Why Poetry is Harder to Write Than Non-Fiction

photo http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1336055 by Robert Linder http://www.sxc.hu/profile/linder6580All writing is art.

My father worked in Production Control for an electronics company. What that meant was that he was primarily responsible for whether the stuff that was made came out right. (Quality Control, where he started out, is about finding what’s wrong when Production Control fails.) No amount of training and oversight can supplant a good written procedure.

He wrote procedures he could send off from his office in Tijuana to techs in Boston and they could be followed blindly without modification.

That’s art.

Over the years I’ve settled into some assumptions about what kinds of writing are harder than others. (I do not warrant this information to be useful. I just hope it’s interesting.)
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Big Projects for 2014 (And Why You Might Care)

photo http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1392189 by WallPhoto http://www.sxc.hu/profile/WallPhotoAfter 6 years of struggle, last fall things turned around. My 7th year back in self-employment has, so far, been the best. Less anxiety. More fun. Greater clarity. Better schedule. And even better money.

There are 3 projects in the pipeline that’ll take less than 6 years (partly because I’m not starting out in a $400,000 hole. Long story. Feel free to ask.)

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The One True Measurement Your Fans Care About

It’s not how many
stars
they gave it at Amazon.

It’s not how well it was
edited.
It’s not that it was available in their
format
of choice: Kindle, Nook, print, audio.
It’s not the
price.
It’s not
how long
or short it is.

image http://www.sxc.hu/photo/965830 by Billy Alexander http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ba1969
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What Does It Cost to Make a Living as a Writer?

picture http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1220297 by Guillaume Riesen http://www.sxc.hu/profile/thegnome54Some authors hope their first book will make enough money to encourage them in their writing dreams.

Not likely.

More likely, you’ll spend a lot of time, money, effort to get it finished, and see very few sales.

If you’re writing to make money, go ahead and give up now, before you waste all that time, money, effort.

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Fifteen Thousand Words: Self-Publishing 101 Q&A

Fifteen thousand words about self-publishing. That’s the conversation I’ve had with Cheryl Campbell, answering her questions about self-publishing. Being a newbie, her questions were basic. Being a smarty, her questions were insightful and clear.

Fifteen thousand words. I’ve written books shorter than that. While most of this content will make it into Getting Your Book Our of the “Someday” Box, 2nd Edition you can read it all here absolutely free.

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Discovering Book Design: One Small Step

I asked the talented Dave Bricker for recommendations on book design, especially interior layout. He recommended Richard Hendel’s On Book Design.

And for the first time in a very long time, I’m completely sucked into a new discipline.

It’s a hygiene sort of art; when you’re done, it should be invisible. Most readers know nothing about book design. Most people I’ve talked to, voracious readers, never thought about what goes into the layout of the interior of a book until I mentioned it.

The exploration has just begun. I’ll be taking it slow, not wanting to derail the rewrite of anodyne. Besides, these books are semi-rare and not cheap.

I’ll keep you posted.

I Will Never Adjust My Art to Suit You

person from a photo http://www.sxc.hu/photo/751032 by Jason Antony http://www.sxc.hu/profile/vancanjay child's drawing http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1422728 by the Horton Group http://www.hortongroup.com/Authors seem to think they need to please their fans, or Amazon, or a publisher. I know I’ll be the voice no one wants to hear, but I don’t change my art for anyone. And yeah, you’re gonna say that I’ll never be a best-seller; that if you don’t bend to the market, you’ll never get popular.

But I already have real-life experience which says otherwise.
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Newbies: All Good Questions Do Fine

I tell every writer I meet they can ask me all the questions they want. A handful ask a couple questions, and I always learn something new from the answers I have to come up with.

Cheryl Campbell
Cheryl Campbell

Once in a while I meet someone with the childlike sponge of curiosity, and it makes my day. Er, week. Perhaps month, depending on how long Cheryl Campbell keeps coming up with these questions.

Cheryl introduced herself on Linked In a few weeks ago, and we’ve chatted so often that I have over 10,000 words of Q&A stored up. And the questions are so universal to neophytes in modern publishing that I’ll be spending all week sharing her questions and my answers with you. And in an uncharacteristic twist, rather than burning hours reformatting everything, I’m going to just paste the emails in her, raw and essentially unedited.
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And Here’s Why “Good Enough” is Killing You

dresserI don’t have a dresser.

My clothes are in a stack of boxes, turned on their side, tops toward the bed. Big ones below, smaller ones above.

More than one person has offered a dresser, but I still don’t have one, for the same reason Terry and Virgie still don’t have kitchen chairs.
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