a book.

I mean, this was a lifelong dream of mine. How could I have failed to prioritize it? I decided right then and there that I would—and happily, I lived to tell the tale. (Literally! My first novel was published in 2016; in 2021, an anthology I’ve edited will join it on my bookshelf.)

But if writing and publishing a book is on your “bucket list,” there’s no need to wait until life reminds you of your mortality. You can make writing a priority right now.

Consider the following strategies for reminding yourself just how important writing is to you, and using that awareness to galvanize your practice:

1. Vision Board

A vision board is a strategy many writers use to bring themselves deeper into the world of their story, but it can also serve another purpose, by reminding you how much time and energy you’ve already dedicated to the task of envisioning, planning, and developing your book.

If that project weren’t important, you wouldn’t have done that, would you?

A vision board sends a clear signal: This project is a priority.

2. Heroes

One way to remind yourself of just how important writing is to you is to surround yourself with reminders of who your heroes are and what their work means to you. Maybe you pin a quote from a favorite writer on your fridge, or affix a photograph of a beloved author to the wall by your desk (I love this series of photos taken of famous authors in their writing spaces).

The author Tayari Jones went even further, by making a pilgrimage to Lorain, Ohio, the birthplace of her literary hero, Toni Morrison, and collecting a sample of dirt there—because to her, this author’s birthplace is literally hallowed ground. That dirt sits in a jar on her writing desk as a reminder of just how much Morrison means to her.

3. Write First Thing

Another way to send the message to yourself that writing is important is simply to make it the first thing you do in the morning, before checking email or social media.

This practice coincides with the advice of many productivity experts, who advise us to do “one high-value thing” each morning before going online, and it’s something I recommend to all of my coaching clients—not only because it tends to be a big help in developing a regular writing practice, but also because it’s a good mental health practice in general, especially in times of uncertainty and unrest in the world at large (like, say, a global pandemic).

Different strategies will work for different people. For some, spending the money required to work with a book coach or editor is what makes writing feel important (because who wants to waste their hard-earned cash?). For others, it’s the social contract of a critique group that does the trick.

Whatever does it for you, remember: No matter how busy our lives are, we find the time for what’s important to us. Finding ways to remind yourself of your commitment to writing, and moreover, why it matters to you, can do a lot to help you find that time, and establish a regular practice.

Instead of Setting a Goal, Try a Writing Dare

Photo credit: David McA Photographs on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Today’s guest post is by author Susann Cokal (@CokalSusann).

You’ve waited all year for vacation, and you’ve decided to spend it at home, at your desk, writing. You have weeks, maybe even months, of unstructured time. You also have a goal: You are going to write and write and write.

Except you don’t.

Or you’ve carefully carved out two hours a day in which you’re not on the job, you don’t have housework or kids to look after, you’re in a quiet room, and you’re ready to create.

But you don’t.

I won’t even mention quarantine—who can get anything done in a pandemic? It’s hard to look at that kind of free time as a blessing. But you’ve resolved to try … and it isn’t coming.

Well, maybe you write a page, but you aren’t particularly happy with it, and since you can now say you’ve written something, you dwell on what makes you so unhappy until it’s time to go walk the dog.

What happened? Why is this gift of time so unproductive—and what can you do to change it into the creative idyll you’ve been anticipating?

We’re used to structured and scheduled time, a day broken into blocks of an hour or fifteen minutes. At home, we naturally drift—pick up books to read, check out the latest on climate change. This drifting is important for a writer; you need your daydreaming time.

But I don’t need to tell you that creative work also needs focus and structure. Goals, yes, but maybe not the kind that you’re used to.

In fact, what you need isn’t actually a goal, it’s a challenge. A dare, if you will.

Here’s what I told my students when they asked, nervously, just how much they should get done over a break. It’s what I also tell myself when I’m making plans for finishing (or starting) a long project:

Aim for a little more than you think you can accomplish.

I’m not talking about wild intentions to write 30 pages a day—that’s crazy pressure to put on yourself, and chances are you’ll break down in frustration if you try to do it for even a couple of days. Or, maybe even worse, you’ll write just to keep the page count rolling over, and you’ll pad your work with extra description and sloppy tangents until you can’t see your characters any more.

I faced this kind of time—unwelcome—with my latest novel, Mermaid Moon. I was trying to recover from a pesky brain injury of long reach; my health got worse, and there wasn’t much structure to my life other than pain pain pain and why are you so confused and silent.

But a story occurred to me, a spin on old fairy tales: A mermaid goes to land to find her mother, who is said to have been an ordinary human. The mermaid also figures out what she wants from her life and the work she needs to do among her people.

So I had an idea; I had time; but how was I going to write it when I couldn’t even read?

I dared myself.

My thinking has always been that if you assess, realistically, what you are able to do in the time you have—let’s say a couple of weeks—you will underestimate what you can actually do. You might think you can produce, say, 40 creditable pages. That’s a good, solid number. If you were your own employee, you’d sign off on the memo and be pleased when the employee (you) actually delivered.

Now try telling yourself that you’re going to write 50 pages. That’s a less reasonable goal, but it’s a good dare. It feels just a bit out of reach, yet not too far beyond what you know you can do.

If you end up with 50 pages you like, wonderful, and you will be very proud of yourself. Even if you don’t quite make it, you can still be proud, because you’ve done good work and almost conquered an ambitious challenge. You came a long way.

What you won’t do is meet a too-easy goal and then stop writing—or write slowly because, after all, you’re only planning to produce 40 pages … even though writing is, in a way, relaxing—it’s that thing that clamors for attention until you give in, and you feel much better afterward.

See, there’s one danger in setting your goals within easy reach, and that danger is that you will actually meet them. When most people meet a goal, they pause for a breather. It’s only natural; marathon runners don’t keep jogging for a few more miles past the finish line.

Or if a group gets half an hour to invent a story together, they will insist on using the full time, even if the actual writing takes only fifteen minutes. Speaking for myself, if I say I’m going to write 100 pages in a month and I get there by the end of week three, I’m going to relax a bit. Until my natural-born anxiety starts prodding me to get up and do something more.

Anne Lamott’s bible for writers, Bird by Bird, offers what might seem like the opposite advice. She says you should look at the world through a window the size of a postage stamp and give yourself small assignments, especially when you’re just starting out. And that is great advice. We simply must let ourselves do small assignments that lead to the other famous takeaway from Lamott’s book, shitty first drafts.

Lamott’s great advice doesn’t make mine any less great. A single small assignment can lead to a novel of five hundred pages, but to get that novel done, you’ll have to keep one eye on the horizon, the amount you can get done in two weeks or a month—the book you’ve been intending to write. You need a lot of small assignments, and you need to set yourself a challenge.

I’ve had students come back from a break talking excitedly about having done much more than they believed they were capable of—good work that propelled their novels and story collections not only toward graduation but also toward publication. Maybe they finished the dare and maybe they didn’t, but they all surprised themselves with how much they accomplished by pursuing a goal that was in sight but seemingly just out of reach.

It worked for me too. As I lay in bed, I imagined the story as I lay in my darkened room. Then I told myself to try writing it down, in bed with eyes closed and a laptop propped on my knees, a few pages a day. Just a little more than I thought I could manage, when I thought I could barely manage anything.

The first draft of Mermaid Moon was a mess. So I dared myself to revise, and I started writing from the beginning. In a few years, I had a manuscript—which I hadn’t truly believed I could ever produce.

Give this a try for two weeks, whatever kind of time you have: Set yourself a reasonable goal, then dare yourself to exceed that by about 15 percent.

Wouldn’t you like to be surprised?

I was.

Developing a Writing Practice, Part 2: Community

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She offers a first 50-page review on works in progress for novelists seeking direction on their next step toward publishing.

In part two of this series based on Sean D. Young’s bestselling book Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life—for Good, we’re taking a look at the C in SCIENCE, Young’s acronym for those strategies that lead to lasting change: Community.

Writing is by nature a solitary process, and many of those who dream of one day publishing a novel will labor on it alone, in fits and starts, over the period of many years—sometimes even a decade or more. This often results in a manuscript that never gets finished, and a “bucket list” dream that remains unfulfilled.

Establishing a regular writing practice is a stronger strategy for completion than just working when inspiration hits, or when you “have the time,” and harnessing the power of community is one way to make a writing practice a priority, even in the midst of life’s chaos.

In Chapter 3 of Stick with It, Young cites the examples of Alcoholics Anonymous, Facebook, and a special online community he helped to create aimed at getting men to prioritize their health, emphasizing the power of what psychologists call “the social magnet.” In each of these cases, the power of the bond that forms between people with something important in common—and in some cases, a common goal—had a huge effect in getting them to take action, by staying clean and sober, scrolling through their social media feeds on a daily basis, or getting tested for HIV, respectively.

For the writer who struggles to establish a regular practice, that kind of community might be a critique group, wherein members meet regularly to share and discuss their work. Such groups can be invaluable for the insight they deliver on our creative work, but just as often, it’s the power of the community itself, and the social contract we’ve entered into by joining one, that keeps us turning out the pages.

The sense of being seen and applauded for our small victories—the fine turn of phrase, the strong sense of place in a scene—is part of the motivation here as well. And the knowledge that others struggle with the same sorts of things we do can also be hugely encouraging.

We are by nature social beings, and part of why establishing a writing practice can feel like “going against the grain” is the sense that doing so is selfish, in that it takes away from the time we have for others (especially for women, who are often socialized to put the needs of others first). Part of the power of a critique group is that it’s no longer just about us, it’s about the agreement we’ve entered into with these people that we feel a common bond with—people who are on the same journey we are.

If an in-person critique group isn’t something that’s available to you, an online group can produce much the same results. Maybe your Facebook writers group isn’t eagerly awaiting your next 20 pages, but if you said last week that your goal was to get in three writing sessions that week—or to produce 2,000 words—the science around behavior change says that you’re going to be more motivated to do so, and to share that small victory with the group, thereby galvanizing others to do the same.

And if sometimes you’re the one who fails to meet their goal, while others meet theirs, there’s a lot more incentive to get back on the horse, so to speak, rather than continue to lie there on the ground.

Other avenues for utilizing the power of community include taking writing classes or attending workshops or conferences—opportunities that are increasingly available online, as platforms and presenters have pivoted to serve writers (and would-be writers) stuck at home under quarantine.

However you choose to do it, connecting with a writing community can help to provide both accountability and camaraderie, which will help you maintain your writing practice in the face of life’s ups and downs. As that process becomes more routine, you may find yourself offering encouragement and mentorship to others who are just starting out, which not only feels good, but further strengthens the social magnet.

So if you find yourself struggling to establish a regular writing practice, either because you’re just starting out or because you’ve spent some time away from writing, don’t feel like you have to go it alone—others are on the same journey, ready to offer encouragement when the going gets tough, and ready to applaud your hard-earned victories. We might be working alone, but we’re all in this together.

Email Newsletters for Authors: Get Started Guide

by lamazone / via Flickr

Note from Jane: On Wednesday, April 8, I’m offering an online class on Email Newsletters for Authors. The following post, originally from 2015, has been updated and expanded.

Early in actor Bryan Cranston’s career, when his gigs were primarily composed of guest-starring TV roles in Matlock and Murder, She Wrote, he sent postcards to casting directors about his upcoming appearances. He told the New Yorker, “I knew 99 percent of them wouldn’t watch, but my face and name would get in front of them, and it would plant the subliminal message ‘He works a lot, this guy!’”

Later on, when he received three Emmy nominations for his role as the dad in Malcolm in the Middle, he took out “for your consideration” ads promoting his work. He said, “The whole idea is to put yourself in a position to be recognized for your work so opportunities increase. False humility or even laziness could prevent that.”

If Cranston’s career had begun in the Internet era, his communication tool of choice might have been the email newsletter rather than the postcard. While email lists have many uses (from selling your books to delivering paid subscription content), their most immediate use for freelance writers and authors is to keep readers and professional connections informed about what you’re doing.

Regular email contact with your readers creates a long string of impressions, so that your name stays at the forefront of their mind. When an opportunity arises—a book club needs a new book to read, a publication is searching for a freelancer to hire, a journalist is looking for a good interview subject, or a conference needs speakers—people are far more likely to think of you if they frequently see your name.

Because most people are overwhelmed with unwanted email, it may seem counterintuitive to categorize the email newsletter as one of the more effective, even intimate, forms of digital communication. However, email has so far proven to be a more long-term and stable tool than social media, which is constantly shifting. Emails can’t be missed like a social media post that disappears in readers’ feeds as more posts follow it. You truly own your email list, unlike Facebook or Twitter accounts. And if you use people’s email addresses with respect (more on that in a minute), those addresses can become resources that grow more valuable over time.

So let’s take a look at the big picture first, then the technical bits.

Developing an Email Newsletter Strategy

Decide on your frequency and stick with it (at least for a while). Your efforts will be doubly successful if you’re consistent. For example, freelance journalist Ann Friedman (no relation) sends an email newsletter that reliably arrives on Friday afternoons. Weekly is a common frequency, as is monthly, but the most important criterion is what you can commit to. Warning: If you choose a low frequency (bimonthly or quarterly), you run the risk of people forgetting they signed up, which then leads to unsubscribes. However, the more familiar your name is to subscribers (or the bigger fans they are), the less likely you’ll encounter this problem.

It’s OK if your emails are short and sweet. Hardly anyone will complain that your emails are too short; the more frequently you send, the shorter your emails should probably be. It can also help to deliver the same structure every time. Every newsletter Ann Friedman sends has links to what she’s recently published and what she’s been reading, plus an animated GIF of the week. I send out my free newsletter Electric Speed every two weeks with a list of digital tools and resources I’ve recently discovered.

Be specific and honest about what people are signing up for. You should create a newsletter sign-up form that tells people what they get if they subscribe. The sign-up for the Brain Pickings newsletter by Maria Popova says, “Brain Pickings has a free weekly interestingness digest. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles.” It’s also helpful to link to your newsletter archives so people can read first before committing.

So what do you put in this newsletter?

The only limit is your imagination, and while the intent is to keep your name and work in front of people, you also want to keep things interesting—which means trying to provide value or otherwise focus on other people or quality content.

Ask yourself: What do you love sharing with other people? What are you already curating or collecting? What do people ask you about all the time? What do you have special insight or expertise on?

The most common content strategies Media consumption list. This is where you curate the best stuff you saw, read, listened to, ate, visited, played, and so on. Austin Kleon’s newsletter is a media consumption list. Many newsletters ultimately can be boiled down to: Here’s the cool stuff I think you might be interested in too. This is a great approach for beginners. Behind the scenes. This is where you offer a peek behind the curtain of your current project, bringing fans along for the ride, giving them exclusive access to your creative process. This usually only works if (1) people are avidly awaiting your next book and want to know what’s coming, or (2) you’re a celebrity author, and/or (3) you’re very entertaining at writing about such things. Not everyone is. Content driven. This is less common because it takes more work: it’s where you deliver original content for just your email newsletter. But it does pay off over time. You might run author Q&As if you’re a novelist, offer how-to articles and tips if you’re a nonfiction author, or share short stories, poems, or brief essays. If you put a lot of original content into your email newsletter, you can always revise or repurpose it later into a book. News and events. This is ideal for people who have a lot going on with their career, with many resources or opportunities that readers might be interested in. Informal personal writing. Such newsletters are typically informed by what happened to the author in the last week or two, or by recent headlines. Some can pull this off beautifully. I am not one of them. Anne Helen Peterson does this well, and combines it with a link roundup.Handling Subscriber Fatigue

Because the word is now out about the power of email marketing, it may feel like every journalist and author has a newsletter. You may receive several a day and have little time to read them all. Study your own behavior with such emails: How much do you read? What catches your eye? Where’s the value that prevents you from unsubscribing? Assume subscribers won’t open every message and will skim your content. For this reason, it’s important to:

Craft a unique subject line for every send to differentiate the issues. (It’s possible to successfully break this rule; just be cautious about doing so.)Make your content easy to scan at a glance, assuming that makes sense for the content you’re sending. Subheads, lists, bolded text, and other visual cues can help readers quickly find what interests them.A table of contents is essential for lengthy newsletters, and sometimes even short ones!Include important links at least twice. If you use HTML in your newsletters, buttons work wonders for any call to action (e.g., a link to buy your book).

Because so many newsletters focus on “great things I’ve read/consumed”—which adds to people’s time burden—be sensitive to the commitment you’re asking from readers to pay attention and take your recommendations seriously. Is it possible to go against the grain and save people time? What if your readers want to simplify and don’t need more stuff to do? See the end of this article for more suggestions about long-term growth and management.

Starting and Building an Email Newsletter List

Before you start building an email newsletter list, it’s best to have your own website or blog. While you could start by putting out calls on social media, too, over the long term, social media calls aren’t the best solution, since they require active marketing on your part and are reliant on time-based feeds and platforms controlled by others. Putting a sign-up form on your website (see instructions below) is an essential marketing strategy: the list should grow without you having to do anything, assuming your site gets even a small amount of traffic.

Aside from your own website, the only tool you need is a formal email newsletter service that automates the subscription process, stores the subscriber email addresses, and archives newsletter issues. Some of the most popular services are:

MailChimpMailerLiteSubstack

I use MailChimp partly for legacy reasons—I’ve been there for 10+ years now. It also happens to be free until you reach 2,000 names. That said, the more economical choice, and the one favored by authors, is MailerLite (free until 1,000 names). Substack is most popular with journalists, freelancers, and others who think they might charge for their newsletter in the future.

Most email services work on a double opt-in basis. This means that when someone subscribes to your newsletter, she has to confirm again (by clicking on a link in an email) that she truly wants to subscribe. This is a best practice and will avoid your building a poor-quality list.

This brings up one of the biggest rules of running an email newsletter: While it is possible to manually add names to your list (without confirmation), never add someone unless she gives you permission to do so. The No. 1 reason email newsletters get a bad reputation is because people break this rule all the time. Just because you connect with someone on LinkedIn or through a conference, or she posts her email address on her website, doesn’t mean you have permission to add that person to your email newsletter list.

Before you start sending or publicizing your email newsletter, take care of the following housekeeping items.

Customize your subscribe/unsubscribe forms. You can customize the header, the text, and what information you collect from subscribers. To get the highest number of sign-ups, you should only ask for the email address and subscriber name (and even make the name optional). However, you can ask for nearly any kind of information you like, and use that information later to target your messages to specific subscribers. That makes your list more valuable, but it will reduce the number of sign-ups. You can also customize the confirmation, thank-you, and unsubscribe messages that people receive. Decide what mailing address to use. Federal law requires that anyone sending email in bulk or for marketing purposes include an unsubscribe option (this will be included automatically in your messages), and also a physical mailing address. Individuals who want or need to maintain privacy often fudge on this without repercussions. Add the sign-up link or code to your website. Regardless of the service you choose, it will provide you with several ways to offer your sign-up form to subscribers. Generally, you either link to the sign-up form directly at your service’s site (e.g., MailChimp), or you can embed the sign-up directly into your website—on a page, a post, or on a header, footer, or sidebar area. You don’t need to know or understand code to do this; providers like MailChimp give you the code to paste into your site and it works automagically. You will get more subscribers if you embed the sign-up into your site. Decide whether to include an “ethical bribe.” Some people offer a free digital download to entice people to sign up for their email newsletter. While this will definitely boost your sign-ups, it can also lead to lower-quality names, or people who will unsubscribe once they have the freebie.

A final note about your list: Pay your readers the utmost respect by never selling their information or sending strong, impersonal sales and marketing messages (also known as blasts). Most people will sign up for your newsletter because they want to hear from you personally. Maintain subscriber trust by keeping the messages as intimate as possible and in your voice.

Other Types of Email Newsletters

There is much more to the world of email marketing and email content strategy. Consider if any of these models fit your work as well:

RSS-based email newsletter. You can schedule and design emails to automatically send whenever a specific RSS feed is updated. In plain English, this means that if you have a blog, you can schedule daily or weekly emails to go out that include notification of new posts, excerpts of posts, or the full text of new posts. (Note: This functionality can be had for free through WordPress.com and Google FeedBurner, but you have no or very little control over what the emails look like and what content is included.) Paid subscription. Some services, like Substack, allow you to charge subscribers to receive your email newsletter. It probably goes without saying, but before you charge, think carefully about what content you’re providing that would motivate people to pay, even if it’s just a few bucks. In this scenario, your content shouldn’t focus on marketing yourself, but on serving a readership. Auto-responders. These are a way to automate a series of email messages that people receive in a very specific order upon subscribing. Common uses of auto-responders include self-study courses via email (which can be free or paid) and a series of introductory messages that help people understand your universe of offerings. Auto-responders make sense for writers with very complex or extended online content or offerings, and are also used by internet marketers to funnel people toward the purchase of high-value, high-price products.Growing and Improving Your Email Newsletter

If you’ve already experimented with email newsletters, then you know the toughest part is long-term engagement and list growth. You can feel it when your list begins to stall, when even you aren’t that excited about putting out another issue. Don’t hesitate to shift strategy when your content feels stale and your metrics flatten or decline; your readers are likely suffering from the same boredom you are.

My own newsletter has evolved several times over ten years. It began as a periodic update about new handouts, worksheets, and presentation slides I had created for conferences. After two years, it became a general roundup of cool digital stuff I liked. This past year, I have extended its length to include reader-contributed suggestions as well as classified ads.

While you should pay attention to how your subscriber list responds to your messages (your open rates and click rates), since these indicate where reader interest lies, consider the following to boost engagement:

Improve your sign-up copy. Saying “Sign up for my free newsletter” isn’t terribly exciting or likely to get you subscribers. Can you ask people to sign up without using the words “free,” “newsletter,” or “sign up”? Put the sign-up in your own voice, so that it speaks directly to your ideal reader. Be direct and conversational with your subscribers: Ask them at the end of your newsletter to respond with what they liked or didn’t like. Ask them what they’d like to see next. Consider adding a reader-contributed segment to your newsletter to build response, interaction, and open rates. Try a simple A/B test on your subject line. An A/B test is when you create two newsletters, but change one single quality, and test them against each other (by sending to a small portion of your list) to see which performs better. I recommend testing your subject line to find out what leads to better open rates, so over time you know exactly what triggers your readers to open your messages. Serializations can work wonders. This is why auto-responders are so effective for things like 30-day courses, because people are on the hook and looking forward to the next day’s lesson. If you’re a fiction writer or poet, you can use the same technique with readers or give yourself the same creative challenge. While it needn’t be daily (or even weekly), what could you divide into installments, or how could you leave people with a bit of a cliffhanger? Add bookends. The BoSacks newsletter, focused on the magazine industry, always begins with an interesting image and a quote, then ends with another, often amusing, image. Regular readers open up the message and scroll to the end just to see what’s there. How could you close your newsletters? Evaluate your image use. If your emails are primarily image-driven, then test how your emails look when the images do not load. Can people still see the most important information or calls to action?Parting advice

It’s easy to pigeonhole email as a very practical (even boring) communication, but it can be used as a creative publishing medium that’s easy to read, share, save, and later repurpose into something else. What if you had a limited-time email newsletter that delivered a specific story series? What if you changed the theme of your newsletter every month (kind of like Grant Achatz’s Chicago restaurant Next, which changes style every few months)? What if a reader had to search for clues in each newsletter? Expand your idea of what email can do.

More Resources No Unicorns: The Right Way to Grow Your Personal Mailing List by Paul Jarvis (99U) How to Create a Self-Paced Email Course by Paul Jarvis (Smashing Magazine)Kirsten Oliphant has written extensively about email marketing here at this site.

Note from Jane: On Wednesday, April 8, I’m offering an online class on Email Newsletters for Authors.

Writing from the Bottom Rung: How to Sustain Your Creativity During a Pandemic

Photo credit: ilandil on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Today’s guest post is by writer, coach and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison (@lisaellisonspen).

Quarantine day one. I sit at my desk and hold my pen. Nothing happens.

Quarantine day two. I stare at my computer screen and wonder what the hell is wrong. I mean, I wrote through Lyme disease, even on the days when my brain barely worked.

Quarantine day three. I scribble in my notebook. There are no words even though I feel so full of words I might explode.

Quarantine day four: I scribble and remember that time my dad said, “Don’t be so sensitive,” as if my greatest gift was really a curse. As my pen slides across the page, I realize I’m saying this very thing to myself. Don’t be so sensitive. Don’t be so sensitive even though it feels like the world is falling apart.

Maybe you’re sensitive too. Maybe all this suffering hurts deep in your marrow. Maybe the fear is like lightening coursing through your nerves. Maybe you’re expecting yourself to write as if this is not happening, somehow thinking all this free time will make you more productive.

All writing requires a certain amount of heart space. We tap into our feelings and memories so readers can inhabit our story worlds. Keeping your heart open enough to do this requires an energy reserve large enough to feel and deal with daily life.

Creative nonfiction, which often mines from our most painful experiences, requires an even bigger reserve.

Right now, our hearts are filled with COVID-19 cases and deaths, and which relative might be at risk, or which grocery store has the food I can eat—or better yet, toilet paper—or how much space is required to actually socially distance or how I will get paid or when will this end.

The bottom two rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs include our physical needs for food, water, warmth and rest as well as security. The top rung—self-actualization—is where creativity happens. Many of us are just not there, yet.

So, what do you do when your creative desires don’t match your rung?

Focus on those bottom-rung needs. Make sure you have enough healthy food to eat. Rest more than you think you need. Turn your house into a sanctuary. Exercise outside when possible. Help yourself feel safe. Stay home as much as you can. Wash your hands. Limit your news intake. Journal about your fears so they can live on the page instead of inside you. Develop a gratitude practice that helps you pay attention to what is going well. Tap into your wisdom. Practice meditation. Download the Insight Timer app on your phone. Set aside some time to just breathe. If you’re looking for a guide, consider Tara Brach or sign up for Deepak Chopra’s free 21-day meditation challenge. If sitting feels impossible, try walking meditations or join that YouTube yoga class everyone’s talking about. Accept what is. We are living through a pandemic. If your mind is swirling with worries, or your day is focused on getting the kids to do that one online lesson, or you’re trying to figure out how to pay your rent, you’re not wasting your creative time. You’re just living from the bottom rung. Before you can climb, you have to make sure your current rung is sturdy enough to support you. Keep showing up. Sit at your desk and try to write. If your work-in-progress calls to you, say thank you. If there’s silence, thank your unconscious for reminding you to practice self-care. Have faith that your pre-COVID-19 projects are still valuable. You will return to them when the time is right. Pivot. Maybe now is not the time to work on your memoir or the novel that taps into a deep emotional vein. Keep a journal. Write a blog post or essay. Try poetry or fiction. Switching genres might help you exercise the heart space that is available for creativity.

There is strength in numbers, so I’m offering a mindfulness-based writing class, Writing Through Challenging Times. It’s a class about pivoting and playing and activating our internal wisdom. We’ll commit to self-care and perform acts of kindness in their communities. Each week, we’ll sit at our desks and try. Some of us will scribble a few words. Others will jot down new ideas. A few will dive into their works in progress. Old messages will surface. Together, we’ll combat them. Success depends only on showing up. As a team, we’ll rebuild our energy reserves. In the process, creativity will happen.

What practices or methods have helped you during this challenging spring? Share with us in the comments.

Developing a Writing Practice, Part 1: Stepladders

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She offers a first 50-page review on works in progress for novelists seeking direction on their next step toward publishing.

Recently, while browsing through ebooks available via my Sribd subscription, I came across Sean D. Young’s Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life—For Good.

The author is the director of the UCLA Center for Digital Behavior, and in this book, he shares the principles behind lasting behavioral change, backed by cutting-edge science. It occurred to me as I read it that these strategies could be especially useful for anyone struggling to establish a regular practice, and for those who’ve taken a break from writing as well.

Young’s acronym for those behaviors that lead to lasting change is SCIENCE, and the first of the strategies he outlines is the first S in that acronym: Stepladders.

Often we’re often told to focus on our big dream, our vision of the end result, as a motivating force for changing our behavior, but Young notes that numerous case studies actually indicate that we’re better served by focusing on the small steps that will get us there, and the short-term goals we can celebrate along the way.

“For example,” Young says, “you could either make a resolution to lose ten pounds before a wedding next month, or you could plan to go to the gym today. How exciting is it to make a resolution to go to the gym today? Not very.”

It’s a lot more fun, he notes, to dream of the end result. But focusing entirely on that big dream can actually cause you to become discouraged and quit because that dream is too big or too far in the future. The author notes that we’re generally more motivated by the process of achieving short-term goals, which increase our sense of self-efficacy—basically, our sense that change is attainable.

For writers, the big dream is often crystal clear. We want to finish that book (the one we’ve written just a few chapters of). We want to land an agent (for the novel we have yet to revise). We want to land a book deal and become a bestseller (though we know our manuscript is still far from polished).

Focusing on the big dream in such cases may not actually be all that helpful.

What can be helpful is focusing on the steps we can take now to get there, and, just as importantly, making sure those steps are small enough.

As a book coach, I’ve had many clients who struggle to find the time to write, though time itself isn’t usually the issue. (After all, we all tend to find time to scroll through our social media feeds and watch our favorite TV shows.) The issue is that these writers have set the bar so high for themselves, in terms of establishing a writing practice, that they inevitably disappoint themselves.

These are the clients who are just setting off on their journey as writers but have decided they will write for two hours three times a week, or for an hour every day, or for five hours every Sunday. More often than not, they fail to meet those goals, because they’re trying to get there too quickly.

If this sounds like you, what you probably need is a series of smaller, more achievable short-term goals—or, in Young’s parlance, a stepladder.

For a new writer, here’s an example of what the steps in such a stepladder might look like:

1. Monday: Prewrite
Taking the time to make notes about your story, your characters, and what your vision for it is—not just at the level of the finished story, but at the level of Chapter One, Scene One—can do a lot to prime the creative pump, making the actual writing much easier. (Plus, brainstorming tends to create less of a sense of pressure than actually sitting down to write).

2. Wednesday: Write (20–30 minutes)
Many people feel like if they can’t dedicate at least an hour to their writing practice, there’s no point in even trying. But when you have a clear idea of what you’d like to achieve at the level of the scene or chapter (see above), it can be a lot easier to make use of a short burst of time. (If it helps to keep you from overthinking it, set a timer for yourself as a motivator to keep writing forward.)

3. Friday: Revise and Write Forward (30–40 minutes)
Many writers find it easier to revise than to draft, and smoothing back over the last section you wrote can help to create a “runway” for writing more. As you revise, remember: You’re not trying to perfect this section of your story, you’re just trying to make it a little better.

For a writer who’s struggling to dig back into a complete draft of a manuscript and revise, the steps on their stepladder might look different, but within the scope of that big project, each step will still be small. For example:

1. Week One: Full read-through of manuscript with notes and brainstorm
If you find yourself struggling to revise, a good place to start is to print out the full manuscript and do a full read-though of the manuscript as it stands, making a note of the big-picture issues you’re seeing. (Don’t get caught up in the small stuff, though, unless you know the story itself is already sound.) After you’ve gotten a handle on these, brainstorm: What are some fixes you can see for these issues?

2. Week Two: Read through with highlighters and chapter notes
From here, you might go back through the MS and note where the issues you’re seeing show up in the manuscript. If it helps, use a different color of highlighter to track each issue across the manuscript—and as you go, create a list of chapter notes, addressing the things that need to change in each chapter to complete your overall revision.

3. Week Three: Revise Chapter 1
Revise Chapter 1, based on your chapter notes. Remember, you don’t have to “perfect” that chapter—you just need to check off the items in your notes for revising that chapter.

Different strategies will work for different writers, and for those at different points in their development: For some, a daily word count goal is a great motivator, while others find it helpful to focus on a time-based one. The key to applying the science around Stepladders is simply to make your first step small enough to feel achievable, and, just as importantly, to celebrate the achievement of those small, short-term goals—because it’s in the process of looking back and realizing that you’ve hit your short-term goals that you’ll build that sense of self-efficacy.

Too often in the rush to achieve our big dreams, we overlook how far we’ve already come. Take the time to celebrate the small steps and the little victories—in time, they really can add up to big ones.

Peer Critique Versus Professional Editing: When, Why and How to Use Both

Today’s guest post is by author Barbara Linn Probst, whose debut novel, Queen of the Owls, will be released on April 7.

At some point in the process of writing a book—or, more likely, at several points—we ask others to let us know what they think. Developmental editors, critique partners, beta readers, workshop leaders, sensitivity readers, friends—we ask different people, for different reasons, and at different times. When they respond, there can be disappointment, painful surprise, and resentment, as well as welcome validation and useful advice.

There are many articles about how to handle our emotional reactions to feedback, especially feedback we weren’t expecting. This article addresses some different questions, however:

How and when should I rely on peer feedback versus paid feedback?When is it time to seek a second opinion?How do I know when to act on the feedback I get?Feedback from peers

This is where most writers begin, because it’s free. Peer feedback usually, although not always, takes place within the framework of a critique group or with a writing partner. Typically, feedback is given in chunks, rather than on the book as a whole. The only cost is your own time, since reciprocity is usually expected.

This type of feedback can be useful when:

You’re in the early stage of a writing project (or writing career) and trying to find your way. You want to test out ideas before investing too much time and energy.You find that you learn by critiquing others.You work best when you have ongoing support.

The utility of this kind of arrangement depends on the skill, candor, and sensitivity of those with whom you’re exchanging pages. Responses can be “too kind” for fear of discouraging you or injuring the relationship. In contrast, a critique group member might be inappropriately harsh or respond based on how he would have written the scene. You might receive valuable advice—or something more akin to personal opinion. Among inexperienced writing groups, this can easily feel like the blind leading the blind.

You don’t have to adopt every single suggestion your critique partners offer, of course; being discriminating and being defensive aren’t the same thing. At the same time, if several people point out a similar problem, it may be something you need to address. Even if your readers aren’t getting paid, their response may have real value. It’s important not to assume that being a novice writer (as is often the case in critique groups) means that the person’s feedback isn’t worth much. Someone can be a sensitive and skillful reader—really good at pinpointing the gaps and weaknesses in what she reads—even if she herself isn’t (yet) a terribly skillful writer.

When is it time for professional (paid) feedback?

At some point, you may decide that you need (or want) to turn to a paid professional. When should you do that? While there’s no ironclad rule, some indications are:

If you have concerns about your work that peers simply haven’t helped withIf the response of peers is so “consistently inconsistent” that the resultant confusion is starting to overwhelm or paralyze youIf external factors (such as a deadline for a requested revision) require a more rapid or thorough evaluation than peers can provideIf you can’t help feeling that the response of a paid professional is more legitimate and that, without it, your book won’t be sufficiently scrutinized and perfectedFeedback from professionals

Editors—and the fees they charge—can vary tremendously. Their services can include a detailed narrative report, line edits on every page, a follow-up phone conversation, or simply a general assessment of the manuscript’s strengths and weaknesses; fees can be hourly or task-specific.

Since this is a business relationship, it’s important to have mutual clarity about what you’re purchasing. There are too many stories of unhappy writers who felt “ripped off” by an editor whose feedback was vague, late, or consisted of a roster of “problems” that the editor would be happy to address—at an additional cost, of course. Similarly, there are editors who’ve been unfairly maligned by writers who didn’t get the praise they expected. If you’re not sure what type of editing you would benefit from—or if it’s worth the investment— Jane offers advice here on appraising your needs.

If you do choose to hire a professional editor, make sure she is knowledgeable about your genre and can provide recent, trustworthy references. Ideally, ask for a trial period or an opportunity to submit sample pages so you can assess the fit between her approach and your expectations. You should also examine your own willingness to listen to what she has to say! Good editors often deliver a big wallop of tough love. That’s what makes them good—and what will make your book better—once you recover from the shock and get to work.

When to get a second editor’s opinion

Sometimes a writer will decide to get a second opinion—a fresh look from someone whose mind is free from memories of prior versions of the manuscript and can respond to what’s actually on the page. Of course, a second professional may give advice that’s in direct opposition to what the first person told you! It doesn’t necessarily mean that one is right and the other wrong, or that it’s all arbitrary. You may have gone too far in correcting one issue, only to create another; cleaning up certain flaws may reveal subtler problems, possibly because the first editor didn’t want to overwhelm you.

How can you know if a second set of eyes is really worth the investment? We’ve all heard stories about the second doctor whose advice saved the patient from the unnecessary or potentially harmful treatment recommended by the first doctor, or the second contractor who had to repair the shoddy work of the first one. It’s not so straightforward with writing, so it’s important to make sure you’re not just looking for someone whose perception of your manuscript will make you feel better. To do that—and guard against the tendency to seek a third and a fourth reviewer—ask yourself:

Is there a specific aspect of the story that the first editor didn’t, or couldn’t, evaluate? Is the second editor more able to fill that gap?Are there sound reasons to believe that the first editor was a poor choice—or a poor choice for you, specifically?Is there a practical reason you can’t return to the first editor—e.g., she isn’t available when you need her, or she herself doesn’t think she can give your manuscript an impartial reading?

In my experience, each editor has something important to offer, and multiple perspectives can often provide a useful balance.

About paid beta readers

Paid beta reading services typically have a much lower price tag than developmental editors. The main difference between paid beta readers and paid editors (in general) is that beta readers will tell you what’s not working but not necessarily how to fix it. They’re skilled readers, not writing instructors.

There are individual beta readers you can hire directly, and there are services that act as a middleman to match you with beta readers they know. The beta reader or beta reading service may have its own list of items and/or allow you to specify what you’d like to focus on. Here too, there’s a wide variety in the depth and scope of feedback.

In my experience, a beta reader tends to be most useful after a major revision. The professional mentor will help you to shape the story; the beta reader will let you know if you’ve succeeded and where more work may be needed.

Obtaining special feedback

Sometimes, we ask someone to read our work with an eye to a particular issue.

“Sensitivity readers” read to let you know if you’ve represented a group authentically; they aren’t paying attention to stakes, tension, pacing, or matters of craft. If you’re writing about a group you know little about, this can be a crucial step.Copy editors will attend to grammatical errors and other surface-level concerns, such as overused words and “gaps and goofs” (for example, someone taking off a coat he wasn’t wearing, or taking off his coat twice in the same scene).Proofreaders will look for and correct obvious errors (typos, misspellings, style inconsistencies).Managing and applying the feedback you’re received

Here are some principles that I’ve found helpful:

Pace yourself. Don’t ask for too much at once; focus on one major aspect at a time if you can. Digest what you’ve gotten before asking for more. Try it on. Ask yourself “what if” and play with changing your story the way the reviewer suggested. You may decide that you don’t want to do that, but try it first. Organize your feedback. Summarize the feedback and put it into categories, like pacing or character relationships. It can also be helpful to date the feedback so you can see how you’ve addressed this element over various drafts. Prioritize. Pay more attention to the identification of problems than to suggested solutions. Reviewers may come up with different solutions, but if they all point to something like stakes or motivation as an issue, then it probably is. You may end up with your own solution, in fact—a surprising insight, rather than “camel” you’ve cobbled together by trying to do what every single person says. Consider the source. Are there any potential biases at work, either in the reader’s perception—e.g., her preferences—or in yours? Beware of thoughts like: “She doesn’t appreciate my kind of writing” and “I paid so much for this, so she must be right.” When feedback seems conflicting, it’s important to step back and consider why each person may have a different idea of what’s working and what isn’t. Come back later. Sometimes you’ll see things in a different light after you’ve been away for a while. Keep all of it. You may be tempted to throw out some of the comments that you’re certain are wrong, but don’t. Set them aside and look at them again later.

I like to think of it this way: we learn something from every bit of feedback we receive, although sometimes the lesson isn’t clear for a long time. It might even crystalize in your next book, not this one!

A New Book Publishing News Feed for Authors—Continuously Updated

Over at The Hot Sheet, I’ve created a free publishing-focused newsfeed (automated via RSS) that gathers headlines from across the industry. It’s divided into various categories, such as industry publications, traditional publishing news sources, self-publishing news sources, international publishing news, and general books coverage.

Right now, because of the need and demand for up-to-date information related to coronavirus, there is also a dedicated section for that—including free educational publishing resources (for your kids at home), how to support booksellers, virtual book events, and more.

If you have suggestions for resources that belong in the newsfeed, contact me.