Personal Highlights and Government Censors

As I recall I wasn't much of a text-book highlighter when I was in high school or college. ("Gee, Bill, maybe that's because you're so old the only felt-tip marker color was black and using that would make it look like most of the chapter had been redacted by some government censor.") I suppose I did some underlining. With a pencil.

One of the (many) strange aspects of the brave new world of e-books is a reader can highlight a passage from your book and you -- and the world -- can see what he or she chose. Here are the top three for Nine Week Novel:

--Week One: 300 words per day for six days. (Take the seventh day off. You’ll have completed 1,800 words. Good for you!) Week Two: 400 words per day for six days. (And another day off. Now you’ll be up to 4,200 words.) Weeks Three through Nine: 500 words six days a week and that seventh day off.

--abandoned the comfortable, theoretical world of “writing a novel” and entered the uncomfortable,
real world of “novel writing.”

--A word count works much better than a time requirement. (No doodling on the paper or dawdling
on the Internet and calling it “writing.”)

I like all three. If you stick with those you can end up with a novel. You can end up with a novel.

Just keep writing.

It's the Best Time Ever to Be a Novelist

When I started full-time freelancing in the late 1980s a publisher advised me that more money was to be made in periodicals than in books. He was right. And when it came to books, non-fiction was a better choice than fiction. That was true, too.

That was then. This is now.

Yes, the Internet has decimated magazines and newspapers. Over the last decade I've lost a lot of (paying!) customers as periodicals get tinier or blink out of existence.

What I hadn't realized is the same thing is happening to non-fiction books. A (relatively) recent article in USA Today points out that fiction is now the genre because if folks want something non-fiction they look for that topic online. For free. They can't do that with a novel, with a unique story, but can get that story in an e-book format for less than the price of a cup of coffee or Hallmark card. (A what?)

Just as the public flocked to the movies during the Great Depression of the 1930s to have a bit of an escape from their challenging daily (real) lives, now readers are choosing fiction for an escape from the Great Recession (and all the challenges of our own era).

There's an audience looking for new novels. And there's a way (e-books!) you can get your novel out there that won't cost you a dime.

It's the best time ever to be a novelist.

Just keep writing.