Spiderwize's Self Publishing Blog

The other day I was talking about the fact that writing matters, regardless of financial success, or whether you are published by a big firm or prefer to go the self publishing route instead.  Today I thought I’d continue this little theme, since frankly, I’m just getting warmed up.

Another reason why writing matters is that it is an absolute fact that your writing can live longer than you do.  Think about it – even if you never become a bestseller, whatever writing you do can still last a long time, providing both entertainment and an insight into your own self for generations of your family to come.  If you do manage even a modicum of success, your work has the chance of being discovered and celebrated, and of affecting people for potentially hundreds of years after you yourself have departed this mortal coil.

Affecting people is actually yet another important reason why writing matters.  Writing can touch people you’ll never meet, in places you’ll never go.  Even something as simple as a blog with a very limited readership can still reach out and touch someone, affect their lives for the better.  Even fan fiction, often a form of writing sneered at by many can produce some often beautiful, haunting, touching pieces of prose that can genuinely affect and move another human being, perhaps in another country, or many years after it was actually written.  That’s power.  That’s writing.

p.s. Writing can change lives.

We’ve probably all been there, the point when you begin to wonder why you ever started this writing lark in the first place.  You can’t get taken seriously by your friends or family, you enter endless short story competitions which never win a thing and you spend an eternity writing a novel that fails to interest publishers, and you’d go down the self publishing route but for all the people telling you it won’t work and doesn’t count anyway.

The fact is, what you are writing matters, for a variety of reasons.  For one, even if you aren’t getting paid at the present time, at the end of the day no one becomes a writer for the cash anyway.  It’s a nice thing if you can get it, to be sure, but writing is not just a career, and it certainly isn’t just a “hobby”.  Writing is a calling.  It sounds terribly pretentious, I know, but how many of us, when we first picked up a pen, did so because we envisaged great riches or just to pass the time until something more interesting happened?  Very few, I’d wager.  We write because we don’t have any other choice.  It’s more than what we do, it’s what we are.  So published or not, paid or not, the fact that writing is such an intrinsic part of our identity as an individual human being is what makes it matter.

p.s. Writers are writers, regardless of success.

Many writers, be they in the self publishing field or otherwise, can find writing fiction a great challenge.  Not that I’m suggesting non-fiction is a walk in the park, but to be out on your own and trying to create a story that will grip people is certainly no mean feat.  The thing to remember is that it is not just the story but also the characters that are important in keeping the reader interested.

After all, a TV show lasts about an hour while even the longest “Harry Potter” movie lasts 2 ½ hours at the most – a book, on the other hand, takes up to ten hours for the average reader to get through.  Ten hours is a very long time, so those characters – whether they’re good, evil or somewhere in between – had definitely better be seriously interesting in order to justify your reader’s investment.

Another tip is simply to write like you.  This simply means to develop your own style of writing and not to try to emulate someone else’s.  If you have a sense of humour (and if you don’t, you have bigger problems than trying to self-publish a book, let’s face it) that humour should bleed through into your characters and your work.  If there is a big idea in your work, make sure it’s an idea that you are taken with.  This isn’t just for your readers’ sake – it’s for your own.  Trying to write a novel about something you don’t care about in a style that isn’t your own is practically guaranteeing failure before you’ve even started.

p.s. In writing, as in life – be yourself.

Today I thought I’d continue my occasional look at the kinds of writing software that are out there today, whether free, expensive or somewhere in between, as there are rather a lot of them and choosing the wrong one can be a major pain in the you know what.

Open Office is one rather neat little piece of software. Essentially an easy alternative to Microsoft Office, with a word processing software together with the other things found in Microsoft Office, such as spreadsheets, databases, the ability to create presentations and so forth. Best of all, it is completely free to both download and use and is compatible with other software packages (including Microsoft Office).

AbiWord is another good and fairly well known word processor, likewise compatible with other software packages, available in different languages and again, perhaps most importantly, completely free of charge. Where would we be without glorious freebies, eh?

If you’re into writing fiction, be it for the purposes of your self publishing career or just as a hobby, there are also different software packages out there which aim to make the process of writing full novels that little bit easier. One of those is New Novelist, which helps writers with world building and keeps their pre-writing notes easily accessible. Be warned though – this one doesn’t come cheap, and is unlikely to be found for less than 30 pounds.

p.s. The correct writing software can help make a difficult job go a little smoother.

As writers, whether in the self publishing industry or not, we frequently come across both spelling and grammatical quandaries. Do you spell program as program or as programme? If you describe an event from history, do you describe it as a historic event or as an historic event? Moreover, does it actually matter which way you do it? Is there a right and wrong way, or is it all just down to individual taste or personal choice?

Taking the historic problem as the example, this of course comes from a fairly famous grammatical rule which you will, as a writer, certainly already be well aware of – that we should use “an” before words that start with a vowel– an eagle, an ambulance, an American, and so forth and so on. With words that do not start with a vowel, we always use just a – as in, a book, a wing, a whiny American, and so forth.

Things get slightly more confusing when it comes to word starting with “h”. This is because of the sound of those words as spoken as opposed to the spelling of the words makes it seem as though they begin with a vowel – the sentence may read like “he was an honourable man” but it sounds like “he was an onourable man”, which is why we tend to use the an instead of the a. That said, while this is definitely the most accepted way of doing things, a not insignificant minority will use “a honourable man”, believing that the sound is overridden by the spelling.

p.s. The choice belongs to you… or a honourable editor.

At the beginning of the week I took a brief look at a couple of the options for writing software for your computer, since some of us still prefer the old fashioned method of pen and paper (pardon me while I fetch my walking stick), the fact is most writing of all sorts, whether in self publishing or otherwise, is performed electronically these days.

Probably the best-known writing software of them all is of course Microsoft Word, which normally comes as part of the Microsoft Office suite. There are about three versions of Office (not counting all the various updates in different years, obviously), the full standard version (which generally costs £180 to £230) and the Home and Student one, which you can usually pick up for around £70 to £100. In addition to Word, which works as a very effective word processor, Office standard version also comes with Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, enabling you to create spreadsheets, presentations and manage email.

Less well known but still pretty good (especially as it’s completely free) is Word Viewer, a very simple program that allows people who don’t have Word to look at, print and even copy Word documents.

p.s. There are many more options available for writing software, which I will continue to look at from time to time.

When it comes to writing, some of us (generally referred to as “luddites”) still think there’s nothing better than a writing pad and a pen, but in the 21st century there are a multitude of options available for those into self publishing who are a little more ready to embrace technology as a fully fledged part of the writing process. Writing software comes in a variety of forms, some it simple, some of it complicated, some of it cheap (and sometimes even free), and sometimes anything but. I thought it was about time I took a look at a couple of these pieces of writing software.

Google Docs is a free online software solution that enables you to have access to pretty much all the basic features that any form of writing software should have to offer, such as the ability to make bulleted lists, add comments, images, formulas and tables and so, to sort things into columns, change font and so on and so forth. Pretty much any of the accepted file formats – doc, docx, rtf, xls etc – are compatible with the Google Docs software, so there’s really very little reason not to use it.

Writeboards, which is available free from 37 Signals, is another cool little piece of writing software. It’s particularly good for those who regularly make errors (not me, of course, perish the thought) as it allows you to save every edit but also roll back to previous versions if you’ve made a serious error along the way.

p.s. There’s a lot of writing software available, and I’ll take a look at them in this blog from time to time.

Being well versed in the correct use of punctuation is a vital tool in the trade of being a professional writer, whether you are in the self publishing field or otherwise. Using punctuation incorrectly – such as adding multiple exclamation or question marks to the end of a sentence when just the one will suffice – is a very bad habit. Why, I hear you ask?!!?? Because it is the clear indication of an amateur and one thing you do not want as a writer is to have anyone – be they other writers, editors, publishers or readers for that matter – to regard you as an amateur. Sometimes it is tempting to add an extra exclamation mark as you may feel that a particular sentence is in need of extra emphasis than one exclamation mark on its own seems to lack somehow, but not only is this very unlikely, but the fact is there are better ways to go about doing this. For instance, bold face, initial capitals, or even italics can be used to add extra emphasis to a sentence without the need for unnecessary additional punctuation. Do You See What I Did There?

Of course, using even one exclamation mark may not be necessary depending on what you are writing in the first place. If you are writing some kind of non-fiction “how to” business guide, it is highly unlikely that you are going to need such marks at all.

p.s. Using punctuation wrongly makes you look like a hack!?;:’”,.*

Okay, let’s talk about structure. Writers, be they in the self publishing industry or otherwise, work in many different ways, and no way is right or wrong as it all depends on the individual concerned. For example, some writers prefer to plan before writing. They will have worked out every detail of the plot, every character’s journey, possibly even the length of each and every chapter in the book before they even so much as write the first word.

Other writers may find this approach uncomfortable and binding (as do I, to be honest – in my mind, if you’ve already worked out absolutely every beat of the story in your mind beforehand, the writing itself becomes little more than transcribing, and seems like such a dull process I often then abandon it altogether!). They prefer to write in a looser fashion, sometimes so loose that the more organised writer might well throw up their hands in horror at the very idea.

Some writers even begin a novel with little idea of where it is going and only discover what the story is really about en route during the writing process. Each approach is not for everyone and discovering which approach – or some kind of happy medium in between those extremes – is an important part of developing your own writing ‘voice’.

p.s. Discovering the best way to structure your writing is an important part of learning to be your own person as a writer.

They say that nothing is scarier to a writer than a blank page. Of course, it’s not the blank page that is really what horrifies us, it’s the blank mind, the feeling of being sat in front of your computer (or your paper, if you’re really hardcore old school) without a clue what to write about. For most writers who may have long since mastered the ability of putting words onto the page in an eloquent manner, it is coming up with ideas to write about that is the true challenge, and that’s the same for everyone, whether in the self publishing game or otherwise.

If you’re writing an autobiography, of course, all you have to do is look at your own life and find something that might be amusing to write about. Fiction, however, is a completely different kettle of fish. What if you’re writing something entirely fictional, such as science fiction or fantasy? The trick here is to look around you but look beneath what you are seeing. That old bloke you pass in the street every day, what if he was a serial killer? What if you got on a train and rather than take you to your mother in laws’, it took you into a parallel dimension? The trick is to keep generating these premises, no matter how whimsical, farfetched, or absurd they may seem.

p.s. Not all your ideas will work, but one or two might just start you down the road to a great story.