Angela Booth's Writing Blog

Go Indie: How to Get Started In Self-Publishing

1. Write What You Enjoy Reading

If you’re not a big reader, change your habits. Bestselling author Dean Koontz once said that a writer’s only recreation should be reading. You read not only to discover what’s selling right now, but also to get comfortable with language and grammar.

Decide whether you’d like to write fiction (novels and short stories), or nonfiction (material that’s factual). Check out the top-selling material on Amazon, and read some of it.

via www.justwriteabook.com

Smashwords Announces New Self-Interview Tool for Authors

Smashwords, however, has developed a new tool—it’s called Smashwords Interviews—that allows the authors on its site to give readers that exact information. The service officially rolled out yesterday with a grand total of eight authors. But not to worry: Smashwords Interviews is now open to all, and a good number of authors have since decided to utilize the new tool; dozens of new interviews have very recently been posted to the site.

via www.teleread.com

Fantastic idea.

Fiction: Your Outline Isn't the Story, Nor the Plot

The outline is not the story. It’s not even the plot. An outline should be kind of the table of contents of the story. The outline should be used as a guide, a map of sorts for the story, and that is not the case for me. What I did was to wrote the story itself in an outline, and then tried to make a story out of it again, a second time.

via joshrollinswrites.com

An outline as a table of contents; best definition of a fiction outline ever.

The Master: Elmore Leonard

He was a master of characterization and dialogue who understood that the two things were connected — that books were boring if everyone in them talked the same way. He gave you just enough detail to set a scene or sketch a character, and let your imagination do the rest. And you could tell from how he wrote that he really listened to people. 

via www.vulture.com

If you want to be a better writer, study Elmore Leonard.

Elmore Leonard Writes The End

He famously tired of people asking what the secrets of his writing might be and responded finally by offering ‘Ten Rules of Writing’ to the Times.  The included, ‘Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip’ and ‘if it sounds like writing, rewrite it’.

via www.independent.co.uk

Gone, but he has a new book coming out this year. Wonderful writer.

Interested in Kindle Publishing? These Articles Will Help

This week, our theme has been fast and easy Kindle publishing. I hope these articles inspire you to WRITE, and to PUBLISH.

Check out any articles you missed.

Fast and Easy Kindle Publishing: Cash in on the Ebook Revolution

Start by thinking about what YOU could write for the Kindle. Look at the image on the right hand side. They’re book categories, and they’ll get you started thinking about what you could write. You’ll notice that there are fiction categories (erotica, romance, mystery etc), as well as nonfiction categories (business and investing, health, computers, education etc.)

via www.fabfreelancewriting.com

(Giggle) You're Not Losing Your Mind, You're Writing

John was always impatient on the weekends; he missed the formal structure of the business week. When he was younger he used to stay late after school on Fridays and come in early on Mondays, a pattern his mother referred to with equal parts admiration and disdain as “studying overtime.”

Jesus, I’ve written another loser.

via www.newyorker.com

This New Yorker article is the funniest example of a writer's struggle to get the words out I've ever read.

Sadly, this is how a writer's mind works. And that's OK. :-)

ASK For What You Want (And Keep Asking)

If you don’t ask—the answer is always “no.” No one likes to be rejected. Asking professional people and successful authors for an endorsement can be emotionally risky. You better learn how to deal with rejection. But if you don’t ask for the support, you’ll probably never get it. No one called me and offered to write an endorsement; I called them. You’d be surprised to know who I asked.

via kurtbubna.com

You know what you want. ASK for it. All anyone can say is NO. But what if they say... YES?

Want Book Reviews? Great Tips

Where do I find betareaders? There are several ways to go on this one.

• Social Media: I simply tweeted and posted that I needed betareaders (and betareviewers) for my new work and was anyone interested? I told people I needed their email and to DM or PM me. I heard from about thirty people over the course of the month prior to release.
• Groups: If you’re in any Goodreads groups, LinkedIn, or Facebook groups, you can draw on these folks to see if anyone would be interested.

via www.business2community.com

Great advice on getting reviews for your book.

Notability: Best Note-Taking App?

Write, illustrate and annotate using gorgeous retina ink. Notability's zoom window helps you quickly and clearly draw every detail, while the palm rest protects your notes from unwanted marks. Choose the right pen and paper for any project.

Import forms, contracts, worksheets, documents, presentations, and even books; then use the same tools that help you take beautiful notes in Notability to mark up PDFs. Do you have files in other formats such as doc or ppt? Notability can import these too thanks to Google Drive.

via itunes.apple.com

I've heard so many good things about Notability that I'm downloading it even though I already have too many note-taking apps.

(It's currently on sale.)

Too Much to Say? Tweet Longer Messages

So, it’s better to use any of these 3rd party sites, which will let you send tweets in more than 140 character limit. Also, if you add a link with your Tweet, your tweet character limit will reduce down to 120.

via www.shoutmeloud.com

It's annoying when you run up against Twitter's 140 character limit... Break out with these services.

Fiction Fiesta Workbook: Write Short Stories

Can YOU write short fiction?

If you can tell a story, you're golden. You can sell your short stories for $2.99 each, and you get 70% of that amount for each copy. Since 70% is just over $2, you'd receive $2 per sale.

Imagine if you sold just 50 copies a month, that's $100 per story -- every month. Of course, your stories won't all sell at the same rate. Some stories may sell hundreds or even thousand of copies each month. Other stories, few or zero copies. Luckily, short stories don't take long to write.

via www.writingchallenge.net

Fiction Fiesta, is now available as a workbook. This is for all those readers who wanted to write and sell FAST. Here you go... ;-)

Professional Blogging: It’s Big Business Now

Blog, blog, blog!

Did you know that the tech blog Mashable puts out 2,000 posts a month? Yes, TWO THOUSAND. A month.

Think about that when you have three posts on a blog, and wonder why you’re not getting traffic and clients.

Blogging is now big business. It’s becoming de rigueur for businesses, large and small, and of course, for publications and publishers.

via www.fabfreelancewriting.com

You're a writer. Consider offering professional coaching services.

Get Creative In Your Spare Time

Don’t create your experiment and judge it at the same time. Creation and judgment are very different thought processes and can interfere with each other, and must be done separately. Experiment with exploring every idea completely first (writing it down, drawing it out, actually trying to do it). Only then move into editing, curating, and judging to get to best version of the idea.

via 99u.com

I work with aspiring writers every day who say they'd love to write "one day", when they stop working, or when the kids have left home.

Stop putting your creative life on hold. Develop a side project or two. As this article suggests, look at them as experiments.

If Your Computer's Ruining Your Creativity...

Leave Space

If you’re writing out a list of headings or topics that you want to expand on, leave lots of space between them on the paper and don’t bother to number them until you’re completely finished. This lets you add or even subtract headings and items as your thinking evolves – without running out of space.

via www.forbes.com

Get a notepad and a pen, or pencil. Start writing, and as the quote above says, leave space.

I think better with a pen in my hand. Perhaps this process will work for you, too.