C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

See all my books at AllThatChazz.com.

Ultimate Blog Challenge: Writing Books on Writing

Can writing be taught?Sure, but what most people mean by the question is, can anyone write to a professional level? One

On Writing

On Writing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

newspaper colleague of mine insisted that it was something you were born with or you weren’t. I think the desire to immerse yourself in writing might spring from a quirk of genetics, but after that it’s up to you.

Certainly, anyone’s writing can be improved. Eliminate excess adverbs and don’t strain a metaphor until it breaks and you’re off to a good start. I’ve taught a couple of writing classes now and I suspect that writing skill is self-selecting anyway. If you aren’t interested in writing to begin with — as it is with anything — you probably won’t improve much. The best training in writing I got was first to read extensively early on. In my childhood home, books were a big deal and they still are now that I’m supposed to be a grown-up. Toward the end of journalism school, I think the best training I got in writing was to write copiously for a daily newspaper with feedback from editors.

There are a ton of books on writing advice and I’m sure I’ve read just about all of them. Reading about writing is often less about learning something new (there’s not really that much new to say about craft, is there?) as it is confirming my thoughts, feelings and biases. Sometimes a unique idea will rise out of that reading. Mostly I read writing advice books to enjoy the voice and the company of likeminded writers and to find inspiration. It’s motivating, yet cozy as a warm blanket, to read a book on writing advice and think, “Yes, I agree. I’m doing that. I could try that. I should go write some more now.” I end up reading writing advice for the same reasons I drink coffee. It’s a stimulant that makes you feel warm inside.

That’s ultimately why I decided I will soon add to the tonnage of writing advice books. Some books are very specific and prescriptive about writing. Others give excellent advice and strategies for marketing for the indie author (like Jeff Bennington’s intrepid Indie Author’s Guide to the Universe.)

Mine will be a softer approach for newer writers, like Bird by BirdI’ve gone back to Stephen King’s On Writing again and again. These are the books that told me I wasn’t alone and this wasn’t so hard or crazy if I just pecked away at it. It was simply craft and there isn’t a secret besides sitting down (or getting on my treadmill desk) and doing the work I knew I could do.

The aspiration for this book is more modest than some who take a step-by-step, flow chart approach. My book on writing will be inspiration for the new indie author, much of it drawn from posts on this blog. Early on I linked to others less and wrote more about craft (instead of focusing on marketing the Indie Author Revolution as I seem to do now.) I selected the best and most useful posts from over 900 articles on ChazzWrites.com, then added to them, wrote some new stuff and edited again.

My book won’t be as ambitious as some who (may Thor bless them) give strict advice on what to do and how to do it. My ideal reader will be a writer like me who wants to grab a steaming coffee, curl up in an armchair and read Crack the Indie Author Code: Aspire to Inspire (yes, that’s what I called it and yes, it’s coming soon). Readers will find an ally, inspiration and company on the journey to publication. For me, the work is about the writing first and foremost. The real fun happens in our heads as we write and nurture that spark of inspiration into a flame that throws light and heat. I’m happiest at my keyboard hooked up to the coffee in the intravenous drip.

Do I think writing can be taught? Sure. If you want it enough to bother to go looking for the education, that’s the cardinal sign and symptom that you’re already infected with the writing bug, anyway.

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Ultimate Blog Challenge: Top 10 things I wish I didn’t know about readers

Small-town terrors and psychological mayhem in Maine.

1. They get bored too easily. We used to have writers who were flavours of the month. With Amazon rankings, you can be the flavour of the hour and then disappear into obscurity unless you fight the death spiral and/or get lucky.

2. Readers are too busy. With the proliferation of “free” we all have huge To Be Read piles. Sadly, as with to-do lists, many of us never get to the bottom of those piles.

3. Many people prefer a genre I don’t write. Romance is much more popular. I used to read romances professionally when I worked for Harlequin. My books have a key romantic element, but they are not romances, so de facto, I am not on the radar of a large group of very dedicated readers.

4. The readers who love me might get sick of me trying to reach the readers who don’t know me. I’m very careful on Twitter to promote others, not just me. Still, I need to kick back and tweet a little joke here and there and say hello. It’s difficult to find the balance.

Paranormal persuasion and scary stories.

5. I’m not reaching some readers because I made some choices in titles that were challenging. (I almost wrote “unfortunate”, but that would put the onus on me and I’m not ready to own that yet.) The thing is, Sex, Death & Mind Control is one of the best things I’ve written but it has the lowest sales. It’s not sexy enough for those searching for erotica. It’s paranormal suspense (with award winners!), but when you see that always-interesting “What Else Customers Viewed” list, it’s almost all erotica on the Sex, Death & Mind Control sales page. “End of the Line” is probably the best short story I’ve ever written, but it  remains a hidden treasure because I turned readers off with a title I thought would get more attention, not less.

6. Ditto Self-help for Stoners. It was a clue for me when one of the reviewers who loved it added, “Don’t let the title scare you off.” It’s a weird mix of War of Art self-help and suspense. Strange, I know, but not really all that transgressive. (Should have called it Self-help for Surrealists to pull in readers who are also painters!) My strategy going in was to have an identifiable group to market to instead of saying it was for anybody who loved suspenseful fiction. To some extent that worked, but not as well as I’d hoped. (It still outsells Sex, Death & Mind Control four to one. I can’t say the Self-help for Stoners strategy was a failure, just that it could do better.)

You don’t have to be high to enjoy it. Sure, it would make you a better audience but…

7. Readers have less patience now. I changed my plotting and pacing with Bigger Than Jesus to cater to that lack of patience. I see it in myself. Maybe the Internet did it to our brains, I don’t know. That’s not even be a bad thing per se, but expect more Blake Crouch pacing and less Annie Proulx meandering. There used to be more room for both approaches.

8. There are still prejudices against anything labeled “experimental”. I wrote Bigger than Jesus in present tense, second-person. That alone is reason enough for some readers to run screaming. I can tell them all day that it worked. Won’t matter. That’s okay, but it’s still a prejudice.

I wanted to do something that some people thought couldn’t or shouldn’t be done and I wanted to do it so well they’d either quickly forget their prejudice or give me more credit for doing it so well. Blanket pronouncements of “You can’t do that!” are one of the reasons I did it. I don’t like being told what I can’t do. In fact, it makes me want to do it all the more. (I admit this attitude is not something that serves me well all the time. Having a job in the regular world, for instance, is uh…a problem.)

9. Readers look for ties to your real life. This is a byproduct of increased author/reader interaction. However, the Internet isn’t to blame for this one. This was very much the rage in English departments across the world years ago. Students were taught they couldn’t understand the fullness of the fiction without making judgments about the author, his or his gender, origin and life experience. They shouldn’t have done that. No one truly knows the inside of someone else’s skull. (I’ve even opened it up and had a look. Trust me, nobody really knows.) Besides, it’s fiction. Take it on its own merit. Please don’t make assumptions about the author from what you read in a book of fiction. Don’t make me kill again. (See what I mean?)

10. Readers fade. Even if they love your work, they move on. They get hungry for something new and different unless you keep feeding them. I don’t think anyone should race to publication if they aren’t up to the schedule and you do have to build in editorial time to make the book better. However, they are hungry and it is a race. People will tell you it isn’t. They’re wrong. It is. It’s a race against time. We don’t live forever and we have books in us and a readership to find and a readership we hope finds us. William Styron came out with a nice juicy thick book every ten years, but he was William Styron and that was before ebooks and our shiny,  new demand-per-click culture.

I love readers. People who don’t read creep me out. I can say that because how would they know I’ve insulted them? What do non-readers have to contribute? Those dummies!

Ha! Wait. You aren’t reading this aloud to someone are you?

~ Like my flavor? Listen to the first chapter of my crime thriller, Bigger Than Jesus. I’m podcasting the book through the summer. Enjoy! (Or be a hero and just click the cover to grab it. Thanks for reading!)

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Ultimate Blog Challenge: Risk more

There’s a scene in the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Parisin which Owen Wilson’s character meets Salvador Dali. I’m a fan of

Woody Allen

Woody Allen (Photo credit: ThomasThomas)

Dali and Adrien Brody makes him weird and charming and, at that moment, obsessed with rhinos. After meeting Dali, Wilson’s writer character (an undisguised Woody Allen surrogate) starts to think that he needs to let his imagination off the leash and be more creative with his writing. I do wish more writers took chances and drew outside the lines.

Experimental fiction has a bit of a bad rep and sometimes for good reasons. It also gets a bad rep for bad reasons and the big bad reason is the author’s fear. Too often we hear that readers want to be made “comfortable” with a story. Agents and editors want “the same thing only different” from the successful authors they happen upon. You can write a competent mystery, thriller, romance — whatever your flavor — but I don’t think you can do anything great if you don’t stretch at least a little bit. Playing it safe means going with the tried and true. There’s plenty of that already.

The reader and writer in me is screaming, “No!”

A writer wants to do something more, different and great. A reader wants to feel like they are in confident, competent hands so they won’t invest a lot of time in a book and three-quarters of the way through discover the story has gone off the rails. Take your risks but make it plausible within the context of the book. I’ve just put a book down because an author made a choice that was implausible and annoying. For the first chunk of the book, we understand we are dealing with astronauts just back from Mars. After the three-year mission is over, they discover that one of said astronauts isn’t what he appears to be. He’s an astronaut impersonator. Really? Maybe that would work for some people, but it didn’t work for me and I put the book down, possibly never to pick it up again. I’ve got a lot to read. Life’s too short to waste on books that don’t work for me. If the author had made the astronaut impersonator the guy who messed up more, the conceit might have worked. Instead, the non-astronaut is the ultimate astronaut. Yeah, right. Got a brain tumour? Hand the scalpel to the brilliant amateur because he’s read some books and has a fresh take on this whole “surgery” thing. Ugh.

Please do take risks with your stories.

Go to unexpected places and surprise me.

Make me believe

(because I really want to believe.)

Midnight in Paris isn’t a great movie, but there is something very appealing about a cadre of artists in Paris in the ’20s who interact with each other, bounce ideas off each other and critique and encourage each other to reach beyond the norm. Too many people were living lives of quiet desperation (like now) while Hemingway or Gertrude Stein asserted themselves and their art as an important value, not a frivolous hobby. I don’t care for Stein’s writing at all and I prefer Hemingway’s short stories, but how noble to be so invested in art for art’s sake! Are we still invested in art or is our attention too fractured? Is there an equivalent to Paris in the ’20s now? Or have we devolved in our expectations of the value of art so much that we melt into the lowest common denominator of art critic: a mewling pack of trolling eunuchs at the harem with nothing to offer but barely literate, troglodytic snipe and snark in one-star book reviews?

Midnight in Paris succeeds only so much as nostalgia for an ex-pat community of artists in the 1920s succeeds, but I do love elevating art. When two hoods in an Elmore Leonard novel or a Quentin Tarantino movie or a Guy Ritchie film have conversations that you don’t expect, that’s a writer taking a risk to bring us more beyond the usual schtick and making it work. That’s “a Royal with Cheese.” That’s “Leave the guns, take the cannolis.”

Smack your reader with something they don’t expect.

Make them love you anyway.

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Making Money From Paperbacks

See on Scoop.itWriting and reading fiction

As regular readers will be aware, I used to post a monthly sales report, sharing my sales numbers, dollars earned, and what I had been up to in terms of promotion or various other projects. I did t…

 

Good pointers on approaching bookstores and a helpful breakdown of CreateSpace terms that help to determine your book’s price point. ~ Chazz

See on davidgaughran.wordpress.com

Filed under: publishing

Ultimate Blog Challenge: The Dumb Reviewer’s False Standard Failure

There’s a certain sort of critic who really bugs me. As much as I enjoy the Slate Culture Gabfestpodcast, there’s an issue

English: Salvador Dali with ocelot and cane.

English: Salvador Dali with ocelot and cane. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

that crops up from time to time which itches like pink insulation on a sweaty naked body in a summer attic. It’s a response that tries to intellectualize the visceral and make a good thing into a bad thing. Here’s the quote that gives me headaches:

“We liked it, but should we like it?”

So much waste of tuition money is revealed in that reaction. It’s a response to art that tries to detour around the heart and isolate the brain. It’s a dishonest afterthought. It’s snooty and, in trying to sound intelligent, is stupid.

I enjoy the movie Roadhouse, for instance. By some people’s standards, I suppose I shouldn’t. However, turn it on and try not to get sucked in. It’s not in the “So bad, it’s good” category, though some movies overshoot the runway and actually manage that. Roadhouse is fun and ridiculous and has a lot of funny lines, mostly intended. It’s just so watchable. It’s a visceral reaction. Can’t I enjoy it without the self-appointed cultural elite’s disapproval?

Art that achieves what it set out to do and entertains its audience is good art.

So says me, anyway. I could list dozens of silly movies and books that demanded little of me that I still enjoyed. The latest victim of this critical chaos appears to be Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.  I just read fellow blogger Jordanna East’s takedown of a bad review here. She’s not the only one to point out misguided reviewers complaining about historical inaccuracy in the movie. Good critics go to action movies with the expectation that it’s not meant to be a historical document. If it’s not a French movie in an art cinema, do not review it as if all movies are French movies in art cinemas!

That said, I’m all for elevating material. It’s a treat to run across sparkling dialogue that mocks expectations. (See the movie The Guard with Don Cheadle, for the best of that phenomenon in movies.) In my book, Bigger Than Jesus, I set out to challenge expectations, too, and not just in terms of plotting and surprises and reversals. I’m talking about getting at real emotion. There are consequences spread amongst all those jokes. The heroine’s fascination with the life of Salvador Dali means something to her, to the story and ultimately to the reader. I set out to make my roller coaster travel through unexpected places without slowing the pace. Elevating material can be done. It doesn’t have to happen all the time for everything, though.

Dalton’s reply to the big bad bouncer in Roadhouse serves equally well for bad reviewers. The bad guy turns up his nose and says, “I thought you’d be taller. You don’t look like much t’me.”

Patrick Swayze, as Dalton, smiles wide and says, “Opinions vary!”

Then bop ’em in the nose if you want to.

~ Like my flavor? Listen to the first chapter of my crime thriller, Bigger Than Jesus. I’m podcasting the book through the summer. Enjoy! (Or be a hero and just click the cover to grab it. Thanks for reading!)

Get Bigger Than Jesus

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Ultimate Blog Challenge: Top 10 What I’ll soon do differently with my book promotion

1. Last November I started up my podcast to reach out to new readers. I called the podcast Self-help for Stoners

English: Third generation Amazon Kindle

English: Third generation Amazon Kindle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

after my book of the same name. The podcast was a good idea, but tying the title to one book when I have dozens in me was a tactical error and I’ll change that soon.

2. This, my main blog, focuses on information, both original and curated, for anyone interested in publishing books.  The blog is not geared to readers. That’s what the author site is for. In the future, I think I’ll post to the author site more often than I do, especially as I have more reviews and events to talk about. I don’t regret writing about writing, though. Some people think authors are stupid for doing that, but I went with my passion. If I had tackled something I was less interested in, I wouldn’t be approaching 1,000 blog posts now and I wouldn’t be able to make two books out of it.

3. My two latest books, Bigger Than Jesus and The Dangerous Kind & Other Stories, are both on Amazon and exclusive to KDP Select so they do not appear in retail outlets. That’s fine for now, but eventually I will migrate them to other ebook platforms. Amazon was great at promotion, but with their new algorithms, they aren’t so great for me anymore. (I hope they rectify this and we, collectively, get through the current summer sales slump to see a more energetic autumn.)

4. In the future, I’ll raise the price of my books. They’re all at couch change for $2.99 now. This is the introductory price and will change, which will also make more sense with Amazon’s new price-based (rather than quantity sold) algorithms.

5. I have several books in revisions that reach beyond 120,000 words. If they were shorter they’d be done and available by now. If it makes editorial sense, I may break the longest books up into trilogies.

6. I will write shorter books. As I wrote Bigger Than Jesus, I discovered that I love to write a book with a high momentum. A fast write (and read) energizes me. The paperback will still clock in at 249 pages, so no one will feel I’m shortchanging them.

7. I will write no stand-alones. Bigger than Jesus is the first of The Hit Man Series. The Poeticule Bay Series is in development. The books are meant to stretch out into long series following certain characters. Stand alone novels are a heavy investment of my time that do not develop a following to the same numbers as a series can. To make more art, I have to make that business decision. What will be fun is when I have crossovers, where many of my characters from different books meet.

8. I will write faster. I wrote Bigger Than Jesus in a month. To perfect it, the editorial pipeline was longer than that, but I find I can write effectively and well at speed. My editor and beta team made that possible and, maybe it’s the journalistic training talking, deadlines are my friend.

9. I will have print versions available for all my books going forward. Currently I just have Self-help for Stoners available as a paperback. The other short story collections didn’t have quite the length needed to make for a paperback with heft. Everything I do from now on makes for a great mass market paperback. I just finished all the book design and print formatting on Bigger Than Jesus today so I’ll have the paperbacks on hand pretty soon. (I’m in love with Georgia. She’s a beautiful font.)

10. I will be less shy about contacting other authors for blurbs and book blogger for reviews. This is more of an affirmation than a plan since I have yet to compose those emails. I’ve sent out a few copies for review, but it’s an issue about which I am still an introvert. (I’m only pretending to be an extrovert here so someone will read my books.)

~ Like my flavor? Listen to the first chapter of my crime thriller, Bigger Than Jesus. I’m

Get Bigger Than Jesus

podcasting the book through the summer. Enjoy! (Or be a hero and just click the cover to grab it. Thanks for reading!)

Filed under: publishing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ultimate Blog Challenge: Indies Versus Committees

The Senate Committee on Budget (ca.1997-2001).

The Senate Committee on Budget (ca.1997-2001). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The common wisdom is that all of us together are smarter than any one of us. Combine a group’s brains and their solutions will overcome that of a genius. That’s not my experience. Here’s why one head is often better than several:

1. The smartest person in a group is not the one who gets to talk in a committee. The loudest person does all the talking and steers the ship, often into the rocks. Stupid people are always the most confident and the less a person knows about a subject, the more certain they are of their opinions. That’s called leadership.

2. Take any group and there’s always one wacko*. Said wacko will espouse insane ideas. The rest of the group will then compromise with the wacko, thus arriving at terrible ideas that only seem more sane within the room in which the committee meets. Half wacko is still wacko.

3. People vote for the lesser of two evils, so they still vote for evil.

4. Committees search for reasons to justify their existence. They don’t complete a task and disband. They say, what can we do next? How can we extend our power, budget and egos? I call this committee creep. It’s for creeps.

5. A committee is a team. It becomes an expression of our genetic gravitation to tribalism. Committees become Us Versus Those Peons over there. (For the Latin derivation of the word “peon”, break it down into syllables.)

6. A committee is a way to spread responsibility around. If an individual says, “I made this decision,” he or she will have to live with it. Put it on a group label and everybody’s hiding behind the responsibility diffusion.

7. When I make a decision about my publishing company, a book cover, a sales platform or an editorial choice, it happens immediately. I may consult my friends with expertise or bat ideas around with my graphic designer, but the decisions come fast. I’ve waited long enough. I’m not waiting anymore and I’m certainly not asking for permission. I can screw up on my own easily without help.

8. I mentioned that, without a committee, the fault gets assigned to me for bad, independent decisions. The rewards come straight back to me, too. Then I dance with naked abandon, so it’s good I’m alone at the time.

9. Without a committee, I am in control of my destiny as much as any human is. Sure, there are a lot of whims and variables beyond my control. One of those variables isn’t a pinhead named Mort from Middle Management who’s telling me what to do. Screw Mort.

10. Committees are cooperative ventures that require a lot of socializing, neckties and appropriate office behaviour. I do not share toys. I do not play well with others. I’m writing this in my underwear. There might even be a naked abandon dance party later.

I  AM INDIE AND PROUD

*If your group has no wacko, the wacko is you.

And yes, I am qualified to diagnose under the It Takes One to Know One Rule.

Get Bigger Than Jesus

~ Like my flavor? Listen to the first chapter of my crime thriller, Bigger Than Jesus. I’m podcasting the book through the summer. Enjoy!

Filed under: publishing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ultimate Blog Challenge: The Warm Chocolate Chip Cookie Exposition

After reading the book descriptions, someone sent me a question:

“What are your books like?” 

“Suspense that’s often funny with lots of twists,” I said.

“Yeah, but what are they like?”

Um…what? I wasn’t sure what they were getting at, so I replied via email.

If you like:

the twists of William (The Princess Bride) Goldman’s plots;

the fast pace of a Blake (Run) Crouch;

the worldview of Chuck (Fight Club) Palahniuk;

the punchy, funny dialogue of Elmore (Get Shorty) Leonard;

and the disappointed humanism of Kurt (I shouldn’t have to name any Kurt Vonnegut books! Read them all!) Vonnegut,

then you’ll love my crime novel Bigger Than Jesus. Enjoy!

My potential reader/interrogator then wrote, “I’m not familiar with any of those books so don’t tell me about them. Tell me what your book is like!”

I sighed and then I fired off another helpful email:

Best chocolate chip cookies I've made in decades.

Best chocolate chip cookies I’ve made in decades. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Don’t you love chocolate chip cookies when they’re straight out of the oven? The chocolate is melting a bit and you risk burning your tongue because you can hardly wait. These are the best-tasting chocolate chip cookies ever. You force yourself to slow down and put one in your mouth. It’s really soft and you just hold it there as long as you can to savour it while you pour a tall, cold glass of milk? Then the kitchen floor falls out from under you and you’re sucked down into quicksand and you’re trying not to die and you can’t figure out why God hates you and all you want is to get away and make the woman of your dreams love you. You only have seconds before the suffocating sludge is over your head and you’re about to find out if what follows this tortured life is hell or oblivion. Your heart is full of regret and if you can just live, you swear you’ll turn your life around. Kind of like that, but with more jokes.”

No reply yet, but I’m guessing he’s not a reader, anyway.

If they do email again, I’ll suggest they consider breaking down and read a sample chapter.

 

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Wise, Ink. | 9 Ironclad Sales Tools for Authorpreneurs

See on Scoop.itWriting and reading fiction

Here’s a nice summary of things to consider for increased sales. I like the term “Authorpreneur”, too. Learn at the link! ~ Chazz

See on www.wiseinkblog.com

Filed under: publishing

Backlinks: What Are They And How To Identify Them | Better Business Better Life

See on Scoop.itWriting and reading fiction

There are certain tech-oriented things I should be doing with my blogs that I just haven’t gotten around to. Here’s a good one for all of us to consider. ~ Chazz

See on www.betterbusinessbetterlife.com.au

Filed under: publishing

Bestseller with over 1,000 reviews!
Winner of the North Street Book Prize, Reader's Favorite, the
Literary Titan Award, the Hollywood Book Festival, and the
New York Book Festival.

http://mybook.to/OurZombieHours
A NEW ZOMBIE ANTHOLOGY

Winner of Writer's Digest's 2014 Honorable Mention in Self-published Ebook Awards in Genre

The first 81 lessons to get your Buffy on

More lessons to help you survive Armageddon

"You will laugh your ass off!" ~ Maxwell Cynn, author of Cybergrrl

Available now!

Fast-paced terror, new threats, more twists.

An autistic boy versus our world in free fall

Suspense to melt your face and play with your brain.

Action like a Guy Ritchie film. Funny like Woody Allen when he was funny.

Jesus: Sexier and even more addicted to love.

You can pick this ebook up for free today at this link: http://bit.ly/TheNightMan

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