Whose Head Are You In?

By Lois Winston

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I cut my writing chops in the romance industry, first publishing in 2006. During the years leading up to my first sale, I was a member of Romance Writers of America, an organization with both online and local chapters. RWA National and many of its chapters ran writing contests for unpublished authors, and I entered quite a few. The upside was that finalists in these contests were judged by agents and editors, which could lead to representation or a book deal.

The downside, unbeknownst to me at the time, was that the first-round judges were often unpublished authors with questionable knowledge or expertise. Case in point: I once had a contest judge write on my scoresheet, “I don’t really get Point of View, but I took off for your use of it because I don’t think you understand it either.” (There was nothing wrong with the point of view in my entry.)

Another time, a friend had a contest judge tell her that she’d gone into the dog’s Point of View. (She hadn’t.)

Point of View (also known as Viewpoint or POV) is often a very difficult concept for beginners to grasp. But if you don’t understand something, how do you know if you’re handling it correctly?

Simply stated, Point of View is the character chosen to be the camera lens for your story, the person from whose eyes the reader sees the action unfolding. It’s the telling of the story or part of the story from that person’s perspective.

Viewpoint is usually either First Person or Third Person. First Person stories are told by a single protagonist. They’re the “I” stories and can be written either in present tense or past tense.

First Person Present Tense POV: I sit by the window and stare out at the crowd in the street.

Example of First Person Past Tense POV: I sat by the window and stared out at the crowd in the street.

Third Person POV are the “he/she” stories. They can be written entirely in the viewpoint of one character or in multiple viewpoints. Third Person POV is almost exclusively used in past tense. Although there are probably some novels written in Third Person Present Tense, it’s not very common. The only place I routinely see it is in stage direction in play scripts and screenplays.

Example of Third Person Past Tense POV: Emma sat by the window and stared out at the crowd in the street.

Example of Third Person Present Tense POV: Emma sits by the window and stares out at the crowd in the street.

Omniscient Viewpoint is a story told through the eyes of a disembodied narrator who is privy to the thoughts of all the characters in the novel, even the most insignificant bystander on the street. It’s often referred to as God’s POV. Omniscient POV is considered archaic and is generally not used in any genre of modern commercial fiction because it distances the reader from the story. However, it does occasionally turn up in some literary novels.

Years ago, nearly all romances were told strictly through the eyes or Point of View of the heroine. Today, most romance novels employ the POV of both the hero and heroine and sometimes at least one secondary character. 

Most mysteries were told only through the eyes of the sleuth. Now, depending on the sub-genre, a mystery might also contain multiple POVs (even the dog or cat’s POV in some paranormal cozy mysteries). Suspense and thrillers often incorporate the POV of the antagonist. Multiple points of view allow an author to tell a bigger story because she can enter the thoughts of more than one or two characters. 

If a story is told in multiple points of view, the writer must decide which character should be the point of view character for each scene. Scenes will have the most impact if the chosen POV character is the one who has the most to lose at that moment. This makes for greater tension and emotional impact within the scene. It’s also the reason that omniscient POV, or choosing a disinterested bystander as a POV character, has come to be associated with archaic writing styles. 

There is no rule that states each chapter must be in one character’s POV or even that each scene must only be in one character’s POV. Some authors switch POV within a scene. However, the author should not be moving the point of view back and forth between characters throughout the scene. POV shifts should be logical and smooth, not jarring. If readers find themselves rereading a paragraph or a page because they’re confused as to whose thoughts they’re reading, the author hasn’t handled the shift well. Point of view that ping pongs all over the place will give readers a reason to toss a book aside.

It’s also important to remember that while you’re writing in a particular character’s POV, that character can’t be telling the reader what another character is seeing, thinking, feeling, or hearing. For instance, if a character is sitting in the living room on the first floor, she can’t be thinking about what another character is seeing as he looks out a window one flight up. She has no way of even knowing he’s in that room, let alone that he’s standing at a window. If she can’t see him, she has no way of knowing what he’s doing. 

If a book is written in first person, there probably won’t be any POV shifts, but there’s no rule that says there can’t be. For every rule there are exceptions and writers who have broken them. Many books are written in First Person from the point of view of two characters, including the first book I ever sold. Talk Gertie to Me, is written in First Person from the viewpoints of a young woman and her mother. The POV shifts in alternating chapters. There are also books written where First Person is used for one character, and the author shifts into Third Person for the other POV characters.

Fiction isn’t static; it’s always changing. Writers experiment and take chances all the time. Sometimes those chances pay off in successful novels. Editors and agents want well-written stories. It doesn’t matter whether you write in First Person or Third Person, Present Tense or Past Tense. What matters is an author’s voice and the story she tells. Most anything can work if done well. But to do something well, you first need a firm understanding of what it is and how to use it. That’s definitely the case with POV.

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. A Crafty Collage of Crime, the twelfth book in her series, was the recipient of the 2024 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Best Comedy. Seams Like the Perfect Crime, the fourteenth book in the series, is her latest release. Learn more about Lois and her books at www.loiswinston.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mini-Mystery.

What if?: A Most Important Question

By DP Lyle 

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Every author has been asked: Where do you get your ideas? The short answer is: Everywhere. Something you see or read germinates an idea, and a story unfolds. Sometimes the story comes together quickly, but most often weeks of building mental scenes and snippets of dialog, setting, and action must be waded through before pen meets paper. 

An overheard conversation might be the spark. Or a couple talking/arguing/laughing at a nearby restaurant table. Maybe an odd character strolling down the street. Perhaps an idea simply pops into your head from wherever those thoughts arise. 

Okay, so you have an idea. Now what? An idea isn’t a story. Ideas are a dime a dozen. They are literally everywhere. The key is to find an idea that can stand up through a 100,000-word manuscript. No small trick.

To do this, the original idea must be refined and fleshed out. An idea can become a scene, but to be a full-length novel it must evolve and expand. It must become a premise, or what many call “The Central Story Question.” It’s what the story is really about.

To become a premise, the original idea must ultimately lead to the question: What if? 

What if this happened? What if that person did this? What if that dude in the shabby clothes was actually a rogue undercover agent with a deadly agenda? What if the restaurant couple was planning a murder? What if that briefcase contained state secrets? Or an explosive device? Or a deadly virus?

From those two words--What if?--stories arise.

The power of your story’s What If? can’t be overestimated. If it is done correctly and not lost in the writing. A good What if? states the main character, the situation, the stakes, and, most importantly, the Central Story Question. 

It is the answering of this question that is the story.

Okay, so our restaurant couple is planning a murder. Who, what, when, where, and, most importantly, why? It’s always the why that makes a great story. Is it to get out of a messy marriage and save all that alimony money, or to cash in that million-dollar insurance policy, or to cover an embezzlement from a company they work for, or to seek revenge for some act? Even though the original idea was a couple planning a murder, each of these scenarios generates a different story. Each will lead your sleuth, who must solve the murder, into a different world.

What if a young couple witnesses a murder and in so doing put themselves in the cross hairs of a transnational criminal organization?

This is the What If? for my latest Cain/Harper thriller, TUNICA. 

The What If? should be stated in about 25 words or less. Because the What If? is brief, it’s often called the elevator pitch or the agent pitch. It communicates your story in the most efficient terms. We’ve all heard writers respond when asked what their story is about by saying things like, “Well, there’s this guy who lives on an island. And he hates the water. And a big shark is killing people and this is threatening to shut down the town’s beaches on a holiday weekend. And then there’s this other guy who is a shark expert and he has a really cool boat. Oh, I forgot, the first guy is the chief of police.” Yawn.

What if a hydrophobic, island-community police chief must go out on the water to kill a predatory shark to save the town’s summer economy and to prove his own self-worth?

What if an FBI trainee must exchange personal information with a sadistic serial killer in order to track another serial killer and save a Senator’s daughter?

What if the youngest son of a mafia family takes revenge on the men who shot his father and becomes the new godfather, losing his own soul in the process?

These are of course Jaws, Silence of the Lambs, and The Godfather, respectively. See how these What If?s reveal the protagonist and cleanly state the story premise? Read these books or watch the movies and you will see that each scene moves toward answering the story’s What If? Each of your scenes should, too. If not, consider cutting, or at least reworking, those that don’t.

Many authors consume weeks creating the What If? for their story. Constantly refining it, making it more on point. You should, too. It’s that important. It concisely states the Central Story Question.

Here’s a tip: When your What If? is completed to your satisfaction, print it out and tape it to your computer or the front of your writing pad so you will see it every time you sit down to write. Before writing each scene, read your What If? and ask yourself, “Does this scene help answer the Central Story Question?” If you do this, you will never lose sight of what your story is about. Particularly in the dreaded middle, where so many stories get lost in the jumble of character and backstory and cool dialog all the other stuff that goes into a manuscript. The What If? keeps you focused and on track.

Ten Medical and Forensic Mistakes Writers Should Never Make

By D. P. Lyle, MD

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Writers make mistakes. An anachronism here, a blunder in logic there, departures from common sense everywhere, and of course the all-too-common break from real world possibilities that plagues even the most well-written story. It’s part of the process. Sitting alone, bouncing clever ideas off your computer screen offers little feedback. But readers notice such breaches. They shake their heads, close the book, snuff out the light, and go to sleep. Not the ringing endorsement you wished for. Here are some of the most common medical and forensic mistakes writers make. Mistakes you want to avoid.

The Quick Death: Death rarely arrives instantly. Sure, it can occur with heart attacks, strokes, and extremely abnormal heart rhythms, but trauma, such as gunshot wounds and blows to the head, the staples of crime fiction, rarely cause sudden death. Yet, how often has a single shot felled a villain? Bang, and he drops dead. In order for that to occur, the bullet would need to severely damage the brain, the heart, or the cervical (neck) portion of the spinal cord. A shot to the chest or abdomen leads to screaming and moaning and bleeding and expletives, but death comes from bleeding and that takes time. How long? It depends on what’s damaged. If a major artery is opened, the bleeding is brisk and death can follow in five minutes, even less. If the bullet or knife blade only strikes tissues and organs, the bleeding is slower and death can take many minutes, or hours, or not at all.

The Pretty Death: I call this the “Hollywood Death.” Calm, peaceful, and not a hair out of place. Blood? Almost never. Except in slasher movies of course and here massive bleeding is the norm. More often, the deceased is nicely dressed, lying in bed, make-up perfect, and with a slight flutter of the eyelids if you look closely. Real dead people are not pretty. I don’t care what they looked like during life, in death they are pale, waxy, and gray. Their eyes do not flutter, and they do not look relaxed and peaceful. They look dead.

The Bleeding Corpse: Your detective arrives at the scene a half hour after the murder. Blood oozes from the corpse’s mouth, from the stab wound in his chest, or from the vampire fang marks on his neck. Houston, we have a problem. You see, dead folks don’t bleed. When you die, your heart stops, and the blood no longer circulates. Rather, it stagnates and clots and stagnant and clotted blood does not move. It does not drip or gush or ooze or gurgle or flow or trickle from the body. It lies there, separates into a dark red clot with a halo of straw-colored serum, and then dries to a brownish stain.

The Accurate Time of Death: Determining the time of death is neither easy nor very accurate. It’s always a best guess and is always stated as a range rather than an exact time. Yet, how many times have you seen the medical examiner (ME) confidently announce that the victim died at “8:30 last night”? I always wondered exactly how he made this determination. Was it rigor mortis, body temperature, or lividity? Was it the presence or absence of certain bugs? The truth is that none of these is accurate. The decline in body temperature, the appearance of rigor, the development of lividity, and the appearance of flies and bugs are affected by many variables so are mostly unpredictable. The touted guidelines for each of these are like stop signs in Italy--merely suggestions. In real-life, the ME would say that death likely occurred “between 8 p.m. and midnight.” But that might make him appear wishy-washy, and Hollywood and writers like their heroes to be smart. Smarter than they could possibly be. Stick with a range, and you’ll be more realistic.

The One-punch Knockout: You’ve seen this a million times. One character socks another character in the jaw. He goes down like a sack of potatoes and is apparently written out of the story since we never hear from him again. Really? Think about a boxing match. Two guys that are trained to inflict damage and they have trouble knocking each other out. And when they do, the one on his back is up in a couple of minutes, claiming the other guy caught him with a lucky punch. Listen to me. Only James Bond can knock someone out with a single blow, and maybe Mike Tyson, but your car-salesman-turned-amateur-sleuth cannot.

Another common scenario is when a character is hit in the head, placed in the trunk of car, driven 50 miles, tied to a post or a bed or whatever, and then a bucket of water is thrown in his face to revive him. He sputters and is suddenly wake and alert. Not going to happen. If someone is knocked unconscious and doesn’t come around in a few minutes, something very bad is going on. Like a brain bruise (cerebral contusion) or bleeding into or around the brain (subdural hematoma). These require a hospital and a neurosurgeon, not a bucket of water.

The Disappearing Black Eye: If your character suffers a black eye in Chapter 3, she will have it for two weeks, which depending on the time frame of your story just might take you to the end of the book. She will not be “normal” in two days. A black eye is a contusion (bruise) and is caused by blood leaking from tiny blood vessels that are injured by the blow. It takes the body about two weeks to clear all that blood from the tissues. It will darken over two days, fade over four or five, turn greenish, brownish, and a sickly yellow before it disappears. On a good note, by about day seven, she might be able to hide it with make-up.

The Quick Healing: Do you know why boxers wear gloves? To protect their hands and faces. Back in the bare-knuckle days, broken hands and cut and bloody faces were the norm. Gloves made the sport more civilized. So, if your character gets in a fist fight both he and his opponent will suffer cuts and bruises and broken teeth. He will not walk away unscathed. His cuts will need stitches, his bruises ice, and a trip to the dentist is likely. Each of these will take a couple of weeks to heal.

If your character falls down the stairs and injures his back, he will not be able to run from or chase the bad guy or make love to his new lover the next day. Give the guy a few days to heal and make him limp and complain in the interim. If he breaks an arm, he’ll need four weeks minimum.

If he’s stabbed or shot and, as so many protagonists do, sneaks out of the hospital the next day to continue his pursuit of the bad guys, all will not be forgiven. He will have pain that will limit his ability to run and jump and fight and do all those hero things. The chances that his wound could then become infected are real and would greatly complicate his situation and might even kill him.

If his car goes over an embankment and tumbles into a ravine, he will not simply crawl out and walk away. At best he’ll be banged and bruised and at worst will have broken bones and injured internal organs. 

The Instant Athlete: Your PI drinks too much, smokes two packs a day, and eats fast food on a regular basis. After all, stake outs are boring. His belly flaps over his belt and he gets short of breath climbing a single flight of stairs. He will not be able to chase the villain for ten blocks. Two on a good day. 

If you create a scene where your character must run down a bad guy, make him capable of such a pursuit. Remember “Babe” Levy (Dustin Hoffman) in Marathon Man? He was student, slight of build, not athletic appearing in the least, yet he had to run for his life as Dr. Christian Szell (Sir Laurence Olivier) and his Nazi thugs chased him endlessly. But he was capable. Earlier in the film we learned that he was distance runner and ran around the reservoir in Central Park everyday. He could run for his life.

The Untraceable Poison: Of all the questions I receive from writers this is number one. Seems that all crime writers want an untraceable poison. Sorry, no such thing. True it might not be found or maybe not even searched for, but if it is looked for and if the ME has good blood or tissue samples, he will find it. With fancy equipment like Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy (GS-MS) virtually any chemical can be identified. This combination gives a “chemical fingerprint” of the compound in question. 

The most common drugs involved in overdose deaths are alcohol, narcotics, amphetamines, cocaine, and various tranquilizers and sedatives. The main reason is that these are readily available either on the street or in the medicine cabinet. Each of these is revealed by a simple and cheap drug screen. So, if your killer employs one of these, the ME will know it in a couple of hours.

But what if the toxin is more exotic? Maybe cyanide or thallium or the toxin of a blue-ringed octopus? This is trickier. These don’t show up on routine drug screens and must be tested for with time-consuming and expensive protocols. Maybe the ME doesn’t have the time, interest, or budget to do a full toxicological examination. Maybe he simply attributes the death to some natural cause and saves the county a ton of money. Happens all the time and it can happen in your story. But, if he pulls out all the stops, he will find the drug.

The Instant Lab Result: The world is not like CSI. Not even close. Those CSI folks get results in a New York minute. Sometimes faster. They crack computers, perform autopsies, complete esoteric toxicological testing, and create DNA profiles before the first commercial break. In the real world such testing typically takes days, even weeks. Sure a tox screen can be done in a couple of hours but sophisticated confirmatory testing takes time. DNA profiling can be done in a few hours, but before the ME reports his results he will often obtain confirmation from another lab, particularly in high-profile cases, including those that crime writers dream up. Give your ME a realistic timeframe to do his work. Your readers will notice if you don’t.

The devil is always in the details. Get these details right and your story will be much stronger.

D. P. Lyle

Outliers Writing University: https://www.outlierswritinguniversity.com

The Importance of Honest Feedback

By Judy Penz Sheluk

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Writing is a solitary pursuit, one where we spend countless hours of our lives, often laboring over a single sentence or paragraph for more time than most of us care to admit. So, it’s only natural that we become protective of our words. After all, something that took hours to perfect must be, well, perfect, right?

If only that were so. Unfortunately, as writers, we are simply too close to our work to see the flaws. Oh, we may find the typo on page 75 on reread, the one where we’ve called a car a cat (though even that is iffy), but the overuse of a favorite trope, phrase, or gesture (my characters love to nod). Maybe not so much. And that’s why we need feedback.

Feedback comes in many forms and at various stages of the writing process. The most important thing to remember is that you are looking for an honest and unbiased evaluation of your work. You may not agree with every comment or suggestion, but you should at least consider each one without becoming defensive. Consider it “thick skin” training for the rejections you’re almost certain to face going forward. 

Let’s look at some options:

Writing Critique Groups

While there are no hard and fast rules, these work best if the group is small—three to five people—allowing each member time to read and respond without becoming overwhelmed. It’s essential to establish parameters from the get-go, such as weekly word count limits and the type of feedback expected. 

While critique groups can be invaluable for some writers, they should never be the final step in the review process. As you become immersed in your work for months on end, you lose objectivity. Those intimately familiar with your work will too.

Alpha Readers

Readers who provide detailed and constructive feedback, both positive and tactfully critical, about your book’s premise, plot, characters, and other elements. This is the place to include readers who have knowledge of the technical elements in your manuscript. 

Whether you choose to hire a professional, or ask a trusted friend or relative, they should be aware that they are commenting on an unpolished (first) draft. They should also be avid readers of your book’s genre or sub-genre. Consider this the first test drive of your overall story from a reader’s perspective. 

Beta Readers

Beta readers (or betas) critique finished manuscripts before they are published. It’s advisable to have betas who are familiar with your genre/sub-genre. Betas can be friends, family members, teachers, members of online writing groups, or other writers willing to do a manuscript swap. This will help identify the finer points of your book that may need an adjustment. Ideally, you’ll have no fewer than two and no more than five, allowing for a comparison of opinions without the risk of opinion overload. If one beta reader doesn’t understand why your protagonist hates red, that might be a point worth clarifying. If two or more betas don’t get it, it’s a must-fix. 

While betas are an excellent way to obtain (often free) feedback, they do not replace the role of a professional editor. There is one school of thought that because traditional publishers pay for editing, there is no need for authors to incur this expense if their intention is to traditionally publish. 

Let’s look at that statement. Is it true that traditional publishers hire and pay for editing services? Yes. However, it’s equally true that agents and publishers receive thousands of submissions from aspiring authors every year. While there are no guarantees, a professionally edited manuscript may increase the odds of acceptance. 

Developmental Editing

Also known as substantive or content editing, developmental editing is the first step, focusing on big picture story elements. The developmental editor will also assess and shape draft material to improve flow and organization by revising or reordering content and clarifying plot, arc of action, characters, and/or thematic elements.

Line Editing

Also known as stylistic editing, the line editor focuses on coherence and flow, eliminating jargon, clichés, and euphemisms, while adjusting the length and structure of sentences and paragraphs, and establishing or maintaining the overall mood, style, or voice.

Copyediting

Ideally combined with line editing, the copy editor checks spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage, and ensures consistency in character names, places, descriptions, and other details. Copy editing also covers fact checking and/or obtaining or listing permissions needed (e.g., use of song lyrics or trademarked products). The copy editor may create or work from a style sheet.

And there you have it, feedback in a nutshell. Now all you need to do is write that book. Hey, if it were easy, everyone would do it.

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About the author: A former journalist and magazine editor, Judy Penz Sheluk is the bestselling author of two mystery series: The Glass Dolphin Mysteries and Marketville Mysteries. Her short crime fiction appears in several collections, including the Superior Shores Anthologies, which she also edited.

Judy has also written two how-to guides to publishing. Finding Your Path to Publication: A Step-by-Step Guide was the Winner of the 2024 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Best Nonfiction. The follow-up to that book, Self-publishing: The Ins & Outs of Going Indie, provides an insider’s insight into the world of self-publishing. 

Judy is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and Crime Writers of Canada, where she served on the Board of Directors, most recently as Chair.

This Crazy Writing Life: On Defining a Book By Its Cover—Part Two

By Steven Womack

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Hard to believe this is already the ninth installment of This Crazy Writing Life. Thanks for hanging with me on this, and I hope you’re getting something out of my <sometimes> seemingly random observations on the world of writing and publishing.

Last month, we talked about book covers—what a book cover is supposed to accomplish, how it works, and the challenges to getting the kind of cover that will serve the book the best. This month, I’m going to briefly discuss the different types of book covers. This won’t take long, so let’s dive in.

EBook covers are the simplest and quickest covers to create. They’re only one panel (no back cover or flaps), and you’ve got a little wiggle room. No need to sweat hitting the dimensions exactly (but don’t ignore them either). For Kindle eBook covers, you should shoot for a 1.6:1 aspect ratio, which is a complicated way of saying the height of your cover should be 1.6 times the width.

Kindle also specifies that the ideal dimensions for an eBook cover are 2560 pixels in height and a width of 1600 pixels. That gives you the best quality, especially if you’re reading on a high-resolution device. The cover image has to be less than 50 megabytes, and it should be either in a .tiff or .jpeg format. When you upload the image, don’t compress it.

Now if that sounds a little complicated, let’s compare this with a print book cover. Print book covers have a minimum of three different components: a front cover, a back cover, and a spine. This is it for a mass market or trade paperback edition. So how to you create this?

First, you have to know the trim size of your print book. And with modern, print-on-demand technology, you’ve got more choices than ever before. Just noodle around on the IngramSpark or KDP websites (start with the FAQ pages) and you’ll see some of your options. Or visit your local bookstore and marvel at the array of sizes books come in today.

After you get the trim size, then you have to decide on what kind of paper you want your book printed on. As I observed in an earlier installment of This Crazy Writing Life, my personal opinion for a simple novel is to stay away from white paper, which comes in 50- and 70- pound weights. But if you’re printing a book with illustrations, especially color, then you pretty much have to go with white.

Why is this critical? Different papers have different weights and take up different amounts of space. A 300-page book printed on 50-pound Crème is going to be thicker than the same number of pages printed on 38-pound Groundwood.

Oh, and did I mention you have to actually have the book typeset before you start work on the cover? Why is that?

Because the thickness of the book will determine the dimensions of the spine. And that depends on the number of pages in the book and the type of paper you choose.

There are a couple of other considerations that don’t directly affect the size of your cover. A paperback print-on-demand book from Ingram can have either a matte cover or a high gloss cover. Some specialty printers that have come into existence to serve the indie pub community (Book Vault, for instance, which I’ll talk about in a later column) can do even higher-end options like embossed covers, gold leaf lettering, and spray-on marbling. Pretty heady, exotic stuff…

If you’re going for a hardcover, the process gets even more complicated because you now have flap copy.

If this sounds a little overwhelming, just remember: once you have all this data (trim sizes, page count, etc.), then the book manufacturers can feed this into their program and spit out a template. A good cover designer is going to be able to walk you through this without too much agony.

So there’s enough to get you started. Both IngramSpark and KDP have lots and lots of information that’s easily accessible. And like every other task in modern life, you can always search YouTube...

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I wrote last month about how essential a good, inspired, effective cover was to marketing your book. Lots of really good books get passed over because their covers aren’t eye-catching enough, or don’t accomplish what a cover is supposed to do.

Sometimes, though, it works the other way around. As I mentioned in previous columns, my inbox gets inundated several times a day with email pushes marketing books, primarily indie-pubbed books. BookBub, FreeBooksy, BargainBooksy, EReader News, Robin Reads, Hello Books… I get daily visits from them all. And I actually read the emails and scrub down through the book offerings, not because I have time to read all this stuff (who would?) but because I like to just keep an eye on what’s out there. As I’ve also mentioned, even though your crazy Aunt Agnes’s Chihuahua has more graphic design talent in his back paw then I have in my whole brain, I can still tell when a cover works and when it doesn’t.

So imagine my delight when one of these push emails landed in my inbox last week and there’s a cover that quite literally left me speechless. It was gorgeous, beautifully rendered, the colors jumping off the page. It was an homage to those great classic hardboiled paperbacks of the Fifties and Sixties. Square-jawed handsome men in the background, a teary-eyed woman in the foreground, and the front end of a Sixties-era Cadillac off to the side, against a fire-engine red color scheme with brilliant yellow type.

The cover just worked…

Needless to say, though I’m saying it anyway, I downloaded the book immediately. It was an indie-pubbed book, the author’s debut novel. I Googled him and found his website, then wrote him a nice note and told him how much I loved the cover—the blurb on the cover was equally effective—and how much I was looking forward to reading his book.

And by the way, would you be willing to share the name of your cover designer?

The author wrote me back, was happy to share his designer’s name with me. He found him on Fivrr.com and his rates start at twenty bucks for an eBook cover!

As Bill Murray said in Ghostbusters, Holy Mother Pus Bucket…

Then I sat down to read the book. Now you may have already noticed I haven’t mentioned the title of the novel or the author’s name or even the broad brushstroke plot. There’s a reason for that. I’m too nice a guy to slam another writer’s work, except under the cloak of anonymity (for the unfortunate author, not me). 

But this novel was one of the worst things I’ve ever read in my life. Literally, by the second page I’m shaking my head and asking myself Did I just read that? If KDP offered a purple-ink option, this guy should’ve taken it. Purple prose so overwritten that it dripped off the page. Clearly, this writer never met an adjective or an adverb he didn’t fall in love with. Clichés that were literally on par with heaving bosoms and throbbing…

Whatevers.

I went into the kitchen and read an excerpt to my wife, who broke out laughing. This literally could have been a winning submission for the Bulwer-Lytton contest, except it was a whole damn book.

Which just goes to show, you can have the best cover in the world, the best marketing plans, the best intentions. But if your book sucks, it ain’t gonna work. Rule #1: Write—At The Very Least—A Passably Good Book.

What the hell, I found a good cover designer, though.

See you next month.

Never Make Your Critique Partner Cry!

By Lois Winston

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We writers are not the best judges of our own work. Neither are most of our family and friends. They’ll either love everything we write because they don’t know any better, or they don’t want to hurt our feelings. Conversely, some will sic the green-eyed monster on us, telling us not to quit our day job. 

That’s why critique groups and/or partners are an invaluable tool in every author’s toolkit. They’re the writer friends we rely on when we’ve developed writer’s block or written ourselves into a corner. They brainstorm with us when the ideas don’t come, and they offer us honest criticism chapter after chapter, helping us hone our work until it’s ready for submission. Then, they either commiserate with us when the rejection letters arrive or whoop it up when we get that offer of representation or a book contract.

And because this is a partnership, we do the same for them.

However, none of us wants to hear that the 400-page baby we birthed through our fingertips onto the printed page is butt ugly. And neither do our critique partners. Just as we hope to find critiquers who will offer us constructive criticism, we also need to be able to give constructive criticism to others in return. The key is always to encourage, never discourage. Luckily, there are ways to do this.

Always remember to point out positives as well as negatives. It’s just as important for a writer to know what she’s doing well and correctly as what she’s doing poorly and incorrectly. As you read a work-in-progress, point out those parts you especially like, but don’t be afraid to point out areas that need work. Most importantly, in both cases, don’t forget to explain why. 

Our critique partners often become good friends, and it’s hard to criticize friends for fear of hurting their feelings. But if we can’t be objective and honest with our critiques, we’re not helping each other. We all need to know where our manuscripts are not working as well as where they are working.

It’s important to find a group or partner who either writes in the same genre or has a good deal of knowledge about each other’s genre. However, interests change. Writers often decide to explore different genres. What happens if Helen Historical is suddenly bitten by the vampire bug? You curl your nose up. You shudder. Vampires give you the creeps. You want to be a good critique partner, but try as you might, you can’t read those chapters with an open mind. If that’s the case, it’s time to step aside—at least until Helen returns to her historicals or you fall in love with bloodsuckers. 

Some writers have a hang-up about red ink. They feel like someone has taken a knife to their manuscript and slashed it to death. Bold type in all caps will make some writers feel as though they’re being yelled at. Be sensitive to how your partners feel about how you deliver comments. Avoid red type and all caps when making notes on digital pages. When working from printed pages, avoid red ink and thick black sharpies. Never write comments in script. Print them. We can all read our own handwriting, but others may struggle to decipher our scrawls.

If you’re one of those writers with a great handle on punctuation or grammar, your partners might ask you to do line edits. Rather than correcting their work, point out problem areas. This way, the writer will learn from the experience and not make the same mistake in future works. 

Keep in mind that just because you would write a scene or a character differently, it doesn’t make the author’s way wrong. If your partner is having problems with a sentence or scene and asks for assistance, offer suggestions, but never rewrite her manuscript in your style.

Often, writers gravitate toward other writers of the same experience level. This usually makes for a group or partnership that can work together more comfortably. If the various members are at different levels in their writing journeys, the more novice writers may begin to depend too much on the more advanced writers, and the more advanced writers may begin to feel that they aren’t getting much out of the group. Since we all progress at a different pace, you may discover over time that you’ve outgrown your present group and need to move on to another.

Manuscripts should be free of typos and spelling errors, but we all occasionally suffer from a short circuit between our brains, fingers, and eyes. No matter how many times we read and reread something, we often miss a “there” for a “their” or a “that” for a “than.” If your partner is getting ready to send her work out to an editor or agent, offer to read through her work with an eye toward the technical, but keep in mind that punctuation and sentence structure is often a matter of style. Point out grammatical errors such as misplaced modifiers and subject-verb disagreements, but keep in mind that characters often dictate grammar. A street urchin in Victorian England won’t speak like the Earl of Sussex.

Pay attention to structure as you read a work-in-progress. Every scene should have a purpose. Make sure the pacing is appropriate for the scene/event taking place. In the middle of a chase scene, the heroine shouldn’t be noticing the intricately detailed pattern of the hero’s tie. 

Sentences should be clear and understandable. Point out if the writer has gone off on a tangent about something superfluous to the scene, such as extraneous background information or too much detail. By the same token, note if the author doesn’t supply enough details and description for the characters and settings to come alive. 

Highlight non-descript words such as “it” or “thing” or bland words such as “pretty” or “nice.” Suggest substituting more specific or descriptive words. If the author uses clichés, suggest she find another phrase. Clichés bore readers. Also note repetitive word usage and sentence structure. 

Understand basic rules of writing before you offer to critique someone else. For many writers, passive voice is a difficult concept to grasp. Not every sentence using the various forms of the verb “to be” is passive. Passive voice is when the subject is acted upon. Active voice is when the subject is acting. 

Point of view is another difficult concept. Make certain you understand it before you criticize others for misusing it. Check for bouncing points of view within a scene, but keep in mind, point of view can change from scene to scene. However, if you feel like you’re at a ping-pong match, make the author aware of that.

Finally, know your facts before criticizing someone else. If you suspect the writer’s information is inaccurate, ask if she’s done any research on the subject. If she tells you she saw a similar event on a television show or in a movie, suggest she check the library or ask an expert. The media is notorious for taking liberties with facts and events. 

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. A Crafty Collage of Crime, the twelfth book in her Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series, won the 2024 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Best Comedy. Her most recent release, Sorry, Knot Sorry, is the thirteenth book in the series. Learn more about Lois and her books at www.loiswinston.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter and follow her on various social media sites.

Gotta Go Through It

By Chrissy Hicks

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Have you ever heard the children’s song, “Going on a Bear Hunt?” My toddler requests this often—either for me to sing the tune for her or play it during car rides.

The main plotline involves a group of people (or a couple, depending on the version) going on a bear hunt, claiming they’re “not scared.” However, after overcoming several roadblocks and approaching the bear in a cave, they realize the terrifying result of their actions and run away. As they face each obstacle, they sing the same chorus, “We can’t go over it, can’t go under it, gotta go through it,” before proceeding through the barrier. 

It had me thinking—partly because this song is frequently stuck in my head—that this idea of going through obstacles is a lot like the writing journey. The initial blocks you might face when starting out might be: finding ideas, getting the first draft fully written, carving out time to write, determining whether you’re a plotter or pantser (or somewhere in between), finding a supportive writing community. Once you get past this, your next hurdle is to polish your manuscript so shiny you’re not sure you want to look at it anymore; this often involves the recruitment of beta readers and editors. Once you’ve leaped over all that, you have yet another hill to climb: how will you share this book with the world? Self-publish? Hybrid? Approach small publishers directly? Find an agent? Each of these options presents an entire list of risks and rewards each, but let’s take finding an agent as an option, for the sake of example. You decide to query your novel—this book you’ve spent countless hours writing, revising, rewriting, revising again—and you spend an incredible chunk of time researching agents, perfecting your query, and emailing these agents, hoping you get a “yes.” When you do finally get your acceptance and you sign with an agent, it feels like Christmas. You’ve found your “bear.” The hunt is over.

Except it’s not. It’s only just begun.

Agents get rejected by editors and publishing houses too. They deal with their own set of setbacks. And what happens when a publisher accepts the manuscript? And it’s published? There’s yet another slew of expectations for the writer when it comes to marketing their book (or at least assisting with the process). Plus, the publisher will likely want more material (not just a single book), so you find yourself back to the beginning, with a fresh page and a whole new set of challenges. When you find yourself in this place, so close to your goals, terrifying as it all may seem, will this scare you away? Or will you stay the course?

The point of this brief exposition isn’t to deter you from writing. The point is simply this: there’s not much you can control outside of your writing and your dedication to the craft. You can’t control whether agents will sign with you, whether readers will like your work, whether you hit the New York Times Bestseller list or barely earn out your advance. So, what will you do when you face these obstacles? If you can’t go over it, can’t go under it, will you move through it?

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Chrissy’s work has appeared in three consecutive issues of Bridgewater State University’s “Embracing Writing” book for first-year freshmen. Her writing portfolio also includes publications in The Broadkill Review, SUSIE Mag, The Storyteller, and informative pieces for a local online newspaper. One of her unpublished novels, Foul Play, was a Suspense Finalist for the 2022 Claymore Award, and an excerpt from her unpublished novel Overshadow won Top Three Finalist of the 2024 Thomas Mabry Creative Writing Award. Though her background is in counseling, having earned a master’s degree in this field, when it comes to the art of writing, she’s an autodidact. She studies books she loves and enjoys completing various creative writing classes online, and attending writer’s conferences whenever she can; Killer Nashville is one of her favorites. Additionally, she’s volunteered since 2023 as a general editor for the Killer Nashville Magazine. She resides in Tennessee with her family, their talkative Husky, and a frenetic cat. You can find her online here: https://chrissyhicks.wordpress.com/ where she occasionally blogs about the writing life and reviews craft books.

When the Words Won’t Come

By Lois Winston

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This is not an article about writer’s block. That’s a topic for another day. Today, I’d like to discuss Brain Block, that deer-in-the-headlights moment when you suddenly find yourself at a loss for words, no matter how well-prepared you thought you were. Or how unprepared because you never thought you’d need to prepare.

There are those people who always seem to pull a snappy rejoinder from their gray matter whenever the situation presents itself. Not me. I’m the person who thinks of the perfect response hours or days later. Sentences may flow from my fingertips onto my computer screen, but rarely do they trip off my tongue in the same pithy manner.

Back in my school days, no matter how well-prepared I was, I morphed into a complete failure during oral book reports, once even forgetting the name of the main characters, even though one was the title of the book! Then there were the dreaded oral exams. I could easily fill several blue books with my knowledge on a topic, but stand me up in a one-on-one with the teacher who held my GPA in his hand, and Brain Block took hold of me.

As writers, we’re told to craft an elevator pitch, that concise short paragraph that will catch the attention of an agent or editor who might turn to you while waiting for the elevator at a conference and say, “Tell me about your book.” Memorization has never been my strong suit. If I couldn’t whip out my index card and read my pitch, Brain Block would take over. 

I’m also the person who never remembers the punchline to any joke. Heck, I never even remember any part of the joke! Which makes it quite ironic that for nearly two decades, I’ve spent my days writing humorous amateur sleuth novels.

I started my writing career penning emotional, angst-driven romance and romantic suspense, but my heroines always relied on a sense of humor to help them cope with their problems. Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone. It’s good advice when crafting characters. No one wants to read about a woe-is-me heroine for 400 pages. 

I suppose that’s why my agent called one day to suggest I write a chick lit novel. However, coming up with a little humorous dialogue now and then is quite different from writing a humorous novel. Since none of my romances or romantic suspense novels had yet sold, I agreed to try my hand at chick lit. That’s when I discovered somewhere in the deep recesses of my DNA lurked an untapped humor gene.

I may not be able to tell a joke in real life, but on the page I’m the Dutchess of Double-Entendres, the Baroness of Bon Mots, the Princess of Puns. My characters routinely engage in witty dialogue. And they always come up with that perfect rejoinder, no matter the situation. My foray into chick lit eventually resulted in Talk Gertie to Me, my first published novel.

Harnessing my latent humor gene changed the trajectory of my writing career. After one of my romance novels finally sold, my agent called one day to tell me I should write a humorous amateur sleuth mystery series with a crafting theme. She knew an editor looking for one, and she thought I’d be the perfect person to write it. 

It’s one thing to write chick lit or to employ a bit of humor to break up the tension in a romance or a romantic suspense, but humorous murder mysteries? Most people find nothing humorous about murder. Or if they do, you might want to steer clear of them. However, an amateur sleuth mystery by its very definition is a fish-out-of-water story, and the fish-out-of-water trope lends itself to situational humor. So I gave it a try. The result was Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun, the first book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series.

I have not been kind to Anastasia. I’ve saddled her with debt greater than the GNP of a Third World nation. I not only saddled her with a nasty diehard communist mother-in-law, but her mother claims descent from Russian nobility and is also a member of the DAR. I then forced the two women to share a bedroom in Anastasia’s home. I’ve also added two teenage sons, a Shakespeare-quoting parrot, and a possible government operative. 

And of course, there are the dead bodies, a pre-requisite of murder mysteries. Every time Anastasia makes some headway whittling down her debt, I throw another corpse in her path. Although she sometimes feels tempted to climb into bed and pull the quilt over her head, she copes with all the mayhem I’ve heaped on her by harnessing her quirky self-deprecating and observational Jersey Girl sense of humor.

However, humor is very subjective. I always hold my breath, fingers crossed, that my readers will get the humor in my books. Some do; some don’t. That’s the nature of humor. All I can do is hope more readers laugh than don’t. Besides, one of the first lessons you learn as a published author is that no author is ever going to please every reader, so don’t even try.

This brings me back to the title of this article and the recent Killer Nashville conference. This year A Crafty Collage of Crime, the 12th book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series, won the Silver Falchion Award for Best Comedy. Here was a golden opportunity to tell a captive audience of several hundred people about Anastasia and the thirteen books and three novellas I’ve so far written about her, especially since this book features her on a trip to Middle Tennessee.

I should have jotted down an acceptance speech to read, but I didn’t because I never expected to win. With a few rare exceptions from back in my romance writing days, I have a long track record of always being the bridesmaid, never the bride. But hey, it’s still an honor to be nominated.

So when my name was called, Brain Block accompanied me to the front of the room, and I wound up giving what can only be described as the shortest acceptance speech in the history of awards ceremonies. I doubt if it even qualified as a “speech.” As I walked away from the mic, Clay Stafford commented that I was “a woman of few words.”

Well, at least I didn’t bore anyone with a too-long, rambling monologue where I thanked everyone in my life, going all the way back to my kindergarten teacher and my pet goldfish!

Later that night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I came up with a perfect acceptance speech—pithy, witty, and including a few bon mots. Too bad no one was around to hear it.

Moral of the story: Even if you think you have no chance of winning, always, always prepare an acceptance speech. AND WRITE IT DOWN!

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston has taken part on many writing panels, taught dozens of writing workshops, and given quite a few solo talks over the years, but she always relies on her notes, never her memory. She writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Her most recent release is Sorry, Knot Sorry, the thirteenth book in her humorous Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series. Learn more about Lois and her books at www.loiswinston.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter and follow her on various social media sites.

The Indie Pubbing Journey Continues—Part Four: Navigating The Distribution Maze

By Steven Womack

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So you’ve written your book, rewritten your book (any number of times), and like the good little professional you aspire to be, you’ve paid an outside copyeditor to get the book in the best shape it can possibly be. You’ve studied the market, maybe queried a few agents (most of whom never even responded), done your due diligence, and decided that in today’s publishing environment, your best bet is to go the indie route.

You’ve done a deep dive into the freelance market that’s sprung up in the last decade to serve the needs of indie pubbers, and you’ve found a cover designer you absolutely love. You’ve either chosen an app to format your book or you’ve decided to spend the bucks to outsource the technical stuff.

Little by little, piece by piece, your dream is coming together. You can see the finish line—pub date—and you get a shaky, excited feeling deep in our gut that this is finally becoming…

Real.

Hundreds of hours of work, planning, following months or even years of writing your book. You’re excited, but at the same time, exhausted emotionally and maybe even physically. But you’re nearing the end, right? The finish line’s in sight.

Hold your horses, cowpokes. The reality is, you’re just getting started.

You think writing that book was hard? Try getting the book out there, grasshoppah…

This month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life is going to—as the head of IT at the film school where I used to teach often said—start to start the process of getting your book out there. There are two main avenues by which you’re going to get your book into the hands of readers: eBooks and print books.

We’re going to start by tackling the question of eBooks, since as we established in an earlier edition of this column, that’s how you’re going to reach the largest number of readers and bring in the largest number of bucks. And in the world of eBook distribution, there is only one question to answer which will determine your eBook distribution strategy.

Are you going to go wide or are you not going to go wide?

What does that even mean, in English?

Okay, time for another [brief] history lesson. As the eBook revolution ramped up in earnest in the first decade of the 21st Century, there was a certain wild west feel to it. There was the Kindle e-reader from Amazon, then Sony came out with the Sony Reader in 2006, and Barnes & Noble came out with the Nook in 2009. So there were three different mainstream e-readers out there, each with different specs and technical requirements.

Then a whole slew of eBook distributors came online. There was Amazon (of course), and then Apple got in the game, followed by Rokuten Kobo, which is a Canadian eBook retailer owned by a Japanese company, known primarily as Kobo. Over the years, scads of other companies emerged as eBook retailers, distributors, or publishers—Tolino, Barnes & Noble, Overdrive, Books-A-Million, Hoopla, etc. etc. etc.

It was a complicated landscape. The administrative load alone to distribute through all these channels was overwhelming.

So in 2008, a book marketing guru, publicist and novelist by the name of Mark Coker rolled out a company called Smashwords, which was the first eBook aggregator. Coker’s groundbreaking and innovative approach brought all these varied distribution outlets into one place. Now indie pubbers could sign up with Smashwords, pick the outlets they wanted to distribute to, and then upload one file to one place, rather than one file to fifteen places. Coker also wrote a number of reference guides on formatting eBooks to meet all the technical needs of the various distributors and did all the accounting and setup. They created tools and guides to help indie publishers navigate this complicated landscape. Smashwords uploaded to the outlets you picked, tracked incoming payments, even did tax reporting and bookkeeping, and distributed payments out to the individual authors and independent publishing companies, all for what was actually a reasonable and fair cut of the earnings.

Coker’s idea—and Smashwords—was wildly successful. Within a few years, they were distributing hundreds of thousands of eBooks.

In 2012, three young entrepreneurs—Kris Austin, Aaron Pogue, and Toby Nance—decided it was time for Smashwords to have a little competition. So they opened Draft2Digital (often shortened to D2D), headquartered in Oklahoma City. D2D took a similar approach as Smashwords, but streamlined some of the processes and offered up a competitive set of user-friendly tools to help indie author publish their books with enough time and energy left over to write more of them.

Ten years later, in 2022, Draft2Digital acquired Smashwords in a friendly deal that kept Coker on board as part of the team. Today, D2D is the 800-pound aggregating gorilla in the indie pub space.

So that, in a nutshell, is going wide. Get your book out there in as many different channels as possible and just wait for the tsunami of bucks headed your way.

What’s the alternative? And why would anyone want to consider it?

Enter Amazon, the exciting, attractive, funny, smart, creative person you’ve always wanted to date but found incredibly high-maintenance. In July 2014, Amazon rolled out Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service that for $9.99 a month gave you unlimited access (with a few restrictions) to Amazon’s entire library of books and audiobooks—as long as those books were enrolled in Kindle Select (in typical Amazon fashion, nothing’s ever easy or simple; if you’re an author you have to enroll your books in Kindle Select in order to get them into Kindle Unlimited). Think of it as Netflix or Spotify, only for books.

There isn’t time or space here to go into the convoluted history of the Kindle Unlimited program. If you’d like to do a deeper dive into that, here’s a link to an excellent article:

https://www.hiddengemsbooks.com/history-kindle-unlimited/

The important thing to remember is that the way KU paid authors has evolved over time. The first payment method was rife for scamming and bad behavior. Amazon tackled that and went into a second generation of KU and now they’re in the third. But basically, in laymen’s terms, when you check out a book in KU, there’s a little widget or something inside the file that enables Amazon to count the number of pages you’ve read (well, hello there Big Brother) and authors are paid a fraction of a fraction of a cent for each page.

Five or so years ago, when I decided to dip my toes into indie pubbing, I chose what I thought was the obvious best route. I created a D2D account and listed all my books on every channel possible. Then, not knowing any better, I started buying Amazon ads and BookBub ads (more on that in future installments) and promoting them on social media and my meager newsletter subscriber lists and doing everything I thought would move books.

The result? Bupkis…

Oh, occasionally I’d sell a book here and a book there, but it’s the understatement of the day to say I was disappointed.

A couple of years or this and I was really burning out. So I reached out to an acquaintance, a fellow Edgar winner who, like me, wrote books set in New Orleans. Julie Smith and I both came into print about the same time, were publishing at about the same level, and encountering the same career struggles. Where our paths diverged was when Julie fully embraced the indie publishing movement in the early days of the eBook revolution and turned her career around.

She began publishing under her own imprint—booksBnimble—and brought back her backlist and later new work. Then she branched out and started publishing other writers. A few years later, she opened up a book marketing division to help indie pubbed authors. I reached out to Julie and after careful thought, signed on with her company.

Julie’s got a marketing plan that won’t work for everyone. Standalone books are a tough sell, as are literary books, nonfiction, and memoirs. But if you’re writing genre novels—romances, mysteries—and you have a series with at least three books, then they’ve got a plan for you.

When she takes you on as a client, you’ve got to get with their program. And the first step is to pull your books down from every distribution channel and enroll them in Kindle Select. This sounds counterintuitive, but truthfully, within a couple of months, I was grossing four figures a month.

I’m running out of space here, but the moral of the story is, don’t discount Kindle Select/Unlimited just because you don’t like Amazon or think you’ll get better results with a shotgun approach. In next month’s issue of This Crazy Writing Life, we’ll take a deeper look into how you make all this work. Thanks again for playing along.

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Decades ago, when I lived in New Orleans and was a newspaper reporter during the first term of the wonderful Edwin Edwards, I learned a great local term: lagniappe. Lagniappe means “just a little something extra; a bonus.”

So here’s your lagniappe for this month’s column. I just read a fantastic book called Love In The Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed The Rules of Writing & Success by Christine M. Larson. It’s simultaneously a history and analysis of how publishing has changed since the 1980s and how romance writers were the first ones to understand these changes, adopt them, and beat the big publishers at their own game. Dr. Larsen is a professor of Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, but don’t hold that against her. The book’s a bit academic at times, but it reads like a well-written story, one we’re all still right in the middle of. It’s well worth the time to read.

The Myth of the Five Senses

By Lois Winston

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The other day, I read a statement that blew my mind—and not in a good way. Someone had written, “Some writing coaches advise that each page should include a reference to the five senses: see, hear, touch, smell, and taste.”

No! No! No! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

The Internet is filled with bogus information and/or people who claim to be experts in fields where they have no expertise. I don’t know where this person got her information, but it’s certainly not from a credible source.

Writing Rule Number One 

All dialogue and narrative in a novel must do one of two things: either advance the plot or tell the reader something she needs to know at that moment about the point of view character. If it does neither, it’s filler and doesn’t belong in your novel.

Writing Rule Number Two

Only describe that which is pertinent to the scene and/or character. If it’s not pertinent, it’s filler.

Writing Rule Number Three

Filler is bad! Always. No exceptions. It kills your pacing and bores the reader.

The five senses can either be a writer’s best friend or worst enemy. When used judicially, they can grab readers and pluck them down in the middle of the book’s action. When overdone, they make readers’ eyes glaze over. And any writer who makes a point of cramming the five senses onto each page, will not only have her readers’ eyes glazing over, but she’ll have them tossing the book across the room. 

5 senses x 300-400 pages = 1500-2000 reasons to stop reading (and probably never pick up another book by that author.)

So, when should you insert the five senses? Refer to Writing Rule Number Two. Need some examples? Keep reading.

Your character is a New York City commuter, standing on the platform of the #7 subway during a hazy, hot, and humid typical August in the city. She doesn’t notice the trash spilling from the garbage cans or the graffiti-covered walls. She’s become inured to the heat and the stench. Not that they don’t bother her, but she’s too used to them to take note. 

As a former commuter, I can tell you the best way to cope with the subway in summer is not set foot in it, but if you must, you learn to close your mind (and your nose) to your surroundings. Which is what our fictional character would do. 

Instead of focusing on the heat and stench and how uncomfortable she is, our stalwart protagonist is most likely scrolling through her Instagram or TikTok feed as she awaits the train. She’d only take note of the sights, sounds, and smells if there’s a good reason for her to do so. I could offer examples, but I’ll spare you the gory details because some of you may be reading this while eating lunch.

Now imagine your character is a twelfth century Scottish nobleman. He wakes up one morning to find himself magically transported to that same subway platform, he’s bombarded with all those sensory images and more. Everything he sees and hears is foreign and frightening to him. The one exception? The stench. Since twelfth century Scots bathed as infrequently as once a year or at most, once a month, most of the offensive odors are normal smells to him. Anything unusual would likely be masked by the smells he’d ignore. In such a scenario, have fun describing every detail of the assault to this very confused poor guy’s senses.

In Stitch, Bake, Die!, the tenth book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, Anastasia enters the victim’s kitchen to find the following:

Someone had ransacked the kitchen. Cabinets lay bare, their contents scattered across the floor in a haphazard array of pots, pans, and broken glassware and dishes. Drawers had been yanked out and tossed aside, appliances swept from the counters. Not a single package of food remained on the pantry shelves or in the refrigerator. Whoever had trashed Marlene’s kitchen had taken the time to open boxes, bags, and canisters and dump all the food. Everything from raisin bran to frozen broccoli florets to dried pasta peppered the room. A dusting of flour and sugar lay over everything like newly fallen snow.

Note, I wrote a short paragraph describing only what Anastasia sees. I don’t mention any lingering food smells or the sound of rain beating on the windowpanes. I don’t have her biting down on the inside of her cheek and tasting the coppery tang of blood or feeling her heart pounding in her chest. I don’t have her going weak in the knees and grabbing the door jamb to steady herself. All that is important to this scene is what she sees when she arrives in the kitchen. Given the plot and what happens next, further description would be filler.

The takeaway here? Describe what needs describing, then get on with your story.

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Her most recent release is Sorry, Knot Sorry, the thirteenth book in her Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series. Learn more about Lois and her books at www.loiswinston.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter and follow her on various social media sites.

The Art of Paragraphing

By Melissa Koslin

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I have read many, many books on writing craft, but I rarely see much about one of the most basic aspects of writing.

Paragraphing.

See what I did there? By making that one word its own paragraph, I called it out. Gave it more attention. Drew your eye to it.

As writers, our main job is to create a world in the reader’s mind, a world and people that seem real to us, so real that we will lose sleep to find out what happens to them. But there are other visual aspects to writing that are not in our imagination. Publishers put a lot of thought into the layout of the book—the font, how the beginning of a chapter is designed, the page headings, etc. And I think we all agree, these literal visual aspects are important. They make the book look and feel professional, and they stay out of the way—if they bring too much attention to themselves, they’ve been done wrong. Paragraphing is similar in that it’s not often noticed consciously by the reader. But it does have a subconscious affect.

Ever flip through a book, see huge blocks of text, and put it back on the shelf? Those books feel heavy, feel like they’ll be a slog to get through. Not exactly how writers want their fiction stories to be perceived.

Know why people are attracted to dialogue in books? Why it makes it feel like a faster pace? Part of that is due to paragraphing. Most conversation is a sentence or two, or even a single word, back and forth between two or more characters, and each time a different character talks, it’s a new paragraph. Of course, there are some books where it’s more of a soliloquy than a conversation—this is dialogue gone bad. No one wants to listen to a speech. Pretty much ever. 

You can accomplish this feeling of a faster pace without dialogue, if done properly. This is especially true in action scenes. I’m a suspense writer, with a focus on fight scenes, so I write a lot of action. Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming book The Lost Library. Notice how short the paragraphs are and how it creates a sense of quickened pace and intensity.

“I don’t think so.” She backed away, keeping her gaze on him and peripherally watching everything else around her.

He lunged and grabbed her bag.

Cali glared. “Back off.”

He yanked at her bag, but she had it slung across her body—exactly for this type of circumstance. As he yanked, he pulled her off balance, but she took a step and strengthened her stance, all while continuing to glare at him.

He raised a hand to slap her, but she blocked. Then she used both hands to shove him away.

A curse slurred from his lips.

He shifted, and she thought he was going to leave, but he came at her.

She blocked a punch and threw a kick at his groin. But she didn’t quite connect the kick—his legs were too close together.

As she was pulling her leg back to the ground, he swung his fist again. This time, it connected with her cheek.

Rage filled her like boiling water. She attacked with an elbow across his chin. And then the other elbow, and a kick to the groin. This time, her foot connected.

He stumbled back and fell.

She ran.

She felt guilty for not calling the police and pressing charges, making sure he didn’t try mugging someone else. But she couldn’t take the risk. Invisibility was her best defense.

However, paragraphing needs to be appropriate for the scene. Let’s say the characters are having a deep conversation. In these circumstances, longer paragraphs are often called for. Though we can’t let them get too long, or it starts to feel like boring blathering. What I like to do is throw in an occasional one-word paragraph, or maybe a short phrase. This draws attention and intensifies that one word. Even more so than in fight scenes because that one word is juxtaposed by longer paragraphs. Of course, we can’t randomly do this, so we need to keep an eye out for opportunities that feel organic, that intensify the emotion.

As writers, we have many tools at our disposal to make the reader see what we want them to see and feel what we want them to feel, and the best tools are the ones of which the reader isn’t even aware.

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Melissa Koslin is a fourth-degree black belt in and certified instructor of traditional Taekwondo. In her day job as a commercial property manager, she secretly notes personal quirks and funny situations, ready to tweak them into colorful additions for her books. She and Corey, her husband of twenty-five years, and their young daughter live in Yulee, Florida, where they do their best not to melt in the sun. Find more information on her books at MelissaKoslin.com.

The Writer’s Playbook: A Lesson in Spray Hitting

By Steven Harms

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One of the benefits of my previous career in professional sports was the opportunity to form relationships with the people on the “sports side” of the teams where I was employed.  I learned, many times by osmosis, the workings of the game from the professional’s point of view.

Case in point, Al Avila was the Assistant General Manager of the Detroit Tigers during my time working for the team. He became a good friend, and besides his genuine warmth and sociable nature, his deep knowledge of the game was something to heed. If you asked him a baseball question, he was great in explaining the answer.

I once asked Al to join me for breakfast as a special treat for a long-time corporate sponsor of the team, owned by two brothers who were rabid Tigers fans. We met them at a nice local establishment just to talk baseball. For me it was an awesome way to entertain a customer and for Al, well I’m sure it wasn’t something he loved to do, but he agreed to help me out. As the meal wore on, he was answering questions and providing his opinion on a variety of baseball topics. Finally, towards the end, he flipped the script and asked the brothers a question. He posed, “Do you know why right-handed batters are better spray hitters than left-handed ones?”

All three of us had no clue. Al proceeded to explain that it’s in the basics of the game. To score as many runs as possible, batters advance runners from first base to home plate, as everyone knows. Runners are moving from right to left in the second two legs of the process – first to second, second to third. It’s a one-way street, and you can’t go backwards. When players are on second and third base, they are scoring opportunities for the offense. When a ball is hit to the right side of the playing field, it helps advance the runner more so than if a ball is put in play on the left side of the field. For example, if a runner is on second base and the batter hits a fly ball to right field, the odds are high that the runner can advance to third base and potentially onto home plate. The right fielder must make their throw from a much longer distance than a leftfielder would have to in the same situation. Consequently, a fly ball hit to left field almost ensures that the runner on second base is not going to be able to advance, at least not all the way to home plate, because the throw is much shorter, giving the advantage to the defense.

With that as the backdrop, left-handed batters learn early on to pull their hits to the right side of the field to advance a runner, which is a more natural swing anyway. Conversely, right-handed batters must develop the skill to hit to the opposite field (right field) to increase the percentage of advancing runners. That’s called spray hitting, or the elevated ability to hit a baseball to the opposite field of your batting position. Due to the simple science on how to advance runners on base, lefties learn to pull while righties learn to spray. The ability to spray hit with some amount of success makes a player a valuable commodity because that individual has a talent to produce runs and win games.

Al’s insight concerning spray hitting crystallizes the value of seeking out information from people that have successful experience and a deep understanding of the topic at hand. Most everyone I’ve networked with or leaned into for advice and guidance on author-related subjects has displayed a willingness to share their learned knowledge. That mutual desire to assist fellow authors is at the core of the annual Killer Nashville Conference, and similar ones around the country. However, I think the secret sauce of my comparison to how Al Avila gave a “lesson” in spray hitting to seeking out advice from our gracious author community lies in the context of it being based on a singular detailed topic. 

Follow me here. Al was pointedly specific on one aspect of hitting. The benefit of a spray hit is uniquely applicable to a situational moment in the game of baseball. If there are runners at second and/or third base, a spray hit from a right-handed batter (the ball is hit to right field instead of that batter pulling the hit to left field) greatly enhances the odds of success in scoring runs from those base runners. But if there aren’t players on second or third base, a right-handed batter putting a ball into play to right field may allow them to reach first base, but a base hit to any field – left, center, or right – will achieve the same result. And, as I’ve witnessed a few times when no one is on base and the ball is hit to right field, the batter can still be thrown out at first base from the right fielder, but that would be impossible if the ball was hit to center or left field.

Bringing all this home (no pun intended), as authors we are well served to seek out advice and counsel from those that have the answers on specific topics. Key word being ‘specific.’ A few examples would be:

NOT SO GOOD: Do you have any suggestions on querying agents?
GOOD: I’m also a writer of cozy mysteries and seeking an agent. How did you land yours and can you steer me to a few agencies or agents that specialize in cozy mystery authors?

NOT SO GOOD: How do you use social media to market your books?
GOOD: Can you share with me your successful strategies for marketing your books across social media, and specifically with TikTok and Instagram?

NOT SO GOOD: Your John Doe thriller series has been hugely successful. How did you do it?
GOOD: I’ve decided to turn my first book, Jane Doe thriller, into a series. With the achievements you’ve had with your John Doe series, would you mind sharing with me the roadmap you took to make your second book a success, and what efforts you undertook that didn’t work?

Many times, it’s the initial question that will either open the floodgates of fantastic usable information or go the other way and all you’ll receive is a general reply containing information you either already knew or can find through every search engine on the internet. I must add that my career in selling pro sports sponsorships taught me to ask explicit questions concerning specific topics that would lead to the information I was seeking to put myself in the best possible position for success in landing them as a client.  The takeaway here is that specific targeted questions provide intelligence-filled answers.  

A final related note is to never underestimate the value of face-to-face interaction. Those conversations always bear the greatest fruit. My two previous clients, who one day had a private breakfast with Al Avila, can attest to the power of in-person connections. With that, next time you’re at a writer’s conference be sure to network, engage, and ask the right kind of questions of those willing to give you advice.

And now you’ve got a question to throw their way as well. Hint…Who’s better at spray hitting and why?

Three Rules for Creating Cozies that Stand Out in the Crowd

By Lois Winston

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Life’s journeys are rarely along a straight path. The same can be said for our writing journeys. I began my career firmly entrenched in the world of romance. Then, one fateful day, I received a phone call that changed my life. My agent asked if I’d be interested in writing a humorous crafting-themed mystery series featuring an amateur sleuth. She knew an editor looking for one. My agent went on to say that she thought I’d be the perfect person to write such a series because I worked as a crafts designer for various publications and manufacturers, and my award-winning first novel, Talk Gertie to Me, was a humorous fish-out-of-water tale.

The closest I’d ever come to writing mystery was my three romantic suspense novels. However, there’s a huge difference between mysteries and suspense. Also, I wasn’t someone who had grown up reading Nancy Drew, and it had been years since I’d watched Murder She Wrote. Still, the challenge intrigued me, and I set out to learn all I could about amateur sleuth and cozy mysteries, specifically, those that involved crafts.

Armed with a stack of books from both the library and my local bookstore, I immersed myself in the sub-genre. I discovered that most crafting cozies centered around a craft shop or a group of crafters, such as quilters, knitters, or scrapbookers. Some featured a production crafter, such as a potter or stained-glass artisan. All took place in small towns, and the amateur sleuth always had a sidekick, usually a friend or relative.

Years ago, I’d been told that it’s never a good idea to follow a trend. If I wrote this series, I’d be competing against well-established authors. To succeed, I needed to stand out, and to do that, I needed to think outside the box. What could I do differently that would set my series apart, yet still be embraced by readers of the genre?

This brings me to Rule One: Give a unique spin to your protagonist, her profession, and/or the setting of your series.

I started out by switching up the setting. Instead of a small town, my series would take place in a metropolitan area, a suburb of New York City. Rather than having a sleuth who owned a craft or needlework shop, I’d make my sleuth the crafts editor at a women’s magazine. 

But I didn’t stop there. In the romance genre, clueless heroines are dubbed TSTL, Too Stupid to Live. These are the women who suspect danger is lurking around a dark corner, in a dank basement, or in spooky woods, yet they deliberately turn the corner, descend the staircase, or head for the trees, where they are then usually confronted by an escaped murderer, monster, or serial killer.

As I read through dozens of cozy mysteries, I came across a similar phenomenon—the busybody snoop who is convinced she’s smarter than local law enforcement and will do a better and quicker job of discovering whodunit. I did not want to write a busybody sleuth. Instead, I decided to create a reluctant amateur sleuth, a woman who wants nothing to do with crime-solving but is forced into it by circumstances beyond her control.

Rule Two: Set up an overall situation that will allow the protagonist to make progress toward reaching her goals and resolving her conflicts as the series progresses from book to book.

Writing an ongoing series means the protagonist needs a reason to keep sleuthing. I set the stage in Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun, the first book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries. It opens with Anastasia yanked from her comfortable middle-class existence after her husband drops dead in a Las Vegas casino. That’s when she learns about his affair with Lady Luck. He leaves her with massive debt and a bookie demanding fifty-thousand dollars. 

In each book in the series, Anastasia works at whittling down her debt to keep a roof over her family’s heads. But as she moonlights and takes on side gigs, she keeps running across unsavory characters and the corpses they leave in their wake.

Which brings me to Rule Three: Develop secondary characters that add depth to your series and create additional problems for your protagonist.

I also discovered that in addition to every amateur sleuth needing someone to play Watson to her Sherlock, she also needs to interact with members of her family and her community. However, many of the books I read kept these secondary and tertiary characters to a minimum. The only new characters introduced in each book were always specific to that book’s murder plot and rarely, if ever, appeared again. Throughout my series, I’ve often introduced new characters who have provided ongoing subplots that are intertwined within the mysteries and add layers of depth to the series as they, too, evolve. Not every character appears in every book. They come and go based on the plot of each book, but they’re available when I need them.

Sorry, Knot Sorry, is the thirteenth and latest book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series. In each book, Anastasia continues to be motivated toward reaching her goals and resolving the conflicts that impede her from doing so, and she has continued to grow as a person. But of course, the dead bodies keep coming.

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Her most recent release is Sorry, Knot Sorry, the thirteenth book in her Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series. Learn more about Lois and her books at her website www.loiswinston.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter and follow her on various social media sites.

The Writer’s Playbook: The Drummer Boy

By Steven Harms

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As a contributing writer to Killer Nashville Magazine, I’ve been tapping into my career as a professional sports executive to showcase some very personal stories and observations from my time in the business. Each one has been filtered through the lens of utilizing those moments to correlate topics to discuss in the world of writing. 

Here, I’m going to pivot a bit and pluck a different kind of story from my background. It’s about my journey to becoming an author and getting published. My hope is that it serves to inspire, in some way, all those who are trying to break into the business despite its tendency to be a rather difficult and complex undertaking.

Writing is our passion. It’s a creative expression full of dreams and hopes and wants. Success, comes in many forms. For me, I simply wanted to challenge myself to write a novel and get it published through the traditional process. Would I have the chops to succeed? But that question and dream followed something I accomplished that was a precursor; an undertaking that took me down a road I had never traveled.

As a backdrop, I’m a person of faith and have attended church my entire life. In the early 2000s, my wife and I started attending a non-denominational church that, we came to find out, used creative arts at times in its sermons. Specifically, dance and drama in the form of skits to underscore that day’s message. I dabbled in theater in college, but frankly, never stayed with it and moved on with my career following graduation. Apparently, the acting bug never truly left me, and I ended up volunteering to be in some skits at our new church home. I eventually started writing their skits around 2004 to provide the need for “home-grown” drama, which implanted in me the writing bug. 

Fast forward a few years. I can’t tell you the exact moment, or the trigger, or the catalyst that washed over me one day and placed on me a calling to take a stab at being a playwright and write a unique story surrounding the birth of Jesus. If you are a person of faith, chalk that up to the nudging from the holy spirit. If you aren’t, chalk it up to me being a crazy half-baked dreamer.

The inspiration was quite clear and straightforward, though. The seed of the idea was to create a story using songs of the Christmas season to help drive the plot like a traditional musical does and build a compelling story arc that would touch believers and non-believers alike. The story wasn’t what you’re probably thinking. The target audience was very much adult-oriented, with the main character’s life unraveling in some very troubled waters. I also have zero musical talent, making this idea even nuttier. After a few nights of trying unsuccessfully to get it out of my mind, I dove in.

There I was, like we all sometimes do, staring at a blank screen with that heavy mixture of excitement and dread. You think I would’ve researched simple things like how to write a script, what were the dos and don’ts, generally acceptable lengths of scenes, and on and on. Well, I didn’t. I just started.

I landed on something from my childhood in the form of the song “The Little Drummer Boy.” It’s been a favorite of mine, perhaps my most favorite. I gave him a name–Mozel–and filled my head and notes with his backstory and plot line to get him to Bethlehem on the night of the birth. Along the way, literally a hundred characters came to life. Eight traditional Christmas songs were used to help drive the plot. It took me about a year to complete. 

I never told my church I was undertaking this effort. I simply acted on the inspiration I was gifted and wrote the story. I distinctly remember, when it was completed, I said something to God along the lines of, “There. I did it. You asked me to do this, and, well, I did, and it’s now done.” I never held any purposeful intent to ever let it see the light of day. 

Maybe a few weeks rolled by, and then something happened. The head of drama for my church had professional theater experience and was an advocate for utilizing drama as an outreach to the community. She directed some secular plays annually at our church over the years, with most of those targeted at kids and families (think ‘Wizard of Oz’ type shows). She and I became good friends along the way. We connected following a Sunday morning service, or maybe at a church picnic or something, and I casually told her why and what I had written. She wanted to read it and was adamant that I send it to her. This occurred in spring of 2007.

In December 2008, The Little Drummer Boy made its debut on our stage. All in, the cast and crew numbered around 150. We pulled together every discipline a professional theater needs, including volunteer leaders who captained costumes, lighting, sound, choir, music, ushers, parking, and marketing. We paid a local university’s drama department to build sets, leaning into their expertise based on our stage dimensions and back-of-house capabilities. The show ran for five years with four shows during one December weekend annually in 2008-2010, 2012, and 2014. Over 20,000 people attended the performances, some from nearby states who became aware of it through social media marketing. We gifted homeless veterans an entire section of seats each year. We bused them in from shelters in Detroit. They usually numbered about 300 and were the most energetic and grateful group of people I had ever been around. That alone was worth every minute of our collective efforts to bring the production to life. After those seven years, I pulled the plug due to personal burnout, and wanting the show to go out on a high note. 

But something interesting happened in that final year of the show. That same little voice gave me another nudge around October 2014. Having never written a short story, let alone a novel, it told me to write one, anyway. The inspiration was the challenge, but more so, to task myself with embedding moral principles as the undertow theme within a secular book in the mystery/thriller/suspense genres. Two years later, with an edited manuscript completed, I began my search for an agent and landed at the Liza Royce Agency in New York about five months into the process. The first book, Give Place to Wrath, was published in 2017 as the Roger Viceroy Series, with the second one, The Counsel of the Cunning, released in 2021 after a pandemic pause.

While the books have been critically well-met, the sales haven’t done nearly so, which makes me a member of the overwhelming majority of authors in the world. But I press on with determination and confidence, having shifted to a stand-alone story taking shape now for my third book.

As mentioned at the start of this blog, perhaps there is inspiration for you in the telling of my road to being a published author. Mine was a voice that simply wouldn’t go away. 

As I look back, I truly believe becoming the playwright of The Little Drummer Boy was a deep-dive training experience. I had to map it all out as the playwright and producer, ultimately having to devise a business plan and then follow through with the hundreds of action steps to bring the show to life. Yes, it was consuming, but the results outperformed even my most positive projections. The process taught me there are no corners to be cut, that inspirational story ideas, told well and authentically, will capture audiences, that people in your universe of contacts and relationships will help without question, that sticking to a plan produces results, and that you can jump into the great unknown and find your footing because you heeded a calling to do so.

Give it your excellent best effort. There are readers out there just waiting to dive into your book. Happy writing.

The Difference Between Passive Voice and Passive Verbs

By Lois Winston

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I began writing fiction nearly thirty years ago. Over the years, I’ve attended dozens of writing conferences, both in the romance genre and the mystery genre. Most of what I learned was invaluable toward advancing my writing career. However, occasionally I’d come across inaccurate information. Such is the case with passive voice and passive verbs.

Once upon a time, somewhere during some talk or on some panel, someone emphatically stated that authors should NEVER use any form of the verb “to be.” That misinformed person said using “was,” along with its brothers and sisters (is, am, are, were, been,) was passive voice and a surefire way to receive a rejection from agents and editors. Like a bad rumor, this piece of writing advice flew from writer to writer, taking on a life of its own, until it became gospel. 

I’d like to set the record straight. There’s a huge difference between passive verbs and passive voice.

Passive voice is when an action is acted upon the subject, rather than the subject acting. The car was driven by Anna is a passive sentence. Anna drove the car is an active sentence. However, Anna was happy to drive the car is not a passive sentence. Anna is expressing emotion. She is acting, rather than being acted upon. Of course, there are more interesting ways to write the sentence to show Anna’s emotions, but that’s a separate discussion.

One of the easiest ways to tell whether your sentence is active or passive is to analyze the position of the subject, verb, and direct object. In active voice, the subject (the one performing the action) will come before the verb (the action), and the verb will come before the direct object (that which is being acted upon.)

There are instances, though, when passive voice is necessary to the unfolding of a story or better suited to the realism of the dialogue. When we speak, we don’t first think whether our sentences are active or passive before uttering them. We just speak them. The same is true when writing dialogue. Manipulate a sentence to avoid passive voice in a conversation between characters, and you often transform snappy dialogue into stilted dialogue. 

For example: Billy ran into the house and cried, “Mom! Come quick. Snoopy was hit by a car!”  This passage accurately illustrates the way a child might respond to a car hitting his dog. Snoopy was hit by a car is a passive sentence because Snoopy is being acted upon by the car, but the child mentions Snoopy first because the dog’s welfare is uppermost in his mind. Also, by placing the last sentence in passive voice, the author is ratcheting up the tension. We don’t know until the very end exactly what hit Snoopy. A stray baseball? A nasty neighbor? A falling tree limb? Although A car hit Snoopy, is active voice, using it lessens the impact of the sentence.

Still squeamish about the use of “was”? After you finish your manuscript, do a search of the word. Check each sentence to see if you can rewrite it to avoid using “was.” If you can, and it doesn’t detract from the pacing, dialogue, or meaning of the passage, do so. If not, leave it. Some “was” are meant to be.

EXCEPT in the subjunctive.

The what, you ask? Subjunctive case or mood is one of the most misunderstood rules in the English language because it runs counter to subject/verb agreement. In other words, if a subject is singular, the verb must also be singular. But not in the subjunctive.

The subjunctive applies to cases of “wishfulness” or “what if” situations. In these cases, “was” becomes “were,” as in, I wish I were taller. “Were” is also used when a sentence or clause uses “if,” “as if,” or “as though,” but only in instances where the statement is contrary to fact. 

Examples include: 
If I were taller, I could see the stage better.
Her twelve-year-old son acts as if he were in kindergarten. 
The maid behaved as though she were queen. 

Because I cannot grow taller, the twelve-year-old is not in kindergarten, and the maid is not a queen, all the statements are contrary to fact, and “was” becomes “were” even though the subjects are all singular.

Keep in mind, though, that the key statement here is “contrary to fact.” “If” statements that are not contrary to fact retain the singular form of the verb. If I was at the store that day, I don’t remember is a correct sentence because the statement is not contrary to fact whether I can recall the event or not. 

So don’t be afraid to use “was” and “were” in your writing but be sure to use them correctly.

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Her most recent release is Sorry, Knot Sorry, the thirteenth book in her Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series. Learn more about Lois and her books at her website www.loiswinston.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter and follow her on various social media sites.

Character as a Haunted House

By Aimee Hardy

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Establishing engaging and relatable characters is one of the most important parts of storytelling. Characters should have compelling backstories, relatable flaws, and fulfilling character arcs, but one of the best tools that I’ve learned about creating characters is to think of them like a haunted house. 

Each house has a facade that everyone sees. This is usually the most complimentary view of the house. Passersby can admire the paint, the sweeping porch, and the manicured lawn. Everything is usually neat and tidy, and all its secrets are safely locked away inside. Even haunted houses look best from the outside. 

Similarly, everyone sees certain aspects of a character. This is the image they present to society. It’s the suit jacket worn for status, the combat boots worn for protection, the high heels worn for seduction. It’s the gruff voice to establish dominance or the motherly coo to show nurturing, the helping hand they give when on the train or the kind words said at the gas station. These are the outward images that we must establish from the very beginning because they show how the character would like to be seen from the outside. 

Friends are allowed access inside the house, however. Acquaintances are invited in and can see the common rooms. Those rooms are still cultivated, yet they are a little more intimate. As acquaintances become friends or loved ones, they are invited further inside the house. They see the dishes that have been piled in the sink, the laundry that is overflowing, or the tub that is in need of a good scrub. In a haunted house, we can see the evidence of ghosts. We can hear strange footsteps, feel cold spots, and see apparitions, but we can’t quite determine what is haunting the house. 

Just as with houses, our characters will reveal more intimate details about themselves (and their own ghosts) as they make bonds with other characters and as we (the reader) get to know them in the story. We can see that they are kind by the way they treat their loved ones but that it hurts when no one says thank you. We can see that they are jealous of an adversary, but we can also see that it’s because they were never given the same opportunities to be great. We can see that they are smart but that they are terrified of losing their top spot. They become nuanced–both kind and resentful, jealous and righteous, smart and insecure. 

Then, there are rooms in this haunted house that are so scary that the main character would not dare to enter. These rooms contain the worst secrets that will not leave us alone, and with characters, these rooms contain their deepest fears. The kind and resentful mother might fear that she isn’t worthy of being loved. The jealous and righteous bully might be afraid of being weak or controlled by others. The smart but insecure scientist might fear they are useless. The main character is haunted by these fears and can’t move on until they confront their ghosts. 

So, when I write stories, I always ask what is haunting my main character. If they are worried that they have no identity, maybe they fill their “rooms” with collections. They might appear to know a lot of things in their search for their identity and might even adopt different identities as they interact with different characters. On the outside, they might overcompensate by wearing elaborate costumes or may even be so insecure that they only wear black. However you design your character, keep in mind that their house is haunted, and that in the end, their ghosts will have to come out. 

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Aimee Hardy is a writer and editor in Birmingham, AL. She is the author of Pocket Full of Teeth (September 2024 Running Wild Press). She has been published in Stonecoast Review, Running Wild Press’ Short Story Anthology, Havik2020, Bluntly Lit Mag, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Lost Pilots Lit and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2020. She has a B.A. and M.A. in English from National University. When she’s not writing or editing, she enjoys going on hikes with her husband and two kids or curling up with a good book and a hot cup of tea. For more of Aimee’s work, please visit www.aimeehardy.com.

Why I Hate Self-Publishing

By Steven Womack

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Some time ago, I gave a talk at the monthly meeting of the Middle Tennessee Chapter of Sisters-In-Crime. A week or so before that, I’d read an installment of Clay Stafford’s writing blog that put forth the proposition that writers should not give their work away. A writer’s work has meaning, Clay wrote. It has value and to give it away for free sends the wrong message to readers and to the world in general.

I’ve known Clay Stafford a good couple of decades now and have always regarded him as a wise and successful friend. When he speaks, I listen—and usually take notes.

This time, however, I had to disagree.

It’s not that I disagree with his notion that a writer’s work has value. It does, even if sometimes it’s only to the writer him/herself. All writers put an enormous amount of work and heart in to getting those words onto a page. But that doesn’t always automatically translate into value, especially value measured in sales/dollars. When there are roughly 2.2 million new books published every year (according to UNESCO), the competition is pretty rough out there and it’s hard to convince an audience that your book has value; in other words, it’s worth reading.

So I put forth the notion—based on my own experience—that the best way to get attention for your book was to give it away. In February, I had my first BookBub Featured Deal and in a four-day period gave away 24,897 eBook copies of the latest installment in my Music City Murders Harry James Denton series, Fade Up From Black. Through the rest of the month, that resulted in over 200,000 page reads. And since Amazon’s policy is to pay page reads on book giveaways if the book’s enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, I made money giving stuff away.

Enough to pay for the BookBub Featured Deal, anyway.

While I’ve given up predicting the future, I feel confident that at least a few of the people who downloaded those nearly 25,000 copies will like the book well enough to actually go out and buy the other installments.

It’s a whole new world out there, marketing-wise. Marketing in the internet age has a  very long tail, and to riff on my old pal Larry Beinhart, sometimes the tail wags the dog.

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After my talk, Clay wrote me a very complimentary note and asked if I’d be interested in writing a monthly column for Killer Nashville Magazine on self-publishing. I was very flattered, but the first obstacle to overcome was my loathing of the term self-publishing. Loathing? Seems kind of harsh. Why would anyone loathe a term like self-publishing, especially since some of the greatest writers in history published their own work? 

Disgusted with his usual publisher, Mark Twain formed a publishing company to publish The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Charles Dickens’s regular publisher showed little interest in A Christmas Carol, so Dickens hired artists and editors and paid for the printing himself. Beatrix Potter literally couldn’t interest anyone in publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, so she borrowed the money to print 250 copies. At latest count, there are some 45 million copies of THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT in print. Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. The rest, as they say, is history.

In our lifetimes, the stories of self-published books that sold gazillions are apocryphal. Amanda Hocking, Andy Weir, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Scott Adams… all have, at some point in their careers, published their own work. And let’s not forget that whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing.

So why such distaste for the term?

I confess here that I’m an old guy. I began seriously writing in 1970, fresh out of boarding school and working on my first novel. There was no Internet then, no such thing as an eBook, and everything was old school; no respectable publisher would consider an unrepresented book, so you queried one agent at a time and if they took six months or a year to get back to you, tough noogies. They were the gatekeepers and they made the rules.

Then, like now, it seemed that every sumbitch who knew how to type thought they could be an arthur (a term coined by the wonderful Molly Ivins, when someone introduced me to her as a mystery writer—Great to meet you, we arthurs gotta stick together…)

Then, as now, there were dozens of predators out there preying on the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers. Self-publishing then was a synonym for vanity publishing, and the vanity presses were raking it in from the naïve rubes. Vantage Press, Pageant Press, and Exposition were three leading vanity presses that were, by the 1950s, “publishing” over 100 titles a year each. 

Even I got roped in myself when I paid $400 to have the legendary Scott Meredith Agency read a novel of mine. Meredith, being one smart cookie, had created a whole separate company to sucker in aspiring writers like moi. I got notes back from some office drone, supposedly signed by Meredith, who needless to say, didn’t take me on as a client.

Not one of those books published by a vanity press had a chance of being reviewed by anybody, let alone a respectable press like the New York Times. No bookstore would carry them.

Writers have always been easy pickings for predators. The most egregious case in history was The Famous Writer’s School, founded in 1961 by Bennett Cerf, a Random House editor and regular panelist on the TV show What’s My Line? There isn’t enough space here to go into that con job, but it made millions by paying writers as diverse as Mignon Eberhart, Rod Serling, Bruce Catton, and Faith Baldwin to join their “faculty.” The suckers thought their stuff was being read and critiqued by Rod Serling, when in reality the work was being done by unknown copy editors. There’s not room enough here to really relate the history of this scam, but Google it. It’s an object lesson for us all.

If not self-publishing, then what?

The world of publishing today bears no resemblance to the publishing world I came of age in, and that’s a good thing. I’m already over my word allotment that Clay gave me for this column, so over the next few months (or however long this little adventure goes on), I’m going to talk about these changes and how my own experience in This Crazy Writing Life have shaped me and my career. To me, it’s not self-publishing. Self-publishing means your stuff’s so bad, you’re the only who’ll touch it.

I prefer the term independent publishing. Going forward, I’m going to talk about how we, as writers, can take control of our work and careers, take back the power from the gatekeepers, and become the kinds of writers we want to be, with the kinds of careers and lives we want to have.

This’ll be a journey we’ll share. After all, as Molly Ivins once said: We arthurs gotta stick together…

Agents- You Don’t Need Them

By Dale T. Phillips

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In the past, literary agents were sometimes useful and necessary for selling a manuscript to a publisher, and as an author representative, negotiating a better deal for the author for the sale of the book rights. Unsolicited, un-agented manuscripts were often sent to the publishing house. These were called over the transom (the crossbar above a door), because in the olden days, some were literally pushed through the window portion over the transom in the hopes that someone would read them. They would be dumped into a slush pile, and good luck to anything that broke out of that oubliette. Once in a great while, somebody would scan some of the manuscripts in the pile and find a pearl in that mountain of clamshells (not even oyster), and a miracle occurred, and the book got published. Extremely low odds, but it didn’t stop the flow. Hope springs eternal in the hearts of writers. 

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the publishing houses churned in a frenzy of consolidation and mergers. The people taking them over were interested in profits more than literature, and things changed dramatically. Many people who had been in the business for the love of books went away (voluntarily or just cut), and the ones remaining had to do more with much less. One thing that got outsourced was the discovery of buyable manuscripts. Many publishers announced they would not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Some still did, even though they advertised the opposite. They just didn’t want to deal with what they considered were piles of junk. So they pushed the work of editors and screeners onto literary agents, who would take on the burden of sifting through submissions for the needle in the haystack, the sellable manuscript. Agents became the gatekeepers to the Big Leagues- if you didn’t have an agent, you couldn’t even get someone to read your work. Agents were convenient for traditional publishing, because they’d recommend manuscripts that had some merit. If an agent sent nothing but duds, they wouldn’t be around long.

Generalization follows. Agents screen by what they think will sell to the handful of editors they have contact with. And instead of reading actual manuscripts to start, they rely on the query letter from hopeful authors. A (usually) one-page letter is a summary of what the book is about. It can be scanned rapidly, and usually discarded. Their reasoning is that if a writer cannot write a good query, the manuscript isn’t likely to be good. So now New Author must spend a lot of time composing the Perfect Query, all to hunt for the elusive Great Agent, who will take them on, to find the Perfect Publisher. Trouble is, the Great Agents are all booked up, and few are taking on new clients. Guess where that leaves New Author? Going through listing of potential agents to query, studying what kind of book they prefer to represent, and firing off a batch of queries to the selected group. Why in batches? Because the agents then usually take their sweet time about responding, if they respond at all. It can be days, but is more often weeks or months before the author hears back. And the response is usually “Thanks, but it’s not for us.”

How does one find a good agent that will take them on? At this point, it’s a matter of rare good fortune. While there are excellent agents, there are some who are just awful, and a portion who are downright toxic or even criminal. Some famous authors have struck deals with well-bespoken top agents, only to discover horrendous abuses. See the horror stories of Laura Resnick and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Sometimes the agents wouldn’t bother notifying the author of additional potential deals. A bad decision by an agent can be costly. And that’s just the honest ones! But new writers are so desperate to get an agent (a process that can often take years) that they’ll sign with the first one who indicates interest. It can be a catastrophic mistake. 

The problem is that anyone can say they’re an agent, hang out an agent shingle tomorrow, run an ad or two, and within a few weeks, probably have hundreds of submissions, because there are so many people hungry for traditional publishing that they’ll sign with anyone who’ll take them. They’ll be taken, all right, usually to the cleaners. 

Agents need no certification or education, no degree, no proof of ability, no license, no standards. It’s all voluntary. In many cases, they give legal advice on complex contracts (which benefit themselves)- in other words, practicing law without a law license, which is actually a crime. Thousands of authors hand over their careers and money to absolute strangers, with little or no vetting other than they saw a listing somewhere. And then a few emails and a phone call or two. “They seemed nice, and eager to work with me.”

The publishing houses mostly send the money due the author for advances and royalties to the agent/agency. When does the author get paid? At the whim of the person holding the money. Imagine if your employer sent your paycheck to your bank, who then decided when and how much to give you of the money you’d earned! 

It’s always a good practice to be in charge of your own finances. If you do decide to sign with an agent, try to work it so the payments from the publishing house go to you first, or to each their share. After all, the agent is supposed to be working for you. Then you pay the agent. Unusual, but not unheard of. 

Other problems with agents are that if you decide to part ways, you might still have to pay them forever for any of your books they represented, or even any you sold elsewhere while you were signed with them. Yup, you could wind up forking over your 15%, even twenty years after you got rid of them. Worse than alimony. And if they sold anything of a series, they may try to get a cut of any future things you sell from that series, even after you’re no longer working together. Dean Wesley Smith (with over 40 years of experience) says writers don’t need agents anymore. He says it’s like giving fifteen percent of your house value to the person who cuts your lawn. 

Many authors say they love their agent. Some authors don’t want to talk about bad experiences with agents, for fear they’ll be blacklisted, because the Manhattan book world is a tiny bubble. And it’s possible an author might not even know for a long time they’re being badmouthed in the industry, and why doors are closed in their face. But many more will tell of the hell they went through with agents. One well-known example had an author finding out only years later that their agent had died! 

If you want to work with an agent, be careful. Have any contract with the agent and with a publisher additionally vetted by qualified, licensed Intellectual Property attorneys, not just agents who say they know what they’re doing. In the new world of publishing, agents are far less useful than they used to be. With all the changes, it’s getting tougher for them to make a decent living as well. Not having an agent means not having to give up a good chunk of profits, which are slim enough. 

However, if you want to meet agents, writer conferences are the best places, because many agents go there to find new clients, and expect to get pitched. Some agents even schedule pitch sessions at these conferences, where a prospective writer has a few minutes to pitch the agent on a book proposal. Many writers get asked for part or all of a manuscript, based on those few minutes. At least the agent will give it a chance. 

If you do this, have a killer tagline to catch their interest. Follow with a few sentences similar to a description of other books the agent has done, or top-sellers. Think high-concept: for example, Gone Girl crossed with Silence of the Lambs, that sort of thing. Keep it simple, exciting, and show you know the marketplace and what type of book that agent represents. Most have their likes and dislikes available on their website, so do your homework first. Some give precise guidelines for how to pitch them. Don’t think your manuscript is so wonderful that a strictly children’s author representative will suddenly want your adult science fiction novel (yes, this kind of idiocy still happens). But if your book is like others the agent has represented, say so. 

Your pitch could go something like this: 

“Hello. I’m [author name], and my novel, A Time for Tea, is an eighty-thousand-word cozy mystery about a blind librarian who solves crimes in her small Welsh village. It’s similar in tone to Murder by the Sea, which I see from your website you represented. This is my first novel, although I’ve had mystery stories published in [credits].” 

This pitch shows the author has done their homework, and in many cases, the agent would want to hear more. The conversation might end with the agent asking for a partial manuscript, maybe the first fifty pages or so. I’ve seen this happen so many times at conferences, and the writer comes out of the session stunned, starry-eyed, and grinning from ear-to-ear. It’s wonderful to see dreams come true, so give them the moment and don’t harangue them with lectures about what other paths they might want to think about. If they’re happy, let them live their dreams. Of course, if someone asks for your advice, wait a bit and then give them the truth as you see it. Just don’t volunteer to be a buzzkill or dream-crusher, and remember that timing is everything. 

Remember that you don’t need anyone’s permission to publish, nor do you have to wait years to be chosen by gatekeepers. You can publish independently while you pursue a traditional path if you want, becoming a hybrid author, or any way that makes you happy. And if you achieve outstanding success as an independent, the traditional publishers will then want you even more.

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Dale T. Phillips has published novels, story collections, non-fiction, and over 80 short stories. Stephen King was Dale's college writing teacher, and since then, Dale has found time to appear on stage, television, radio, in an independent feature film, and compete on Jeopardy (losing in a spectacular fashion). He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sisters in Crime. 

The Writer’s Playbook | A Ripe Kumquat

By Steven Harms

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“Fumble at the thirty-two-yard line! Rod Smith jumped on that ball like it was a ripe kumquat!”

That line was uttered during a radio broadcast of a Detroit Lions home football game. And I’d bet my life savings that “kumquat” hadn’t been used in an NFL broadcast prior and would never be again. The Lions radio color announcer, Jim Brandstatter, made that rather pointed reference to a Lions defensive player recovering the fumbled ball. The idea of a kumquat on a football field conjures up a comedic image. A fumbled football is sort of one itself: as the ball bounces around, players scramble to get it; sometimes they accidentally kick it or refumble it as they frantically try to hold on. In the context of a fumbled football, using a kumquat simile was perfect.

Why did he say it that way? Well, he and I had a weekly challenge when I was working for the Lions. Each week during the season I would give him a word that he had to weave into the broadcast. I wrote it out on a small piece of paper about an hour before kickoff, entered the broadcast booth, and subtly handed it to him. It was our “thing.” If he was able to insert the “word of the game” into the broadcast each week during the season, I owed him lunch. If he missed one game, he owed me the same. As the weeks wore on, I had to get more creative if I wanted to win, and I thought I had him trapped with “kumquat.” The fumble happened in the fourth quarter, no less, of that game. Jim told me afterward he was on the verge of losing but for that fumble.

The point is, using a kumquat as a descriptive simile worked. In fact, it worked very well. Reimagine the utterance if it was a ripe apple, green bean, onion, or ear of corn. Not quite the same for some reason, is it? Or worse, if he stated “like a ripe egg” or “like a noisy kumquat.”

Bad similes are story killers and can take an author’s credentials down a few notches on the reader’s scale. They undermine a reader’s engagement with the story and implant in them a negative distraction that may carry throughout the rest of the book. 

However, a well-written simile can evoke just the right emotion. As a creative tool, it paints a picture that resonates in readers’ minds—good or bad—but it clicks. Similes can be quite powerful if written well and deployed at the perfect intersectional moment. 

A few rules to follow in writing similes (and there may be others):

KEEP THEM LOGICAL

The simile must be logical in comparison with the moment described, and it must have an immediate connection for the reader. If the reader needs to pause to think through the comparison because it doesn’t compute, don’t use it.

USE THEM SPARINGLY

Overuse of anything is generally not an effective strategy. I’ll relate it back to sports. If a football team always runs to the left on first down, the maneuver becomes boring and predictable and unsuccessful. 

STAY WITHIN COMMON KNOWLEDGE

A simile that uses unique or uncommon elements in the comparison can destroy the moment because the reader can’t grasp what it is you’re trying to say. If Jim Brandstatter had said “Rod Smith jumped on that ball like it was a timorous mangosteen!” (a real fruit from Southeast Asia), he may have been fired the next morning, or at least ridiculed for a full week.

STAY CLEAR OF SIMILARITY

When you’re deciding on a simile, ensure the two components of your comparison are different enough to drive home the point. As an example, a sentence that reads “She ran up the hill like an athlete in training” doesn’t give the reader much clarity on what that character was doing, since athletes do run up hills as part of their training regimen. There’s not a lot of separation. Conversely, “She ran up the hill like a wounded deer” creates an image of a frantic person, hobbled by fear as she’s trying to get somewhere fast and out of sight.

Whenever similes are deployed, read them to yourself to see if they’re effective. As an example, one of my characters in The Counsel of the Cunning voices his feeling that what he and his assistant detective are experiencing during their hunt for a missing person isn’t adding up. He amplifies this and says, “it’s like a duck in robin’s nest.” The point being that while a duck and a robin are both birds, their distinctions are profound, and a duck would never, nor could ever, be in a robin’s nest. He instinctively knows something is “just off,” and he uses this simile to make the point. He’s saying a bird in a nest is right, but the type of bird is wrong, or the nest should be in the water and not in a tree. In other words, their hunt is going in a direction that gives him pause, that makes him think something’s amiss, but he can’t quite put a finger on it.

Similes are a great tool to propel a story or a moment or a character description. But they are a unique tool and need to be done with precision if used. Don’t shy away from using them as writers, but be tactical in placing them and intuitive in writing them.

Productivity

By Dale T Phillips

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“Writing a novel is like driving at night with your headlights on- you can only see a little of the road ahead, but you can make the whole journey that way.”

—E.L. Doctorow

You write a novel the way you’d eat an elephant—one small bite at a time.

Writing even one novel is a lot of damned hard work. Continuing to write them is little short of obsessive. But to be successful, you’ll have to keep doing it over and over. Unlike singers, however, you get to do different ones each time, not the same thing over and over. 

Every writer has a different way of doing the work. Two major types of writers are (with many of us doing one or the other, or both):

• Plotters, who carefully detail everything before writing, doing the outline, and setting the scene first.

• Pantsers, who write “by the seat of their pants,” just jumping in without a complete structure in advance. Dean Wesley Smith uses this method, which he calls “Writing into the Dark.” He has an advantage, though, in having done it several hundred times!

It’s good to keep files of ideas, titles, character sketches, and turn of phrases. When you need a new idea, scan these files for things that spark your imagination. I’ve got hundreds of potential titles in one file and ideas for new stories in another. I’ll never run out of things to write.

The best way to be productive is to write every day if you can. It builds the habit. Don’t wait for inspiration. If you can do that, it’s a wonderful way to be productive. On the other hand, I do it the “wrong” way (even though fellow writers compliment me on my productivity, which I find amusing). I have to be inspired by the ancient Greek concept of “The Muse,” which many say is not effective, because you won’t write as much. Lucky for me, I take The Muse seriously, and She often drops by to tell me what to write next. It sometimes messes me up because I shift projects at a moment’s notice. 

For too long, I was working on three different novels and not completing any of them. One was 75 percent done, another was 50 percent done, and the third was 25 percent done. Which all adds up to zero percent finished. There were some publishing strategy changes and various issues in the narratives which bogged me down. 

Then I finished one novel, but before I got to the other two, another novel sprang into being. I wrote most of that, and got stuck again when illness, depression, and Covid-19 hit in rapid succession. I was down and out for too long before I decided that writing would give me back my life. Indeed, it did, and I burst forth with a completed and published novel, a new story, and a finished draft of another novel. 

Write whenever you want or can: early morning, late at night, on lunch breaks, whenever. Find the time that works best for you. Short stretches or long marathon sessions, it doesn’t matter. Keep a notebook handy for ideas that come to you when you’re doing other things like driving, showering, or taking a walk (when many ideas turn up). 

If you have trouble, try the “Pomodoro Method” of sprints and movement. http://graemeshimmin.com/the-pomodoro-technique-for-writers/

NaNoWriMo is a fun method to put out a lot of work in just a few weeks. If you’re having trouble getting words down, think about giving it a try to kickstart your brain into fevered word production.

One good habit is to set aside your writing time as the primary task for the day. Writers procrastinate better than anyone else, and it’s so easy to get sidetracked that writing time can easily slip away. Write first, do all else later. Don’t do research in your writing time because it’s easy (and lots of fun) to fall down the rabbit hole. If you come to a passage that needs to be researched, just mark it as such and move on.

Doing the Math 

If you’re just starting out, you may produce at a slower rate. That’s okay, it will just take you longer. If you’re going to be a successful indie writer, you’ll need a fair amount of good work. Do you know how long on average it takes you do finish, edit, and publish each book? If not, start with an estimation of writing one book a year, 50-100,000 words. When you get more experienced, you’ll definitely want to increase this output, but it’s a good place to begin. At that pace, it will take you roughly five years to write five good books, which will (simply by that output) put you in the top 20% of all published writers. 

Have you got at least five good books in you, just as a start?

So, your first novel. Say 75,000 words, and you want it done in a year. That’s only 1500 words a week (a few hundred a day) and around 5 pages. Fifty weeks later, you’ve got 250-plus pages, and those 75,000 words. Congratulations! You’ve done more than many who set out to do this. It may not be the best yet, but you got it done.

Celebrate!

Then get to work on the second novel. You’ve practiced for a year, so maybe this one will go faster. Up your word count to 2500 words a week. Still quite doable. This means you’ll get this one done in just over six months. How about that? Almost half the time. You learned a lot more, and it’s probably better than book one.

Celebrate! 

Write the third book, slightly better pace. Finish. 

Celebrate! 

Two years total, three books under your belt.

Starting to get the hang of it? Hopefully. Rinse and repeat. 

If you need a million words to get really good, how many can you write in a year? A book a year is a decent pace, better than most, but for more success, you might want to step it up some. If you can put out 5,000 words a week, you can have 250,000 in a year, and a million words in only four years. 

One book a year might net you a few hundred dollars in income (or a few thousand), but you want more, you want volume. The more you write and publish, the more you’ll make. If you want to make 48,000 dollars a year, you’ll need 4,000 dollars a month, or roughly two thousand total sales at two dollars profit each, or 500 sales a week. One book will sell x number of copies, ten books will sell much more. So you want to get to ten good books published, as quickly as possible. That takes discipline and dedication. 

Figure out how much you make per hour, and scale up. If you make a penny per word, an hour of good writing at one thousand words nets you roughly ten dollars. That’s your scale. If you want to make $48,000 a year, you have to either write faster or get paid more. Daunting, yes. 

After six to ten books, you should be selling more of everything. Each new book adds to the total. The “Halo effect” means that other books of yours are bought because people discovered a first book, then went on to others. Especially if you have a series or connected books. 

In the old way of publishing, some authors could get by with one book a year. Today, you’ll likely have to be far more productive to make a decent income. It’s up to you to determine your level of success.

Dean Wesley Smith calls his copyright and production output The Magic Bakery.

Imagine that you have a storefront with all your items for sale within. If you have one book in one format, you have one product. Have you ever walked into a store and bought a single product? You likely won’t stay long. As a successful author, you want variety and choice, different price points, and for shoppers to come back again and again to buy more. A series can bring them back for more. Put your work out as an e-book, in print, as audio, and other formats, such as graphic novels. The other aspect of The Magic Bakery is that as an indie author, you can keep licensing pieces of each product, while keeping the original. Traditional publishers buy the whole product, which you cannot resell. Dean made thousands of dollars from one story, by licensing different pieces of it. Make your work into a virtual storefront, and fill it with tempting merchandise. 

It’s amusing to me that when I set up my display at book events (24 books currently, plus anthologies with others), people look at the output, and think I’m prolific, when I feel like a slacker who doesn’t do enough. I smile and say, “If you want it badly enough, you’ll work for it.” I sell more than most writers at these events, because of my sheer variety, and the different price points (with prices shown for each book, so browsers don’t have to ask). A few secrets of my success. I point out that someone can grab a book of short stories for little more than a cup of coffee or get a good novel for half the price of a hardcover in a bookstore. And because people love a bargain, I’ll give them a price break if they want to buy more than one book. By having so much available, with ebooks and audio of everything, I’ll offer them other free versions of the work when they purchase print (which costs me nothing). People will remember and come back in subsequent years to buy more. And every year they come back, there’s more to sell. 

Advantage, productivity.

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Dale T. Phillips has published novels, story collections, non-fiction, and over 80 short stories. Stephen King was Dale's college writing teacher, and since then, Dale has found time to appear on stage, television, radio, in an independent feature film, and compete on Jeopardy (losing in a spectacular fashion). He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sisters in Crime.