Writers, Readers & Self Publishing

  If you set your story near home, then you know the plains, the streets, shops, the roads, the types of people, vehicles, and the “busyness”, dangers and fun of daily life. f you venture overseas with your characters, you could perhaps visit the places the characters would live in, smell the sea, touch the plants, walk under the hot blue sky, or freeze in a biting wind. If you reach into the past to set a historical story you need not only to research the period in meticulous detail, but also get inside the heads of the characters, imagine what they see in their everyday world, what they smell, eat and touch. And it will be quite different, fifty years ago, let alone five hundred. Going further – inventing a country, planet or other reality as in my Roma Nova alternate history thrillers – you will need to gear up your imagination to its highest level. We’re creative beings; we’ve imagined space adventures, high crime, medieval romances, sea voyages, in short, alternative realities, since we were children. We’ve built worlds of richness, deprivation, strange laws and customs, silks, satins and broadcloth, rural, industrial and futuristic. And with that imagination,…

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          KRISTEN TABER Authors tend to be a solitary bunch. What can I say? We like to talk to people in our heads. But those of us on the self-publishing journey also recognize that we work in tandem with so many people outside the worlds we create. We source editors and artists, work closely with beta readers and bloggers, and rely on friends and family to help with the publishing process or get through the initial writing stages. When I finish my books, I make sure to acknowledge those who helped my manuscripts become novels, but the biggest thank you belongs to my husband, Joe. He does a lot that goes without proper recognition and since interviews generally focus on authors, I thought it would be fun to change that and get his bookish take on the world. What types of books do you like to read? What book are you currently reading? I typically read non-fiction books, on business, self-improvement, or technology topics. Currently, I am reading The Challenger Customer by Brent Adamson, a fascinating book about positioning a sale within a complex organization. Do you prefer eBooks or physical books and why? I love eBooks!…

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ALAN BRAY   I appreciate the chance to write about this. It’s one of the most difficult and important questions I can imagine. I certainly don’t claim to have any original techniques but I can describe how I use some of the time-honored ones. I will wake up in the early morning with a story idea, or more specifically, a character in a situation. It’s coming from dreams, I suppose. There’s that moment when I wake up and become aware of being in the bed and the light, and a strong memory will be there too. Sometimes it’s a development on a story I’m working on, sometimes it’s something entirely new. I don’t usually rush to write the idea down as it will stay with me through morning coffee, getting my daughter to the bus stop, and breakfast. I usually begin a story with one of these images of a person doing something—as opposed to first developing a plot. I know that some experts advise outlining stories before starting to write. If writers can devise a plot first and then develop characters and scenes, I admire them. My God, it would save so much time! I’ve tried to do it,…

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So where do ideas for a story come from? An event you witness? An overheard conversation? A dream? Or is there, perhaps, a parallel world of Imagination where a characters reside, their exploits and adventures leaking into our Universe via a sort of telepathic mind-link? Far-fetched? Yes maybe, but ask any author where a certain powerful scene originated from and I bet they’ll answer, “I don’t know, it just came.” There are scenes in my books that I have no recollection of writing – and I occasionally find my male protagonists suddenly immersed in dangerous scrapes,  and then relying on me to get them out of it (thanks guys). And what about the stories that, before you know it, have gone off at a completely different tangent to the one you’d planned out? Writing a novel is a bit like going off into uncharted waters. You know your starting point, you know the end point (probably), and have a vague idea of a mid-way encounter. The rest is a bit like they used to put on the old maps to indicate unexplored territory: “Here Be Dragons” (In some cases for fantasy writers – literally! One of my novels, Harold The…

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AMBER FOXX It’s harder than writing the whole book! How many authors have said that about the back cover blurb? I know I have. At some level it can feel more challenging to get those few words right than it did to get the entire novel in satisfactory shape. It’s a different kind of writing. If you’re a plotter, you might write the blurb along with your outline and find it easier than a “pantser” or a hybrid plotter/pantser will. Those of us who work that way don’t know how the story works out until we’re done, so we usually have to create this short, tempting piece of reader bait after we have spent months to years immersed in the depths of the story. That adds to the challenge, because we have to step back from the details of the plot. Some of the least effective blurbs are like synopses. A good blurb A: Makes readers want to know what happens in the story. B: Helps readers decide if it’s the kind of book they like. The instigating incident for your plot belongs in the blurb. What sets the ball rolling? Like much of what goes in this description, it’s…

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