I’ve spent a lot of time this week talking about e-Books and pitching my new product for professional bloggers. One of the questions I’ve been asked (and that I very much anticipated) is, “How does this apply to the creative writers who make up so much of your audience?” The answer isn’t a sales pitch — it’s a story.

There was a time in my adolescence — back in those awful primitive days before ubiquitous cell phone adoption — when my family had three teenagers involved in all the social drama teenagers get involved in, two grown-ups seriously overcommitted to projects that kept them busy at all hours, and one telephone line.

We didn’t get a second phone line because it was too expensive, and we didn’t get call waiting because my dad thought it was “rude.” Instead, we fought. We fought and fought and fought over the precious use of that phone line.

Then I had a revelation. At some point I was given a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook (as was every male of a certain age and interest, at that era in history). I read through the whole thing, and instead of trying to buy or build any of the naughty little devices it discussed, I came away completely obsessed with the subsections on Phishing, or manipulating the nation’s telephone system.

Most importantly, I came away with the realization that it’s all just wires. There’s no magic to telephone communication (or there wasn’t in those days, anyway). If you’ve got an electrical circuit, you’ve got a connection. There was also a passing mention of the live test connections at the top of every telephone pole, where technicians can connect and make calls out.

And we had a telephone pole in our backyard.

So I stopped fighting over phone time with my sisters. I stopped trying to convince Dad to invest in a second line. I dedicated all that time to research and planning. My goal was to climb the pole, splice into the test connection, drop a wire down into our yard, and route it to my bedroom closet. I’d have my own private line, free and clear.

I never thought about what would happen the first time a technician climbed the pole. I never thought about how Dad would respond next time he went to mow the back yard and saw a wire snaking across it. I never got that far.

One Friday afternoon, after school, I decided to see if my plan would work at all, so I went out back and climbed the pole to see what was up there. It was a lot messier than I’d expected, and being up that high was a lot scarier than I’d expected, and I climbed back down without really figuring anything out.

And then on Saturday, some very scary gentlemen from the FBI showed up. Turns out a neighbor had witnessed my little expedition and made a call. I wasn’t home, so they talked to my dad, and when I got back he talked to me. I didn’t get in nearly as much trouble as I should have for that, but I dropped my plan completely. Instead, I started saving for my first cell phone.

“It’s All Just Wires”

I’ve got an e-Book for sale. You know that by now. It’s called How to Build an e-Book, and it details a single, specific process — transforming a vast blog archive into a discrete product focused into a cohesive message. So how useful is that to creative writers?

It depends. It’s not aimed at creative writers. I wrote it to all the people already trying to build professional blogs, and heavily invested in that process (not necessarily the people who just decided it would be a good idea last week).

There are an awful lot of those people out there on the internet, and I know people who know a significant chunk of them. So the book has a real potential market, even if its overlap with…well, you, in the plural, is approximately zero.

The trick to creating any effective How-To — whether it’s an e-Book or a book-book — is to isolate a single process and convey it in a way that is accessible to your target audience. In other words, you’ve got to reduce the massive, magical complexity of, say, a nationwide telephone system into something as straightforward as “it’s all just wires.”

The problem is, it’s always more than just wires. That doesn’t invalidate the process by any means, it just makes things a little confusing. When I told Carlos my e-Book wasn’t really aimed at creative writers, he frowned, confused, and said, “But aren’t creative writers supposed to have professional blogs?”

They are. When I told Justin, one of my reviewers, that I didn’t really expect the process to be useful in his current project — converting a serial novel into an e-Book for sale — he wrote back and said he’d found it useful enough that he’d gone back and reworked an earlier (fiction) e-Book using some of the principles I’d taught.

That’s not to say, “If you want to be a serious novelist, you should buy me e-Book.” Not at all. The point is that, just like the phone system, there’s a lot of different elements involved in writing. Some of them matter to you, and some don’t. Some of them you’re aware of, and they make the whole process seem amazingly simple, and others you will only discover when scary men come knock on your door to tell you you’ve made a mistake.

If you’re trying to do design and layout on a novel to self-publish, this e-Book would have a lot of powerful technical advice to offer you. If you’re just trying to write a novel, though, you don’t need it at all.

How to Build a Novel

There’s a valuable lesson for you in the onslaught of marketing material you’ve seen in my big launch this week, though. Maybe you don’t need to build a professional-quality e-Book, but that’s just one of the systems at play.

Creative writing is composed of a host of powerful processes you need to be able to perform at various stages in your career. To name just a few, there’s

• Basic written communication
• Rhetoric and style
• Characterization
• Plot development
• Markup and revision
• Platform and promotion
• Audience and market analysis
• Page layout, flow, and design
• The publication process (paper)
• The publication process (digital)

Each of those is a technical, teachable process. How many of those are you good at? How many of those are you even working on? And how many do you think will matter to you someday?

Those aren’t rhetorical questions, where I’m assuming the answers are “not many,” “not many,” and “all of them.” The answers are going to be different for every writer, but it’s important to at least consider the questions so you’re not caught off-guard somewhere down the line.

The good news is, you’re already working on all of them. How to Build an e-Book got you thinking about document layout and design, even if you decided not to buy it. I’ll have How to Build a Novel out sometime around September, with a heavy emphasis on characterization, plot development, and the revision process.

Those are major undertakings — two to three projects a year, dedicated to detailed discussion of a specific process. But you can count on me to keep providing regular weekly discussion of all those topics and more, completely free, here at Unstressed Syllables. In the coming weeks I plan on talking about

• Managing work flow, collaboration, and revision in Google Docs
• The New Market for fiction, and the prospect of self-publishing
• Serial novels, and the ups and downs of showcasing your work online
• Making the most of research without sacrificing your voice
• Why, when, and how to build a document outline
• Managing a storyline so reader’s don’t get lost
• And, of course, much more.

You can count on me to keep bringing the content, as long you keep coming around to read it. If there’s anything particular you’d like to hear about, let me know.

Photo credit Julie V. Photography.

My dusty dreams

It’s been nearly three months since I told you that you should start a blog to become a better writer. My attitude hasn’t changed a whit, but my advice has.

You see, when I was…let’s say twelve, I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I liked writing well enough, I loved reading, but my reasoning was extremely practical: I wanted a job I could do from home. I wanted a job I could do from any home, because at the time I figured I was going to be living in a castle in New Zealand by the time I turned twenty. I didn’t want geography impeding my career.

As I grew up, some things changed. I gave up on a lot of my plans for my future, but one childish fantasy lingered. I believed, with all my heart, that I would be a fabulously successful novelist before I turned twenty. It wasn’t something I spent a lot of time dwelling on, it wasn’t a motivational sort of thing, it was just something I knew. It was a logical truth. There was no question to it.

And then I grew up more, and that didn’t happen. I hit twenty without getting discovered (and, for what it’s worth, without sending out a single manuscript submission). At twenty-one I finished a pretty decent fantasy novel and started sending it out, but I got no bites. At twenty-two I did a major revision, a complete rewrite really that dramatically improved the story’s readability, and even as I took on my first full-time job to pay the bills, I spent a year aggressively shopping my novel to publishers and editors. And I got nothing.

Somewhere in that process I finally started to realize that getting rich and famous wasn’t a foregone conclusion. I started paying a lot more attention to the process, started reading writer and publisher blogs, started learning all the dirty rumors that circulate about the dreaded slush pile. I began to get a concept just how many new novels are mailed off to publishing houses every day, and how very few new authors actually get published in any given year.

Then something sad happened. I gave up. I came to accept that I had about as much chance of getting published as I had of winning the lottery, and I stopped sending off submissions. I stopped writing. I stopped hoping. I watched my lifelong dream wither and die.

And that wrecked my life. I sank into a deep depression. I became a terrible employee, a terrible husband, and a terrible friend. I stopped trying to accomplish anything, and just spent my days killing time. It was a miserable experience. I tried to live my life based on a childish expectation, and I paid a terrible price for it.

Lucky for me, nobody walked away. Not my wife, not my friends, not my family. They kept believing in me, even when I didn’t, and they brought me out the other side. I grew up a little. I became a better person, and started writing again. It took me two more years, but eventually I even started looking into the publication process again — this time without the distorting lens of entitled disappointment. I learned something then that I should have seen years before:

It’s not enough to write a good book. That’s just the beginning of the process.

Building a Platform

The fact of the matter is, writing and getting published is a process. It’s a slow process — most published fiction authors are in their thirties when they sell their debut novels. It’s also a challenging process that takes a mighty commitment, but it’s a process that works. The first step is to write a fantastic manuscript, which is our favorite part. Once you have that manuscript, though, it’s time to start getting noticed.

These days, they’re calling the process of getting noticed “building a platform.” When you send off a manuscript submission, one of the most important things to include in your cover letter is a paragraph describing your platform. If you’re actively involved in a social organization, you can talk about that. If you’re important enough to get media coverage, you can talk about that. If you’re a widely published author with a huge fan base, you can talk about that. That’s what an acquisitions editor wants to hear.

That’s no help when you’re just starting out, though. How are you supposed to get a fan base, if you’re not published yet? The answer, of course, is with a high quality, effective website. You have the chance, right now, to start letting the world know who you are, and why they should care about you. You have the chance to start convincing Google that anyone typing your name into their search page is looking for you.

It’s more than just name recognition, though. The internet makes it easy for you to demonstrate the ability you’ve been developing. Show off your writing chops! And don’t stop there. The internet rewards authorities, subject matter experts, so start establishing yourself as an authority. As you do that, as you gather real followers and create a real demand for your words, you make yourself more and more appealing to all the acquisitions editors who’ve been signing your rejection letters.

Using Your Platform

Just this week Writer’s Digest published a blog post on Facebook explaining why aspiring writers should start a blog. It is packed with good information. Here are a couple of its best points, from the section, “How Will This Help You Get Published?”

You need a starting block. You don’t want to start thinking about a site/blog the moment you need one. There’s a learning curve. Wouldn’t it be much better to have familiarity with site or blog building tools, to already have a structure in place, to already have a knowledge base? These things take time to learn, grow and improve. By the time you DO get published, your site will be far more refined and sophisticated if you’ve been tinkering and improving over a number of years.

You need to develop an understanding of online interaction. Once you have a site/blog, you can start experimenting in ways you couldn’t before. You can comment on other blogs and link back to your own site, you can make mentions of it on Facebook and Twitter. You can add it to business cards, talk about it at events, etc. And you can watch how visits are affected or not. It gives you a baseline to work from when you REALLY want your site to accomplish something. Wouldn’t it be great if, in the early stages, there wasn’t pressure for the site to perform or grow?

I recommend reading the whole thing, though. It’s not terribly long, and it gets into some good specifics.

I followed on from there to another article, this one from a blog called Writer Unboxed, called “Audience Development: Critical to Every Writer’s Future.” The abstract of that one is the same as the Writer’s Digest article I shared in the last Week in Words — publishers are fundamentally incapable of getting your books in the hands of the people you want to read them. That responsibility falls on you.

Giving Up on the Gatekeepers

So what’s the point of publishers, then? There’s a lot to be said for the value of editors, as Toby reminded me earlier this week. Beyond that…I don’t know. There are arguments to be made (and I provided a link to a blog up top that is anxious to make precisely those arguments). I don’t really have any vested interest in making them, though.

When it comes right down to it, it seems like the major publishing houses are making themselves increasingly irrelevant (a topic I’ll address in a lot more detail next week). The thing about it, though…either way, what you need to do is exactly the same. You need to learn to be the best writer you can, you need to write a compelling manuscript, and you need to establish a strong platform to market yourself to the audience you want to reach.

Maybe you’re doing it so you can land a good agent and get a contract with a publisher who expects precisely that of you. Maybe you’re doing it to build your own distribution network for self-published e-Books. Either way, you need to be blogging. If you need to know how to get started making a professional blog, go back to last Tuesday’s article. I understand if you skipped it at first, but that message is more important to the Creative Writers out there than to anyone else at all.

Photo credit Julie V. Photography.