Well, duh, yeah. Every writer wants to see their name on that list.

But, it’s not as easy as writing your best story your family has ever read. 

Each Sunday I enjoy reading the Arts Section of the newspaper. And the first page I turn to is the column where the New York Times Best Sellers are listed. I’m always looking to see who made the list. Is it one of my favorites? Is it a newcomer?

The same holds true for the Amazon.com Top 100 List. I love clicking through looking for a good read, when I have the time that is.

Have you given much thought to how a writer actually gets listed on the New York Times Best Seller List? Or The Wall Street Journal or makes the Amazon.com top 100?

Sell lots of books, make lots of $$$$ and voila! Right?

Well, that’s what I always…

According to an ancient Chinese legend, there is a huge feast in hell, laid out on the table, but everybody’s knives and forks are so long that they can’t get the food to their own mouths. Struggle as they may, in the face of all this food, they starve.

In heaven, the story is almost exactly the same. There is a wonderful feast laid out and the knives and forks are so long that you can’t get your food to your own mouth. The difference is that the people in heaven stop trying to feed themselves and use their long knives and forks to feed each other instead.

I was reminded of this story while reading a blog post on Your Writer Platform by Kimberley Grabas titled “Your Path to Influence”, in the context of promoting one’s books.  You can read those points of hers that mostly resonated with me, but…

It’s Sunday and it’s raining –again-, so it’s a good opportunity to write. I know what you are thinking: it rains A LOT in Athens –it must be the third or fourth Sunday that I mention it has been raining. Amazingly enough, it seems that the weather is choosing very carefully when to rain and when to destroy some well-thought, perfectly-laid plan involving BBQs and/or walks in the forest with the dog. In fact, I know that tomorrow we will have some fantastic sunshine!

Anyway, I was reading this io9 post about how to write a great fiction novel, and it gave me the idea for this post.  So, what do you need to write a great story?  To me, it is the following four steps that are the most important:

Have an idea

Oh yes, the idea. Mine came as I was reading an ancient historian who was describing the…

Tara Sparling recently wrote a couple of blog posts about  self-publishing; namely, What makes people buy self-published books, and What Puts Readers Off Self-Published Books. I loved them both, and confess to a tiny bit of envy at her excellent material.  However, being the gracious author and blogger that I am, I will share Tara’s findings with you and urge you to visit her blog, which is filled with interesting posts, beautifully written.

Tara interviewed readers and writers regarding what makes them buy a self-published book, thus giving us invaluable insight into how to better market and promote ourselves.

Heavenly graph by Tara Sparling

• cover, blurb and sample: I will not go into the known cliché, since we DO judge a book by its cover. From my day job as web developer / web promoter, I know for example that certain colours work better than others (blues, oranges) and that people like seeing faces in ads…

This is the promised followup post to Barbara Hinske’s Facebook Really Can Help You Sell Books and my Can Facebook Really Help You Sell Books? posts. I spent some $350 on Facebook ads in December with the twin aim of getting more subscribers to my newsletter and promoting my new bundle.

So, how did I fare?

The Ultimate Bundle of Fantasy Novels and SF Short Stories Is Born

I designed the campaign with help from my author friend, John Logsdon. John is a brilliant, fun guy with a great head for marketing. He’s also the author of some brilliantly funny SF novels.

The very first thing he suggested was that I bundle all my work. As he pointed out, to run an ad, the first thing you need is a bargain.

So, Rule #1: don’t bother advertising a full-price book.

It turns out that, if someone bought…

Self Critique Your Novel

Today on Write Better Fiction we’ll cover the Antagonist. Write Better Fiction is a process to help you critique your own manuscript and give yourself feedback. This will help you improve your novel, so you’re ready to submit it to an editor. Check the bottom of this post for links to previous Write Better Fiction articles.

This is similar to last week’s post except you are looking at when your antagonist shows up in your novel instead of the protagonist.

The antagonist should show up early and be visible throughout the novel. This doesn’t mean they can’t disappear for a while, but controlling the appearances will give you power to create the most tension.

The antagonist may or may not have the point of view in any scene. That’s a choice for you to make. In the thriller genre you may be pitting your protagonist…

And, it seems I break most of them most of the time.

There are two that plagues me like little devils. They pop up in my writing like annoying toddlers and no matter how many times I rearrange them into the proper order, if I turn my back they’ll break out of line. 

But, as my critique partner and anyone else who knows me will tell you, I write like I talk.  And proper is not it. Oops, broke two in one tiny paragraph. I need to get the broom and sweep up a conjunction and stranded preposition. 

Conjunctions plague me as do prepositions.

Too bad I talk as I write. I think it’s more important to connect with the reader than to write every sentence grammatically correct. Now this is just my personal opinion. As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m no expert. 

Reading something that sounds stilted and phony pulls me out…