The Author's Toolkit

A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing and Publishing Your Book

Mary Embree

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781621534822
• eBook ISBN: 9781621534921
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Authorship
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

All writers yearn for success and recognition. And now we are entering a golden era in which self-publishers are in the driver's seat. In The Author's Toolkit, aspiring authors, students, and even established writers will find the resources they need to achieve their goals and avoid common writer pitfalls. Updated and expanded to cover the changes in copyright fees and registration, the newest developments in electronic publishing, the growth of ebooks and print on demand, and tips for using social media for promotion and community, this detailed guide offers advice on every step of the writing and publishing process. Readers will learn how to: •Develop and research fiction and nonfiction ideas
•Find a "hook" to attract reader interest
•Organize a plot and delineate characters
•Format for print and ebook readers
•Find an agent
•Understand literary contracts
•Market and promote a finished book
•Obtain backing such as crowdfundingWritten in an informative and easy-to-understand style, this guide is a treasure chest of resources and tools for writers seeking professional advice.Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

CHAPTER ONE

The Beginning

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

Plato

You have an inspiration. It might have come from an event, an experience, a remarkable person, or a fascinating animal. Whatever it is, it inspired you to write about it. But where and how to start are always the major questions at the beginning. Those are the ones that make us sit and look at the blank page or computer screen for an interminable amount of time, tapping our fingers on the desk instead of the keyboard. Sometimes it’s hard to put into words the thoughts and feelings we want to express but that’s not such a bad thing. Have you ever noticed that writers who tell you writing is easy are writers who have never been published? If writing isn’t difficult at times, it probably isn’t very good.

Even if you have written a lot of articles and short stories, you may feel that you are not a good enough writer to write a book. But the principles of writing are the same no matter what you are writing. Talent can’t be taught but know-how can. If you have ever written anything—business proposals, technical manuals, doctoral dissertations, essays, poetry, or even a daily journal—you can learn to write a book. Of course, the kind of book you choose to write should match your experience and knowledge of the genre and subject matter. Otherwise, you will have to do a great deal of research before you even begin.

Any story worth telling, any lesson worth teaching, and any idea worth expressing are worth writing about. And if you can tell, teach, or express your thoughts well, you can write a book. So if you have a great idea for a book, there’s no time like the present to get started.

Maybe it seems to be too great a task and will take too long to complete. You might be one of those writers who ponders the nuance of every word and takes a long time to get her thoughts down on paper. Well, take heart—Franklin P. Adams, in his book Half a Loaf, wrote, “Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.”

Consider the possibility that you may be an excellent writer who simply needs the discipline to sit down and write. You might take years to write a novel that never gets published but that time won’t have been wasted. Throughout the process of writing it, you will be learning things you won’t realize you learned until you start to work on your next book. It is an undeniable fact that the more you write the better you write.

You may worry about how to make your book interesting, how to organize it and put it together coherently. If you feel that way, you are not alone. Many first-time authors feel overwhelmed at the beginning. Even those who have done a lot of writing before often have fearful feelings when it comes to writing a book—until they learn the process.

Both writing and editing require large doses of concentration, discipline, passion, dedication, and integrity. And the necessary self-editing of your work requires great attention to detail and a merciless resolve to throw out anything that doesn’t advance your premise or story.

Whether or not you are working on a book right now, write every day. It has been said that if you do a thing for twenty-one days in a row, it becomes a habit. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron advises writing three pages every morning. Those pages don’t have to lead to a book, they can be about anything. The important thing is that you establish a pattern of writing.

There are many paths you can take to authorship and I suggest you look into as many of them as you can. Attend writer’s conferences, book festivals, seminars, and writing classes. Join organizations where you can network with and get inspired by other writers. Subscribe to writer’s magazines and newsletters. Buy books on writing and study them. Read great books by legendary authors. Let them become your bedtime reading. Become familiar with the writing process and learn the rules. Then have the courage to break a few of those rules when they get in the way of what you want to say.

Getting Started

To break the attack of inertia, just start typing the first thing that comes to mind about your idea. Don’t be concerned with spelling, sentence structure, or anything else. All you need do right now is make the inspired thought tangible. Get it out of your head and onto a piece of paper—or Word program. Don’t worry about how you start it, just make the commitment.

Two things to do immediately are to (1) write a short blurb that briefly describes the story or concept and (2) give it a working title that will identify it. That will be the name you put on the folders you create for the project, such as Research, News Clips, Bibliography, Illustrations, Notes, Endorsements, Biographical Information, Character Descriptions, or any other material you gather or create that relates to your proposed book.

The concept sometimes changes. It may grow, improve, or even move in a different direction from that which you had originally planned. Very likely you will rename it by the time you reach the final draft—and maybe before.

Don’t worry if you can’t figure out what that first page, first paragraph, or first sentence should be. You don’t have to know that now. You might find after you have written fifteen chapters that your book really starts at chapter 5 and you can throw away chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 or plug them in somewhere else.

There are some tricks to get you going, to help you get something down on paper before the day is over. If you plan to write nonfiction you could start by explaining what kind of book it is, why you are writing it, and who will benefit from reading it. If you can convince yourself that there is a very good reason for you to write this book, you’ll probably have no trouble going on from there.

If you are writing a novel, go into greater detail about the plot. Then describe your main character and put him into a scene that reveals his personality. Where is he? What is she doing? What is he feeling? Is there something compelling about your protagonist? Many of the best novels are character driven. You must know your protagonist intimately so that you will understand why she makes the decisions she does, why he is angry, how far she will go to get her way, or what he is willing to do to get ahead. What are the limits? Where will your protagonist draw the line?

Your characters tell the story and they will take you to exotic and mysterious places you may never have dreamed you’d go. After you do this exercise, if you feel that you have an interesting protagonist and a story that must be told, it will be easy—well, easier—to continue.

In his book Double Your Creative Power, S.L. Stebel suggests writing a book jacket for your novel, thinking of it “as a kind of preview of coming attractions.” That’s very good advice. I advise the authors I work with to become familiar with the book proposal format or even to prepare a proposal as soon as the idea for a book occurs to them. There’s probably nothing more disappointing to an author than to write a whole manuscript and find it doesn’t have a chance of getting published. The research that must be done to write a proposal could turn up that information. Another reason to study the book proposal format is to help you focus on your subject and organize your work.

What if you have done all of the above and you are still staring at a blank page wondering what that first sentence of your book will be, the one that you know is only the most important line in the entire book? This is not the time to concern yourself with the opening sentence. That may come to you later. The important thing is just to get something onto the page.

If you think that you still aren’t on track, it may be time to disengage your conscious mind. Walk the dog, wash the car, mow the lawn, plant some flowers, bake some cookies—do anything that shifts your brain into neutral—and stop worrying about it. Then tonight before you go to sleep get very comfortable and relaxed and tell yourself that tomorrow when you wake up you will know exactly where to begin. Convince yourself that during the night your unconscious mind will sort it all out and the next day you will approach that blank page virtually exploding with creativity.

Sometimes this works so well for me that my sleeping mind won’t let me wait until morning. It wakes me up in the middle of the night with the answer. I turn on the light, get out the pen and paper that I keep in my nightstand drawer, and write it down in detail. There are times when ideas flash as urgently as lights on an ambulance and I must get up, turn on my computer, and start typing feverishly. I love it when that happens.

Planning Your Book

Do an outline or write chapter headings and a short paragraph on what’s in each chapter. Some writers put this information on small index cards and arrange them on a table. They can then see the whole book at a glance and rearrange the chapters if necessary. If you are writing a novel, write character sketches too. Get to know the information, people, location, and events that are involved in your story so that you can confidently introduce them to the reader. Once you have a plan, a road map of where you are going, you are not likely to drift off, become lost, or encounter writer’s block.

Have a clear idea of what you want to say and then develop your concept along those lines. But don’t be rigid. Let it flow like water in a stream, following its own natural course. Unleash your creativity. You can rein it in later when you reach the point of cutting and editing. Make it interesting. If it interests you, it probably will interest others.

Write a Brief Description

To help you focus on your subject, write one sentence that describes your book. Check bestseller lists to see how they do this. Here are some examples.

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown. A group of American rowers pursue gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

Gray Mountain by John Grisham. A young woman whose promising Wall Street career had been snuffed out by the Great Recession hopes an unpaid one-year legal aid internship will be her ticket back.

The Wolf Gift. Anne Rice takes us to the rugged coastline of Northern California, to the grand mansion at Nideck Point, and explores the unearthly education of her transformed Man Wolf.

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned.” Lena Dunham writes about making one’s way in the world and having the guts to believe that your story is one that deserves to be told.

Brooklyn, a novel by Colm Tóibin. The story of a young woman from a small town in Ireland who leaves the world she’s known and moves to Brooklyn in the 1950s.

The Lost Symbol, a novel by Dan Brown. Harvard professor Robert Langdon uses his symbology skills to unravel the mystery of a missing Freemason in Washington, D.C.

Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpam. A collection of fictional stories portraying the suffering of African children.

Blues for All the Changes by Nikki Giovanni. A collection of intensely personal poems on sex, politics, and love “among Black folk.”

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro. The short story master explores women and their relationships in ten new stories.

There isn’t any single way to explain what a book is about. But the above will give you an idea of how you could describe yours. Writing these one-sentence descriptions will help you in the writing process by focusing your ideas and sharpening your point of view. This exercise will also help you later, when you are out there marketing your book. There will be more about this in the chapters on Query Letters and Book Proposals.

There is an organization that encourages writers to get started on their novel and I think it’s worth looking into. It is Nanowrimo.org. That stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is November 1 to November 30 of each year. The aim is to write a 50,000-word rough draft in thirty days. Please note, that’s a rough draft. That means you don’t do any editing, don’t correct spelling, don’t rewrite. Just keep writing. If you are interested in trying it out, go to http://nanowrimo.org and sign up. Then follow the steps they recommend. You will get tips and nudges to continue. They’ll help you get inspired with pep talks from well-known authors, and help you keep track of your progress. Even if you don’t succeed in writing 50,000 words in that length of time, you might just come up with the beginning of a great novel.

For most of us who possess the soul of a writer, there are book ideas that call us, begging us to write them and bring them out of obscurity. I think it would be sad to reach the end of our days and realize with regret that we never did get around to writing that book—the one that tugged at our heart for so many years.

What is the book that calls to you? Is it nonfiction? Are there valuable lessons you could teach? Is there important information you could share? Is it a family history or an autobiography that generations who come after you would treasure? Is it your poetry that springs from deep within your heart that you’ve never really shared? Is it a novel that is trying to get your attention? Are there voices inside your brain that long to be heard and stories that only you can tell? Are there fascinating characters only you can bring to life? Will you let them languish mutely within the prison of your mind or turn them loose upon the world to tell their story?

Don’t wait for inspiration to get started. Sit down at your computer, dust off your old typewriter, or get out your pad of paper and a pen, and write anything that comes to mind. Then just keep writing even if it makes no sense at all. Get a timer and set it for one hour. Ignore interruptions unless they are emergencies. Don’t pick up the phone or go to the door. Keep writing. In that hour, the inspiration will come. I can almost guarantee it.

CHAPTER TWO

Researching

Get your facts first, and then you can distort ’em as much as you please.

Mark Twain

In the above quote, Twain was probably referring to writing a novel. For a nonfiction book it would not be a good idea to distort the facts. But no matter what you are writing, the likelihood is that you will need to do some research on the subject. If you are writing nonfic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Beginning
• 2. Researching
• 3. Tools of the Trade
• 4. Writing Groups
• 5. The Rules of Writing
• 6. Writing a Novel
• 7. Writing Nonfiction
• 8. Editing Your Work
• 9. Presentation of the Manuscript
• 10. Copyright Information
• 11. Literary Agents
• 12. The Book Proposal
• 13. The Query Letter
• 14. The Literary Agency Agreement
• 15. The Book Publishing Contract
• 16. The Collaboration Agreement
• 17. Getting Published
• 18. Self-Publishing
• 19. Ethics and Legal Concerns
• Resources
• Glossary
• Index
• Alsworth