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When writers apply visual thinking to their writing magic happens. This tutorial teaches you how to make your content clearer, vivid, and more persuasive.
Via Penelope
Now, you might be thinking “Author brand? What in the heck is an author brand? I’m not Coca-Cola. I’m a writer. What does branding have to do with me?” You don’t have to be a big company like Coke or Pepsi for branding to have a positive impact on your success. Having a strong author brand helps your audience understand who you are, what you stand for and what they can expect from you. It sets you apart from the millions of other authors out there trying to make it big, and it shows what makes your writing unique, which will help you build a readership that’s going to go bananas over your stuff....
They say not to judge a book by its cover, but there’s no saying about judging a book by its first line. I can usually tell within a few minutes if I’ll enjoy a book. Based on this infographic, it seems that many famous books are good from the start. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” but did you know the entire first line for “A Tale of Two Cities” is much longer? The first sentence in the book is a whopping 119 words. On the other hand, “Fahrenheit 451” opens with an easy to remember one-liner: “It was a pleasure to burn.”...
Book covers can teach us a lot about condensing complex ideas into simple designs that attract consumers and sell products. The best covers manage to give book browsers an idea of the book's plot, tone, themes, and genre, all without revealing too much. To inspire your next design project, we've compiled a list of 20 beautifully designed books that beg to be judged by their covers....
“I just wanted a story with a nice guy.”In late 2012, author H. M. Ward had an experimental manuscript collecting proverbial dust on her computer. It starred a woman named Sidney and a man named Peter—an impossible nice-guy combo of handsome, strong, smart, patient, and, oh, super wealthy. Ward had been writing since 2010 and had been down the traditional publishing route before, finding an agent and shopping her work around. Her instinct told her that publishers would have no interest in Peter. “If you take a nice-guy book to a traditional publisher,” she says, “They’re like, ‘That’s weird. Nice guys are boring.’” So in April 2013, she published her manuscript online on her own. “I just put it up out of curiosity to see what would happen,” she says. Despite reports that e-books are dying, Ward’s chance paid off, and continues to pay out today. According to the author, Damaged shot to No. 6 in Amazon’s Kindle store within a few days and held the No. 1 spot for several weeks. It spent a month on the New York Times bestsellers list for combined print and ebook. It was the first in two series of nice-guy books that would go on to sell 12 million copies in three years. Publishers took note. In the year after Ward published Damaged, she was offered a series of deals from various publishers totaling $1.5 million, by her estimate. She turned them all down, and by the time she said no to her last contract, she was making eight figures as a self-published author. “It would have been a colossal mistake to sign with them at that point, financially,” she says....
How do successful authors engage their fans on social media? And what can authors post on social media besides links to their own books?
Below you’ll find 23 ideas, along with examples from successful authors. Many of these tactics can help promote a book, but in more creative and engaging ways than simply posting a link to a book’s retailer page.
Publishers and agents, this post is written for authors. We encourage you to share it with your authors to help them build more engaging profiles.
Authors, we hope hope you find the list useful — and please share your great ideas in the comments!...
Writing of any sort is hard, but rewarding work – you’ll gain a huge amount of satisfaction from a finished piece. Being creative can also be difficult and challenging at times, but immensely fun. How to get started Many people think that just because they’ve read a lot of stories (or even if they haven’t!) they should be able to write one. But as Nigel Watts writes: There is a common belief that because most of us are literate and fluent, there is no need to serve an apprenticeship if we want to become a successful wordsmith. … That’s what I thought until I tried to write my first novel. I soon learnt that a novel, like a piece of furniture, has its own set of requirements, laws of construction that have to be learnt. Just because I had read plenty of novels didn’t mean I could write one, any more than I could make a chair because I had sat on enough of them.(Nigel Watts, Teach Yourself Writing a Novel)...
"The great writer's gift to a reader is to make him a better writer." “Stories,” Neil Gaiman asserted in his wonderful lecture on what makes stories last, “are genuinely symbiotic organisms that we live with, that allow human beings to advance.” But what is the natural selection of these organisms — what makes the ones that endure fit for survival? What, in other words, makes a great story?
Via Mary Daniels Brown
While the majority of our readers are likely beyond college age, it’s still fun to wistfully remember your experimental undergraduate years—or whatever they were. That’s why I’ve written a list of the 10 best colleges for creative writers, based on my own highly idiosyncratic metrics: accomplished professors, famous alumni, environments conducive to writing, bizarre course selections, and, best of all, any random facts that might add to the writerly collegiate experience.
What exactly goes on your author website—especially if you're unpublished?I strongly advocate all authors start and maintain a website as part of their long-term marketing efforts and ongoing platform development. But one of the first questions raised when you get started is: What exactly goes on your author site—especially if you’re so far unpublished?Before I answer that question in detail, I’ll set a few ground rules....
... Businesses are now feeling the pressure to start blogs and fill them with good, useful content on a regular basis.
Websites need effective copy. Email campaigns need to be written strategically. And then, of course, there are tweets, Facebook messages and LinkedIn posts.
This is overwhelming for a lot of businesses. And many are not equipped with the marketing staff to handle the need.
This creates incredible opportunities for savvy writers to shine.And, there are plenty of businesses that would love to work with writers directly.
So, how do you get noticed by businesses that would love to pay for your writing? Here are seven tips to help you get started:...
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For as long as I’ve been writing books, I’ve been in a constant battle with the design of word processing software.Just the phrase “word processor” itself is soul-sucking. But the real problem lies in the common interface conventions almost all word processors share, locked in a framework that took shape in the early days of computing, when software was almost exclusively oriented around the business market. These tools are undoubtably well-engineered for producing an inter-office memo, or a short business plan that follows a conventional structure. But they are almost comically unsuited for long, complex, and structurally open-ended documents like non-fiction books or novels. To understand why, you need to consider the entire the life cycle of a book, from the early ideas to the completed project....
We invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay, to help us create an updated list of books everyone should read. Each participant made 10 picks. It's a new year, a new Esquire.com. We're looking forward to reading and we hope you are, too.
In my experience, a big challenge for writers is the inappropriate edit. You know, the guy who corrects spelling errors in your outline, or wants to rearrange the whole thing during the proofreading stage. In fact, only 32% of business writers say that their process for collecting and combining feedback works well. I’ve written before about the five levels of editing, with posts on each type. But if your reviewers still don’t get it, lay this infographic on them. Then tell them what you’re looking for, and when you need the feedback. It will increase your chances of getting the comments that you need, rather than the ones that drive you crazy....
JODIE ARCHER HAD always been puzzled by the success ofThe Da Vinci Code. She’d worked for Penguin UK in the mid-2000s, when Dan Brown’s thriller had become a massive hit, and knew there was no way marketing alone would have led to 80 million copies sold. So what was it, then? Something magical about the words that Brown had strung together? Dumb luck? The questions stuck with her even after she left Penguin in 2007 to get a PhD in English at Stanford. There she met Matthew L. Jockers, a cofounder of the Stanford Literary Lab, whose work in text analysis had convinced him that computers could peer into books in a way that people never could. Soon the two of them went to work on the “bestseller” problem: How could you know which books would be blockbusters and which would flop, and why? Over four years, Archer and Jockers fed 5,000 fiction titles published over the last 30 years into computers and trained them to “read”—to determine where sentences begin and end, to identify parts of speech, to map out plots. They then used so-called machine classification algorithms to isolate the features most common in bestsellers. The result of their work—detailed in The Bestseller Code, out this month—is an algorithm built to predict, with 80 percent accuracy, which novels will become mega-bestsellers. What does it like? Young, strong heroines who are also misfits (the type found in The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). No sex, just “human closeness.” Frequent use of the verb “need.” Lots of contractions. Not a lot of exclamation marks. Dogs, yes; cats, meh. In all, the “bestseller-ometer” has identified 2,799 features strongly associated with bestsellers....
At every writers conference or self-publishing panel the question that almost always inevitably comes up is: “How much will self-publishing really cost me?” Because the book publishing industry is one of the last industries to go digital, it’s going through a quick transition. As a result of this shift, authors no longer need to go through the traditional gatekeepers to publish high-quality books and are instead moving toward self-publishing. Launching a book is like launching a startup. Putting together a quality book involves not just writing it, but getting it edited, then formatted, designing a cover, and having a marketing strategy around it. "Not having an editor is like not QA’ing a software product or not testing a drug before it goes out into the marketplace." Below, I break down the costs of how much professional services will cost you for a high-quality book. (For the purposes of calculation we’ll assume you have a manuscript that is 70,000 words.)...
For beginning freelancers, figuring out the right rate to ask for can be almost as difficult as landing the gig itself. Who Pays Writers is an anonymous, crowdsourced open data that lets writers report their rates from various publications for print and Web. Though it has been around since 2012, this week the site received a redesign to let you easily search and report your rates.
You can sift through the site for publications you’re thinking about pitching (or are simply curious about) or search by name. If there’s data for said publication, you’ll see a per word rate or a flat rate fee, along with the year submitted, a small description of what the piece was, and whether the writer had a relationship with the assigning editor going into the job....
As I watched holiday re-runs of the Lord of the Rings movies, I wondered if there might be a term for the way Gollum adds syllables to words. Note: Gollum is a fictional character in The Hobbit and its sequels by J. R. R. Tolkien. In Peter Jackson’s movies, Gollum is played brilliantly by Andy Serkis. Gollum frequently adds a sound or syllable to words, especially plurals. For example: Sneaky little hobbitses....
So a portmanteau is formed from two french words, "porter" which meanscarry and "manteau" which means mantle – a mantle is a cloak, the kind Anna wore in Frozen, or if you are a more traditionalist fairy tale lover, what Red Riding Hood wore en route to grandma’s house (to be honest, I’ve always thought it was a cape but I digress). A manteau is more of a clothes valet, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Put them together and you use portmanteau to refer to travelling bags or suitcases (because they carry your cloaks around?) only these bags are old-fashioned, made from leather and can open into compartments. Here are some examples....
The key to an emotionally engaging headline? Context Words: a group of 1,072 words in the English language that can increase a person’s interest and attention in a specific message.
Context Words were uncovered through EEG testing and something called the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, a way to measure the correlation between two variables. In this case, we were looking to understand the relationship between word choice and the brain’s emotional response.
We’ve split the Context Words into four categories: insight words, time words, space words and motion words.Insight words provide more detail, i.e. closure, admit, inform, think. Time words refer to a point in time, i.e. after, fast, long, prior. Motion and space words help us understand where something is happening, i.e. appear, replace, arrive, enter....
You’ve just spent a year, two years, five, writing your book. Now you’re releasing it out into the world, and you just want everyone to read it. But getting attention for your book amid the great deluge of content can be hard. Perhaps your agent, editor, or publicist has told you that you need a website, but you’re hard-pressed to know what to do with it. You don’t know what to write on a regular basis or how to maintain it technically or attract a readership.
What you do know is that you need to be where readers are: a space that’s beautiful and easy in which to publish, requires no maintenance, and provides immediate distribution.That’s where Medium—a place where thinkers, experts, and writers of all stripes have come to express themselves—can help. Here are a few ideas:...
"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."
Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of my favorite authors. Enjoy.... (photo of Joan Didion)
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