writing

Buck Up: The Importance of Little Wins for Your Writing Morale

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(This is the first part of a two-part series. Part II coming soon!)

I’m of a cynical bent, so am ill-disposed towards cheerleaders, positive thinkers, and canned morale boosts. But the life of a writer is a lonely and often discouraging one. If you don’t want to end up jumping off a cliff with the pages of your last manuscript fluttering after you, you have to find small victories to keep you going.

I think this is worth writing about because the need for encouragement came as something of a surprise to me. Whether it was because I believed I would become an overnight success or I was young enough to have a naturally rosy outlook when I started writing I don’t know, but as I’ve moved along in my writing career, I’ve found it invaluable to try for, grab onto, and celebrate the little wins…while I work towards the big ones.

If you find your hope flagging and lately all your short stories have titles like “I’d Rather Work in a Coal Mine”, try a couple of these paths to the little victories that will keep those serotonin levels up and empower you to stay in the game. If you have your own ways to boost the ego, please share; there’s no such thing as having too many tricks.

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Three Shorts is free!

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Hi folks –

My first crime fiction collection, Three Shorts, is free for a limited time on all the major eBook channels and readers (Kindle, Nook, iTunes, Kobo, Sony). Please take advantage and grab your copy today; I’d love to know what you think about it, so feel free to comment here or on the collection’s page.

This is my first foray into a free promotion and I’m excited to see where it takes me. On the first day it went free (last Friday), it jumped from #377,721 (or so…) to #1,844 on Amazon. Still far from Top 100 material, but exciting nevertheless. Sales of other titles have remained level, but I’m after exposure and reach at this point. We’ll talk money later 🙂

Being There: Write Where You Know

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Seven-thirty a.m. in Georgetown, Penang and breakfast was an iced chai and a vegetable dosa hot enough to melt the paint off a car. I sat outside under an awning, wondering if the tiny vinyl chair, wilting in the tropical heat, would hold my weight until I was done. A dozen feet away, a Chinese man in a stained apron stood at a butcher’s block, lopping the feet off of dead ducks with a cleaver and dropping them into a white bucket. Every fifteen minutes, a young boy would arrive, put the feet in plastic bags, and take them to the market across the street. Exhaust from scooters put a gasoline tang in the air, but then a breeze from the ocean–never far away–would clear it away. Three-wheeled bike rickshaws pedaled by, flicking their bell every block, trying to attract custom. I watched the butcher wipe the cleaver on his apron as the sweat trickled down my spine and the small Malaysian neighborhood woke around me.

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Micro-reading: Experiments with Wattpad and Scribd

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Today marks the one week anniversary of a little experiment of mine: posting my fantasy short story Sword of Kings for free with two different mobile reading services, Wattpad (http://www.wattpad.com/3237579-sword-of-kings-part-i) and Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/doc/79242254/Sword-of-Kings).

If you haven’t heard of either service, don’t feel bad. I’d vaguely heard of Scribd before but only came across the possible sales and promotional potential of both it and Wattpad after reading David Gaughran’s attempts with both his own short stories and serially posting his novel A Storm Hits Valparaiso.

In essence, both services offer a variation on the same theme: they facilitate the process of writers finding readers. Writers post their work (though Wattpad is almost exclusively fiction and poetry) without charge; readers can download those works for free. The reasons why writers might want to offer their work for free are many: to find beta readers, to “field test” an odd-ball idea, to stimulate interest in your writing so that it leads to sales of other works, to simply spread your ideas.

While Wattpad and Scribd may seem like just another internet fad, consider that Wattpad claims 1 million users, 3 million comments/votes per month, and the average user spends 30 minutes twice a day on the site. The top stories in each genre of the “What’s Hot” category routinely register over 1-2 million reads. That’s exposure.

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