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Writers: Working with Louise Cusack

Tag Archives: books

Kindle Scout: Reader-powered publishing

05 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by louisecusack in Getting Published series, The Publishing Industry, Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

amazon, Amazon publishing, books, Kindle publishing, Kindle Scout, literature, publishing, Unpublished Manuscript, writing

scoutpreview

If you’ve never heard of Kindle Scout, don’t feel bad. Until last week, I hadn’t heard of it either, but it’s shaping up to be a game changer for indie authors, as well as traditionally published authors who have a book they just can’t sell, like my unpublished novel SILK (above). SILK is book one of a fantasy romance series that I’ve been trying to sell for years, and I’d love to see it gain a wider readership than I can manage with self publishing, so I’m giving Scout a shot.

HOW SCOUT WORKS: Any Amazon customer can go to the Kindle Scout website (you can see my book on their website here: https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/GDATHRYHT8YR) and without needing special logins beyond their normal Amazon account, they can scroll through lists of unpublished books that authors have uploaded and nominate any three. If a book that they nominate is selected by Amazon for publication, the reader receives a free copy as a bonus for supporting the author.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR AMAZON: Publishers are getting savvy about ‘author platform’ and a great book is often not enough to get you a publishing contract. In the Kindle Scout model,  Amazon is not only assessing the popularity of your book excerpt and cover, they’re assessing your social networks (which should equal new readers for them if they publish you). In the “campaign stats” for your book, you can see where the page traffic is coming from. Here are my stats at day 4 of my campaign:

campaignstats5dec2016

I’ve got over 1000 Facebook friends on my personal page, and I called in favours to get shares of my post about SILK there. I also have a Facebook Author page with 1200 Likes, so I’ve boosted that post on Facebook over the next few days to those followers who I hope will take the time to check out the book and nominate it. So my traffic from Facebook is looking good so far. I imagine that as my campaign progresses, the traffic from Kindle Scout will slow as all the habitual ‘scouts’ have looked at SILK and either chosen it or not. However, for all I know there could be hundreds of new ‘scouts’ turning up on the Kindle Scout website every day, so I look forward to assessing that as I go.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU: The end result of your 30 day campaign is that if your book is wildly popular, Amazon may offer you a 5 year contract with a $1,500 advance and 50% eBook royalty rate for worldwide publication rights for eBook and audio formats in all languages. (Authors retain all other rights, including print.) You’d also receive ‘featured Amazon marketing’ which I’m guessing will make your novel far more visible on the Amazon website!

HOW DO AMAZON DECIDE? No one’s quite sure at this stage, but is seems clear that the number of  nominations you receive and the breadth of your social networks play a role, as well as the feedback readers have given on your book when they nominate it (screenshot below):

telluswhatyouthought

HOW DO YOU SUBMIT? The website is simple and the upload is easy but read all the instructions before you start. You’ll need certain answers beyond the blurb and bio, so I found it easier to create a document to list all my answers so I could cut-and-paste them during the submission process. That helps ensure your answers don’t go over the character count limit because if they do, they’ll be cut.

You need to submit a proper book cover as well as the completed and proof-read manuscript in Word format (even though only the first 5000 words are shown to readers). My 5000 words ended 87 words short of a cliffhanger, so I emailed and asked if they could extend the sample that much and they did it immediately, which was great customer service.

Once you’ve uploaded all your bits and pieces, Amazon takes up to 2 days to decide if your work is of sufficient quality to be accepted. If it is, they email you with details and a link to a preview of your campaign page so you can let them know if there are any details you’d like changed (as I did with my excerpt).  Your 30 day campaign usually starts within 48 hours of that acceptance email, so that gives you time to get your “Please nominate me” emails and Facebook posts ready to go. Once your book is live on the Kindle Scout website, you can go to town, calling in all favours and trying to get your book into “Hot and Trending” for as many hours a day as you can manage! Here’s how mine went in the opening days:hottrending5dec2016

Pretty good so far, but 30 days is a sustained effort, and I’ll be away from my computer over Christmas, so I’m giving it my best over the next fortnight and hoping momentum will sustain it after that.

So, that’s where I’m at with it so far. If you’d like more info on Kindle Scout or how I’m going, please feel free to email me mail@louisecusack.com or pop a comment in below about your experiences with Scout if you’ve already tried it. If you’ve got a book in the bottom drawer gathering dust, it could be a good option for moving it forward!

 

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A short dream workshop with Sophie Masson

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by louisecusack in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Workshop Wednesday series

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

books, By the Book, creativity, dreams, literature, short stories, Sophie Masson, stephenie meyer, writers, writing, writing process, writing tips

I’m excited to be inviting Aussie fantasy author Sophie Masson to share some writing tips with us today. But first a little about Sophie:

Sophie portrait blue and redBorn in Indonesia of French parents, and brought up in Australia and France, Sophie Masson is the award-winning author of more than 50 novels for readers of all ages, published in Australia and many other countries. Her adult novels include the popular historical fantasy trilogy, Forest of Dreams (Random House Australia). Sophie has always had a great interest in Russian myth and history, an interest reflected in several of her books for younger readers. Her latest Fiction novel is TRINITY: The Koldun Code (Book One)

Sophie is also a teacher of writing, and her book By the Book: Tips of the Trade for Writers is full of practical and entertaining tips on the craft, business and inspirations of writing. From using your dreams to craft great fiction, to writing dream outlines to attract the attention of publishers, from knowing how to make the most of literary festivals to understanding how magical characters tick, from coping with reviews to being inspired by fairy tales, By the Book is bursting with practical, entertaining and illuminating tips on the writing life. Written by an author whose career spans more than twenty years and more than fifty books published, this book offers advice for writers both new, and not so new.

Sophie has very kindly offered to share an extract from the book:

A short dream workshop by Sophie Masson

From time immemorial, human beings have dreamed–every night we go into what one of my sons’ friends once referred to as ‘those brilliant eight hours of free entertainment.’ And from time immemorial, writers have used images or scenes from dreams, or entire dreams, to enrich and expand their creative work in waking life. I’m certainly no exception. My night-imagination has always enriched my day-imagination. Several of my short stories have started directly as dreams, for example, ‘Restless’, a chilling ghost story I wrote not long ago, began as a really creepy and unforgettable nightmare. Another disturbing story, ‘The Spanish Wife’, a vampire story set in the 1930’s, started as a dream in which someone said, very clearly, ‘No-one took any notice of him till he brought home a Spanish wife,’ and that turned into the very first sentence of the short story. Images and scenes from dreams have also gone into my novels, and in one case, a very vivid and intriguing dream inspired an entire six-book children’s fantasy series of mine, the Thomas Trew series. It’s not always fantasy or supernatural stories that have sprung out of dream-compost for me, though; everything from family stories to thrillers to historical novels has benefited from it.

Over the years, I’ve learned quite a few techniques on how to best use vivid, scary, tantalising or intriguing dream sequences in my writing, and how to investigate them for best effects. Here’s a short workshop based on some of the techniques I’ve developed over the years:

*Think of a dream you’ve had. Any dream. It doesn’t have to be anything exciting or unusual. Go back over the dream-scenes, as if you were a police witness being asked to remember an event. Who was in it? What did they look like? What were they wearing?

Were they people you knew or strangers? Were there any animals in it? What sort? What was the setting like? Indoors, outdoors? What could you see? Smell? Touch? Hear? Taste even? What were you in it—a participant, a helpless observer, a godlike figure?

*If you did something supernatural, like flying, what did it feel like, physically? (I’ve often had flying dreams and in them I feel a strong pull in the chest, arms stretching. Once I even woke up with what felt like an actual slight ache in the arm muscles—very spooky indeed!)

*Were there any machines in your dream? If so, what sort?

*Did anyone speak, and if so what did they say? Many dreams in my experience are like silent movies, with thought-subtitles and maybe some music, but a few have dialogue, even if it’s often minimalistic and quite enigmatic.

* Knowledge: Do you know why you were in that particular place, at that time? If you had some supernatural ability, did you know why? If there are interesting objects or gadgets in the setting of your dream, do you know what they can do, and why, and who made or used them? Backstory is very often missing in dreams, but is very important in a story, even if you only spend a few lines on it.

*Now, once you’ve written down as many descriptive details as you can about what was there in the dream, think about what wasn’t there, and write that down. While you were dreaming, did you know for instance why you or other people were doing things(even if it was a kind of weird dream-logic?) Did you understand the sequence of events? Was there a sense the dream was moving towards some conclusion, or just randomly jumping about? Motive, continuity and plot—all very important in actual stories—are often missing from dreams.

*Think of your own self in the dream, however you appeared in it: did you recognise yourself? Did you feel it was fully you or something that was only partly you, or a stranger? Did characters behave randomly? Character development is usually absent in dreams too though it very much needs to be present in a story.

*What about the setting? Were there things missing: for instance, if you were in a house, were there doors? Windows? Furniture? If you were outside, was anything odd: for instance trees growing upside down, or a wall of water appearing out of nowhere?

*Now put those two things together—the things that were there, the ones that weren’t—and you have the beginnings of a real story framework, where the wild imagination of the night and the more disciplined one of the day cross-fertilise and turn into something amazing and wonderful.

bythebookcoversmall_1Thanks Sophie! I’m so looking forward to putting these tips into action. If you’d like to buy a copy of By the Book by Sophie Masson, you can source it here:

Australian Society of Authors or via Amazon if you have a kindle eReader.

You can find Sophie Masson here: Website  Facebook  Twitter

And if you’ve every turned a dream into a story (as I know Stephenie Meyer did with Twilight) I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Happy writing!

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Perseverance: One Writer’s Journey

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by louisecusack in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Understanding Ourselves as Writers

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

books, contracts, editing, getting published, literary agency, literature, manuscript, manuscript assessment, perserverance, publishing, submission, writers, writing, writing tips

I’d like to introduce a client of mine, Alison Mather, who’s recently signed with a prestigious literary agency in the UK. She’s had an interesting journey (to say the least) and has agreed to share it with you. I think you’ll find it inspiring:

Perseverance. It’s a word most commonly used when telling a person’s story of triumph, after they’ve triumphed – which is all well and good and serves as a reminder that your goal can be achieved, but is utterly horrible when you’re actually trying to do it: being perseverant. At least it is to me. I find it very much akin to what I imagine being lost in the wilderness to be like (without the constant threat of sudden death). What direction should I take? How do I know if this step is the right one? What if I’m just going around in circles? Why are the signposts so damned hard to find?

Okay, so that’s where the analogy ends because most people know that the best thing to do if you are physically lost is to stay still and that is absolutely, positively the worst thing you could do if you ever want to be a published author.

During my own journey as a writer I have asked all of these questions every step of the way, and a heck of a lot more. The results can be stultifying and very damaging to your chances if you are the sort to give up easily.

I am one of ‘those’ people who took time off to write. I am very lucky to have an extremely supportive spouse who encouraged me to do so. If you are now thinking that means I’ve had it easy, think again. Six months into writing my first manuscript I was diagnosed with thyroid disease, my husband was retrenched from his job and a 24 foot tree fell on our house during the big Brisbane storms. Add to that, I received nothing but rejection letters to every single query I sent out to publishers and agents. Things were not going to plan and it was very, very hard.

Somehow, though – and here is where the perseverance bit comes in – I managed to write a second, and much better, manuscript and tried again. Now, five years later, I have just signed with a literary agency and am starting work on editing the story – for what feels like the billionth time – in the more real hope of interesting a publisher.

Not the ideal journey to becoming an author, perhaps, but here’s what I’ve learned:

Your writing is key – do everything possible to ensure it is the best it can be, and I don’t mean asking your family. They will always be on your side and that’s not what you need. Join your local Writer’s Centre and find a manuscript assessor. I edited my own work three times and then hired Louise to edit it again. Is it really worth the expense? I sent my work, edited by me, to every publisher in Australia and it was rejected. I paid for professional advice and now I have an agent.

Listen to everything that’s being said to you by the people who know. I was rejected by a tonne of agents earlier this year but one actually took the time to write a personal letter of explanation suggesting that I was aiming at the wrong age group. I was so cut up about the rejection that I almost missed the significance of that particular crumb of advice. And they will be crumbs and you have to fall on them like they’re nuggets of gold, even if all you can hear is the criticism.

Cast a wide net – as in global wide.  My agent is in London. By all means go local to begin but understand that there are a handful of publishers and agents in Australia and a shedload of writers – unless you’ve written that must-have story in which case I’m struggling with my resentment. I smashed the internet doing research and you really have to look. I strongly recommend the following websites: www.literaryrambles.com for agents that rep in your genre, www.writersdigest.com for new agents alerts – you have far more chance with agents who are looking to build their lists, Sarah’s blog at www.greenhouseliterary.com for tips on query writing and many more that I can’t fit in here.

Remember, I was totally green, I knew nothing about the industry that I was hoping to carve a career in, but I dedicated myself to it utterly and I’ve made it this far. You can too.

Alison Mather signing her agency contract

Alison Mather signing her agency contract

Writing success really is one part inspiration and ten parts perspiration. Keep at it, and if you’ve got any tips on how to keep motivation up while persevering, do share them with us below. Cheers! Louise

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The Guilty Pleasure of Solitary Writing

30 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by louisecusack in Uncategorized, Understanding Ourselves as Writers, Writer's Self Sabotage

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

books, creative process, guilty pleasure, reading, solitary writing, writers, writing

solitary writingFor writers who aren’t already subscribed to my blog at louisecusack.com, my latest post is on…

The Guilty Pleasure of Solitary Writing

If you have a passion for creating stories but struggle to find time for them, take heart, inspiration is at hand!

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Workshop Wednesday: Write What You Know with Katherine Howell

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by louisecusack in Uncategorized, Workshop Wednesday series

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

books, crime, fiction, Katherine Howell, paramedic, silent fear, write what you know, writing process

Today’s Workshop Wednesday guest is best selling crime novelist Katherine Howell, sharing her tips on how to use the details of your life to enhance the authenticity of your fiction. But before we get started, here’s a snippet of bio:

Katherine Howell worked as a paramedic for fifteen years and uses that experience in her bestselling crime novels, the sixth of which will be released early in 2013. Her books have won awards and are published in multiple countries and languages, and in print, e-book, and audio form. Katherine holds two degrees in writing and is studying female doctor investigators in crime fiction for her PhD at the University of Queensland. She teaches workshops in writing and editing, and lives in Queensland with her partner, who owns a bookshop.

Katherine’s latest release is Silent Fear:

On a searing summer’s day paramedic Holly Garland rushes to an emergency to find a man collapsed with a bullet wound in the back of his head, CPR being performed by two bystanders, and her long-estranged brother Seth watching it all unfold.

Seth claims to be the dying man’s best friend, but Holly knows better than to believe anything he says and fears that his re-appearance will reveal the bleak secrets of her past – secrets which both her fiance Norris and her colleagues have no idea exist, and which if exposed could cause her to lose everything.

Detective Ella Marconi suspects Seth too, but she’s also sure the dead man’s wife is lying, and the deceased’s boss seems just too helpful. But then a shocking double homicide related to the case makes Ella realise that her investigations are getting closer to the killer, but also increasing the risk of an even higher body count.

I’ve read and loved several of the Ella Marconi series and am looking forward to this latest edition!  But without further ado, here is Katherine’s advice on adapting your experience into fiction…

Katherine: My first novel, Frantic, was published in Australia in 2007 and features police detective Ella Marconi alongside paramedics. It’s been followed by four more novels, and each continues the angle of using paramedics as protagonists, something that not only provides a point of difference for the books but also draws on my experience of doing that job for fifteen years.

I’m often asked about the process of turning that real-life experience into fiction and I always answer that it wasn’t easy. I initially resisted the idea and instead wrote bottom-drawer manuscripts about – variously – cults, forensic science students, and cops chasing a killer with assistance from a ghost. When I did finally recognise the drama and story value in the job, my first attempts to put it on paper overflowed with my grief and anger about the situations I faced daily and the people I tried to save. It took counselling and my eventual resignation to manage these emotions, and even then it was months before they disappeared completely from my writing. Once that happened, however, I was faced with the next problem: how to use these paramedic stories in the procedural crime series I wanted to write.

I’d wanted to have a paramedic as my protagonist, but couldn’t see how to have her plausibly solving crime. Over time I realised I needed a police detective; a scary thought at first, because I felt a huge gap in my knowledge—I knew the paramedic’s world so well, it seemed wrong to not have the same understanding of the detective’s. I wanted to be true to these jobs, and to not know it all made me think I couldn’t do it justice. I saw, however, how many crime novels are written by non-cops (ie, most of them), and decided to give it a try.

This then brought up another problem: to me, being true to the job of paramedic meant putting in every moment of a case, every question and answer, every action, every step of treatment. But as my manuscript grew longer, with scenes rolling on interminably for pages, it was clear this wouldn’t work. I reread a heap of crime novels, analysed how the authors delivered information, and saw that I needed verisimilitude rather than total adherence to the facts. The real-life details were like a garnish, to be sprinkled in here and there to add flavour and impact. Too much of it overwhelmed the most important elements of all, the reasons people pick up a book: characters and story.

I went back to the start of the manuscript and changed how I incorporated my experiences, and finally saw the work come alive. Months of hard work later, and a year after I quit that job, the ms sold as part of a two book deal to Pan Macmillan, and as I write now I keep the ideas of ‘detail is garnish’ and ‘story is king’ foremost in my mind.

Louise:  Thanks Katherine!  Great to see the process of adapting your career experience into best selling crime novels. If anyone has questions for Katherine, or has used their own life experience in fiction, we’d love to hear about it. Just drop in a comment below.

And if you’re interested in other Workshop Wednesday topics, the full list is here.

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Getting Published Part 2: Doing the Work

01 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by louisecusack in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Writer's Self Sabotage

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Anne Lamott, books, cart before the horse, creativity, doing the work, first draft, getting published, literature, process of writing, procrastination, psychology, writers, writers block, writing

As a writing tutor, mentor and manuscript assessor, I meet a lot of writers who want to be published.  Unfortunately a proportion of them spend far too much of their creative time putting the product (book) before the process (writing) by researching publishers and asking questions about how to submit a manuscript or how to publicise it through social networking and blogs, before they’ve even finished their first draft!  This behaviour might sound grandiose, but in fact it’s a procrastination technique that’s very often caused by a lack of confidence.

The bottom line is that unless you’ve written several novels and are assured of your ability to complete the book and edit it into something publishable, my advice is to delay talking to publishers or agents until you have a finished product to talk about.  I’m a big advocate of thinking about what you want (and not what you don’t want), but you have to be practical.  You have to do the work.  The bald truth is:

Writers write.

It sounds impossibly simplistic to say that, but it’s the most important thing I can teach writers.  Write.  Make notes about your characters, your settings, your plot, write character diaries, and when you have enough momentum, write scenes and chapters and push the story forward relentlessly until you get to The End, resisting all procrastination urges and any unhelpful perfectionism that’s telling you to go back and edit for grammar and flow, or stop to research that insignificant minor detail that will probably end up being edited out of the finished manuscript anyway.  Keep the flow going.  If you’re stuck on a plot point then leave a hole and leap forward because there’s a good chance that what you write next will help you discover the missing piece.  If that doesn’t help, stop writing draft and go back to character diaries and backstory.

But stick with your characters and keep writing about them in whatever form you have to until you can get back to your draft.  Rack up word count.  Flex those writing muscles until you can’t stop thinking about your characters and they invade your mind while you’re hanging out washing or driving kids to school.  Allow your first draft to come out imperfectly, so long as you capture its essence.  As Anne Lamott says in her beautiful book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.” and “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”

Unfortunately most writers have the perfectionism gene, and from what I’ve seen it’s the #1 reason that we procrastinate.  Subconsciously we get a dialogue happening that says, If I can’t do it perfectly on the first attempt, I mustn’t be a real writer.  I’ve even had clients who’ve been so paralysed by perfectionism that they can’t write a thing, and all because they’re comparing their first draft to a book they bought and read the week before.  As if there’s no such thing as editing!  The reality is that a first draft is edited several times by the author before the manuscript is submitted, then several more times by the publishers.  It’s like comparing a pile of self raising flour to a gourmet mudcake from a boutique bakery.  Crazy.  Yet writers do this to themselves.  Completely unrealistic.

Concert pianists, in comparison, are well aware that they must practise the scales for years, getting their fingers nimble and laying down those pathways in the brain that say This finger placed there produces that sound.  Writers are no different.  We need to write so we can lay down pathways that say This word combination represents the experience I want to convey.  Our job is to take our vision of the story and to translate that into words on a page which a reader’s imagination will then recreate into a similar vision in their own mind.  It takes years of practice to get the right word combinations to create the right experience for the reader, and this is what’s called developing the craft of writing (completely different to natural talent).  There’s no getting around it, you have to write a lot to develop your craft.  And you have to stop beating yourself up if you don’t get it ‘right’ on the first draft.  Remember: The art of writing is rewriting.

Sure, you need information (how-to books and workshops) so you know how to write, and you need feedback (manuscript assessment and critique partners) so you can hone your skills, but the vast majority of a writer’s time, no matter where they are in their career, should be spent doing the work: writing.

So my advice this week is to write.  If you really do want to be a published author, you must set aside time to practise.  And if perfectionism is a problem for you, watch this video and see if it inspires you to let it go, at least while you’re writing first draft!

 
 
 
 
Have you ever been plagued with self doubt?  Thought your writing was utter rubbish (when it wasn’t)?  I’d love to hear how you overcame it.
 
 (Link to Getting Published Part 1: Making the Commitment)

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My new blog at louisecusack.com

08 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by louisecusack in The Publishing Industry, Writers out in Public

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

blog, books, eBooks, fantasy, lost world, Louise Cusack, publishing, reading, romance, romantic adventures, social networking

I have a new blog with information for my readers at www.louisecusack.com.  My Shadow Through Time fantasy trilogy is being re-released this month as eBooks by Pan Macmillan and I’ve blogged on the amazing journey the series has had in the ten years since it was first print published by Simon & Schuster Australia and selected by the Doubleday Book Club as their Editor’s Choice.

If you’re a lover of “romantic adventures in lost worlds” then I invite you to explore the new website and consider subscribing to my blog there.

Happy reading!

Louise Cusack

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Shiny new book covers

14 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by louisecusack in Ramble, Writers out in Public

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

book covers, books, eBooks, emotion, fantasy, fantasy romance, publishing, writers, writing

Is there anything more exciting for an author than seeing their book covers for the first time?  How about seeing those same books get a second lease on life with brand new covers?

I’m in author-blissland gentle readers because my Shadow Through Time trilogy is about to be re-released as eBooks with shiny new covers which I just adore!  Momentum Books have done a sterling job of capturing the heart of the books: romantic fantasy that’s a cross between Alice in Wonderland for grownups and Excalibur.  Can’t wait for the launch next month!

   

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Writers: protect the work

05 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by louisecusack in Understanding Ourselves as Writers, Writer's Self Sabotage

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

books, focus, procrastination, protect the work, psychology, social networking, timing, writers, writing

Even writing mentors have their own mentor and I saw mine on the weekend.  She cares about me and she also completely understands the fact that marketing books has changed enormously in the fifteen years I’ve been published, but the one piece of advice she gave me was the same thing she’s been saying to me for twenty years, “Louise, protect the work.”

What she means by this is do the book first, then everything else second.  I’m an intelligent woman so you’d think I’d be able to do that.  I’ve run my own business and also run businesses for other people.  I’ve had a variety of jobs before I came to writing and time management has been easy.  So I’m not sure whether it’s procrastination that sees me Tweeting when I could be writing, or simply the fact that there are some days when I can’t stick to my “No Internet until 2pm” rule because I’m expecting an email from someone.  So at 7am I’m on the Internet downloading emails and invariably one will link to a website and before I know it I’m tweeting or blogging or linking to other people’s blogs or Retweeting.  An hour or two can pass before I realise what’s happening.  An hour or two when I could have been writing or editing.  My friend Lisa at Twine Marketing has told me I need a timer beside my computer, set to 20 minutes.  I think she’s right.

At the Romance Writers of Australia conference in August there were a variety of panels and workshops on how to promote your writing, and some authors said the only way they could be productive was to severely limit their Internet time.  I remember US paranormal author Kelley Armstrong saying she didn’t blog.  It was 600 words she could use in a story.  She Tweeted instead and had Forums on her website where her readers could interact.

Successful authors need to find a way to “protect the work” by prioritising it.  Because if there’s one thing everyone agrees on, it’s that the best form of promotion is to write a good book.  And the next best form of promotion is to write another good book.  Everyone from agents to publishers to publicists will tell us that the work itself has to be what sells us, and that all the bells and whistles in the world won’t help you have a long and successful career if you can’t write well.  So I know the book is paramount, but I also know that I can’t hide in a cave.  So it’s easy to get distracted by people’s recommendations to Hootsuite or Tweetdeck or Paper.it because these things might eventually lessen the amount of time needed to manage social networking.  But the trouble is that it takes time to check them out, time to set them up, and time to manage them.  Then before you know it, something even better comes along (as well as more social networking media) and you’re off and running again.

It feels like that.  Running.  As if you have to catch something.  When what I’d really prefer is to write an awesome book and have it act like a magnet, drawing people to me.  So this is an ongoing dilemma for me.  Not something I can readily solve.  But I hear my mentor, and I try.  Would love to hear other writers comments on how they work, what they do and what they don’t do to protect their work.  I know I’m not alone.

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Writers Online: Authenticity vs Spin

13 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by louisecusack in The Publishing Industry, Understanding Ourselves as Writers, Writers out in Public

≈ 25 Comments

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authenticity, blogging, books, censor, censoring, debate, facebook, goodreaders, google+, social networking, spin, twitter, vs, writers, writing

I was chatting to a girlfriend this morning about authenticity, and we were discussing the challenge of sifting through recommendations on the internet when you’re looking to buy a product.  Some are obviously written by genuine customers giving their honest opinion, but some look so effusive you have to wonder if the person or company who’s selling the product has snuck in and posted it themselves, then maybe gone to their opposition’s product and posted a bad review!  But wait, it gets worse than that.  My girlfriend told me there are people called Reputation Specialists who are paid to go around the internet posting good reviews and comments about their clients.

I mean, really?

For politicians, sure.  They need all the spin they can buy.  But do businesses and celebrities need to pay someone to blow wind up our (collective) skirts?  Whatever happened to earning respect and letting your actions speak for themselves?  Colour me naive, but authenticity means something to me.  And I have to admit that as a new author I imagined all I needed to do to sell billions of books was write good ones.

Then a little over twelve months ago it became apparent that I also needed to rack up quality time on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Google+ and blogging, because authors are encouraged by their publishers to be ‘visible’ across social networking platforms.  And it’s actually beneficial on a couple of levels.  Writing is a solitary profession, so social networking helps me feel like part of the online community, plus it keeps my writing muscles toned in short bursts.  But after the discussion with my girlfriend this morning, I had to wonder if all my comments and conversations online were also creating ‘spin’?

While I’m blogging and tweeting, am I the authentic ‘Louise’ online that my family and friends know and love, or am I projecting an image – Louise The Author?  And if so, is that okay?  Is it fine to censor out the occasionally grumpy Louise, the silly Louise, and the overtired-and-might-say-something-she’d-regret Louise?  Or should I let those parts of me have just as much social networking time as the rest?

Is self-censorship really just spin-by-omission?

Or are the things we post on our Facebook pages a product in themselves that we tailor to fit the readership, hoping they’ll attract people to our writing?  And if so, is that a bad thing?  Is it possible to be authentic and offer only part of yourself to the public?

If your answer to that is “Yes,” then I’d like to ask you why we bother to be authentic at all?  Why not just create a persona and project that?

I have no answers to these questions.  On a good day I try to be just me, like I am today, some insights, some confusion, lots of hope.  On other days I don’t think the ‘me’ I’m feeling is good enough to be out in public, so I censor.  It’s an imperfect method, but perhaps within that framework I really am being authentic.

Or maybe I’m deluding myself.  Would love to hear others comments on this.

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Welcome Writers!

I'm Louise Cusack, an Australian author of fantasy and romance published by Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, and Pan Macmillan. I also mentor and tutor other writers like yourself. Please avail yourself of the resources on this website, and happy writing!

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