Keep an eye on the world around you and see what stories present themselves.As I said in class, I’ll be posting notes after each Wednesday session, which all three classes can use to ask questions about or comment on what we covered. I encourage the students to hop into the discussion here, but it’s also open to the public.
We started by talking about what makes a story and the idea of character(s) involved in a conflict with rising tension that moves to a resolution at the end. It’s a pretty classic model and Vonnegut says some useful things about it here. Everyone brought a two line description of the story they’d like to write, and we listened to those and talked about which would work as is for stories and which need some narrowing down.
In discussing how we know when a story will be good, we looked at the first few paragraphs of stories by Carol Emshwiller, Joe Hill, and Kurt Vonnegut. I asked you to, in the coming week, look particularly at how people begin stories, and for Week 2, people will be bringing in a story beginning by someone else that knocks their socks. I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments): Abyss & Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. One of the things I mentioned is that reading other people’s short fiction, particularly good stuff, is important: you’ll find more story ideas coming to you, you’ll learn new tricks from them, and you’ll become familiar with the markets you hope to sell to.
We also spent some time on writing process and the idea of timed writings, as taken from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and did some in class. Feel free to post yours here if you like it. I urged you to spend some time this week thinking about your writing process and perhaps trying to change it up a little: writing by hand instead of the keyboard, or in a place you don’t normally write.
>>I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments):
One thing I found pretty helpful are the Hugo nominated stories featured in audio over at Escapepod.org. Save the .mp3’s to your player of choice and listen on your way to work / school / date / etc. Another great audio fiction site is of course is The Drabblecast at http://www.drabblecast.org. They have some fantastic features.
If you want to be mega-cool, try transcribing some of your favorite stories to screen or paper. Peace & love.
I absolutely agree with that – one of the things I keep is a notebook where I copy out passages from stories and novels that I really love. It’s part of how I try to figure out how the author’s achieving the effect (and how I might use it.)
Timed writing was great. I can’t believe I haven’t tried that before. I went through one of my collections last night and read the first three paragraphs of each story and was surprised to see how well they fit the pattern you discussed. I’ll do a few line edits on one of my short stories tonight and get it sent over to you. I’m really enjoying the class!
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Making the Most of GoodReads
(This originally appeared on the SFWA blog.)
Goodreads is the largest reader community site in the world, with over thirteen million members. Goodreads was recently acquired by Amazon, creating worries that the site would change, but Amazon has said they do not intend to make changes. Users can track their reading, find or make book recommendations, and discuss what they’re reading. Goodreads lists self-published books as well as those from professional presses.
Goodreads reaches outside its own site, supplying reviews to Powell’s Books, USA Today, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Columbus Metropolitan Library, and Kobo, among others. It supplies lists of books to the popular website Listopia, such as “Best Books of 2012.”
Beyond that, however, Goodreads offers authors tools that they can use to promote books. Using Goodreads, you can create giveaways, post excerpts, and help Goodreads readers discover your books.
When someone joins Goodreads, they create a profile that shows their reading side. Your profile includes optional information such as a photo, location, date of birth, website, reading interests, and a brief bio. Fill it out but be aware that after you’ve added an author profile, the second profile will be what most people see, rather than this one.
Goodreads allows you to maintain lists of what you’ve read, what’s on your to-read list, and what you’re currently reading. Each of these is referred to as a shelf.
You also have a newsfeed, which is displayed on your Goodreads home page, and shows recent news from friends and authors you are following as a fan. You can see what Goodreads events they are attending, whose reviews they are following, when they rate, add, or review a book, and so forth.
As a writer, you can expand your basic profile by adding an author profile and joining the over sixty thousand authors participating in the Goodreads author program. How do you add an author profile? It’s simple. Find one of your books on Goodreads and look for the “Is this you?” link at the bottom. Click on that to claim the book. It will take a few days for Goodreads to confirm you are the author, but they will mail you when your profile has been updated.
Now that you’re a Goodreads author, you’ve got access to a dashboard of new and interesting tools. On the home page, click on “Visit your dashboard,” which should appear near the top on the righthand side. The page that opens up should have Author Dashboard up in the top righthand side under the Goodreads toolbar. You’ll see it displays stats like number of works, which is the number of works attributed to you, and the number of fans and friends.
That section may seem a little mystifying. What’s the difference between “added by unique users,” “fans,” and “friends”? When you are looking at someone’s profile, you can opt to become a fan or add them as a friend. (If they’re not a Goodreads author, the option to add them as a friend will not appear. Goodreads automatically creates pages for authors.) If you are friends with someone, both people have to have approved the relationship, and each will have their reviews and comments displayed in the other’s newsfeed. If you are a fan of someone, their reviews, comments and blog posts will appear in your newsfeed, but they will not see yours. Added by unique users does not affect your newsfeed at all but is the number of people who have added one or more of your works to one of their shelves.
You’ll see all of your works listed in the “My Books” section under your statistics, along with statistics for each, including the number of ratings, the average rating, the number of Goodreads reviews, how many people have it on their to-read shelf, and how many people have it on their currently-reading shelf. You can drill down on each listing: while I don’t believe you can currently add ebooks, you can edit the book’s information and see Goodreads statistics for how many people have added, rated, reviewed, or included that title on their “to-read” list.
Beneath that is your blog. I am still looking for an easy way to push a WordPress blog post to one’s Goodreads blog, but so far I haven’t found one. There are plenty of Goodreads related WordPress plugins (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/goodreads) but the majority of them allow you to display data from Goodreads on your site, such as a list of what you’re currently reading. Generally I mirror a few, but not all of my blog posts, here, because it’s a pain in the butt.
One of the most useful Goodreads Author Tools is their Giveaway system. Go to their giveaway page and you’ll see a wide variety of giveaways, which you can sort by which are ending soon, which are most requested, which are from popular authors, and what’s been recently listed. Goodreads makes it very easy to enter giveaways and allow requesters to add the book to their to-read shelf/. You can set the dates for the giveaway, as well as what countries it’s available in, if you don’t want the cost of shipping something overseas. It does not cost anything to list a giveaway, but be prepared to follow through. You cannot give away e-books as a giveaway, so you will have to bear the cost of shipping.
This is handy because Goodreads promotes the giveaways for you. Over 40,000 users sign up for giveaways on a daily basis, according to Goodreads, which means that mentions of your giveaway are appearing in the newsfeeds of their friends, as well as being accessible from the main giveaway page.
For the best experience, I suggest going through GoodRead’s Author Tutorial, as well as the abundance of other documentation they’ve provided. You’ll want to investigate groups as well as how to run an author Q&A. You can create trivia questions that drive interest in your book or publicize book signings and other promotional events. You may want to add some of its widgets to your blog or website or even pay to use its Self-Serve Advertising platform.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
I have several maxims that I have developed over the course of my writing career. One of them is, “If Kris Rusch invites you into a project, you say yes.” Because Kris is one of the people who understands independent publishing and its possibilities, and she is a savvy, savvy marketer.
When Kris came and asked about including my book Creating an Online Presence in a Storybundle, I was thrilled and also a little panicked, because I knew it had to be updated before it went in there. Too much had happened on the Internet in the two and a half years since I’d first put it up. I was also flattered that she thought the book was worth including, because I value her opinion.
And the truth is, if you’re a writer, you do need to at least think about this stuff enough to make an informed decision. If you’re being traditionally published, your publisher will probably expect you to be helping out with the marketing in the form of social media or other Internet efforts. Every book launch, for example, seems to involve a slew of guest blog posts and similar promotions.
If you’re small press published, again the publisher will probably expect you to be helping out with the marketing and I would regard a lack of such expectations as a possible danger sign.
And if you’re going indie, there’s no way around it. You’re going to have to think about this stuff, and the more you do, the more it will pay off — IF you are writing good stuff and making that the focus, not the marketing.
The world is changing rapidly in many aspects; publishing is definitely part of that change. Writers must stay informed of that if they want to make a living at it. Look at this Storybundle. E-bundles are easy to do and even easier to download. Storybundle and Humblebundle have both been making big strides in this area. Kobo lets you bundle your books, I found out in talking to Mark Lefebvre from Kobo last weekend at the Nebulas.
Here’s what you get beside the brand new version of Creating an Online Presence:
The Rational Writer, Nuts and Bolts by Mindy Klasky
Weinberg on Writing – The Fieldstone Method by Gerald M. Weinberg
How to Make a Living With Your Writing by Joanna Penn
Heinlein’s Rules – Five Simple Business Rules For Writing by Dean Wesley Smith
How to Negotiate Anything – Freelancer’s Survivor Guide by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Stages of a Fiction Writer by Dean Wesley Smith
Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel by Lawrence Block
Business For Breakfast Vol 2.: The Beginning Professional Publisher by Leah Cutter
The Writer’s Business Plan: A Plain English Guidebook by Tonya D. Price, MBA
Part of the success of such bundles is using online marketing like this very blog post. So please — help me out by spreading the word of this excellent bundle (which might make a great graduation gift for a new writer) and its contents.
6 Responses
>>I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments):
One thing I found pretty helpful are the Hugo nominated stories featured in audio over at Escapepod.org. Save the .mp3’s to your player of choice and listen on your way to work / school / date / etc. Another great audio fiction site is of course is The Drabblecast at http://www.drabblecast.org. They have some fantastic features.
If you want to be mega-cool, try transcribing some of your favorite stories to screen or paper. Peace & love.
I absolutely agree with that – one of the things I keep is a notebook where I copy out passages from stories and novels that I really love. It’s part of how I try to figure out how the author’s achieving the effect (and how I might use it.)
Timed writing was great. I can’t believe I haven’t tried that before. I went through one of my collections last night and read the first three paragraphs of each story and was surprised to see how well they fit the pattern you discussed. I’ll do a few line edits on one of my short stories tonight and get it sent over to you. I’m really enjoying the class!
Awesome! Thank you for volunteering for the first workshop.
And yeah, once you catch onto that first three paragraph thing, you realize how much the good stories are packing in there.
I just e-mailed you my story for the workshop.
I really enjoyed the class last night! The timed writing was fantastic.
Thanks! I missed the part where you talked about the first three paragraphs and what they do. Is there any way I can get caught up to speed on that?