R. Lawson Gamble's Blog: R Lawson Gamble Books, page 22

Style

I am moved to write about style because I am currently reading books with very different styles, and the contrast is a nightly experience for me. I am 500 pages into Ian Pear’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, an example of a fine literary narrative style, somewhat Dickensian in feel and most

effective for the tale he tells. At the same time I am immersed in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, also very literary but somewhat rougher; very well structured, of course (he is the master) yet intentionally direct and somewhat coarse during the dialogue, appropriate to the Salinas River Valley of the early twentieth century, and the personalities he presents. Lastly, I have just begun Thomas McGuane’Ninety-two In The Shade, written in a contemporary somewhat rakish style with dialogue current to the abbreviated, slang-corrupted  American speech of today.

So how important is style, really? If Faulkner hadn’t written in the dialect of the backwoods south in As I Lay Dying, with individual voices and his particular use of tense, would it have had as much impact? Would we even have noticed? If Margaret Mitchell hadn’t written her characters’ dialogue with stretched southern drawl and if she hadn’t used the point of view of her self-centered protagonist in Gone With The Wind,  would it have mattered?

Perhaps not. I have read books by notable authors where no attempt was made toward a particular dialect or style, just good writing. And they read just fine. But then I think about the books that leap to mind when a certain style appears in other works; the style of Dickens, for example, and Hemingway, and even the Bible. Clearly these books bring something extra that renders them memorable.

Of course, we must differentiate between style and voice. An author’s voice remains unchanged except to mature, but her style may change from work to work to suit the story. The ability to write in a particular style is a tool that must be developed over time. Nothing comes harsher to my ear than an unsuccessful attempt to write dialect, for example.

And so I write my novels without a conscious attempt at style or dialect. The story with its setting and ambience is in my brain, and hopefully it will subtly transfer itself to paper, and its characters will speak in their own manner, without my interference.

Tagged: dialect, East of Eden, Instance of the Fingerpost, John Steinbeck, Margaret Mitchell, Ninety-two In The Shade, Salinas River (California), Steinbeck, Thomas McGuane, writing style, writing voice

Formatting Frustrations (learning by experience)

I find most technology somewhat frustrating. Code is written by left brain people and organized in very logical ways – logical to them. To others of us, those hierarchical layers of processing do not compute.

That complaint aside, my personal method for utilizing technology is persistence…try and try and try and then go to Google to chat threads to see how other people like me managed it. My hope is that this short article will do the same for someone else who thinks like me.

The subject is formatting an e-book. I spent this last week doing just that. I had decided that the second novel in my series (Mestaclocan) would make its first appearance with Amazon KDP Select. Because this program does not permit the work to be published anywhere else for 90 days, I needed to format specifically for Amazon.

My first novel (The Other), I published with Smashwords (as mentioned in my last post). Mark Coker recommends the ‘nuclear’ method of preparation which involves copy and paste of the entire manuscript to simple text to erase all of Word’s (or Pages’) hidden markers, which can cause chaos with your publishing.  I did the same with my second manuscript and then returned it to Word 2011 (Mac Edition).  Then came the elimination of all automatic settings, paragraph indent as desired, line spacing, preferred font, etc., etc., just as I had done before.

Yet there are always unforeseen problems.  I had written chapters with multiple breaks within them separated by asterisks. I now found I had too many spaces. With 40 chapters and several breaks per chapter, I was kept very busy finding and then fixing those. Then I found that my Chapter Titles were not centered correctly. Forty more fixes. All of this was annoying, time-consuming drudgery, but not completely unexpected. These are the bits that make formatting so interesting.

Finally, all was ready. Check, double-check, triple check… publish. Then I waited 12 hours to see what I had wrought.

Finally, there it was. Beautiful! The wonderful cover by Digital Donna, the front matter all correct, the prologue perfect, and…but wait! Where was the Table of Contents? There was none. With my Kindle I could go to the beginning and to the end, but I could not go anywhere in between. What happened?

I hadn’t put one in.  I didn’t know I needed to. Publishing with Smashword, a simple TOC is placed automatically. But Amazon is not a publishing platform, just a very large retailer, and they don’t create TOCs. It was up to me.

Unfortunately, I’d never made one. And even more unfortunately, it seems that while Microsoft Word for PCs has an automatic TOC building feature, Word for Mac does not. I tried to follow the Mac Word instructions for creating one manually – again and again.  Nothing worked. I went to Google.  Everyone there had a way to do it, but the first six I tried didn’t work. But then I found a saint who had written out some very simple instructions just for people like me. This time it worked. Finally, my hyperlinks functioned and my heretofore typed out but not connected TOC actually took me to the page it advertised. I republished and the rest, as they say, is history.

The above mentioned saint can be found at Blackbird-Digital Books.com in an article written specifically for the problem I just described. Hopefully by sharing this link I am Paying it Forward for some other poor soul caught in the quandary that is technology.

Tagged: Amazon Kindle, format, manuscript preparation, Mark Coker, Publishing, Smashwords, Table of contents, Word for Mac

I find most technology somewhat frustrating. Code is writ...

I find most technology somewhat frustrating. Code is written by left brain people and organized in very logical ways – logical to them. To others of us, those hierarchical layers of processing do not compute.

That complaint aside, my personal method for utilizing technology is persistence…try and try and try and then go to Google to chat threads to see how other people like me managed it. My hope is that this short article will do the same for someone else who thinks like me.

The subject is formatting an e-book. I spent this last week doing just that. I had decided that the second novel in my series (Mestaclocan) would make its first appearance with Amazon KDP Select. Because this program does not permit the work to be published anywhere else for 90 days, I needed to format specifically for Amazon.

My first novel (The Other), I published with Smashwords (as mentioned in my last post). Mark Coker recommends the ‘nuclear’ method of preparation which involves copy and paste of the entire manuscript to simple text to erase all of Word’s (or Pages’) hidden markers, which can cause chaos with your publishing.  I did the same with my second manuscript and then returned it to Word 2011 (Mac Edition).  Then came the elimination of all automatic settings, paragraph indent as desired, line spacing, preferred font, etc., etc., just as I had done before.

Yet there are always unforeseen problems.  I had written chapters with multiple breaks within them separated by asterisks. I now found I had too many spaces. With 40 chapters and several breaks per chapter, I was kept very busy finding and then fixing those. Then I found that my Chapter Titles were not centered correctly. Forty more fixes. All of this was annoying, time-consuming drudgery, but not completely unexpected. These are the bits that make formatting so interesting.

Finally, all was ready. Check, double-check, triple check… publish. Then I waited 12 hours to see what I had wrought.

Finally, there it was. Beautiful! The wonderful cover by Digital Donna, the front matter all correct, the prologue perfect, and…but wait! Where was the Table of Contents? There was none. With my Kindle I could go to the beginning and to the end, but I could not go anywhere in between. What happened?

I hadn’t put one in.  I didn’t know I needed to. Publishing with Smashword, a simple TOC is placed automatically. But Amazon is not a publishing platform, just a very large retailer, and they don’t create TOCs. It was up to me.

Unfortunately, I’d never made one. And even more unfortunately, it seems that while Microsoft Word for PCs has an automatic TOC building feature, Word for Mac does not. I tried to follow the Mac Word instructions for creating one manually – again and again.  Nothing worked. I went to Google.  Everyone there had a way to do it, but the first six I tried didn’t work. But then I found a saint who had written out some very simple instructions just for people like me. This time it worked. Finally, my hyperlinks functioned and my heretofore typed out but not connected TOC actually took me to the page it advertised. I republished and the rest, as they say, is history.

The above mentioned saint can be found at Blackbird-Digital Books.com in an article written specifically for the problem I just described. Hopefully by sharing this link I am Paying it Forward for some other poor soul caught in the quandary that is technology.

Tagged: Amazon Kindle, format, manuscript preparation, Mark Coker, Publishing, Smashwords, Table of contents, Word for Mac

New Novel Mestaclocan

 

After weeks and months of editing and a solid week of formatting followed by 6 attempted uploads, my second novel in the Zack Tolliver Series is uploaded to Amazon KP Select.

I am told by my readers that Mestaclocan is even more intense and hard to put down than The Other.  The action moves to the big city, San Francisco, where Zack Tolliver and Eagle Feather become involved with some new characters and a most formidable killer.

My experience with formatting for Amazon was quite different from publishing on Smashwords. An advantage to the latter is the very thorough Style Guide made available  by Mark Coker. It takes you through the process step by step. There are guides for publishing on Amazon, but you need to go out and find them. Yes, you can simply move through the publishing steps one by one, but simple as that seems, there can be confusion resulting in less than perfect editions. After all your work, who wants that?

It is important to remember that Smashwords considers itself a publishing platform, and Amazon does not.

The details and differences of formatting and publishing with both are the subject of an upcoming post for this column. Stay tuned.

 

 

Tagged: Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Eagle Feather, Mark Coker, Mystery, New, Novel, Publishing, San Francisco, Smashwords, Thriller

Reviews, Anyone?

Would anyone like to review my crime thriller, THE OTHER?

This should be the cry of every author. The life sustenance of a writer is arguably reviews…good ones, that is. In the final analysis the author needs folks to read his/her book and then comment on it, pass it along, or in some way help it to proliferate.

Reviews do this. And the reviewer who commands the largest readership will ultimately assist an author the most. But we shouldn’t neglect the small blog or the reviewer just starting out. Very few reviewer platforms are harmful and some may have unexpected results. And any on-line mention of a work renders it more Google-visible.

A caution, however. The book must be of a quality to contrast favorably with 50% of others of its kind. No one should expect magic from a reviewer – the magic originates with the writer. And seek reviews only from those who appreciate and understand the genre that you write. My worst reviews have come from those who found their way to my book by mistake, thinking it was something it is not.

How do you get reviews? The same way everything else in marketing is obtained – through persistent effort. Make a list of the reviewers who are right for your work, then request a review. Work through that list and then create another list if necessary. Build your own momentum.

There can be nothing more frustrating than to having written the greatest book  never read.  Particularly when you know that if people read it, they will love it. And who among us doesn’t know that?

Tagged: Author, Blog Reviews, Book reviews, Literature, Review, Reviews and Criticism, Writers Resources

The Complexity of Domains

As one who has recently tried to switch a domain from one registrar to another, I’m astounded at the intricacy of this simple sounding process. When I purchased my domain, I believed that as long as I paid the annual fee the domain was mine to have and to hold and to move about as I saw fit.

That may be true in the final analysis, but what I didn’t see was the vast array of supervisors any one of whom could negate my intent.

Here’s the story. I worked with a Website designer and together we created a handsome, practical, useful site that I was anxious to publish. It was to become my home site and therefore needed my home domain, which I had already purchased from a registrar. It was active and waiting.

However, since I had another domain being hosted elsewhere I thought it best to have both reside with the same registrar and so set about transferring my domain from one registrar to another.  Several days later I received an Email reminding me that I had secured (locked) the domain and it must be unlocked to be moved. I did that. Then I waited. And waited.

My site designer checked progress with the receiving registrar several times and found only that the transfer was in progress. Many days after that she suggested I check on it myself. I learned that there was no impediment to the transfer that the technician could see. He went on to comment that I was approaching a record with their site for longest transfer. As you can imagine, I was delighted (not!).

It was around then that I began to research the procedure to try to understand what might have gone wrong. On line I located a PDF of a many-paged booklet that listed procedures for every possible scenario during a transfer, the many authorities who needed to sign off on each leg of the journey, and the many, many things that one could have unwittingly done to prevent it from happening. I slowly began to understand that my process could have hung up in any number of places, and that by now the likelihood of success was slim.

Then, a full 21 days after our initial request my designer suggested we bite the bullet and either use another domain or have the original registrar host my new site. In other words, the domain might be mine, but I had not to been allowed to do anything with it.

My ire significantly raised, I called a technician at the receiving registry to announce my intention to stop the transfer.  But he conferred with another authority and found that it wasn’t a human responsible for the problem, it was an automated procedure that had misfired. And nobody noticed –  or else nobody cared.

The technician set about arranging to have the domain transferred manually and assured me it could happen as soon as twenty-four hours. And I had been waiting almost a month!

I’m not there yet. And until I actually see my site nesting in my domain, I won’t be counting any chickens.

I wish I had contacted a human at the beginning of my attempt. Not to ask that he/she do the transfer, just to supervise all the supervisors in case the more efficient automated process simply takes too long or hits a snag.

Tagged: Business and Economy, Computers and Internet,

Where Do Characters Come From?

It’s always interesting to consider the origins of characters in books. What part of the author appears in each one? Does any one particular character represent the author more than another? Or are characters simply what they seem – pure fictional creations?

I’ve looked back over my own work with curiosity regarding this question. Clearly, since every character originates in my brain, each to some degree must represent my perspective on the world. I suspect this is the base upon which other considerations are layered.

But beyond that, if you have a protagonist, you must have an antagonist who defies the views of the hero, who represents moral opposition, who has a completely different agenda, or in some way offers dissonance. But is the antagonist also part of me? If we consider Jungian  philosophy in this context, we’d see the antagonist as our hidden dark side.

The more fiction I write, the more intrigued I am to read the books of other authors and using my own experience as a guide, try to discern what part of that author resides in a character. What part of T.C. Boyle is in Delaney in The Tortilla Curtain? What part of Hombre is in Elmore Leonard? What part of Joad is in Steinbeck? And most intriguing of all, what part of any of his characters is Stephen King?

Authors must use real life models for characters and generally not fleeting ones, such as movie stars or pop singers. We need models we have known more than superficially. Therefore I suggest that any relative or long standing friend or colleague of an author is in danger of finding themselves represented in a character, at least to some degree. This may occur without the author even realizing it. A colleague from my teaching days, after reading The Other, remarked on my use of another teacher in that school as a character. I didn’t even know I had done so.

Go figure!

 

 

Tagged: antagonist, Author, characters, Elmore Leonard, Fiction, Hombre, John Steinbeck, protagonist, reading, Stephen King, Tortilla Curtain, writing craft

Do You Know Your Market?

For those of us who got into this business because we want to write, marketing is a huge unwelcome distraction. It presents conflict, and not just because of the time it consumes. There are other, more disconcerting conflicts as well.

For instance, market expectations. I was recently told by an agent/publisher that my new novel is too long. To me that is like Solieri telling Mozart that his music has too many notes. I know that under the same circumstances this person would not have told Stephen king or Larry McMurtry that their novels were too long.

I understand that such observations come from knowledge of the market place and are not an actual critique of my work per se. Increasingly, representatives of the market have become less concerned about the quality of writing than its marketability. The two measures are not necessarily related.

The marketplace today is flooded with books. Giants like Amazon list millions. Every author is looking for an edge. Exposure is king. The quality of an author’s work is immaterial if no one reads it.

And so it is increasingly important to know the market. Your specific market. What is your niche? Is your marketing focused on your readership or is it too general? Are your keywords accurate, is your category correct, do you tag effectively?

The learning curve is huge. As I prepared for the release of my second novel this September I learned that a fall release may not be the best timing. Why? Because the “Big Five” publishers traditionally dump their new books in the fall. Who knew? Will it affect me? Maybe not, but it is one more nugget of knowledge that I will squirrel away for future consideration.

You can’t do it all. But you can stay informed. I rely heavily on book marketing experts, not as a client, but as an avid reader of their bulletins, blogs, and newsletters. It is their business to stay on top of market tendencies and I know that if I read those columns two or three times a week, I will remain relatively current. And hopefully my decisions will reflect a bit of their wisdom.

Where Have All The Readers Gone?

Ever notice that there’s no category for “readers” in Twitter? You can find writers in abundance. I suspect it is because virtually any topic can be associated with readers.

As an author, if you want to reach readers you need to go where they hang out. Virtually, that would be places like libraryThing, Shelfari, and Goodreads.  In real life, the bookstores and Amazon.com.

But it seems somehow sinful to go full-bore advertising your book in these locations.  It’s a turnoff to the patrons, to say the least.

What to do? Is it permissible to nominate one’s own book for various lists?  To rate one’s own book (and what author would rate it less than five?)? To enter discussion  groups and raise one’s book as a topic of discussion? Other than listing the book, how does an author take advantage of these sites?

Some marketing gurus say go ahead and nominate, discuss, and rate your book. But the self-marketing author needs to learn subtlety. How can you tout your book without seeming too self-serving?

On the other hand, if you are an entry-level author and you hope to reach the readers on these sites, you could wait forever for someone else to nominate your work.

The solution? Perhaps this is where authors need to help one another rather than compete. Find another author or two and nominate each other’s books. Rate each other’s books (favorably, I would hope) and help each other to get your work discussed. If  authors don’t team up, your will risk being ignored or being a boor.

Tagged: Amazon.com, Author, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Literature, marketing, readers, Shelfari, Social media, Twitter

Speaking Out

In discussions about marketing your book the experts always mention Author Talks. Presentations of this type appeal to me because they are real; that is, I am in direct contact with the people I hope will read my book.

Not only might the audience be persuaded during my talk, but there are the inevitable questions and discussion afterword that present yet another excellent opportunity to stimulate sales.

Assuming, then, that the author is comfortable in front of an audience and has chosen a topic with which he/she is conversant and comfortable, how does one go about getting engagements? Most columns and articles about book marketing tend to skimp on that detail.

Here are some options. I begin with libraries, which often have presenter programs scheduled during the year. I will select a location suitable to my book topic and send a letter offering a free book. In the final paragraph I mention that I am available for a free Author Talk. There are many other venues, such as retirement homes, various business clubs seeking informative presentations, and book events, either on-going or ones the author creates.

Yet it is difficult to find a venue because there are so many authors out there doing the same thing, and when one blankets the area with inquiries it is difficult not to feel, well, “easy”.

But recently I thought of a solution. Rather than compete with all of those other authors, why not join them? The idea is this: gather a group of writers (a writers’ club, for instance) of any genre who are willing to try this approach. Find the venue you prefer and offer an event, not for just one book and author, but for several. This should be attractive because it will mean a larger draw to the venue and a wider area of interest.

I recently suggested this to a fellow author who has written a book about dying. My book is crime fiction  (there may be a relationship there, but not a strong one). At such an event we would likely draw very different people with very different interests – which is fine. These are people who I alone would not ordinarily draw. Add a few more authors, and voila! an even bigger crowd. I am happy, my fellow authors are happy, the venue is happy, and the customers are happy.

Am I describing a book fair? Only in the most simplistic sense. A book fair requires greater organization, preparation, advertising, and expense. I’m suggesting simply gathering together  a few authors, approaching the venue with the idea, and spend the morning reading excerpts, signing books, and selling books.

Congregate, and they will come.

Tagged: Author, author talks, book events, book sales, Crime fiction, Fiction, Literature, marketing, Writers Resources