I've been home with my foot up dangling off the ceiling cerning books out on a consistent basis now.
Poor guy! Hope you feel better!
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Free registration at the forum removes this block.I've been home with my foot up dangling off the ceiling cerning books out on a consistent basis now.
Way to turn a bad thing into a good thing. Congrats, by the way, Pop. Better get those titles out in a hurry!I've been home with my foot up dangling off the ceiling cerning books out on a consistent basis now.
Hows your book coming along? I noticed your thread and was meaning to sub to it.
And that's pretty much what's happened to me. I work 2 jobs but as I focused on writing, freelance work came on its own out of nowhere. Even if it's just a brief project it's distracting, but it's okay because money calls. I just remember what the ultimate goal is.
Make your ONLY goal to be to provide books that people read and enjoy.
Money can't solve this.
Only the understanding of your existing financial habits and what needs to change (and then actually changing) will help.
If your house is on fire, you don't quickly build a bigger and bigger house to outrun the fire. You put out the fire first THEN you can rebuild while making sure you don't accidentally set the house on fire again.
(I don't know your situation, but the above to applies to the vast majority of North America, so excuse the generalization).
Ahh. Book is now live
Man, formatting the the novella in Apple's Pages was a pain in the a$$.
I enrolled in the free countdown special with kindle select just to get the ball rolling first with exposure.
Pumping out book number 2 now. Highly debating whether to continue the 2nd book as a sequeal to the first book or literally dive into another novella completely.
Hi. Congrats on getting started.
not to be a bore but:
1) I think a prerequisite of enroling in kdp select and doing free promos is that you can't have the book on any other platform (ie apple store). Please check this for your self.
2) also out interest are your books in English?
Well done with the progress. Best of luck
Not to emphasize what everyone has said already.
"You are writing for the reader, who is your ultimate gatekeeper. Get your work in front of them, even if it’s one at a time, one reader a month or year." Hugh Howey from My advice to aspiring authors
You've made a great start, so congratulations. Welcome to the club. Hope to see you post good progress regularly.
I try to sometimes plan ahead and outline, and plan in more detail than "this thing needs to happen at some point", but 90% of time my stories quickly get derailed :/ Or the outline just feels flat and lame, especially in comparison to the batshit crazy stunts my characters tend to pull on me... My writing speed is about 500 words/h which sucks.
But your point made me wonder. How much time did you spend outlining? Do you do it once ahead of the book, or separately for each scene?
First I spend time to outline the story . Literally brain dump all of my ideas out onto a piece of paper or on the computer into a page. The point is to just drop all the words and vomit it all into hard physical words .
After the outline is done, dialog is honed in. Not preciously exact but a general idea of what's going to be said.
I find that not being 100% specific in the outline has helped give my characters freedom to do what they want when the time comes. That way I'm not restricted to anything.
I guess I do a bit of that by doing a mind map, or planning out some key scenes up front, when I do try to follow some -act-ish structure. I find most of the time what my mind gives me is the ending, or an epic scene that precedes it. I like stories that have twists and unexpected endings, so I guess that's what comes to me naturally.
That's interesting, so essentially dialogues become part of your outline? I would find that hard, since often the dialogues hinge on there being an opening for a line. I sometimes have a running list of "still need to have these topics discussed by these characters" in my head. Maybe it's a matter of genre, but it can feel really infodumpy in epic fantasy, when your characters just go on explaining stuff "for hours". Recently I changed my minds three or so times as to in which scene to deliver some piece of information, because there seemed to be no good opener for it...
Oh, my outlines usually are very top level and unspecific. And that's sometimes the problem. I find that as I write a scene small details start to appear, or specific hints get dropped in the dialogue, that actually can completely change the course of the story. The dilemma is if I outline deep enough to research most of these ahead of time, it will be restricted and I would waste a lot of time, if I do stumble upon something that works better but requires scrapping half the existing outline. On the other hand a loose outline lends itself to even more of these changes :/
I guess these aren't very commercial either. I think I do have faster output with something that I'm less emotionally attached to, and that doesn't have a vast world already developed. A downside to a series, you have to make sure they're all consistent and timelines and characters align in all the books. Foreshadowing for book X, Y, and Z doesn't make writing faster either
I can vouch that It gets reeealllly easy to get side tracked without a definitive goal and ending of the novel at hand. We all want to add clues and spectacular endings and twists to make it the next best thought provoking novel.
Sometimes it's easier though to just get one idea and goal out of the way, keeping at it until we become masters at one particular ending. Once we accomplish that, is when I feel like we should be tossing in great works of artistic concepts
I feel this is an issue with determining the goals of the story. Make sure you outline the specific ending and what each character does to accomplish their tasks . It's easy to jump from idea to idea if you have no definitive goals that each character is suppose to complete.
They use Scrivener and other fancy tools. I simply don't have the income for that yet.
On other news, my first book had its first sale last night!
It sounds to me like you're writing a Sci-Fi book with vast worldly events.
I would love to work with you personally if you would like to! I feel that my stories could use some of your indepth-ness.
Hey Hicks,
About the KDP Select, yea it's officially kindle only. I might be wrong but it's only for 90 days I think? Not home to double checks
And yea my book is in English. Albeit, I was never the greatest English student in my classes in college, practice makes perfect
Just trying to supply a demand in the market is all.
Yeah, bouncing ideas of another person can lead to a lot more complex and creative stories. Especially if you have the right person that's ont he same wave length. I admit I am jealous sometimes of my sis who writes with her friend (they are co-authors under one pen name). Just their word counts are so much higher with two people typing But it also helps alleviate that fear of: "is this even making sense?"
Congrats on the sale! It really is a long term business, and those sales eventually do start adding up, even if they seem small at first or when looking at a single book. And 700 words in 30 min is a nice pace. Now you just need a few more of those 30min sessions
I just checked this. Indeed, the "content exclusively for kindle" limitation is for the first 90 days. This is what they call the "enrollment" period.
Question: do you guys suggest getting a cover paid for on Fiverr ? Or is it better off learning how to do it on my own ?
Whatever you can do to get the highest quality product is what I would do. If that's do-it-yourself, then do that. If that's fiver, then do that. If it's hire a professional designer, then do that.
Just figure out what's the best/most affordable way to get the highest quality packaging for your product.
I do my own, for right now, most because I'm a control freak and it's very, very cheap if you can do your own, but I also enjoy it.
Hmm that's cool. How do you do it on your own? Photoshop? Flickr creative licenses? Stock photos?
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