Common wisdom has it that, as an Indie, it’s a good idea to write a series. You price the first book as free or $.99 and set the rest at a regular price. Once readers are hooked, you can pretty well count on them to buy the others. Loyal customers and all that. But inherent in the multi-book series, you have two main problems. Continue reading “Writing a Series: Pitfalls and Solutions”
Author: Gordon Long
Gordon A. Long is a writer, editor, publisher, playwright, director and teacher.
Learn more about Gordon and his writing from his blog and his Author Central page.
6 Key Differences Between Storytelling and Writing
Lately I’ve been working on a project recording people’s personal stories and editing them for publication. While creating these transformations, I have gained a new appreciation for the difference between a work told by a storyteller to a live audience and something written by an author for the reading public. Storytellers who want to write their stories down run into so many problems because some elements of the storyteller’s art just don’t translate to written form. Since the ability to tell a story is one of the key items in every writer’s toolbox, we all tend to slip into storyteller tricks. Watch out for this slippage; often it doesn’t work. Continue reading “6 Key Differences Between Storytelling and Writing”
8 Elements of Tradecraft: Is Your Writing Plumb, Level, and Square?
Over the holidays I was talking to my brother, who is a carpenter in Fort McMurray in the Alberta Oil Patch. Because he spends a lot of time living in camp, he is a voracious reader, so when he talks about books, I listen. His comment was that a lot of the authors he reads do not pay enough attention to their tradecraft.
As a carpenter, his objective in every project is that everything is plumb, level, and square. It is easy to slack off and not bother. Boards are usually cut off square in the mill, so if you jam them together tight, they will usually align themselves square to each other. However, if they are even slightly off, your project will not end up completely square. Which is no problem, until some day, later on, you try to match it up to another project. Then, if the other piece of work isn’t quite square either, the errors always multiply, and the two will never fit together, and in the end it will all look like crap. And if the first project is, for example, the foundation of a house, the whole rest of the structure is going to be problematic. Continue reading “8 Elements of Tradecraft: Is Your Writing Plumb, Level, and Square?”
So You Wanna Write a Book but You Dunno How to Start?
He
re at Indies Unlimited, we get this question all the time:
“I want to write a novel based on …(something I love)… but I have no clue how to write one. How do get this idea off the ground?”
There is only one answer: start. Far too many people have a story inside them, but they spend years hemming and hawing about it and never get it done. So you aren’t Margaret Atwood. So what? I know. It looks like a huge, unassailable task, and you have no idea what to do first. Read on. Continue reading “So You Wanna Write a Book but You Dunno How to Start?”