Tips for eAuthors

Book Critique: Robert Parker’s Looking for Rachel Wallace

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Earlier this week, I talked about the usefulness of the book critique to help refine my writing. I thought I’d show a critique I did on one of crime fiction writer Robert Parker’s best Spenser novels, Looking for Rachel Wallace, a book that has helped me immensely as I try to make a career in the same field.

If the writing seems abbreviated or sloppy or informal, that’s the way I write these so as to better understand the critique later. It’s essentially a monologue I have with myself on paper; if I wrote any more formally or self-consciously, I feel that I’d lose something in the study. Unlike my guide in the previous post, there’s not much in the Issues section and there’s no Summary…I think I cover everything in the other sections. If I get a positive response, I’ll post a more complete critique on another novel.

I hope you find it helpful, but there are huge SPOILERS, obviously. Don’t read the critique if you haven’t read the book!

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Reading to Write

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I imagine that, for most authors, the urge to write comes from reading. My earliest attempt came from having read a story and wanting to emulate it. There is something about the cognitive process that, for writers and would-be writers, makes the act of reading equate almost directly with writing.

Unfortunately, our cognitive process blithely glosses over an important fact: that writing a book is an order of magnitude harder than reading one. That single issue has broken the will of more than one would-be novelist over the years. We probably all know someone who, flush with the pleasure of having finished a really good book, has bought a new laptop, a shelf-full of Writers Digest guides, and sat down to knock out their first novel in a weekend…only to give it up before Monday morning.

But that doesn’t mean that the original impulse—to read in order to write—was unfounded. To be a good writer, you have to continue to read and, in fact, improve as a reader if you want to be successful.

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Printing Your Book With CreateSpace: Part III

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This is Part III of a three-part series on my attempt to print my short story collection, one bad twelve, using Amazon’s CreateSpace method. Part I covered many of the basics; Part II covered the “short list” of tips and tricks that helped me get my title to CreateSpace.

In many ways, this is the easiest part of the CreateSpace process and is more about reporting than tips or tricks. Once I’d been through the formatting and artwork (cover) stages of my book, much of the “creative” process was over. There are still a few issues that might be of interest to writers new to the print format, however.

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Give It Away! Strategies for making your ebook free

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For authors going indie, it quickly becomes apparent that the best way to get the word out about your books and stories is to give some of it away for free. Although handing out novels like they are candy doesn’t have quite the same impact it did two or three years ago, it still may be the best strategy for newcomers to the digital publishing game.

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Using the Kindle to Edit

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When the manuscript for my novel A Reason to Live was ready to move from critique groups to professional editing, I was lucky enough to land the wonderful Alison Dasho (nee Janssen), a former editor for Bleak House Books and Tyrus Books [visit her at http://www.alisonedits.com/].

She’s in Wisconsin, I’m in Virginia; obviously, this was going to be a digital relationship. But there are a million ways to exchange documents online. How best to get my 90,000 words to you? I asked. Just send the Word document, she said, I’ll put it on my Kindle.

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