Finish Your Book Now
By Deb Gallardo
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been around the writing industry and a subscriber to Writer’s Digest magazine for longer than I care to remember. And every year their January issue invariably has a headline something like this:
“GET PUBLISHED THIS YEAR!”
It was always an unpleasant reminder to me that I hadn’t achieved my goal — AGAIN.
Well, the good news is, traditional publishing is not the only game in town anymore. It used to be that the only alternative was paying ungodly sums to vanity publishers, with little to no profit ever realized, a garage full of unsold books and no way to otherwise publish that book again.
Now, there’s a third alternative – “Indie” publishing. Yes, independent publishers are the game changer of the decade. There’s no longer a reason for you to procrastinate on finishing that book. You owe it to yourself and your potential audience to write the book that’s inside you.
NOTE: This post has been updated. In the original article, I publicized an offer for an inexpensive writing course with a deadline which has now expired. That course has been pulled from the market. But not to worry.
My friend and esteemed online colleague, Kristen Eckstein, is still someone you need to get to know if you’re aspiring to be published. She has her finger on the pulse of the book industry and is an expert on Indie publishing. Not only can she coach you from idea to publication, she’ll make sure you retain all your rights.
To start of f the new year, and to capitalize on the move to publication on tablet devices, here’s what she can do for you:
Ready to Finally Finish Writing Your Book?
Get her done in 90 days @ Ultimate Book Coach.
Full disclosure statement:
I cannot recommend Kristen highly enough. For your sake, I don’t promote anyone or anything that I don’t wholeheartedly endorse. If you should eventually purchase from her from the link above, be aware that I would receive a commission from that sale.
For more information, see my Material Connections page here.
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Creative Writing Ideas – Pay Attention! Part One
By Deb Gallardo
In my writing ideas journal, late in winter a few years back, I wrote the following:
“A bird sang outside my window this morning. It was startling, but quite welcome, considering that we have just come out of two weeks of double-digit sub-zero temperatures and more snow than normal. It’s an unmistakable sign that spring is not too far off.”
Without having made that notation, I wouldn’t now have such a vivid recollection of the incident. In fact, I doubt I would Continue reading this post »
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Story Ideas – Borders, Boundaries, Barricades & Invisible Lines Revisited
By Deb Gallardo
This topic is so thought-provoking and the Kristi Tencarre photo so inspiring, I’m revisiting a timeless post in hopes that it will stimulate your creativity and get you eager to write. Click here for Borders, Boundaries, Barricades & Invisible Lines
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Bloggers – Win a Super WordPress Plugin
By Deb Gallardo
If you’re a blogger, you likely know how a good WordPress plugin can make your life so much easier. I’ve been using CommentLuv for quite some time on this blog. Now the developer is about to release a premium version that “kicks it up another notch.” It goes live mid-November.
Today I got a quick message from a fellow writer about a free contest you may want to enter to win a copy of this plugin. Here’s what she had to say:
There is a hot new WordPress plugin coming soon! Cathy Stucker is giving away a free copy at her book marketing site, SellingBooks. Learn how you can enter and win by visiting Cathy’s CommentLuv Premium giveaway page.
Cathy also added this: “The more people who use CommentLuv, the more valuable it is to all of us!”
That’s something I’d never considered. We’re actually helping each other out when we support great products like CommentLuv. That was an eye-opener!
Also, be sure to sign up for her free newsletter here to help you sell more books. Haven’t written your book yet? Even better. Get the inside scoop BEFORE you write it, so you can gear it even more towards your intended audience. You can’t be too thin (unless you’re sick) and you can’t learn too much about selling books! After all, that’s why we write ‘em!
Drawing is November 14, 2011. (Plugin release date November 15.) WIN BEFORE YOU BUY. Go to Cathy’s giveaway page now before you forget!
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Writing Tips from the Experts
By Deb Gallardo
A pithy quote from Nora DeLoach, which captured my imagination is this:
“Writing is rewriting… If you fall in love with the vision you want of your work and not your words, the rewriting will become easier.”
And from Earnest Hemingway I offer these quotes:
- “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
- “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
- “All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
- “The first draft of anything is sh*t.”
- “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
- “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
- “Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because that gives you perspective.”
- “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
- “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
- “I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
- “That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best –make it all up –but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”
- “From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?”
- “The great thing is to last and get your work done, and see and hear and understand and write when there is something that you know and not before and not too d*mn much afterwards.”
- “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
- “The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life -and one is as good as the other.”
- “You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.”
- “In order to write about life, first you must live it!”
- “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
- “When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.”
- “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse.”
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