Monday, October 15, 2012

Which do you think will gain the most profit e-books or print?

ebooks, definitely. They already have the most profit per item. Eventually they’ll overtake print books on total volume.

My mother is 80 years old and reads two or three paperbacks each week. I asked her recently if she would like to read ebooks. She could save a lot of money and I showed her how nice they look on an iPad.

Her response? No interest whatsoever. Of course she wasn’t raised on computers and displays the way people below the age of about 35 were.

Bad Reviews

Well, if you can’t handle bad reviews then you’re in the wrong business. I’ll want to understand specifics. Is this a good reviewer who has legitimate points? Or someone who, perhaps, this just is never going to be the kind of book they would like. Sort of like me reviewing a rom com –it’s just not something that’s going to really grab me, sorry.

If it’s the former, then I listen. And listen hard. Because that’s the thing about being the writer – you can never really read your book as an unbiased observer. Right? Impossible. Unless maybe you put it down for many, many years and then read it. No, probably not even then.

So I listen to ‘professionals’, what they think, and I have gone back after reviews and actually made edits based on input – particularly if I hear it from more than one reviewer.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Advice to new writers?

Don’t let ANYBODY read that initial draft. It will suck.

Oh – and don’t let ANYBODY read that initial draft. It will suck, indeed.

Also, be ready for criticism. You may think it’s the best novel, potentially, ever written. It’s not. You need direction from others to make your book be all that it can possibly be.

Finish your first draft and then refine, rewrite, make it real. Until you love it. I’d say a year or more. For me it took 3 years after the initial draft to get it where I wanted it to be.

And at least one year before it was ready for anyone else to read.

Because before that, it sucked. To be clear, I never thought it sucked when I finished writing sections. Only when I re-read them months later.

You see, here’s another bit of advice. Don’t spend too much time on the polishing when you first get the words down. You’re just building the foundation. The polishing and finishing comes later.