“Advice to Young Journal Keepers. Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations. Give yourself all the good and interesting qualities you want and haven’t got. If you should die young, what comfort would it be to your relatives to read the truth and have to say: It is not a pearl we have lost, but a swine?” ― Rosamond Lehmann

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” – Jane Yolen

“Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.” – Francis Bacon

“Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.” ― Christina Baldwin

“These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.” ― Terry Tempest Williams

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

A number of websites will promote you book for free, usually by posting a thumbnail of the cover and a brief blurb about it. Some of these sites also let you post press releases about your book or to write a promotion for your book that they’ll tweet.

These sites come and go as riding the economic cycle, and most ultimately aim to become popular enough that they become a paid service. Kindlepreneur usually publishes a list of current sites.

Given that these websites don’t bring in as many visitors as Amazon.com or Goodreads and so don’t sit very high on search engine rankings, taking the time to post your book on them may seem like a wasted effort. Still, many of these sites – usually geared at specific genres of independently published books or for ebooks – often boast thousands of readers. You never know what potentially interested reader will spot your book on one of those sites.

In any case, the real long-term benefit of these sites is when they link to your personal blog or website that promotes your book (Though not all do, of course.). This raises the ranking of your blog or website, which increases the chances that over time someone looking for a book just like you’ve written will stumble across it via a search engine.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of 80 books including the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my book marketing guidebooks:

If you’ve already started writing the next book you plan to publish, the back of the one you’re about to release is a great place to promote it. You might do that by offering readers an excerpt of your next book. This is particularly popular among novelists.

Before doing that, however, you should be absolutely sure that the excerpt really will be from your next book. You don’t want to tease readers then decide not to publish the book or instead publish a different one. That only will confuse or disappoint them.

The excerpt should be powerful and compelling writing, a passage that really hooks readers. Chapter 1 usually makes a good excerpt. Whatever section you excerpt, though, make sure it can be read as a self-contained piece, with no extra explanation, and that it ends with an intriguing problem to be resolved.

No more than 10 or so pages need be given as an excerpt. Ideally, you wouldn’t want to give more than five or six pages. After all, the idea is to get the reader so excited about the story that they want to keep reading it once they’ve reached the excerpt’s end.

The text need not look any different, in terms of typeface or point size than the rest of the book. Some authors have placed their excerpts entirely in italics, but studies suggest that a large chunk of italicized print is difficult to read, so that probably is not advisable.

Be sure to clearly mark at the passage’s beginning that what readers are about to cast eyes upon is an excerpt from your next book. Give the book’s title and projected release date by month and year. For example, you might write “The following is an excerpt from (your name)’s next novel, ‘Title,’ due out July 2027.”

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional book editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of 80 books including the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my book marketing guidebooks:

So you’ve got a story written and are about to send it to a magazine or a publisher. Congratulations! One of the largest barriers preventing beginning writers from becoming established is that they never finish their work.

But now that you’re ready to send out a short story or novel, there are some professional guidelines to follow. These “rules” largely are intended to make life simple for editors, who literally wade through hundreds of manuscripts a month. Failure to follow them is disrespectful of the editor.

In any case, not meeting these standards makes reading your piece more difficult, and anything that distracts editors from your actual story works against you. Many good manuscripts are rejected simply because there aren’t enough slots in a magazine or a publisher’s schedule for them. There’s no reason to give a competing piece of equal value the edge simply because you didn’t follow some basic professional guidelines.

Don’ts
When submitting a manuscript for publication, don’t:
• Send it in non-manuscript form so it stands out (colored paper, colored ink, specialty typeface)
• Bind your manuscript with staples, ring binders, clamp binders, comb binders, strings or brads; paper clips and rubber bands are OK but unnecessary
• Place each page of your manuscript in a sheet protector
• Place a creation date on the manuscript
• Place a rights offered statement on the manuscript or in the cover letter
• Place a copyright symbol on the manuscript
• Write a cutesy cover letter
• Beg the editor to buy your manuscript so you can pay for some emotionally moving cause
• Warn the editor not to steal your ideas (don’t worry, he won’t)
• Place extra spaces/an extra line between paragraphs
• Place -30- at the end of the story
• Turn a page upside down, dog-ear a page, or paste two of them together to see if the editor has read the piece
• Send it in safe-deposit boxes, couriered envelopes, wrapped in fancy paper
• Make your envelope cute: tie-dying it, covering it in stickers, or writing political statements all over it
• Send it to the wrong address; this includes sending it directly to the editor even though the guidelines say to send it to another email address or to send it only by snail mail
• Submit more than one story at a time, unless the writers’ guidelines say you can
• Send your story to two or more magazines at the same time, unless the writers’ guidelines say you can; a story sent two or more editors is called a “simultaneous submission”
• Send a gift to the editor
• Miss deadlines

Do’s
When submitting a manuscript for publication, do:
• Send a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope)
• Send you stories to an editor whose choices you already like; he’s more likely to like yours
• Be willing to work with an editor who suggests changes
• Call an editor or agent to talk about questions and problems concerning business if your manuscript has been accepted (but don’t overdo the calls)

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Q: Sometimes writing books and instructors recommend that writers a “project bible.” What is that?

A project “bible” is a notebook of reference materials, usually kept in a 3-ring binder of looseleaf paper or a document on your computer, of story ideas that you’ve collected but not developed. Often when you’re doing something else, inspiration will strike on one of those ideas. You then can go back to the original idea and add your new idea to it. A project bible also gives you a collection of ideas you can go back to when you don’t know what to write about during daily writing sessions.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

What is a story? An idea or a setting or a character alone do not make a story. A fictional story is all of those and more.

For the convenience of analysis and discussion, stories often are broken into parts. These parts typically are referred to as the five elements of fiction. They include:
• Plot – How the problem in the story is overcome, typically thought of as physical action
• Setting – Where and when this action occurs
• Character – Whoever attempts to solve the story’s problem as well as those who create the problem and those that appear incidentally
• Point of view – Perspective from which the story is narrated
• Theme – Purpose for which a story is told

It’s easy to think of the five elements of fiction as a matter of the 5 W’s and 1 H, or what, where, when, who, why and how. Plot is what happens in the story. Setting is where and when the story happens. Character is who the story happens to. Point of view is how the story happens to be told. Theme is why the story happened to be told, or its message.

Each of these elements appears naturally in the story, whether you consciously intend them to or not. For example, the plot of a story may be about a lone Roman legion that must stop a barbarian invasion. The setting is the northwestern corner of what is now modern Germany in the land once ruled by the Cauci. The characters are the Roman Legion commander, his lifelong best friend who is a tribune, and the barbarian leader with his second-in-command. The point of view largely is from an outside perspective, as if we were seeing all that occurs in both camps from a bird’s eye view. The theme might be the folly of war.

Virtually all of the problems with poorly written stories are that they in some way muddle one or more of these elements. In addition, you may perfectly nail each of these five elements but still tell the story poorly because it lacks flair; such problems are a matter of style, which is a part of understanding the craft of writing though not an element of fiction itself.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my guidebooks for writing your story:

“Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it’s so hurtful to think about writing.” – Heather Armstrong

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.” – Leonard Bernstein

“I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.” – Lord Brabazon

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.” – Isaac Asimov

“No letter from a lover is ever more welcome, brings more joy, than a publisher’s expression of interest does to a new author!” – Judith Brocklehurst

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Once you’ve published a book, one way to generate sales is to obtain positive book reviews on sites like Amazon.com and Goodreads. Not just any review will do, however. You want reviews that are meaningful, written by people who actually read and were interested in your book (Usually readers can tell when a reviewer isn’t genuine.). You also want a lot of reviews, for the more they are, the more likely they are to generate sales.

One to generate those reviews is to hold a contest.

A currently trendy contest among self-published authors – probably gaining traction because of sites like Story Cartel – enters readers who write a review of your book into a drawing for a free ereader (typically a Kindle). Readers can download your book either for free from a specific site or must make a verified purchased of the book before their review qualifies them as an entrant.

To make this contest work, you’ll need to do some promotional work. Start by posting a blog entry a about the contest a couple of days before it begins and then send links to the entry via your social media platforms, such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and so on.

Some authors have reported up to a hundred reviews added to their sites via this effort. Of course, the downside is that some reviews – because they are honest – may be negative (But that also can be a good thing!).

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional book editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of 80 books including the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my book marketing guidebooks: