Sit down at your typewriter and bleed

How Amazon is Tyrannizing Small Book Publishers …and why it’s still working.

In the past year, Amazon has been called ruthless, a bully and a greedy giant. Where is the malice coming from? The same people who enabled Amazon to get its start—book publishers and authors.

Through the early 2000s, many small publishers eagerly jumped at the opportunity for better distribution through Amazon—and just as they became dependent on the e-tail giant for sales, Amazon demanded lower discounts and longer pay periods. Those that didn’t comply, suffered: Amazon would up the price on their books and make them harder for customers to find. In “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” Brad Stone wrote that CEO Jeff Bezos openly admitted that he approached these publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” Thus, the company’s relationship with them was named “The Gazelle Project”—though Amazon lawyers would later demand that it be renamed to the less controversial “Small Publishers Negotiation Program.”

While I’m still in a world of stress (job hunting is the literal worst), I don’t want to completely shove off Edit A Month again. So I’ll be updating, not in a month, but as much as I can, until I fill up the 31 day quota.

Let’s say you had this brilliant idea and you did so much work on it only to have your research later reveal that key components of your plot hinge on things that don’t actually work. Now what? You could try to keep going, but just like plots that rely on the ten percent of your brain myth, you’ll probably end up looking silly. Readers are not nothing if harshly critic to factual inaccuracies, and no one really wants to spread misinformation anyway.

So, now what?

Writing a historical novel means knowing how far they can travel on a horse, This is good info right here.

Table of contents:

What is viewpoint?

Our viewpoint (point of view) characters are the filters through which we tell the reader the story. Once we have decided on a character, we need to choose a viewpoint for him or her. We have three choices: first person, second person, and third person.

How do we know which viewpoint to use? Read 10 Ways to Tell a Story

Using third person is the usual way of writing a novel. Readers, agents and editors like this format because it is flexible, accepted and easy to use. It is used in most genres and it is good for action-packed plots, particularly in the crime, family saga, fantasy, and science fiction genres. Multiple viewpoint characters in third person offer the author many plotting options and this technique has been used in countless best-sellers.

However, I become irritated when I do not know which filter the author is using. This usually happens when the characters are too similar, or when the author head-hops (switches viewpoint) in one scene, or when the author has not made the change in viewpoint clear. All of these problems show an author’s inexperience. 

How do we prevent this from happening?

Six Simple Ways To Ensure That Viewpoint Changes Work

You may also enjoy:

The Nine Types of Unreliable Narrator

10 Ways to Tell a Story - All about viewpoint

Look at this list. Pick out 3-6 adjectives you think especially describe you. All the adjectives are positive. The point of the college essay is to write about what makes you the good kind of special.

Come up with a few stories you could tell with each adjective. The stories should exemplify why/how you are that adjective. If you’re really good, you can write a story about several adjectives. The story is often personal experience, but you can also discuss your personality or why you are this way in an abstract form.

Choose the story you think you could write best. If you have that kind of time, you can choose a few stories. Your essay’s only going to be ~650 words.

Write (Part I)! Remember that the story is supposed to be about you and your good qualities. You can acknowledge your faults and you can talk about other people, but ultimately it must come back to you and your goodness. Try to stay within 150 words under and 100 words over your limit. 

Write (Part II)! Basic structure: title, cool intro sentence, intro paragraph, body paragraph(s), conclusion that links back to the introduction. If you have humor, use it (appropriately). Self-deprecating humor is always appreciated and it makes you look humble. You can fudge your story a little bit, but don’t make the whole thing a lie. Have a strong voice! This marks you as an individual!

Find a beta reader. The beta reader should be someone who knows you well and isn’t afraid to constructively criticize. That way, they can best advise you on how to play to your strengths. (You can even get a beta at the beginning of this process.) The beta will give you criticism and check over any issues.

Rewrite. You’re going to need to. No one pops out the perfect essay on their first go. 

Repeat steps 6 and 7 as many times as you need to before you and your beta(s) is satisfied. It took me three repeats on my first essay before I completely rewrote it - that took me four repeats.

Copy and paste. Copy the final document that you and your beta have agreed has no errors and paste it into whatever box the college has provided. Make sure the formatting is OK. Hooray! You’re done!

Some Pointers

If you’re writing about another person/animal/event, talk more about how they impacted you than how great they were/are.

Do not write the “I am so unique in this world of shallow Barbie clones!” essay.

You can write a reflective essay (e.g. I am looking at this globe and that makes me think about how much I want to save the planet) or you can write a fictional story (e.g. If I were a dragon I would burn the wicked with hellfire and that is why I want to be Frollo in Disneyworld) or any other genre except poems and picture books. Personal essays are often easier and therefore more common.

Dark does not equal deep

Start writing +3 weeks before your college’s deadline

I think the key to this is just making sure that the antagonist’s goal conflicts with that of the protagonist. It might not be a conscious conflict, or they may not be pursuing their goal for the purpose of getting in the way of the protagonist, but their choices should ‘bounce off’ the decisions of the main.

A good example of this is having a non-human antagonist, like a hurricane or other great forces of nature. The hurricane doesn’t have a specific dislike for the protagonist, it doesn’t do everything it does to get in the way of them, but the things it does will hinder the main character(s) somewhat, even if it’s not an intentional interception.

Some quick tips:

Think their background through

A person mostly does things with good reason, so really think about how they got to where they are and what has shaped their goal into fruition. What motivates them to do what they do, and what is their relationship (if any) to the protagonist(s)?

Make them human

Providing they’re not a hurricane or a huge organisation, it helps to balance the antagonist with good qualities and bad qualities, or to show in some way that they are more than their motivation. So they don’t just make choices willy-nilly, they have real reasons behind them and a life that exists outside of that goal as well. This will help the reader to relate to them, making them more believable.

Ask yourself why they’re necessary to the plot/world

So most stories do need an antagonist of some sort, but think about why you need them there beyond just blocking the protagonist from their goal. If you bring them in as a barrier, you might as well just make your antagonist a wall. What do they represent in the story? This doesn’t necessarily have to be a real-life thing (such as, ‘this character represents the disillusioned youth of the 21st century’) but can be that they represent something in the story, like an ideal, idea, race, a problem with something, something about the main we don’t yet know of, etc.

I hope this helps anyways. Here are some resources for writing antagonists:

Non-Human Antagonists

Antagonist Vs Villain: What’s the difference?

Antagonist Wednesday (Prompts)

What to do with your antagonist

Best of luck…!

Hello there, dear writerly friends!

Over the last year I’ve gotten hundreds (if not thousands :0) of writers sending me their story-ideas and asking me if they’re ‘good.’ Now, instead of continuously copy-pasting the same response, or worse ignoring them, I decided to format my thoughts into a nice-and-simple test c;

Now, since I have a feeling some of you still have questions, let me post here my answers to the responses I’ve gotten from this test:

Is this seriously the test?

Yes. Just 3 questions. Not more. Not less.

You’re saying that if I find the story-idea ‘fun’ to write, then I’m good to go?

Yes.

Even though you know nothing about my story-idea?

Nope. I don’t care what your story is actually about. All I care about is that you have fun. Seriously. If you have fun writing it, the reader will be able to tell. It’s easier to be passionate about something you enjoy. On the flip-side, have you ever read anything that was written by someone who clearly was not having ANY fun? Ask your English teacher if they can tell when someone actually enjoyed writing an essay. You may be able to half-ass a cake and make something edible, but you can’t half-ass a book and expect people to like it.

Even though I think this story idea is similar to that of another book?

Jorge Luis Borges said that there are only 4 types of stories: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power, and the journey. The truth is that, really, the idea for the story does not matter. It’s not what you say, but how you it say that matters. And, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s easier to get your voice across when you’re actually enjoying the process of writing c;

How do I make my story-idea more ‘fun’?

Be honest with yourself. Write about what excites you. You don’t have to write about anything you don’t care about, or meet some sort of imaginary guidelines. Writing is art. Write about anything you want. Additionally, you may want to checkout my (Strange) Guide to Planning Your Novel, it’s built on this entire philosophy.

I hope this helps! I have gotten this question so many times, I thought it would be best to just put my answer out there for all of you  c;

Don’t be scared.

Before we get started, the answer to your question actually depends on where you live.

More specifically, THE FOLLOWING RULES ARE FOR AMERICAN ENGLISH, which is very strict when it comes to putting commas and periods in and around quotation marks. British English uses rules that allow the writer to determine whether the period or comma belong with the quotation or are part of the larger sentence. (See below.)

If you want to be “safe," go with the rules for American English: if nothing else, it’s consistent and "predictable." (See what we did with the punctuations after "safe" and "predictable"?)