An ISBN is an International Book Standard Number. It identifies the book, and it’s usually printed with the barcode on the back and on the book’s title page. If an ISBN was assigned before 2007, it’ll be 10 digits long. If it’s after that, it’ll be 13 digits long. The ISBN records the book’s metadata – so the publisher, the title and the country that it was published in – and is unique to that book. This means it can be easily identified by any bookseller or library. What do the numbers in the ISBN mean? The numbering system can get pretty complicated (check out the Wikipedia page if you want an in-depth analysis) but basically the numbers tell you the country, the publisher and the title, and the final digit is a checking number to ensure the code’s correct. Do I need an ISBN? Basically, yes. If you’re planning on just printing a book as a gift or a private record, you don’t need an ISBN. But if you’re planning on selling your book, or think you might want to sell it or give it away more widely in the future, you need an ISBN. What is the barcode for? Do I need a barcode? The barcode on a book is the ISBN in a machine-readable format. If you’re planning on selling hard copies of your book, then you will need a barcode. Usually, barcodes are provided by the publisher or self-publishing companies. It’s only if you’re getting your book printed privately that you’ll need to purchase a barcode along with your ISBN. Who sells ISBNs? Where can I get mine? ISBNs are sold by national agencies in each country. In the US, Bowker deals with ISBN purchases; in the UK, it’s Nielsen. If you put in “ISBN” and *your country*… read more →
Everyone knows to “use” social trying to cover all the bases. So where do you begin as an author or small publisher looking to make your mark in a clustered book world? Know what they’re good for. Each platform serves a useful and largely individual purpose in terms of promotion and engaging people with what you do. Here’s a brief, basic run through of some: Twitter: Bitesize updates, good for socialising and interacting directly with people. Facebook: Good for slightly longer statuses and more concentrated discussion. Instagram: Visual. Got a book? Post it in well-crafted pictures. Got a dog? Definitely post pictures of them. Youtube: For videos. Regularity can work well here: weekly, fornightly, monthly updates. With vloggers, you need to make sure these are of a fairly high quality to compete. Blog: WordPress, Blogspot or your website are all great places to write longform pieces about topics that are relevant to or interest you, if you’re going for straight up blogging. Or… Tumblr: Can be used for blogging but also a GIF-kingdom. Full of fandoms, and offers a little more freedom than other blogging platforms, and a readymade community. Pinterest: Where you ‘pin’ images, links and more that you like in collections for people to view and pin again. Perfect for moodboards. Linkedin: CV. It’s good for professional networking and snooping people who work for companies that you’re looking to perhaps get in touch with. Snapchat: Temporary photos and videos sent to followers’ phones. Create stories. Periscope: Live streaming, can be integrated into other platforms like Twitter easily. Reddit: A massive community that covers anything and everything. You share things and comment, upvote and downvote. You need to get to grips with subreddits, though we’d assume you’re looking for /r/write. Emails: It’s often forgotten, but setting up a mailing… read more →
Writing’s often a very lonely and very solitary thing; you’re stuck in your own head, dealing with your own problems…and it can sometimes be very hard to explain what the issue is to someone who doesn’t live in imaginary worlds! While readers and editors can help, it also helps to have a support group of other writers around you who understand the problems. Well, you’re in luck. There are a lot of different writing groups out there, and here’s some suggestions for how to find them. NaNoWriMo National Novel Writing Month takes place in November, and the aim is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. The idea is to encourage writing without editing, worrying or plotting issues – just write, write, write! There are individual regional forums for many areas of the world; they have online boards, and many areas also do real-world meetups during November. You can buddy up with other NaNo writers, and offer support and encouragement – or word count competitions, if pressure is what makes you write. There’s also a number of general forums for writing support during November, and plenty of support including pep talks. Online Forums Reddit’s r/writing. You can ask any writing questions you have, and can get pointers to other support. Genre forums. For fantasy, SFF World and FantasyFaction have good forums; the sites are primarily for lovers of the genres, but have a fair scattering of writers as well as readers! Goodreads is a book-lovers site, there are lots of book-loving groups and you’ll often find many authors. World Literary Cafe – this is good for self-publishing support. Facebook groups: there are plenty of local and general groups, so it’s worth searching for your specific needs – or see what groups your friends (and favourite authors) are part of. Conventions… read more →
There’s two hard parts of being a writer…sitting down to write, and actually writing! How do you find time to ensure that you write? And how do you make sure you use that time effectively? When do you work best? For me, it’s mornings and evenings, with a slump in the afternoon. I know that if I schedule writing time in for an afternoon I’ll most likely end up on Facebook…so I’m much better off accepting that my brain wants an afternoon nap (even if it can’t have one) and scheduling writing time in for a morning or evening when I’m more likely to focus. When do you have time available? Not everyone has the luxury of being able to pick a time. If you’re struggling to carve out time, can you make use of the small spaces between other things? Even half an hour a day is more than nothing, and will slowly build up. Can you wake up an hour earlier? (Horrible, I know, but it does add uninterrupted time to your day). Can you find a spare half-hour at lunch? Can you use a dictaphone on your commute, or take a notepad? How do you work best? I need multiple projects at various stages; if I get stuck on one, I’ll move on and work on another so that I’m never unproductive. But I know authors who focus on one project at a time and push that through to completion before starting another. What’s going to work best for you? Where do you work best? Most authors have a ‘place’ that is only for writing; the idea is that when you’re there, you associate it with writing rather than browsing FB or talking to someone, and it helps you to focus. Potentially you could also do ‘writing… read more →
I was asked recently how to make characters more individual; how to make them unique, colourful and distinctive. How do you get the different quirks of humans into a piece of writing? Major characters Sometimes it feels as if you could have robots as your main characters and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. They all speak and act in the same way, and you could replace them without anyone batting an eyelid. How can you make them individual? List six character traits for each of your major characters, and use these when you’re writing. How would these traits affect their reactions to events? How would they speak? How would they react to other characters? It works particularly well if you’ve got two traits that play off each other; what would happen if you get two stubborn and angry characters disagreeing with each other? Think about their background. Where have they come from? What happened to them? What adventures have they had? What events have made them who they are? List three priorities for that character at various points during the plot. While at the start, their First Priority might be getting back to their family, as time goes on Priority Two: Saving The World may come to the fore, or occasionally be superseded by Priority Three: Get A Good Night’s Sleep. At each plot point, think about what that character’s priority is likely to be at that point, and how it would affect their actions. Even minor priorities get quite big at certain points – if you’ve ever been wet and tired, getting to shelter or sleep is usually more important at that point than whatever your day’s aim was. Minor characters Cardboard cut-outs in the background. How to give these walk-on parts some personality? Give minor characters… read more →
You should write every day. Learn the rules then break them. Variety is the spice of life and you’ll get stuck if you only have one project. You need a routine. Write whenever you feel like it! Write one thing at a time and make sure you finish it. Do 500 words a day and never end on a preposition. There’s so much writing advice out there that it sometimes feels overwhelming. I spent my first ten years as a writer feeling that I was Doing It Wrong. I don’t write every day, or write X number of words. I don’t really plot. I don’t have a routine. I just write as I want to, rather than analysing the language and trying to develop a feel for my themes. I don’t follow genre rules, I play fast and loose with my characters, and I don’t worldbuild before I write. I felt inadequate, amateur, and frankly as if all of my writing failings were stemming from my inability to follow several hundred pieces of contradictory advice. You know what? Screw it. It’s YOUR talent. Try things. See what works. People work in different ways – what works for someone else, even if they’re a best-selling and world-famous author, might not work for you. Experiment. Find your groove and make it work for you. If something isn’t working – if you’re not writing, not finding the time, haven’t got the inspiration, have an idea but don’t finish it, can’t get over that blank page feeling – then that’s the time to be looking at the advice. See if working for an hour in the morning makes you write. See if a routine helps. See if having six simultaneous pieces and working on each of them in turn means you Get Writing Done.… read more →
If you write (or if you enjoy reading!), you might be asked at some point to look over someone else’s work. You might be asked what you think of it, and – if it’s unpublished – to give some feedback. This is usually known as alpha or beta reading, or critique. So if you’ve agreed to read someone else’s work – whether a short story, a section, a chapter or a full novel – what should you be thinking about? There are three main parts; expectations, critique, and feedback. Check the author’s expectations First thing – before you even look at the manuscript – is to check what the author actually wants. Checking at this stage can save a lot of work and heartache later on! What do they want from you? Writers might not necessarily tell you directly, so ask a few questions; there’s no point wasting time and energy on something that won’t be useful to the writer. What is their major concern with the piece? Do they want every flaw pointed out, or just major plot issues highlighted? Or do they consider the manuscript finished, and want you to do a final read before sending it to a publisher? What’s their time frame? Do they need it back in a week, several months, a year? Do they have an aim in mind – for example, an open submission period? Have they got other work to be getting on with, or are they likely to get impatient and bug you about the work even if they’ve said several months is ok? And, most importantly, can you do what they’re asking (ie. read a novel) in that timeframe? Are you sure you want to take this on? It’s not a nice point to have to put in, but every editor has come… read more →
So, you’ve finished a first draft of something. Yay! But before you send it to anyone else, you need to re-read it. Editing is majorly, majorly important. Unless you’re a comprehensive planner and sketched out everything before you wrote it, you’ll have some organic writing; you’ll have points where the characters have gone off on their own, or that piece of plot didn’t work, or you’re not entirely sure what happened to that scene. You’ll have writing you did at 2am and 11pm and high on caffeine and snatching a quick moment between other tasks. You need to at least re-read your own work to check that it makes sense, that it is what you wanted it to be, and that it works as a complete piece. The benefit of self-editing is also that it teaches you how to improve your own writing. If you look at your own work with a critical eye, you start to spot the flaws – and then you can change them! Editing isn’t meant to be a process of self-loathing and criticism; it’s meant to be a process of critique and improvement. It’s meant to make the writing better. Don’t edit as you write. Most writers tend to find it distracts from writing new stuff, and it can also put you off if you’re overly critical about what you’ve already done. Get some distance. Let the writing settle; two weeks is a pretty good amount. If you read it too soon, you’ll ‘know’ everything you wrote – you need to be a new reader, yet still remember what you were intending when you wrote the piece. It’s a hard balance! Edit first. You should always be the first reader – don’t send it to your alpha unless you’ve at least looked it over once.… read more →
Short stories are regarded as one of the hardest things to write well, and this has some truth! While writing 80,000 words takes more time and requires more continual effort, short stories are effectively packing almost as much information into 10% of the words. So, here’s some pointers in how to write effective short stories. It’s got to be short I know, this is kinda a ‘well, duh’ thing. But you’d be surprised how easy it is to approach short stories as if you’re writing a longer work, and then suddenly realise you’ve hit 8000 words and you’re only halfway through the story… Short stories are short. You don’t have the luxury of waffle, set-up or info-dump. That’s not saying you can’t put background information in, or explain things; but there’s a definite line between not-enough information, just-enough, and waaaay-too-much. You have to let the story speak. It doesn’t have to be a complete story… You don’t have to make the story self-contained. It can be part of a larger story or world, or part of a series; it could end on a cliffhanger or a journey. You could tell part of a story from something else; how did X character get that scar? Where did they meet their sidekick? What exactly happened in That Incident? You can write a section of something else, or a point in a longer story. However…please don’t use a chapter of a Work In Progress as a short story. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done well; they usually lose too much at both ends, and lack the background and tightness needed for a good short story (see next point). …but it’s better if it is Short stories do work better if they have a beginning, middle and end (which is where chapters… read more →
Cover letters are usually sent with submissions, either to publishers or agents. They’re intended to say something about the item you’re submitting and about you as a writer and person. However, for something that sounds simple, they can be surprisingly annoying to get right. Here’s some advice from Joanne Hall, who is submissions editor for Grimbold Books and sees a lot of cover letters. Take it away, Jo! First of all, I should say that there’s a difference between the standard “cover letter” (UK format), and the US-standard “query letter” (examples and advice behind the link). The US letter usually asks for more information. As with everything – look to see if there are any guidelines on the publisher’s website before you start. Some publishers want 3-4 paragraphs about the book, some don’t. Usually if you’re including a synopsis with your query, you won’t need to include as much information. I find the American-style query letter works best if all you’re doing is sending out a query to see whether and agent or publisher might be interested in seeing your opening chapters and a synopsis. In that case, your query letter needs to do the work of your synopsis and opening chapters, to draw the reader in and make them want to ask for more. From a personal standpoint, I prefer a shorter query letter. The longer you make your query letter, the more chance there is that you might write something that would put me off? But let’s break it down, paragraph by paragraph. Use a clearly readable font, and don’t include any pictures unless requested. In fact, don’t include anything that hasn’t been requested! INTRODUCTION Include your mailing address and email address at the top of the letter. You don’t need to include a phone number, but you can if… read more →