Great Stuff on the Writers’ Blogs, February 16-18, 2013

Quite a variety of Great Stuff today: it’s been a productive weekend on the blogosphere.

One mini-announcement before I turn you loose, I’ll be “attending” the IndieReCon online writers’ conference Tuesday through Thursday, so Wednesday’s and Friday’s posts may be a bit thin.

CRAFT

KM Weiland’s (@KMWeiland) penultimate entry in her series on scenes and sequels has to do with Variations on the Sequel. These variations can happen in the reaction (it’s ongoing, delayed, or shown in a flashback), in the dilemma or decision (such as if the decision turns out to be a dead end), or in the entire sequel (how quickly or slowly it happens, whether its elements are in order or not, or are disproportionate in length or strength, or if the sequel is interrupted by a new scene). Of course, this summary doesn’t do the post justice, so click that link and get the whole story, as it were.

BUSINESS

I have no idea what prompted Suw Charman-Anderson to write Piracy, Saviour of the Book Industry for Forbes magazine, but her message to the publishing industry is somewhat similar to what Cory Doctorow has been saying to writers for over a decade: not only is piracy of written works a minor problem at best (Charman-Anderson calls it a boulder in the road), it’s (@Doctorow says) an opportunity to reach more readers, many of whom will eventually pay for their free copy or buy another one and, again from Charman-Anderson, opens up the possibility of a secondhand ebook market. I wonder who will listen.

Meanwhile, Joe Konrath’s (@JAKonrath) now ebooks are selling like hotcakes, maybe better (does $15,000 of income in a week sound good?), in part because he’s been giving them away via the KDP Select program. In Hungry Dogs, he explains how readers are like those hungry dogs—in good ways!—and offers six keys to Konrath-like sales numbers. Note (once again) that he, like Doctorow, is NOT worried about giving away copies.

SOCIAL MEDIA

We haven’t visited the hilarious Catherine Ryan Howard (@cathryanhoward) of Catherine, Caffeinated in a while, but today we get to with her Social Media for Authors: [Groan] Do I HAVE To? Here’s her answer from near the end of a very funny post: “You’ll only make money by selling books, and the first step in selling a book is to inform a potential reader than it exists. For a self-published author, social media is the only gateway to a global audience that doesn’t charge a toll. So yes, I think you have to.”

TECHNOLOGY

If you’re self-published and want to track your sales (of course you do), Carol Wyer (@carolewyer) has posted a Tutorial: NovelRank that introduces you to NovelRank and shows you how to use it. Well, sort-of shows you. Wyer posted lots of screenshots, which was a great idea, but they’re so small it’s very hard to see what she’s filled in, highlighted, circled, or got arrows pointing to. Now, there is a video on the NovelRank site that shows you how to do it, too, but it flashes through so much in 60 seconds that for a new visitor it’s hard to absorb what’s being done and there’s no narration or explanatory text, only background music. So, the idea of the post and video are both good, and the service may well be useful, but you’re going to need to spend some time with the post and site to make it work.

Well, this should be interesting. By his own (indirect) admission, Joel Friedlander (@JFBookman) was a bit of a software snob, favoring high-powered (and high-priced) programs like Adobe InDesign over the relatively cheaper and more pedestrian Microsoft Word. And yet… people still insisted on using Word to format their ebooks! Badly, too often, which made Joel and others like him cringe. So he railed against using Word. But now he’s seen the light and announces today in Book Designer Confesses: The Truth About Word Processors that it’s time to help Word users do book design well, or as well as possible within the capabilities and limitations of programs like Word. And so a series is about to start. Stay tuned!

THE WRITING LIFE

Full-time high school math teacher and epic fantasy writer Patrick Carr posted How to Write While Managing a Full-Time Job: 5 Ways to Maximize Your Time on the Guide to Literary Agents over the weekend. If you, like so many of us, are in this situation, you’ll find these hints helpful. Personally, I would have put #5, “Make writing a priority,” at the top of the list, because if you don’t do this, none of the other four will matter—or happen—but that’s just me. The suggestions are all still good.

There are some people (I’m not naming any names) who are absolutely dead-set against writers’ groups, whatever they might be called. It’s too bad their minds are so closed. For the rest of us, Gabriela Pereira’s (@DIYMFA) Writing Workshop: How to Tell When You Need That Boost is a clear summary of what a group can do for a writer. If you think a group might be for you, check out Gabriela’s four ways to tell and three important factors to consider about yourself and the group(s) you might be considering.

Like anything you see here? Please share it with your writing friends!