Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

As e-books continue to take the world of publishing by storm, it’s natural to wonder how any good books are going to be found by readers in the rising river of e-books. Won’t they be lost in the flood?

Heather posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I have lately been doing lots of reading on the e-pub buzz and thinking about marketing implications as they relate to fiction. I think to aid the ‘average’ ebook reader in making good fiction selections there will be a rise of some type of ‘recommendation medium’ (like blogs or an offshoot of social networking) that judges/reviews fiction ebooks. Do you see something like this currently developing and if so how as an author do you intend to take advantage of this marketing tool?

Randy sez: Yes, this sort of thing has already developed and will continue to grow. The basic idea is known as “crowdsourcing” and you can Google this word or search for it on Amazon to learn all that you want to know about it.

What is crowdsourcing? For the case of selling e-books, there are three fundamental elements: an open market, word-of-mouth, and a “similarity measure.” Let’s look at each of these in turn:

An open market is necessary for crowdsourcing to work. You make a sea of products available to anyone at reasonable prices, without unnecessary constraints. E-books fit this description exactly. There are hundreds of thousands of e-books available on Amazon now, and many more public domain e-books available at places like Project Gutenberg. This is in sharp contrast to the field of traditionally published books, where publishers and their marketing people make decisions about “what will sell.” The market of paper books is only somewhat open, because the economics of book production require that gatekeepers refuse most books for publication. They have to do this. They couldn’t afford to publish them all.

Word-of-mouth is also important to crowdsourcing. People like to talk about the books they read. They don’t talk about the books they don’t like. What happens is that good books get talked about and they tend to get read by more people who also talk about them. Good books get a chain reaction of word-of-mouth. Bad books don’t get talked about and they tend to get read by only a few people. Reader reviews are essentially word-of-mouth on steroids. This is one thing Amazon does very well — it encourages reader reviews. I read the 5-star reviews and the 1-star reviews of any book before I buy it. I also look at how many reviews there are and what fraction of them are 4 and 5 stars. If a book has many 1-star reviews and many 5-star reviews, it tells me that it’s a controversial book, which may well mean that it’s a very good book. If it has many 1-star reviews and few 5-star reviews, then it’s probably not very good. All those reviewers out there generally do a good job of sifting the good from the bad.

“Similarity measure” is one thing Amazon gets stupendously right. For any book on Amazon, you can see a list of several other books with the caption: “Customers who bought this item also bought:” For example, people who bought my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES also buy Jim Bell’s book PLOT & STRUCTURE. No surprise there. The two books cater to the same reader. Amazon wisely gives readers a choice to buy them both as a bundle. When an online store tells customers what other people are buying, it’s a terrific way to let people know which books the masses of customers believe are similar.

When you create a completely open market with word-of-mouth in the form of reader reviews and then show customers what the market believes are similar products, the cream rises to the top. Quickly. The junk falls to the bottom. Quickly.

How do you take advantage of this? By writing your best possible book and by getting it out there on the open market in the online stores that do reader reviews and show similar products best. In our current world, Amazon mastered those skills sooner and better than anyone else. Barnes & Noble is making strides to catch up. Competition is good, and we should all hope that several excellent online retailers gain market share by putting these key elements together. Right now, Amazon and B&N are the big players because they deserve to be.

Quality matters, now more than ever. Write a good book. Write a great book. Then get it out there to the online retailers that have mastered crowdsourcing.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

So you’ve got a GREAT Storyworld for your novel and you can’t wait to tell your reader all about it. How and when do you do that for maximum effect?

Dre posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I have a problem transferring vast amounts of information to my reader in an interesting manner, like the history and the natural laws of a Storyworld.

-Footnotes seem a cheap way to do this.

-I’ve considered excerpts from made-up chronicles or study books, but typical for such texts is that they’re not compelling.

-Simply interrupting the narratives with informative lectures gets disturbing and is a violation against the MRUs.

-And weaving the information through a dialog doesn’t always make sense.

So I’m lost. How do other writers cope with this?

Randy sez: Writers always believe that the reader is dying to know the entire life history of every character and the full history of the Storyworld and exactly how the Storyworld works in all its infinite complexity.

The reader is and she isn’t. Let’s take those in reverse order.

When you pick up a book, you’re looking for a story. Something happening here and now. Characters doing things that matter right now. If you don’t get that right away, you’re going to put the book down. You just will. And your reader is just like you.

As you get into the story, you begin to realize that these characters weren’t born yesterday and the Storyworld in which they live has a long history. Some things in the story just don’t make sense unless you have some context–some backstory or some description of the present world.

So when do you put in that context and how much do you put in?

The answer is simple: Just when you need it and no earlier. Just as much as you need to make sense of the action and no more.

You have many tools to do this:

• Exposition or Narrative summary. A block of it to fill in the past.
• Dialogue. One character explaining the past to another.
• Interior monologue. One character thinking about the past.
• Flashbacks. A scene set in the past, connected to the present.
• Diaries, chronicles, or other written texts found by a character.
• The Pensieve. Works if your name is J.K. Rowling. Works very well. Essentially a flashback.
• Description. Works best if it’s filtered through the senses of the viewpoint character.

Those are your tools. You can even use footnotes, as Stieg Larsson did in his Millennium Trilogy, although this is pretty rare for a novel.

The important thing is to not give backstory or description to your reader until she’s begging for it. She’ll be begging for it when the main story gets confusing and can be easily clarified by a few snippets of backstory or description. Give it to her then. Just enough to answer the questions, and NO MORE.

You may believe that you are the amazing exception to this rule, and that your readers will find you uniquely gifted at telling backstory or description and therefore you can heap it on and let the pace of your story go to zero.

No you can’t. No more than your brother-in-law the tax accountant is amazingly gifted at explaining arcane 19th century tax laws to his enthralled friends. He isn’t. You aren’t. Don’t do it.

Tell your story. Save the backstory until it’s screaming to be told. J.K. Rowling held off on giving her readers the full backstory of Severus Snape for thousands of pages — until that information was desperately needed late in Book 7 in order to advance the plot. Take a lesson from the master. Tell no backstory before its time. Less is more.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

If you’re writing a novel, how many storylines should it have? How many is too many? How do you handle them all?

Josey posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’ve been using your Snowflake method to organize my idea for a fiction novel. (I really like it by the way). My question is this: In the process of character sketching and writing the synopsis, it has occured to me that each of the main characters could possibly have their own story. Is that normal? And should I consider doing that or keep going with the story I’ve planned?

Also another question. (I hope it’s ok to ask two) If your category is mystery, does the snowflake method still work? I have a few ideas for a mystery type of story, but in thinking through the snowflake method I’m finding it hard to work the story into that model. I haven’t actually sat down and written anything out yet so I don’t really know if it will work or not. I’m just curious right now. The idea is in it’s beginning stages and I haven’t thought it completely through yet.

I have Writing Fiction for Dummies and I think it is great!

Randy sez: It’s normal for each of the main characters in a novel to have their own storyline. In fact, if you don’t, the novel is going to feel very thin. It’ll feel like the characters are tacked on to play some role in your story.

In real life, everybody thinks they’re the lead character in the story. Think about it. You’re the lead character in your own life, aren’t you? You don’t exist merely to play the role of “humble minion” in your boss’s story. You don’t exist so as to be the “spouse” in your spouse’s story. You don’t exist to play the role of “wicked step-mother” for your step-daughter Cindy.

It’s possible that you do actually play one or more of those roles in other people’s stories. But those aren’t your main role. Your main role is to be the hero or heroine of your own story.

Likewise for every one of your characters. Each of them is the lead character in the novel of their life.

So Josey, what you’ve found is that your characters are real people, and that’s good. I’m not sure I understand part of your question, however. There’s an ambiguity in your question, “And should I consider doing that or keep going with the story I’ve planned?”

If you’re asking whether you ought to write a separate novel for each of those characters, the answer is no. If you do that, you’ll have a cast of main characters for each novel. Each of those main characters will have his or her own story. Then you’ll want to split out separate novels for each of them. And that process will never end.

If you’re asking whether it’s okay to have multiple storylines in your novel, then the answer is yes. That’s good. That’s the right way to do things. Your primary storyline will belong to your lead character. But each of the other main characters will have a storyline, and you’ll assign some amount of space in your novel to develop that story.

But your novel is NOT six different novels in one book. Your novel should be one novel, with separate threads for each of the main characters. You can have as many of these as you have main characters. The amount that you write for each one will depend on how important each thread is to your main thread — the storyline of your lead character. If a thread is closely tied in to the main story, then it should get a lot of airtime. If it’s a peripheral thread, then it should get a little. If it’s not related at all, then yank it out of your story, because it doesn’t belong.

As for the question of whether the Snowflake method works for mysteries, the answer is yes. The Snowflake method is designed to be useful for any kind of story. I’ve never written a mystery myself, but I have some ideas in mind for stories that might be mysteries. I would use the Snowflake method to design those stories, just like any other novel I’d write.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

If you self-publish your work, do you risk anything? Will publishers consider you damaged goods?

Andrew posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Thank you for all the great information provided on your site! I’ve recently signed up to receive your emails.

I have one quick question that has come to mind while reading your “The Future of Publishing” article.

My question is this: As a amateur writer with a book self-published on Lulu.com, do you think it is valuable to use this self-publishing site to begin to get my name out there, or would paper publishers potentially look down on the fact that I’ve self-published and already reaped sales?

Thanks for your answer!

Randy sez: The publishing industry is changing rapidly. The correct answer to this question three years ago would have been, “No, self-publishing almost always won’t help you in your venture to get published — unless you’re one of those very rare few who manage to sell a few thousand copies of your self-published book.”

Even a year ago, most authors, agents, and editors would have felt this way.

But a funny thing happened in the last year or so. A lot of self-published authors started doing extremely well on Amazon with their e-books.

If you want to see the honor roll of authors who’ve managed to do Xtremely well, I’ll refer you to Joe Konrath’s blog, where he’s been interviewing them practically daily.

Joe himself earned $42,000 in January from his self-publishing efforts. You read that right. Those aren’t yen Joe earned. Not lira. Not pesos. Those were dollars.

It’s easy to blow off Joe’s success as the result of his “platform.” After all, he’s got a very widely read blog and he published a number of books in the past with New York publishers. Joe’s got a name. He’s an established writer. So way too many people say, “Sure, yeah, Joe’s easy to market, because he’s Joe. I’m not Joe. I’ve never been published. I have no blog. So I can’t sell near as many copies as Joe.”

The problem with that is that it’s nonsense. Several of the folks Joe has interviewed lately are writers who haven’t been published by traditional publishers — or writers who just didn’t fare well with traditional publishers, even though they did get a book or few out. Some of these good people are selling better than Joe.

And there’s the case of Amanda Hocking, 26 years old, never published by a traditional publisher, who sold about 100,000 copies of her books in December. Way more than Joe did.

You might believe that Amanda benefitted from the Christmas shoppers in December, that there’s no way she could repeat those kind of numbers in the dead month of January.

Heh, heh. Amanda sold about 450,000 copies in January.

The moral of the story here is that all the rules changed sometime in the last year or so. If you want to self-publish, you can make an amazing success of it — if your stuff is good. If it’s not good, then that’s a problem and you aren’t going to sell thousands of copies, but that’s always been true.

What has changed is that authors can now make an end-run around the “gatekeepers” — the marketing people who decide what will sell and what won’t. Increasingly, readers are becoming the new gatekeepers. That’s the way it should be. The market should decide what sells and what doesn’t.

This is not to put down those marketing folks. In the past, they were necessary because publishing was an expensive venture to get into. A mistake could be enormously expensive.

With e-books, that is no longer the case. No need for a big production run, a big laydown on launch day, and big returns if the book doesn’t sell. Returns for e-books are almost non-existent. Shelf space is unlimited, so there’s no reason for a bookseller to return unsold copies, so the only returns are those from disgruntled customers who bought a book they didn’t want.

But the need for gatekeepers is fizzling. Soon there will be no need at all.

So no worries, Andrew. Market that book. If it catches fire, it’s all good. If it doesn’t, it’ll be lost in the flood. You can always withdraw the book, or rewrite it, or write something else.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Quick, take a guess: Where is the most unlikely spot on earth? And what might this have to do with writing fiction? My own answer to the first question is, “I have no idea.” My answer to the second question will take a bit of unpacking.

Chris posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I started by story using your snowflake method, and love your critiques of one-sentence storylines. Don’t know if you get fed up with them, but here’s mine just to push you almost (but not quite) to the edge:

A confrontation-shy ex-cop battles plots and doublecrosses to save crash survivors marooned in the most unlikley spot on earth.

I’ve gone thru maybe 30-40 different variants as I try to hone in on the crux of my story. This is my best so far. How can it be improved? What do your readers think?

I’m trying to emphasize the unique hero at the start and mysteriousness (of the crash site) at the end.

My protagonist is a korean-american raised in Texas (so he has a drawl, of all things). My villain is an English ex-soldier and newbie member of parliament who’s an accomplished bully like the hero’s (hated but rich) father. You can probably guess where the extra fuel comes from in their conflict.

Randy sez: This is a promising storyline, like the one we analyzed in my last blog post. And like that one, this can be improved by making things a bit more specific.

First, let’s start with that “most unlikely spot on earth.” I can think of plenty of places that are unlikely for a plane crash. The South Pole. The peak of Mount Everest. The Bikini Atoll. My back yard. (I’m hoping a plane crash in my back yard is unlikely, because flying airplane parts can play havoc with a greenhouse.)

This sentence would grow dramatically in power, Chris, if you were to specify exactly where it is. Don’t TELL us that it’s the most unlikely spot on earth. Show us and we’ll figure it out.

This seems to be a general rule to apply to those pesky one-sentence storylines. Whenever you find yourself writing “most” or “best” or “biggest” or any other superlative, ask yourself whether you might be telling something that you could be showing. If so, then show it and see if that makes it stronger.

The second point where I see room for improvement is in the “plots and double-crosses” that our ex-cop hero is facing. In a thriller, you expect to see plenty of plots and double-crosses of all sorts. Those are generic words that don’t really get the blood pumping because they’re generic.

Instead of using the words “plots and double-crosses,” Chris, I’d recommend that you show us ONE of those. Maybe our hero’s girlfriend is secretly on the villain’s side. Maybe whoever pays his expenses cuts him off while he’s in Ulan Bator with no cash. There are any number of ways to be double-crossed. Pick one and sketch it for us in a few words.

Which one? That’s easy. Pick the big one that happens at roughly the one-quarter mark in the book. It should be the one that will pretty much define the conflict for a big chunk of the book.

That’s another general feature of many one-sentence summaries. If you show how your main character gets into serious trouble that will last for a major part of the book, then you really define the conflict. And conflict is essential to your story.

One thing that’s working nicely here is the description of your lead character as a “confrontation-shy ex-cop.” It’s always possible that you could improve this slightly, but it’s strong enough to work with.

The other thing that’s working well here is that our hero is working to save those crash survivors. You don’t have to tell us to root for him. We know that automatically. (Another lesson that has been known for a very long time: Fiction is moral. Readers instinctively root for the good guy. It’s a very rare story where we find ourselves, against our will, rooting for the bad guy.)

Well, Chris, take that and run with it. I’m betting you can sharpen your storyline substantially by adding in a couple of specifics.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Blog Post of the Day: I regularly read a boatload of blogs. One that made me laugh today was this one by Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. The title of the post was “Put The Big Rocks In First.” That’s good advice, and you’ll see an unforgettable demonstration of what that means in a video clip where Stephen Covey asks an assistant to try to put the little rocks in first. Have fun!

Today, we’ll analyze the one-sentence summary of a novel submitted to me by one of my Loyal Blog Readers. Along the way, we’ll cover two important principles that make the difference between a storyline that sells and a storyline that doesn’t.

Jennifer posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

This is the one story line of my pending novel. Can you analyze it for me.

The investigation into the brutal murders of city officials threatens to bring the city to its knees.

Here is a longer version:
Amidst a heat wave of political corruption, scandal and local crime, homicide Detective Spalding must investigate the brutal murders of city officials that once solved threatens to bring the city to its knees.

Randy sez: The short version needs a bit more detail and the long version is too long. But together, there’s enough here for us to work with.

There is certainly an interesting story here. The first question is: Whose story is it? In the short version, the noun of the sentence is “the investigation.” This is fairly impersonal, but Jennifer instinctively knows this, because in the long version, she personalizes it around the lead investigator, homicide Detective Spalding.

A great storyline almost always focuses on a person. So our first improvement will be to put Detective Spalding into the short version in some way. Note that his name really doesn’t tell us much about him, so we won’t need his name. His job is far more useful to us. He’s a detective. This tells us right away that the novel is either a police procedural or very close to it. That’s a standard category in fiction.

But we need to do more. How is Detective Spalding different from all other detectives? Or more importantly, how is he different from all other people on the planet? If you can find a way to answer that question in no more than four words, then you’ve got a really powerful lead. Jennifer, even if you can’t define him that specifically, any details you can give us about Spalding that make us like him or make us curious about him will put you ahead of the game.

Now we’ve got a series of brutal murders, always a good thing in this category, so let’s look at the consequences of those murders. They aren’t just a series of random murders. They threaten, in some way, to bring the city to its knees. That’s good, but that’s also pretty vague.

Here is the second main improvement I would suggest: Give me enough details about the circumstances of these murders so that I’ll see for myself that the city might be brought to its knees. Don’t TELL me the city is at hazard. SHOW me the hazard and I’ll figure it out.

There are lots of ways to bring a city to its knees. We need some specifics here. Was the mayor murdered in bed with his girlfriend? Was the city attorney murdered with his personal safe open — revealing that he’s been embezzling the city funds? Was the chief of police whacked in the company of the local mafioso? Each of these might conceivably bring the city to its knees, but each would do so in a very different way. Get specific here — in ten words or less.

Jennifer, you’ve made a good start. Get more specific with your lead character and with the consequences of the murders and you’ll have a strong storyline.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

A week ago, I set up a contest for my Loyal Blog Readers to suggest a title for Cathi’s novel, which she’s been working on for about five years. That contest is now closed and Cathi has named a winner.

Here’s what Cathi sent me in an email:

And the winner is:
David Benedict

David’s suggested title was:
Dark Heritage

Congratulations David!
I chose David’s title because putting the words “Dark” and “Heritage” together best sums up the whole of the logline and has real potential as a title, especially for the second book. The Black Dark is the name of a place, but the word “Black” does not necessarily refer to a color and “Dark” does not have to mean the absence of light. The word “Dark” in Dark Heritage is a bit curious. I like that – I don’t want my story or my title to be predictable. I want to thank Randy for his time and help by posting this contest, and everyone for their creative entries and well wishes. It has been a fun week! -Cathi

Randy sez: Yes, congratulations, David! Thanks to all my Loyal Blog Readers for pitching in to help Cathi get unstuck on this title thing. I know we all had fun, and there were a very large number of strong entries.

David, please email me at your convenience with the first five pages of your novel and I’ll critique it as soon as I’m able.

Tomorrow, I’ll resume answering questions submitted by my Loyal Blog Readers about all aspects of fiction. See you then!