How to Get Published

by Jerry Simmons

Selling books without a minimum marketing effort will result in poor sales. Here are the basics every author should follow when marketing their book: (1) seek book reviews prior to launch, (2) write a press release announcing the publication and availability of your book for sale distributed to all online outlets, and (3) pitch yourself and your book to local print, radio, television and online for publicity. Read the rest of this entry »

by Al Kalar

Every publisher has standards for inquiries. If you ignore those standards, you have a very good chance of being rejected before your manuscript is even read.

The reason behind this is two-fold.

1. The publisher has set up a system in-house that depends upon the author’s cooperation. Some receive hundreds of submissions a day and don’t have time to wipe the drool off the chin of some prima-donna author who thinks the publishing world is drooling at the mouth while eagerly awaiting their particular “next best seller”. They need to have the elements requested, ONLY those elements, and in a format that is easy for them to handle.Those elements may include: submission by an agent (cuts down on the size of the pile), double spaced (allows room for handwritten notes), on paper (no electronic submissions), a cover letter, a synopsis, a particular portion of the entire ms (may be just a couple of chapters or the entire manuscripts), 12-point type (to save wear and tear on the eyes of the employee who has to read the submission), and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

by Al Philipson

Rights

When you create a manuscript in any readable form, you automatically receive “copyrights” to that work. You can sue for actual damages is someone intrudes upon those rights. If you register you copyright, you can also sue for “punitive” damages.

What most people fail to realize is that, like property rights, copyrights are actually a “bundle” of rights.

A property “owner” may not “own” the subsurface rights to his property. Here in the Northwest, where Weyerhouser has owned so much of the property that it subsequently sold to developers, the original owner has retained the “subsurface” rights. That means that if oil is discovered on your property, you don’t own it; someone else does.

Now, how does this apply to copyrights? Read the rest of this entry »

by Penny C. Sansevieri

So you have a website, congratulations! Now let’s make sure it’s doing what it is supposed to be doing for you. Read: selling your book or product. While websites will differ in color, layout, and target audience, there are a few things that need to remain consistent. Let’s take a look at them.

1. Editing: Your website needs to be edited. There is no discussion on this topic at all. And don’t self-edit. Hire someone to go through your site page by page and make sure you don’t have any typos. Finding mistakes on your site is like finding typos on a resume. Doesn’t bode too well, does it? Read the rest of this entry »

by Al Kalar

There are a number of ways to make sure your inquiry to a publisher is rejected. These are just a few of them and I’m sure the list will grow as author “wanna be’s” dream up new ways to annoy a prospective publisher. The examples are from our experiences here at AKW Books, but the problem isn’t one that this little eBook publisher has; the paper publishing industry suffers from the same

1. Try to rip off some other popular idea and thinly disguise it. If you want to write CSI books, pitch the CSI franchise owners, don’t try to write one “like” it. Heck, if you’re good enough, you might get a gig scripting episodes of one of the programs. If you LOVE Harry Potter, by all means try to rip off that idea; call it HogWorthy’s rather than Hogwart’s. Rawlings won’t mind and she doesn’t have enough money to sue you (and us) into poverty anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

by Al Kalar

Head Hopping:

You’ve seen it in the writings of even established writers. The scene is being played out from the viewpoint of one character, when suddenly you’re given the internal reaction of another character. Some writers can do this without confusing the reader, but often the reader is left hanging, wondering who’s thinking or feeling something.

“Head hopping” is the result of sloppy writing. New authors (who get rejected because of this) and established writers who have become lazy are the most frequent offenders. The established writer gets away with it because his work will sell in spite of it and his publisher knows this (but still dislikes putting the story out that way). Read the rest of this entry »

by Jerry Simmons

Anything is possible in publishing, dream big but follow a few simple rules. First: write your own story and never worry about a potentially hot category or bestselling style of another writer. Second: seek professional editorial help, someone you are comfortable with who can challenge you to be a better writer. Third: follow your publishing dreams and find a way to make it happen. There are no secrets, it takes hard work, lots of time and don’t give up attitude. Read the rest of this entry »

by John Bowers

One of the hardest things I face when writing a novel is keeping the story consistent. Writing a book-length story may take from a few weeks to a few months, and you put the story down a few hundred words at a time. Over a period of several weeks, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what happened earlier, and consistency can suffer.

If you’re writing from a detailed outline it may be easier, but if you’re like me, outlines are too restrictive. When I start a novel I usually have a general idea of what the book is about, three or four high points I want to hit, and a couple of characters. From that starting point, the adventure begins, and I usually don’t end up where I thought I might. But the journey is fantastic-I discover the story as I go, just as the reader does later on.

The problem with writing that way is that things will often happen that I didn’t anticipate. Characters may make decisions on their own (don’ t laugh, this actually happens), and I find myself on a side road heading for a different horizon than the one I had aimed for.

That isn’t always a problem, but when you get into the details, consistency can get lost. Read the rest of this entry »

by Michelle Gagnon

During our first page critiques, we discussed the danger of incorporating strong language on page 1 of your manuscript. Encountering an f-bomb at the outset of a novel can turn off a lot of readers, so editors are understandably leery of acquiring works with it.

However, I think that strong language does have a place in novels- at least in mine. I frequently get emails or reviews from people who say things like, “I loved this book, but wish that someone had gone through and crossed out all the f-bombs for me.” Equally perplexing to me are the people who claim that they “didn’t mind the f-bombs, but at times Gagnon takes the name of the Lord in vain.” Read the rest of this entry »

The art of what I call “the big grab” – getting the reader hooked from the start.

By James Scott Bell

Last time, I wrote about what not to do on your opening page. Today, I want to suggest to you an opening strategy that works for any type of fiction.

At the outset, please note that what follows is not a formula. This isn’t painting by the numbers. But it is a principle, and thus has infinite possibilities for application. No matter what your style or genre, this principle will work its magic for you, every time.

Recall that my last post was triggered by something an agent said at a recent conference, to wit: “If you cannot write a compelling opening scene, from the opening sentence, I’m not going to finish your proposal.”

I assume you do want agents — and editors — to finish your proposal. If so, you must grab them on page one. How can you do that?

By beginning your novel with a disturbance to the Lead’s ordinary world.

Why disturbance? Because: Readers read to worry. They want to be lost in the intense emotional anticipation over the plight of a character in trouble. Only when that connection is made does reader interest truly kick in.

But in their opening pages many writers fall into what I call the “Happy people in Happy Land” trap. They think that by showing the Lead character in her normal life, being happy with her family or dog or whatever, we’ll be all riled up when something bad happens to this nice person, perhaps at the end of chapter one, or beginning of chapter two.

Or they fall into the “I’m the Greatest Literary Stylist of Our Time” trap. This is where a writers desires to display brilliance via pure prose before, somewhere down the line, something like a plot kicks in.

But that’s too long to wait. You need to stir up the waters immediately.

A disturbance is something that causes ripples in the placid lagoon of Happy Land. It can be anything, so long as it presents a change or challenge to the Lead. (It’s important to note that this disturbance need not be “big” as in, say, a thriller prologue. The opening disturbance can be a jolt, however slight, that indicates to the Lead she is not having an ordinary moment here).

And you need to have that jolt on page one, preferably paragraph one.

This is true for both commercial and literary fiction, BTW. Compare the following two openings, the first a commercial example, the latter a literary one.

They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

(The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain)

The world outside the window was in flames. The leaves on the pistachio trees shone fire-red and orange. Mattie studied the early morning light. She was lying on the side of the bed where her husband should have been sleeping.

(Blue Shoe by Ann Lamott)

Notice that Cain starts with a character in motion at a point in time that is obviously a disturbance to him. In this case, the disturbance is physical.

In Lamott’s example, we have two lines of description, then the Lead is introduced, and the last line is a ripple of disturbance, this one emotional: where is her husband?

Dialogue, if it indicates immediate conflict, is another way to create an opening disturbance. I’ve heard more than one agent say they like to see dialogue in the first pages. Why? Because it means you are writing a scene. Not exposition or description or backstory, but a real scene. Like this:

“The marvelous thing is that it’s painless,” he said. “That’s how you know when it starts.”

“Is it really?”

“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you.”

“Don’t! Please don’t.”

(”The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway)

From these examples it’s plain to see that there are countless ways to grab readers right away through this wonderful thing called disturbance.

Now why wouldn’t you want to do that?

Perhaps you have a reason. Maybe style is what you’re after most of all. A mood. Or maybe you’re writing a grand epic, and want to “set the scene” as it were. But before you abandon the disturbance principle, look at the opening lines from a couple of “big” novels:

The boys came early to the hanging. (The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett)

The gale tore at him and he felt its bite deep within and he knew that if they did not make landfall in three days they would all be dead. (Shogun, James Clavell)

I don’t know about you, but that’s enough narrative energy to propel me through the next few pages. If I get a long weather report up top, or two pages on the sunlight over Rio (no matter how beautifully rendered) I will be sorely tempted to put the book down. If you tell me how the character got to the scene, via backstory or flashback, I’m definitely moving on.

But if you indicate there’s a character here facing change or challenge, uncertainty or conflict, I’m going to want to know why. I don’t need to know the background info yet. I’ll wait for that if trouble is brewing.

John LeCarre once said, “The cat sat on the mat is not the opening of a plot. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is.”

Mr. LeCarre has it right. The opening page of a novel has to draw the reader in with an indication of trouble to come.

Do that by disturbing your characters from the very start.