How to Get Published

A Rerun

by Al Kalar

“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of - but do it in private and wash your hands afterward.” -Robert Heinlein

Point of View (POV)

How are you going to tell your tale? Through who’s eyes will the reader see and experience what is happening? This is an important decision, because you must be consistent throughout your book.

There are three main methods of telling a story: (more…)

by Al Kalar

Writing is easy, “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” - Red Smith

Language

Know your language and its requirements. Grammar and spelling. If you flunked your language classes in school, it’s time to go back to school or hire a ghostwriter.

If you don’t know your language requirements, this blog isn’t going to help you learn. That’s another huge body of knowledge that is best addressed by educators and schools.

Purpose

Why are you writing this? If you don’t know where you’re going, (more…)

A Rerun

By Al Kalar

Introduction to the Series

Working for an eBook publisher as an acquisitions editor, I see a lot of manuscripts cross my “IN” basket. Many of them have a good story yarn or an interesting subject matter, but most of them are not written with sales in mind.

Some of the problems are because the writer is using a technique s/he saw in the writings of a popular author. What a new writer has to remember is that s/he is not a popular writer — yet. Popular writers can get away with a few bad techniques because their fans will buy their books anyway. Professors can write poor text books because they can require them for their course.

Most of the problems I see are a combination of poor English skills and problems in the construction of the manuscript (the order and manner in which the piece is written). (more…)

by John Bowers

It seems that more and more people are taking up writing every day. Many of these new would-be authors are people with careers who haven’t attended an English class in decades. What they learned about grammar in high school, if anything, has long since faded from their memory.  Yet some of them are pretty good story tellers, and as such deserve a decent chance at publication.

Unfortunately, for most of them it will never happen, simply because they don’t possess the mechanical skills to get their work reviewed. Visit the workshops or read the slush piles and you’ll be amazed at some of the mistakes new authors (and even some published authors) make. While the stories are sometimes pretty good, the nuts and bolts of grammar and punctuation are missing. There seems to be a lot of confusion about exactly how to format a story. (more…)

by Al Kalar

Last week I was talking with Christine Golden, Editor in Chief of Golden Visions Magazine (science fiction short stories). During the discussion, we found we regularly encounter some of the same problems in manuscripts.

1. Redundant speech tags.

John shook his finger in my face. “You need to straighten up and fly right, flunky, or you’ll find yourself without a job,” John said.

There’s absolutely no reason for “John said”. We already know who’s speaking because of the first sentence. (more…)

by Mike Carambat

[Mike belongs to an online writing workshop for "hard" science fiction writers, Science Fiction Novelists. The question came up about accents. How much is too much? At what point does the writing out of a character's accent become a distraction?

This is Mike's contribution (reprinted with his permission), edited somewhat for understanding since it's taken out of context.]

At last a subject which hits rather close to home for me.

In my book (I’ve only still got the one), I drag you all over the friggin’ planet. You meet people from England (upper & lower classes), Russia, Croatia, Germany, India, America (North, South and Central) and even Australia. Not to mention, I use dialects and euphemisms from the 1900s and modern day. (more…)

by John Bowers

If you’re anything like me, nothing is more fun than writing a novel. Just the idea of starting a new one fills you with giddy anticipation, and you can hardly wait to get started. But once you begin, sometimes you run into problems you didn’t anticipate - how should my character react to this or that situation? Should he run or fight? Is he smart or dumb, assertive or indecisive? Does he know first aid? Can he handle a gun? Would he call the cops or take the law into his own hands? Is he smooth with the ladies or painfully shy? Can he dance? Can he swim? What color are his eyes?

These and many other details are important to your story, and if you haven’t answered those questions before you start writing, you can screech to a halt in a hurry. The problem may be that you haven’t defined your characters before you started writing, and without some ground rules you, the author, simply don’t know how they should react to given situations.

What you need, before you start writing, is backstory. (more…)

by John Bowers

Writers hear a lot of talk about grabbing the reader’s attention on page 1. Editors, agents, and publishers aren’t likely to look at your manuscript if you don’t grab their attention right away, and if they don’t look at it, they won’t publish it - and if they don’t publish it, no one else will ever have a chance to put it down because it just didn’t grab them.

So it’s a no-brainer that you need to get that reader’s attention right away. And the only way to do that is to hook them immediately - which is why this part of your novel is usually called the “hook”.

Some hooks, of course, are better than others. It is generally agreed that you have until the end of the first paragraph to sink that hook, but that in itself can be a problem. If the first paragraph is too long, or poorly constructed, the reader might not even last that long. So I say, Bait the hook. (more…)

by D. Keith Howington

It’s your responsibility to feed dialog into your readers’ minds without causing them to do a double-take and have to go back and read a bit again. When that happens, you’ve lost the mood, and lost the reader. Too much of that can lose them permanently.

We all know the basics: that “said” is essentially invisible, that using adverbs like “angrily” to convey feeling is risky, and that using speech tags such as “he smiled” are physical impossibilities and jarring to the reader. (more…)

by John Bowers
Any writer who hopes to be published in any genre has, hopefully, consulted many sources of advice on how to proceed. Almost every such source, whether book, article, or blog, will tell you that before you submit (and this is especially true with fiction), you need to polish your work.

Polishing means many things; it includes proper grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and even formatting per the target publisher’s requirements. One of the biggest items in polishing is spelling.

Many people have trouble spelling. For some it’s just a matter of aptitude; for others it may be that they had no desire to write until they were already out of school, much too late to concentrate on those spelling lessons. And, I suspect, some people just don’t care.

But if you want to write - and get published - you need to start caring. (more…)