Angela Booth's Writing Blog

Self-Publishing Opportunities: Discover Short Reads

It’s been at least a year since I deep-dived into self-publishing opportunities for short ebooks. Not only has this sector grown, with more ebooks published, it’s also more lucrative.

You’ll find the details in our new program, Short Reads’ Secrets: A Short Reads Self-Publishing Report.

Discover new self-publishing opportunities

There are two primary categories for short ebooks, Short Reads and Short Stories. Of the two categories, pay attention to Short Reads — it’s a restricted category, which means that you can’t choose it as one of your two categories when you publish. Amazon slots your book into Short Reads depending on reading time.

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Inspiring Bullet Journal Ideas You Can Use For Reading And Writing

Your bullet journal: should you have one, or several?

We discussed this at a recent writers’ group meeting. Our group has several BuJo enthusiasts, and opinions were divided. Several authors maintained that the point of a bullet journal is that you keep everything together, in one notebook.

I’ve found however that I prefer to keep an additional A6 notebook (Field Notes size) for my Collections. Since I fill up bullet journals at a rapid rate, it takes an hour or more to transfer my Collections from a filled notebook to a new one. I also keep a lightweight, cahier-style notebook for each novel I write.

What’s important of course is that you do what works for you.

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Fun Writing Exercises: End Procrastination, Write Easily And Well

Fun writing exercises to end procrastination and kickstart your creativity

Writing depends on a smooth interaction between your conscious mind, and your subconscious. You know how this interaction feels. When it’s going well, you spend hours writing, and it seems as if just minutes have passed. You can’t wait to get back to your writing.

When it’s going badly, your writing slows. It’s painful. You want to get up and do something — anything — to escape the misery.

Let’s look at some exercises my students have found helpful.

Use them regularly — don’t wait until you’re procrastinating, or become blocked.

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Fiction Writing Basics: 2 Time-Saving Character-Creation Tips

In fiction writing, it’s all about the characters

Unfortunately there’s no magic trick to making characters “come alive.” You construct them.

Instead of lengthy character bios which you won’t remember, try choosing keywords for your characters instead. That serves a double purpose. It makes your character’s attributes easier to remember, and it also kickstarts you into several scenes. Once you’ve decided that Fred’s bad-tempered, and that Alice regrets marrying him, you show that in your early scenes.

Let’s look at two tips which you can use at any time when writing your first draft; try to do it as soon as you can. If you do, you’ll find that your characters will do most of your plotting for you — and editing will be much faster and easier.

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Writing A Novel? 3 Tips To Boost Your Creativity

Writing has been used as a therapy to recover from emotional trauma as well as to aid physical healing.

For example, a JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) article from 1999 was titled: “Effects of writing about stressful experiences on symptom reduction in patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis: a randomized trial.”

The study concluded that writing offered: “clinically relevant changes in health status at 4 months compared with those in the control group.”

Many writers and authors have suffered from ill health for much of their lives. As the saying goes… much of the world’s work is done by people who weren’t feeling well at the time.

Julius Caesar, for example, arguably the most effective military commander in history, suffered from epilepsy. Not only did he command his legions, and live in the field with his soldiers, Caesar was a prolific writer.

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Fiction Writing Exercises: Use Your Imagination To Write More Easily

Everyone is imaginative. Unfortunately, many of us who are highly imaginative into adulthood tend to use our imagination in destructive ways — we worry about things which never happen, for example.

Build your imaginative power: fiction writing exercises you can use at any time

I’ve had many queries from writers who’d love to write fiction, but who worry that their imagination is non-existent.

Let’s look at some exercises which will help.

1. Use repetitive tasks: they often trigger creativity

An imaginative mind state is focused. But it’s also loose — free wheeling, and dream-like.

Repetitive tasks which don’t require much thinking help to trigger creativity. For example, I go for a drive if I’m stuck on a plot point. Other writers do household chores, or go swimming.

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Writing Goals: 3 Tips For Self-Publishing In Series

Reviewing your goals is essential. These days, I review my writing goals every week.

I’m sure you’re wondering: what do goals have to do with SERIES writing?

In a nutshell: you need to set goals when you write in series. Otherwise, you’ll forget about your series because you’re chasing the latest bright shiny idea you had.

(Apropos of series writing, Planning And Writing A Hot-Selling Series has just been released; check it out.)

Series sell, in both fiction and nonfiction, but it takes persistence to write in series

It’s worth focusing on series for one simple reason: you have more chances to sell books and build a readership. When I coach authors and look at their publishing catalogues, I see a lot of standalone books.

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Writing Fiction: 3 Beginners’ Tips To Help You To Get Started

When you’re writing fiction, you get paid to tell lies

When you’re writing fiction, in essence you’re getting paid to tell lies. Yes, I’m stating the blindingly obvious, but it’s worth remembering.

Here’s why. New fiction authors tend to write autobiography as fiction, usually unconsciously. This is a trap, because it’s limiting.

You can only write from what you’ve experienced, but this means emotions you’re experienced. It doesn’t mean that you must experience events in order to write about them, otherwise many mystery authors would be writing their novels from prison.

Let’s look at some beginners’ tips.

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Self-Publishing: 3 Tips To Mine The Gold In Your Catalogue

When self-publishing, check your sales each quarter: do more with what’s selling

We’re writers, so we’re all about what we’re writing today, and our next brilliant idea. If we give a thought to already-published books, it’s to line up a marketing schedule for them

Sadly, this means that we’re missing out on sales.

After you’ve published a few books, you become aware that some books out-sell others by a wide margin. When this happens, it’s time to capitalize on it. I recommended to Jenny that she watch her sales, and study them carefully each quarter to find the gold.

Let’s look at some tips for mining the gold in your self-publishing catalogue.

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Self-Publishing Serial Fiction: 3 Easy Ways To Promote Serials

I’ve received some questions about promoting serial fiction, so let’s look at easy ways to promote your serials today.

Yes, paid promotion works for serial fiction

Paid promotion works for serials. Of course your mileage may vary, depending on your genre and other factors. However, many authors find that they quickly recoup their advertising spend.

1. Set up pre-orders for each episode

Use Kindle eBook Pre-order, because as Amazon says:

… you can start promoting your eBook (we don’t currently offer pre-orders for paperbacks) before it’s released. You can promote your eBook’s pre-order page on Author Central, Goodreads, your own site, and elsewhere. Also, pre-orders will contribute toward sales rank and other Kindle Store merchandising even before your eBook’s released. This can help more readers discover your book.

Using pre-orders is a no-brainer; it’s free promotion.

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A Plague Of Plagiarism: It’s Everywhere

A plagiarizing romance author

Romance author Cristiane Serruya allegedly lifted words from many romance authors, including Courtney Milan. That proved to be a big mistake:

Milan is a lawyer who used to teach intellectual property law at Seattle University.

Weirdly enough, I’d just written a blog post about ghostwriting, and then I saw Courtney’s post.

As soon as I read Cristiane Serruya’s tweet blaming her Fiverr ghostwriter, I posted to Facebook:

Apropos my blog post about ghostwriting that I posted to the blog earlier; I noticed Courtney Milan’s post here.

And this tweet from the alleged plagiarist. (The tweet was deleted within hours.)

(The plagiarist) claims she hired a ghostwriter from (the mind boggles, and I can’t believe I’m typing this) FIVERR? Seriously??

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Writing Fiction: An Easy Way To Keep Your Plot Moving

Problems? Writing fiction is easier when you focus on your characters

Here’s what I suggest to my students. Whenever you’re writing fiction, and you’re stuck, ask yourself: who wants what, and why?

What your characters want will change over the course of the novel. Usually a “want change” happens at a turning point in the novel.

What your characters want changes over the course of your novel

For example, the inciting incident (the event which starts the main action of the story) will change what your main character wants.

Let’s say you’re writing a mystery. Your sleuth is a detective (Bob), who has major challenges. Not only has Bob missed out on promotion, his wife has packed up and left him, and he’s discovered that his boss is in the pay of the local crime boss.

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Social Media Common Sense: Write Books, Do What Works

Do you spend too much time on social media? Are you more productive because of social media, or less?

Photographer Nick Fancher posted an interesting article, Why I Deleted All of My Social Media and 60,000 Followers.

He makes an interesting point:

…social media trains creatives to be inauthentic. At the least, social media trains us to stay within the lane of our “brand”.

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The Professional Ghostwriter: Questions About A Wordsmith For Hire

Over the past few months I’ve received a slew of questions about ghostwriting, such as: “Who hires a professional ghostwriter?”

Other questions included:

• How much do ghostwriters make?
• If I wrote (something) for my client as a ghostwriter, can I do… (fill in the blank) with it?

I thought I’d answer the questions about professional ghostwriting in an article.

Firstly, let’s look at our definition of a “professional ghostwriter.” He or she is a writer or author who’s hired by a client to write something, under a work done for hire agreement, or a specific ghostwriting agreement.

Whatever the agreement is, once the work is created and paid for, all copyright in the product devolves to the hirer.

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Writing Fiction: 3 Tips For Building A Bigger Novel

Writing fiction: does your novel need to be bigger?

“It’s short,” my friend said. “Can you take a quick look?”

So, I did. She’s writing in one of those “big book” genres, and is concerned that her completed novel will come in at around 50K words. After reading half the novel, and skimming the rest, I though it was great. The story pulled me in, and I loved the main characters.

My friend still wasn’t happy. She wanted to build out the novel, so I shared some of the tips from our writers’ group which might help her to extend it.

Two tips are easy; the final tip is a little challenging.

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