I've Added My Indie Catalog to the Amazon Prime Lending Library

If you're an Amazon Prime member and you have a Kindle or Kindle Fire, you can now borrow any of my self-published Kindle books for free under the Amazon Prime Lending Library program!

Just turn on your Kindle or Fire, go to the Kindle Store, and look up Adelaide Einstein (comic fiction, chick lit), Snow Ball (dark, comic mystery), Shorts (collection of shorts and flash fiction) or From Concept to Community (nonfiction, about strategies for maximizing traffic for a new online community on a shoestring budget, using Publetariat.com as an example).

Here's a link to the Prime Lending Library page on Amazon, where you can get more information about the program and instructions for checking out and returning books.

I'll be adding my new book, Overshare, to this program when it's published, too.

Indie Author Guide Webinars!

I've been a guest speaker for numerous webinars and have found them to be an excellent way to deliver presentations. Now that my book, The Indie Author Guide: Self-Publishing Strategies Anyone Can Use, is coming up on its one year anniversary since release, many of you are hoping to get your books available for sale in Kindle format in time for the holidays, and thousands of folks will soon have completed NaNoWriMo manuscripts and will be looking for next steps, I've decided to launch a series of my own webinars.

The webinars will be offered online, and will be presented with a mix of presentation materials and live chat. No special equipment or phone-in will be required of attendees, and you don't even have to download any software!

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The foundation of my new webinar series is a free, monthly, hourlong Q&A session. This monthly webinar is intended to serve as a supplement to my book, and therefore questions based on specific content from the book will take precedence. However, anyone may attend to get answers to any questions they may have about self-publishing, ebooks, author platform and related topics. The first of these webinars is already scheduled for Sunday, October 2 from 6-7pm PST (9-10pm EST). Register for the free Oct. 2nd Q&A here.

I'm planning to continue this free, monthly Q&A webinar at the same time on the first Sunday of each month, and will promote each webinar in advance on Twitter, Facebook, here and elsewhere.

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In addition to the free, monthly Q&A, I'll be offering more in-depth, webinar training workshops on specific topics of interest to self-publishers.

First up, based on a high level of interest in the topic, will be a webinar on Simplified Kindle Publishing: Step By Step. In this webinar you can get plain English instructions in: how to get your manuscript properly formatted to meet Amazon's Kindle specifications, convert it to Kindle format using free conversion tools, preview the resulting Kindle book (with or without a Kindle) and what to do if there are problems in the file when you preview it.

This presentation is similar to the one I gave at the Writer's Digest Business of Getting Published conference earlier this year, but its content has been revised, simplified and brought totally up to date. If you've got intermediate or better Word skills (can apply paragraph formatting, know how to use Styles, know how to insert a Table of Contents), you can do this!

The registration fee of $24.99 admits you to the 90-minute webinar (approximately 60 minutes of instruction followed by a 30-minute Q&A), during which attendees will also be given access to a free, pdf download of the entire presentation. Why pay for professional conversion services when you can learn how to do it yourself for a fraction of the cost? Get your book out there in Kindle format in time for the holidays, and never pay for professional ebook formatting or conversion services again! This webinar will be held on Sunday, October 9 from 4-5:30pm PST (7-8:30pm EST).

You can register for the Simplified Kindle Publishing Workshop here. Don't delay, as registration is limited to 100 participants. For those who can't attend at the scheduled time, a recording of the webinar will be made available at a discounted price after the presentation.

NOTE: the instruction given in the Kindle Publishing webinar will be specific to Windows PC users, please do not register for it if you are a Mac or Linux user.

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The next webinar workshop will be on the topic of Leveraging Amazon: a survey of all the free marketing and platform tools Amazon offers its authors, how best to use them, and step by step instructions for setting up your Amazon Author page. This webinar will be offered in November, details to follow.

Additional, upcoming webinar workshop topics will include Getting Started With Author Platform, Getting Started With Social Media, and Low- and No-Cost Book Marketing Opportunities. Again, details to be posted here as they become available.

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I'm very excited about this great opportunity to provide you with the tools and skills needed to self-publish and promote your books as effectively as possible, and hope to "meet" many of you in my webinars soon!

Keep Your Characters In The Driver's Seat

Have you ever been watching a movie or reading a book in which a character does or says something that doesn't fit with who that character has been set up to be, and you're left annoyed, wondering why the character behaved or spoke as such? And then the plot continues cranking right along, and if the story's very funny or involving, or there are lots of explosions and cool special effects, you keep watching or reading, but with lower expectations. This is what happens when plot drives character, instead of the other way around.

A common example of this problem is the story that would never get off the starting blocks at all, were it not for some illogical action on the protagonist's part. Otherwise level-headed and pragmatic CPA Polly suddenly decides to ditch the security and status she's come to love in her career, move to the other side of the country and open a cupcake shop---not because she's always yearned to be more of a free spirit, dreamed of being a professional baker, has always wanted to move far away, or any other good reason based in logic or her life cicumstances, but because doing these things will open the door to a series of madcap adventures and romance with a cute industrial restaurant supply sales rep who lives in the new city.

You might wonder why the author doesn't just start the tale in the new location, with Polly getting settled in and looking for a good retail bakery space. The author thinks, in beginning with Polly's 'old' life, he's setting up the necessary background to create a "fish out of water" story and demonstrate an arc of character growth. But in reality, unless there's some very compelling reason for Polly to uproot herself in this way, her behavior and choices read more like authorial convenience than growth.

Perhaps even more annoying is the character who's been well-established, whom you've come to like and root for, right up to the point he does something that makes no sense whatsoever. Suddenly, this fully-realized, three-dimensional person becomes a puppet on a string, being forced to go through certain motions to get the reader or viewer to the next major plot point.

In a thriller, the sweet, kind, but mousy library clerk who's normally scared to walk to the parking lot alone at night nevertheless ventures into the dark basement alone when he hears a strange noise from the top of the stairs. In a sci fi novel, the by-the-book researcher who finds his lab has been breached doesn't report it to the proper authorities, but decides to launch his own, private investigation instead. In a romance, the strong-willed, self-sufficient, feminist heroine melts into a needy puddle of damp lace doilies at the sight of her beloved. In a mystery, the clever and resourceful hero could resolve a case of mistaken identity with a single phone call to one person, yet somehow the idea never occurs to him. I could go on, but do you really want me to?

The reason why this is so irritating to the reader or viewer is that our estimation of a story's believability is based on how well it jibes with our own, real-life experiences and knowledge. Even in a fantasy or sci fi story, we want the behavior of human and humanoid characters to match up with what we know of real-life people. And in real life, character ALWAYS drives plot.

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Every choice that every real person makes every day is a product of who that person is. His motivations, goals, fears, desires, etc. are all rooted in his background and lifetime of experiences to date, and it's his motivations, goals, fears, desires, etc. that dictate his actions.

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The cure for the author-as-puppeteer syndrome is to begin with well-drawn characters, and then keep asking yourself, "Given who she is, what would this character do when confronted with these circumstances?" as opposed to, "What does this character need to do or say to get the story to the next major plot point?" Even in an intricately-plotted novel, characters should never act...well, out of character.

I tend to start with a character and a set of challenging or unusual circumstances, and let character dictate plot. Whatever I believe the character would do next is exactly what happens. If you're going to begin with plot, then you probably need to work backward: rather than creating the character and then asking yourself what she needs to do or say to get to the next plot point, start with an assumption that the character is going to do or say whatever is necessary for the sake of plot, then ask yourself what kind of character would do or say that thing. In so doing, you create the illusion that character is driving plot.

What To Do With Your Stale-Dated Prose

Ah, progress. Had telephones existed in Verona of old, Romeo and Juliet would've been able to synchronize their plans perfectly and avoid all that mistaken suicide business. Consider the movie, It's A Wonderful Life: if security cameras had been mounted in the Bedford Falls Building and Loan, George Bailey and his scatterbrained Uncle Billy would've known in a matter of hours what became of the missing $8,000, and Clarence the apprentice angel would've had to find another way to earn his wings. Underwater radar and GPS technologies could've reduced Moby Dick to a short story. My point is, changes in technology and social norms can eliminate certain kinds of problems and conflicts, create previously unforeseen problems and conflicts, and more generally affect the way people behave.

Many writers and authors are jumping into the indie fray these days, dusting off old manuscripts and shorts that have yet to find a home with a traditional publisher, giving them a cursory once-over and forging ahead with indie publication. I applaud these efforts, and hope they continue. But a word of warning: that pre-publication once-over needs to a be a bit more thorough if your material is contemporary, but more than a few years old.

If your upper-middle-class dad gets lost when he hits the road in his brand-new SUV, the reader will be wondering why he doesn't just use his car's (or phone's) GPS to get back on track. Similarly, if your characters' pop culture references include The Oprah Winfrey Show and the post-divorce exploits of Lady Di, those references are dated and the reader will notice.

You may think, "So what if the reader becomes aware at some point that the book was written years ago; it's not like they're going to stop reading it, or think it's a bad book just because of that." I don't disagree, but with all the distractions of the modern world's wonderland of electronics, technology, social media and noise of all kinds, it's already a big enough challenge to get and keep your reader's attention. Anything that takes the reader out of your story world for any reason is to be avoided, even if it's only for the moment or two it takes the reader to mentally observe, "Nobody uses Thomas Guide road map books anymore; this story must've been written a long time ago." Far worse for the reader is the supposedly contemporary story in which the central conflict or source of tension would be easily eliminated with some modern (and common) convenience or other, like caller ID or the internet.

However, stale-dated prose doesn't necessarily require an extensive rewrite. It just calls for the author to manage reader expectations. The simplest fix is to insert subtle cues and signposts in the beginning pages that will let the reader know your story takes place in the recent past. This may be as simple as editing to highlight the anachronisms, rather than merely observing them in passing. If you make a point of the fact that your protagonist works in the Twin Towers in New York, the reader will immediately know the story must take place prior to 9/11/2001 and therefore won't expect to find anything that happened, was invented, or was popularized after that year.

Stories that were intended to be of-the-moment when they were written will probably require a more extensive edit to update or eliminate dated references. For example, your story about the impending doom of Y2K will no longer work as the straightforward thriller you had in mind when you wrote it. You can either take it in the direction of satire or comedy, or change the threat to something people are still worried about today: 2012, anyone?

Finally, don't lose sight of editorial repercussions. If you decide to change your protagonist's paranoia about Y2K to paranoia about 2012 for example, make sure you update all such references throughout the manuscript to maintain consistency.

Publisher, Sell To Thyself!

I'm always astounded by the hard-sell and oversell antics of some indie authors. While I often advise indie authors that they must be able to take off their Author hat and put on a Publisher hat, the thing is, no matter which of those two hats they're wearing they should always have a Reader beanie on underneath.

While I wouldn't ever advise a writer to engineer his or her fiction to suit a given demographic, this is definitely required when it comes to nonfiction. You must do this in order to identify your target audience and ensure your book contains the information or reference material that audience will want. But having said that, I'll go on to say that even fiction authors---even literary fiction authors---would do well to give a thought to the reader as they lovingly craft their prose. You want to see your vision brought to vivid life on the page, certainly, but you don't want to confuse or bore your readers in the process.

It's even more critical to keep your Reader beanie on nice and snug when you go to don your Publisher hat. This is necessary because among other things, you still must identify your target audience, regardless of whether your book is fiction or nonfiction, in order to develop an efficient and effective marketing plan. You need to figure out who's most likely to be interested in your book, and where and how to reach those people. But this doesn't mean that once you've done so, you should go all full-bore, Mad Men, Marketing Exec From Hell on them.

Author and Publisher you may be, but you're also still a human being and a consumer. You still shake your head in annoyance at the pile of junk mail, junk email, junk fax and even junk Facebook and Twitter flowing into your life on a daily basis, don't you? So why on Earth would you ever risk being counted among the purveyors of that junk?

How is it possible that the Author who chuckles to herself at over-the-top marketing hype in advertisements for weight loss aids will nevertheless splatter "MY BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!" in gigantic, flashing red letters two inches tall on her author website?

How can the Author who complains about all the pointless piano-playing cat videos his Facebook friends post to his wall go on to blast all his Twitter followers with twice-daily reminders of his book's current availability and sales rank on Amazon?

Why does the Author who's sick of all the spam comments left on her blog turn around and post a so-called review of someone else's book in which she devotes as much time to plugging her own book as talking about the book she's supposedly reviewing?

Yes, you must get the word out about your book. But you most do so with some consideration for the people on the receiving end. When in doubt about a given tactic you're about to employ, put yourself in the shoes of a non-writing, non-publishing, ordinary consumer and imagine how your tactic will be received under those circumstances. Don't overthink it, just go back to the Golden Rule: advertise how you'd want to be advertised to.

6 Dialogue Traps To Avoid

Dialogue is an area where many writers struggle. This is pretty ironic when you consider that words are writers' stock in trade, and unless a given writer is mute, he or she has been plying that trade since about the age of eleven months. Yet while most of us communicate normally and without much difficulty in our everyday lives, for some reason many of us have a tendency to go all flowery, choppy, melodramatic or wooden when it comes time to put words in our characters' mouths. Avoiding the following dialogue traps will go a long way toward making your dialogue more natural and believable.

1. No two people talk exactly the same. In believable stories, as in life, each person will have his or her own rhythms of speech, pet phrases and regional or family expressions. This doesn't mean each character should broadcast his geographic or cultural background with every sentence, however. It just means that if, by about a quarter of the way through the book, a reader can't tell your characters apart merely based on their dialogue, you haven't made each character's "voice" distinctive. The important thing here is to be subtle when drawing those distinctions. If you're not sure what this means or how to go about it, here's an exercise to try: the next time you're in a crowded, public place, pay attention to the bits and pieces of conversation floating all around you. Notice how different people express the same thoughts differently.

For example, where one person might say, "I called Sally," another might say, "I phoned Sally," or, "I rang Sally." Where Joe (in his forties) says, "That whole night was a waste of time," Jake (a twentysomething) might say, "Two words: epic fail," and Steve (an ex-military man) might say, "FUBAR, all the way, man." Thinking about your characters' backgrounds, histories, and even biases and motivations when constructing their dialogue will help in making their voices distinct from one another.

2. Life is not a movie. While heated exchanges, adamant diatribes and weepy heart-to-hearts all have their bit to contribute in various stories, they should be used sparingly if you don't want your novel to read like a soap opera script. If you're prone to succumb to melodrama in your dialogue, try reading it aloud. If the words feel or sound unnatural coming out of your own mouth, they shouldn't be coming out of your characters' mouths, either. Of course there's some wiggle room here if you're writing something historical, a fantasy, sci-fi, or anything else with purposely unusual language.

3. Men and women communicate differently. This really boils down to a single, simple concept. Speaking in gross generalizations, the masculine communication style is based on utility, whereas the feminine communication style is about socialization.

In the masculine, words are used to accomplish some goal. The goal is usually imparting necessary---and that word, "necessary", is key here---information, but it can also be to quickly size up a person or situation, or to establish or reinforce the pecking order (e.g., teasing). Generally speaking, believable masculine characters talk less than feminine characters, and get to the point pretty quickly. With feminine characters, a given conversation need not have an intrinsic point: the point of the conversation may simply be for the feminine characters to hear and be heard, and feel validated by one another as a result. But having said that, I'd caution against too much mutual navel-gazing on the part of your feminine characters, lest you bore your readers.

4. In general, the words should not draw attention to themselves. Dialogue should never take your reader out of the story, for any reason. If your reader must reach for a dictionary or fire up some device that has access to Wikipedia in order to understand what the heck that character is talking about, that reader is being pulled out of the story world.

While particularly intellectual characters may employ five-dollar words at times, try to err on the side of conservatism in that area. If you can substitute a word or phrase that's better-known, though still only rarely used in everyday conversation, make the change. Similarly, if a given character wants everyone to think she's worldly and well-traveled she may pepper her speech with foreign words, and that's appropriate. Just make sure the foreign words are familiar to most readers, or that their meaning is adequately conveyed through context.

5. Dialogue that's used for exposition will sound stilted 99.99% of the time---so don't do it! As a general guideline, characters should NEVER say things to one another only for the purpose of conveying necessary information or background to the reader. If a given character might just as well open his bit of talking with, "Well, since the reader probably doesn't know anything about particle physics, let me give you a thumbnail sketch of string theory," then you're doing something wrong. Find a way to get the expository into your story in other ways: through actions, settings, and so on. Consider the following example.

Michael was physically and mentally abused for years at the hands of his mother and as a result, he has a great deal of trouble extending trust to any females. This history informs the character and actions of Michael, but is not a central focus of the story at hand. When Michael visits a new girlfriend's home for the first time, one writer might include a confrontation between the two characters in which the girlfriend voices concerns about Michael's unwillingness to open up to her and Michael responds by spilling his guts about his mother. A better writer will have Michael flinch when the girlfriend removes her belt while changing out of her work clothes, when she playfully quotes an overbearing female movie or TV character, or when she reaches for the knife block while preparing dinner, and then have the girlfriend notice this.

6. When in doubt, read it out...loud. This goes back to trap #2, but it bears repeating.

Can The Subscription Model Work For Trade Publishers?

I recently read a Slate article about how the film industry is repeating the DRM and business model mistakes of the music industry, and of course saw many parallels with, and implications for, trade publishing in it. But unlike the film and music industries, Big Pub has plenty more market and cultural shifts to contend with these days than just the rising popularity and availability of digital media.

The once-mighty Borders has failed, proving once and for all that brick and mortar is no longer the ace in the hole it once seemed for trade publishers. Authors, established and aspiring alike, are seeing fewer and fewer reasons to partner with trade publishers now that it's become clear they can get their work to a readership more quickly, keep control of their intellectual property rights, and earn higher royalties to boot by going indie. As if to add insult to injury, Amazon seems poised to eat whatever's left of Big Publishing's lunch after everyone else has had a go at the trough. But it occurred to me that there may yet be some unexplored and promising territory for Big Pub, if they're willing to entertain an unorthodox idea: a subscription model of ebook content delivery.

Much like Gamefly and O'Reilly's Safari Books Online, major publishers could offer a monthly, flat-fee subscription service for book-at-a-time access to all their ebook titles in various ereader formats. Note that I said access, not ownership. It would be a rental-type paradigm, and like Gamefly and Netflix could be offered at various pricing tiers according to how many titles the consumer is allowed to have checked out at any given time. Such a plan would enable publishers to maintain steady, ongoing revenue streams in addition to their existing sales channels, and would allow publishers to do an end-run around Amazon, B&N's Nook store, and Apple's iBookstore, too.

Perhaps just as importantly, it would allow publishers to gracefully exit the ebook pricing, DRM and staged release debacles of the past, and finally be seen as offering a valuable service to consumers instead of being the big, greedy bad guys.

Gamefly charges the equivalent of the cost of one new game at retail prices for its basic subscription; trade publishers could do the same. At $10 - $15 per month I think plenty of avid ebook readers would be willing to sign up, because they're probably already buying at least one ebook at retail prices each month.

There are only 5 major players left in trade publishing, so even if you had to 'subscribe' to all 5 of them individually (since it's not likely they'd form some kind of collective service), you're still only talking approximately the same monthly fee as what plenty of people are already paying for their Gamefly accounts.

While publishers would lose money on accounts signed to voracious readers who currently buy numerous ebooks every month at retail prices, those folks are outliers. Most people I know don't buy ebooks at that rate, and most people I know don't read more than one book a month, either. Also, there would surely be a large contingent of people who sign up fully intending to wring their money's worth out of the subscription fee, but ultimately end up 'checking out' a book only every second or third month. Once you know the books are there for the taking any time, there's no urgency.

If you subscribe to Netflix, Gamefly or even a health club, you're probably personally acquainted with this phenomenon. I say this while gazing ruefully at the Netflix DVD I've had checked out for nearly four months now. Yep, I've paid the monthly fee for that movie three times over, and in fact could've bought the DVD for less than I've paid for this rental by now. But I still have no intention of cancelling my Netflix subscription because it's a convenience I'm willing to pay for. And maybe someday I really will end up checking out a new movie every few days, like I imagined I'd be doing when I first signed up.

Yes, there are technological hurdles to be overcome. And yes, there will be some considerable startup effort and investment. But those things are true of any new business model trade publishers might try to adopt. And heaven knows, the model they've currently got is no longer working so they're going to have to try something.