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Publishing Single Short Stories

There are lots and lots of people who buy and read mainly stand alone short stories. Probably because of the speed of life these days. This came as a big surprise to me when I published my first one. There are short story connoisseurs who follow authors who only publish short, and are considered masters of the art. I thought it was a cop out to be honest – a way of publishing something a lot easier than a novel length book, because I thought that anyone can bang out a short story. There’s an art to creating a good short though, so that’s not entirely true. I’ve always enjoyed reading them and have piles of anthologies and singles on my Kindle, written by authors from debuts to Stephen King. A short story must still be a complete tale, with good flow, plot, structure and ending. In some ways getting a great short written can be more of a challenge than when you have much more space and time when writing fifty thousand words or so.

I have quite a few lurking on my computer waiting for polishing and publishing, and for me personally, because there’s so much less time invested in them than my longer books, I allow myself to play with the way I write them. The story I wrote for the Save the Rhino anthology, Nkoninkoni, inspired me to write a whole lot of short tales of Africa and its legends. Other stories I’ve started with the purpose of trying to write in different styles and genres, and then just follow where they choose to go. Writing a bad short story is going to be less heartbreaking than writing a bad book, although you might just surprise yourself when you’re just going with the flow. Writing shorts is good practice, but it has other advantages too.

I’ve always thought that as an Indie, the best way to get a feel for the process is to publish a short story before that novel you’ve been slaving over for a year or two. If you publish your novel green, there will be all sorts of learning curves that you’ll wish you knew before, and without any ideas about marketing it you could end up really disappointed when it just sits there and nobody buys it. There is no shame in publishing a single short story, as long as you put the same effort into its creation that you would a full length book. You’ll be in excellent company, because most bestselling authors publish them too. And if you enrol it in Amazon’s Kindle Select programme you can use it as a free marketing tool when you publish your big boy.

Doing this will take some of the terror away when you do publish your novel – not all of it – I don’t think that ever goes away no matter how many books you put out there. Make a great cover for it, edit it and make sure it’s nicely formatted. Make it the best little book that you can, and then let it loose. Have a marketing campaign on all of your online sites. Have a couple of free days in the hopes of some nice reviews. Set up your Amazon Author page. Join Twitter if you haven’t already, and see how it works. Even if you don’t have many sales to begin with, you’ll have learned a great deal, and your systems and sites will all be in place and ready for you when the time comes to publish your labour of love.

The Absolute Indie

When I first decided to self-publish my books I had no intention of doing every little thing myself. I planned on paying for editing and formatting, and buying my cover designs. I had a rude awakening when I discovered that living in Zimbabwe, as I was at the time, meant that I had no access to PayPal, who sanction that country, and from what I could see back then, that was the only way to pay.

I had page numbers, headers and footers, indents and lots of other fancy bits and pieces in my original manuscript and no clue as to what formatting even meant. Seeing other writer’s beautiful covers all over, my heart sank because I knew that I could never create such things. It was the most frustrating feeling in the world until I discovered a few free resources that meant I could do it all myself. None of these things cost a cent, and every new indie author should at least have a look at them whether they have money to work with or not.

With no money to work with, the first book to download would be Building Your Book for Kindle. The steps shown here are incredibly straightforward and simple, from formatting to cover size. Personally, I copy the first few pages of an already formatted book every time I begin a new one so all I have to do is change the title and front matter and Bob’s your uncle. While you’re downloading that book get Publish on Amazon Kindle with KDP as well.

Mark Coker, of Smashwords fame, has three incredibly useful free ebooks on Amazon. His Smashwords Style Guide will walk you through that old meatgrinder if you decide to publish there, but even if you don’t, there is a wealth of general information as well. Remember that if your book is on KDP Select on Amazon you’re not allowed to publish it elsewhere. And they check. His other two books, Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success and Smashwords Book Marketing Guide are also must reads for new indie authors.

If you want to play around with individual ebook creation before you publish, or even if you just want to create ebooks to give away or sell, download Calibre. It’s very simple to use, and comes with a tutorial that will walk you through the process. With Calibre you can produce anything from epub to Mobi.

And finally that costly, essential item – the cover. Now that I can buy covers for my books I do for some of them, but after the original terrifying learning curve, knowing that if I didn’t make one myself I wouldn’t have one, I now find that I really enjoy making some myself. I have a couple that I’m really proud of coming up soon with new books to be released, and over time I’ve collected a couple of paint programmes and a nice camera to help me get the exact designs I see for the stories behind them. But to begin with, I downloaded the free, watched a LOT of tutorials, and at the end of that I had my covers.

I know that a lot of people swear by Gimp, but I could never get it to install on my computer for some reason, so I downloaded Paint.net instead. It looked like gobbledegook to me and I almost gave up, but after spending not more than about three hours watching tutorials I had a grasp of the basic process. The most important thing to get to grips with there is how to use layers. Then you can play with various effects, brushes and opacity to produce a totally original cover using either your own photos and sketches, or some of the amazing free images to be found online. Always remembering to be one hundred percent sure that they are free to use of course, or you could end up in a bit of infringed copyright hot water.

I’m not saying that you should do it all yourself if you don’t have to, or that doing it all yourself is going to be a doddle. It is hard work, but for the cash-strapped writer it really is doable if you set your mind to it.

Research

Write about what you know is pretty good advice. It is possible to write about what you don’t know, but whenever you do you’re going to have to make sure that your research is spot on. The wonderful thing about Google is that you have a world of information at your fingertips. The not so wonderful thing is that not all of that information is accurate. So when I’m looking for specific facts I always find at least a couple of different sources to be sure that I’m not using flawed or bogus articles.

Most of us have felt the gamut of emotions to one degree or another, so those are fairly easy to convey. I believe though, that there are some extreme emotions that would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible for most – not all – writers to communicate unless they’ve lived them. So all the research in the world isn’t going to help you there. Readers are a canny lot. I know, because I’m one of them. If the subject is something they have a deep and personal knowledge of, you’ll probably lose them right there.

Mental illness is not something you’re going to understand unless you’re a psychiatrist, or you’ve lived it, although there is enough information available to research the experiences of others in certain instances. If you want to get inside the mind of a serial killer there is plenty of information out there, so there is absolutely no need for you to be writing what you know in this instance. Hopefully you aren’t. Not all people feel the same degrees of love or empathy, and those emotions can never be learned through research. Emulated possibly, but never learned. You’re going to have to be a brilliant scribbler to be able to write about the deep pain some empaths will feel at the suffering of another, or about a soul destroying, all encompassing love, if you’ve never felt anything like it.

Nuts and bolts on the other hand are a totally different kind of thing. You don’t have to travel to different dimensions through wormholes to write about them. Obviously you weren’t around when heads were rolling off the guillotine in France, or when the west was wild, or when Atlantis sank beneath the waves. Science fiction writers should research scientific facts and theoretical physics to write about warp drives and multiple universes if they aren’t going to raise the brows of die-hard fans of the genre. When writing a story in a specific historical era, again research is an absolute must if you don’t want a glaring blooper to jar your readers away from reading it. Even if your tale is fantasy, where you really do get to make it all up, a little research could make all the difference. I use a lot of mysterious ancient sites on Earth, and myths and legends in my stories, because I find them fascinating and so do many other people. For me, a little bit of fact makes fiction much more fun to read, and all stories have to be credible within their genre if I’m going to stay absorbed. Image Credit: Wiki Commons

NaNoWriMo Time

I took part in the NaNoWriMo event in 2012, and completing that crazy, epic sprint to the end taught me more than I expected about the job of writing. First and foremost is the daily word quota. The more you fall behind, the less chance you have of catching up, and writing just under 1 700 words a day seems daunting. The thing is, that most of us write more words than that every day without thinking about it. We blog, we interview, we write bits of our works in process. It’s absolutely doable though.

The beauty of the NaNo is that you get to leave chunks out. You just pop over anything you’re not sure of and write on, because editing during NaNo is death. The urge to go back and at least read over what I’d written so far nearly took me out, but I knew that if I did I’d get to editing, and that would mean I’d never make it. NO editing. That month taught me that ongoing over-editing can cause more grammar problems than not editing your first draft at all. I only decided to join at the last minute, so I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write apart from the fact that I was going to write in a genre that I didn’t think I could. I had no idea from one minute to the next where the story would go, or if it would be absolute garbage in the end.

At the end of that November I had completed just over 50 000 words of a book I loved. I found that I loved writing in a genre I believed that I would be hopeless at, and had the beginning of a series that is now well on its way to book four being published in early 2015. To any of you thinking of having a first try at the NaNoWriMo this year, I say a hearty Go For It! You’ll learn to write every day to meet your personal goals. You’ll be way too busy to angst over all the writing things we usually angst over. You’ll feel the warm camaraderie of fellow scribblers from around the globe. And if you win – well then, you’ll have a novel to edit. A couple of tips I learned from my NaNo month….

• Tell your family what you’ll be doing, and ask for their support. Let them know that there probably won’t be any homemade pudding or cookies in November. Suggest that there might be days when you aren’t going to brush your hair, and expressions of repulsion aren’t conducive to a happy muse. Support will be key this month.

• Whatever you’re cooking now, cook more and freeze what you can. You’re going to be far too wrapped up in your story to chop and peel anything. I froze piles of fillings, and pancakes were so prevalent during my frantic scribbling month that they were banished for a long while afterwards.

• Don’t feel guilty – it’s only a month, and perhaps you’ll be better appreciated for all that you usually do after a month of eyeballs firmly on computer. Prepare for a month that’s all about you and your writing.

• I never did this, but it would have made my life a lot easier. Write an outline and a rough cast of characters now. Think of where your story will play out – think scenes and settings. Plan your ending so that you can work towards it as soon as you type your first word.

• Keep a notebook and jot down important scenes, names or anything you’ll need to remember later in the book, because you don’t want to be wasting time reading through what you’ve written to find anything during the process.

• Don’t edit. At all. Really.

• Make a rough cover now to inspire you. You can change it later.

• Plan to have fun with it. When you hit that word target you’re going to feel on top of the world, and NaNo rewards their winners with quite a lot of writerly swag, deals, and a gorgeous badge to share your impressive accomplishment with the world.

• Go for it. You have all to gain and nothing to lose.

Procrastination

I believe that procrastination is always caused by fear – not laziness. I’ve always really wondered with what ears we hear our inner voice. That’s assuming that all of us humans operate pretty much the same way and have these little guys yammering away at us all day long about one thing or another. I’ve also always wondered why my particular inner voice is sometimes as harsh as it is. I think that that little nag in your head that says things like – Why on earth would you think you could write a book? Why are you such a lazy sod? You should have written two thousand words by now – slacker! You’ll always be mediocre, because you never finish what you start – because it’s trying to protect you from failure, ridicule, and pain.

Most of our fears and general weirdnesses really do stem from our childhood. Thank you Dr Freud. Our parents generally (with even the most loving of intentions) plant the biggest seeds. If you don’t get A’s you’ll never get anywhere in life. I won’t even mention those parents out there who don’t have the most loving of intentions – they’d create some pretty nasty inner critics. Our school teachers plant more seeds. Stop making excuses – climb that rope – learn that equation, or you’ll FAIL! Or our peers – children growing up can often be hurtful little guys. You don’t get picked first for the team, and therefore you’re not good enough. That little voice that resides in you remembers every single one of these terrifying painful things, and wants to protect you from feeling the future pain of failing horribly. And of course, the best way not to fail is never to try. So that loving, caring, worried little terrorist will stop you any way that it can.

You’ve just had an amazing epiphany about what comes next in your book. You excitedly zoom over to your computer, load up your work in progress, read the last paragraph, and suddenly know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s utter garbage. Then that brief period of time when your mind goes absolutely blank, and you can’t even remember what your epiphany was. Now your turgid inbox, or the pile of dishes that need to be washed seem much more important to get to doing. Creativity nicely replaced with mundane, safe things. Before you know it you’re parked on the couch watching reruns of Friends, eating three thousand calories of Doritos in one sitting, and accomplishing nothing at all. Job done. No book will be written. No readers will scoff at you. You will not ever feel those sharp, icy tendrils of rejection in your soul. You will never have an epic fail. You’ll never know if you’re any good at what you know you’ve been called to do because you’ll never do it. Well done little inner voice guy.

Every writer will cope differently with this protective critic. Personalities are different – with some the voice will win every time and nothing will be accomplished, and others will squish it on arrival and finish their books at record speed. Some people agonise about how they are perceived. They worry about hurting feelings or offending people. Some people couldn’t give a continental, and write away without worrying about any sort of reactions. But for those of us who listen to the voices within, and creative souls spend a lot more time than most inside their own heads anyway, those paralysing little criticisms are impossible to avoid. The thing to do is to realise what they are, stare them down, and let them know that you know that they’re lying.

You’re not mediocre or untalented, and you don’t leave everything you start unfinished just because someone back in the forgotten mists of your life told you so. The fact that you actually have a work in progress means that you’ve already accomplished something totally unique – not many of the billions of people on this planet will ever get around to writing even half a book. So when you freeze, staring at your computer screen, unable to think of a single word, before heading off to the television, have a quick little look inside, and sooth your little protector with the truth that you can do anything you want to do. It doesn’t matter what anyone else has said or thought of you in the past. It doesn’t matter if you’ve failed in the past – everyone else has too at some point or another, or if you fail again in the future. All that matters is that you trust in your own ability, grab your desire to write your story, and just go right ahead and do that. This is your life – it is finite – there are no guarantees – it’s important that you do whatever you feel driven to do, regardless of the outcome. What’s the worst thing that can happen? You’ll have written a book.

Marketing – Your Way

There have been quite a lot of articles around lately about how free and very low priced books are creating a large band of readers who are not prepared to pay for regular priced ones, thereby swiping the food out of “legitimate” authors mouths. That’s fine. People who are never going to pay for a book don’t matter, and probably wouldn’t buy your book even if it suddenly became illegal to ever give one away for free anyway. You’re in charge of the pricing of your work, and if somebody wants to read it they will buy it. Regardless of what all those intrepid freebie hunters get up to. So don’t be shouting at hardworking people simply doing their best to get a new product to the eyes of people who would otherwise never have a clue who they are. Indie authors who started publishing eBooks with Amazon seven to ten years ago had a lot more room to move up there than new Indies today. Some of the strategies that they used to get noticed, and beat their way up the rankings back then might not be so easy to implement successfully now with the thousands of books being published every single day. Those early writers who managed to grab hold of a rung on the ladder and work their way to the top will probably stay there now, so they won’t have to think totally out of the box to come up with brand new ways for their latest books to be noticed in amongst that epic labyrinth of millions of others that is Amazon 2014.

New ways will be found though. The kind of person who has the will and the determination to write a book, then polish it to publishing standard, design and make a cover for it, publish it, and then market it, all the while scribbling away at the next book, is most definitely the kind of person who is capable of thinking outside of any old box. I think that the self-publishing landscape will probably have to shift and morph to accommodate the sheer volume of new books pouring in, and the work to get to the top will be harder. I also think that we should be wary of demonising one or another of the tactics scribblers use to get their books to new eyeballs. After all, if there really was a proven formula to sell books, everyone would be in Stephen King Land, and that is not a reasonable idea to have. There is no formula that will ensure your success as an author. It’s all down to lots of hard work, trial and error, more patience than you would expect, and a large dollop of good luck. Indies are their own bosses, and with that goes the privilege of making their own rules as far as their own careers are concerned. They can do as little as they want, or as much as they want to market their books. They can sell boxed sets, give their books away for free or charge 99 cents or $9.99 for them if they want to. Very little of what other Indie authors do should have any effect on you. What works for one person’s book promotion won’t necessarily work for yours and vice versa. Apart from never, ever – seriously never – ever – spamming anyone with desperate pleas to buy your book, keep all of your options open when the time comes to launch your labour of love into the arms of the reading population.

If you have the resources to pay for the professional finishing of your book after writing it, and are able to afford to pay for it to be advertised, you obviously are going to fare better out of the starting gates than the writer who can’t afford these things. For the Indie who is going it totally alone, the work will be harder, and the pace to the point where you finally find some regular readers will be much slower. Much bumpier too, what with the inevitable learning curves with missed typos, disastrous first attempt covers, and formatting faux pas. You’d have to be some kind of superior being if you get it totally right the first time around without any help at all. It’s not the end of the world to make mistakes, as long as you fix them just as fast as you can when you realise what you’ve done wrong. The wonderful thing is that every time you falter and scrape your knees – or your ego, you’ve learned something new about the industry by the time you’re back up again.

It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about the free, the low priced, or the Goodreads giveaway. There are many vocal supporters both for and against these things. The only opinion that should count in your Indie world is your own. You are your publisher, editor, creative department, and sales department – and you get to make all executive decisions. I’ve tried the freebies and the 99 cents to very good effect – but that’s just me. Your book – your decisions, so try them all for yourself, and see how things go, and don’t for a minute believe that your little promo is going to have an effect on the sales of anyone else’s books at all. Only their own marketing efforts will. One thing I’ve learned in this wonderful world of Indie is that you’re learning all the time, and that opinions seemingly set in stone often change.

Writer’s Block

I love it when those super productive plot bunnies come to visit. Those days when ideas for new plots, or new exciting twists for a work in process come streaming in hard and fast, and supply writing fodder for years to come. But then sometimes you have those moments when you hit a brick wall writing a story. You’re scribbling away, and then—. Something needs to happen, and you realise that you haven’t got a clue what that something should be. You think, and you think, and you stare at the screen. You squish your face with the effort and hurl expletives at the world in general. But still nothing comes. A great big pile of nada. It can be quite a frightening moment, and if you carry on pushing yourself for days or weeks to think of what comes next to the exclusion of anything else, you will end up scaring yourself into the back of a cupboard somewhere, quivering and muttering profanely turgid sentences about the tragic ending of your yellow brick writing road.

For me, rather than wasting time, and upsetting myself with thoughts of my absolute lack of any writing talent at all, or verbally abusing innocent passersby, there are a couple of things that I try to do instead, and one way or another that missing happening always arrives when it’s ready. Without fail. The first and easiest thing is to type in a whole lot of bold red exes so that there’s no chance of losing that plot black hole, and then carry on writing on the other side. You obviously know why you need this event to happen – it is the cause for some outcome in your book, so just carry right on into the outcome and the event will eventually be revealed to you. Promise.

If you’re just way too angry at your own ineptitude to write anything at all, then walk away from your computer and do something else. It’s amazing how being tense can block up all creativity, just as it is the way being relaxed or doing something totally different can unplug that old blockage. Run around your house – hop up and down in the garden – windmill your arms, or do the Makarena while singing it loudly. Writers are supposed to get moving every hour anyway, to prevent the entire body from oozing downwards and pooling around your ankles after years spent unmoving in front of a computer. Not a good look I would imagine. Any old physical thing generally gets me going. Get all those endorphins on the move, while at the same time gaining inspiration for future scribbles from the reactions to your awesome activities from your family and neighbours.

Edit. Work on ideas for your covers. Do some research. Either for the event that has you stumped, or for any other project. While you’re cramming up on the merits of murder by lily bulb, your brain is working on your problem behind the scenes, and the solution could pop up at any time. Have a little faith in your writer’s mind – it’s probably more than a little strange, but it won’t let you down in the end.

Ideas come from the strangest places, as all you scribblers already know. Television is great for inspiration, and for me, watching shows like Ancient Aliens classifies as research. So get out the ice-cream or other equally healthy snack and settle into your couch to do some work. Or for a little bit of fun, go play with a Random Plot Generator. You never know what could be lurking in a bit of silliness to inspire you. Click on the image to read the brilliant computer generated story, and see – reviews too!

The Rules

A lot of indie authors are pretty rigid with their writing rules. There’s nothing wrong with this when it’s your style, and self-imposed. You’ll have problems though if rigid rules don’t fit well with your character, and you’ve only inflicted them on yourself because a successful and well known writer said that that’s what you should be doing if you ever want to succeed. “Must” is often the word lurking behind procrastination in any field, and when it comes to creative souls, I believe it could shut down production pretty well.

The minute we’re told we must do something, our subconscious goes into overdrive, bombarding us with all the ways we could fail, and settles like a lump in your mind, effectively blocking all those wonderful sentences that had been champing at the bit to leap onto your pages. This fear can be good in small doses. When you have to do one particular finite job, it can goad you into stepping up to the plate and giving it your best shot, purely so that you can put it behind you and move on. But if it’s a rule that you see looming into your entire future career, it could very well be daunting enough for some to throw in the towel rather than risk failure.

If you are told that in order to be any sort of author worth your salt that you MUST write a minimum of X amount of words every single day, and you MUST avoid adverbs, and you must this or that or the other thing – and you believe it – even though your writing regime and style are miles away from that, you’re pretty much going to knobble yourself. If it is your own personal goal to churn out ten books a year, and your personal writing style is naturally succinct, then apply those rules to yourself without fear. On the other hand, if you like to toss in a couple of flowery or acrimonious adverbs now and then (as I do), and if forcing yourself to write thousands of words every day raises your cortisol levels to terrifying heights, then you really shouldn’t, because even if you do manage to get any words down they’re not likely to be the ones that you would have written under your own steam. Fine for businesslike articles, but not so much for creative fiction or non-fiction.

We have more than enough fear already as writers, whether previously published or not. Thoughts pop up that what we publish will be laughed under tables all over the place, or that readers will guess which bits of our fiction aren’t really fiction at all, and think that we’re just plain weirdoes, and so on, and so on. Write your own book at your own pace, and in whatever style is yours without worrying about what anyone will think, until you’ve written the very last word of it. Then you can worry about grammar while you’re doing your dreaded edits. And just because a particular way of writing is believed by many modern authors to be the most well received, that doesn’t mean that it’s true. There is nothing wrong with a couple of well placed adverbs in any story for instance. They can add feeling and depth to a sentence. We use them in our speech after all, so why should they be excluded from the written word?

So yes, read what other authors say about their own success stories. Read all the advice out there, but think it through first as it would apply to you, and follow your own heart and style when you write your own. Many of the most wildly successful books were written in styles and by writers who conformed to nobody but themselves, and broke so many of the rules that they wouldn’t have stood a chance if they had followed the pack.

Let Your Friends Know

Let Your Friends Know

Let Your Friends Know

Let Your Friends Know

Let Your Friends Know

Let Your Friends Know

Let Your Friends Know

Let Your Friends Know