by S.E. White
As in: flawed, yet awesome. No one wants to read boring perfection.
I’ll list my top two favorite female literary characters, straight off the top of my head, to start making my point:
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One key to writing a book that connects with readers is including characters they care about.
Or hate. It can be characters they hate. Just as long as the readers want to follow from the first page to the last.
Follow-worthy characters come from awesome descriptions, dialogue, goals you want to see them achieve, odds to beat, or devastating actions to their consequences. Another layer to add to your characters is the one that makes them; their backstory.
While you should avoid info dumping any part of your book, info dumping the backstory rates even higher. Why? Because it slows things down. This is especially true in the first three chapters of your book.
The beginning of the book is when you should hook the reader, not bore them with how the MC grew up in a small town, got high grades throughout school, moved to…
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Image: dailyfinance.com
I often write about Amazon reviews, as it is one of the most important aspects of marketing for many people and Amazon seems to keep changing the rules!
Now, Amy Collins of The Book Designer published an update in the form of Frequently Asked Questions. I’m sharing here the most common ones:
To contribute to Customer Reviews, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the $50 minimum.
Book authors and publishers may provide free or discounted copies of their books to readers, as long as the author or publisher does not require a review in exchange or attempt to influence the review. Also, you are allowed to discount your…
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The indie publishing world has been abuzz since authors received an email from CreateSpace stating CreateSpace would be closing and KDP Print would take its place.
Some authors have been greeted with a pop-up on CreateSpace that tells them they can move their entire catalog with one click. Other authors haven’t yet received the pop-up but should soon, since CreateSpace said the option would be rolled out slowly over the next few weeks. If you don’t yet have the pop-up, don’t worry; CreateSpace has said within a few weeks, if an author hasn’t moved books from one account to the other, CreateSpace will do it for us.
I must have been in the first group to see the option, because the pop-up appeared in my CS account shortly after I received their email. Because I didn’t trust the company to do the migration for me, I decided…
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Welcome back to another Monday of writer’s links from No Wasted Ink. This week I have a nice assortment of general writing tips and a few about the editing process that I found to be above the fold. I hope you enjoy them!
WHY WE SHOULD LEARN TO LOVE THE FULL STOP
THE PERSISTENCE OF THE LOGICAL
How to Get the Reviews You Want – Ethically
Do You Really Need Developmental Edits?
Staying Afloat in the Roiling Sea of Books
What to Do When the “Abyss” Stares BACK
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Mistakes are unavoidable. To fear them is to fear life itself. To try to eliminate them is to waste life in a futile struggle against reality itself.
I daresay no one has more opportunities to learn these truths than does a writer.
As writers, our lives are a never-ending litany of mistakes. Certainly mine has been full of mistakes—everything from the opening sentences I wrote for this post, thought better of, and replaced—to literally hundreds of thousands of deleted words I’ve carefully saved from all my rough drafts—to entire story ideas (representing hundreds of hours of dedicated, hopeful work) that have proven themselves unsalvageable and earned a dusty place in a back corner of a closet shelf.
I won’t say I don’t regret these mistakes. I do. I regret the wasted time and effort. I regret the bereavement of loving and nurturing something that never…
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Characters, whether sympathetic or despicable, are the fuel that keep a plot moving. I’m sure you’ve heard many writers—whether plotters or pantsers—compare writing a novel to taking a trip.
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