Elke provided me with nine design concepts, but these are my top four. I want to share what I love about these covers, as well as a few things that aren’t working and slight fixes I’ll ask Elke to make.

CONCEPT 1. I love the composition of this one. The image is compelling, the design simple. The red of the bookmark picks up the red in the title nicely. I also like the hierarchy of the title, subtitle, author name. The positioning of my name under the book is well-balanced. The only thing I don’t like about this concept is its subtle energy. It’s beautiful, but perhaps a bit understated for my taste and personality. I want a cover that really conveys who I am. Also, the book looks like a well-worn novel, which while okay, doesn’t exactly speak to what I’m driving for, which is getting you, my audience and clients, from idea to publication. The image needs to be something more sleek and a little less used.

CONCEPT 2. I love the type treatment on this one. I’m a fan of red, and clearly Elke picked that up from my cover transmittal, which I share here at the bottom of the post. The title jumps out at you, which I also really love. In this concept, the subtitle is a little small. Because my subtitle is important, I would ask that it be a little bigger. I also don’t like that my name is at the top of the cover. This is a personal preference, but I prefer the treatments with my name at the bottom. While I love the single image and the placement of this image, I’m not sure this is the exact right image for the cover. I’m on the fence about it, though. I like that it’s reaching up and that there’s a stack of books, but my concern is that it’s not immediately readable as a stack of books. And they look a little like journals rather than published books. However, the overall impact of this one is powerful and it’s probably my top pick.

CONCEPT 3. I absolutely love the type treatment on this cover, and the simplicity of the entire design. In this design, your eye is drawn to the title, and the fact that PUBLISHED AUTHOR is so big is a plus. If you are an aspiring author, you will take notice of those words. Because of how central this image is, my name at the bottom feels like a bit of an afterthought, or like it’s awkwardly tacked on. I would probably at least suggest that it not be red, but black. I think this is a beautiful design, but I do have a concern with the fact that there’s no book. I’m not sure the torn paper holds the same promise that some of the other images do, since they allude more strongly to the promise of a book at the end of reading this book!

CONCEPT 4. I think this one is very clever. I love that Elke thinks outside the box and this cover appeals to the part of me who loves symbolism and meaning. I like the silver around the edges of the typewriter letters. I also really like the typeface. This one is also subtle, but it’s powerful—more powerful to me than the first treatment, in part because of the colors and in part because of the history and meaning of typewriters to authors. It doesn’t feel old-fashioned either, even though typewriters are obsolete. In this treatment I’m actually okay with my name being at the top of the cover, but I would want to ask to see what it looks like if it were at the bottom. I would also ask for the type size of the subtitle to be a little bigger. It wouldn’t matter to me if it were a little unbalanced—again because of the importance of what the subtitle promises. If you have a subtitle that doesn’t hold much of a promise or a delivery, its size is less critical.

WATCH MY BOOK COVER MEMO WEBCAST

BROOKE’S COVER MEMO DETAILS

Title: What’s Your Book?

Subtitle: A Step-by-Step Guide to Get You from Inspiration to Published Author

Author: Brooke Warner

Trim Size: 5.5×8.5

Cloth/Paperback: paperback

ISBN: TK

Price: $12.95

Category: Writing/how-to

1. Make a list of 10 adjectives that describe this book. It may be helpful to narrow the list after reviewing all of the questions.
Self-help, upbeat, fun, informative, interesting, light even though information-packed, inspiring, connecting writers to their dreams, inspiring, motivating.

2. List 5 adjectives that do NOT describe this book.
dry, boring, without personality, a manual

3a. Which book is your primary competition? Pick your toughest.
Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before Your Dead is the one that most fits my style and energy

3b. Which other books out there are most like this book? Make a list for visual and for content competitors.
Really any book on writing but I’m attaching a few covers (see below) to this transmittal to see a range of ones I like/admire.

4. What makes this book different from what is out there now? What is the unique selling point? Why would someone buy this book instead of others similar to it?
The biggest point that’s different is that I’m encouraging. I rely on inspiration and really using coaching techniques to help authors. I have an iron fist in a velvet glove. I can tell it like it is but still inspire and encourage. I want people to tap into their innermost desires to become an author.

5. What are the major strengths of this manuscript?
My encouraging, upbeat voice; my absolute belief that anyone can become a published author; my desire to help; my real information-giving. There’s a real takeaway here. a lot of value!

6. Who do you want to buy this book? Describe them in detail (men/women/both, age range, hobbies, lifestyle, especially unique characteristics).
Anyone who wants to write a book. I don’t want to specifically have this oriented toward men or women, or even novelists, memoirists, or self-help people. It needs to be for anyone with an idea.

7. What do you want your reader to get from reading this book?
Real tips on what they need to do to finish their book and to get it to a place where an agent or a publisher is going to want to take it on. Understanding about how the industry works and best practices. All easy-to-digest and delivered in a really upbeat style.

DESIGN CRITERIA
I would like it to be modern and clean. Please see my website for inspiration: www.warnercoaching.com. I would describe the site as modern, clean, and elegant. I don’t need the book to mirror those colors, but I like the color scheme. I’m a fan of red. It says bold to me, and I’m into challenging writers. I’d be open to an all-type treatment. I’d like it to be inspiring without looking New Agey. I like the idea of dreaming big and aspiring to your goals and self-reliance and all that good stuff, but I don’t like the idea of dreaming being associated with clouds or thought-bubbles.

Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg.
This one is so famous but what even is this image??

Is Life Like This? by John Dufresne
I do like the clean lines here, but the overall effect is pretty boring.

The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield
I really like this cover: single small image and bold typeface.

How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, by Ariel Gore.
I’m a fan of I like the energy behind this one, but it’s a bit girly for my taste.

If you’d like a copy of a book cover memo template, email me. I’m happy to give you a copy.

Until next month,

Brooke

Just like a lot of you, I have a busy life, a messy house, and other things I could be tending to besides my writing. So here’s my progress report, complete with messy kitchen and makeshift writing space.

What I’ve done so far:
•Scaffolding (intro and Chapters 1-5 pretty much figured out)
•Quiz complete (intending to open the book with a quiz)

Places where I feel like I’m struggling:
•Finding time!! There’s no question that between my full-time job, raising a baby, tending to my relationship, and doing coaching on the side, it’s pretty tough to find time to write.  So when am I doing this? Right now at 4.30 am!
•Not hitting snooze. More than a few times I’ve hit the snooze button and woken up around 5.30 or 6, which basically feels like a wash since James is about to get up at any moment.
•Prioritizing my writing. Freelance projects and coaching takes precedence over my own writing. I have a feeling I’m going to have to create some boundaries here. Working on that one…

Write Your Book in Six Months starts at the end of June, but as a benefit to our readers, followers, and students—and for my own accountability since I announced last year that I would write a book in 2012—I am announcing today that I am committing to writing my own book before the course starts.

That gives me exactly 5 months to write my book.

Title of my book: What’s Your Book? A Step-by-Step Guide to Get You from Idea to Published Author

Number of words written: Zero

Word count goal: 50,000 words (yes, 10,000 a month!)

Progress on scaffolding: Pretty good—maybe a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10

Fear that I’m taking on more than I can handle? Very high!!!

Watch my launch video and check my YouTube channel to see my progress.

Thanks everyone, and wish me luck!

When a writer comes to me with a complete manuscript that’s been rejected multiple times by publishing houses, or that they know needs editing for whatever reason, nine times out of ten they confess to not having done any scene-mapping. I understand why writers don’t like to do it. It’s hard! It can be hard to find real joy in mapping out your whole book when you find fulfillment in the writing. And yet, the real fulfillment comes in being able to write and know where you’re going.

Scaffolding Is Your Friend

“Scaffolding” is a term I use for outlining. Scaffolding, according to Wikipedia, “is a temporary structure used to support people and material in the construction buildings and other large structures.” Which is exactly what an outline is: a temporary structure that supports writers in the construction of their large project. And just like a builder who tries to build a skyscraper with no scaffolding, anyone who tries to write a novel or a memoir without scaffolding either has or will run into a big mess somewhere along the way. Writers need the support of scaffolding to know where they’ve been and where they’re going. Perfectly adhering to every scene you lay out is not a requirement. The outline is a living document, subject to change as you explore what you want to say. But tending to the scaffolding and making sure that it’s caught up to you is important. You’re not in a good place if you’ve reached the eighth floor of the building and realize that you’ve left your scaffolding five floors down.

The primary reason to do scaffolding is to keep track of your storyline. I talk about the creation of storyline as planting seeds. Have you ever finished a book feeling disappointed because some major dilemma or theme or problem was left unresolved? This is the result of an author planting seeds and letting them die rather than cultivating and harvesting them. Seeds die when authors get too overwhelmed or too distracted and fail to remember (or sometimes to care) about aspects of the plot that were laid down in earlier scenes. For any number of reasons, books get published with these kinds of flaws all the time, so there’s no shortage of editors who are similarly overwhelmed or distracted, or perhaps simply don’t see what needs to be fixed.

Harvesting these seeds is your responsibility as an author. It’s the payoff the reader is hoping for when they buy your book. It’s the reason people want to read books. If we’re going to hang in with you, the author, for 80,000-plus words, for the days and weeks it takes to get through a novel or a memoir, we want you to remember to tell us what happened to the stalker ex-boyfriend who showed up in Chapter 2. We anticipate that you’ll circle back to share the ways in which an early trauma affects the man or woman your character becomes as he or she ages. We expect you pull through your threads so that, if you’re writing a food memoir, food shows up in every chapter. We expect that you will not get so distracted by the storytelling that you forget the promise of your book.

Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian, kept a flow chart above her writing space to help her keep track of her characters and storylines. This is extreme scaffolding! But the complexity of her story and the ways in which she was able to weave stories within stories is testament to the value of this kind of exercise. (Read more.) Readers need the author to hold the big picture for them and to keep their needs and desires front and center. Reading memoir and fiction, after all, is mostly for pleasure. A good novel or memoir is not about you, the author; it is about your audience.

Control Your Line Breaks

Another aspect of scaffolding that’s beautiful, when it works, is that it tells you exactly where to place your line breaks. Most of you need line breaks in your work. A line break is the equivalent of a fade-out in a movie. You don’t notice the switching of scene. It’s fluid because the story progresses; this is true in well-written novels even when there is a point of view change after a break.

Line breaks, however, must be used intentionally. Knowing where to place them is a skill in and of itself. Most novels and memoirs have them. Obvious placements include: between point of view shifts; after a scene comes to a close and before the following paragraph that opens at a later time or in a different location; following a particularly intense scene where you want to give your reader a moment to collect themselves.

Start reading other writers for line breaks. Notice where they’re placed and what the impact is on you. Some writers use them too sparingly, and others use them way too much! But they are as critical to your chapters as the scenes themselves. Just like a rest in a piece music, line breaks are intentional; they’re part of the rhythm of your book. As much as they can provide the reader with a moment to catch their breath, they can also function as a rest stop, a good place to bookmark until tomorrow.

Tip: As a general rule of thumb, have at least two or more paragraphs of text between line breaks and don’t overuse them. They serve a purpose, but too many of them will feel jarring to your reader.

Call to Action

No matter where you are right now with your book—even if you have a complete manuscript—stop and do your scaffolding. If you intend to shop your book at some point, this scaffolding will become the chapter-by-chapter summaries portion of your proposal, so it will not be for naught. It’s a valuable exercise and good practice.

Over years of doing this with writers, there’s been an interesting commonality: Oftentimes the saboteur haunting writers is sticky. I’ve seen saboteurs manifest in all sorts of ways—as humans, animals, beasts. But yes, they are often sticky.

It seems obvious when you lay it out in writing that the sticky has everything to do with being stuck. But as is often the case, experiences with clients (and my own recent stuckness) made this connection extra clear this month. December is already a month of excuses not to write. It’s the holidays; family is in town; it’s stressful; people go insane! Writers rationally conclude that everything will change in January. Writing more is a great new year’s resolution, after all.

But back to the sticky stuckness. What is this stickiness all about? Any writer who’s ever been stuck can relate. Your thoughts are as slow as molasses. Writing feels like a thing you should be doing, and at the end of the day it’s always the one thing you haven’t done. One of my clients this week described her stuckness as a fur ball—and it was certainly threatening to be a sticky mess she’d have to deal with if she dared to cough it up. I had another client a few years back whose sticky demon was downright scary, something straight out of The Ring. And this saboteur was doing a very effective job of keeping her from writing her memoir. Stickiness doesn’t just slow us down. It makes things unclear and messy. The very thought of dealing with it is hard work. Who wants to slog through a sticky mess? No one. Better to avoid it altogether. Better to save the writing for later when you have the energy to deal with the fall out, to clean it all up.

What I’ve realized with stickiness is that structures don’t work when you’re in this place. This presents a challenge for me because I’m the queen of structures. Get me on the phone and I can count off twenty structures to keep you writing in under fifteen minutes. But no amount of creativity or accountability—or even threatening—will make a writer who’s deep in the sticky stuckness start writing.

When you’re in the sticky stuckness you’re not just stuck, you’re also experiencing resistance. It’s not about having other things to do; that’s always going to be the case. You sit with the knowledge that you should be writing, but you can’t figure out why you’re not making time to write. This is worse than being unconscious. It’s being in denial—making all sorts of good excuses to make you feel better about what you’re not doing. Right now is just not a good time. You’ll come back to it when you have more time, more energy, when you’re healthier, when your family life isn’t so demanding, when it’s not the holidays. You can see this is a slippery slope. When will you make time to write? Once you get a different job? Once your kids go off to college? Once you’re divorced? Once you’re dead? I know, I know, this is a harsh way to put it, but for some of you it really is this dire—and you know it.

Do you have a project you want to write and you’re just not doing it? Are you finished with a manuscript that’s sitting in a drawer somewhere? Are you stuck midway through your book and failing to meet self-imposed deadlines?

There are consequences to being a person who answers yes to any of these questions. The primary consequence is heaviness. Yes, heaviness. Unfinished projects weigh on those who know their projects are destined for something bigger. Your unfinished writing lives in the recesses of your mind and weighs on your conscience. As much as you might think that there’s always going to be a better time, the truth is that there is no better time than now. Right now, smack dab in the middle of the holidays. If you can figure out a way to make time to write during the holidays, then you will always find time during the rest of the year. Right now is the worst time, unquestionably, so why not set the baseline now?

I challenge anyone who’s struggling to start, to finish, to complete, or to make a deadline to name that this is true. Do it here in the comments section and see what happens. The only truly effective strategy I know is to voice out loud to yourself and others that you are making a commitment. Put it in writing and make it happen.

And now I will tell you all about my own struggle with this issue. I was supposed to write a free report for my readers—and I’d been sitting on it for months. I have a coach holding me accountable for this, and after weeks of showing up without having completed this assignment, she told me I was overthinking it.  I was making more of it than I needed to. I’d had it on the top of my to-do list for weeks, and it was getting heavier with each passing day. I became the client I coach every day. It was eye-opening, frustrating, and also gave me some insight into the psychology of procrastination. I was in the sticky stuckness and it was uncomfortable. I thought about that damn report every single day. In the end, it took me about four hours to complete. Not a lot of hours for all the struggle and mental energy it consumed. So think about it. If you’re in the sticky stuckness, I get it. But you can get out. Make a commitment to yourself that stuck will not be your permanent state of being where your writing is concerned. It’s way way better on the other side, and once you overcome the sticky stuckness once, you’ll be better armed to deal with it when it shows up, as it inevitably will, in the future

Note: You can (or will) get a copy of that free report by the way. If you’re not on my mailing list, sign up (NEWSLETTER sign-up is in the right-hand margin) and you’ll get a link to the download. If you are on my newsletter, I’m sending it to you this week as a Christmas gift.

Happy holidays!

Until next month.
Brooke

In the spirit of Simon, I want writers to know what they’re getting into if they want to get published—and for their writing, proposals, and platforms to be good enough so that they are met with success when they start shopping their work. The course I’m teaching at She Writes this month and next has pushed me into Simon mode where blogging is concerned. I’ve found myself thinking, and even saying a few times, “This is totally irrelevant!” And this lack of relevance—where there is too little connection between book and blog—is far too prevalent among aspiring authors.

Too few writers, I’ve found, understand the purpose of a blog. If you are a writer who wants to get published, a blog is not a place to practice being a better writer. It’s not a place to tell people what you’re thinking about today, or to share a story about your kids (unless you’re writing a book about your kids). Your blog might have started out as a place to share with family and friends, and that’s fine, but the moment you decided you wanted to get published, everything changed. Your blog is now a platform-builder. Your blog should be turning you into the go-to person on the subject of your book. If it’s not accomplishing that, and if your posts have nothing to do with what you’re writing, you are being irrelevant. And it’s going to work against you.

I recently told one of my clients that I wanted her to imagine putting on a pair of glasses whenever she blogs. The lenses would be comprised of the themes in her book. Being an author blogger is all about focus. If you’re writing a travel memoir, for instance, your blog needs to be about traveling. I have rejected manuscripts before based on the fact that an author’s blog has nothing to do with their topic. Maybe once upon a time this travel author had a travel blog, but then the trip ended, and so there was no more travel going on. So the blog turned into all the things she loves about living in New York City and the foods she likes to eat. As soon as an editor sees this, they will be confused. And that travel writer has likely just lost her shot at a book deal.

So what could she have done? She could have continued to write about traveling—about other people traveling or her love of traveling or missing traveling. She could have written posts about her time abroad and stories which, even though they’re not at the forefront of her daily experience, have to do with her book. She could have posted short little excerpts from her memoir, maybe a line or two that would have served as a lead-in to blog about travel in a thematic rather than specific way. If she had done these things, an editor might have gone to her blog and found something cohesive. Something that made sense. Something that was relevant.

A great example I always give to my clients about someone who did this whole using-a-blog-to-build-a-platform thing really well is Jenny Block, author of Open, a memoir about open marriage. Jenny effectively made herself the go-to person on open marriage. She set up Google Alerts so that she would be notified about what was happening online on the subject of open marriage. Any time anything happened in the media that had to do with open marriage, she did a blog post about it and put in her two cents. Even before her book was published, the media was contacting her to comment on stories.

And don’t think you can’t do this because you’re a novelist. You can. Let’s take the example of Sarah’s Key, just because I happen to be trying to finish that novel this week. That’s a book with many themes: the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up in France during World War II, discrimination against Jews, an American woman living in France, late-in-life pregnancy. If this were the mid-2000s and this author were toiling away on her novel and looking for more exposure, I would advise her to blog on these topics. There is a lot to say on any one of these topics, and it’s okay to bring relevant issues back to your characters. She could have done a blog post about the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up for starters. She might have set her Google Alerts to troll for content about late-in-life pregnancies and written about women who were making that choice, putting it into context for her readers by writing that the protagonist in her novel faced a choice about whether or not to have this baby after having gotten pregnant by accident.

The bottom line is this: It’s better to blog on topics that have to do with your book than to blog often. Cohesion is better than quantity. Staying on theme is better than writing for the sake of writing. Don’t do throwaway posts just because you think you “should” be writing. It’s a waste of your time and it doesn’t contribute to your platform.

If you’ve been doing all the wrong things, don’t fret. It’s not too late to change course, and it doesn’t mean you should delete your old posts. Don’t do that! Just set your sights on the subject matter at hand and put on those theme-colored glasses every time you sit down to blog. With Google Alerts as your constant companion, you’ll wonder why you ever thought there wasn’t enough to blog about! And you’ll be able to write with your head held high knowing that you are absolutely relevant.

So Amazon will publish 122 books this fall, in both physical and e-book form, which is a rapid acceleration in its publishing program.

Not a huge surprise.

The purpose of the article seems to be to draw attention to the continuing demise of the industry, but it has a few things wrong. The industry is changing, and has been changing for some time. Publishers are struggling. Lots are going out of business or have been eaten up by bigger companies. Many companies, the one I work for included, have had to lay people off and are operating with very lean staffs. But not all publishers are, as Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House says in the article, “terrified and don’t know what to do” about Amazon playing the game at a higher level. I’m sure some publishers are terrified. The smaller the publishing house, the more terrified they are likely to be. But Amazon does not have the prestige of well-established houses, and it’s going to take a while for Amazon to prove itself. Sales will tell.

Publishing has already been consolidating for years, and Amazon getting into the publishing game is not the tipping point. The article notes that Amazon signed its first deal with Tim Ferriss and that it paid Penny Marshall $800,000 for her memoir. As much as the article talks about cutting out the middle man, Penny Marshall is represented by Dan Strone at Trident Media Group, so in this case Ms. Marshall clearly benefitted from having representation by an agent. I doubt she could have or would have brokered that deal on her own.

The next case study—meant to drive home the point about how scared traditional publishers must really be—is Kiana Davenport, who, the article states:

“signed with Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin, for ‘The Chinese Soldier’s Daughter,’ a Civil War love story. She received a $20,000 advance for the book, which was supposed to come out next summer.”

But Ms. Davenport took it upon herself to package a handful of old stories she’d written two decades ago and sell them as an e-book, through Amazon.

The article states:

“When Penguin found out, it went ‘ballistic,’ Ms. Davenport wrote on her blog, accusing her of breaking her contractual promise to avoid competing with it. It wanted ‘Cannibal Nights’ removed from sale and all mentions of it deleted from the Internet.

Ms. Davenport refused, so Penguin canceled her novel and is suing her to recover the advance.”

The article fails to note that what Ms. Davenport did was a breach of contract. Publishers explicitly state time limits in their contracts so that authors don’t publish competing works. These are standard non-compete clauses. When Ms. Davenport packaged and made for sale a book of short stories, her publisher undoubtedly felt that these stories being for sale constituted a breach. “Suing” is also the wrong term here. A publisher has the right to try to recoup its advance if an author does in fact breach his or her contract. It happens fairly often, and the route the publisher takes is to send a letter to the agent, or directly to the author, with language that may sound legal, but is not, in fact, a lawsuit. Believe me, Penguin would not be suing to recoup $10,000 (which is what they would have paid Ms. Davenport upfront—half of her $20,000 advance). To Penguin, $10,000 is a drop in the bucket, but publishers always make an effort to recoup advances.

The final author showcased in this article is Laurel Saville. Hers is a typical story. She was “locked out by the old system,” the article says. (Important note: It’s not an old system. It’s the system that’s still very much in place.) She experienced what so many authors experience. It’s tough to get published if you don’t have a platform or name recognition. So she did a really smart thing: she self-published! And she got noticed for it. I have been telling authors for some time now that self-publishing is in fact a platform-builder, and Ms. Saville is a perfect example of what can happen. She invested $2,000 of her own money, self-published, and got picked up by a publisher. That publisher is Amazon.

They did not offer her an advance, but she still comes to the conclusion, “I assume they want to make a lot of money off the book, which is encouraging to me.” This is a sweet but naïve assumption. If Amazon is in the business of publishing, they need to have books on their list. Some of those books will be the big-ticket books, like Ms. Marshall’s memoir, and others will be books they can pick up because they’re available.

Some authors take advances to be indicators of a publisher’s commitment to their book. I take issue with this only because different houses have different amounts of money that they can actually put toward advances, and being a big fish is a small pond definitely benefits certain authors. Getting a $20,000 advance on a small press, for instance, can mean that you are the cat’s meow and lead title. The same advance on Simon & Schuster could very well mean you’re at the bottom of the barrel.

So I don’t think it’s encouraging that Amazon is taking on authors and not paying them any advance. I haven’t seen their contract, but what happened here is that Ms. Davenport did all the work and Amazon repackaged her book and now they’re going to take most of her profits. Unless they have a nontraditional royalty model in which they’re paying her better terms than the industry standard, I’m not sure it’s going to be worth it for Ms. Davenport.

I don’t take issue with Amazon. I think what they’ve done for the publishing industry at large is rather miraculous. Kindle and other e-readers have more people reading. I order books off of Amazon all the time. I own a Kindle. So hello, Amazon, welcome to the publishing industry. It’s a hard game, and they don’t have any better recipe for creating bestsellers than any other publisher who’s playing at their level. And from the sound of it, they’re going to try to shoot high and acquire some really big books, and scoop really low and try to round out their list with whatever they can get. It’s a model, but is it a model for success?

I guess we’ll find out.

It’s normal for writers to become discouraged at some point in their journey to getting published. For some it starts well before their manuscript is complete. For others the challenges don’t truly start until they start shopping their proposal and manuscript to agents or publishers and getting feedback that’s hard to interpret, difficult to hear, or conflicting.

Three of the most common hurdles writers face include saboteurs (the inner critic), lack of time (time bandits), and being strategically underprepared (not knowing what you don’t know).

The Inner Critic

Do you grapple with the voice in your head that says, Why bother with this? Who’s going to want to read it? Or maybe your critic shows up in the form of telling you that you’re doing everything right and anyone who tells you otherwise is totally wrong. Another common critical voice is the one that says, You should be spending time with your partner or kids. You’re not making any money at this so it shouldn’t be such a priority. Do any of these ring true? Say hello to your inner critic. Welcoming him, her, or it with open arms is the first step toward developing a lasting relationship that will serve you well. You need to get to know your critic and understand what it really wants from you. Most people are surprised when they find out that the inner critic is only trying to help them in the best way it knows how.

Time Bandits

Do you have to unload the dishwasher and do a load of laundry before you let yourself sit down to your computer to write? Do you lie half-awake with dread after you’ve hit your snooze button for the second time, willing yourself to get out of bed for your morning writing session? Are you conflicted about what’s more important—spending an hour exercising or an hour writing? Maybe you own a business and everything comes before your writing. Undoubtedly the biggest time bandits are our families. We wouldn’t have it any other way, but when you’re finding it difficult to carve out even an hour of time because you feel guilty about the time you’re not spending with your family, that’s a clear indicator that time bandits are controlling your life. There are solutions to this problem. It’s called making and keeping dates with yourself.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

You get feedback from one agent that your writing is amazing, but you don’t have enough of a platform. Another agent says, wow, impressive bio, but they don’t think they can sell your work. An editor friend of yours raves about your work and tells you, don’t you dare stop trying. You’ve put your heart and soul into this manuscript and you’ve done so many drafts of your proposal you feel like you might throw up if you look at it one more time. Where do you go from here? Not knowing what you don’t know is frustrating in any circumstance, but in the publishing industry it’s particularly nebulous. Information gathering is the solution. Being open to feedback and actually hearing it and implementing it is the only way through.

If any of these issues feel like things you’ve grappled with on the road to getting published, I have an offer you won’t want to miss.

Register for my She Writes class, THE EDITOR IS IN, this week and get a FREE proposal evaluation AND a 45-minute consultation with me.

For $225 you get the course, which includes:

• 4 information-packed calls that will inspire you and help you navigate the road to getting published.
• 4 hour-long Q&A calls that will give you an opportunity to get any question you’ve ever wanted answered answered.
• PLUS, you have the opportunity, if you’re so compelled, to be the client in Calls #3 and #4. In the first calls, Deborah Siegal, cofounder of She Writes and author of several books, is going to share some of her own concerns, fears, and hurdles she’s facing right now as she writes a new book. In Calls #3 and #4, we’re looking for volunteers. This is an opportunity to get coached, again, for FREE. So if you know your inner critic well, or struggle with time bandits, or have had a WTF? moment in shopping your proposal/manuscript, then volunteer yourself!

And:

Enroll this week and cash in on:

FREE proposal evaluation ($100 value)

FREE 45-minute consultation ($100 value)

All you do to cash in on this offer is email me once you’ve enrolled in the class and we’ll get a date on the calendar.

This offer is good this week, Monday through Friday, October 10-14. I’m making this offer widely available, so please feel free to send it along to anyone you know who’s about to shop a project to an agent or editor, or who’s already started the process and needs a little pick-me-up.

Meanwhile, for those of you for whom the class doesn’t sound like a good fit, take a look at the hurdles you’re confronting and start taking stock of what might be true for you.

Until next month,
Brooke

So often in my coaching practice I’m working with writers around the various things they need to be doing to raise their author platforms, and it often occurs to me that I don’t always practice what I preach, or take my own advice!

This year I hired a wonderful coach who has helped me follow through on a few goals of my own. I want to give Karla a shout-out here for all she’s done to keep me accountable to what I say I want. Thank you, Karla!

This month I’m sharing some of the things I’ve been working on, and some of the things I’m committing to moving forward. I encourage you to steal my ideas!!

First and foremost I’m proud to announce that I’ve finally (after two years of saying I wanted and needed to do this) had my website redesigned—and it launched last week. This site is on Wordpess. I’m always telling clients to start on WordPress if they don’t have a website/blog already, or to migrate their existing site to WordPress if and when they can. One exciting new feature of the new site I urge you all to use whenever you want is “Ask Brooke.” Here you can submit a writing- or publishing-related question at any time and I will post the response on my site. I encourage you all to do this if you ever want to corroborate something you’ve heard, or if you have questions or concerns when you’re running up against conflicting advice out there in the world of publishing.

Second, I’m pushing myself to use different social media tools to promote my upcoming classes, and to get more exposure and visibility. I’m also always talking to my authors about putting themselves out there. I invite you to check out—and copy—some of the things I’m doing this month.

Free audio recording

I gave a free half-hour talk on September 5 about the three paths to getting published (big houses, small houses, and self-publishing). Thirteen minutes of that talk is now available for you to listen to on my site. Publishing free audio content is a good way to introduce people to who you are, and it showcases your expertise in a way that’s easy and accessible. I used All Free Conference to record the call, and Audacity to edit it down to thirteen minutes. I used divshare to get the audio content on my website so you can listen to it on my site.

Mightybell experience

Mightybell is a brand-new site that’s all about launching step-by-step “experiences.” It gives you the opportunity to, again, showcase what you know, and invite people to participate in an interactive experience. Give it a try by joining my experience, which is all about building your platform!! There are six fun steps that you can get going on today.

Talking on Blog Talk Radio

This month I will be talking on She Writes Radio, which is a free station on Blog Talk Radio. Anyone can get a free radio show on Blog Talk Radio, and I encourage you to give it a try. Being on the radio is a major platform-builder, and even if you start out with just a couple listeners, you can repurpose your content by creating free audio clips or podcasts, or using what you talk about to write an article that you can publish as a blog post or as an article on sites like ezinearticles.com.

Please join me on October’s call. It’s Wednesday, Oct 5, at 10 PT/1 ET. The call-in number is (347) 884-9779 and here’s what the show is about:

Here’s the write-up: Every writer faces hurdles on the road to getting published. Sometimes these are our inner saboteurs that keep us stuck with their messages: No one cares; why bother? Another hurdle is time—how can anyone find the time to write and publish a book with all the things pulling at our attention every day? And finally there are strategic challenges: Am I ready to shop my proposal? How do I build my platform? How do I get noticed?

Moving forward

Other goals I’m setting for myself as we move into fall and 2012 include writing a “free report,” which will be available to download on my homepage in the coming months. I’m also committing to writing my own book in 2012. Yep, time for the book coach to write and publish her own book. I’m stating it here and now, making myself accountable to all of you, my readers. And now I’m going to go post my intention on Mightybell.

Thanks for reading everyone, and happy platform-building! Please share you own goals for the sake of accountability if you’re so inclined!

Brooke