From Dave Farland:

Many writers begin their writing journey and choose to focus on gaining the skills they need to become publishable. In fact, that becomes their sole focus. They don’t worry about learning how to sell their books. After all, you can’t sell a book that you haven’t written, right?

But what happens when you do sell a book and suddenly find that in addition to learning how to write, you now need to launch a career?

I’ve known many authors who have done just that. They focused on becoming writers and never learned the first thing about building a career. They’ve taken so little thought to the business side of writing that in some cases, they even managed to derail their career before it got started.

So, what are the first steps in building a career?

One of the first steps you need to take is to begin building “your list.” What is your list? It is a list of friends and fans and business associates who want to follow your career. These are people who will go out and buy your books. In fact, a good friend or fan will go out and buy your book on a certain day, a day that you ask them to buy it, in order to help launch your book on the bestseller lists.

Now, if you’re like me, you’ll think, “I don’t know anyone who would do that!” Well, you might be surprised at how many people would be willing to do that, if you just ask them to.

So, how do you ask? You send an invitation to people that you keep on an email list. This list is your most important business asset as a writer.

Who is on your list? How about this: look at your family first, not just your immediate family, but also your cousins, nephews, nieces, and even your crazy uncle. If you’re from a large family, getting the names and email addresses of these people can take some time. But it’s worthwhile. Family members are often eager to buy your books, tell friends what you’ve done, and so on. Even if they aren’t frequent readers, they’re likely to read your work.

Who else is on your list? How about your business associates at the place(s) that you’ve worked? How about old friends and classmates from school—from kindergarten on through college, and even people that you’ve taken seminars with?

Then go to your business associates—other writers, producers, editors, agents, and so on.

. . . .

But what if you don’t build your list? It is possible that a few great reviews will help guide readers to your book, and advertisements in magazines will also help. And if people begin reading and talking about your novel, the “word of mouth” advertising is invaluable. The problem is, that word of mouth is also slow. If someone buys your book and doesn’t read it for a few weeks, by the time that she tells her friends about how great you are, your book might be out of print.

. . . .

My friend Richard Paul Evans has a story about a writer who failed to build his list. Richard went to do a book signing on the East Coast a couple of years ago and was excited to be signing right next to an author whose first novel was a blockbuster—one that stayed on the New York Times Bestseller list for more than a year. He’d sold millions of copies and had gotten emails from tens of thousands of fans. But when Richard got to the store, he found that his own fans were there but the new author had no one in his lines. His publisher had not advertised his second novel widely, and the author hadn’t kept a list of his fans, so he had failed to tell them about the signing. When Richard asked the author what had happened to his fans, the author said, “I guess that they didn’t get the memo.”

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From bestselling author Dave Farland:

It seems that in the past few weeks I’ve heard from a lot of people who want to write so that they can get rich quickly, and I worry about them.

I don’t begrudge people the desire to get rich.  If you’re a writer and you make a decent wage at it, it will give you the freedom to keep writing.  That’s a good thing.

But I’ve met a couple of novelists who have told me that they have a terrible time writing, that even though they make good money at it, every word that they write is a chore.  That strikes me as being . . . rather painful.  Why do a job that you hate just for money?

In both cases, the novelists seemed to write less and less until they went out and took other jobs.

So that’s one problem with writing just for money.  But there are others.  I see many writers trying to take shortcuts.  They try to go out and get major publishing deals before they’re ready—before they’ve really learned to write.  In fact, many of them will go write a novel and then work to get that major deal without ever having gotten a single critique.

That’s like sitting down at a piano and banging out your first concerto while hoping for a recording contract.  It’s foolishness.  These same people will pay decent money for stupid scams.  For example, there’s a writing book that claims you can write a bestselling novel in thirty days—in only five minutes per day.

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Experts said “if there were several land vehicles in the story, the killer was likely to be female. Similarly, a prevalence of nautical vehicles suggests they are more likely to be male.”

Read the explanation http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11779272/Experts-devise-formula-to-crack-Agatha-Christies-murder-mysteries.html

From author David Farland:

Most editors will warn you against writing too many dream sequences.  The problems in writing about dreams are multitudinous.  Very often, a new author will write an opening to a story and feel that it is dull, so he or she will spice it up by putting in an action scene—and then have the character wake up at the end.  The editor always feels cheated, and then has to wade through the tedious information that the author was trying to avoid.  Editors are very aware of that, and so we get angry when we find that we’ve been suckered into a dream sequence.  Usually, we get our vengeance: by gleefully rejecting the manuscript.

Now, the technique can work, but it’s hard to pull off.  Your description has to be vivid; your characters need to come alive and become strong protagonists; and you need to be very imaginative.  So you can open a tale with a dream sequence, but be forewarned.

The only cliché worse than opening with a dream is where the writer tells an entire story or novel and then ends with a character waking from his dream.  Don’t do that one folks.  If your editor reads it and then shoots you, it’s considered justifiable homicide.

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From author Dave Farland:

I hesitate to mention problems with self-publishing. In some genres, such as romance or self-help books, the industry is doing great. But for those who are trying to sell fiction, it seems that the markets are contracting, and it appears that things will go from bad to worse.

If you’ve been self-publishing for the past few years, you probably remember the good old days. For example, a few years ago I put my novel The Golden Queen up as a free e-book for a week and forgot about it. I was going to mention on my social media what I had done, but seriously got busy with something else. Three days later, I got an email from someone who said, “Why don’t you take your free e-book down and let someone else have a shot at the #1 spot.” I’d given away 15,000 copies in three days, and had sold thousands of dollars in inventory on the other two books in the series.

. . . .

With e-books, you can’t sell them unless you can advertise them. Of course, the folks at Amazon try to set their rates at about $1.70 a click on their advertisements. If every potential buyer who clicked on an advertisement actually bought a book, that would be a good deal. But in most cases, fewer than 1 in 10 people who click on a book ad will actually buy the book. Unfortunately, in my studies, Facebook ads don’t pay for themselves, and neither do any other kinds of ads that are sold online. That’s why we don’t see a lot of ads for books from major publishers online.

. . . .

Let’s say that you put your new book up for sale on Amazon. You tell all your friends and family, and get folks to announce it to their friends. You do a big blog party and get blogs up on twenty sites besides your own. Your book comes out … and it’s a blip on Amazon’s radar.

Amazon has lots of other books for sale. You’re a little blip. How do they know to promote your book?

Well, they have to look for independent verification. So they look at the number of reviews that you have on Amazon and on Goodreads. They try to make sure that the reviews are from real buyers instead of sock puppets. They look at the ratings given to the book in the form of stars, and then they decide whether to begin cross-promoting your book.

If you’ve got a book that has a high velocity of sales and an extremely high customer satisfaction rating, they’ll help promote your book, and that can be a great thing.

But here’s the problem: The people who get the highest velocity of sales almost always already have a pretty good customer base. They’ve got say 50,000 fans. If you’re a brand new author, you might have a great book, but you very likely don’t have 50,000 fans. So even if you do get picked up for promotion, you won’t get promoted heavily or for very long.

Meanwhile, let’s say that a new author comes out with a traditionally published book in hardcover and it gets put on the New Release shelf at Barnes and Noble. Hundreds of thousands of book buyers will walk by the shelf and see it. That book has visibility that your book doesn’t. Indeed, if people like it, they can take a picture of the ISBN number and order the book as an e-book right away. That’s how many e-books are bought.

Of course, the big publishers charge more for your e-book than you would like, but Amazon respects that. In fact, their algorithms will place higher-priced books onto the bestseller lists above books that are sold above deep discount. Thus, if you put your book online for 99 cents and promote it widely, you might make lots of sales, but you won’t make traction onto the bestseller list.

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From NYT bestseller and former writing professor Dave Farland:

Some authors never get “Writer’s Block,” and they don’t believe that it exists. They’ll blithely say, “Do doctors ever get ‘Doctor’s block,’ or do plumbers ever get ‘plumber’s block’?” and they think that they’ve just scored a point.

If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have told you much the same.

The truth is, doctors do get doctor’s block. Plumbers do get plumber’s block. It’s just that only writers have been smart enough to give the problem a name.

Think about it. Have you ever known someone who didn’t like their work environment, so they just got up and quit from a job that perhaps they had loved a year before? It’s a huge problem. I’ve worked as a manager in a number of businesses and believe me, employee retention is a big problem for management. So we have to make sure that the employees know that we care about them, that they’re properly reimbursed for their time, talents, and expertise, and that they’re given a nice work environment.

Right now, in my online writing workshops at www.mystorydoctor.com, I’m training a number of professionals with high-paying jobs that they were probably once happy with—lawyers, doctors, dentists, pilots, government officials, and execs in Fortune 500 companies. But all of them have decided that they would rather write.

But being a writer can be a tough job. If you’re starting out, early in your career you probably don’t get much in the way of benefits. Instead of praise from fans, you get torn apart by the critics in your writing group. Instead of a pleasant office, you may be writing in a dusty cellar. Instead of big paychecks, your first stories might be paid in copies of the small-press magazine that you just got published in.

. . . .

Several years ago, an agent called and asked me to hurry up and get a book turned in—the last novel in my Runelords series. Now, I’m going to be honest here. He called at a very bad time. I had gone to Oregon to take care of my mother, who was dying. I had literally been holding her hand, trying to comfort her, when my agent called. You can imagine that I wasn’t in a great mood to write.

On the phone my agent relayed a threatening message from my editor—one that I found outrageous. I thought about calling my publisher and demanding a new editor. I thought about just quitting my work with the publisher altogether.

In short, I became blocked on that project.

I tried working on it over and over again, but each time that I did I felt . . . confused. I couldn’t focus. I began to worry that I was getting Alzheimer disease, or something else. So I began taking vitamins and exercising, trying to get back on track.

Each time that I tried to write on that project, I also found myself getting angry all over again and feeling a keen sense of despair.

. . . .

People are most often blocked by negative criticism. The criticism might come from literary critics, from writers in a writing group, from editors, from random terrorists posting on Amazon.com, from family members or friends, or even a thought that flashes through the back of a writer’s own mind.

Some writers get anxious. They set unrealistic deadlines for themselves, or they feel undue pressure with their work. They may worry about tough critics or the possibility of bad reviews—or they might worry that they’ll actually succeed. And those worries block the creative process.

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From NYT bestselling author and former writing professor, Dave Farland:

Last week I got a note from a student who just had a novel accepted by a major publisher. He seemed a little surprised at how easily it had happened, as if he’d happened to enter a horserace and had just taken first place by accident.

But it’s no accident. I’ve heard a lot of writers talk about publishing and making money in this business as having an element of chance, as if writers who succeed are just lucky. I’ll grant you, it does seem to me that at times there is an element of chance.

For example, my friend Richard Paul Evans started out as a self-published author. He took his little book out to Book Expo America—a huge trade show—and tried to get a table so that he could display it. But the tables were sold out.

Yet as he was walking through the exhibition halls, he noticed that one table was open—the vendor that had reserved it was a no show—so he quietly set up a little display and talked to people about his book. No one was interested, it seemed, but he was invited to a small bookstore in the South to do a signing.

He went to the bookstore, and signed in the midst of a snowstorm. No one came. He realized that he had wasted his time and thousands of dollars in self-publishing, but then a woman walked in late, just before the store was about to close for the night.

She brushed the snow off of her coat and got to talking to him. She told him that she was a television producer for a morning news show—Good Morning America. Due to the snow, their guest the next morning wasn’t going to be able to make it. She asked if he would be willing to stand in for the missing guest.

. . . .

Was it luck? Coincidence? Perseverance?

I think it was a combination of factors. Richard Paul Evans perseveres. He’s also smart. But eventually, when he most needed publicity, he met someone who happened to need a guest speaker, and it changed his life.

Yet time and time again I meet young would-be writers who say, “You know, those authors who make it big? It’s all a matter of luck.” This becomes their excuse for doing nothing at all.

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From author Dave Farland:

Many new writers don’t know when to stop polishing a manuscript and move on to the next. Part of the reason for that might have to do with Ernest Hemingway.

Many years ago, a writer asked Hemingway, “How many times should I rewrite a manuscript?” Now, Hemingway hated dumb questions, so he answered “Oh, at least 60.”

He loved doing that to writers. On one occasion, a writer asked him what kind of chair he preferred to sit in, as if perhaps the brand of furniture that an author had planted his butt on might somehow confer literary genius.

Hemingway answered, “I don’t sit when I write, I stand.” And a generation or writers began to write standing up. The problem with that is that you can go to any one of Hemingway’s old homes or offices, and see the chairs that he sat on.

On another occasion, a writer asked him how long she should wait between drafts when revising, so that she would be able to look at her story “cold.” He suggested that it should be two years.

Think about it. If Hemingway did sixty drafts of a novel and waited two years between each draft, he would have never finished a single book. Don’t listen to bad advice, even when it comes from a genius.

Back when I first began writing, I used an old typewriter. I didn’t like it. I had to really bang the keys hard, it was noisy, certain keys didn’t work well, and the type was uneven. Because of this, doing rewrites was difficult. I’d type out a draft, make extensive corrections on the page with a pencil, and then try to type out a perfectly clean copy.

Using that system, it would have been foolish to repeat the process sixty times. Because of this, in the 1920s and 30s, a professional writer would typically try to learn to write a finished copy in a single draft. It was simpler to write out a nice outline in longhand, and then thoughtfully type out one clean draft, than to retype a piece over and over.

. . . .

Of course with the development of computers, revising became quite easy. My first computer would allow me to put only 2 pages of text on a disk, but by the late 1980s I was able to get first a whole chapter, and then with the addition of a hard drive, an entire novel in a single file. It wasn’t until then that rewriting became so easy that it became problematic.

You see, as an editor I’m looking for stories that have some originality, that carry an author’s own voice, his odd quirks. But when a new writer begins showing a manuscript around to members of her workshop and polishing it further and further, eventually the author tends to lose her own distinct voice. The result is, that the story can become less interesting to me as an editor with every draft.

So the question is, how many revisions does a novel or short story really need?

. . . .

As I rewrite, I try to avoid changing both the voices of my characters and my own narrative voice. Rather than polishing away the differences between voices, I think it’s better to look for ways to heighten the unique characters in the tale.

In fact, on one of my last rewrites, I do what I call a “voice edit,” where I go through key characters person by person to make sure that their voices are consistent.

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