I’m lazy. I’m honest about this. And I despise self-promotion. That’s not a very good combination for an author who’s expected to promote her own work. So trust me, if there’s an easy way to do something – I’ll find it.
Twitter used to be fun for me, so I didn’t mind going there. Now I’m so inundated with spammy comments that I hardly ever go there anymore – but millions of other people do. Authors are expected to have a Twitter presence and a following. But if you hate going there, how do you keep these imaginary legions of adoring followers entertained? Easy: you set up your author page on Facebook to generate the tweets for you. Continue reading “Tuesday Tutorial: Tweeting from Facebook”
For the sake of simplicity, let’s agree that authors who write fiction draw freely from their imaginations. Nonfiction writers are expected to deliver verifiable truths. We do not invent characters, events or dialog. Our task is to spill hard, cold, often ugly facts onto the page, framed in captivating paragraphs. Like novelists, we are storytellers engaged in a similar creative process, and what we write is filtered through our subjective perceptions.
Passion is the emotional component that drives the research. How we interpret information cannot be objective, no matter how hard we try to restrain influences that sway our points of view. Deeply held convictions influence the way our sentences are constructed, determine which resources will be brought forward to support our opinions, while at the same time we strive to keep the third person narrative consistently detached and trustworthy. After scouring every other author’s tome on our topic, we must remain convinced that we have something utterly new to offer our readers. Otherwise, why bother to retell the story? Continue reading “The Challenges of Publishing Indie Nonfiction Books by Marcia Quinn Noren”
See, everyone reacts differently. Reading a really bad manuscript doesn’t make me want to cry. It makes me angry. No, I’m not kidding. I wish I were. This article could also be called “How to Make Me Stop Reading Your Entry” because clearly you didn’t take the time or make the effort to have someone else read what you wrote first. Among other things.
Honestly, NOT having someone else read your first chapter before submitting it ANYWHERE is clearly insane. That first chapter is your hook…that first chapter is going to dictate whether the reader keeps reading…and in my case, if the judge keeps judging. Yes, I’m back on the novel writing contest again. Hopefully, someone will gain some sort of insight from the awful, awful things I’ve seen. My eyes! (Cue music from Gone with the Wind.) Okay, I may be exaggerating just a little bit. My eyes don’t actually hurt, my brain does.
Missing words and typographical errors should NEVER occur in a first chapter. Theoretically, they should never occur in a manuscript, but we’re all human and eventually it’s going to happen. But in a submission to a contest? Really? I don’t get that. Many agents and/or publishers will ask for the first chapter(s) in their submissions instructions. If you’re not self-publishing, and you’re trying to hook someone, you HAVE to have that first chapter stellar and pristine. Anything less is setting yourself up to lose. Continue reading “How to Lose a Novel Writing Contest”
Judge not, lest ye be rendered into incoherent babbling. And a really bad headache.
Novel Ideas for Novel Contests – or…what NOT to do when entering your manuscript in a novel-writing contest.
I’ve been a first-tier level judge for a prestigious novel-writing contest for about five years now. First-tier? Yeah, that means I’m important. Okay, maybe not. What it’s supposed to mean is that at least one someone else has already read through the entries and has sent me the very best of those. Now I get the final word. Or something like that. Sounds important, anyway. Continue reading “Novel Ideas for Novel Contests”
