Prasenjeet Kumar's Blog, page 7

Editing Is Vital, Even If You Think You Write Like Shakespeare

Editing is a subject which no author should ever ignore. 

Editors broadly come in two flavours- structural and line. Structural Editors go through the entire structure of your book and then suggest rearranging your chapters, or rearranging paragraphs within your chapters to make your book structure more cohesive.

Line Editors, on the other hand, go through your book line by line. They fix grammatical errors and in general improve your readability.

You can find freelance editors on the internet and the good ones will cost you a packet. What do you do then, if you are on a budget?

This is where your friends and indulgent relatives come in handy. Do you remember that classmate of yours who was always a few points ahead of you in the English paper? Or that senior who edited the college magazine? Or that relative or family friend who is a voracious reader at least?

The most important thing is that this friend or relative should first have an indulgent, benevolent and not overtly critical view of your writing skills.

Next, he should be able to adhere to some kind of a time-line. Otherwise, the work will never be finished.

As for me, I am still on a shoe string budget so I can’t afford a professional editor. But it is true that most self-published authors, who are serious about writing as a career,  pay for professional editing. So if you can afford one, do go ahead and employ one.

I do have some friends helping me out. Sometimes when I really feel confident about the quality of my first draft, I even ask my father to give me editing tips and suggestions. The results actually are quite pleasing. I always make fun of my father saying that I have got a really mad editor who can make my entire writing look red with track changes.

I wish you luck in your quest for a similarly ‘mad’ editor.

Prasenjeet

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Setting a daily word count

Image Courtesy of phanlop88/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

With the draft outline out of the way, you need to start setting your other tasks and targets, of which the most important is the word count target.

A word count target: All successful authors have a daily word count target. I read somewhere that Stephen King writes nearly 2,000 words in a day. For me, I realize that  writing 1,000 words (2-3 pages in an A4 sheet paper) in a day is a decent target.

Unless I’m jostling with a serious writer’s block, I find I can easily achieve this target by writing for nearly 2 hours. There are many days when I get into a flow and write more than 1,000 words. Some days I have written 1,500-2,000 words. I think writing the first few hundred words is the most difficult part. After that reaching your target is pretty easy.

Just imagine if you wrote 1,000 words a day. You will be completing a 30,000 word book in just 30 days (a month’s time). If your average is more than 1,000 words then you will be finishing your book in 15-20 days time. This would, however, be just the first rough draft.

A word of caution though. You do need to be extremely disciplined. It is very easy to wander off. You will want to procrastinate. Friends, parties, social media and the Internet can all be  major sources of distraction. However, you can very well develop your own strategy to turn each of these distractions into strengths.

Prooof Reading: 

Did you notice the extra ‘o’ in the word proof that I just wrote? To avoid embarrassments like these, you need to first proof read your book yourself. Modern word processors have made this task quite easy by underlining spelling mistakes on the fly and then offering suggestions. But beware of auto corrections and the very handy “Find and Repalce” commands.

Once I wanted to change the abbreviation “mins.” by its full form “minutes”, which this command did in a flash. Happy, I even put the book out on Amazon. Then to check how the formatting looked, I “looked inside” the Kindle version.

You can imagine my horror when I found that my great word processor had not only changed “mins.” to “minutes”, but also “vitamins” to “vitaminutes”, whatever that might mean!

That should bring us to the next step of “editing” that I’d try to address in my next post.

Do follow a daily word count schedule? What is your daily word count target?

Prasenjeet

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“The Men Who Made Us Fat” Episode-III

In Part-III of “The Men Who Made Us Fat” documentary shown on BBC, Jacques Peretti examines assumptions about what is and is not healthy. He also looks at how product marketing can seduce consumers into buying supposed ‘healthy foods’ such as muesli and juices, both of which can be high in sugar, and “organic food’ […]

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Writing my first book

When I started writing my first book, I had an idea in my mind that I should write a book for an audience which does not know how to cook at all. So the sub-title of my book had to be “Even If You Have Never Boiled An Egg Before”.

I was already running a blog www.cookinginajiffy.com discussing my mom’s recipes. A few interactions on Facebook made me realize that some group members were actually just starting out in the kitchen, and didn’t know how to even make tea or set up a basic kitchen.

This reminded me of my own College days in University College London when I was forced to cook because the Hall of Residence, that I was living in, did not serve any meals during the weekends. So, I had a first-hand knowledge of the problems faced by beginners in this field.

I researched further on the internet. I also checked on Amazon and “looked inside” (a great feature on Amazon that allows you to read about 10% of Kindle versions) a few student cookbooks. I realised that most of the student cookbooks assumed that you knew a little cooking and jumped straight to recipes such as sweet n’ sour Chinese chicken. This could be a problem for someone who does not even know how to boil an egg, let alone make sweet n’ sour chicken.

So I started writing my outline in that background. Here is a sample of the first rough outline that I wrote:

Cover Page

Copyright Notice

What People Say

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Who is this book for?
My Story—why I had to learn how to boil an egg and do much more?
Why should you learn cooking?
How NOT to turn cooking into a chore?
How only home-style cooking can ensure putting nutritious food on your table?
What if things go wrong in the kitchen?

Lesson 1: Setting up your kitchen: What equipment to start with?

Lesson 2: What spices and other ingredients you need to stock and experiment with?

Lesson 3: How to make tea or Coffee?

Lesson 4: How to toast bread and graduate to:

·         Making bread crumbs

·         Making a Garlic toast

·         Making a cheese garlic toast

Lesson 5: How to boil and peel an egg flawlessly and graduate to?

·         Making an Egg sandwich

·         Making an Egg grilled sandwich

·         Making an Egg poach or Egg Benedict

·         Making an Egg fry

·         Making an Omelette

·         Making a Cheese or Spanish Omelette

·         Making a Scrambled egg

·         Making a French Toast

Lesson 6: How to cook your vegetables?

Sauté peas
Grill tomatoes
Sauté spinach
Roast Baby Potatoes
Sauté mushrooms
Sauté mixed vegetables
Sauté anything and everything
Learn to make a white sauce
Steaming vegetables- the Jiffy way
Make Vegetables au gratin
Make Aubergines au gratin
Grill cottage cheese

Lesson 7: How to handle chicken?

What should you buy whole or cut into pieces?
How to boil a chicken?
What to do with a boiled chicken?
 Make a delicious chicken sandwich
 Make a grilled chicken sandwich
 Make a cold chicken
 Make a breaded chicken for dinner


How to grill a chicken

Lesson 8: What to do with fish and seafood?

How to grill trout.
Make a simple Indian fish curry
Graduate to making fish in a Yoghurt and mustard paste

Lesson 9: How about some soups for your soul?

Making Pumpkin soup
Making Tomato carrot soup
Making the classic Chicken soup
Graduate to making the Chicken Sweet Corn Soup: Chinese style

Lesson 10: Making a full meal in 30 minutes: with proper sequencing & parallel processing

The concept of Foundation Meals and parallel processing
Making a Foundation Breakfast
Making a Foundation Indian  Lunch or Dinner
Making a Foundation Western Lunch or Dinner

Parting Tips

 Make Cooking a pleasurable experience by involving your friends and family members
Don’t shy away from tweaking, adapting and experimenting with any cooking idea you come across, including from this book.

About the Author   

I am sure you would have got a pretty good idea by now of why and how you should write an outline. I have always written an outline for all of my book

Nothing can help organize your thoughts better.

What is your favourite way of preparing a book structure? Would like to hear your views.

Prasenjeet

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Writing is planning, then plodding and then some more plodding

 Success is supposed to be one percent inspiration and ninety-nine  percent perspiration.

 Writing is quite similar. You do need inspiration, dreams and fantasies  to start with. But to finish your book, large dollops of sweat are  required for sure.

 As I’ve mentioned, all my books were of decent length. Many Kindle  authors write shorter books especially in non-fiction. The good ones  write around 80 pages per book (14, 000 words approx.). If this is your  target, then this would mean that you could write  7-8 books in the  time I wrote 3 books. Or you can also take the same amount of time for writing one book if you write longer books or are a Fiction Author, a genre where you are required to churn out lengthier tomes.

There can’t, of course, be any hard and fast rules about your speed of writing. Medical thriller author C.J. Lyons sets a target of writing five books in one year!

Let me shock you even further. There is no magic to it. The Authors who can tote up higher word counts in a short amount of time are not Gods. I am, of course, no God/god. But you do need to set and follow a routine that you are comfortable with. Every book that I have read on this subject suggests that you must have first a target to achieve. That target may be very modest, but the important thing is that you must fix one and then go all out to exceed that.

This is how I achieved my target:

Prepare an outline: 

If you have reached so far, I am sure you would have already decided what you want to write. The first step is to write an outline. Make a few pointers on an A-4 sheet document in word. Think how you are going to begin? What chapter titles will be there? Write sub-heading titles of your chapters. Don’t worry. Make a very rough outline of your book. It may not be your final outline.

I’ll detail this process in my next post.

What is your favourite style of writing? Do you plan or prepare an outline or just start straight away?

Prasenjeet

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“The Men Who Made Us Fat” Episode-II

Since this second part of  “The Men Who Made Us Fat” hasn’t been shown on BBC in India, I had to go to YouTube to watch this. In this part, Jacques Peretti investigates how the concept of ‘supersizing’ changed our eating habits forever. How did we – once a nation of moderate eaters – start to […]

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How exactly do you become an author, part-time or full time?

Beginning As An Author At The Very Beginning…..

As the mindboggling material available on the worldwide web would indicate, the path to becoming an author would be as different as there are writers.

I’m a voracious reader, and I think it would certainly help if you too can decide on a strategy that suits YOU after some exhaustive, and exhausting, research.

In my case, I decided that before writing a full book, I should start sharing my ideas through a blog. Then assess the feedback I’d get and decide on the next step.

So I first taught myself some basics of website designing (I’ll share the “tricks” a little later). I then needed an idea that won’t cost much. After some brainstorming, I decided to share my mom’s recipes on a website registered as  www.cookinginajiffy.com.  This happened in April 2013.

After some four months of bumbling about, and after getting some interesting reader feedback and encouragement, I started jotting down my thoughts for my first book “How To Cook In A Jiffy Even If You Have Never Boiled An Egg Before” in August 2013. As the title suggests, this book was meant for the complete newbie (like myself) who was just starting out in the kitchen with no previous cooking experience. I could self-publish the eBook version on all platforms like Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, Apple etc. by mid-September 2013. Its paperback version could, however, be published only on my 29th birthday (8 October 2013).

I certainly couldn’t have wished for a better birthday gift.

As to why I decided NOT to approach a traditional publisher, please dear Reader wait a while for that story.

Enthused that I could write and publish a BOOK totally on my own, I immediately started writing my second tome “Home Style Indian Cooking In A Jiffy” in mid-October. With an amazing compilation of over 100 delectable Indian dishes, many of which you can’t get in any Indian restaurant for love or for money, this is, I believe, unlike any other Indian Cook book available in the market. What this book quite uniquely focuses on is what Indians eat every day in their homes. It then in an easy step-by-step manner makes this mysterious, never disclosed, “Home Style” Indian cooking accessible to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of cooking and a stomach for adventure.

This book was published in December 2013, simultaneously in both its Kindle and Paperback avatars. I also enrolled in the KDP Select programme which meant that I couldn’t go onto any other platform. (As to why, that’d again be another story.)

Like any other young person of my generation, I have always been interested in healthy foods, diets and exercises. I had, however, a strong sense of discomfort with the current eating and cooking practices that were oscillating from low fat diets one day to low carb high protein diet the other, with vegan diets, crash diets, etc. sprinkled in between. I suspected that these fad diets did more harm to you than good. I wondered if it was possible to have a healthy lifestyle by not following any of these confusing advices. So I started researching and writing my third book “Healthy Cooking In A Jiffy: The Complete No Fad, No Diet Handbook” in January 2014. This book (in both Kindle and Paperback versions) could be “published” and put out on Amazon in March 2014.

So far I have crossed over 100,000 words in six months with my three books. You may have noticed that August 2013 to March 2014 is actually 8 months, and not 6. The missing months were actually spent on marketing the books. The actual time taken minus the time spent on promotion, therefore, remains at six months, for three books, which may be a world record!

To be sure, I have just started out, on a really long journey of being an author-entrepreneur.  There has been a lot of learning, and unlearning, in this voyage, which I don’t think will ever end.

More on this soon, I promise.

Prasenjeet

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If I Could Publish, Without Spending A Dime, 3 Amazon Books In Six Months, So Can You….

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This is my story of how I could publish, 3 Amazon books in six months, without spending a dime.

 You, of course, don’t know me. By training and academic qualifications, I’m a corporate lawyer with an LLB (Hons.) degree from the University College London, and a Legal Practice Course (LPC) Diploma from College of Law, Bloomsbury, London. I had had also my share of corporate law stints in London and Delhi for three years.

But this all should be of no consequence to you.

What may interest you more is that over the last six months, I have been able to self-publish three Amazon books Worldwide, both in Kindle and Paperback avatars. These constitute the foundation block of  my “How to Cook Everything in a Jiffy” series of cookbooks.

And all this was achieved FREE. Without spending a dime on writing, editing, cover design, printing, binding, distributing, publicity, et al.

None of the  books look like those 20-50 page pamphlets that litter the Amazon eBook and other marketplaces today. My first book was 200 pages long (27,ooo words approx.), second  308 pages (37,000 words approx.) and my third book was 297 pages long (36,000 words approx.)

Did I mention that I am no Chef, by training, aptitude or inclination?  And also that I refuse to be labelled as a Cookbook author.

What I need to underline is that one fine morning, I just felt an urge.  I wanted to not only catalogue my family’s traditional and, what I think, innovative recipes but also  help busy people create cooked meals from scratch, in a jiffy, so to say.

I have generally loved writing about things that I am truly passionate about. I also like to dream  that my writings should help change at least some people’s lives forever (for good, of course!).

So I suppose, the first takeaway from my experience should be that if you intend to be a writer, it may be a good idea to also locate a similar urge and dream.

To be sure, initially I didn’t think I’d ever be a full-time author.

And now, I don’t want to be anything else!

In PUBLISHWITHPRASEN, I intend to share all my experiences of donning this second hat of author, blogger, publisher, and entrepreneur, all rolled into one.

It’ll be great if you could join me in this unique (for me at least) roller coaster ride of experiences, and allow me to benefit from your views as well.

Prasenjeet

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“The Men Who Made Us Fat” Episodes: Must Watch

I saw the BBC’s “The Men Who Made Us Fat” Part-I on my TV yesterday.  Originally published on August 28, 2012 (I don’t know how I missed that earlier), Journalist Jacques Peretti in this 3-part series tries to trace those responsible for” revolutionising our eating habits”, to find out how decisions made in America 40 […]

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Thai Green Curry Recipe: Our Jiffy Version

Do you ever get tired of eating the same thing: pasta, grilled fish or sautéed vegetables? You are not alone. There does come a time when you may eye the nearest Chinese takeaway or aim for an Indian, Japanese or Thai joint. You may be surprised to know that many of the conventional recipes that […]

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