When I started my Indie career, I realized one of my most useful skills was my experience with Internet marketing. But I constantly wished I was experienced in legal matters, too. Which is why I was so excited to meet Lucy Taylor, a legal expert at LY Lawyers. Luckily for us, Lucy is also an avid blogger who enjoys sharing her tips and suggestions with her online readers. Lucy often helps people dealing with legal problems, addictions, and crime. Today, Lucy will share with us some useful tips for writers.
7 Most Useful Legal Tips for Writers
Whether you’re writing a blog post or the next great novel, there’s a responsibility that comes with publishing any creative work. Many people don’t realize it, but there’s quite a bit of legal navigation that comes with being a writer, both in protecting your own work and respecting the rights of others. Here are…
Charles Yallowitz provides us with a post on his blog “Legends of Windermere”, describing different types of closure. I love the article. Thank you, Charles.
I’ve said in previous posts that one of the most important parts of concluding a series is creating closure. You need to bring things to an end, which isn’t as easy as some people think. In fact, one of the reasons it can be so tough is because you have a variety of closure types to choose from. It depends a lot on what you’re going for, but even planning doesn’t alleviate all the pressure. So, what are the types?
Classic Good Ending– All of the good guys get what they wanted and all of the bad guys got what they deserved. It’s the oldest type of closure in the book. Nothing messy and no risk of people feeling it’s a downer. Though, you might get called out for being weak and unoriginal.
Classic Bad Ending– I’m not sure how long it took for someone…
Need to save more storage? See what else you can do to limit the space used up by your images. Thanks so much for the tips, Chris, The Story Reading Ape!
If you use more than one image in your posts, then use WordPress Publicize to automatically upload your post to Twitter, Facebook, etc, or, manually upload them, the image last inserted into your post, is the one that will be displayed on your media.
To avoid the wrong image being displayed, either:
Insert it LAST
OR
Select it as your ‘Featured Image’
Authors especially would probably prefer their Book Cover being displayed, rather than some other, random, image.
WP TIP 2
If you opt for using a Featured image, or, have the same image appear more than once in your post (as I’ve done on this post):
You DO NOT NEED to upload the same image for each separate appearance!
Select the same image to be inserted wherever you want it to be shown in the post.
This will save taking up unnecessary space in your media…
Phenomenal! On The Story Reading Ape’s blog I found blogger tip #1 to save storage space when it comes to our pictures. It’s a really important post to read for our very busy bloggers. Thank you, Chris!
During the past years of activity on ‘Writer’s Treasure Chest,’ and the inquiries to publish posts and interviews for different Blog Tours I promised myself once I find the time I would do research on ‘Blog Tours.’ What is this? And why is it so important to writers? Who does organize them and if I have to do that myself, how to do it best?
What is a Blog Tour?
Alessandra Wike writes on “PR by the book”: The age of the internet gives authors the opportunity to connect with thousands of people. Taking advantage of these seemingly endless possibilities, blog tours provide great publicity for a new book without the hassle (or expense!) of travel. Instead of an author traveling from bookstore to bookstore and city to city, an author’s book can travel virtually from blog to blog and garner hundreds, if not thousands, of views in a short amount of time.
A blog tour is very much like a traditional book tour, where the author would go from town to town to sign their books and meet new readers; except this time, you go from blog to blog. There are countless fiction and non-fiction blogs that have emerged in the past few years, all written by passionate readers who want to share their love of books with other readers. They post book reviews, launch announcements, and interviews with their favorite authors. To continue reading the article on Reedsy, click here.
“Bookmaster” for example gives us a hint on what it means to work on a Blog Tour by writing:
A blog book tour can be set up by a publicist, but if an author has self-published and doesn’t have a publicist, they can do the leg work themselves. The key is to find blogs that are relevant to the topic of the book that are interested in participating in the blog book tour. For example, cooking blogs would be the target if you wrote a cookbook and relationship blogs would be the target if you wrote a book that provided love advice. Depending on the topic of the book there could be an unlimited number of blogs, or there might only be a handful if the topic is extremely niche. Each book tour should include a manageable amount of blogs, as the tour requires a significant amount of time from the author. Even though it’s not an in person tour, there is still plenty of work that needs to be done. (The article can be found here)
Now: what interested me most is: How do I really organize a Blog Tour? Of course, there are several hints, tips, and tricks from different writers; the basic work seems more or less the same – several have apparently had super-success while others complained that their echo was insufficient.
One article that impressed me was an article, published by Penguin Random House.
For example, does the post answer important questions like:
• What are the benefits of putting your book on a blog tour?
• What types of books work best for blog tours?
• How can an author ensure his or her blog tour is a success?
• How can an author work with his or her publicist to set up an effective blog tour?
or
• What are some best practices when preparing for a blog tour?
By researching further into the topic, I found another impressive and informative post on Joel Friedlander’s Book Designer’s Blog. He published a guest post, 7 Top eBook Blog Tour Sites, written by Greg Strandberg.
Greg informs about seven eBook Tour Sites, gives prices, information and his opinion to them. I think it’s worth checking them out. He as well links their names to their websites. (For copyright reasons I cannot do this below.)
1. YA Bound Book Tours
2. Xpresso Book Tours
3. Enchanted Book Promotions
4. Bewitching Book Tours
5. Goddess Fish Promotions
6. Sage’s Blog Tours
7. Rockstar Book Tours
If you like to read his opinion about these Sites, please check them out on his article by clicking here.
Finally, after hours and hours of research, I found an excellent post, provided by Mixtus Media on
They not only provide us with an 11-step-guide on how to organize a Blog Tour, they as well provide us with a free Blog Tour Worksheet.
STEP 1: IDENTIFY YOUR IDEAL READER
STEP 2: RESEARCH
STEP 3: CREATE A LIST
STEP 4: DETERMINE YOUR RESOURCES
STEP 5: FIGURE OUT YOUR TIMEFRAME
STEP 6: CONTACT BLOGGERS
STEP 7: Stay ORGANIZED
STEP 8: CONSIDER GIVEAWAYS
STEP 9: ANNOUNCE THE TOUR
STEP 10: FOLLOW THROUGH WITH THE DELIVERY
STEP 11: FOLLOW UP
Each step is carefully described. To download the Worksheet, which I did, you are first subscribing to their newsletter. But I doubt that’s a problem. They do have more interesting information on their blog. (I didn’t have problems to download their worksheet, just in case your virus program is sensitive. Mine is, and it has carefully scanned the file and found nothing.)
After all the information I had found on Blog Tours I would love to hear from experienced writers how they had found it to organize their blog tours. Is it easy, is it hard? Do you mind providing us with some extra tips, tricks, and hints?
Original image courtesy of flowcomm, via Flickr Commons
All righty. So we have spent a couple of posts talking about getting our head right when it comes to doing this writing thing. Once we get our heads in the game, then the practical How To advice gets a heck of a lot more mileage. Today we are going to talk about the writing of the actual novel.
When I started out wanting to become a writer years ago, I was so clueless I didn’t even realize I was clueless. I had an overinflated ego from all those years making As in high school then college English. I believed I could write so when it came to reading craft books? I thumbed through them and decided I didn’t want my writing to be “formulaic” *flips hair*.
Trying to take a short cut cost me a lot of time and wasted words…
A couple of months ago, visiting a successful and experienced writer friend he told me, he read one of my pieces. I still am honored and flattered he took the time. He has an amazing way of complimenting and encouraging me – but also bringing on constructive criticism which I apparently deserved. Just this time I had no idea what he meant when he told me: “You have only one character voice.”
— ?? —
I was a little shocked. Not that I didn’t believe him, I just couldn’t believe it.
He is a wonderful mentor and of course took the time to explain to me what he was talking about:
All of my characters talk the same way. I frowned. I know my characters in and out, I know their looks, their abilities, their character, and personalities, whenever I write about them I can nearly hear their voices in my head – and still, they all talk the same?
After my visit I went back to the piece he was talking about – and I wasn’t half through I thought I understood now what he was talking about.
On “Now Novel” I found an interesting and very helpful article which helped me define the problem I apparently have: “Talking about your Character: Voice.”
What is character voice?
Thinking about dialogue
Separating character voice and author voice
How to develop the voices of your characters
In four different chapters, the article not only defines my problem but offers a helpful and informative solution. It’s easy to read and explained in a simple and understandable way.
Jordan offers the following, excellently explained five ways to create a character’s voice:
Word Choices
Confidence Level
Quirks/Mannerism
Internal/External Voice
Metaphors/Similes/Comparisons
Each one of them is explained in details and is logical and, as I think, easy to learn. We’ll see.
*****
As a bonus, Jordan offers a link to a New York Times online test, which of course I took. And this is my result: Look at that… according to this test I’m a Southern Girl. 😀
“The Editor’s Blog” offers a variety of advice in making the voices of characters sound different. I found this blog post interesting and helpful as well. Variety in Character Voices
Use different words
Use different sentence patterns
Add humor to one character
Cut of speech or thought
Let a character ramble
Have characters pay attention to different things
The article is short, simple and precise. I think it’s adding to my learning in this matter.
Each of the tips includes a further explanation as well as an exercise, which I consider very helpful and I’m looking forward to learning more by doing them.
The “Writability”-blog delivers us an excellent definition of the “character’s voice” by giving us examples and makes us feel how important the different character voices are for our writing.
Jackie Cangro has published a blog post on “The Writer’s Block” blog, providing us with the seven elements of our “character’s voice”:
Style
Tone
Personality
Perspective
Authenticity
Consistency
Originality
She defines each of the elements in details and delivers descriptions which are easy to follow. I very much appreciate the easy read and learn-part of this blog post. The entire post can be found here:
K.M. Weiland has published a video post on her blog “Helping Writers become Authors.” It’s easy to follow and very educational.
“How to find your character’s voice” not only shows us the video but also delivers us the video transcript and help us understand the difference between authorial and character voices.
It helped me a lot to enter this topic and understand the basics.
This article too is very educational and gives us eight tips and hints to play with our character voices. Each of the tips comes with a detailed explanation and helps us develop our characters:
Listen to how people talk
Try to “hear” your characters’ individual voices
Realize your characters are not talking to you, or directly to the reader
Try giving each character a few unique verbal tics, or habitual words
Go one step further, and give them catch phrases and stuff
Realize that you may have, at most, three or four characters “voices” and refine those
Vary your sentence lengths, and play with punctuation
Each of this articles and blog posts has helped me a lot to get at least an idea on how to do better and give each of my characters an individual voice instead of them sounding like me.
But most of all I owe my writer friend a HUGE Thank you! He was the reason I started thinking about a problem I didn’t know I have! Thank you, Jim Spencer.
So you’ve finally got your page numbers right. Check that you’ve Justified your text for your CreateSpace book. I know that some authors choose not to justify text in their eBooks (not me), but a paper book really must be justified or it’s going to look messy. Choose your font and font size. You have lots of fonts that you can use in your paperback, but it’s a good idea to stick with something plain, other than for dropcaps or chapter headings.
Decide what trim size your book is going to be and set your manuscript’s size accordingly. From the Page Layout tab, click on the little arrow to the right of Page Setup, then select Paper from the three tabs at the top of the page setup box. Change the Width and Height settings to 6” x 9” or 5” x 8” or whatever size your book will be…
Whether you’re writing a blog post or the next great novel, there’s a responsibility that comes with publishing any creative work. Many people don’t realize it, but there’s quite a bit of legal navigation that comes with being a writer, both in protecting your own work and respecting the rights of others. Here are…
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Original image courtesy of flowcomm, via Flickr Commons 
Writer's Treasure Chest 
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