Author Archives: kingmidget

About the name. I was the youngest of four. Until I got to kindergarten, I didn't have much to say. All I had to do to get what I wanted was to point, and a sibling, or loving parent, would fulfill my request. As a result, my father coined the nickname -- King Midget. At least that's the way the story goes. I am a father, husband, friend, and lover, writer, runner, pizza maker, baker, and many other things. What I am not is my occupation. It is my job that pays the bills and provides for my family. But, it does not define me.

A Writing Exercise, Day Two

Here’s the concept, as started on Monday, September 27.

So, the word for the first day was … elimination.

Today’s word is … irrepairable (Or my preferred spelling, irreparable. And yes, bonus points will be awarded for using my spelling.)

A Writing Exercise

— Mark Paxson

Beginning today, I’m going to post a word. Each day for the next week, I’ll post another word. These words are selected more or less randomly.

Your job is to begin a story with today’s word used somewhere in the first few hundred words. And then use the word I post each of the next six days in the same fashion as you continue your story. It’s totally up to you how many words you write each day. It’s totally up to you what genre. Everything is up to you, except for you to use each day’s word in the next chunk of the story.

One final note … use the word I identify or any form of it. Also, once this is done, please share your work. Either on your blog and provide us with the link, or email us at writinghelp2021@gmail.com, and we’ll post your story here.

So … today’s word is … elimination.

Pick a Genre. Any Genre.

— Mark Paxson

I spent a couple of days at Lake Tahoe this weekend. By myself. Which means I spent a lot of time in my head. On the drive home, I started thinking about our last video chat. At one point Lucinda Clarke commented during that chat that she had screwed up by writing in multiple genres. I responded that I had done the same thing.

A few days after that chat, I met a friend for luinch. I took him a copy of my latest book. Until this book, he hadn’t realized I wrote fiction. We had a lengthy discussion about books and writing. At one point, he asked me what genre I write in. There is no easy answer to that for me. My published works can be broken down this way:

Courtroom drama; young adult, coming of age; quirky, all dialogue oddball of a story; a novella that is the opposite of coming of age — a literary take on a life of loneliness and despair; and dozens of short stories that are all over the place.

My works in progress can be broken down this way:

Dystopian — I have three different WIPs that are variations on a dystopian future (one is a sexy space romp, one is a tale of a President who declares martial law and rules for years afterwards, destroying the country, and the third is something I actually can only dream about — a story told in reverse like the movie Memento). Then there are … a baseball novel; a collection of short stories that interconnet to produce a larger story (actually, I think I have two of these on the drawing board); And a few other things I’ve forgotten at the moment.

Genre? I don’t need no stinking genre!

But what I thought about this morning on the drive home was that maybe Lucinda was right. Maybe it’s a mistake to write stories that are all over the place. I got to thinking about people who might read my latest novel (the YA tale) who then would look at my other books, maybe even buy one, and then be disappointed that nothing else I’ve published is YA.

To some extent, I can’t help myself. This is just who I am. As I’ve said during our video chats, part of writing for me is exploring new ways to tell stories and new stories to tell. I simply don’t think I could have stuck with courtroom dramas for every story I wrote. It would be too stifling for me to stick with one genre — even if that novel was my most successful.

If I’m going to create, I want to keep creating. Which means, to me, spreading out into different genres, different voices, different stories. I guess what fascinates me the most about the art of writing is the ability to tell a story that people want to read. It’s not about the genre. It’s about an idea that comes to me and if it interests me, I’m going to pursue it, and see if I can write a story that is compelling enough and good enough that it gets readers’ attention.

But the question for this post is … in search of a reading audience, does that hurt me? As Lucinda suggested during the chat, does switching genres hamper a writer’s ability to attract and grow a consistent and loyal audience.

I think about when I first started blogging and there were all sorts of experts who counseled that a blog should be on a specific topic. Find a niche — whether it be cooking or traveling or writing or politics — and stick to it. That was the best way to grow an audience for a blog. Well, readers of my blog know that I did not follow that advice. Like my stories, my blog is all over the place. It represents everything in the world that fascinates me — music, politics, current events, cooking, gardening, exercise, writing, and whatever moves me on a day that I decide to write a blog post.

Maybe it’s time to write the next chapter of that courtroom drama. 😉 Maybe not. Because here’s the thing. After I finished that novel, I thought of two more books I could write about the main character, because that’s what mattered the most about that story. Not that it was a courtroom drama. No. What mattered was the characters and I had two ideas for more misadventures that would befall good ol’ Jack McGee. But even Jack couldn’t keep me interested and I ditched those two ideas and moved on to other stories, newer characters. (I’m struggling with the same dynamic with my most recent novel.)

So … let me ask again. Writers and readers out there … should a writer stick with a particular genre or two? Or should a writer write whatever the hell he or she wants and take a chance with each new product? What do you do? Stick with one genre? Go all over the place? What’s your motivation — because at the end of the day, that’s the ultimate reason for what each of us do.

Social Media. Do We Really Need It?

— Mark Paxson

When I started writing and then thinking about submitting short stories and eventually publishing my work, a common refrain was “You gotta have a blog. You gotta be on Twitter.” There was this emphasis on having a social media presence. After years of curating a social media presence, I’m not sure all of those experts are right. But then, maybe it’s just me.

A writing acquaintance had a contract with a small publishing house for his first two books. He writes cozy mysteries. A genre I had never heard of until I started reading his. After those two books, the publisher refused to consider anymore because he didn’t have much of a presence on social media. Sure, he had a blog, but he didn’t blog much. He was also on Facebook, but wasn’t super active. As far as I know, he never got on Twitter.

It’s a shame that his future efforts were rejected, not because of the quality of his writing or whether his books could sell, but because of his relative invisibility on social media. It’s another instance of traditional publishing going by something other than the quality of the story to make decisions.

What I’ve come to realize is that, except in incredibly rare circumstances, being on social media does not produce huge sales. To be honest, I’m not even sure what those rare circumstances are. I don’t know anybody who claims their social media presence has produced a lot of sales.

Earlier I said, maybe it’s my own fault. My social media presence is all over the place. I talk politics on my blog and on Twitter. A lot. I post pictures of food and beers and my trips out into the world. I blog about family life. Work life. I share all sorts of things on my social media outlets. It’s not just about writing.

And what I don’t do is constantly hawk my books on my blog, on Facebook, on Instagram, or on Twitter. When I publish a book, I’ll send a few tweets out, announce it on my different blogs, try to push it on my friends via Facebook. Then, every once in awhile when a good review gets posted, I’ll quote from it and remind people that I still have books out there in the world for them to consider.

A lot of writers I follow, particularly on Twitter, tweet and retweet blurbs about their books on a regular basis. Weekly and, in some cases, every single day. When I look at their sales on Amazon, it doesn’t look like they’re doing much better than me. So …

Here’s what I think I’ve figured out. On the one hand, my blogging and tweeting has produced some sales. Those sales, however, come mostly from people who, although we’ve never met, I’ve developed a connection with via social media. Bloggers I follow and who follow me where we have regular “conversations” via our blogs. Or the same on Twitter. There are a lot of great people I’ve “met” through social media and many of them have become regular readers of my books. As have I of theirs.

My reading audience basically consists of about 100 people. Friends and family, and those social media acquaintances with whom I’ve formed a bond. Beyond that, I don’t see anything I do on social media having any noticeable impact on my book sales.

With my latest novel, I ran an Amazon ad for a week. It produced no sales. I also tried one of those services that promises to tweet your book to their tens of thousands of followers and to feature your book in an email to even more of their followers. It produced no sales. (With both of those efforts, the price for my book for Kindle was $4.99. I wonder what would happen if it was .99 or free.)

On some level, I get it. I’ve never bought a book via an Amazon ad. Nor have I ever bought a book from one of those email/Twitter services. To be honest, I don’t even crack open their emails anymore. Why? Because the vast majority of books they feature are in genres I simply don’t read — like romance.

If I’m unwilling to buy a book via any of those avenues, why would I expect other readers to buy my book that way? Well, because it worked once. With my very first novel. EReaderNewsToday did wonders for sales and downloads for One Night in Bridgeport. Since then, however, nothing has worked. Nothing. Except for developing relationships with others. That, however, is a slow way to build a reading audience.

So, writers and readers out there … what about you? Does being active on social media produce results for your books? If you’re a reader, do you buy books via any of these social media outlets? And, if social media doesn’t work, what’s a better way to do this?

We Want You!!!

— Mark Paxson

We started this blog around nine or ten months ago with an idea. We wanted to develop an on-line community of writers who would share their lessons and wisdom and support each other in the pursuit of creative magic.

Berthold and I started, Audrey joined us shortly thereafter. Then Richard jumped feet first into our video chats. Chuck Litka offered an occasional guest post and now is a full member of the blog able to post at will.

Yesterday, we recorded another video chat that will be posted soon. The topic: our greatest fears and grandest dreams as writers. What I found fascinating about the discussion was how much we each wanted to be part of a writing community. That idea played a part in our dreams.

It’s why we started this blog. And I’ll admit that I haven’t done as much with this blog as I would have liked. I wanted to put forward writing exercises to motivate people to participate. I have yet to do that. I started a Resources page, but haven’t touched it in months. I wanted to blog much more regularly here than I have.

Life gets in the way, you know.

We’re still here and enjoying our conversations and the opportunity to discuss this thing we all like to do.

But … it’s not a community without you. If you’re a writer and are interested in contributing posts or participating in our video chats, let us know. We really want to talk with other writers about their work, their process, their views on the creative life.

We want you. If you’re interested drop us a comment or shoot us an email at writinghelp2021@gmail.com.

A Publishing Update

— Mark Paxson

Months ago, I posted that I was going to try the traditional publishing route with my latest novel. That effort didn’t last very long. Queries sent, queries rejected. Or just not responded to at all.

So, I decided to go the indie publishing route again. Only, I was going to put a little money into the effort for the first time, beyond some editing costs. I paid for a Kirkus Review of my novel.

The Kirkus reviewer provided a decent review, with some quotes that could be used for marketing purposes, but … the reviewer referred to the novel as a novella and the summary of the story line only included content from the first third of the novel. Which makes me wonder if the reviewer bothered to read the whole thing.

I asked them to fix the reference to it being a novella. It took more than a week to get that done. As the review was finalized, I pushed publish on the e-book version of the novel, while I finished up the formatting for the paperbook.

Let’s just say that the formatting experience became a gift from hell. Or something like that. There are certain things about Word that simply are not intuitive and never will be. Every time I work on formatting something for publication, I have to learn it all over again. It took me days and days and days to get it done.

One of the things I did with this book was to pay for a professional cover. It looks incredible and I never want to DIY on covers again. But that was another $300 down the drain.

Once I pushed publish on the paperback, I ordered author copies from Amazon. Twenty copies to hand out to people as I wish. Unlike when you buy a book from Amazon and it takes two days, sometimes a few more, for delivery, author copies take about two weeks. And for some reason, Amazon split my order of twenty copies into two separate orders. One order was … nineteen books, while the other was for one book. That one book showed up about a week later, and I waited and waited for the other nineteen books. They never showed up. Yesterday, I ordered twenty copies again. Let’s see what happens.

Meanwhile, I’ve entered the book in a couple of book contests, primarily ones focused on independently published books. I await the results. That was another couple hundred bucks invested.

And I’ve tried some promotional websites. EReaderNewsToday, which was so good for me with my first novel eight years ago, has been a difficult nut to crack this time. I submitted the book for their consideration a few weeks ago. Their website said that they were pretty booked and to make sure to submit for a date more than 30 days out. But the submission form required a date within 30 days. So, I requested a date within 30 days, and the book was rejected because they didn’t have enough room.

I re-submitted the book to EReaderNewsToday with a proposed date that was more than 30 days out. They rejected the book because they didn’t have room. Sheesh. Before I started writing this post, I tried for a third time — which is always the charm, right?

I also tried another promo site — GoodKindles. For the small fee of $45, they featured my book. Which means it was the lead book of the day in their emails and tweets to their subscriber list. My book ran on August 2 on their site and in their subscription communications. It produced a grand total of … zero sales.

A couple of days ago, I set up an Amazon ad campaign. I committed $150 to the campaign, which only costs me something if somebody clicks on the ad. What I set up was a campaign for Kindle screens. When you turn on you Kindle or it goes to the lock screen, ads show up, typically for books, but occasionally for other things. The campaign started today. As I write this post, 48 people have seen it, one of them has clicked on it, and none of them have bought the book. But at the moment, I’m only out .32 for that one click!!

This is all a long way of saying that nothing is working and I’m close to being at a complete loss for what to do next. I try to remember Berthold’s words on this topic in previous exchanges. To write for the pleasure of it and for the interaction with whatever readers I have. Between the Kirkus Review, the cover, and the promo efforts I’ve tried, I’m in for more than $1,000 now on this book and it’s actually sold worse than my last book. Even though I think it has more popular appeal that that last book.

What do you do when you get frustrated with results like this? Or do you not get frustrated? This goes back to a concept we’ve discussed frequently around here. It comes down to objective. While I don’t expect to ever write and sell a bestseller, I’d at least like to write books that reach an audience beyond my family, friends, and social media buddies. I’ve yet to figure out how to do that. I’d like to at least make some money at this and not just break even, or in this case, lose money.

It’s a mystery. How to do this in the indie publishing world is becoming almost as opaque as the traditional publishing world. Part of the problem is that there are so many of us. Literally, everybody is publishing a book now. Okay, not literally — almost everybody. It’s hard to find a spot in a limited world when it appears that there is an unlimited number of books out there competing for that spot.

I’m frustrated at the moment, but I’m also oddly motivated. I want to get to my next half completed novel and push it out there and see if that’s the one that can be a breakthrough. And, if not that one, the next one. I haven’t given up. Yet.

Typos: How May Are Too Many

— A Guest Post by Chuck Litka

As a reader and/or a writer, how many typos are too many? One, you say? We’re talking about self-published books here. Still one? We are talking in this world, not heaven, right? Okay, having no typos is an ideal to aim for, but realistically, how many are acceptable? Still none? Be that way.

Putting an actual number to the acceptable number of typos (more than none) is hard. The real world measure is likely the ratio of typos to the quality of writing, i.e. is the writing and story compelling enough to overlook the errors, or not? Still, let’s see if we can try to put a number in that ratio.

I’m going to compare software code to writing. A line of software code does about the same thing as a word or punctuation mark in writing – it conveys a bit of information. And software has errors – bugs. A line of code usually has more letters – things that can go wrong – then a word, but we’ll make adjustments for that as we go.

It is estimated that a shipping software program might have an error rate of 3 to 5 errors per 100 lines of code. This is eventually reduced to somewhere around 1 error per a 100, to 1 error per 1,000 lines with bug fixes after shipping. For writing we’ll consider misspellings, wrong words, missing words, double words, missing or wrong punctuation, and missing or double spaces as typos. In writing 1 typo per 1,000 words, or about 1 every 3 to 4 printed pages is pretty high. If we cut that rate in half, to 1 typo in 2,000 words, we’d get 5 typos in 10,000 words or 50 typos in a 100K word novel, roughly 1 typo in every 5 to 6 pages, on average. I think that we’re now nearing the ballpark, if perhaps still a little high. However, if we cut that rate in half again, to 1 typo in 4,000 words we’d have only 25 typos in a 100K word novel, which I think is an acceptable error rate.

While 15 to 25 typos in a typical self-published novel might still sound like a lot, a significant number of them will never be seen by most readers, just as bugs in software do not affect most users. I send my manuscripts out to 5 or 6 beta readers after we do our in-house proofreading who report the typos they find back to me. Some find more than others, but time after time their lists of typos have remarkably little overlap between them. Different readers find, and miss, different typos. Hopefully between them they find most of my typos, but individually, most of them find less than half of the actual typos present. And these are readers looking for typos. This suggests to me that most readers will notice significantly less than the total number of typos in a story. There are, of course, natural born proofreaders who see every typo. And some of them get annoyed when they bump up against them – and mention it in a review. However, these readers are edge case readers, and I’m not sure whose problem it is.

In software, it is possible to achieve a zero rate of errors, and it’s necessary when human life is at stake – think of self-driving cars. To do so, however, is very expensive and time consuming. The same can be said for eliminating all typos in a manuscript. Traditional publishing has a series of procedures with multiple editors going over every aspect of the work to eliminate all sorts of problems. But this is an expensive and time consuming operation, and it is reflected in the cost of traditionally published books. Self-publishing authors do not have the resources to conduct multiple edits by different professionals. And even self-publishers who spend the money to do it “right” and hire professional proofreaders still aren’t guaranteed a zero error copy. I’ve seen a review that mentioned the “typical self-published” typos for a book that I know had been professional proofread. Still, there may be self-published books with zero typos. Indeed, I find them all the time, but then, I’m blind to typos.

Being blind to typos, I likely underestimate how annoying typos are to most readers. And as someone who has never mastered spelling the idiotic language of English, I’ve long since realized that for a person to know that a word is misspelled, they must know the correctly spelled word – which means that the misspelled word actually worked – it did the job of the correct word. The reader simply had to spend a fraction of a second to translate it. However, I understand that for some readers typos derailed and bump them out of the story. Ideally, all authors would like to prevent this from happening. Our name is on the cover of the book, and its imperfections are our imperfections. However, given how expensive it is to even get close to zero typos, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a traditional publishing level of copy in a much less expensive self-published book. As I see it, when it comes to books, one can either be persnickety or cheap, but not both. Self-published books are cheap. Very persnickety readers might be more comfortable with the more expensive traditionally published books.

So to sum it all up, I feel that if a writer has a process in place that reduces the rate of wrong words and punctuation down to 1 in 4,000 words or fewer, they’re as close to perfection as any reader of self-published books can reasonably expect. And that’s a hill I’m prepared to die on. But what about you, dear reader? What do you think is an acceptable rate of typos, either as a writer and/or as a reader? Am I being too cavalier about typos? Am I being too dismissive of the adverse effect of typos on readers? What is your standard?

The Afterlife of Self-Published Books — Is There One?

— Guest Post by Chuck Litka

Have you ever thought about what will happen to your self-published books once you’re no longer on the sunny side of the lawn? Have you ever talked to anyone about looking after your literary estate once you no longer can? Have you made actual plans and shown someone how it all works? Have you looked into the legal aspects of it? Do you have any idea as to what someone will need to do in order for Amazon and the other retailers to pay royalties to a new rights holders? Heck, do you actually care what happens to your books after you die? I probably would have to answer “No” to all of the above. So take that as your baseline. Do you care more than I?

This site’s Mark Paxson is a lawyer, so he might have some insight as to what you would need to do for your books to live on with Amazon and the like after you’re gone. I suspect that unless there is just one heir, or the disposition of your intellectual property is spelled out in a will, it might be a rather expensive prospect to transfer your intellectual property to someone else. Certainly in my case, the revenue stream would be unlikely to be worth the expense, unless someone makes a movie of one of my books very soon.

But that’s just one side of the coin. The other side concerns the ebooks you’ve sold. It seems likely that most ebooks will die with their readers. At the very least, all those books on a reader’s devices – ebook readers, tablets, computers, and stored in the cloud – will face an uncertain fate when their owner dies. Will the survivors even know the passwords to be able to access the deceased’s digital library? And would they have any interest in it, even if they could? I may be a little bitter, but I have a wall of books that I’ve collected since my youth, and neither my children, nor my grandchildren have shown any interest in them, except for the Harry Potter books, so I doubt that many ebook collections will be passed along – assuming it’s even possible. If they are stored in the cloud, it might take legal expertise to gain access to them. And if they have DRM, they may not be transferable at all. All of which to say, It would seem that ebooks are very ephemeral things. I doubt that many of our ebooks will still be around fifty years from now.

That said, pulp magazines were pretty ephemeral things, as well. They were read and perhaps passed along, but they were pretty much designed to be forgotten by the time the next issue was released. Of course fans saved them, and not all of them were tossed out by mom along with the baseball card collection, so that today some of them still exist – as brittle yellow objects in plastic sheaths on the shelves of several hundred collectors, various university libraries, and used book stores. And they still have fans, even 80 to 100 years later. Some of these fans are scanning them and posting the scans on the internet so that they won’t be forgotten. Perhaps something like that will happen with self-published ebooks as well. Maybe the young people growing up reading ebooks today will someday collect and post them on some site as well? Who knows, stranger things have happened.

Our paper books, on the other hand, will have just as good of a chance of living on, as any commercially published book. They will make their way down through history via boxes in the attic or basement, garage sales, thrift stores, antique malls, and used books stores. They’ll be very rare, of course, but who knows, 50 years or more from now, they might be very collectible because they are rare. And the great thing is that you don’t have to lift a finger to make it happen. They can look after themselves. So in the end, I think that it will be our paper books that carry the torch of our creativity, however humbly, into the future. We may or may not be famous after our death, but we’ll still have our name on more things than on a tombstone, which is more than most people can say.


Write What You Know … Or Branch Out

— Mark Paxson

We’ve talked about this on our video chats and, who knows, maybe one of us has posted on here about this, but recently Audrey wrote a post on her blog about writing from the POV of somebody not like you.

Audrey writes about the reasons writers can do this and offers some tips about how she goes about trying for authenticity when she writes from the perspective of a character who has lived a life that is not like hers. I think her ideas for how to go about it are spot on, and get to a few things I want to discuss here.

First, she mentions drawing on observations made over the course of a lifetime. Absolutely 1,000%. If writers aren’t observing the world and the people around them and using those observations to ground their stories in authenticity, than I’m not sure how they write. Audrey mentions both conscious and unconscious observations. I think that’s key. It’s not just about what we consciously notice, it’s also about the things that happen that don’t register, but they inform our sense of human nature, which can go a long way towards informing our imagination and how we might write a story from a POV that is not exactly our own.

Second, Audrey talks about how important is to read and obseve characters, in books and in movies and on television. Again, the importance of this cannot be emphasized enough. People ask me how I write what I write. How I come up with some of my stories. The only answer I have to that is that I have read my entire life. It is simply what I do, more than anything else, I read. After 50 years of doing so, I have an idea of what a story looks like, how characters do things, and how to structure stories. I don’t know how a person can write fiction without also reading it. Wallowing in it. And learning from that.

I get a giggle out of one of the reactions I’ve seen from some readers of my first novel. The story was a legal “thriller.” A criminal matter that meandered towards a trial that … well, that’s all you need to know. A novel about a criminal case that ended up in court. I’m an attorney. Some readers have commented that my knowledge of the law and criminal law made the story more believable, more authentic. But, here’s the secret.

I’ve never practiced or done anything as a professional involving criminal law. Nor was I ever a litigator, so I never spent much time in courtrooms. Yes, I get it, as an attorney, even if I didn’t practice criminal law, I have a bit of knowledge that others may not have. I took Criminal Procedure. I took Criminal Law. I spent four years in law school. That can add something. But, here’s the deal — how did I come up with the detail for the courtroom scenes and the jury selection and the questionining of witnesses, and the ultimate outcome of the novel? Through all of the reading I’ve read over the years. Through the observations I’ve made in watching people in real life and in movies and on televicion. All of those stories and visual images helped inform how to put my novel together.

Meanwhile, as I’ve said in our video chats, the stories I am most proud of are the ones where I can say, not just that the POV is not mine or based on any experience I’ve had, but that the entire detail of the story is contrary to anything I’ve experienced. A story in which the narrator is a 14-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. A story in which the narrator is a young white woman dating a black man in the racist South. A story in which the three different primary narrators are two 16-year-old kids and a 20-year-old, two of the three being female. The list could go on.

I get the idea behind “write what you know.” At least from the start. When I wrote that first novel, I could put myself in the place of the main character and write based on the idea of “how would I react to this situation,” but at some point I think writers should try to stretch the boundaries. Use your imagination. Use your observations. Use what you’ve read and seen over the course of your life time. And make something new and creative. See what you can do.