Category Archives: The Writing Life

A guest post by Stephan McLeroy.

Hello Fictorian loyalists!

Blogging, the soapbox of our generation. And just like finding a soapbox down some random alley, it’s actually really easy to snag a blog these days. So easy, that, according to blogging.org, in 2012, there were 42 million blogs in the U.S. alone. With about 315 million people in the U.S. by the end of 2012, that means there was one blog for about every 7.5 people.

Then, on top of that, I’m sure there’s a cacophony of questions singing through your brain as you consider your own blog: “What will I post? How is this going to supplement my writing career? How many cats should I have on the site?”

These are all important questions. However, I would propose that the most important question you should be asking right now is, “How much money am I willing to spend?”

What I want to do is help you navigate a couple of the financial decisions that go into making a respectable blog. I hope that, after this, you’ll have your blog up and running, and be well on your way to creating a site that will blow the blogosphere away without breaking your wallet.

Number one: Getting your website hosted

To own any website on the internet, you need to get a domain URL (for writers, usually our name). Once you’ve thought of the URL you want, write it down on your best stationery along with two or three alternatives and go to the next step: finding a hosting site. There are tons of hosting sites out there, all vying for your business. If you ask around, you’ll find out people have vastly different preferences for what they want/require from hosting sites. However, being an active writer, you probably don’t have time for that, so I did you a solid by running a basic search for “best hosting site” on Google and got this sweet LifeHacker article. You can thank me later. Once on a hosting site, do a search for the URL of your choice by following the site’s instructions and sign up for hosting. You are well on your way to becoming a bonafide blogger.

Number two: Pumping money into your blog

Deciding how much money to spend on your new website falls along a spectrum. At one end we have the penny pincher who declares, “I will do everything myself!” To them, I say, play on! You have a lot of research to do. There are plenty of How-To books, YouTube videos, and, funny enough, blogs about what you need to learn in order to set up and maintain a blog successfully.

But if you’re like me, your dollar-per-hour rate is probably a lot higher than the gentleman or lady I was speaking to in the last paragraph. I have a day job and a very limited amount of free time. I need professional help. Oh, and a small team to help me with my blog (Hey-Yo!). I currently have a webmaster, a web designer, and a publicist friend who manages my posts, all for reasonable sums. The main thing I do is generate content for my blog (my editor, btw, reviews the content I make).

To make this type of set up work, remember that your blog is only a component of your publicity efforts. It supplements writing by being a place to post updates and work. With that in mind, I, for instance, set a budget for myself and my blogging exploits. Under no circumstances do I allow myself to blow that budget. If I need more for my designer this month, I reduce the amount of work I send to my publicist. Is there a broken plug-in on the site that needs addressing? Then design gets suspended until the plug-in is fixed.

This brings us to the next piece of advice.

Number three: Communication

No matter what team you set up, you gotta communicate with them to get good results. For me, at the end of each month I take a few minutes to have a discussion with my team, letting them know what I see as a priority and then getting their input. Everyone wants money, yes, but usually the work of one person directly affects the productivity of another, so that, 99% of the time, everyone is in agreement on where the money should go. We then create an in/out list for the month and boom! The well-oiled machine continues to crank out a respectable blog.

Number four: Make sure you trust your team

Just starting out, you’ll probably end up working with people who are your friends, but they may not be; they may be people you’ve met at work, at a convention, or online. Make sure you trust them, because without trust, you will not be able to have open, frank conversations, which wastes precious time you don’t have.

Your team may look smaller than mine, or larger, depending on your own needs. I would suggest, if anything, that you at least have someone who can design the site, someone who can manage the non-design programming, and someone who can help you keep regular posts going. From the successful bloggers I’ve spoken to, these seem like the bare essentials for running a site when you can’t do it by yourself.

I hope this little post helped get you started on your blogging exploits. I can say that I am still a novice at this and my advice is not the end all be all, but it’s what I’ve learned in the time I have been blogging. Feel free to leave comments or questions.

Good day!

Stephan McLeroy Bio:

Stephan McLeroy is a historical urban fantasy writer based out of the San Francisco Bay area. His current work, The Adventures of Lockwood and Blackfox can be read for free on his blog at stephanmcleroy.com. He recommends “Death on the Pearl River Delta.” It’s his favorite.

The Business of Promotion: When the Hero Comes Home 2

November 6, 2013

mary

Marketing Mary Pletsch Publishing The Writing Life 4 Comments

Doing business requires a businessperson to give some attention to promotion. If you’re a store, yes, you’ll get a few customers by hanging an open sign on your door – but not as many as you’ll get if you make sure to have an attractive display window, some enticing sales, an active social media presence and involvement in your local community. If you’re a writer, yes, you may sell a few books by virtue of their presence on a bookstore shelf or convention table, but not as many as you’ll sell if you choose striking cover art, participate in convention panels, have an active social media presence, interact with your audience….

You’ve created something and brought it into the world. You’re passionate and enthusiastic. There are other people out there who are also passioniate and enthusiastic, about your subject. All you need to do is let them know that your story exists.

Last month was Marketing and Promotion month here at The Fictorians. The Fictorians and their guests contributed some excellent tips to let you know the best ways to spread the word and boost the signal: you have a book for sale!

I have a book for sale.

Hook your readers’ attention. Let them know, in a few short sentences, what your story (and, if applicable, the anthology it’s in) is about:

Everyone knows the archetype of the hero’s journey. But do you know what happens after that journey ends?

When the Hero Comes Home 2 is a collection of short stories that begin where most stories end. The hero who returns is different from the average guy who left–how does he readjust to his old life? What advice does she give to the next generation of heroes? What happens when the hero comes home in defeat?

Blood Runs Thicker is available in the ebook version of When the Hero Comes Home 2. It’s the story of a young man named Jim and his personal hero, his best friend Al. Against all odds, Al has been elevated to a decorated veteran of a galactic war, and Jim fears he barely recognizes his old friend. He’s yet to learn that winning her medals has cost Al everything that ever mattered to her, and that a similar sacrifice looms on his own horizon as their destinies entangle.

Sometimes it’s fun to throw in a few “behind the scenes” details about writing the story. Human interest bits are appealing and help whet readers’ curiosity:

The core idea for Blood Runs Thicker was inspired by a single line in a Blue Oyster Cult song: Jim says some destinies should not be delivered. I started thinking: what is destiny? Why should some of them not come to pass, and what happens when they do anyway? Who is judging what “should” and “should not” be delivered? From this line, I developed my main character–Jim, a shaman who works with tarot cards–and his best friend Al. Jim’s cards foretell Al’s destiny: to become a hero, at a terrible cost. What Jim doesn’t recognize is that those cards predict the same fate for him.

If your audience is hooked, make it easy for them! Make sure they know how and where to purchase:

You can get the ebook version of When the Hero Comes Home 2 here, on sale for a limited time, in either Kindle or Epub formats:

http://dragonmoonpress.com/when-the-hero-comes-home-2/

Or you can buy from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/When-Hero-Comes-Home-2-ebook/dp/B00F5CFVKW

So don’t just put that book on the shelf and hang the open sign on your door. Make sure your product looks good, and most importantly, let people know it’s out there–and why they should care.

Get on the Train

November 5, 2013

Evan Braun

Conventions Evan Braun Motivation Superstars Writing Seminars The Writing Life No Comments

Train3 I have a few different fingers in the publishing pie. I wouldn’t be writing for the Fictorians if I wasn’t a writer, but that’s not the aspect of publishing that dominates my time. I’m also a professional editor, something I don’t often talk about in my Fictorian blog posts. In addition, I am a typesetter. Occasionally I’ve even served as a slush pile reader, though that torturous (and tortuous) experience hasn’t always been a high point.

Recently, while on an afternoon walk through my neighbourhood, I realized that I’m kind of unemployable in the “real world.” I’ve been a full-time, self-employed contract worker since the age of twenty-four, and all of my skills are in publishing. Sure, I could wait tables and wash dishes, but I am pointedly leaving those items off my resume. To say the least, I’m firmly enmeshed in the business of publishing.

This is a pretty surprising career development, at least from the perspective of ten-years-ago me, who didn’t set out a specific goal to get to where I am today.

However, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it accidental. Rather, I started making choices that allowed me to follow my publishing dream, and those choices led to opportunities, and those opportunities, when seized, led to my current reality. In short, I got on the train.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The watershed moment happened in Pasadena, California in the winter of 2010—the first annual Superstars Writing Seminar, which we’ve devoted a lot of digital ink to on this blog. Over the course of the next couple of years, I went from trying really hard to be a writer in a hostile world to being surrounded by writers all the time. The world doesn’t seem so hostile now. The proportion of my Facebook friends who are writers is truly out of control. I used to read my newsfeed for updates from old high school buddies. I can hardly do that anymore, because the newsfeed has gradually been swallowed up by publishing business.

I call it business, because that’s what it is. Every day, my friends are asking for advice, providing advice (because some of my friends are seasoned pros), posting articles from trade magazines and blogs, providing sneak peeks of cover art, hunting for beta readers, and on and on and on. This level of immersion, I think, is crucial in a writer’s life because it marks the point when education becomes continuous—and almost automatic. I live and breathe this stuff.

The first conventions and seminars I went to were all about learning new things. Attending Superstars in Pasadena was an overwhelming experience, because ninety-five percent of what I heard there was totally brand-new information. I came home with over forty pages of notes. The notes were important, but the forty friends I picked up were actually much more helpful, because they got the ball rolling. Instead of cramming years’ worth of learning into one weekend in a convention centre meeting room, I started getting it piecemeal every day of my life.

This last spring, I went back to Superstars for the first time in four years. In 2010, attending Superstars was like attending a computer programmer’s convention without any computing knowledge beyond how to boot up Windows. I could barely follow along half the time; I hung out at the fringes of conversations, snatching up scraps like a hungry dog beneath the family dinner table. I was hopelessly lost. This time, I was the guy talking contract terms, market trends, and business practices. It’s impossible to pinpoint where and when it happened, but I came to speak the language.

The information at Superstars 2013 had changed probably sixty percent from the first year—because that’s how quickly this industry is shifting under our very feet—but I went from forty pages of notes to four. Maybe fewer. It’s not that the information wasn’t timely and valuable, and yet I absorbed very little that I didn’t already know—well, that’s not true; there was plenty that I didn’t know, but I was so well primed for it this time around. The benefit was not all of the advice and new-fangled information. It was having so many of my business friends and contacts in the same place at the same time.

That’s what will happen once you start down this track. You don’t need to have a step-by-step plan for how you’re going to succeed. The industry changes too fast for step-by-step plans to be practical, anyway.

Think of the publishing industry as a train. One day, it motors past your station, so you hop aboard. At first, you don’t know any of your fellow passengers and you don’t have the context to understand their insider conversations. But there are only so many people on this moving train, so unless you hide in your cabin all day and refuse to talk to anyone, it’s only a matter of time before you’re caught up in the hustle and bustle of daily train life.

So just get on the train.

For the Love of Words

November 4, 2013

fictorians

Craft & Skills Editing First Drafts Guest Posts Motivation Publishing The Writing Life 1 Comment

A guest post by Lisa Mangum.

I love words. I love how they work and how they sound and how they look on the page. I’ve been reading since I was three, so perhaps it’s not much of a surprise that I chose a profession that is all about words.

I actually chose two professions: I am both a writer and an editor. I’ve been in the publishing business since 1997, when I was hired by Bookcraft as their Editorial Assistant. Bookcraft merged with Deseret Book in 1999, and I’ve been there ever since. After several years as an Assistant Editor, I recently switched responsibilities to work more in acquisitions and developmental editing. It’s the part of the job I love the most: finding that diamond in the rough and polishing it until it shines. Every time I see a manuscript turn into a book I think it is magic.

And nothing was more magical than seeing my own manuscript turn into a book. I wrote The Hourglass Door in 2007, and it was published by Shadow Mountain in 2009. I finished out the trilogy with The Golden Spiral and The Forgotten Locket. My most recent book is After Hello.

So, having been on both sides of the writing desk for so long, what is the best advice I’ve been given about writing?

Three things:

My first piece of advice comes from my friend Rick Walton who tells this to his students who aspire to be writers:

1. “Quit. But if you can’t—do the work.”

Writing is hard. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time, but it is hard. So, before you get too far down that road of “being a writer,” you should think seriously about just quitting. Because if your heart isn’t in it, then there’s nothing wrong with not being a writer and being something else—with following your true passion.

But if there is something inside of you that won’t let you quit, that says, “No! I am a writer; I do have a story to tell,” then your only choice is to do the work.

Which leads me to Advice #2:

2. “Dream bigger.”

Recently, I was on a panel at SLC Comic-Con about Disneyland and one of the other panelist said that what she wished she’d known earlier in her career was that it was okay to dream bigger.

I love that! I think we as writers work hard to figure out what works for us and how to write a story and how to get published. And then we think, “Whew, I made it.” Well . . . maybe we need to dream bigger. If there is always a bigger dream out there beckoning to us, we’ll never stop reaching for it. And if we never stop reaching, we’ll simply get better and better until we reach that new dream.

So whatever it is you’re dreaming about—dream bigger.

3. “Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. Don’t stop.”

I saw this years ago written on a wall in the Innovations building at Disneyland, and I instantly resonated to it. Writing is a process; don’t hurry. Take time to learn your craft. Take time to enjoy the journey. Publishing is a process. Take time to learn the business. But don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time. Don’t worry if you make mistakes, or if other people don’t understand your vision. Just—don’t stop.

I believe that there is a story inside each of us that only we can tell. Each of us has a valuable and unique voice. Don’t be afraid to use your voice. Don’t be afraid to tell your story.

So dream bigger. Do the work, and don’t hurry, don’t worry, and don’t quit.

Guest Writer Bio:

Lisa Mangum has worked in the publishing department of Deseret Book since 1997. She specializes in editing fiction for the Shadow Mountain imprint and has worked with several New York Times best-selling authors, including Ally Condie, James Dashner, and Jason F. Wright. While fiction is her first love, she also has experience working with nonfiction projects (memoir, educational, cookbooks, etc.) and some children’s picture books. She loves finding that “diamond in the rough” in the slush pile, and she is particularly skilled in the developmental editing part of the process. Lisa is also the author of four national best-selling YA novels (The Hourglass Door trilogy and After Hello). She graduated with honors from the University of Utah, and currently lives in Taylorsville, Utah, with her husband, Tracy.