I am penning this article as I have seen some blatantly ridiculous evidence of some indie authors taking something that “inspired” them and turning that inspiration into one of the following categories of books:

1) A “cash in” book on a current trend. ie. The endless vampire teen romance books aimed at targeting Twihards (No offense to Twihards, just an example). This is the least of all evils as although it can be mind numbingly similar, at least it’s not plain plagiarism

2) A “blended” book of two or more movies/books. The awesome idea of grabbing two stories of someone else’s work and combining them into a story of “their own”

3) A “shapesift” book. Taking a well known and successful story, and shapeshifting the main character into someone else, but rewriting the same story as “their own”

On top of this, a lot of these books get self published with no or minimal editing/proofreading/beta reading. As an indie author, I feel that indie books should go through the same thorough process that commercial books do, but I digress.

What happens is that the market that myself and other indie authors are publishing in, are flooded with these books… and the majority of them sell at 99 cents.

Now, don’t get me wrong as there are some amazing indie books out there. The gems that are hiding under the rubble of mediocrity are what we all want to find and read.

Staying on topic, I recently picked up a few indie books… written by what I can safely say are nice people to chat with. The opening of the books sounded promising as there were some genuinely great ideas within them.

Suddenly I found myself feeling a sense of Deja Vu… my instincts were confirmed when I read scenes that were pretty much identical to worldwide best sellers. I wanted to read more of them, but the experience was ruined.

Why do people do this? Why are writers thinking that it’s a great idea and that it’s “okay” to take someone else’s hard work and just change some details to make it their own?

If we were in the film industry and someone took Harry Potter, changed his name to “Robert Batfry”… made his character a vampire and then re-filmed similar scenes to Harry Potter, threw in some of their own scenes and then released it… I think we all know what would happen and it wouldn’t be pretty.

So, to get back on point… what should we do and what should we *not* do with inspiration?

Here are things you *should* do:

* Watch plenty of movies in your chosen genre to assist with visualisation. While watching the films, think about how you would write a scene to describe it to a reader.

* Watch plenty of movies focusing on emotionally charged stories. This helps to build your EQ, but also acts as a great way to learn from how others capture emotions and create scenes and scenarios that would make readers

* Research writing techniques and read the blogs of your favourite authors

* Read plenty of books by good authors that you admire, and stories which you find yourself sinking into. Learn from their techniques, let their chapters inspire you. Feel free to pay homage to a famous work, but tread carefully.

* If you haven’t already, enlist a team of proofreaders for your books and truly *listen* to their feedback. Let your readers inspire you.

And here are some things you should *not* do:

* Write a book solely for the purpose of the genre being popular and hoping to cash in – The story ends up having no “soul”, and the likelihood of your indie book being a “cash in” is little to none (sorry to burst your bubble)

*Plagiarise someone else’s work. There is a solid line between inspiration and plagiarism. If a scene was mostly written by someone else and you change a few details, that is plagiarism.

I am sure that you all have things that you can add to the Do’s and Don’ts, so feel free to comment

Until next time, happy writing!

Read More

I recently posted about Legacies and what we will leave behind. That leads me to this topic, motivation. If we’re not motivated and driven, how will we achieve anything that we want to leave behind?

One of the hardest disciplines to master is that of motivation and self-discipline. As writers, it is very easy to fall into the trap of “doing it later”, “I will…”, “One day…”, “When I…”

So, how do we get things done? How do we achieve? (I am totally trying not to sound like motivational poster right now…)

mo·ti·va·tion

noun

1.The act or an instance of motivating, or providing with a reason to act in a certain way: I don’t understand what her motivation was for quitting her job.

Synonyms: motive, inspiration, inducement, cause, impetus.

2. The state or condition of being motivated: We know that these students have strong motivation to learn.

3. Something that motivates; inducement; incentive: Clearly, the company’s long-term motivation is profit.

This applies to our working day, our passions, our short term goals, and our long term goals. So, how do we keep ourselves motivated and how do we achieve the most that we can?

I was given an mp3 version by a friend, of a great speaker by the name of Brian Tracey, who spoke about the miracle of self discipline. I highly recommend everyone to check it out if you’re interested as this is barely covering any of it. There is a key technique which I have adopted and that can help all of you, and it revolves around something as simple as lists and effective goal setting.

The reality is, that 95% of writers never finish writing their novels. They get started, talk about it, but never finish it. Out of the 5% that do, 95% of those writers never publish their novels. That means that they have invested a good chunk of their lifetime into producing something that never gets to print.

How do we avoid becoming one of those statistics?

The human brain is an incredibly powerful tool that we don’t tend to harness enough. Have you heard of the power of positive thinking? How about the power of subliminal thinking?

The next time that you make a decision, are you really thinking about it? Do you make it under pressure? What if you take even 10 minutes out of your day to focus on the biggest issue and nothing else but that issue, will that help you to come up with a solution?

Use this when you are stuck on a chapter, or don’t know what to do next. Cut everything out and sit down for 15-30 minutes and focus solely on the problem. You will be amazed at how quickly you can find a solution.

Your brain is capable of handling ten goals at any given time and helping you to make them happen. Whether you realise it or not, you will find yourself making better decisions, being more productive, working smarter as well as harder, and achieving your goals in the process.

I like to use an iPad, but even your old-school, non-charging, hold in your hand pen and paper will do the job for you. So, here is what you do:

1) You carry this with you every day and you write out a list of at least ten goals, they can be things you need to do today, things in the short term, and long term goals. The important thing is to write those goals as you have already achieved them, and to set a deadline. “I have written chapter X and submitted to my proofreaders by Thursday” or “I have finished my book by December 2011″. You may have small goals, like, “I have read a blog today to improve my writing.”

2) Once you have your list, you organise them into categories from A-E. A being tasks that must be done or there are consequences, B and C being lower priority, D being Delegate, and E being Eliminate.

3) Work with this list and watch the feeling of achievement that you get when you cross something off that list and replace it with a new goal. Do that for everything you have to do.

4) When you start your day, check your list, add new tasks or goals and get used to your new habit of checking the list on a daily basis. You will feel motivated because you will feel responsible for your tasks. Nobody else is responsible for your list, but you… even if you delegate a task, you cannot delegate everything. It’s very hard to look at someone and say “I’m writing a book” when you have the same 10 tasks incomplete that stare back at you every day. You’re not getting anywhere if you’re not marking off tasks.

5) Watch your productivity soar, you cannot forget your tasks if they are clearly written out on a list… and it’s incredibly hard to procrastinate when you have a list sitting in front of you.

Be aware! You are your own antagonist, and to keep yourself motivated and as productive as you can be, it is going to be an on-going battle with yourself and you will have your great days and days where it is tough. Your ultimate goal is to be the best that you can be and to achieve the most that you can in every waking hour of your day.

Read More

I don’t usually write articles about non-fiction books, but in this case… it’s worthy of spreading the word.

Let’s take a quick ride in the mad scientist’s DeLorean and jump back into my history, I wrote and later published my first fantasy novel in November 2009. Not a bad feat by any means, but I then continued to attempt to “promote” it online.

To give you a bit more of an idea about my skillset, I also happen to be an IT professional… which is a great skill to be able to design, customise, and configure my own website. However, I was under a foolish belief that I would somehow be able to achieve great successes online.

Twitter, Facebook, online marketing… can’t be too hard, right? Should be pretty easy to know what to do, right?

Boy was I delusional.

My book wasn’t selling very quickly, but I wasn’t expecting it to. After all, i’m a fantasy fiction author that nobody has ever heard of and my publisher (iUniverse) did their part by distributing my book to book stores and online stores alike.

That is another discussion to go into, and I will post more about my publishing experience at a later stage.

I threw a book launch, which was actually a successful one that I really enjoyed. I am a writer with no agent, no marketing guru paid to spread the word, and for all the writers out there in the same boat, we tend to feel a little lost for what to do.

So, as it stood, about a month or so ago… I had achieved very little.  Sure, I had a twitter account that I had plenty of followers in… but was it bringing people to my website? not really. Was it establishing my name as a brand for fantasy novels? nope

What was I achieving? A few small wins of adding the right people to my list, but I was wasting that relationship by not engaging with them.

If we go back to the future, and return to today… I wish that I could have knocked myself about the head and spent the time to learn how to do social media, right.

By investing a lot of time and effort into the wrong things, or approaching things the wrong way, I was running uphill to a summit that I would never reach. But hey, I was dedicated

Enter Kristen Lamb, who I cannot thank enough for sharing information with the rest of us that really need it. Wise scholars have said many times that the best way to learn is to learn from the mistakes of others, and Kristen lets us save a lot of hard yards and helps us to find the right direction.

How did I meet Kristen, you ask? Actually, I stumbled onto her site by adding her to my Twitter account and following one of her links to her blog.

Who is Kristen? (Taken from her bio)

Kristen Lamb is the author of the best-selling book We Are Not Alone—The Writer’s Guide to Social Media. She is currently represented by Gina Panettieri of Talcott Notch Literary. Kristen worked in international sales before transitioning into a career as an author, freelance editor and speaker.

She takes her years of experience in sales & promotion and merges it with almost a decade as a writer to create a program designed to help authors construct a platform in the new paradigm of publishing.

Kristen has guided writers of all levels, from unpublished green peas to NY Times best-selling big fish, how to use social media to create a solid platform and brand. Most importantly, Kristen helps authors of all levels connect to their READERS and then maintain a relationship that grows into a long-term fan base.

For any writer out there, I highly suggest that you at the very least follow her blog. If it helps you as much as it helped me, and is continuing to help me, then it’s one of the best investments of your time that you will make.

I am not yet an expert at social media, heck… I probably never will be an “expert”, but her blog inspired me to buy her book “We are not alone”, that has helped me to adjust my thinking and understand social media for the way that it is supposed to be used, not the way that I now can clearly see countless others making the same mistakes that I did.

There is even a fantastic multi-part series of blog posts all related on how to blog on her website, for FREE.

For all you writers out there, or for anyone who is involved or interested in Social Media… what are you waiting for? read, learn, implement, and better yourself and your online presence.

Read More

I remember when I finished the final draft of my manuscript and was ever so excited to be publishing my novel. Like a child on a sugar rush, I felt fantastic!

That was until I got the requirements from my publisher that I need to write a book synopsis. Suddenly without warning, the sugar drained out of me and I was thinking to myself… “How the heck do you write a synopsis?!?”

I did not even know where to begin and I am guessing (as you are here, reading my blog), that you are facing the same scary dilemma.

As a writer, I find myself able to sometimes relax and let the imaginary world in my head flow out of me into words etched on digital paper. But a synopsis made me face an utterly blank wall. It is incredibly difficult to sum up our novels, stories, self help books, etc into a little blurb on the back of the cover to give the reader an idea of what it is that will interest them in the book. But that is exactly what the synopsis or blurb is designed to do, to sell your book.

And as writers, we generally don’t tend to be salespeople. Don’t be worried about that, but recognize that selling is a skill that needs to be learned, improved, and perfected over time.

Selling… That is what you pay a marketer to do, right? Wrong! That is, unless you are full of bags of money (which I know most writers are not), that is not going to be an option.

Even a published book requires your input into the process, and why shouldn’t it? You are supposed to be the writer.

It’s almost identical to someone you know asking you, “So, writer, tell me… what is your book about?”

Are you choking yet? is your heart pounding? do you not know what to say? Are you already running out the door??!??

Sorry, I digress.

So, how does one tackle this task? There are obviously many ways to do this, but I will share with you the process that I use when I wrote my synopsis and what I will use to do the same for my future books.

Let’s step forward many years into your future aspirations and imagine that your book has just become a best seller and a director has picked up the rights to your book. Fantastic work!

Now, imagine that the movie has been made! (I know, ambitious right?)

And finally, imagine that you are sitting in a cinema, and you are just about to watch a movie trailer about your book. You know that fantastic voice over? The one that tells you snippets about the movie to get you excited?

“One man, one impossible mission in a race against time. A girl next door, whose only dream was to become a scientist is taken hostage by terrorists as she holds to key to unlocking the secrets to a new disease, that will take the world in its icy grip…”

I know, that is a terrible example, but you get the idea. The audience buys it, they are thrilled at the excitement of what will happen next, the story grabs their emotions and takes hold. They plan on buying tickets when the movie comes out as they need to see it.

That movie trailer is the voice of your book synopsis.

If you really are a writer, using your imagination should not be too difficult for you. I want you to picture that scenario, and imagine what the voice-over would be saying about your book-turned-to-movie, and pen it. It may not be brilliant to start off with, but it will give you something to start from.

Now, take that synopsis and do something brutal… ask for feedback from your beta readers, your friends, but do try to avoid the trolls of the internet who are just itching to knock you down.

The aim of your synopsis? To grab your reader’s head, dreams, heart, emotions or a combination of the above and make them *want* to read your book, because they just have to know what happens.

Try to follow the following rules:

1) Keep it short

2) Avoid throwing in sales pitches, at all costs

3) Keep it short (i’m not stuttering, just accentuating the point)

4) Do not compare your book to other books in your synopsis

5) Avoid rambling, repeating yourself, repeating yourself, and repeating yourself

Is it easy? No, but is writing ever easy?

The other alternative you have is to choose a gripping or attention grabbing snippet of your book and put it on the back cover.

What do you all think? Do any of you have another or better suggestion on writing a synopsis?

And lastly, good luck!

Read More

I have found that a lot of Author’s are confused or ill informed of how to make a good website to promote their book, themselves, and moving toward new technologies that embrace socialising.

Most of what I have written below is learnings from my skillset, trial and error, feedback, learning from other IT professionals and other authors, and doing a lot of research.

“I just want to sell books through my site” – (many random authors)

It is very important to remember that your website is heavily influencing the perception of you and your work. If your site is horridly disorganised or it looks amateur, anyone will assume that your book is going to be the same.

This may be a hard pill to swallow, but why invest years of hard work into your book, and then put up a website that does not display you and your writing in a good light?

Old school “static” sites that are manually coded, are extinct in this day and age. Also, beware locking a site to a set resolution.

On the other end of that scale, sites built entirely in Flash and heavy on animations will find themselves closed down before they even load more often than not. People get sick of seeing a “Loading” screen or waiting for some long animation to complete before they can click to where they want to go.

If you already have a website, and you want to test this, install browsers like Chrome, Firefox, IE8, Safari, and Opera. Now, navigate to your site in each of those browsers, try increasing and decreasing fonts, lock your browser to a small resolution, increase the resolution in your monitor… Do you notice anything strange? Does it look terrible?

Where to begin?

Don’t already have a website? you need to make a choice.

If you don’t want to do any of the building of the site yourself, then be prepared to pay upwards of thousands of dollars for someone or a company to make your site for you professionally.

If you’re even a little bit technical, it is not actually that difficult to build a website yourself. It will take some learning, willpower, Google searching, and trial and error.

It is the latter which this article is catered for, but some of the topics discussed will affect everyone.

Get hosted!

Before you build your website, you need good hosting. The last thing you want to be saying is “You want to check out my book? Great, go to www dot blogspot dor org slash peterkoevari slash site”

You just want to say something like “www dot peterkoevari dot com”

Not having your own URL makes your site harder to find, more difficult to promote, and even more difficult for people to type into their browser.

Lucky for all of you, I have done my research and the best hosting I could find, even at the time of writing this, is http://www.justhost.com . They are very affordable, offer a ONE-CLICK WordPress installation, and much more.

If you are Australian, using a DOT COM, instead of a DOT COM DOT AU will save you a large sum of money.

Like the website you are reading this on? It’s hosted by Just Host.

I’m hosted, now what do I do?

Once you’ve chosen your URL, paid your fees, your site is active, and you have control panel login, then you’re set to install wordpress! or another CMS of your choice.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is the number 1 blogging CMS (Content Management System) in the world. Why? Because it works, it’s easy/simple to use, there are plugins for everything you need on your site, free themes to customise your site (Or you can buy Premium themes, like I did), great community support, and it is powerful.

There are lots of guides on the internet on how to use/install/configure WordPress (www.wordpress.org) but that is not the aim of this article.

From herein, I will assume that either you have a WordPress installation, or you have your own site that you wish to improve/enhance/redesign.

How can I improve my website? What makes for a good website?

Design and Aesthetics: The fastest way to win or lose surfers before they read your content.

I surf to a website where I don’t have a burning desire to read the content within, and I am greeted by a horribly designed website that is hard to read, has shocking colours/fonts, and even worse… has a popup in my face asking me to buy something.

I will bounce off the site faster than a winning serve at Wimbledon.

If the site looks like a spam email I get in my inbox and handle with antivirus, I will avoid the site completely.

Make the site easy on the eyes. Use colours that do not clash or are really bad to look at like bright SOLID yellow, red, etc. A font that is easy to read. If your site has “Handwritten” fonts on it, it may as well be “Wingdings”. Use something easy to read, like Calibri, Arial (Internet standard), etc. Getting too creative with fonts will just annoy people who find your webpage, and they will surf somewhere friendlier.

The Basics

For your author site, here is what you should have as a bare minimum:

1)    A page for each of your books
2)    A preview/Excerpt for readers
3)    Biography
4)    A picture of yourself (Don’t use one of you having a drink with friends or swimming in the beach, make it professional)
5)    A way for people to buy your book. (You would be amazed how many people don’t have this on their site. Either sell direct, or provide links)
6)    Details of any reviews (Excerpts are fine)

7) A way for readers to contact you / comment

The Recommendations

Here is some of the goods that will separate you from the pack:

1)    Integration with twitter/facebook and actually use those services.
2)    Providing an RSS feed
3)    Creating a Book Trailer and putting it on your site
4)    Putting up regular Blog entries
5)    Create content to help others (Like this article) – It will bring people to your site, and build your profile
6)    Be creative, add content to your site that will be interesting for your readers

iPhone interface?

This is an area that I see most people fail to accommodate. A starkingly large amount of people in the world use iPhones or smartphones to browse the net, and they will hopefully find your website. What you don’t want them to have to do, is spend most of their time trying to drag their way around your site to find content.

WordPress has many plugins that will automatically create such an interface for you, just search in plugins for “iPhone”

To spy or not to spy

It is very important to use analytics and tracking to monitor what users do. Knowledge is power, and through tracking clicks in and out, user’s activities on your pages, you are empowered with information that allows you to make effective changes on your site.

If you’re using wordpress, I use WP-stats and StatPress plugins to keep an eye on what’s going on in my site.

Advertisements, proudly brought to you by…

It is understandable that you want to make money from your website, or to try to recoup hosting costs. However, the absolute worst way you can do that, is to insert ads into your Author site with big banners, or “Buy now” for unrelated products that have nothing to do with your book. This is one of the fastest ways to lose someone who has found your site, avoid at all costs!

If you really want to make a few dollars, you can use banners to Amazon that include your affiliate link when people click to buy your product. I don’t do this myself, but some do.

Unrelated Content?

I recently had some interesting feedback, namely suggesting that I remove fantasy movie reviews from my website as it’s not helping me to sell books. I have a few points on this that may help you with your site.

1) If you are writing about something “unrelated” to your book, as long as there is some connection to the book or yourself, it can make sense. In my case, I wrote a Fantasy novel, so I review Fantasy Movies.

2) The more you write about, even if it’s not directly related to your book… the more likely you are to get more traffic on your site. For example, people google “Avatar review” and find my site regularly, and most of them find themselves on my author site, reading the review. A lot of them then browse through my site. Fans of fantasy movies tend to be fans of fantasy books.

Overall

1) Make your site easy to find

2) Make your site easy to navigate

3) Make your site easy on the eyes

4) Make your site easy to understand

Do you see a pattern? Your site needs to be easy in general. Not easy for you to build, but easy for people to use.

There is obviously a lot more to making a good website, and I could write a whole new article on how to promote your website (the net’s full of them), but I hope that this article gives you some ideas and helps you and your readers connect with you.

Read More

Your book’s finished manuscript is before you in all its glory. Take a moment to celebrate what you have done, as you have achieved what 95% of writers never can. The question I asked myself at this point was, what now? The bad news is, you have a lot of work ahead of you.

Everybody has their own methods for making their manuscript publishable. What does “Publishable” mean? To me, a book is not publishable until it is as free from errors, grammatical errors, plot holes, inconsistencies, spelling mistakes, etc as possible.

I say “as possible”, as perfection in every possible way is a target which is unattainable. Throughout the process of turning my first draft of Legends of Marithia: Prophecies Awakening into its final version, I learned a lot. Most of this was from making mistakes, learning from others, and of course… having to make some sacrifices in order to make my book of the highest quality possible.

Now let’s get to the nuts and bolts of the process.

I will list this for you in steps of what I will do when I finish my manuscript of the second book in the Legends of Marithia series. By the end of this, you will look back at your first manuscript and you will literally cringe, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1) Revise

I don’t mean to harp on about this, but you need to go over your work. Start being clinical and pedantic. Check every word, sentence, and paragraph of every page for:

• Spelling errors that your spell check will not pick up. This may surprise you but if a word spells correctly in the dictionary, but it is completely incorrect in the sentence, 9 times out of 10 it will not show up in spell check. Example: This line contains and hard to find error.
• Grammatical and punctuation errors. If you are serious about your writing, then this is mostly a cost-saving exercise before your proofreader gets their hands on your manuscript. Find as many as you can as your time invested is your money kept in your pocket.
• Dialog punctuation errors. The most common of all mistakes I see is incorrectly punctuated dialog, look up guidelines on this and do your best to follow them.
• Capitalization errors. Although this may be classed as a grey area, it is incredibly important. Be careful of what you capitalize and when.

2) Revise Again!

I can hear you all groaning, but revise your manuscript again as you missed corrections on your first run (trust me).

3) Read the book carefully (Put your readers’ hat on)

This time, you need to sit back and read your story. Think about the following:

• Are you stopping at certain points in the story, confused about what was written?
• Are you finding yourself wanting to change the way you described something? Change it!
• Are your characters being consistent with their personalities or the storyline?
• Do you find yourself getting excited by a part of your story, but then being abruptly taken to a new chapter? Elaborate your story
• Is something happening in your story that is conflicting with something you read earlier? Change it!

3) Revise Again!

After reading your story, I would be completely shocked beyond belief if you didn’t make changes or elaborate your story. So, revise all of your work again (Repeat steps 1-2). Am I beginning to sound like a drill sargeant? We have barely gotten started.

4) Give your book to someone else to a reader

This is a heart wrenching moment, but you have to do it. If your work is not good enough for you to choose your reader, you should not publish it to the general public.

Ask your reader if they are prepared to invest the time to provide you feedback chapter by chapter, positive and constructive.

IMPORTANT! Do not under any circumstances give your book to a family member or a close friend with the expectation of feedback or improving your book. The last thing you need is someone handing your book back and saying “Wow, that was amazing! Everything is perfect!” because they are not telling you the truth!

I prefer to ask readers to read my book who love the genre I am writing in. Someone who is willing to think of your book along with a long line of established and professional authors. Why? Because they will be tougher on your book than anyone else. If your book stinks, they will tell you. If something’s wrong in your story, they will tell you. If something’s great, they will really enjoy reading that.

If you’re feeling particularly game, give it to a few readers.

As you get your feedback, edit your book one chapter at a time. This should be brutal, so be prepared to put your ego aside and put your listening ears on. The aim of this is to better your story and your writing, remember that. I know how tough it was for me to read feedback on my own book, so I know the pain your will feel.

5) Revise, Again!

Don’t hate the rules, but you need to go through steps 1-2 all over again.

6) Now give it to a professional proofreader/line editor

You have invested a lot of time and effort into your book, and now it is time for you to put some of your money on the line for your book (if you haven’t already). Yes, this cost will hurt your pocket but it will take your book to a whole new level.

Find a good proofreader/line editor and hand over your manuscript.

7) Done!

You are only now ready to begin submitting your manuscript to traditional publishing houses or print-on-demand publishers (which is what I opted for, but that will also cost you money).

Be prepared, if you get your “Publishable” manuscript in the hands of a publishing house editor, then you will have even more work ahead of you, but if you get that far then you have achieved another success.

Traditional vs POD publishing is a much debated topic with divided opinions. However, traditional publishing houses only print a small number of books and they get an incredibly large amount of submissions. It is a case of time vs money.

I will leave that topic to another day, good luck to all fellow writers out there.

Read More