MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY

Merry Christmas

You tell me what new author you discovered in 2010. I am finishing reading "Return the Heart" by TK Richardson.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY

A quick note about writing goals: Did you set goals last year and if so how did you do? Mine was simple, finish the first draft of my second book in The Darkside of the Medallion trilogy. Sad to say I am at the fifty percent of my goal. I was at seventy-five percent but removed almost 100 pages because I did not like the voice. I took notes and resumed writing. Good luck to all aspiring writers in the New Year.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING



I want to wish everyone a wonderful THANKSGIVING. During this day of feast and remembrance, of our Pilgrim ancestors struggling to eke out an existence in a new land, think of the less fortunate in our world.


Thanksgiving on the Net - The Pilgrims and America's First Thanksgiving



Creating: Writing Cliffhangers by Randy Ingermanson and a free gift!

The secret to writing novels that readers can't put

down is simple -- in theory. All you have to do is making the ending of each chapterso exciting that your reader can't help but turn the page.

That's a nice theory. How do you do it in practice? The answer depends on the kind of novel you're writing. The purpose of a novel is to give your reader a Powerful Emotional Experience. Each category of fiction creates its own mix of emotional experiences. Each category makes a promise to deliver a certain kind of emotion at the end of thenovel. A romance promises to deliver love. A suspense novel promises to deliver safety. A mystery promises to deliver justice.

As your story progresses, your reader tracks how close you are to delivering the final emotional payoff for your story. If the payoff looks like it's getting closer, your reader's tension eases. If it looks like the payoff is getting further away, your reader's tension tightens.

When something happens at the very end of a chapter to make the payoff suddenly look dramatically less likely, that's a cliffhanger. Lee Child is a master of writing cliffhangers. Child is the author of a series of thrillers starring Jack Reacher, a drifter who left the Army after 13 years as a military cop. Now Reacher hitchhikes around the country, running into one set of bad guys after another and reluctantly puttings right.

Reacher is a skilled street fighter who knows every dirty fighting trick in the book and uses them to get out of trouble. That's a great skill to have when you get in fights with thugs three at a time, or you're threatened by guys with guns.

In one scene in KILLING FLOOR, the first novel in the series, Reacher and a businessman named Hubble are put in prison on a trumped up charge late one night. There's been a murder in town, and both Reacher and Hubble are incidentally connected, even though they're not suspects. They're supposed to be put on the holding floor for nonviolent prisoners. By mistake, they've been put on the floor with the hard guys -- lifers.

By the time Reacher realizes the mistake next morning, the guards aren't around and he's got a pack of toughs in his cell, and they've got rape on their minds. Hubble is cowering in the corner and is clearly not going to be any help. Reacher is on his own.

A lot of authors would end the chapter right there. It would be a nice cliffhanger. Lee Child doesn't do that, because that's not good enough. Instead, he continues the scene. Reacher takes on the first guy, smashes his face with one good head-butt, and then shoos the other thugs out of his cell.

A lot of authors would bring on more hard guys to make some sort of threat against Reacher and end the chapter
there. That would make an even nicer cliffhanger, because it would increase the number of Reacher's enemies -- and now they're forewarned that he's a good fighter.

Lee Child doesn't do that either, because it's still not good enough. Instead, Reacher talks to his cellmate Hubble about the reason they've been arrested. He learns that Hubble's been involved in something crooked that he can't talk about and he's been threatened by somebody he won't even name. If he tells who, Hubble says, they'll nail his limbs to the wall. They'll cut off certain parts of his body and feed them to his wife. They'll cut his throat. They'll cut his wife's throat. They'll make his children watch. Then they'll do unspeakable things to the kiddies. That's where the chapter ends. That's a cliffhanger with some bite to it.

The reason this works better than ending the scene with a physical threat to Reacher is because Jack Reacher can take care of himself, and the reader knows it. A threat against Reacher is just an invitation for a great fight scene. A treat against Hubble, though, creates conflict. Reacher is a drifter who just walked into town, and he barely knows Hubble. Reacher would just as soon walk right on out of town. But now he has to make a choice -- will he get involved or will he leave Hubble in trouble?

The reader doesn't know the answer to that. The reader wants Reacher to get involved, but Reacher hasn't really got a reason yet. He knows he can't be responsible for fixing all the problems of the world, of which there an unlimited number. So he'd just as soon walk away. Will he or won't he?

In the next chapter, Reacher and Hubble go down to the bathroom. They're trapped inside by five huge guys -- Aryan Brotherhood types. Two of them hustle Hubble out of the way, and the other three single out Reacher. It's clear these guys have come to kill. Again, Lee Child doesn't choose this as the cliffhanger ending to his chapter. Instead, he lets the fight run its course. There's a guy choking Reacher from behind and a guy in front about to punch his lights into next
year. Reacher kicks the guy in front of him where it counts the most, breaks the little fingers of the guy choking him, and gouges out the eye of the third wannabe killer. All in a day's work for Jack Reacher.

Next thing you know, the guards rush in, break up the fight, and take Reacher and Hubble up to the holding floor where they should have been to begin with. Reacher does a little thinking and it's clear to him what's going on. The whole thing was a setup. The guards must have put the Aryan boys up to killing Reacher. Not just any guards. The head guy. Somebody important, wants Jack Reacher dead. Somebody who controls the people who run the prison. Somebody big
and nameless. That's where the chapter ends. Again, it's a good solid cliffhanger. Jack Reacher is in danger from somebody he can't see, can't name, and therefore can't fight. The reader doesn't know if Reacher is up to this kind of danger. Neither does Reacher. But this puts tremendous pressure on Reacher to get out of town as soon as he gets bailed out of jail. If he
doesn't, he'll be in over his head against somebody he's unqualified to fight. Leaving Hubble still in massive danger.

The next two chapters have Reacher getting bailed out of jail with Hubble and talking with the cops. He's planning to leave town, but some of the cops are good guys, and they're trying to get any information they can from him before he goes. Then the fingerprint information comes in on the murder victim. The cops have a positive ID on the corpse. They
show it to Reacher, and suddenly he's got all kinds of reasons for staying in town and getting to the bottom of this mystery. Because, by some awful coincidence, the dead man is Reacher's brother. That's a cliffhanger.

Reacher doesn't owe Hubble anything, and he could leave him to his faceless foes. But not when Hubble's enemies are the ones who killed Reacher's brother. Now it's personal. Now Reacher is committed to battling Big Faceless Evil, whether he wants to or not. He's in the crucible now. How in the world is he going to get out? And the story is launched -- with a cliffhanger.

What makes these cliffhangers work? We can extract several principles from the scenes we've seen:

* A good cliffhanger attacks the weak character, not the strong one. It was better to end a chapter with a threat to Hubble than a threat to Reacher.

* A good cliffhanger attacks a strong character at his weakest point. It was better to threaten Reacher with a politically powerful and invisible enemy than to threaten him with a thug.

* Moral obligations are strongest when they involve people close to your character. Reacher might not stay in town to rescue the stranger Hubble, but he has to stay to find justice for his brother.

You're probably in the middle of reading a novel this week. Keep an eye out for any chapter endings that qualify as cliffhangers. Ask yourself these questions:

* Why did the author end the chapter where he did?

* Would the cliffhanger have been stronger if it came earlier or later?

* What emotional forces is the author using to make you turn the page?

* How can you use what you learned about this cliffhanger in your own novel?

If it's 3 AM and your reader hasn't finished your book yet, she really has no business going to bed yet. If you can keep her up all night, she'll hate you in the morning. But she'll buy your next book for sure.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 23,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel. Amazon US is offering an outrageously great deal this week on the Kindle version of my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES.
From November 15 to 19, 2010, Amazon US is offering WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES Kindle edition as a FREE
download. Here's a quick link to the page: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/blinks/wffd_kindle.php


If you do not have a Kindle, no problem. Go to http://www.amazon.com/ and query PC for Kindle (it's free. You need an account and this takes a few minutes). After the download is finished download the free eBook and enjoy.

Sell Throughs, Part Two

Noah Lukeman, of the Lukeman Literary Management Ltd, a New York based literary agency has some great advice to share on how to write a strong query letter, and he is giving it away as a FREE downloadable book. Check it out: http://www.writeagreatquery.com/

Ever wonder what the ancient Egyptian language sounded like. With new advances in linguistics we are getting closer to vocalizing how the ancient Egyptians spoke. Check out this video and enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM7-LqTj5L8

Sell Throughs, Part Two:

Retail sales information is generally more reliable than publisher sales figures, though publishers generally don’t pay too much attention to retail sales numbers in the short term except on major bestsellers. Retail bookstores get their sales figures from cash register sales, so they have a day-by-day, week-by-week, store-by-store tally of how many copies of a given title they’ve actually sold. Overall, sell-throughs still take time to accumulate and are only final when the retailer pulls the book off the shelves. In most cases, it takes at several months for a retail establishment to accumulate the sales to compute the final sell-through for a particular title. (This is not true for series romance titles. For those books, two to four weeks is sufficient to get a solid sell-through. However, it still takes months for bookstores and wholesale accounts to get the covers to the publishers, so series romance publishers are as much in the dark about sell-throughs as any other publisher until significant time passes.)

The sell-through numbers in bookstores can be computed many different ways. Retailers can compute sell-throughs based on initial orders of a given title only, or upon total orders, including all reorders. Typically, retailers compute sell-through this way:

Sell-through percent = Books purchased by consumer

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------  X100

Books ordered by retailer

Many retailers, who are interested in comparing apples to apples, so to speak, keep a database of all titles, with sell-throughs computed at some given period—usually eight or twelve weeks—during the book’s life. This database enables them to see if a given book is performing particularly well or particularly badly against others of its kind at exactly the same moment in its lifespan. If a writer can get a sell-through at all from a retailer, that’s generally the number given, and it tends to be lower than the full life-of-the-book sell-through. So even the numbers we think of as so reliable aren’t set in stone. They can change depending on who’s putting the calculations together and why.

Can you calculate sell throughs for eBook sales? If you press the buy button for a book the sell through will always be 100%. Think about it, one book was ordered, paid for and delivered. Looking at the bye button it represents a single book until you press it. Once your book is delivered another book is available for purchase. So the formula is now, (1+ n )/total books sold. Or is it? If I use this formula and purchase the first book, the sell through for the publisher is 1 divided by 2 times 100 equals 50%. Two books purchased equals 33.3333%. You can see this formula will not work. The sale of eBooks cheat the system. For every one sold the sell through is 100%. The total eBooks sold will not be known until the retailer removes the button. If a given book only sells a single eBook the sell through is a cool 100%. If a million copies are sold it’s still 100%.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sell-Throughs, But Were Afraid To Ask

Quote to ponder: “We should be as quick to compliment as we are to criticize.”

By

Mitchell P. Ejnik

Can words that sound exactly alike, but spelled differently confuse your readers? Here is a tale of a one-day trip that is still in motion. To help demystify this short video, Morrow is a small town in Ohio. Enjoy.

Sell-Through by Literary Agent Denise Little, Literary Agent with the Ethan Ellenberg Agency. Ms. Little is a new agent at the Ethan Ellenberg Agency. She is not new to either the publishing community or being a top-notch agent. Read her full profile HERE. Submission guidlines HERE.

Sell-Through

September 7, 2010

by Denise Little

I always find it interesting to listen to writers talking about the business of writing. Part of the fun is that any such discussion is likely to wind down into metaphysics or ratchet up into verbal battle before it’s over. Even the simplest issues, issues that are basic to the industry, can ignite a firestorm, because there are no clear answers, no absolutes to be found in publishing.

Nowhere is that more evident than in what should be the cut-and-dried subject of sell-through. A sell-through, as virtually every writer knows, is nothing more than a mathematical formula indicating percentage of books sold. Or, in terms, my various math teachers would have reduced it to:

Sell-through percent equals Copies of books sold

             --------------------------------------------------    X 100

Copies of book printed

It sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? There shouldn’t be any question as to what a sell through is or what it means. And it should mean the same thing in every case, right? A high sell-through is good, and a higher sell-through is better, right?

Wrong.

Like everything else in publishing, sell-through numbers are open to interpretation. While a high sell-through will only rarely hurt a writer’s career, and a low one frequently can, the interpretation of sell-through figures is an art, not a science. There are actually times in a writer’s career where a low sell-through can be a sign of publisher commitment, and times where a high sell-through means that the publisher goofed up. We’ll get to that later.

So, keeping in mind that we’re dealing in an art form, not a science, and that everything here is opinion (my opinion) rather than fact, here are some of the nuances of sell-through analysis I’ve picked up in my twenty years in the book business.

First off, let’s deal with the fact that even the formula itself isn’t as ironclad as any of us would like to think, and start with a primer on how the numbers are arrived at. Some publishers compute sell-throughs using the number of copies shipped from their warehouse, rather than total copies printed, as the divisor. This can change the sell-through number substantially. Most publishers compute their sell-throughs based on stripped covers or unsold copies returned to them by their various accounts, rather than on actual copies sold. Typically, publishers use the following formula:

Sell-through percent = Books shipped – Books returned

                  ---------------------------------------------------------        X 100

     Copies of book printed

Because of this, the information takes at least eighteen months to accumulate—the same amount of time it takes the majority of covers to land in publishers’ warehouses. Any figure you get from a publisher earlier than a year from the publication date of the book is a guess, not a real sell-through. They’ve got enough experience to guess well, but surprises are a part of the business and always have been. In addition, the publishers’ reliance on stripped covers or whole copy returns as sales indicators means theft, miss-shipments, and losses due to the sort of thing insurance companies call an act of God count as sales—usually only a small percentage of total sales, but in some rare cases that percentage can be substantial. In the eighties, a book on graffiti art “sold” well enough to trigger a sequel. It was only when the publisher was presenting the sequel to accounts that they discovered that virtually the entire print run of the first book had been shoplifted, incurring large losses for the booksellers, and making the stores resistant to ordering the new volume. In another case, a flood at a major warehouse destroyed several months’ worth of accumulated stripped covers and artificially boosted publisher sell-throughs of mass-market books across the board for the period. In the early nineties a major national account changed its return systems and, in the process, lost about six months worth of stripped covers forever, raising sell-throughs for that period substantially. There was also a case of a wholesaler who forged stripped covers and returned them, artificially depressing sell-throughs for a while. Sell-through figures, while they’re the best indicators we have for what works in the marketplace, aren’t always foolproof.

The next installment will cover sell through from the bookseller’s point of view and the sell through of the eBook Think about this one).