Angela Booth's Writing Blog

You're You: There's No Competition

The message says something like: "I've been laid off from _______ (wherever.) I've been trying to get writing jobs, but the competition's too tough. Thousands of other writers have been laid off too, and..."

If you're looking at the world this way, please stop it.

Fact: you have NO competition.

via www.angelabooth.biz

I've been receiving more emails from writers who want to get writing jobs and are psyched out by the "competition."

Please read the above article. When you're YOU, there is no competition.

Stop making yourself crazy. Be yourself, that's all you need to do. (Being both competent and reliable should go without saying.)

21 Days to Create a Writing Habit

Identify Good Habits

Browse the most popular habits or invent your own. Pick the ones you want to achieve.

via lift.do

If you started the 30-Day Novel-Writing Challenge on August 1, you know what today is our final day. The 30 days are all done, so kudos to you, if you took part. If you didn't, you can start today.

I hoped participants would get into the writing habit. In today's message, I shared what I learned over the 30 days:

I learned to be kind to myself, and not beat myself up if there was no way I could devote a whole hour to my novel. I accepted my limitations. With luck, I'll remember that.

Did you build a writing habit? Psychologists suggest that it takes 21 days to build a habit. Add a note to your schedule to "write!"

A clever app to help you to build good habits

I'm terrified that now the Challenge is over, I'll start procrastinating on my fiction again.

Lift, a clever new iPhone app, may help with that. I've just downloaded it. It's free. The first daily task I entered was: "work on new novel". I'm not the first person on Lift to create the task, so obviously this task will be a popular one.

Now let's see how I go with my new "work on new novel" habit. :-)

Give Your Ebook Away, and Sell More

The results where pretty conclusive: Over the five days that Hellbound was put up for free, it was downloaded close to 4000 times, which is more than it sold in the past year for eBooks. Not only that, after the free period finished, sales were still higher by quadruple the previous month AND sales for I Am Satan were given a boost as well. The fact that the title rose to Number 1 on the Amazon Fantasy Rankings for free kindle books, also meant it was sitting next to books the likes of Game of Thrones and The Hobbit.

via www.timhawken.com

Amazon knows how to sell stuff, so maybe Amazon can help you sell your ebooks by giving them away.

Tim Hawken discovered the power of free samples on Amazon, as he reveals in the article above.

Watch What You Think

... it teaches you to be aware of your own thoughts and to put them into words. And this helped enormously.

"And the reason it helped enormously is because it taught me that I have a certain habit of mind. My anxiety came from years, years, probably from simply from who I am, from my own temperament, of talking to myself in a fearful and anxiety-producing manner, and that if I wanted to be less anxious, I had to foster better habits of mind.

via www.npr.org

I'm a great proponent of journal writing for writers.

Many writers look on journaling as a waste of time. If you never journal however, you'll never understand how you think. And for writers, realizing how your mind works -- the automatic tracks it runs on -- is essential.

I practiced mindfulness meditation for many years. I should still be doing it, but I've found journaling just as useful. Anytime I become too obsessive however, I practice mindfulness again.

As a writer, your thinking is all you have. Watch what you think by journaling. You'll be more productive and creative. Chances are it will contribute to your peace of mind, too.

Write A Book And Sell It Forever

Traditionally-Published Print Books Only Have A Small ‘Window Of Opportunity’

The endlessly repeated tragedy of traditional print publishing is when a writer discovers that after the launch of their book, they’re not selling nearly as many copies as they had hoped.  They need more time to find and grow a readership for the book, but unfortunately, no such time is granted.

via bestsellerlabs.com

When you write a book and are traditionally published, no one tells you that by "publication day", your book MUST already be a success. It should have plentiful sales, and back orders. Otherwise your book is doomed -- before it's published.

Ebook publication is different. Your books (and you) can take all the time in the world to find a readership. You have forever. :-)

Most importantly of all: you're in total control. No one will pulp your books, and they never go out of print.

All you need to do is write good books.

Never Lose An Idea

Flexible Output

From directly within Drafts send tweets, post to Facebook, compose and send email, SMS/Messages, create calendar events – or save drafts to Dropbox or Evernote. You can also use “Open in” to export a draft to any other app installed which supports importing text files.

via agiletortoise.com

Drafts is my new favorite app. It's saved me from a blizzard of index cards and sticky notes.

We writers are always getting brainstorms. For decades, I jotted them on any handy scrap of paper.

That's all good, but I'm lazy. An hour or two later, I'd look at a sticky note, decide it was too much trouble to transcribe it, so I'd toss it.

Three days later, I'd wonder what that great idea was...

Drafts is saving me from myself. Now I just tap out an idea, and I'm done. I know I can't lose the idea.

Scrivener: the Novelist's Delight

Then I had an idea. What I needed was a whole new plot arc that spanned the book. I even knew what it had to be. Phew, book saved! But then the question remained, how exactly did I get the new plot arc in?

via blog.pauldorset.com

You're a novelist and you're NOT using Scrivener?

I'm always shocked when someone admits to this. Haven't you got enough problems? Why make writing harder than it needs to be?

Paul Dorset's written a lovely post on how to add a completely new plot arc into a novel using Scrivener.

Knowing Scrivener, I know it's as simple as he makes it sound. If you tried to do it in Word, or any other word processor, it would be a nightmare.

The Big, Bold, REAL World For Writers (YES!)

As Kris stood in my office door laughing about the $12, not in a bad way, but in an astounded way that those two stories had made 12 bucks in one month, I understood finally the new world we had just entered for writers.

For the first time, writers had an option other than traditional publishers, a viable option to reach readers directly, a viable option to make a living with their fiction.

I glanced at the 14 file drawers crammed full of short stories I had written and sold, and miraculously they turned from dead fruit to pure gold right in front of my eyes.

At that moment, I knew I would never leave writing and the publishing industry.

For the first time in my lifetime, writers had viable options for their work besides the churn of traditional publishing.

via www.kirkusreviews.com

I got tears in my eyes when I read Dean Wesley Smith's article, because I know what he's talking about.

Publishing has changed forever for writers, and not a moment too soon.

Yes, there are challenges for writers in our brave new world. However, we're no longer waiting on the gatekeepers (most have always been clueless) to say yay or nay.

These days, if you want to write and publish, you don't need anyone's permission. Go do it.

Why Aren't You Writing Every Day?

And pretty soon after this I realized that I actually needed to write these stories. That may sounds strange, but the act of just sitting at my computer and then forcing myself to write something, for at least five minutes every day, started to help me with writing my novels too. And i know that's the hardest part of being a writer, not the writing itself, but actually sitting down and ignoring everything else and getting on with it.

via www.yaindie.com

Writing becomes a habit.

Get the habit. :-)

Self-Publishing? Don't Read Reviews

Oh, I can’t believe that reader left that nasty 1-star review, I’m going to reply and give them a piece of my mind! Authors need to have thick skin. Not everyone is going to like your book. In fact, some people are going to hate it. And some will be vicious about it, since the anonymity of the Internet makes it easy to be mean. You can learn from bad reviews, so you should welcome constructive criticism. But resist the temptation to pick a fight with your reviewer.

via www.thebookdesigner.com

If you know you can't handle it, don't read any reviews -- none at all, neither good nor bad.

Who cares? The book is done; for you, it's over.

(Well, maybe not if it's nonfiction and you're writing a second edition...)

Tell yourself that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and they're just as entitled to publish that opinion as you are to publish your book.

Write. Focus on your next book, and the one after that.

Dorothy Parker's Wit Lives On

Dorothy Parker on money

“I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.”

“I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.”

via www.flavorwire.com

Here's my favorite Dorothy Parker poem:

Résumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Pure genius.

Bake (And Write) Your Way to Happiness

Baking helped Anneliese to rediscover her identity and rebuild her self-esteem — one perfectly risen confection at a time. 

The idea that such a simple pastime can have a powerful therapeutic effect on serious problems such as this seems unlikely, yet Mary Berry herself has spoken in The Mail of how baking helped her cope with the enormous grief she felt at the death of her son in a car accident 20 years ago.

And last year best-selling novelist Marian Keyes revealed that she baked herself out of one episode of the dark depression that has plagued her throughout her adult life.

via www.dailymail.co.uk

What an inspiring story. Anneliese Giggins baked her way through Mary Berry’s Baking Bible, and blogged about each of the 219 recipes. Yes, 219.

The American Chocolate Wedding Cake, her final recipe, sounds absolutely luscious.

Kindle: Publish Your Novel Serially

Create a publication schedule, so that readers know when to expect upcoming installments.
You don’t want readers waiting too long. If they have to wait, they’ll forget all about your characters and the fascinating story you wrote.

via writinghacker.com

Serial publication used to be all the rage in magazines. Now authors are publishing their novels serially as ebooks.

Be aware that you may annoy some readers if you do this. The above article gives you some useful tips.

Publish: You Don't Need Permission

Bloggers with audiences and subscribers in the hundreds of thousands can take micro content (posts) and then edit and aggregate and produce macro content (books). No longer do you need to wait for a publisher to discover you and “pick you” to publish, you can curate, connect and lead you own tribe of fans, readers and viewers and wrangle your own audience. The social media aware author and blogger who understands the power and leverage of having 1,000′s of people ‘Follow’ you on Twitter and ‘Like’ you on Facebook can have a tribe of fans that can launch and promote their own book without waiting to be picked by a publisher.

via www.jeffbullas.com

The gatekeepers have gone. If you want to publish your book, who's stopping you now? :-)

Your Novel: How to Find Ideas

Ideas Are in the News

Bad things happen to people every day.

Browse the online news sites, and within five minutes you’ll have a slew of ideas. Local news sites are great for finding ideas for mysteries and romances. World-wide news sites deliver ideas for thrillers and science fiction.

Tip: remember that other writers scour the news sites for ideas too. Therefore, to create truly unique seeds for your novels, combine several ideas. Never use a news-story as-is. Make it your own.

via www.justwriteabook.com

Want to write a novel? The above article helps you to find ideas.