Here are the materials for the presentations that I’m giving at LTUE this year. Enjoy!
2017 LTUE 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories
2017 LTUE 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories HANDOUT
2017 LTUE The Secret to a Story Idea that Works
2017 LTUE Banish writer’s fear doubt and block with cognitive therapy
Alan Peterson runs the Meet the Thriller Author podcast. He recently met with me to get my advice for new writers. The interview is now up on his site. After that, you’ll want to listen to some of the others. He’s talked to some great authors.
The RWA conference was a blast. It was a wonderful time to hook up with writing friends, to make new ones, and to listen to insights and advice from folks who are selling tons of books.
Brenda Novak, whose latest book hit #48 on the USA Today list, gave a great presentation on generating emotion in the reader.
RaeAnne Thayne, whose book is currently the #5 best selling book in the USA this week, shared lots of helpful tips on ways to make this your most productive year ever.
Kristan Higgins, whose latest book hit #20 on the USA Today list, gave a presentation on the role and delights of secondary characters and how to use them. She also gave a humorous and insightful keynote speech about one of the most satisfying reasons to tell stories–to help others.
Lynn Kurland’s presentation on world building was short, but sometimes short is more powerful. I came away remembering that one key to great world building is remembering that nobody will care much about the world if they don’t care for the characters!
There were others presenting, but I wasn’t able to attend. I’m sure they were equally good. I had a great time.
I promised those that attended my presentations that I would post the PDFs here. Enjoy!
“More than 50% of all traditionally-published book sales of any format in the US now happen on Amazon.com.”
That’s just amazing. But I found something even more amazing this week.
Author Earnings released a report this week of their analysis of a million titles on Amazon. Data Guy, the tech guy behind the software gathering the information and crunching it, posted this graph in the comments.
Do you see the amazing thing?
Well of course you do, I gave it away in the title of the blog. Science fiction and fantasy sell MORE units than thrillers.
More.
What?!
For, like, ever I thought SFF was a tiny portion of the market. Not so, my friends.
Some may say, well, but this only represents Amazon. What about the channels traditional publishers sell through? Author Earnings explains a way to account for that in their report. Basically just double the size of the purple and red bars. If you do that I think thrillers might just edge SFF out. But it doesn’t dwarf it by any means.
Furthermore, for an indie author, I don’t worry about those other channels because they’re not really a viable option for me. My world is selling online. And the online market for SFF is the SECOND BIGGEST MARKET after Queen Romance.
Oh, BTW, next book in the queue is volume 1 of Lord of Bones. It’s going to start with something like this.
The four men did not leave. Instead, they spread out just a bit in shallow semi-circle in front of Blaze.
Four of them. One of him. There was definitely going to be blood.
“You don’t want to do this,” Blaze said.
The big one drew his sword and swung it a bit to loosen his shoulders. “Oh, but we do. Because you’re not handing over the blackmeal. And we’re not leaving without it.”
No, he was not going to hand that over. Couldn’t. Not if he valued the lives of his wife and boy.
Two of the others drew their swords. The fourth brought his staff up and laid it on his shoulder in a two-handed grip.
The big one would be the obvious target to take first. But Blaze knew that would be a mistake. The big one was there just to focus his attention. To fix Blaze in place. And then the silent one would slice him up the side.
The man with the skinny face said, “Old man, the vultures will be picking your eyes out before lunch.”
Blaze said, “Well, if you’re so determined, let’s not keep them waiting.” And then he rocked forward.
I’ve not forgotten the Dark God series. I will finish it, but I need to get this smaller volume of Lord of Bones out.
And now for something for your typesetting hearts.
You know what orphans are–A short line appearing at the bottom of a page. Sometimes the first line of paragraph appearing at the bottom of a page.
You know what widows are–A short, paragraph-ending line appearing at the top of a page.
But what’s the last word or part of a word of a paragraph stranded by itself on a line?
I went to the store, looking for
Paul.
I could never find an answer. Some called it an orphan as well.
But David Blatner revealed the name in the comments of his post What Are Your Favorite Word and Character Space Settings for H&Js?
He actually coined the term years ago when he couldn’t find a name, and I love what he came up with and am going to use it forever.
He calls them “runts.”
Ha!
BTW, those settings he mentions in that article are awesome. Drastically reduced weird hyphens, which reduced time formatting.
Furthermore, I noticed something in the big time author Stuart Woods volume I happen to be reading. And then I checked it against a James Patterson and a Lee Child.
1) They don’t care about most runts. As Blatner said, there’s a runt zone, but the zone where they control for runts appears to be less than 5 characters if that includes the end punctuation.
For example, I just opened a random page of the Woods book and see the following runts:
a) results.”
b) entry.”
I flipped to another page and saw:
a) said.
b) trunk.
c) them.
And the thing is that I DIDN’T notice them in the least while I was reading. Only when I started looking for them.
Of course, there were no runts that were smaller than those. Nothing like “tie.” or “do.” or “for.”
2) They don’t control for orphans either.
3) They DO control for widows. However, when you’re not controlling for orphans and most runts, controlling for widows is easy. And sometimes the control is just to increase the tracking just a tiny bit to make it span the whole line.
I spent a number of hours on Saturday formatting my book only to find when I finished that I had set the leading at 18pt instead of 16pt. That meant I had to reformat the whole bleeping thing.
But I adopted the Big Boy rule, allowing all runts that end at or beyond the first line indent of the paragraph. I ignored orphans. And I controlled for widows. And it took me a fraction of the time and still looks great.
Here’s to runts and orphans!