Selling Books

Your Guide to Writing, Publishing and Marketing Books and Ebooks

Storytelling and the Superconscious Mind

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In broad terms, yoga separates the mind into three aspects: the conscious, the subconscious, and the superconscious. • The conscious mind is concerned with the senses and evaluating relationships. • The subconscious mind stores memories and issues about the self. • The superconscious mind, above the other two, offers a dispassionate awareness concerned with … [Read more...]

The Pitfalls of Writing from the Dark Heart

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A difficulty in writing a first novel is for the writer to recognize the difference between creating a story meant to transport an audience and a story meant to process the feelings and issues of the writer. Most people in this world are ego-centric, which makes it easy to accumulate grievances and angry feelings. In yoga, this is referred to as the eight meannesses of the … [Read more...]

Using URL Titles for Promotion of a Website

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When I created my Essays on the Craft of Dramatic Writing! website in the late 90's (the title a reflection on what I'd learned from Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing), my main and only impulse about urls was that they be short. So, for example, my essay on the movie Lethal Weapon was wdetect.htm. Short and sweet, but it had no link to the actual title of the … [Read more...]

Using Twitter, A Guide for Authors New to Twitter

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Twitter is a website (www.twitter.com) that allows people to join and post messages of 140 characters. When you join (it's free), you can both 'follow' others and have 'followers' who receive messages you send (this message passed 140 characters with the word followers). Twitter began as a way for people in a business to send messages ("meeting time changed to 1:30"), but it … [Read more...]

Lyrical Writing

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Notes on E Annie Proulx's  Annie Proulx's  is a great example of lyrical writing. While her writing might seem to violate conventional writing, her style always aims at getting to a deeper truth. Many years ago I attended a reading of published romance authors and unpublished authors. The published authors use lyrical writing judiciously. The unpublished authors seemed to … [Read more...]

Finding the Right Critique Group

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As office manager of Willamette Writers, a non-profit writers group, I often get calls asking about critique groups. I advise people to think of them as coming in four types: Support Light Critique Heavy Critique & Wise Readers Support groups generally offer encouragement in writing or marketing, and little or no critique. Some support groups also operate as … [Read more...]

From Book to Screen: Notes on the Hunger Games

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This well-made film offers a great example of how to turn a popular novel into a movie. The film eliminates several minor characters and shortens something that preoccupies Katniss in the novel, whether she'll go along with playing someone's girlfriend to score points with the audience for the Hunger Games. A common mistake for novelists writing a first script would be to take … [Read more...]

Using Transparency to Understand Storytelling

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When I teach storytelling, I'll often start by using an example from a well-known YA novel like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Hugely successful novels like these are often transparent about introducing a story's promise and setting a story into motion through what I call character's dramatic truths, those issues that define a character and what they seek in the … [Read more...]

Conveying a Character’s Journey On The First Page of a Novel

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Notes on Good Grief, by Lolly Winston I teach that a story creates movement and the movement transport an audience. In many of the unpublished novels I read, I'm often 40 pages into a manuscript before I have any idea of a main character's journey. In some cases, I have to read to the end of a novel to understand that journey. This puts me (and readers) in the unfortunate … [Read more...]