Carnival of Storytelling – November 3, 2011
Welcome to the November 3, 2011 edition of Carnival of Storytelling.
Yes, it was actually posted a little later than November 3. And that’s my fault. It’s also a little skimpy, and that’s also my fault.
Even so, thanks to everyone who submitted a link at BlogCarnival.com. Please browse their blog posts, and share your own favorite posts from across the Internet for the next edition.
Enjoy!
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Carnival of Storytelling – October 20, 2011
Welcome to the October 20, 2011 edition of Carnival of Storytelling.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a link at BlogCarnival.com. And thanks to all the bloggers who posted wonderful articles that I have hand-picked for the following list. Please browse their blog posts, and share your own favorite posts from across the Internet for the next edition.
Enjoy!
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Carnival of Storytelling – September 22, October 18, 2011
Carnival of Storytelling – September 22, October 18, 2011
Welcome to the Carnival of Storytelling.
Now that the summer break is over, to launch a new season, I’m catching up on editions of the Carnival of Storytelling. A lot of great links posted. And more coming up tomorrow and Thursday!
(UPDATE Oct 19: I didn’t understand how blogcarnival.com worked. After I posted this edition, it recomputed all the outstanding submissions into Thursday’s. So the next edition is on Thursday, and then we’re all caught up.)
Thanks to everyone who submitted a link at BlogCarnival.com. And thanks to all the bloggers who posted wonderful articles, which I have hand-picked for the following list. Please browse their blog posts, and share your own favorite posts from across the Internet for the next edition.
Enjoy!
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Carnival of Storytelling – August 11, 2011
Welcome to the August 11, 2011 edition of Carnival of Storytelling.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a link at BlogCarnival.com. And thanks to all the bloggers who posted wonderful articles, which I have hand-picked for the following list. Please browse their blog posts, and share your own favorite posts from across the Internet for the next edition.
Enjoy!
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Carnival of Storytelling – July 28, 2011
Welcome to the July 28, 2011 edition of Carnival of Storytelling.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a link at BlogCarnival.com. And thanks to all the bloggers who posted wonderful articles, which I have hand-picked for the following list. Please browse their blog posts, and share your own favorite posts from across the Internet for the next edition.
Enjoy!
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Self-Publishing for Fun and Profit
Photo © 2008 Quinn Dombrowski CC BY-SA 2.0
Click here for the original image.
In yesterday’s post, I distinguished between the “indie author” and the “self-published author.” A reader named Wendy commented, with a question.
This is a distinction that I originally got from Bob Baker, author of 55 Ways to Promote & Sell Your Book on the Internet. Bob got his self-publishing start with a book about indie music marketing, back in the mid-90′s. He told the story in a recent interview about self-publishing:
In 1996, I self-published the first crude version of the Guerrilla Music Marketing Handbook… one of the first books to advocate self-reliance and taking your music career into your own hands (as opposed to “getting signed” to a record label, which most music business books were all about back then).
My DIY perspective came in handy when the traditional music biz began to crumble around 2001. Before long, going the “indie” route became the way to go…
Eh. So the book industry is 10 years late.
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What the End of Borders Means for Authors
Photo © 2009 The Ewan CC BY 2.0
First of all, a clarification: when right-wingers talk about “closing the borders,” this isn’t what they mean.
The big news over the past week is that Borders Books is officially going out of business.
Book lovers have expressed grief and dismay. One Borders fan called it “a case of internet outsourcing.” He’s not too far off the mark. And this has been coming for a long time. (The photo above was taken a year and a half ago in Oxford.)
But Barnes & Noble continues to succeed, because there’s a difference between Borders and Barnes & Noble, a difference in how the two companies approached the book industry. Barnes & Noble has embraced the ebook—a little later than Amazon, but at least they did. Barnes & Noble has embraced online ordering. You can even special-order copies of my books at Barnes & Noble stores. And Barnes & Noble got the Starbucks deal, too. Barnes & Noble probably sells more coffee than books.
A friend recently asked me whether books would completely disappear. I had to correct her: ebooks are books, too. Now, I don’t think paper books will ever completely disappear. (That’s a different post.) However, ebooks present a number of advantages to authors, not only in what ebooks do for authors, but also in the market changes they portend.
Everyone keeps talking about the demise of the book industry, because people no longer buy books at bookstores. But if you include ebooks and online sales, the book industry is most certainly not dying. And if you include all reading of all online content, the writing industry is more active than ever. And the book industry is changing in ways that portend more and more good things for authors.
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Carnival of Storytelling – July 14, 2011
Welcome to the July 14, 2011 edition of Carnival of Storytelling.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a link at BlogCarnival.com. And thanks to all the bloggers who posted wonderful articles, which I have hand-picked for the following list. Please browse their blog posts, and share your own favorite posts from across the Internet for next week’s carnival.
Enjoy!
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A Sneak Peek at the Ardor Point #2 Outline
I’ve been working on-and-off on this outline for over a year and a half now. I could go down the list of excuses and reasons why it took so long. – And it’s still not “finished” yet, but I can’t stand it anymore, so I’ve started on the “zero-draft.”
I’d like to share with you my outline for the novel, and some stories around it, how I’m using my process on this novel. I’m hoping this will give you some ideas or inspirations for the story you’re working on.
The Summary
The process I follow starts with a one-sentence summary of the story, as many writers do. My original sentence went like this:
A newlywed bride, at a romantic, seaside cottage on her first wedding anniversary, as the onset of economic depression threatens to tear her marriage apart, finds joy.
I didn’t really like that. Too vague. Too blasé. Too blech. But it was enough to keep me focused on what I wanted the story to be about.
However, I revamped the sentence when I started the zero-draft. Here’s how it stands now:
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More about Book Covers
Photo © 2005 Jenn Calder CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Click here for the original image.
Related to last week’s extensive post on book-cover design for indie authors and publishers, Roger C. Parker posted over the weekend a few more tips for better book covers.
He also linked to a page of interactive book-cover makeovers at Dunn+Associates Design’s web site. For a kick, check out a few, and think about how the “before” and “after” designs use the 10 elements of book-cover design that I talked about last week. Pay particular attention to the title and front-cover graphics. How do the new designs use these more effectively than the “before” covers. Especially if you’re wrestling with a book cover right now, this little experiment should inspire you, if not give you a spark of enlightenment.
-TimK
P.S. With at least one of the book covers in Dunn Design’s exhibit (Mark A. Williams’s Your Identity Zones), the author rejected the book cover that his publisher preferred. Traditionally published authors should understand book-cover design, too, in order to use whatever influence you have with your publisher to ensure your book gets an effective design. (Although, as far as I can tell, both the “before” and “after” covers of that book were good covers. The “after” version was marginally better, because it had more focus—less clutter—and highlighted the title more. So it might split-test significantly better than the “before” version. Yeah, at some point, I’ll have to write an article on how to split-test a book cover.)
P.P.S. [update] Kristen Lamb posted over on her blog an interesting guest post by Maria Zannini, a list of Down & Dirty Tips for Creating Cover Art. I’m not sure I agree with all of her advice, e.g., to necessarily put something visually stimulating on the left side to guide the viewer’s gaze toward the right—I would usually start in the middle and work toward the edges, keeping in mind the rule of thirds… but that’s a whole other blog post. Her tips will certainly get you thinking.
-TimK