Self-publishing used to be a last resort for aspiring authors unable to break through the traditional publishing fortress. With the help of vanity presses, those writers took matters into their own hands and brought their books to market, for a fee.

These days, self-publishing has a newfound respect. The “guilt by association” connection to vanity publishing has largely disappeared, and even bestselling authors are opting to self-publish. Today’s e-book and print on demand (POD) technology enables authors to control the publishing process on their own terms, and based on the proliferation of self-publishing success stories, it’s safe to say the trend toward self-publishing is here to stay.

One of the most appealing aspects of self-publishing is that it isn’t one-size-fits-all. As your book’s publisher, you can choose just how many services and technologies you’ll utilize. Supported Self Publishing (SSP) provides you with nearly all services and resources in the publishing process, whereas with Do-It-Yourself Publishing (DIY), you are responsible for all aspects of publishing and marketing your book. (For a helpful breakdown of SSP and DIY publishing models, visit Abbott Press, a division of Writer’s Digest.)

Regardless of which model you choose, there are quantifiable benefits to self-publishing, as Marilyn Ross and Sue Collier illustrate in The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing. Following is some key advice for writers from the book:

7 Reasons to Self-Publish Your Book

 1. You Just Might Strike It Rich

Self-publishing offers the potential for huge profits. No longer do you have to be satisfied with the meager 5 to 15 percent royalty that commercial publishers dole out. For those who use creativity, persistence, and sound business sense, money is there to be made.

 2. You Can Be Your Own Boss

Self-publishing can be the road to independence. What motivates entrepreneurs to launch their own businesses? Most want to be their own bosses. More personal freedom is the second most important reason. Some do it out of necessity in tough economic times. But most dream of becoming self-employed. You can turn that dream into reality. Here is a dynamic, proven way to shape your own destiny. It is an answer not only for city folks but also for urban escapees seeking to prosper in paradise. (Does Marilyn ever know about prospering in paradise, living and working in a lovely Colorado mountain town of only two thousand …)

 3. You Can Create a Tax Haven

Becoming a self-publisher also provides a helpful tax shelter. After forming your own company and meeting certain requirements, you can write off a portion of your home and deduct some expenses related to writing and to marketing, such as automobile, travel, and entertainment costs. Always check current tax regulations and restrictions.

 4. You Get to Move at Your Own Pace

Another advantage is that you can begin your business on a part-time basis while keeping your day job. Why risk your livelihood until you’ve refined your publishing activities and worked out any bugs?

 5. You Maintain Control of Your Work

In self-publishing, you guide every step. You’ll have the cover you like, the typeface you choose, the title you want, and the ads you decide to place. Your decision is final. Nothing is left in the hands of an editor or publicist who has dozens (or hundreds) of other books to worry about. You maintain absolute control over your own book. (Along with this advantage, however, comes the fact that you also get stuck doing everything.)

 6. You Can Be the First to Market

Privately publishing your work also gives you the advantage of speed. Big trade houses typically take from a year to a year and a half—or even longer—to get a book out. Self-publishers can do it in a fraction of that time. Zilpha Main, who self-published her book Reaching Ninety—My Way, commented when asked why she took that approach, “At my age, I can’t wait for New York publishers to make up their minds.”

 7. You Can Create a Springboard to Traditional Publishing

Once the marketability of your book has been proven, traditional publishers will be eager to take it off your hands. (We advise you on this in chapter twenty-two of The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing, “Bagging the Big Game: Selling Your Self-Published Book to a Goliath Publisher.”)

Buy The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing.

Learn from a panel of experts on how to succeed in self-publishing: Register for the 2012 Writer’s Digest West Conference.

Get started in e-publishing today with help from the on-demand webinar, “Do Your E-Book Right.”

New seasons have a way of bringing about change just when things are getting stale—an apt metaphor for both writing and life. In my house, the start of summer means our screened-in porch replaces the living room as our central gathering place. It means our table is set with pasta salad, berry shortcake, and other favorites we’ve missed during the colder months. It means after-dinner strolls to the playground up the street, where my baby boy recently discovered the simple joy of a swing. And it means a nagging feeling that it’s time to revisit my approach to my writing, as the rest of my daily life shifts with the season.

I know I’m not alone in this—so I thought I’d share some of the most creative writing tips I’ve spotted lately for revamping a writing practice or work-in-progress that could use a little fresh air.

In between deadlines here at the office, I’ve been grazing my way through a new crop of books for writers we’ve been lucky enough to preview. Each one is filled with new tips on improving how you think about your work … perfect for a seasonal shift in whatever kind of writing you do. Here’s a taste of my favorites.

Creative Ways to Revamp Your Work and Routine: 5 Writing Tips

1. Watch out for subtle wordiness. We’ve all been taught to eliminate redundancies in our writing, but it takes constant vigilance to catch the most elusive culprits—those that go beyond redundancy into pleonasm.

Pleonasm is the use of words unnecessary for clear expression. Here are some other common offenders to watch for:

• advanced warning
• basic fundamentals
• circulated around
• close proximity
• close scrutiny
• constant nagging
• downward descent
• exact replica
• exact same
• new discovery
• top priority

Isn’t that a great list for more concise writing? These are my top picks from a much longer list in the clever new book Tyrannosaurus Lex: The Marvelous Book of Palindromes, Anagrams & Other Delightful & Outrageous Wordplay, by Rod L. Evans, Ph.D. (Perigree). It’s a fun, easy-to-skim book for word nerds like—well, like me.

2. Don’t use a long (read: complicated) word where I short (read: simple) word will do. Here’s an interesting analysis of why less really is more when it comes to your writing:

In 10 novels I studied, I found bestselling novelists consistently use shorter words than non-bestsellers. It’s one of the reasons their writing reads at a faster pace. The samples from the bestsellers I studied averaged 4.21 characters a word. Other samples I analyzed for comparison averaged about a full character more. In the worst corporate writing samples I studied, it’s common for samples to average more than 6 characters per word. In academic journals, writing is so dense as to be unreadable at more than 7 letters per word.

This tip comes from The Writer’s Little Helper, by James V. Smith, Jr. (new from my colleagues at Writer’s Digest Books), which is filled with bite-sized bits of info that might just make a big difference in your work.

3. Redefine how you think of writer’s block. I’ve never heard anyone define it in quite this way before:

“Writer’s block is real but intangible. It is a momentary lack of anything to say that gives rise to the fear that you have nothing more to say—ever. … Coming to the end of speech can be a moment of blessed silence, and ought to be welcomed when it comes rather than featured. It isn’t the lack of something to say or write at the moment that is the problem, but the fear generated by the story that this present quiet will extend through the rest of your life.”

Sort of makes it sound easy to eliminate that anxiety, doesn’t it? This illuminating thought is from Writing: The Sacred Art—Beyond the Page to Spiritual Practice, by Rami Shapiro and Aaron Shapiro (coming next month from Skylight Paths Publishing).

4. Write more by setting a smaller daily goal. If you’re one of those writers who struggles with finding time to write, here are some convincing reasons why this approach might work for you:

• It’s easier to find smaller bites of time than long, uninterrupted periods.
• Repetition strengthens habits.
• Repetition also builds momentum.
• If it’s only for 15 minutes, you can justifiably postpone other tasks. You can reverse procrastination—instead of procrastinating the start of your writing, you procrastinate following the distractions that used to keep you from writing.
• You can envision letting go of all the other things competing for your attention and allow yourself to really focus, because it’s for only 15 minutes. This kind of focus, where we get lost in the writing, is one of the biggest joys of writing.

These helpful hints come from my advance copy of Around the Writer’s Block: Using Brain Science to Solve Writer’s Resistance, by Rosanne Bane, forthcoming from Tarcher/Penguin later this summer.

5. Don’t abandon your other passions to focus on writing. I find this tip especially helpful in the summertime, when the kid in me wants to play outside. I love the way Austin Kleon puts this in Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (Workman):

“Don’t throw any of yourself away. If you have two or three real passions, don’t feel like you have to pick and choose between them. Don’t discard. Keep all your passions in your life. This is something I learned from playwright Steven Tomlinson. Tomlinson suggests that if you love different things, you just keep spending time with them. ‘Let them talk to each other. Something will begin to happen.’ The thing is, you can cut off a couple passions and only focus on one, but after a while, you’ll start to feel phantom limb pain.”

This idea also supports my earlier post about ignoring writing tips that lead you to give up other things you enjoy (even mundane things) to make more time to write—but instead discover How to Find, Rather Than Make, Writing Time.

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How are you revamping your approach to your writing this summer? And what writing tips or resources are helping you do it? Share your own best advice for the season in the comments section below—I’d love to keep the conversation going.

Jessica Strawser
Editor, Writer’s Digest Magazine

Follow me on Twitter: @jessicastrawser


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No sooner had I written the post below than I received a number of great reports, some of which I’ve noted elsewhere. The one I received today comes from Sheri Graz who reports that her story, “Last Call,” just won the mysterious photograph contest in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. It’s on newsstands now if you want to check it out – the July/August issue.  This is her first story in print, so congrats to Sheri!

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Hey everyone,

I sent an email the other day to our VIP members and asked them to forward their success stories to me. I did this because I’d also announced some recent successes with our own editors, including Brian Klems, who recently secured his first agent, and Chuck Sambuchino, whose second book with Running Press will be pubbing in the very near future. I figured you all have your own stories, so why not share them with the community?

I’ve received several responses already. Jacquie Galvin sent a note stating that her book, A Tease of Murder, is gaining a following as well as a groundswell of support to produce a second volume in the mystery series. She notes that book signings have been very important to this success, as have radio interviews. And in the latest issue of Writer’s Digest, we spotlight Dianne Warren, Nichole Bernier, and Natalie Bakopoulos, all of whom are celebrating the publication of their first novels.

If you have a writing-related success story of your own that you’d like to share, why not post it below and let the rest of the community know about it?

Keep writing!

Phil

Our profile of Dubus in WD magazine is on its way to subscribers right now, and will hit newsstands June 5. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite unpublished excerpts from the interview—those inspirational writing bits that wouldn’t fit neatly into the piece, and deserve better than to be lost in the jumble of notebooks on my desk.

I’ve also got a new copy of Dubus’ memoir Townie on hand—I’ll give it to one randomly drawn commenter on this post below.

Happy Friday. Here’s Dubus on how to stay true to yourself and your work, and some other tips.

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“If you don’t put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There’s the writer and there’s the author. The author—you don’t ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care—easier said than done. Accept that the world may never notice this thing you worked so hard at. And instead, do it for it, find a job, find a way of living that gives you an hour or two or three a day to do it, and then work your ass off sending out, trying to get out there, but do not put the pressure on the work to do something for you. Because then you’re going to be writing dishonestly and for the market instead of for the characters and your story.”

“There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel—it’s that postmodern thing—it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being’s experience.”

“I really think that if there’s any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you’re doing, you’re not doing it as well as you can. Don’t think about publishing, don’t think about editors, don’t think about marketplace.”

“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”

“One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.”

“I still have my truck, and I still have my carpentry tools, and if this writing thing dries up on a publishing level—it’s never gonna dry up for me on an artistic level because I’m never going to quit—but if all the sudden I were out in the cold in the publishing world, them I’m gonna build you a kitchen. I’m gonna do your roof. I would rather do that than sell my soul to the publishing devil. I just won’t do it.”

“I think it’s important not to talk about what you’re working on. … It releases that creative tension that can be fuel for your writing. Don’t show anyone what you’re working on. Don’t talk about it. And don’t think about it. Don’t be taking all these furious notes because I think that when we take all these notes when we’re not writing, they’re actually sexy ideas that may be just ideas. If it’s a real direction for the story, it’s gonna show up in the next day anyway. So just push it back.”

“Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.”

 

Zachary Petit is an award-winning journalist, the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine, and the co-author of A Year of Writing Prompts: 366 Story Ideas for Honing Your Craft and Eliminating Writer’s Block.

Like what you read from WD online? Don’t miss an issue in print!

“Curiosity, attention, a little bravado, and a willingness to break routines lead to great writing ideas,” says writing coach Don Fry. “You lurk, listen, ask questions, and find experts. You can prowl the Internet, but the best writing ideas come from face to face interaction with people.”

He offers these great writing tips and more from his new book Writing Your Way (Writer’s Digest Books):

 6 Surprising Ways to Find Writing Ideas

“The best ideas are subjects that other writers haven’t written about, or haven’t noticed. The following writing techniques work because they dynamite you out of your routine ways of thinking and dealing with the world. They make the world ‘strange’ so you can see it fresh.

 1. Explain Common Things

Ask experts to explain how ordinary things work, preferably things invisible to the public. For example, how does your town’s water-purification system work? What happens to recycled plastic? How do wine aerators work? What do lifeguards look for? What makes chocolate taste good?

 2. Mine Your Emotions

If something bothers or puzzles you, find out why by interviewing people with similar reactions. You’ll discover you’re not alone in never changing your passwords, buying lottery tickets, or your fear of high bridges. I’ve always wondered if my parents are really my parents, which turns out to be a fairly common doubt.

 3. Follow Alternative Paths

Take alternate routes to your normal destinations, and try out different types of transportation, especially slower ones that let you see more. Leave your car at home and walk to work, or ride a bike. Climb stairs instead of taking elevators, take the service elevator, or enter through back doors.

 4. Cultivate Weirdos

Your mother taught you never to talk with strangers. Good advice for children, bad advice for writers. Strike up conversations with people you don’t know, even cultivating weirdos. Introduce yourself to airplane seatmates, to people carrying a sign or wearing a name tag.

 5. Lower Your Standards

Accept any piece of paper handed to you on the street. Read junk mail. Watch awful TV shows and ask why they appeal to anyone. Buy TV gadget offers, test them, and try to get your money back.

 6. Make Yourself Into Somebody Else

Role-play the lives of people with viewpoints different from yours or your readers’. I once spent half a day in a wheelchair and learned about hazards I never imagined. Bob Graham, the former governor of Florida, did manual labor one day a month to understand the public.

All of these writing techniques jar you out of your normal vision, because that’s where the writing ideas are, invisible in plain sight.”

Purchase a copy of Writing Your Way from WritersDigestShop.com

Thinking of self-publishing? Find out how Abbott Press (a division of Writer’s Digest) can help you achieve your goals.

Find more writing inspiration and ideas in 10 Essentials for Writing a Kick-Ass Novel Premium Collection.

I am one of the few original self-publishing success stories. And, I did it way before the advent of e-books, Amazon, and social media. Over 10 years ago, I left corporate America as a sales executive to pursue what seemed like a ridiculous dream to write a book. I had no publishing contacts, no name recognition, and no desire to wait two years to get published. So, I chose the D-I-Y “do-it-yourself” approach. I worked tirelessly on my manuscript for a year. Then, I hired my own editor, page layout designer, graphic artist, and printing company. Long story short, I put my sales background to work and wound up selling over 13,000 copies, spoke to more than 35,000 people, generated a consistent six-figure income, and eventually signed a nice contract with a reputable publisher. Ten years later, that book is still selling in bookstores acrossAmerica.

What was the key to my self-publishing success?  I took great pains to avoid appearing self-published. That’s right, I did everything I could to make people think that I had been traditionally-published. My manuscript was continually edited until my wife, the VP of Quality Control, deemed it “a real book.” My book cover looked amazing and received great feedback. My book was printed on high-quality paper. My first website was created by an experienced professional. My marketing materials all featured the same brand. I succeeded because didn’t let a D-I-Y mentality give me excuses to cut corners on quality.

Today, I see too many self-published authors sacrificing quality to get a book done quickly and cheaply. Maybe that explains why the average self-published books only sells 150 copies…total. That’s a lot of hard work flushed down the drain.

Anyone can be a maverick and write their own book. But, not everyone can be successful. I’m all for the entrepreneurial spirit, saving money, and enjoying the fruits of your labor. However, unless you’re gifted in every area of publishing, spend the extra money to utilize professional freelance editors, graphic artists, and web designers. Don’t D-Y-I (Do-Yourself-In) with a D-I-Y mentality. If you choose to self-publish, do it right from the beginning and create a book that becomes your own success story.

About the Author

Rob Eagar is the founder of WildFire Marketing, a consulting practice that helps authors and publishers sell more books and spread their message like wildfire. He has assisted numerous New York Times bestselling authors and his new book, Sell Your Book Like Wildfire, will be published by Writer’s Digest in June, 2012. Find out more about Rob’s advice, products, and coaching services for authors at: www.startawildfire.com

In my work as a marketing consultant, I’ve met numerous authors who work in academic circles, such as counselors, professors, pastors, and specialty book publishers. A common problem among these scholastic groups is the tendency to believe that their marketing should be exempt from the need to answer the consumers’ primary question, “What’s in it for me?” Appealing to a person’s felt need is viewed as stooping to a lower level of commerce.

They maintain that focusing on logic, displaying didactic descriptions of their content, and listing pedantic endorsements should rule a promotional campaign. I would agree that this attitude makes sense if you only want to preach to the choir. But, if you want to expand sales beyond just a small restricted club, that type of narrow-minded approach will limit your growth.

Some academic leaders forget that everything is a felt need. People aren’t robots. Logic might make us think, but it is emotion that makes us act. Every decision, no matter how academic, is still infused with the desire to protect and achieve our self-interests. Ironically, the most studious people in the world still buy fancy food because it tastes good, nice clothes because they look good, fine wine and fast cars because it makes them feel good.

Marketing efforts are rarely effective when you treat people like robots who should ignore their self-interests. Robots don’t run our economy. People do. People who buy things according to a desire that says, “What’s in it for me?” Therefore, when it comes to marketing, no matter how academic the product, everything is a felt need.

About the Author

Rob Eagar is the founder of WildFire Marketing, a consulting practice that helps authors and publishers sell more books and spread their message like wildfire. He has assisted numerous New York Times bestselling authors and his new book, Sell Your Book Like Wildfire, will be published by Writer’s Digest in June, 2012. Find out more about Rob’s advice, products, and coaching services for authors at: www.startawildfire.com

Photo by Colin_K (on Flickr via Fotopedia.com), Creative Commons License

Is there a question you’ve always secretly wished you could ask a literary agent? Maybe you want privileged information … or maybe you want real, tell-it-to-me-straight advice. Maybe something’s been bugging you for a while, but you’re too afraid of sounding like an amateur if you speak up … or you’re too professional to risk sounding bitter. Maybe you haven’t gotten up the nerve to ask what you really want to know about what goes on behind closed doors in Manhattan publishing. Or maybe you’ve just never gotten the chance to ask.

Well, writers: This is it! Submit your question—polite or disagreeable, starry-eyed or frustrated, serious or half-joking—about writing, publishing or anything in between—in an email to writersdigest [at] fwmedia [dot] com with “Ask an Agent” in the subject line. Or leave it in the comments section below. Feel free to submit anonymously (your secret is safe with us!). You may just get a response straight from an agent in the pages of a future issue of Writer’s Digest magazine—and/or right here at WritersDigest.com.

The more you rely on technology to spread your message, the more you must be brief. We live in a world of smaller screens, smaller attention spans, and smaller conversations where media platforms continuously shrink discussions. For instance, radio and TV interviews these days are typically no longer 3 – 6 minutes. And, social media tools, like Twitter, limit your remarks to just 140 characters.

To market successfully in a world of micro-communication, it’s crucial to speak concisely with power. People no longer give authors a long time to explain what they do. You’ve got to capture another person’s attention right off the bat. 

The best way to grab someone’s interest is to speak in powerful sound bites, or “power-bites.” Think of power-bites like a newspaper editor uses punchy headlines to introduce articles. Talk about your book in a manner that makes someone curious or inquisitive.

For example, I’m starting to promote my new book, “Sell Your Book Like Wildfire,” which releases in early-June. When media reporters, bloggers, or publishing executives ask me about my book, I don’t go into a long drawn-out description. Instead, I lead my responses with pithy power-bites, such as: 

• Never tell someone what your book is about. Tell them “What’s in it for me?”
• If you want to sell more books, stop selling books and start selling results.
• Start small to sell big. Light a fire with your kindling audience first.
• My book is the bible of book marketing.
• Marketing is easy with 3 simple questions: What’s your value? Who needs it the most? Where do they congregate?

If you write fiction, here are some great examples of power-bites to describe a novel: 

• My novel is for every woman who has ever had a complicated love-hate friendship.
• Discover a story that reveals how to risk everything to be true to yourself.
• Enjoy the pleasures and intrigue of a bygone age.
• Experience how love and hate, cowardice and courage, good and evil are always a part of life, in our own time, as well as on the eve of the greatest war the world has ever known.

In a fast-paced world where Facebook, Twitter, and the 24/7 news media allow everyone to have a voice, it’s more important than ever to cut through all the noise. Use power-bites to punch through the cacophony, gain people’s attention, and spread your message like wildfire.

Action Step: Take a moment today to create three new power-bite sentences for your book.

About the Author:

Rob Eagar is the founder of WildFire Marketing, a consulting practice that helps authors and publishers sell more books and spread their message like wildfire. He has assisted numerous New York Times bestselling authors and his new book, Sell Your Book Like Wildfire, will be published by Writer’s Digest in June, 2012. Find out more about Rob’s advice, products, and coaching services for authors at: www.startawildfire.com

Every week, I spelunk into the Writer’s Digest archives to find the wisest, funniest, or downright strangest moments from our 92 years of publication.

About 10 years ago, lawyer-turned-novelist John Grisham spilled the beans in Newsweek that a 1973 Writer’s Digest article paved the way for him to write his bestseller The Firm.

Naturally, we’ve been geeking out about this since we first heard it, and see it referenced every so often in relation to Grisham books, but I’d never actually read the piece. So I dug it up today—it’s by author Brian Garfield, and was originally titled “10 Rules for Suspense Fiction.”

In case the next Grisham is out there reading this, I’ll include Garfield’s 10 points below, and will also link to the full article (which is reproduced over at the International Thriller Writers website).

Happy Friday!

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The 10 Commandments of How to Write a Thriller

1. Start with action; explain it later.
2. Make it tough for your protagonist.
   
3. Plant it early; pay it off later.
4. Give the protagonist the initiative.
5. Give the protagonist a personal stake.
6. Give the protagonist a tight time limit, and then shorten it.
7. Choose your character according to your own capacities, as well as his.
8. Know your destination before you set out.
9. Don’t rush in where angels fear to tread.
10. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want to read.

For the full piece, “10 Rules for Suspense Fiction” by Brian Garfield, click here.

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Zachary Petit is an award-winning journalist, the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine, and the co-author of A Year of Writing Prompts: 366 Story Ideas for Honing Your Craft and Eliminating Writer’s Block.

Like what you read from WD online? Don’t miss an issue in print!