Guest Bloggers – Page 12

This past year has been difficult for me (Marlene), not just during the long month of November.

I have been playing catch up all year, trying to whittle down my never-ending to-do list. Susan Bono’s guest blog post reminds me to stop, notice, and savor the moment.

Susan writes:

Even those of us who start the day with a list know what it’s like when unplanned-for events start coming our way. In spite of our intentions, we start tackling the unscheduled instead of working on what we had planned. Emergencies come up, of course; we can’t control everything. No one can plan for bad news or times we are suddenly needed. But the list of unanticipated tasks is endless, and after a while, we just start doing what comes to us, instead of what we had intended.

You should have days when you follow your bliss. In fact, have them as often as you like, but the trick is in telling yourself right from the start, “Today I’m going to do whatever I feel like.” But a plan that’s been ignored is a sign of defeat, and most of us have long range goals—I mean, who doesn’t? So whenever you miss an opportunity to complete an intended task, you are altering the look of your Big Picture.

Whether you regularly schedule too much for yourself or sell yourself short, you’ll benefit from the TL list. TL stands for “Tough Luck,” because that’s what you say to anything that’s not on it. If you can complete your assigned tasks, then let the spirit of que sera, sera take over.

So tomorrow, do whatever is in your power to follow your list. The more in control you become in this area of your life, the fewer details your list will need to contain, but for tomorrow, make a schedule of what you think will cover every hour of your day. Include meals, personal care, regular errands, like carpooling, time sinks like phone calls, TV, or email. Now fit your to-do list into that existing framework. How much time do you really have?

Once you’ve made your list, do your best to stick to it. Each time you say, “Tough luck” to extraneous chores, you are giving yourself a big helping of Tough Love. You are proving to yourself and the world that the work you set out to do is important, and so are you.

See if you can love yourself enough to use the TL list until you discover what your true desires and capabilities are. As you plan your list for each tomorrow, note any substitutions you made earlier that day. Did you trade a trip to the grocery store for a surprise phone call from an old friend? Did you not get the ironing done because you couldn’t put down that exciting book you were reading at lunchtime? Were your “failures” or trade-offs satisfying, or did they leave you wishing you could have a do-over?

It’s important not to beat yourself up, because maybe what you really need is to make room for more fun. You can start scheduling that in, too, as you transfer whatever’s undone from the day’s list onto tomorrow’s. And if you’ve really missed the boat on some assignment you’ve given yourself, give it a decent burial. If what you failed to accomplish alters the Big Picture, accept this change with grace and trust that you were meant to change course anyway. As you learn to work with the TL list, you will internalize its rhythms and you won’t need to write everything down. But when you feel yourself getting out of control, you can always use this method to get yourself on track again.

We can’t control what life does to mess up our plans. But we can eliminate our own tendencies to sabotage ourselves. You’ll know when the TL list is working when you stop being so mad at yourself and start building a list of your accomplishments. That’s when Tough Luck goes beyond Tough Love and becomes True Love.

Susan Bono, author of What Have We Here: Essays about Keeping House and Finding Home, was once a high school English teacher, is now a freelance editor, and has been facilitating workshops, critique groups and free-writing classes for more than 25 years. She was the editor and publisher of Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative from 1995—2014.

Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray writes:

What if the chaos we experience in the world today and in our lives is actually an invitation to let go of the old ways and create something new. What if in letting go in the face of fear of the unknown we actually make room for the new to enter. Often when we give up trying we find a sort of magic that can bring unexpected opportunities beyond what we thought possible.

We tend to resist chaos. We associate it with war or natural disasters or with the unraveling of the structures that we have always thought of as solid. We cling to what feels comfortable. Chaos can rattle our bodies and emotions leaving us feeling overwhelmed. It can trigger a reaction of fight or flight which puts us in our reptilian brain which is incapable of creative problem solving.

What we call chaos can actually be part of the process of creativity and renewal. Look at nature. Fire recycles nutrients and restores certain species of trees like the Lodgepole Pine that require heat to release seeds from their cones. Immediately after a fire, nature gets to work restoring a new kind of order.

In her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus explains, “The new sciences of chaos and complexity tell us that a system that is far from stable is a system ripe for change. Evolution itself is believed to have occurred in fits and starts, plateauing for millions of years and then leaping to a whole new level of creativity after crisis.”

Then there is the chaos in our individual lives. We lose our job, a relationship ends, we are diagnosed with an illness or a loved one dies. Such changes can leave us feeling disappointed or sometimes even devastated. Yet often out of such chaos it’s possible that we get a better job, we met the love of our life, we develop increased kindness and compassion or we deepen our spiritual life.

Allowing for chaos can open up new doors. I know a woman whose house burned down. At the time she didn’t see it as a gift. Yet a year later she is living in the house of her dreams paid for by her insurance. She is laughing as she tells me it’s the best thing that ever happened to her. In my own life it was the disturbing loss of job that prompted me to become self employed combining my love of teaching, writing, creativity and nature.

Chaos is at the heart of being creative. Creativity begins from a place of swirling possibilities. It can be messy. On the creative journey we often feel like we don’t know what we’re doing or where exactly it’s going. Yet as we take it step by step following the threads of intuition and inspiration, and showing up for the work we are guided to do, we discover the process itself to be deeply rewarding and satisfying.

We find that we are okay when something doesn’t work out the way we want. We let go of wanting to control everything and learn to let ourselves be surprised by what unfolds. We let ourselves be like a child with finger paints, who isn’t the least bit concerned about the mess. We learn to trust something greater than ourselves is working on our behalf.

By bringing creativity into every area of our lives it can help us transcend the chaos by reordering the world and our lives in new and inspired ways. Take a minute consider a place in your life that feel chaotic and ask “what newness wants to be born in my life?” Don’t think about it, just allow an idea to pop in, follow your heart. Then see what one small act that you can take to start creating from this inspiration. What if we could help change and evolve the world that way?

Join Suzanne Murray for a one day workshop in Point Reyes, CA. October 15, 10 am to 4 pm.

and not with “my name is.” So . . . how could you, how should you begin your novel?

Guest Blogger, Bryn Donovan, writes about: What Happens on Page One: 30 Ways to Start a Novel.

Note: This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Note from Marlene: Edited for brevity. Scroll down for link to original post.

Bryn writes:

Even when you have a basic idea of your story, sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin it.

One of the best things you can do with your first five or ten pages is to get readers to care about what happens to your main character (or one of them.)

In my opinion, and in the opinion of most editors, a prologue that only serves as backstory is generally a bad idea. It makes a novel feel like it’s taking too long to really get started. You can weave the backstory into the present-day action. Build some mystery and anticipation about past events.

Many of us begin the story too soon in the first draft, with too much backstory.

Ask yourself what happens in the story to jog your character out of her usual rut and take her in a different direction. A lot of people refer to that thing, that event that changes everything, as the “inciting incident.”

(Something I have yet to do in my own stories is make the character’s own action lead to the change, rather than having her react to something. For instance, in my favorite movie of all time, Mad Max: Fury Road, Imperator Furiosa changes everything by deciding to rescue the sex slaves of a horrible dictator. And in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Finn rewrites his own destiny and everyone else’s as well by having a crisis of conscience. This leads him to make a daring escape with an imprisoned Resistance fighter.)

In Blake Snyder’s screenwriting book, Save the Cat (a terrific resource for fiction writers), he lays out an outline that establishes a baseline for the main character: Here’s what his life is like, here are some of his issues, and oh, in case you were wondering, here’s the theme, stated by some character or other. The inciting incident (or what he calls “the catalyst”) happens a little ways in.

It’s also possible to have the inciting incident on the first few pages, or even in the first sentence. That’s really up to you. But you don’t want to go too long before that first big thing happens.

As my friend Trish tells her improv students, Start on the Day Everything Changes.

[Bryn lists ways not to start a novel. Please go to her blog for this list.]

Here are 30 ideas of places to start… maybe one of them will work with your story! For some of them, I’ve given examples of novels that begin in that way.

As with the plot lists in my Master Lists for Writers book, you’re not cheating by using one, because these are all really broad! Each one of them could go a bunch of different ways.

The arrival of a letter, email, or package. The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

A main character in a frustrating situation.

A main character in an awkward or embarrassing situation.

The discovery of a dead body. Thief of Shadows, Elizabeth Hoyt

The death of somebody in the family or the community. All The Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy; The Known World, Edward P. Jones

~This is a popular one, and understandably so, because an ending is a new beginning.

The beginning or the middle of a disaster. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, kind of.

~It could be a bombing, a plane crash, or a tornado.

The aftermath of a disaster.(Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

A kiss.

A performance, or the conclusion of one. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

A main character in the hospital. Kindred, Octavia Butler

A main character declaring that he is in big trouble. The Martian, Andy Weir

A main character who’s clearly in big trouble. What Is the What, Dave Eggers

~She might be getting mugged or running from Nazi soldiers. Readers will start caring about her immediately.

The arrival of a plane, ship, or train. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas

~The character might be on board, or she might be watching it come in.

A scene at a party, a bar, or a nightclub. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy; The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

A fight. The Warrior, Zoë Archer

The character may be part of the fight, or just witnessing it.

A character moving in to a new place.

It could be a neighborhood or a dorm room.

A broad statement about one’s life. One For the Money, Janet Evanovich

~One For the Money begins, “There are some men who enter a woman’s life and screw it up forever. Joseph Morelli did this to me — not forever, but periodically.” That’s a great hook.

A dramatic moment in the middle or end of the story. The Secret History,Donna Tartt.

~You can begin in the moment and then backtrack to explain how they got there. For instance, the prologue of The Secret History begins, “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

A trial in a courtroom. Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson

A job interview.

~ I really like this idea because you could get a lot of information across about your character naturally. She might be giving appropriate answers while her internal monologue tells you the rest of the story. Also, an applicant at a job interview is in a vulnerable position, which I think would create empathy for your heroine right away.

A main character meets someone new. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

A street scene. Perdido Street Station, China Miéville

~Your character could be getting an errand done or going to visit somebody. For a novel that takes place in an historical, futuristic, or fantasy setting, this can be a good way to establish a sense of place as well as establish your character’s normal life and priorities.

A main character in a triumphant situation.

A character or characters getting dressed, shaving, putting makeup on, or doing their hair. The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki

A big, happy occasion such as a wedding or a graduation.

~Of course, it might or might not be happy for your main character, who may be a participant or someone in the audience.

One character teaching another how to do something.

A visitor showing up at the door. The Big Sleep,Raymond Chandler.

A main character coming across a significant object.

A character committing a crime.

A character or characters completing a task. Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

Originally posted on Bryn Donovan’s Blog, ” tell your stories ~ love your life.”

For the complete blog post, please click on: “What Happens on Page One: 30 Ways to Start a Novel.”

Bryn’s goal for her blog: “Share as many writing resources as possible, encourage people to remember how amazing they really are, and inspire myself and others to get as much out of life as we can. Hope you like it!”
Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray writes about: Connecting to Nature and Creativity as a Gift for Ourselves and the World.

Nature and creativity are doorways to the sacred. They can help us connect to the deeper parts of ourselves, the knowing of our hearts and souls. They can assist us in being more present in the moment and give us access to expanded capacities of intuition, inspiration and imagination. Connecting to the natural world, which is inherently creative, opens us to our own creative gifts, which allows us to bring forth new possibilities and solutions for our own lives and our troubled world.

The ongoing tragedies in the world combined with instant access to these events through the news and social media can leave us feeling helpless and hopeless. Our psyches and nervous systems overwhelmed.

Spending time in nature as well as creative play can be a balm for heart and soul and help us ground our lives in an expanded sense of self. Spending time in nature and creative play relaxes us, bringing us more into the moment where we can breathe more deeply and release our worry about the future. They can increase our sense of well being allowing us to connect to a sense of peace.

I’ve been connecting to nature and creativity for most of my life and know the joy, satisfaction and comfort that both offer.

Excerpt from Suzanne Murray’s August 17 Blog Post.

Suzanne Murray shares her knowledge of connecting to nature and creativity in a one-day workshop, “Connecting to Nature and Creativity,” in Point Reyes on September 17.

“We will explore a very special place I have known since I was a teenager to deepen our connection to nature and our creative capacities.”
What would you write if you knew you would die soon?

Today’s Guest Blogger, Rebecca Lawton, took the plunge and explored what it means for our work to be “so essential that we must complete it before we leave this earth.”

Becca’s Cool Writing Tips during the month of August were such a success, she’s repeating the series in September. So, if you missed out in August, you have another chance to be inspired by Becca Lawton’s Cool Writing Tips.

Becca opened the second week of Cool Writing Tips with this provocative quote from Annie Dillard:

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you write if you knew you would die soon?

Becca responds as if she were having an intimate conversation with Annie:

Ms. Dillard, I’m so glad you asked that question. Now if I could only answer it.

“What would you write if you knew you would die soon?” is a good question, but it’s one I find myself turning from, wanting to say, “Next!”

Because to answer the question of what we’d write if we knew we’d die soon acknowledges that we will, in fact, die.

And, the truth of the matter is, we will. Someday. Die. Hopefully not today or anytime soon, but sometime. And, given that fact, what should we write today?

When I was writing my first novel I was also raising a child and working for a consulting firm that took the biggest part of my days. I’d rise early to steal a few hours before changing hats to care for my daughter and then go off to work. As I drove to the office, my characters still spoke to me, making their case that they needed my attention, and now.

I’d promise to get back to them and then immerse myself in my consulting work. I’d only begin tuning into the novel again on my way home.

Often—almost every day —I worried that I wouldn’t live long enough to see my novel finished. The thought that I might not finish this important life’s work terrified me. Not even when I was running the biggest rapids in the United States every day had I so considered death a possibility. Not even when I realized how quickly my daughter was growing did I feel immortal. No—it was the writing.

That we find our work so essential that we must complete it before we leave this earth strikes me as a positive sort of feeling, if paranoid.

Because, if we can’t really face the question as posed in Anne Dillard’s quote, maybe we can at least check in with ourselves about how we’re spending our time. We can ask ourselves, “Would I keep slaving away at this thing if I knew it was the last thing I’d ever write (or paint or design or photograph?) If no, then why don’t I regroup?”

We’re all terminal—but that’s okay. As Annie Dillard says, let’s assume that’s who our audience is. Because that is also who we are. And if we let that simple fact keep us honest and on track, I believe it will.

Rebecca Lawton is the award-winning author (and co-author) of seven books. Her path as a writer and fluvial geologist started with her first career, rowing rafts on the Colorado in Grand Canyon and other Western rivers.

Some of her writing stems from observations in the field as a guide and researcher. Her essays and stories have been published in Aeon, Brevity, Hakai, More, Orion, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Shenandoah, Sierra, Thema, Undark, and many other journals and anthologies.
“The past,” Phillip Lopate says, “is an Aladdin’s lamp we never tire of rubbing.”

Guest Blogger Norma Watkins studied with Phillip Lopate. The following is what she gleaned working with the master of the personal essay.

The hallmark of personal essay and memoir is its intimacy. [Links below on memoir writing.]

In a personal essay, the writer seems to be speaking directly into the reader’s ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom: thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, whimsies.

The core of this kind of writing is the understanding that there is a certain unity to human experience. As Montaigne put it, “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.”

This kind of informal writing, whether a short piece or a book of memoir, is characterized by:
- self-revelation
- individual tastes and experiences
- a confidential manner
- humor
- a graceful style
- rambling structure
- unconventionality
- novelty of theme
- freshness of form
- freedom from stiffness and affectation
The informal writing of the personal essay and memoir offers an opportunity toward candor and self-disclosure. Compared with the formal essay, it depends less on airtight reasoning and more on style and personality. We want to hear the writer’s voice.

How do we achieve this?

Use a conversational tone. Instead of seeing our memoirs as collections of facts we are leaving to the future, strive to write as if this were a letter to a friend.

We have a contract to the reader to be as honest as possible.

Humans are incorrigibly self-deceiving, rationalizing animals. Few of us are honest for long. Often, in shorter personal essays, the “plot,” its drama and suspense, consists in watching how far the essayist can drop past her psychic defenses toward deeper levels of honesty. You want to awaken in the reader that shiver of self-recognition.

Remove the mask. Vulnerability is essential.

The reader will forgive the memoirist’s self-absorption in return for the warmth of his candor.

The writer must be a reliable narrator. We must trust that the homework of introspection has been done. Part of this trust comes, paradoxically, from the writer’s exposure of her own betrayals, uncertainties, and self-mistrust. This does not mean relentlessly exposing dark secrets about ourselves, so much as having the courage to cringe in retrospect at our insensitivity that wounded another, a lack of empathy, or the callowness of youth. As readers, we want to see how the world comes at another person, the irritations, jubilations, aches and pains, humorous flashes. These are your building blocks.

Ask yourself questions and follow the clues. Interrogate your ignorance. Be intrigued by limitations, physical and mental, what you don’t understand or didn’t do.

Develop a taste for littleness, including self-belittlement. Learn to look closely at the small, humble matters of life. Develop the ability to turn anything close at hand into a grand meditational adventure. Make a small room loom large by finding the borders, limits, defects and disabilities of the particular. Start with the human package you own. Point out these limitations, which will give you a degree of detachment.

You confess and, like Houdini, you escape the reader’s censure by claiming: I am more than the perpetrator of that shameful act; I am the knower and commentator as well. If tragedy ennobles people and comedy cuts them down, personal writing with its ironic deflations and its insistence on human frailty tilts toward the comic. We end by showing a humanity enlarged by complexity.

We drop one mask only to put on another but if in memoir we continue to unmask ourselves, the result may be a genuine unmasking. In the meantime, the writer tries to make his many partial selves dance to the same beat: to unite through force of voice and style these discordant, fragmentary parts of ourselves. A harvesting of self-contradiction is an intrinsic part of the memoir. Our goal is not to win the audience’s unqualified love but to present the complex portrait of a human being.

A memoirist is entitled to move in a linear direction, accruing extra points of psychological or social shading as time and events pass. The enemy is always self-righteousness, not just because it is tiresome, but because it slows down the self-questioning. The writer is always examining his prejudices, his potential culpability, if only through mental temptation.

Some people find a memoir egotistical, all that I, I, I, but there are distinctions between pleasurable and irritating egotism. Writing about oneself is not offensive if it is modest, truthful, without boastfulness, self-sufficiency, or vanity. If a man is worth knowing, he is worth knowing well. It’s a tricky balance: a person can write about herself from angles that are charmed, fond, delightfully nervy; alter the lens a little and she crosses into gloating, pettiness, defensiveness, score-settling (which includes self-hate), or whining about victimization. The trick is to realize we are not important except as an example that can serve to make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.

The Past, as we said in the beginning, is a lamp we never tire of rubbing. We are writing the tiny snail track we made ourselves. Such writing is the fruit of ripened experience. It is difficult to write from the middle of confusion. We need enough distance to look back at the choices made, the roads not taken, the limiting family and historic circumstances, and what might be called the catastrophe of personality.

Finally, the memoirist must be a good storyteller. We hear, “Show, don’t tell,” but the memoirist is free to tell as much as she likes, while dropping into storytelling devices whenever she likes: descriptions of character and place, incident, dialogue and conflict. A good memoirist is like a cook who learns, through trial and error, just when to add another spice to the stew.

The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate, Doubleday, 1994.

Note from Marlene: For more suggestions about how to write a personal essay, please see Write Spot Blog posts:

How to Write A Memoir-Part One

How to Write A Memoir-Part Two

Norma Watkins will be the Writers Forum Presenter on August 18, 2016: “Writing Memoir and How To Turn Your Stories Into Fiction.”

Norma grew up in Mississippi and left in the midst of the 1960s civil rights struggles. Her award-winning memoir, The Last Resort: Taking the Mississippi Cure, tells the story of those years. When asked what the memoir is about, Watkins says: “Civil rights, women wronged, good food and bad sex.”

Watkins has a Ph.D. in English and an MFA in Creative Writing. She teaches Creative Writing for Mendocino College and serves on the Board of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, and the Coast branch of the California’s Writers Club.
Do you feel guilty when you re-read a book (on purpose, not because you forgot you previously read it)?

Juan Vidal wrote a thoughtful essay about the joys and discoveries one makes when re-reading.

“Returning to a book you’ve read multiple times can feel like drinks with an old friend. There’s a welcome familiarity — but also sometimes a slight suspicion that time has changed you both, and thus the relationship. But books don’t change, people do. And that’s what makes the act of rereading so rich and transformative.

The beauty of rereading lies in the idea that our engagement with the work is based on our current mental, emotional, and even spiritual register. It’s true, the older I get, the more I feel time has wings. But with reading, it’s all about the present. It’s about the now and what one contributes to the now, because reading is a give and take between author and reader.”

Excerpted from: “You Can Go Home Again: The Transformative Joy Of Rereading,” by Juan Vidal, NPR, April 17, 2016 NPR. KQED Public Radio.

What books have you re-read?

Note from Marlene:

I have re-read so many favorites, it would be a long list.

One of my all-time favorites to re-read is What Have We Here, by Susan Bono.
Guest Blogger Arlene Miller, The Grammar Diva, gives us a sneak preview into her recently published second edition of The Best Little Grammar Book Ever!

If you are a member of the nerdy world of grammarians, you know that there are “controversial” grammar topics. One of those is the use of the Oxford comma. Another is the use of the singular they.

I use the Oxford comma, and I don’t use the singular they. But both these issues are up to you. Let’s talk about the singular they.

They is a pronoun. A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun. We know that they is third person plural. Third person singular pronouns are he, she, and it.

Now how many times have you said, or heard someone say, Everyone is bringing their book to the meeting or something similar? Let’s pick that sentence apart:

This is an issue of agreement: a singular subject has a singular verb form to go with it. And a singular noun or pronoun will have a singular pronoun of the same gender stand in for it. Everyone sounds plural, but it is singular. You can tell because you use a singular verb with it; you wouldn’t say Everyone are bringing. But you would say They are bringing because they is plural. Okay, so we have a singular subject (everyone) and a matching singular verb (is bringing), but what about their book? Their is plural. It doesn’t agree.

Now if we said Everyone on the girls basketball team has her uniform, we would all be happy.

But if everyone refers to a mixture of male and female, or if we simply don’t know, what do we do? Well, we used to just say his or her and be done with it. Actually, before that, we probably used to just say his and be done with it — but that is not politically correct and will not do any longer.

What to do . . . what to do . . .

Well, most everyone just uses their. It is easier to use one word than that clunky old his or her. The English language, so far, doesn’t have a word that can stand in for either a singular male or female.

The sentence Everyone is bringing their book to the meeting is now acceptable and considered correct. Most people use it and have been using it, without knowing or caring, forever. But many people, especially when making a speech, do use he or she, or his or her.

Many grammarians and language purists are horrified by the use — and even more, the acceptance — of the singular they.

My advice is to rewrite your sentence to avoid the issue entirely. It is usually really easy to do: Everyone is bringing a book to the meeting.

Problem solved . . .

Six years ago, I published my first book, The Best Little Grammar Book Ever!. Since then, I have written five more grammar books and a novel. Now, a second edition of that first book, with a new format, a new subtitle, and new information has been published. New information, you might ask? Does grammar change? Yes, slowly, but things do change, although there are always those (me, among them) who would rather stick to the “rules”!

Arlene Miller, The Grammar Diva, is also a blogger, copyeditor, speaker, and former English teacher. She is a member of Redwood Writers and Bay Area Independent Publishers Association, where she has been a featured speaker.

Book Launch for the Second Edition of The Best Little Grammar Book Ever! Speak and Write with Confidence/Avoid Common Mistakes will be in the form of a Grammar Workshop at Petaluma Copperfield’s Books on Saturday, August 6 at 1 p.m.
Guest Blogger Shirin Bridges sheds light on Ingram Spark, BookBaby, and CreateSpace.

The following is an excerpt from Shirin Bridges’ June 24, 2016 blog post on Goose Tracks.

I was recently asked for the pros and cons of Ingram Spark vs. BookBaby. The answer, I quickly realized, is a complex one, greatly dependent on the particular publishing goals for the book. I also thought that in any decision tree, Amazon’s CreateSpace would have to rate a mention. So what follows is my attempt to delineate the decision tree I would adopt in choosing between these three services . . .

[Note from Marlene: For the full post, please go to Shirin’s informative blog, Goose Tracks].
1. How important are bookstores to your sales strategy?
  If NOT VERY, skip to 4.
  If VERY, keep reading.
Self-published authors will find it almost impossible to get wide distribution in bookstores. Period. The reasons are legion but boil down to two words: workload and risk. Most self-published authors aren’t represented by distributors that bookstores are already doing business with, and there’s little incentive to slog through the paperwork to set up a new account or to take your books on consignment and handle you outside the system.

. . . bookstores might be a valid cornerstone of some self-publishers’ sales strategies. A good example would be if you have a book with a very specific market that can be reached through very specific bookstores. Take Katy Pye‘s Tracking the Flash: My Lighthouse Travel Log. Where would you sell that? Gift shops attached to lighthouses, or bookstores in the neighboring towns. If you’re a buyer in one of those stores . . . You’d probably at least take a peek at something so specifically lighthouse-y.

You may also decide for emotional reasons that getting into bookstores is important to you. It’s perfectly valid to feel that if you’re going to go to all this trouble to write, fund, and publish a book, you’re going to enjoy a book launch party and the pride of having your book on a shelf in your local bookstore(s). Depending on your relationship(s) with your local bookstore(s), this might be a real possibility and may even lead to a reasonable number of sales. Amanda Conran, for example, was guaranteed a launch party at Book Passage in Corte Madera, for the excellent reason that she works there. She sold around 120 copies of The Lost Celt on her big day. That’s about half the total sales of most self-published titles . . .

. . . if you decide that bookstore sales are important to you, then drop CreateSpace right off the bat. Most independent bookstores will not knowingly take a CreateSpace book. They hate Amazon that much, and Amazon doesn’t help out by playing ball either: CreateSpace offers roughly half the discount (read profit margin) that bookstores are used to getting from other distributors and publishers.

Ingram, on the other hand, already has a relationship with just about every bookstore in the USA and an established (and accepted) discount schedule. Within the industry, Lightning Source, Ingram’s original print-on-demand offering, was thought to provide much better production quality than CreateSpace—better color handling, more trim sizes, fewer typographic anomalies, etc. Spark has probably inherited some of this perception as a halo effect, even though its production process is different. (Lightning Source accepts printer-ready PDFs, forcing someone to pay attention to typography—or so one would hope; Spark, like CreateSpace, uses a “meat grinder”—an automatic formatting system that, in CreateSpace’s past, at least, was prone to errors.)

The Amazon stigma, if you’re targeting bookstores, is a compelling argument for favoring Ingram Spark. But how do you choose between Spark and BookBaby?
1. Do you want someone to produce your book for you?
  If you want help, keep reading.
  If you think you can do it yourself, skip to 3.
As Ingram wholesales for other book producers, you can benefit from Ingram’s bookstore relationships without producing your book with Ingram. BookBaby is a popular option.

When authors gush about their experiences with BookBaby, and quite a few of them do, it’s usually because BookBaby makes everything so easy. You pay them; they take care of it. Then, once your books are produced and in all the promised sales channels, they are out of the picture. No ongoing royalties, etc. It’s a straight “for fee” service.

They are credited with an excellent support staff who actually answer the phone. They provide easy, one-shop access to professional book designers and editors. (BARNT BARNT, that’s my alarm system blaring: for a professional-quality book, you need both of these services!) If I wasn’t a publisher myself and didn’t have easy access to designers and editors, etc., I’d probably consider using BookBaby.
1. Do you think you can produce a book yourself?
  On the other hand, some self-publishers don’t need BookBaby’s menu of services. Some are already working with editors. I’ve been retained by a few of them, and these clients are a determined bunch who want to be more than authors—they want control of the entire publication process. (I actually brought one an invitation to submit from a traditional publisher, and he turned it down because he wanted to retain all creative control.) They want to pick their own illustrators and/or designers and have control of the cover art. They relish the challenge of marketing. They are digitally adept enough to deal with the meat grinders without suffering dangerous spikes in blood pressure. If you have your stable of professionals in hand and don’t need much additional production help, Ingram Spark is the most direct route into the Ingram database. As Ingram is America’s largest book wholesaler, that’s the catalog most independent bookstores will use when placing an order.
Be very clear that Ingram Spark, BookBaby, and nearly all similar services offer production, fulfillment, and easy ordering of your books, but although they use the word “distribution,” they are not full-service distributors. Industry distributors like Perseus and Independent Publishers Group have sales forces. In theory at least, their sales reps will go out there and plug your book. (In reality, their sales forces have thousands of books they can plug; they will plug what they think they can sell.)

Ingram and BookBaby, et al., do not offer sales services. They do not sell to the trade. YOU have to do the work to get a bookstore to place an order. Although you will be in the Ingram database, that database during any given season includes thousands upon thousands of titles, so unless the bookstore is actively looking for it, your book will not be found.
1. Are you primarily interested in online sales?
  . . . If your intent is to go online-only, the choice comes down to Amazon vs. someone like BookBaby.
BookBaby’s advantages were covered in #2 and they apply whether or not you’re interested in bookstores . . . BookBaby will take care of production of the print-on-demand (POS) book and conversion of the e-book, and usher both into the appropriate retail channels, dominated by Amazon for POS, and Kindle for e-books. They’ll charge you a fee for their services, and then you will take all profits minus the cut to your retailers.

Amazon is a little trickier in that not only do you have to handle print book production yourself, you have to handle ebook production also. Even if you are not intimidated by this, there will still be two separate Amazon companies with their own procedures that you’ll have to deal with: CreateSpace for the POS book; and Kindle for the e-book. If you would like your e-book available for every device, you will also have to convert your book into multiple e-book formats and distribute them separately to non-Kindle platforms like iBooks and Kobo.

One plus of persevering and tackling CreateSpace and Kindle yourself is that you can take advantage of Kindle’s Select program. This gives you higher royalties and various marketing perks in exchange for a period of exclusivity—at a minimum, 90 days. Another advantage is that your POS books are directly in the Amazon system. You don’t have to ship books to them; they print them right off their own printers. But one of the most compelling reasons to consider the CreateSpace + Kindle bundle is profit. By not paying the likes of BookBaby, you can invest less in the production of your book. (Although, repeat repeat: I would really urge you to pay for a book designer for the cover, a professional editor, and ideally a separate copyeditor—so any apparent savings may be a false economy.) CreateSpace is also thought to generally offer lower per-book prices than Ingram Spark, although costs vary with page count and format. When you get into the publishing business, you will be bowled over by how thin the margins are, so any penny saved is a penny earned.

OK, at this point I’m not sure if I’ve bored or depressed you into a stupor or confused you with all the branches of my decision tree, so I’m going to close with one last question:
1. Do you really have to choose between them?
  Going back to the original question of whom I would choose, BookBaby or Ingram Spark, and having introduced Amazon as a third candidate myself, here is what I would try if I were a self-publisher with a commercial fiction novel. If, say, I had a romance, or a piece of sci-fi, or a mystery—all genres that do well digitally—and I were a first-time publisher with few professional contacts, I would:
Go to BookBaby and have them help with design and editing, because, as I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, both are necessary to give your work its best shot, and unless you are from an affiliated field, you might not know what good design and editing is. BookBaby not only gives you access to those services, but their suppliers have been vetted, and from what I can see, BookBaby knows a thing or two about professionalism and design, so “better than nought” as they say in northern England (pronouncing the “nought” as “nowt”).

Have them distribute your POS book, including to Amazon and Ingram. You will get the world’s largest online retailer, and the world’s largest bricks-and-mortar wholesaler as sales channels—recognizing that the responsibility for sales (pushing consumers to those channels) falls 100% on you.

Order 100 (more if you’re really brave) print copies and sell them hard to friends and family. Take sample copies into all the independent bookstores within a 50-mile radius (my personal definition of “local”) and try to negotiate consignment deals. Do the math carefully here because you should expect to give away a commission of at least 40%. That may leave you with little profit.

At the very least, negotiate a book launch party with the best independent bookstore within that radius. I work very, very hard at bringing my own crowd, knowing that I will get exactly three members of the public who happened to wander in.

Have lots of photos taken signing books. This is your author’s moment, and most self-published authors will look back and realize they spent a few thousand dollars on it, so suck as much joy out of this marrow as you can.

In the meantime, happy writing!

Note from Marlene: Please go to Shirin Bridges’s blog, Goose Tracks, for the rest of her amazing and thorough report on this topic.
Guest Blogger Elaine Silver: How to show your expertise in your writing.

Think about any book that you have read that really grabbed you. Take some time to read parts of that book again with the idea in mind of writerly authority. Once you start looking for it, you will be dazzled at the facility with which the author commands the story.

You can write like that too.

Let’s examine the word authority. What feeling do you get reading the word “authority?” Do you feel rebellious, like you don’t want to listen to someone else? Do you feel like you want to immediately say “no” to a request? If you answered yes to these questions, then you think of authority as something that subjugates you.

Or conversely, when you think of authority, do you feel secure knowing that someone else knows more than you do about something? Do you envision someone who can give you guidance and advice? Does having someone around in authority make you feel like all is handled?

Or do you have both reactions to the word—positive and negative?

It is my experience that many people are ambivalent about authority—both as it is exercised by others and by themselves. We seem, as a culture, to be confused about it. To whom do we give authority and why? When do we claim it ourselves? This ambivalence is understandable since we live in a heterogeneous culture with many value systems and many people claiming power over us who may not have our best interests at heart.

What does this have to do with writing, you may ask? Well, actually, everything.

The word authority comes from the word “author.” From the Latin: auctoritatem (nominative auctoritas) “invention, advice, opinion, influence, command,” from auctor “master, leader, author.”

In my work as an editor, one issue that I deal with frequently is a writer who is reluctant to become an author, a leader—someone who is actually claiming authority over what the reader is reading and understanding.

I can tell you that the writer/author/leader who does not claim authority might as well hang up her keyboard and call it a day.

Here are two examples:

I recently helped a vocal coach with a book about the technique she has developed to teach her singing students. She is without question an absolute authority on teaching singing and her students have had remarkable results using her methods. However, the initial version of the book did not reflect these facts. She backpedaled on many of her explanations of her methods. She wrote in passive sentence structures

I asked her to describe to me how she acts in her studio sessions with her students. She painted a picture of herself as a confident leader who creatively deals with every issue that comes up and inspires her singers to move past their perceived limitations to achieve vocal prowess that they did not think possible. Armed with that knowledge, we changed her book and her writing to reflect this powerhouse of a teacher. Now her message comes through beautifully and forcefully, as it should.

Another client of mine who is writing a memoir found herself awash in a powerful story but she was writing it as if she had no idea what was going on. This made me, as surrogate for the reader, uneasy and insecure. How am I supposed to trust this author if she doesn’t trust herself?

This writer made the mistake many writers make. She did not take charge of the story and instead let her main character (her younger self) run the show. And the show she ran was a meandering and bumbling mess, much like her life. The author was confusing the actions of her main character with her own role as author. Once she began to differentiate between herself and her protagonist, the book gained cohesion and clarity while story remained an account of chaos and confusion. What a lovely achievement!

No matter what the story is or who the main character is, the author must act as captain and keep steering the ship with a steady hand even in unruly seas.

We read because we want to see the world through the eyes of the author. We want to know what he knows. We ask and expect her to be our leader and show us some new terrain. We expect our author authority to navigate us safely into and through an uncharted, exciting land that we have not experienced before.

Know your story. Know the journey you want to take your reader on. Lead with confidence. Write with Authority.

Elaine Silver helps writers realize the greatest potential of their writing by discovering their true intent and translating it to the pages of their books. She has written on topics as varied as choosing the right college to the innovations in green building techniques. Elaine’s specialty is seeing how your message will be perceived by others and guiding you to create your best work.

Elaine will be one of the editors on the Editors Panel at Writers Forum on July 21, 2016, 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm at Petaluma Community Center.