Indie Life Blog Hop: Lawrence Block's Gone Indie!!!

Written for the Indie Life blog hop. Visit the link if you'd like to participate in this monthly blog event.

Being an indie writer has been making great strides in respectability lately. Especially now that famed mystery author Lawrence Block has gone indie for some of his books.

  He'd done an indie book before, Write for your Life, to go with some seminars he was then conducting. But he also decided to go the indie route for a collection of Matt Scudder short stories. (Link: Anne R. Allen's Blog: Lawrence Block talks self-publishing.)

And now, he's self-published a Bernie Rhodenbarr novel--- the first since 2004. I didn't know it was self-published until my own copy arrived. (Links: Lawrence Block: Look Who's Back, Mystery Fanfare: A dialogue between Bernie and Larry on Self-Publishing.)

Lawrence Block, I would say, is doing indie right. He has his credentials as a writer well-established through years of traditionally publishing his books. He has a reader base for both the Matt Scudder series and the Bernie Rhodenbarr series, both of which have fans looking for more.

Sometimes the new indie author forgets that the first thing he has to do is establish those writing credentials--- to prove to the world that he really can write. There are too many books and ebooks out there written as a get-rich-scheme or by a tag-along NaNoWriMo writer, that show no skill at all as a writer. Readers who pick up such books come away with the conclusion that the indie writer, like the old-style vanity press writer, is someone who just cannot write well enough to do the job.

Traditional publishing--- somewhere, somehow, in a forum with a gatekeeper that doesn't publish dreck, establishes those writing credentials. So would a well-written blog that has sufficient traffic to make it authoritative. Or being invited to post articles on a well-regarded website.

Without these credentials, most indie authors don't sell well. By continuing to write well and publishing many novels and short stories, eventually the good indie writer will pick up fans.  In time, success at the level enjoyed by Hugh Howey may come along.

Lawrence Block's indie books:
The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (Volume 11)

The Night and The Music: The Matthew Scudder Stories

Has your initial opinion about indie (self-published) fiction changed recently? In which direction? What factors led to the change?

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Indie Life: The Most Important Ways To Promote an Indie Book

This post is for the Indie Life blog hop, please visit their site!

Now, I'd like to make it clear that the 'ways' given in this blog post do NOT originate with me. I've only ever self-published one book--- a poetry book--- and I have never promoted it much and so haven't sold many copies.

This advice comes from a REAL writer, one who has been published traditionally and who has self-published. And what he says, essentially, is that these are the seven most important ways to promote your indie book:

1. Write a great book.
2. Write a great book.
3. Write a great book.
4. Write a great book.
5. Write a great book.
6. Write a great book.
7. Everything else--- web presence, reviews, publicity, book signings....

And sadly, numbers 1-6 are EXACTLY where the average indie writer falls down. This is how you can find out how badly go to Amazon.com and make like you are shopping for a new Kindle book. When you spot a book you suspect is an indie book, one that is big enough news to have 20 or more reviews, check out the bad reviews--- 2s and 3s, 1s, if any--- and see what they have to say.

Aside from complaints about spelling and grammar, I've seen complaints about boring story lines and flat characters, major plot holes, never-resolved issues, and, in one case, an author who confusingly calls important characters different names in different parts of the book.

The next way to find out where indie authors go wrong is to read the sample chapters provided. Often you will see that the very bad review you read about it was actually somewhat flattering as the book has flaws that weren't mentioned. Or you might find that it's not BAD, exactly. Just dull. Grading-school-papers-from-C-students dull.

The way NOT to end up one of those indie writers who makes readers resolve to NEVER read another indie book again, even if it's free, is to WRITE A GREAT BOOK. What is the first step to that? Write. Write lots. Write stuff you will never publish. Always have another writing project in the pipeline. You may need to write 10 bad novels before you write a good one, and 5 good novels before you write a great one. Do that writing.

To improve the quality of that writing, I'd suggest reading every how-to-write book you can discover that is written by someone who really knows about the writing business. Stephen King, Jerry B. Jenkins, Lawrence Block, Orson Scott Card, James Scott Bell, and Holly Lisle are among the writers who have written at least one book on writing. Donald Maass is a literary agent who has written a book on the subject. 

As a indie writer, you may lose a lot of readers because those readers believe indie fiction = badly written fiction. The number one way to fix that problem is not to self-promote like hell, but to deliver an excellent product that will GRAB the reader and not let go. Books like that don't need you to self-promote like hell. They cause readers to talk about your book to others voluntarily, and people will buy/download copies not because they've been urged to, but because they WANT to.

Have you ever cut into your writing time to promote a finished/published book in some way? Do you think that was a good decision or a bad one? How many indie books have you read that were as high-quality as books by a major publishing house author? Does finding a book like that make you more enthusiastic about being an indie author?




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Would the Saints Kill Sick People During a Zombie Apocalypse?

 

Recently on The Walking Dead, Carol killed a couple of people because they were sick, and might spread their illness and/or turn into zombies when nobody was looking. And lots of Walking Dead fans said Carol did the right thing.

That made me thoughtful. As a Christian I'm called to be a saint. What would the saints do during a zombie apocalypse? I just can't picture Saint Paul or Saint Maximilian Kolbe or Saint Therese the Little Flower killing sick people because they might become zombies.

A saint would quarantine the sick people in zombie-proof cells and then most likely volunteer to be the one stationed in the quarantine area to care for the sick.

Honestly, I don't think I'd volunteer for the get-sick-and-die zombie apocalypse duty. I mean, I admire Saint Maximilian Kolbe, how when he was in the Nazi death camp and a man was about to be killed Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to die in his place. But I know I wouldn't have the courage to do that myself.

Moral issues like this need to be thought through logically. If we establish the principle that one may preventatively kill a sick person to stop them from spreading a disease or becoming a zombie, that sets a precedent. Many people in the zombie apocalypse may suffer sicknesses and even if medical doctors are around--- NOT a given--- there are no operating labs to confirm a diagnosis, so one cannot tell which sicknesses may be fatal ones.

And any person, regardless of age or apparent state of health, might die suddenly and become a zombie. So--- if some member of a survivors group kills another, it's fairly easy to make a claim of necessity--- the dead person seemed unwell. He might have endangered us all. How can anyone prove it one way or another? And chaos would reign and groups fall apart.

No, the whole Thou-shalt-not-kill thing is still a good rule. In a zombie apocalypse, you can't go it alone. You will need people with skills you don't possess. You will need people to watch your back. You will need to be able to trust them, and how can you if you knew they would casually kill you if it might conceivably make themselves a bit safer.  

How would YOU handle the issue of people sick with a contagious disease during a zombie apocalypse? Would you kill them? Abandon them? What if you had no handy place in which to quarantine them and no one to care for them that was not needed to care for vulnerable people?

 

This post is my post for the Indie Life blog hop. And the message the above post has for the indie writer is I guess on the importance of thinking things in your story through in a logical fashion.

If you are writing a zombie apocalypse tale, for example, you may have a vague notion as you put your characters through their paces that in a zombie apocalypse everything is different and the old rules don't apply.

Question that. What are the old rules? Why, in each instance, might they not apply? And what will be the extended consequence of their not applying? It actually doesn't matter what your precise answers are to these story questions--- so long as you have thought these things through and it makes sense, not just to you but to the average intelligent reader.

Because a well-thought-out story is a story that people will remember.

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Indie Life: Competing With the Slush Pile

 This post is part of the Indie Life blog hop.

Writing life in the old days--- back then, every publisher had a slush pile. This was a backlog of unsolicited manuscripts that arrived at every publishers' door. Some low-wage employee of the publisher would be assigned to sort through the slush manuscripts.

Most slush pile manuscripts could be disposed of after a glance at the first page. Failures in spelling and grammar, clumsy sentences with unfathomable meanings, and just an air of mind-numbingly dull about the manuscript told the tale. Such manuscripts were, rightly, sent back after this slight evaluation.

Other manuscripts needed more attention before the reader could tell they weren't what was wanted, and this was the place to be for a new writer. Your manuscript was deemed worthy of a bit of attention and you might warrant a personal note on the rejection slip. Those notes meant you were a real writer, and that someone out there thought you ought to keep trying, that someday you would produce a manuscript that would make some publisher some money.

The slush-pile days are over at most publishers. Given today's minimum wage laws and soon-to-be-required benefits, nearly all publishers reckon they can't afford to hire someone to read their way through a slush pile, and so they issue a decree that only agented manuscripts are accepted. And most agents don't want slush pile manuscripts, either.

But for the indie writer, the slush pile still exists--- and if we are not part of it, we are competing with it.

Now, for most of us indie writers we spend a lot of time cocooned in a virtual world of other indie and small press writers. We don't contact non-writing readers much until our writing career takes off and we start to get fans coming to our blogs and author Facebook and Twitter pages. But ask a reader who has tried an indie book or two, and chances are you will hear some slush-pile novel horror stories.

Indie books, conclude the reader, are bad, and they will stick with traditionally published books from now on. But the traditionally published world also has their slush-pile-worthy books. They are just hidden away, and not out there competing with well-written books for readership.

This is what you must do to compete with the slush pile: You must make your book stand out from the pack in three ways.

1. You must know enough about spelling, grammar and sentence structure that you can ensure your manuscript is correct. You may have beta readers and hired editors to catch mistakes for you--- but if you don't know the rules yourself, you have no way to know if they are correct. If your school education shortchanged you in this area--- in other words, if you are under 50--- you need to educate yourself. Errors in this area are a well-known mark of the slush-pile writer.

2. The average reader may be ignorant of a lot of things. He may think that World War 2 was fought between the armed forces of Adolf Hitler and George Washington. He may think that Shakespeare was just some dead white guy who wrote boring stuff. But even the most ill-informed of readers expects their authors to be filled to the brim with correct information, and if they catch you in an error of fact, they will assume you are just another slush-pile writer not worth reading. Enhance your education by reading books on cultural literacy and history-for-dummies, and then read on from there.

3. It's not enough to be correctly spelled and culturally literate. You need to show, right from the start, that you are not a bore. This means dumping the prologue about the hundred-year elven war or the history of your main character from the date of his grandfather's birth and other bits of tedium writers fiddle with before they get down to the beef of it. Concentrate on the central story. And don't whine about how some other writer got away with prologues and genealogies and such and is a famous writer. YOU are not a famous writer, and you are not going to be one if you can't convince skeptical readers you are not going to bore them to death.

The writer in the old days had to convince one reader at a publisher's office that he was a competent writer. You, as an indie writer, have to convince reader after reader after reader of the same thing. Your first few chapters that are made available as a free sample have to show your prowess in the three areas mentioned above. And the rest of your book must match it. Do this, and you will rise above the indie fiction slush pile. Don't do it, and you are condemned to be a part of the slush pile other indie writers are complaining about.

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Indie Life: Using Asperger Special Interests in Fiction Writing

 

This post is a part of the Indie Life blog hop, in which we blog about life as an indie writer.  We are also remembering on this day the events of the Sept. 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Welcome to my blog! For those who don't know me, I am not only an indie writer, I am a writer with Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism. One of the symptoms of Asperger Syndrome is special interests.

A special interest is a somewhat obsessive interest in certain things that brings a certain degree of happiness to those with Asperger Syndrome. They can be something useful, like an obsession with computers like Bill Gates has, something relatively normal like being an obsessive Star Trek fan, or something a bit odd like an obsession with railroad schedules or collecting doorknobs.

When it comes to writing, incorporating some of your special interests into the fictional work can have certain benefits. First, it helps keep up the writer's interest in the work of fiction in question--- an important issue for a writer who often begins and then abandons fictional projects. Also it can create reader interest when the special interest used is one many people have some degree of interest in.

Bringing the passion that the typical aspie has toward a special interest into a fictional work may pay off in the fact that a novel written out of a great passion is usually more compelling than same-old, same-old fiction. And, finally, the special interests you use in your fiction can help define the themes and topics which make your writing unique. Think of the Valdemar novels of Mercedes Lackey (who as far as I know does not have Asperger Syndrome). She often writes about child abuse, misunderstood children, horses, falcons/falconry, and, in a disguised manner, cops (the Heralds of Valdemar).

In my own WIP Starship Destine, I have used a number of my special interests. One of my earlier special interests is an obsession with the Star Trek series, particularly the original one. Starship Destine, like Star Trek, is starship-based science fiction. Some of the characters in Starship Destine are the extra characters I made up for Star Trek stories.

Another special interests I have is languages, and in particular created languages and international auxiliary languages like Esperanto  (learn Esperanto here).  I speak Esperanto pretty well, and I know some of a couple of other similar international auxiliary languages that never got the speaker base that Esperanto has these days. I could have incorporated this interest into my story by simply creating an idealized future society where all Earth people have agreed to speak Esperanto as a second language and thus done away with language problems--- at least until they meet their first aliens. But that kind of story isn't me. In Starship Destine there are no less than 3 international auxiliary languages in use--- the two major political factions each have their preferred IAL, and the Fleet uses a third to show its attempted neutrality.

I also have an interest in politics, as well as a dismay at the anger and hatred over political divisions today. Because I don't want to project contemporary politics into the future, I have replaced today's conservative/liberal dichotomy with a different one: we have the Omaynists, which include ALL of today's conservative/liberal/socialist/'reactionary' factions, who are characterized by the fact that they actually believe in things, and usually share the idea that at least sometimes it is good to tell the truth, and the Alliterists, who openly boast of telling lies and who admire the evil dictators of the past such as Caligula, Stalin, Hitler and Kim Jong-il.

Now, as beneficial as special interests can be to your fiction, there is a downside. Aspies can run on and on about their special interests to the point that they bore people. Think of all the details about whaling in Moby Dick, written by probable aspie Herman Melville. By modern standards at least he should have cut some of that out. And if he was a typical aspie, he might easily have added two or three times as much of those whaling-details. It's kind of like the social skills we aspies have to learn, that we have to limit the amount of stuff we say about our special interests to others, just give them very brief highlights to avoid boring them.

Another trap is letting your special interests eat your writing time, if not your life. That's a constant temptation for me in this project. One of the languages I use in the story, Universalglot, is a very obscure one, and a language I don't know very well yet. I'm very tempted to spend my writing time studying Universalglot or working on my Universalglot Facebook page. The essential thing is to set a fixed rule--- your writing time is for your writing. Your special interests you work with at some other time--- usually after the day's writing work is over.

After all this, I bet some of the neurotypical writers out there are beginning to wish that they were lucky enough to have Asperger Syndrome and the attendant flock of special interests. Don't despair, your more ordinary interests can take the same role in your writing. And though you may not have the same level of passion for them that the aspie has with special interests, they are also less likely to take up too much of your time.

Question: what interests of yours, special or otherwise, have you incorporated into your current writing? Is it working out?
 
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Indie Life: Aspie Writers & the 10-word Rule

Indie writers--- those who are self-publishing rather than seeing a traditional publisher--- have even more need than other writers to have a good, regular daily working schedule. There is no one standing over you to get your writing work done on time. You have to learn to do it for yourself.

If you are, in addition, an Aspie (Asperger Syndrome) writer, that gets double tough. The Aspie condition comes with this charming little function called 'executive function deficit'. It's kind of like having AD/HD. It means your writing life may be in a state of constant chaos. Chaos is not good if you want to get anything done!

And this is where the 10-word rule comes in: each day, when your designated writing time rolls around, you absolutely must dip in to your story and write a minimum of 10 words. You are allowed to take one day of rest per week--- it's in the Ten Commandments somewhere. But other than that, EVEN on days when you, for good reason, are not going to be even trying to fulfill your daily word count goal, you owe yourself 10 words.

Ten words! It's not so much. Even if you are not yet ready to start a new chapter, you may find a place here or there in a sparse paragraph which could benefit from a word or three of description.

And the magic of the ten word rule is when you are dipping in to your story for the ten words you absolutely must do, you seldom write JUST ten words. Yesterday I did over 600 words when I intended to do just the minimum. Since my word count goal was 926 per day, that was going a good way toward fulfilling my goal.

Being utterly strict about your ten words leads to a writer's blessing--- steady forward progress. Even if you have a whole bad month, if you do your ten word minimum, you are further ahead than when you started.

Plus, dipping into your story 6 days a week without fail keeps the project from growing stale, and then dying on the vine, as so often happens to a work of fiction that gets put aside for awhile.

Now, about that designated writing time: you need one. Yes, even if you are a wild and crazy Aspie who does things when the mood strikes and not on a schedule. A day--- yours, mine, anyone's--- needs a framework to it. When you were a child, your parents provided the framework in that there were set times for meals, for going to school/to do your homeschooling, to get up and to go to bed.... As a grown-up, you have fixed times depending on events like getting up, going to work, perhaps other things like watching the evening news--- these provide your framework.

If you look at yourself as a professional Indie writer, you must attach a designated writing time to your day's framework. In my own case, I find that unless I schedule things first thing in the morning, they don't get done. Once mid-morning rolls around, I've looked out the window and noticed the escaped sheep, or discovered I am out of kitchen garbage bags but not out of kitchen garbage, and my day's excitement has begun. Writing has to happen before this. If you are not a morning person, you may decide to write after you get home from work or school, or after the kids are in bed, or some other fixed point of your day. Whatever works for you. The exact time doesn't matter as much as the fact that you have scheduled one daily.

What is your own best writing time daily? Have you ever had to try shifting that time around? Do you think adopting the 10-word rule will help your writing?
 
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"The Indelibles will be hosting a monthly feature called INDIE LIFE. Modeled after Alex Cavanaugh's awesome Insecure Writer's Group, this will be a chance for indie authors to post about indie life, find each other, offer support, encouragement, news, helpful hints, and anything else that makes life as an indie author a little easier.

What is Indie Life?How: Sign up on the Linky at the bottom of this page here. When: Post on the second Wednesday of the month. What: Write anything indie related: something that will inspire or help a fellow indie; something that celebrates a release or a milestone; something that talks about the ups and downs, joys and heartaches of Being Indie. Grab: The banner above to include in your posts!"