The biggest revelation in recent weeks has been the inception of the Facebook group that was, I admit, a bit of an after-thought. We have 668 members after just 17 days and what is really interesting is that having been contacted by my old author friend, Boris Starling, the introduction into his group of friends has taken us into a world-wide network of Authors, other publishers, editors, retail book sites and general literary people. This is very encouraging and I feel it potentially could give the site the deserved boost it needs into a completely new market-place.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=118551254829944

The Literary competition is now well and truly under starter’s orders and with Sir Tim Rice joining our judging panel; I hope some publicity will be forthcoming in the next few weeks. Our Press Release goes out this week.

As I mentioned earlier we have a number of new books waiting in the wings that will be coming out in the next few weeks and I hope that our new authors will continue to bolster our listings.

Sales are still a bit weak, but there are signs that the authors who promote their books hard are getting some results, so please continue to get the word out and one little tip I have picked up this week; if you have a Facebook account use your book cover as your profile picture.

Thank you all for your continued support and I am more confident than ever that eBooks time is coming sooner than you think.

Torquil

Sadasivan’s novels—three already published in ebook format--present you with the light you’ll badly long for when you find yourself inside some of the infinite dark tunnels in your life. Not only are they a far cry from escapist fantasy like Harry Potter, chick-lit, or striptease but also grounded on realities in life and empowered by a strong focused vision behind them of how best to lend a helping hand to those that need it but don’t know whom to turn to. Meet his sexually illiterate women, terrorists on the reform path, Islamic Banking missionaries, plucky women entrepreneurs, harpies and mentors! ‘Matto Grasso’ scenarios are commonplace in life, he remarks; so his novels guide you gracefully to the nearest glade on the wings of management science. Are you finding yourself in a hellhole? Befriend either Abu of Another Tequila Dawn (forthcoming) or Jimmy Singh, the Nobel Laureate of LEST. Just a housewife endowed with the urge to excel on your own? Get acquainted with Ms Visalam of E=MC Square and emerge a winner for life through sheer entrepreneurial spunk! Are you simple-minded but personally ambitious to make it out on your own? Enroll at the clubs of either Blotchy Basheer or that of “Salma Mohamed” in Another Tequila Dawn! Puzzled by the spiritual imponderables of life? Follow John Ayanikkadan of Another Tequila Dawn! Are you a temperamentally reflective daydreaming teenager? Meet Susie the banker-cum-globe trotter on the magic carpet of her imagination! Without a Drop of Blood seeks to reverse an injustice but also enlightens you about women empowerment routes. Every one of Sadasivan’s heavily-researched, authentic and extremely info-taining novels charts a somewhat parabolic and at times tortuous route through clutter and puddles to a sunlit elevated ground at its end. Everyone is based on life in India too. The darkest hour in life comes for many a character—just as in your and my lives-- just before he/she revels in a prayed-for dawn. The personae in his fiction either upgrade themselves through conscious effort on a cue, or first expiate for the evil they’ve done, realize their potential and then grow great. Climb your intellectual and emotional Everests with Sadasivan’s characters—or opt to dive into abysses of dull realities also along with them safely. Laugh along with his characters(They laugh at themselves too);listen to them as they make you sit and ponder on the deep mysteries of life, death, and redemption, faiths and religions or marital glitches, dreams, and the tenets that hold true at all times! All classes of life’s great drama coalesce in his stories and all religions too; he has malice towards none and a good natured consideration for all! Miraculous coincidences, the generation of moral force through stints of collective meditation, verbal and situational ironies also stud these works at times. His works also have a poetic fragrance about them inasmuch as much as he uses either poetic excerpts or uses own compositions, including verses from Sanskrit. He also exposes the fallacies, false ‘gods’, imponderable myths, lore and legends of India for what they are worth! Another lesson you imbibe from his oeuvre is that narrow domestic walls like caste, community and sectarian mindsets don’t hold water when it comes to love and marriage! Squirrel Village-about an actual Indian village full of burglars and robbers—is his passion at the moment. Welcome to this elevating world of self improvement through fiction mode. Get your passport and visa from his London publisher: www.abook2read.com.

Trevor Chesterfield

Not only are British and American literary agents egotists and snobs, they take pleasure in being rude as well. Not all of them of course, but the majority that I approached during a two year period lacked the courtesy of responding, or if they did found a list of excuses, why they didn’t want to look at your work, or even a synopsis of your efforts. There is this impression that the large majority take pride in responding in the nastiest way possible without quite descending to the use of expletives, but they would have done that as well if they could get away with giving you the metaphorical middle-finger.

You would not mind so much if the excuses were genuine. But after fifty-four years as a journalist, more than half of which has been spent covering cricket around the globe – a job which a friend once accused me of being a paid loafer – and having from time to time met a few literary agents who cheerfully extolled their abilities and virtues with a multitude of ‘Just call, I’m there to help you,’ their sneering responses when eventually seeking assistance came as a nasty surprise.

It ran from, ‘Sorry old boy, too busy. Try next year,’ or ‘I’m far too busy to read even a line of your silly synopsis. Don’t bother me again,’ to ‘How did you get this email address. Anyway, publishers want big names and just who **** are you to bother me?’ and ‘If you slip me a couple of hundred I’ll get around to you in a month or so . . . My account is with – Bank and the number is --’ have been the run of the mill reactions and rejections.

In early 2007, when hit with a sudden illness, boredom set in. You can do so much reading; watching television as well as DVDs. Being creative was the answer. What I did next was have my daughter hunt for some typewritten MSS in an old trunk, and post them to me. The result is five novels of a romantic genre, but there is a lot more to them than that.

I began to first transcribe the books from the old typed MSS to a special file on my PC and found much of the old enjoyment of writing return. Earning a living through writing as a journalist does give you that feeling you can achieve something better. And as each novel was input, there was the realisation how my writing style had changed when these were written between 1978 and 1983. It meant a need to give freshness to the stories and bring the characters to life again, in some cases, a radical approach.

The first novel, “Hello Again . . .” had been an old favourite. As my dear Sri Lankan wife began to read the typewritten pages, there was surprise. She suddenly found that the mad cricket aficionado and writer (Cricket is life . . . what comes next are mere details etc motto) she had in a fit of sympathy decided to marry, could write about other subjects. Okay, it does help if, having travelled and being involved in a variety of scary events such at Vietnam, a fractious Cyprus in 1963, South Africa and anti-apartheid movement and protests, as they enable you to immerse yourself in local society and try to understand what is going on and why.

Three publishers approached through the internet were just as bad as the literary agents, as they wanted me to pay for the book to be published, or the so-called ‘vanity plan’ and grab two-thirds of the profits of your cerebral labours. With the sums asked to publish way out of reach, it fell to doing a search in early June for a genuine publisher. All this changed when I came across an eBook publisher, www.abook2read.com and enquired about “getting published”.

I had heard about, but not seen an eBook publishing site but had no experience of them, yet I was intrigued and took a wild chance, writing a note thinking “Yes – that will be the last I will hear of this lot” yet continued to revise the novel “Hello Again . . .” . This is because my wife felt it was worth publishing, as she loved the story with its “tastes and smells of London” as she put it.

When Torquil Riley-Smith, head honcho of Life of Riley Productions Limited, emailed me back with a positive response, the enthusiasm which had begin to wane, returned and after reading through the novel on the top of the pile, thought that maybe abook2read.com might give me a chance. As was the case when I did the first draft way back in 1969, the novel is written in present tense and a difficult style to sustain for so long. But the reader who looked over the book was most helpful with suggestions and the end result is something which suddenly makes you realise that all the hours spent inputting the old material and revising it is worth it. I know it would have made my father happy. He didn’t live to see any of the cricket books I have written, but I would like to think how he knew that my enjoyment in writing would one day lead to something worthwhile outside the newspaper and new website world.

Don’t be shy. If you have the ability and creativity, you can put a story together for others to enjoy. And thanks to Torquil and eBook publishing, life has become a more entertaining challenge. It is like being part of a growing family and that gives you even a better feeling.
 

Here I shall impart a few trade secrets to help you do an awful lot of the drudgery that editors would have to do before they get down to the finer side of their work. Most of it will make common sense, I hope, and you could therefore cut their bill considerably. Also remember that Editors are a moody lot (so would you be with eye-strain day in day out) and each very covetous of their own particular style. In fact, no two may ever agree. I shall therefore only restrict this to what I find either makes a book more appealing and sometimes, forgive me, horribly irritating… Because the average computer spelling and grammar checks don’t belong in our business — and many recurring mistakes in your copy cannot be rectified using the ‘find and replace’ command without needing an extra reread to put correct ones back!

Remember, all of this applies to ebooks as well as normal books, and to unpublished authors as well as published.

And so, here is the Epistle on Editing according only to myself… LET ’EM BREATH! Readers need to breath — not only you and I, but all of us —

And there is nothing more frightful to me than to open a book and find the first paragraph almost a page long — and the second, and the third, ad nauseum.

I automatically get claustrophobic! And the first question I ask myself is not, ‘Does this author not know how to write?’ but rather, ‘Does he feel so Goddamn important that he has to lecture me?!’

Hopefully I have already shown visually in the paragraphs here and in the preceding chapters just how easily we can add a line-space between each new thought — The old way was to simply start a new line with the first word indented say three millimeters, but that, thank God, has generally fallen away — though your computer can do it quite easily without us ever thinking about it again.

And so our work is already starting to ‘breath’. Now let us go back to basics: A sentence is a single thought usually containing a subject, a verb and then an object — though anything goes today in Creative writing! Several of these thoughts are grouped together to form a larger concept within a paragraph — and I would like to recommend that no more than three or four sentences should be used per paragraph before distraction overtakes our reader. (Another advantage of this is that if the telephone or doorbell rings, or we take a long break, a reader can quite easily relocate to their last place without having to reread through a ‘jungle of words’!)

Similarly, a number of paragraphs can be grouped into a section connecting various concepts together or, as in a novel, all incidents occurring simultaneously in the same place, relative to the same people at the same moment. The preceding and following sections may be totally different concepts in every way. I like to separate these sections by three line spaces, as above, finding that only two would not be sufficient to jerk the reader out of any comatose staring at letters.

I also then like to group a number of sections into a subsection with a heading if the book allows me — so as to create intrigue as to what is coming next.

Otherwise I just let section follow section till I have said everything I need to say on that particular subject… Then I create a new chapter — and the standard here is to start a new page to tell our reader to breakaway from the old thought because we are on a new tack.

Whether we start with just a number like ‘Chapter Two’ or a heading like ‘2. Deuteronomy’ is up to each of us, but again we may want to drop a few line-spaces at the top of the page before opening up with our copy. This really heralds our new thought, especially when the last chapter ended at the very bottom of the preceding page — and we don’t want to include a whole blank page to confuse our friends, or to waste money.

And so we are being more reader-friendly in a very subtle way and they feel more comfortable, believe me.

INVERTED COMMAS

Perhaps a lot of us were sick when teacher gave us lessons on quotation marks. Maybe we just weren’t paying attention, but a lot of confusion abounds when we want to express someone’s spoken words: I still rather like the old ‘66/99’ way (“ and ”) of starting and ending the interjection, simply because anything quoted within the quotes were shown by ‘6/9’ (‘ and ’) and, of course apostrophes pop up constantly, like:

John said, “My mother’s comment. ‘Don’t go.’ didn’t mean you should stay!”

But today the standard seems to dictate the 6/9 combination throughout — at least in the English language! Having said that, however, there is another editor’s nightmare, which I fight with constantly (not because I am opposed to it but that I simply often don’t see the logic of it) and that is in the use of punctuation immediately preceding the first inverted comma, thus: He said, ‘Don’t do that!’ And I battle to always put it there be it a comma or sometimes a colon (:) as often occurs in the Bible.

Why? So I have established my own parameters, based on the numerous books I have read on Grammar, who all religiously follow the above, but I also drop the comma where it is, for example, a title of a book, like: William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. I have also found it quite pleasurable particularly in a long novel with lots of pages filled with Roman type (upright letters) to put all spoken words in Italics (slanted letters) if only to break the monotony.

See this as only a personal choice, please. Of course, if I do not feel that a two or three word inverted comma case arises in context, like: This theory, known as ‘The Archimedes’s Principle’ is…, then I keep the Roman type to show that it is not spoken.

Even more confusion arises at the end of a quotation (and the end of brackets) where to put the punctuation: And here the basic rule is to keep within and preceding the 99 (”) be it a comma, full stop, question mark, whatever. Then close the quote with your 99 and follow straight on with a lowercase letter, unless the next word is a Proper Noun, like: ‘Thanks a lot.’ John said — as opposed to: ‘Nothing doing!’ was the general consensus. Only if the quotation is within a sentence, as shown right here, the full stop comes after the ‘9’. Or the ).

COMMAS, COLONS AND SEMI-COLONS

Here I must have definitely been asleep in class for this lesson, like I am sure were most of you, because no matter how often it has been explained to me I am still quite confused: Basically, they all represent pauses where a comma counts for a quick one ‘something’ while a semi-colon counts for two and a colon for three — and a full stop for a long four!

But also a semi-colon can also separate thoughts within the same phrase, often as a substitute for the words ‘and’ or ‘but’, like: ‘Running for pleasure; racing for money’ While a colon, as you often see herein, can indicate a demonstration coming up or can precede a list, like: ‘I need you to get: carrots, potatoes, onions, peas and pumpkin.’ I know in my subconscious when to use them, but you should research into more erudite publications if you want to master their differences.

IN A NUTSHELL

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of both a dictionary and a thesaurus as you write. It shouldn’t be an editor’s job to correct words like ‘there’ and ‘their’ or ‘bare’, ‘bear’ or ‘beer’! But it is his job to look out for ambiguities and confusions that the author may be unaware of or overlooked, like: ‘He said that he should look after their cats while they’re away’. Who? Who? And whose?

Editors, need I repeat, generally expect to have to read a book three times:

• To get the feel of the book, correct any glaring errors, juggle chapters et cetera to make more sense and recommend dropping some parts and adding or enhancing others. In other words, ensuring a better flowing plot with reader-friendliness.  It is an essential part of our work and can easily be chargeable at £5 upward per page for this stage. (The book may then be returned to the author for correction before coming back.)
• The second stage is to fine-tune — often starting with a professional spell-checker program and then tweaking word by word and correcting grammar etc. as we go along. This can cost another £2 a page.
• The final run-through — often printed out in its entirety — is very intensive and thorough and should have neither interruptions nor boredom from ‘watching the same movie’ three times in a row. Yawn! And this normally costs a further £1.50p a page.

A lot of this can and should be done by yourself and/or a friend upfront before submission and can mean not only a cheaper quotation from an Editor but also a more readily accepted and approved work from the book or ebook publisher.

Everything herein, without exception, is important to those who want to progress without causing undue irritation to others — especially if they are paying you — so please show empathy from the outset and never submit half-baked manuscripts thinking conceitedly that we should be grateful with open arms — Remember that when we have waded through your book so many times, we have another dozen still to handle!

Don’t give up! Enjoy writing. God bless.

GETTING YOUR BOOK TO SELL ITSELF By John R Berry (johnberry@telkomsa.net) Editor and bestselling life-coach author of “The Game of BEATING A MANIPULATOR” and “FREELANCERS’ FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS” both published and available from www.abook2read.com

Open any real book and shortly after its title page you will find another dedicated solely to the author’s copyright and other legalistics that need to be spelt out clearly.

YOUR COPYRIGHT

Copyright is the easiest of all rights that a creative person can apply — and it is absolutely FREE — unlike patents and other means of protection.

Just how much safety it gives us is debatable in the light of plagiarism not only on the Internet — but at least, it acts as a forewarning to those with an ounce of decency in them — and it adds professionalism to our works. Simply put a ‘c’ in a circle (there is a key stroke for it on your computer — on the Mac it is alt + G) followed by your name and initials (if there are lots of folk with your name) and then the year (also the month if your concept is so revolutionary that you need be more specific) thus: ©John Doe December 2009. And that is it.

And copyright is yours and your estate’s for fifty years after your death. But note: If we are commissioned to do work by a publisher, be it artwork or documentation, and are paid for it, we have no right to such personal copyright per sé.

I have often had to explain to them in writing that my distinctive cartooning style, for example, cannot be taken away from me but that they are purchasing the rights to freely publish — and they have willingly accepted that without argument.

Honestly, though, many publishers have nevertheless gone ahead and added their own copyright codicil upfront anyway, much to an author’s chagrin — but, as far as I am concerned, I would rather get more work from them later than lose their account because I am being so ‘awkward’ — Besides, I couldn’t afford a lawyer to argue my point! It would however get ‘up my nostril’ if they deliberately removed and replaced my protection with their own!

But that is usually only discovered after they have gone to print and it would cost everyone a fortune to rectify it!

So let it go or write them your dissatisfaction just in case something may, if ever, come of it.

YOUR ‘ISBN’ NUMBER

‘ISBN’ stands for ’International Standard Book Number’ and means that your work is registered for all time under its title, genre and author’s name and address, and sometimes even your publisher’s details, in international archives — and is of great value to bookstores and libraries when someone asks for it particularly.

Every country has its own National Library register, generally in its capital city, and their telephone’s Directory Enquiries should be able to find it easily for you, whence the whole process can be conducted telephonically and your number provided instantly.

These days, that same number needs to also be registered, again freely, with your local bar-coding authority linked to the EAN International headquarters in Brussels — especially if you hope to have printed publications in future. And again this can be given telephonically usually with one or two codes added to your ISBN number — and any printer of note will be able to create the barcode for you where needed.

FURTHER SAFEGUARDS

The last bit of small print we see in all books is that paragraph about ‘All characters are fictitious blah, blah…’ and we may be frightened into thinking we need pay a lawyer to set it out properly for us. But for a newcomer to the writing industry you can easily create your own by checking out a few of your own similar type books on your bookshelf and lay out your own preconditions.

After all no one is going to pay too much attention to it if they are more interested in the essence of your book. (I did have one rookie author complain that I had copied his verbatim with minor changes, but simply told him to go ‘get a life!’) In it list any new words and concepts you may have invented and feel like protecting as your own, and make sure that any real living, or dead, persons’ names have been sufficiently changed within your copy as not to be identifiable, unless they are so well known and related to such an incident as to imply otherwise would only make you look stupid.

And, of course, be very careful how you describe their notoriety with such compassion and understanding that you can’t be hit with a lawsuit for slander or libel!

And so, with this one page of legal bumph we can both protect ourselves, hopefully, and also give the impression that we are professional. It doesn’t take much effort and may afford you a little bit more of the marketshare that is rightfully yours.

Go for it and add it yourself, not at the end of the book but immediately after your title page — Don’t rely on the publisher to do it — it may not turn out the way you want it!

By the way, all this applies to ebooks as much as traditional printed books.

GETTING YOUR BOOK TO SELL ITSELF By John R Berry (johnberry@telkomsa.net)

Editor and bestselling life-coach author of “The Game of BEATING A MANIPULATOR” and “FREELANCERS’ FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS” both published and available from www.abook2read, leading ebook publisher

Together they need a lot of preplanning and dreaming about. And they go hand in hand — The title can often set the entire tone of our ebook from which the concept is derived or, in some cases, we may have the concept already established but cannot think of a really catchy name.

What do I mean? My ‘Beating a Manipulator’ book is more about my ‘Three S Formula’ than about being bullied, and I was going to call it just that: ‘The 3S Formula of Emotionology’. But it didn’t have ‘oomph’ and I was stuck for a long time just working on its title. But meanwhile I knew exactly what I intended to say. It was only after I had finished my umpteenth draft I realized that it was also a ‘Game’ and I needed to emphasize that — so I re-edited the whole thing in a new and much brighter light! And I added ‘or How to baffle a Bully!’ in smaller capitals for those folk who would need a dictionary just to interpret the cover! Having eventually gotten the essence of its new image I then put the same concept back together around the Manipulation angle — and the rest is history…

But it can also be the other way round, particularly in novels and fiction where we find the heading hidden, three-quarters way through our already finished manuscript, in a subtle twist that is just staring us in the face. Maybe not! Sometimes it takes an editor, proofreader or even a cover designer to offer a better suggestion and I have known many an author to give a big hug to the third party for their brilliant suggestion — I mean who would have thought ‘Great Expectations’ would have ever been a suitable title for Dickens’ most popular classic romance?

GETTING OFF THE GROUND

We need to be flexible as we mull these two facets around in our oft-restricted brains. They can make or break our story before we get any further. We need mind-power! I also find, being a Graphic Artist in the first place, that the cover needs a slogan or précis accompanying its heading much like a company’s logo in signage, letterhead and business card do — A take-away outlet called ‘Deli-delicious’ added a slogan ‘Food for People!’ and trebled their flow of traffic overnight. A restaurant in front of a theatre changed its name from the ‘The Green Room’ (a familiar term for the rehearsal area) to ‘The Red Room’ and also improved its trade — though the subtlety of colour may have been lost on its patrons and its psychological appeal to the juicy succulent steaks as opposed to crispness of vegetables was awesome! .

So in thinking of how to start, try also to summarize your concept down to a simple catchphrase, slogan or précis of your message — and the rest will follow naturally.

At the same time remember that in literary and theatrical jargon the term ‘comedy’ means the book has a happy ending while ‘tragedy’ means a sad one. Rather include the word ‘humorous’ if you hope someone will find it hilarious! But most won’t! Then we may find that the title now has more significance than the concept, and we also need to break it down from ten words to no more than four or five so that it flows off one’s tongue more easily, hopefully… Yes, there are book titles like mine and Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ and ‘How to stop Worrying and start Living’ which are much longer — but, believe it or not, they very soon rolled off everyone’s tongue and have become household in their entirety.

Both his titles are succinct and define exactly where he intended taking us. Whether he thought them up before starting writing may never be known, but I do know that his first book title was even longer with bigger words and that its new title using ‘win’ instead was suggested by his first jacket designer if only to squeeze the whole mouthful into a restricted space!

Getting past the title is a massive advancement, as I have said — But again we must use our consideration and think of the overall effect such a title may have on less educated folk like the bookstore staff: I have often found books on cooking and embroidery in the woodworking and handyman section because their titles started with ‘How to…’ and others on business accounting in amongst the novels!

Incidentally, anything under 120 000 words, or two hundred pages, is a short story and over, say, 180 000 is a mammoth epistle. Similarly, any page size under A5 (105 x 298 mm.) stands the chance of being pilfered off the shelf!

Likewise keep in mind the ‘teaser’ (which comes on the back of paperback covers and book jackets). Sometimes we may even write that upfront — but it is often better to get a third person to do it for us afterwards. (And book reviews, believe it or not, are generally written by the authors themselves under fictitious names with fanciful degrees and titles. Or, if they are very lucky, are solicited from a good friend in exchange for a bottle of whiskey!)

SETTING OUT OUR CONCEPT

There are many ways of starting out and what I have found easy may being extremely hard for someone else, but I offer this to those who really are stuck… Contrary to what I intimated in my previous chapter ‘Understanding the Market’ we cannot just sit down and start churning out page after page until ‘writers’ block’ kicks in. We need to format our attack:

Whether we layout our thoughts, or more likely our chapters, in a list form – and then apply numbers to each, correcting our intended sequence or reformatting our layout — or we use the ‘Spider diagram*’ layout now recommended in most schools, we need to establish some sequence of readability so that our readers don’t jump haphazardly back and forth and have to piece together events that are related, say, geographically whereas we felt they were better in a time sequence.

(* Spider diagrams are those where we put our central thought, heading or theme in a circle in the middle of a blank sheet of paper and then extend lines out to what I call ‘suburban’ subcategories which, in turn, each have their lesser ideas appended — and the author then composes their book around this visual chart.)

I recall Arthur Haley’s book ‘Airport’ and many of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books where one minute we were sharing moments with the hero and the next sharing ‘meanwhile moments’ occurring somewhere completely alien — and then we are back swashbuckling with our maestro swag…

These were expertly and harmoniously intertwined by authors with tremendous experience and they succeeded, but we may not be quite as agile as those authors — not just yet.

Another very effective technique is to start a story, or even a part of one, in the middle or at the end, just to set the mood like, ‘Jim Fish awoke in a dimly lit room as the male nurse was replacing the saline drip…’ and then proceed to explain how he ended up hospital in the first place.

If we can simply whet our reader’s appetite by creating intrigue upfront, through our juggling of our concept, then we must do it in spite of any time warp or geographical relativity.

Plan your attack precisely and don’t be scared to try new approaches. There are many books on how to do this and I strongly recommend you collect a few that really detail writers’ trade secrets. There are also magazines like the ‘Writers’ Digest’ that provide dynamic clues if only in piecemeal chunks.

ADD A BIT OF SPICE!

And while we are juggling our layout, be it fiction or not, let’s work on our characters and really give them distinguishable personalities from bubbly buxom wenches to down-and-out car-guards and ever-so pompous retired Sapper Colonels based upon sundry fellows from our own lives. But make each one very different from the others and dress them accordingly.

Liberally sprinkle your work with their dialogues be they all Soufafrican, Yanks or Brummy.

Change their dialogues with literary licence, knowing your real-life models may actually only speak Queen’s English but in your book have a gorgeous Cockney lilt (because you experienced some ‘cor blimey’ moments while in London) or a fine Italian nuance of ‘Howa you say?’ English.

Have fun!

And ninety-eight percent of books are written around personal experiences of their authors, though highly embellished for effect — and often include Creative Writing of places they have actually visited.

One beautiful thing about our being able to read, as opposed to watching a movie, is that we can each paint our own scenarios in our minds without having to look at someone else’s interpretations of them. However, I have read many books where it is blatantly obvious that the author is cheating and pretending that they know a place when all they had done was to research the internet and encyclopedia. (I particularly also impart this fact to my art students based upon my own mother who was a dabbler in both oils and acrylics. She painted the most beautiful aloes and cacti from our African garden together with reflected lights and shades and subtle distinguishing growth patterns, but was then commissioned to paint a fishing boat coming into harbour from a postcard, and I looked at it (as her constructive critic only) and remarked, “But it looks like it’s plonked on the water — Where are the worn out rigging, the scratched hull, the torn sail and dripping nets? You obviously have never been out to sea on a trawler!”

Neither have I, but I needed to then merely observe her inexperience by just looking at it!)

And don’t go defusing a bomb when you have never worn military gear nor been to war nor been scared silly in a dug out!

Experiences and places need to have been lived in and NOT dreamt up. N’est pas! Keep to what you know, please — or really research deeply — which can cost us mega-bucks and time — Already-famous authors pay others generously for this service.

ROMANCE AND ‘HOW’S-YOUR-FATHER’!

Literature is pretty liberal with creative enlightenments hidden within those pages and one is often left feeling that half the authors don’t know how to do it (!) in the first place — be they straight or gay!

However, there are a few things that really B-O-R-E me to tears — and I am sure I am not alone: The first are those porn movies where some half-baked actor knocks up half a dozen sluts within an hour with as much aplomb as a dog humping a cushion! Are they promoting STD’s and AIDS? Has he got infinitesimally more stamina (not to mention panache at quickie pick-ups) than you and me? Has he any idea where he’s aiming that thing?

And half the fun of the chase is in the conquest — not in dropping our underwear at the ‘drop of a hat’! The second is in dialogues that are filled with every profanity and sexual innuendo, intended either to wrongly appeal to the reader or showing off the author’s knowledge of a few choice words. It does neither — as swearing (to me anyway) simply reveals someone’s utter frustration and nothing else.

Use such words and phrases only when you really need them — like in a damn good argument! And thirdly are those novels that build up to a crescendo getting us overly excited as their couples head for the bedroom and literally close the door on us.

Fizzle pop — What a damp squib! Next page we are back riding a gondola in Venice on a sunny day — fait accompli! Sis man! Who tore out those pages?!

Men enjoy Hustler®, or rather looking at the pictures, whereas women delight in Mills and Boone books. Authors should read a few of their books to get a feel of what literally turns them on. We may well be shocked!

There we find lengthy love scenes filled with ‘knights in shining armour’ (Have you ever made love in a tin can?) and ‘maidens in distress’ and four or five pages of passion, electrified emotions, vivid descriptions of gentle caressing and kissing and explosive climaxes. No wonder ladies, young and old, prefer to take a book to bed!

Remember that love is not about ‘what can I get?’ but about ‘the more we give the more we get back’ applicable as much to men and women alike! Because love-making in books is neither salacious (look it up in the dictionary!), about banging away like a pneumatic drill nor wimping around in the hopes of getting lucky, but more about strong gentlemanly and masterful control, empathy, soft touches and stroking and in holding out.

We must help our readers share the same compassions and every precious moment with our heroines and revel in page after page of foreplay and sheer ecstasy for them no matter how prudish we may feel about being so explicit nor how our own spouses may feel about our innermost revelations. Get your ‘creative juices’ boiling over with every stroke (!) — I knew one man whose wife threw down his book in disgust with something that went like, ‘Lucky bitch, I wish you would do that to me sometimes!’ And he did! Need I say more?…

PUT IT ALL TOGETHER

Let us feel your emotions with you; let us get into your shoes and walk the distance with you; let us laugh and cry and share that bout of Swine Flu or prison or even being raped, if you must, with you — like it was us, ourselves inside your ‘picture’. Know that folk briefly stare at malformed others — and enjoy ‘ain’t it awful’ stories and urban legends — not out of intrigue, disgust, utmost sympathy nor heartfelt compassion but rather in thanking God wondering how they would ever handle such an infliction upon themselves!

Let your mind flourish and overflow as you churn out your work — and the more you expand your horizons the more we, your readers, will relate and eagerly climb inside your pages anticipating your every next moment with glee.

And twist and turn and add surprises and a sting in the tail and you’ll be assured of becoming a well-read author. And keep a dictionary close at hand — and a Thesaurus to add sparkle or to prevent over-working the same word or phrase to death!

Need I repeat that readers’ word of mouth can still be our greatest ally or our worst enemy!

GETTING YOUR BOOK TO SELL ITSELF By John R Berry (johnberry@telkomsa.net)

Editor and bestselling life-coach author of “The Game of BEATING A MANIPULATOR” and “FREELANCERS’ FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS” both published and available from www.abook2read, leading ebook publisher

This opening chapter then is simply to introduce you to a few details without too much elaboration — That will come in later chapters…

WHAT IS A BOOK?

Books have been around for a long time even before the invention of the printing press. Our Bible was written on papyrus and transcribed individually by dedicated penmen. But it was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that more freedom was afforded novelists, politicians and theorists to literally publish anything they liked. And believe me a lot has not survived the test of time.

Only the Classics and those books teachers made us read and a multitude of manuscripts hidden away in archives remain for our enlightenment today.

And books come in all forms — Even those classified as ‘Fiction’ can be further subcategorized into numerous divisions like Science Fiction and Romance and ‘Non fiction’ into Technical and ‘How to do’ or ‘Idiots’ Guides’. And there are always readers who enjoy one type and not the other.

So our first priority is to determine our TARGET MARKET and then to write with it constantly in our mind.

“WHY SHOULD I READ YOUR BOOK?”

• Firstly, we need something to say — Something totally unique applicable to ourselves and nothing plagiarized nor adapted (readers will spot our folly a mile away!) There are lots of folk who will read anything just for the pleasure of it, but then will pick up the next book or magazine or brochure with the same intensity and our message will be blown away with the wind!
• Then we need to indulge in ‘Creative Writing’ and flower-up descriptions as we see them, be it a rainstorm or a magnificent mountain: I have just edited two books for www.abook2read.com where the one author visited the Equator in Uganda and saw a mind-boggling demonstration of water draining away clockwise on one side of it and anticlockwise on the other!

The other book took me to Antarctica where it described how in summer the sun was constantly at the 8 am position and he could traverse all 360°s longitude around the South Pole in minutes. I delighted in both books — Such is the joy of being able to read!

I will never be able to afford to visit either of those places but someone else has taken me there and I have shared their experience through ‘Creative writing’.

CHOOSING A LANGUAGE

Fortunately for some and unfortunately for others, English has pretty well become the preferred universal language for first editions (though many may disagree) and only later will their translations become available if demanded.

• But English is not everyone’s mother tongue, and this is where a good editorial service can help get your book out to a wider market. Editing and proofreading are expensive from £2 upwards per A4 page — i.e. often less than a penny per line but still a lot cheaper than playing golf every weekend! But remember that nothing is more deluding to a reader than a poorly written script.
• Realize too that while you, the author, can read your manuscript in a matter of hours (knowing what comes next) your readers may take up to a week to get through it with all sorts of distractions in between — And our eyes also often have to reread simple phrases and sentences before we grasp what you are trying to say!
• So ensure your publisher recommends a good and dedicated service that goes beyond just dotting the ‘i’s’ and crossing the ‘t’s’ nor one who wants to juggle your paragraphs and chapters until their final version is nothing like what you intended — unless, of course, it is for the better! NOTE: Editing is a profession with prescribed text and marginal notations, and each has their own style; whereas ‘test reading for acceptability’ can be easy pocketmoney for anyone interested!
• And remember that a lot of changes are usually ‘invisible’ to the author and their polite friends — There may be anywhere from just two to, say, thirty corrections on a page and unless we compare word-for-word we will not notice them! Spell-checkers are fine for business correspondence and love- letters but not for that highly critical public who have paid for ‘Good English’. Kapishe! An editor needs to read a book three times on average: to get the idea, then to correct sequence, spelling, grammar and readability and finally to check punctuation and minor glitches! Each is an important stage.
• With e-mail today we can trade one-to-one for such services anywhere in the world and not just close by, and are able to electronically transfer money to them literally overnight (though it may take a fortnight for verification) — provided that such services are proven trustworthy and conscientious. Work with industry standards like the Word® program with either Times or Arial/Helvetica fonts and ask for a free tester of the first couple of pages. And then you may have to put down a 50% deposit.

SO MUCH TO PAY OUT AND SO LITTLE REWARD FOR SO MUCH WORK!

Here we need a rapid mindset change and not get angry every time we meet a new hurdle…

One appreciates that you have spent months dreaming up a plot, developing characters etcetera before actually putting finger to keyboard; that you have written and rewritten over and over and that you have even done some editing of a sort yourself. My Manipulation book took me over thirty years to research and compose draft after draft — my FAQ book took just two weeks to write and self-publish for a conference I was to attend — and has sold ten times faster than the first one!

(I have also, like many of you I am sure, often dreamt up many fantastic scenarios in the night only to awaken next morning to wonder what I was ever thinking or be able to decypher the squiggles I wrote down in my dazed state at the time!)

A lot of established authors start out in broad sensible daylight just setting down and churning out page after page before the dreaded ‘writers’ block’ kicks in, and then spend those next listless days adding and subtracting to get those pages in order — hoping the ‘fog’ will pass over and they can continue!

And then we find that our book is only marketable at, say, £3.50 each and the publisher wants to take most of it for just sitting there selling our product with apparently little or no input. Yeach!

But, now, look at it another way — The author of those ‘Chicken Soup’ books needed a million dollars and got a brainwave so he set to with his first edition and figured that the ‘Christian market’ was a gullible one (don’t think the same, it is already oversaturated!) and accepted that he would only get 12% return on each book — But multiply that by a hundred thousand copies and he got the million he needed. His books have sold infinitesimally more than that and he is laughing all the way to the bank!

BUT DON’T EXPECT MIRACLES THE MINUTE YOU PUBLISH

Folk are lazy unless we can get them enthused and excited, and few will look at a two hundred page book and want to be bothered having to wage through it. And that includes Publishers too, believe me.

NOTE: Be sure to approach only those publishers who specialize in or include your genre — or expect your package to be returned unopened!

Those pages may, and do, look innocent in bound form, but can also contain thousands of hidden thoughts and secrets, be they technical knowledge or the filthiest smut! We need to get folk to read them entirely, and not just scan, and readers’ word-of-mouth is one of our greatest allies — or our worst enemy!

Paperback publishers’ in-trays are notoriously piled high and, despite promises, our manuscripts can be easily overlooked forever!

• We have to break folks’ Emotional Barriers and entice them to choose our book over all the millions of others out there. And this is where our ‘Powers of Persuasion’ play a big part.
• Without elaborating on later getting the best artist for the cover, the best editor for the contents and the best marketer for the promotion, let me, at this stage, just elaborate upon the importance of widening your target market. Neither Wilbur Smith nor T.K.Rowlings nor most authors do all this other work themselves and rely upon publishers and specialists to help them — but at a price.
• A book on photographic techniques, for example, or ballet, or even a romantic novel will each only appeal to about one percent of their own total markets — We need to expand that to encompass a much larger share of would-be buyers and gear our brains into writing for that greater readership market. We also encounter the problem that readers often freely lend their favorite books out to others who then forget to return them and pass them on and on to others — or sell them to secondhand bookshops and bazaars!
• Likewise realize that a topical subject of only immediate interest has a very limited shelf life — A book on Hilary Clinton’s Presidential race in 2008, for example, would hit the bookstores’ paper-shredders faster than yesterday’s newspaper — but may still be found in better libraries where they were donated freely!

PUBLISHING IS NOT AN EASY WAY TO MAKE THAT EXTRA MONEY!

And so I end this diatribe hoping that I have at least enlightened you to a few of the problems you will encounter along the way. Some folk have been luckier than most, I’ll agree, but we must look at the world through readers’ eyes and realize that we authors are each trying to get just a tiny bit of an immense empire ruled by tin-gods for many centuries and here we come thinking that we are going to instantly knock their socks off. Life ain’t like that! And an upfront payment is often just a fallacy, being applicable only to the already rich and famous — and fictitious characters like in movies!

• But, I have good news! And here I commend folk like Torquil Riley-Smith and his www.abook2read.com who have opened doors for us to expose our works in e-books without those added costs of paper, minimum run of a thousand copies, distributors, book fairs and shelf-space in bookshops and their staff to handle the transactions.

NOTE: A pocket-size e-book is a convenience but your work can also be more easily read on any computer! Be a pioneer in a paradigm-shift that is growing rapidly!

• Piggyback on such sites, and check out their daily hits and visits, (your own individual website can easily get lost in Cyber debris without specific search-engine skills!) And don’t begrudge the small returns — Nor get onto a site that boasts over a thousand titles (you’ll be lost amongst all that ‘vanity rubbish’) and, please continue writing whatever comes to mind — rather with an attitude of self-gratification and passing time in your leisure hours than with a dream of ‘I am’ or ‘I will be’ nor picking a fight because ‘You weren’t whatever’ — Please prove me wrong!

My next chapter will be elaborating upon CONCEPT and TITLE and will show how to create that pizzazz needed at the outset. In the meantime practise Creative Writing even if it is only a few paragraphs at a time on a multitude of subjects — and get your friends to read and critique constructively.

GETTING YOUR BOOK TO SELL ITSELF

By John R Berry (johnberry@telkomsa.net)

Bestselling author and editor of

“The Game of BEATING A MANITPULATOR” and

“FREELANCERS” FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS”

both published and available from www.abook2read.com

A lot of folk turn to writing more as a pastime than as a profession and then get very disillusioned with rejection after rejection — and resort to self publishing or what is often known in the trade as ‘Vanity Publishing’ — only to discover that their many hours of work still isn’t selling.

Why? They have created several copies and distributed them freely amongst friends, who have all raved about the author’s ability — Are they just being ‘nice’ or do you have something really worth telling the world?

How is it that Wilbur Smith and J.K.Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, are amongst the bestsellers and pulling in the dollars faster than they can spend them? What of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain back in the Nineteenth Century? Have they never been rejected?

Yes — but they persevered — and the market proved them right!

But the trade secrets and the industry itself are very hallowed and only available to those who will not just lie down and die! We often think we are the only person to have done what we have — but over a million books are published yearly worldwide and a lot are still not read!

Publishers abound at a dime a dozen and need us authors to survive. Surely they should be grateful for our efforts?

In the next few months I will be producing various topics to assist you get a greater insight into what makes our work saleable under such headings as:

•  ‘Understand the Market’ will elaborate in depth about what people want to read — or preferably wait till the movie comes out! Today they even wait for it to be on television!
• ‘The Concept and Title’ will explain how to appeal to folks in subtle ways, expanding your target market and adding pizzazz. Then your book will sell more by word of mouth.
• ‘Paperbacks and Shops versus e-Books’ will give both sides’ advantages and drawbacks and the work they have to do behind the scenes,
• ‘The Cover and Whetting the Appetite’ will reveal subliminal techniques in getting viewers to seek more details. A few do’s and don’ts knowing the adage ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ may no longer apply,
• ‘Editing and Proofreading’ will discuss the advantages of these services no matter what the cost. A brilliant idea will not get past ‘first base’ if your execution is poor, and
• ‘Hidden Publishing and Distribution Costs’ will justify everyone else taking their little bit off the top and leaving us with peanuts. Yes, they can be justified even if we don’t like it!

These articles will appear here at www.abook2read.com over the next few months.

I have been there and done that myself — mostly to my detriment, I must add — but I trust that I have something here which will encourage you all to follow this column over the next few months and encourage you to communicate via johnberry@telkomsa.net letting me know if I have helped you or slam-dunking me if I haven’t.

By John R Berry (johnberry@telkomsa.net)

Bestselling author and editor of

“The Game of BEATING A MANITPULATOR” and

“FREELANCERS” FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS”

both published and available from www.abook2read.com

God bless and keep on writing. JRB §;0)