The Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Publisher: Randy Ingermanson ("the Snowflake guy") Motto: "A Vision for Excellence" Date: August 7, 2012 Issue: Volume 8, Number 8 Home Pages: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com http://www.Ingermanson.com Circulation: 32136 writers, each of them creating a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ "Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing" _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ What's in This Issue 1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine! 2) Organizing: How and Why To Track Your Writing 3) Creating: Life Interrupted 4) Marketing: Why the Future is Bright for Writers 5) What's New At AdvancedFictionWriting.com 6) Randy Recommends . . . 7) Jim Bell's Weekend Seminars 8) Steal This E-zine! 9) Reprint Rights _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine! Those of you who have joined in the past month (about 500 of you signed up in July), welcome to my e-zine! You should be on this list only if you signed up for it on my web site. If you no longer wish to hear from me, don't be shy -- there's a link at the bottom of this e-mail that will put you out of your misery. If you need to change your e-mail address, there's a different link at the bottom to let you update my system. If you missed a back issue, remember that all previous issues are archived on my web site at: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/ezine What's in this issue: The successful novelist needs good organization, good craft, and good marketing. In this issue, we'll talk about each of these in turn. * Writing a novel on deadline can be horribly scary. Or it can be routine. Want to know one factor that makes a huge difference in your fear factor? Read my organizing article, "How and Why To Track Your Writing." * Some novels feel like the characters have been in suspended animation their entire lives, waiting for the story to begin. Want to know how to fix that? Read my craft article, "Life Interrupted." * Rumor has it that the sky is falling. In the future, they say, writers won't be able to earn a living. Do you know the four main reasons why that's nonsense? Read my marketing article, "Why the Future is Bright for Writers." Are you reading my blog? Join the fun here: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/blog _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 2) Organizing: How and Why To Track Your Writing Imagine the following two scenarios: * Your agent calls to say that an editor at your dream publishing company has made an offer on your first novel. Congratulations! You're now an author. But there's a catch. It's a three book deal and you must deliver two more complete manuscripts in the next 12 months. This is non-negotiable. Can you do it or not? * You're an experienced professional writer with numerous published novels. Some of your works are out of print and you've put them back into print as e-books. Now you have to decide whether you want to sell your next book to a traditional publisher or self-publish it as an e-book. Which will earn you more money? These are scenarios that writers face all the time. There is no obvious right answer for either case. They both depend on one thing: your track record. To decide whether to accept the multi-book deal, you must know roughly how long it will take you to write a book. If you can't do a book in six months, then you have to turn down the deal. It's unethical to sign a contract when you know you can't deliver on it. To decide whether to work with a trad publisher or go indie, you must know what your return on investment is for each choice. How much will each route cost you? How much will you earn? When will you earn it? You can't make rational decisions on these unless you have hard numbers. I strongly recommend that you track the time you spend working on each book project. I also recommend that you try to compute your return on investment for each project. Starting now. Going on forever. Even if you're a raw beginner. Even if you hate numbers. Even if you don't want to. How do you do it? Here's how: How to Track Your Writing Time ______________________________ Tracking your time is easy. It takes just a few minutes of daily discipline. For my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, I started by creating a new spreadsheet named "Time Log". The first column is labeled "Date" and just holds the date for each day that I worked on the project. The second column is labeled "Task." During the first draft and editing stages of the project, I noted in this column what chapter or chapters I worked on each day. When I got to the promotion stage, I just entered "Promotion" in this column. The third column tells how many minutes each day I spent working on first draft copy. After I finished the first draft, all entries in this column are blank. At the bottom of the third column I created a formula to sum up all these minutes and divide by 60 to get the total hours. I spent 131 hours writing the first draft for the book. The fourth column tells how many pages of first draft copy I produced each day. This is summed at the bottom. I wrote 299 pages total. The fifth column computes how many pages of first draft copy I was writing per hour. On average, this worked out to about 2.3 pages per hour. The sixth column tells how many minutes I spent in editing previously written copy. The total at the bottom is 159 hours. The last column tells how many minutes I spent each day doing marketing tasks. Most of this was backloaded to the end of the project, when I launched the book. I spent a total of 59 hours marketing. The total time writing was 350 hours over the course of 8 months. This works out to 44 hours per month for a book with a final page count of 384 pages. If I were asked to do a similar project, I'd be able to quickly estimate how many hours it would take for each phase of the project. This would tell me three things: * How many actual hours will it take to do the project? * Given the amount of available time in my schedule, how much calendar time will the project take? * Given the advance, how much am I earning in dollars per hour for my labor? Knowing these, I can make a rational answer on whether to accept the project. (For this particular book, I also factored in the long-term value of the book for my reputation.) I have similar spreadsheets for most of the other books I've written. This gives me information on how quickly I can write a novel. Yes, it's a small hassle to type in those numbers every day. But the value is large. I can make intelligent decisions. I know when to say yes and when to say no. That's gold. If you don't believe me, talk to any author who bit off more than she can chew and is now working till 2 AM every night to get an impossible project done. How To Compute Return on Investment ___________________________________ It's not hard to track your return on investment for a book, whether it's traditionally published or self-published. For a trad-published book, the only investment you make is your time. Usually the only income you get from it is the advance (although you hope and pray that you'll also get some royalties someday). If you have tracked the time you put into each of your previous books, you can estimate roughly how many hours your next book will cost you. This allows you to calculate your hourly rate for your writing. If you are lucky enough that your books earn out their advance and then continue to earn you royalties, things get more complicated because your effective hourly rate increases each time you get a royalty check. In this case, just calculate your hourly pay rate for the time you invested to earn out your advance and make a note of how many calendar months it took for the book to earn out. This is usually somewhere between 12 and 24 months. Then from that point on, calculate the monthly earnings from royalties and the total lifetime earnings from royalties. My book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES earned out its advance in about 9 months. It has continued to earn royalties at a nice steady rate since then. I track this number every six months when I get my royalty statement. For a self-published book, you have to invest both time and money before you earn anything. Track both of these. After you launch your self-pubbed book, track your earnings monthly, and make a note of how long it takes to earn back your initial investment. If you like, you can make a note of how long it takes to earn the advance that you think you would have earned on the book. (Remember that with a self-published book, you get no advance. If you're going to make rational decisions about self-publishing, you need to factor this in to your decisions.) Last fall, I rereleased my novel OXYGEN. It took about 3 weeks to recover expenses for the e-book. Since then, it has averaged steady earnings at about 1/3 the rate that WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES is earning. If it continues to earn at the current rate, it will take a little more than three years to earn the advance that I was originally paid by a traditional publisher for the first edition of the book. Computing return on investment is not complicated. It may be boring and tedious, but it's not hard. Once you have this kind of information, you have a rational basis for making decisions. You can estimate your expected hourly rate to earn out the advance for your next book. You also can estimate your expected monthly earnings from royalties. And you can make the same estimates for a self-published book. These are rough estimates because they're based on partial information. You have no guarantee that the future will be like the past. That's OK. Life is the art of making decisions based on partial information. Some information is better than none. Tracking your return on investment takes some work. It amounts to an hour or two per year. With a traditionally published book, you have to enter your earnings every six months when you get a royalty statement. With a self-published book, you can get information much quicker but you may have to work a little harder to get it. I recommend looking up your sales information monthly. Information is power. The publishing world is changing radically as publishers react to a changing market. What doesn't change much is your writing speed. You can't make a rational decision unless you know what your options will cost and what they'll pay. The only way to know that is to track your results. Even if you hate numbers. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 3) Creating: Life Interrupted Reading a novel is fun. But what's it like to BE INSIDE a novel? Generally, it isn't nearly so much fun. Characters in novels get pushed way outside their comfort zones. Being a character in a novel is a major inconvenience. It disrupts your life, and in many novels, one or more of the characters never really get back to the way things were. I've been reminded of this recently because I'm editing my novel DOUBLE VISION for rerelease as an e-book. In the first scene of this novel, mystery novelist Keryn Wills is brainstorming the method of killing the victim in her next novel. Keryn's book is due in only a couple of months and she's horribly behind on her writing schedule. Keryn desperately wants to have a productive Saturday writing. Her entire life right now is focused on meeting her deadline. Then life interrupts. First, her mother calls and interrogates her about her date last night. Keryn really doesn't want to talk about it. The date went well, but it was a first date and she's had plenty of first dates that never went anywhere. She's not holding her breath that Dillon will be better. Then life REALLY interrupts. Keryn's boss calls and he sounds worried. Keryn has a day job with a small startup technology company and things have been rocky lately, but predictably rocky. Now Keryn's boss asks her to come in for an emergency meeting. And he tells her, "Don't panic." He's wrong. Keryn should be panicking. The financial wheels have just come off the company. But there's a chance to save the company with an amazing new secret technology that's been under development for months and is almost ready to announce. Very soon, Keryn is going to realize that this technology is so valuable that it's a hazard to whoever owns it. Within days, Keryn and her coworkers realize that Somebody Bad knows about this technology and is willing to do anything to get it. And the story's launched. But what about Keryn's novel? That was the big thing in her life before the story started. Keryn's novel goes on hold. She's too busy trying to stay alive. There's no time to meet her daily word count quota. Her novel doesn't go away. Her deadline is still looming, getting worse every day. But in the grand scheme of things, it's irrelevant. If and when Keryn solves her life-and-death issues with Somebody Bad, that novel is going to come roaring back as an issue, worse than ever because she's neglected it for days and days. This is a general principle for writing fiction. When the story starts, your characters have no idea that the stakes are about to be raised. They're living their lives, dealing with things that seem important. Then the inciting incident for the story breaks in on the characters, and now there's a whole new game to be played. What seemed important yesterday suddenly isn't so much today. I see two common problems with the work of beginning novelists: * Not giving their characters any life at all before the story starts. This makes the story feel like it happens in a vacuum. * Spending too much time explaining the ordinary life of their characters before launching the inciting incident. This bores the reader and risks losing her completely. You need to strike a balance between showing too little and showing too much of that ordinary life. Let's look at some examples of how it's done well. In the recent self-published e-book hit ON THE ISLAND by Tracey Garvis-Graves, the two lead characters are on their way to a remote island in the Indian Ocean. Anna is a 30-year-old high school teacher who's been hired by a wealthy American family to tutor their son for the summer. T.J. is a 16-year-old boy who's recently survived cancer but now is way behind in his schooling. The plan is for Anna to spend the summer tutoring T.J. so that by the fall, he'll be caught up to his high school classmates. Anna is at the tail end of a bad romance with a boyfriend whom she's expecting to dump at the end of the summer. T.J. is just starting a crush on Anna -- he thinks she's smoking hot, even if she's fourteen years older than him. Both of these characters have a life. Not a great life. Plenty of struggles. But both of them hope this summer will give them a chance to move forward a bit. Then the pilot on their tiny plane has a heart attack and crash-lands just off a remote uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean. Now the story starts. The pilot is dead. Anna and T.J. have to survive until they're rescued. This trumps everything else in their life. Until they solve the survival problem, nothing else matters. As they learn how to live on their own in tropical paradise, their old lives start to resurface, bit by bit. The important point here is that they have old lives to resurface. It never feels like their lives began on the day of the crash. In S.M. Stirling's dystopian apocalyptic novel DIES THE FIRE, one of the lead characters is Mike Havel, an Idaho back-country pilot. Mike's job is to fly people places. Today, his customers are the Larsson family who have a ranch in Montana. The story begins with Mike meeting the family. A dad. A mom. A pair of 18-year-old twins, boy and girl, both pretty full of themselves. A Tolkien-obsessed 14-year-old daughter with a bow and arrows. An obnoxious cat. The goal is to fly a few hundred miles and land safely. Standard procedure. Nothing complicated. Mike's biggest problem is ignoring the undercurrent of bickering between the various family members who probably love each other but don't seem to like each other. And, oh yeah, ignoring that the older daughter is gorgeous. Mike is a cautious man and he works through the pre-flight checklist with care. He packs in his usual survival gear and herds the family onto the plane. Then they're in the air and on the way. This is Mike's life, pretty much the same every day, but with different faces. Then comes the massive interruption. The radio picks up news of a giant storm back east. The news people have never seen anything like it. It escalates in intensity and then -- A white flash. A blinding bolt of pain. Silence. Silence, because the engine has gone dead. The radio has gone dead. The lights in the plane have gone dead. Mike Havel is six thousand feet in the air with the lives of five people and a cat in his hands. He tries three times to restart the engine. No luck. Now he's got no choice but to glide the plane down to an emergency landing wherever he can. It's dusk on a chilly March day in the middle of nowhere. Mike now has plenty of problems. It gets worse. After a difficult landing in a rocky snowmelt river, Mike and his clients learn that physics and chemistry have somehow changed. Electricity doesn't work. Gasoline has lost its explosive power. Guns don't fire. It's not just Mike's problem. He doesn't know it yet, but the change is global. And permanent. Most of the technology developed in the last five hundred years is now useless. The seven billion people on the planet have to survive using skills most of them no longer have. Most of them won't. Somebody or Something has interrupted life and nothing is ever going to be the same again. Again, the important point is that we know what that ordinary life has been like. We've seen just enough of it to know that the new life is wildly more dangerous and infinitely more interesting. Now look at the novel you're working on right now. There are two questions you need to ask. First, what is the ordinary world for your characters? Do your characters have some sense of purpose in that ordinary world? Some direction? Do they think they know where they're heading in life? Do they have some sort of plan to get there? If they don't, then you've got a problem. Then it feels like your characters have been concocted solely for the story, created out of thin air. They had no life for your story to interrupt. Second, how long does it take for the story to interrupt that ordinary world? If it takes more than a few pages, then you've got a different problem. You're running the risk of boring your readers. Fiction is about interrupting the ordinary world. Your characters must have a Normal Life that the story is violating. A Normal Life they want to get back to, with its petty little plans and ambitions. You must show enough of that ordinary world so that your readers know what Normal Life is. But Normal Life is boring. As soon as you can, interrupt that dreadful Normal Life and get your story rolling. Your readers don't want Normal Life. Your readers want story. Your characters may think they don't want Normal Life, but they will as soon as it's been interrupted by the horribly inconvenient story that you've plunged them into. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 4) Marketing: Why the Future is Bright for Writers A couple of weeks ago, there was a bit of a fuss among writer over the alleged impending death of writing as a profession. The fuss focused around an article published by John Barber in The Globe and Mail. I would include a link to this article, but it's a long and convoluted link that won't fit on one line here. You can find it by Googling "there will be no more professional writers in the future." No, I'm not making that up. That is the real title of a real article that seriously claims that the future is dim for writers. According to the article, the title is a direct quote from a UK writer, Ewan Morrison, "There will be no more professional writers in the future." I don't believe it. I believe that there's never been a better time to be a writer than now. I believe the future will be even better for writers. I believe the future is bright for writers. Now it's true that the future is going to look different from the past. In the past, large corporations created publishing companies that guessed what readers would want to buy and then paid writers to create it. The corporations took all of the financial risk and most of the financial reward. Authors didn't have to pay for cover art, editorial work, marketing, sales, distribution, printing, postage, or anything else. In theory, authors took little financial risk and therefore got very little reward. (The author royalties for most paperback books are less than a dollar per copy. Royalties on hardcovers are typically a few dollars per copy.) But in practice, authors took plenty of risk. Before getting published, a writer often worked for years to learn the craft of writing. It's common to hear a writer say, "I took ten years to become an overnight success." Most of that training time earned the writer nothing. Let's be clear that a very few writers have done stupendously well with the old system. That's natural. In a free market economy, the 80-20 rule applies. Roughly 20% of the authors earn roughly 80% of the income. The top 1% of authors earn a lot of money. The 80-20 rule has always been approximately true and probably always will be. It's certainly true now as we watch the rise of independent authors. There are a very few big winners -- the new e-book elite. People like Amanda Hocking, Joe Konrath, John Locke, and Bob Mayer have sold huge numbers of e-books and earned very good money. Five years ago, nobody would have believed that could happen. Now, it's extremely believable. There's a new superstar every few months. The gloom-and-doom people like to point out that the vast majority of e-book authors don't earn very much. The median income for e-book authors these days is said to be about $500 per year. It's hard to see why that's a bad thing. That is a radical improvement over the old days, when the median income of all writers was zero. (Because the overwhelming majority of writers couldn't get published at all, which meant they earned nothing.) If the 80-20 rule has always been true and will always be true, then you may think that nothing really has changed. In the old days, there were a few hundred high-earning authors, a few tens of thousands of published writers who earned modestly well, and hundreds of thousands of wannabes who couldn't sell a thing. In the new e-book market which is still developing, we're seeing a few very self-published big winners, thousands who are doing moderately well, and many tens of thousands who are earning only small amounts. What's different now? What's different is that writers now have more control. If you want to publish an e-book, you can do it. Nobody can keep you from doing it. You might not earn much, but if you don't, then you can't blame those pesky gatekeepers. How is this better than the old days? It's better because now a writer has more choices. Remember, if you liked things the way they used to be, you still have that option. Nothing prevents you from working ten years, writing a brilliant novel, getting a top-notch agent, selling it to a big corporate publisher, and reaping huge rewards. If that's your wish and if you have the talent, go to it. But if that's not your thing, you can write a book, make your own decisions on art, editing, and marketing, and live with your choices. If the novel hits big, then you get the rewards. The online retailers will take a small cut. You get the rest. How could that possibly be bad? Checking back to the article on "There Will Be No More Professional Writers In The Future," we find these reasons why that's supposed to be a Bad Thing: * Advances from publishers are shrinking. * Sales are shifting to "heavily discounted, royalty-poor and easily pirated ebooks." * The Evil Empire Amazon is launching a predatory price war. * The new "winner-take-all" economy somehow "doesn't allow young writers to flourish". I'm not buying any of this. Let's look at each of these. * Advances for most authors most of the time have always been small. It's a shame that they're shrinking, but even in the good old days they were rarely enough to live on, especially for debut novelists. * An author earns a lot more royalties from a self-published e-book priced at $2.99 than from a traditionally published trade paper book published at $14.99 or a mass market paperback published at $8.99. So why is "heavy discounting" bad? It is pure double-talk to call that "royalty-poor." And piracy is a red herring. What evidence does anyone have that piracy hurts sales of e-books? * If Amazon is truly evil and is truly engaging in predatory pricing, then the Department of Justice can sue them. Most readers I know like Amazon because it has low prices. Most self-pubbed authors I know LOVE Amazon because it pays vastly higher royalties than traditional publishers. Where's the harm? * The economy is not really "winner-take-all." The economy is "winner-takes-most." That's nothing new. All free market economies work that way and always have. The old book publishing industry was never friendly to young writers, who had to work in obscurity without pay for years before finally breaking in. And the average advance for debut novelists for decades has typically been quoted as $5k to $10k. Young writers never "flourished" on that level of support. Here is the real reason the future is bright for writers. There is a large market for books. The estimates I've seen are around $27 billion for net sales revenue for traditional publishers in the US. This does not include self-published books. The trend that everyone seems to be worrying about is that traditional publishers might get less of that in the future and authors might get more. Yes, that's bad for traditional publishers. But for authors, it sounds pretty good. If traditional publishers have to treat their authors better in order to stay competitive, then that sounds great. Writers now can control their own destinies in a large and vibrant free market. At low cost, they can create a product geared to any niche market they choose and easily post it for sale worldwide. They can earn 70% of the sales revenue and be paid promptly. Or not, if they really can't stomach all that freedom. Readers who switch to using e-readers typically start buying more titles, especially the lower-priced ones. A book becomes an impulse buy. This is good for authors who now have a better shot at finding their audience. Now buying decisions can be based on quality, rather than on whether a publisher has bought space for a book on the front tables of bookstores. Writers have more freedom, an international market, a bigger share of the pie, and a level playing field. Oh, the horror of it all. The future is bright for writers. The future is incredibly bright for writers. The future is amazingly incredibly bright for writers. Go get it. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 5) What's New At AdvancedFictionWriting.com My coauthor John Olson and I recently launched the new e-book edition of our novel THE FIFTH MAN. The book reached the #1 spot on the fiction bestseller list on Smashwords.com. We're now hard at work editing our next e-books. Mine will be a new edition of my novel DOUBLE VISION. John is working on a new edition of his novel ADRENALINE. My book, WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, has been selling well since it began shipping more than two years ago. For the last year, it's been the hottest selling fiction-writing book in the Kindle store. You can find out all about WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES here: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/info/wffd If you've already bought the book and like it, I'd be delighted if you wrote an Amazon review. Thanks to those of you who already have! I appreciate you! I've also been gratified at the response to my flagship software product, "Snowflake Pro," which makes it fast, easy, and fun to work through the steps of my wildly popular Snowflake method for designing a novel. You can find out more about Snowflake Pro at: http://www.SnowflakeProSoftware.com I normally teach at four to six writing conferences per year. This year it's four. If you simply MUST hear me speak in 2012, you have already missed two conferences where I taught in February and March/April. I will be speaking only twice more this year, at these locations: August 13-16, Oregon Christian Writers Conference, northern Oregon, "Marketing 101": http://oregonchristianwriters.org/category/summerconference/ August 24-26, Romance Writers of New Zealand, Auckland http://www.romancewriters.co.nz/conference/ I expect to also attend the ACFW conference in Dallas in September (where I will take a few 15-minute mentoring appointments) and the Novelists, Inc. conference in New York in October (where I will just be enjoying the workshops and hanging out with writers). Why don't I teach at more conferences? Because teaching is an incredibly demanding blood sport and it sucks a huge amount of energy out of my tiny brain. I prefer to put my absolute best into a few locations than to muddle through at many. If you'd like me to teach at your conference in 2013 or beyond, email me to find out how outrageously expensive I am. If you'd just like to hear me teach, I have a number of recordings and e-books that are outrageously cheap. Details here: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/info _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 6) Randy Recommends . . . I don't take paid ads for this e-zine. I do, however, recommend people I like. I'm a huge fan of Margie Lawson's courses, both the ones she teaches in person and the ones she sells on her web site at http://www.MargieLawson.com Margie is a psychologist who applies what she knows about human psychology to writing fiction. I believe her material is brilliant. Check her out on her web site! I've also become a fan of Thomas Umstattd's terrific uncommon-sense thoughts on internet marketing. You can read Thomas's blog at: http://www.AuthorMedia.com/blog Thomas and his team are especially skilled at helping authors create a powerful web site using WordPress blogs. I am a huge fan of this approach, since it gives the most bang for the buck in an author site. Find out more about this at: http://www.AuthorMedia.com I'm watching Thomas's latest venture with interest: The BestSeller Society. I don't know enough to have an opinion on it yet, but wanted to mention it because Thomas is a bright guy who usually has smart things to say. More info on it here: http://www.bestsellersociety.com Please be aware that in this section I ONLY recommend folks who have never asked me to do so. Tragically, this means that if you ask me to list you here, I will be forced to say no. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 7) Jim Bell's Weekend Seminars My good friend Jim Bell is doing a series of weekend seminars this summer in Austin, Nashville, and Cincinnati. You may recognize him as the author of the best-selling book PLOT & STRUCTURE, one of the very best books on how to write fiction. Or you may remember that Jim is the former fiction columnist for Writer's Digest. I have known Jim for many years and I have a high level of trust in his ability to deliver the goods. Jim is the guy who first taught me Three-Act Structure years ago, and he's a terrific speaker and teacher. I've learned a lot from him. Jim asked if he could buy an ad in my e-zine for his seminars. I don't accept paid ads, but Jim is a great guy who contributes a lot to the writing community. So I offered to give Jim a free mention here on one condition: I asked Jim to give readers of my e-zine a discount. He agreed to give you all a $30 discount. The normal price of one of these 2-day seminars is $399. You can get it for $369 with the discount code ADVEZ. What do you get for that $369? Here's the writeup Jim sent me: Two power packed days to take your fiction writing to the next level . . . and beyond. For both traditional and self-published writers. Lunch is included both days. Among the things you'll learn: * The Most Important Thing Every Successful Novel Must Do . . . and How to Do It * Mastering the Seven Critical Success Factors of Fiction * The Emotion Quotient for Grabbing Readers and Not Letting them Go * Plotting With Perfect Structure, Every Time -- Never Write a Weak Story Again * Thematic Unity, What Most Writers Want But Can't Figure Out. We'll Figure. * Creating Characters That "Jump Off the Page" * How to Write Scenes With No Dull Parts * The 8 Essentials and 12 Tools of Great Dialogue * The Secrets of Making Readers Turn the Pages * Creating a Compelling Voice and Style Plus: interactive exercises that will add depth and appeal to your current project. You can get more info and sign up for one of these weekend seminars at the following web pages. (If you sign up, use the promo code ADVEZ to get the $30 discount.) Austin, June 16 & 17 Too late to sign up for this one! It's done. Nashville, August 11 & 12 http://jsbnashville.eventbrite.com/ Cincinnati, September 15 & 16 http://jsbcincinnati.eventbrite.com/ Have fun! _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 8) Steal This E-zine! This E-zine is free, and I personally guarantee it's worth at least 7734 times the price. I invite you to "steal" it, but only if you do it nicely . . . Distasteful legal babble: This E-zine is copyright Randall Ingermanson, 2012. Extremely tasteful postscript: I encourage you to e-mail this E-zine to any fiction writer friends of yours who might benefit from it. I only ask that you e-mail the whole thing, not bits and pieces. Otherwise, you'll be getting desperate calls at midnight from your friends asking where they can get their own free subscription. Of course you should not forward this e-mail to people who don't write fiction. They won't care about it. At the moment, there is one place to subscribe: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 9) Reprint Rights Permission is granted to use any of the articles in this e-zine in your own e-zine or web site, as long as you include the following 3-paragraph blurb with it: This article is reprinted by permission of the author. Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 32,000 readers. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com. Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Randy Ingermanson Publisher, Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/ezine _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________