blog:articles:info:self_publish_traps
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- | ====== Self-Publishing Traps ====== | ||
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- | This article is about some of the traps self-publishing authors tend to fall into - and which the successful SP authors avoid. There are many things i could discuss here, but I'll just stick to the ones I see cropping most often. | ||
- | ===== Rush to Publish ===== | ||
- | Some books are sent to me, as per the instructions on the [[: | ||
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- | ===== Structure ===== | ||
- | There are many structures a novel might utilise, and it is not even necessary for a novel to use one at all. However, structure is there for a reason - over hundreds of years (sometimes thousands) structure has been shown to work. If you ignore structure, you need to know what it is that makes stories tick, and understand fully what you need to do to compensate. You can ignore structure, but you do so at your own peril. | ||
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- | It is well worth learning about the various forms structure can take, so you can decide which suits your story best. Each structure brings something to the story to give it impact, and without knowing what this is and how it works, how are you going to write a story that uses no structure at all and get it to work? You might do it once, just out of sheer luck, but repeating it is going to be almost impossible. Structure brings things to the story that still have to be there even if you use no structure at all. | ||
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- | A very common structure is 'The Hero's Journey', | ||
- | ===== Cliché Characters ===== | ||
- | Another problem I often see are clich< | ||
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- | ===== Lack of Editing ===== | ||
- | I've actually read two novels in the last year that seem to have had no editing whatsoever. They were full of spelling mistakes - which in this day and age is unforgivable - and there were sentences where the author had clearly changed their mind halfway through but failed to delete all the original sentence. | ||
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- | ===== Not Doing Research ===== | ||
- | Sometimes we come up with ideas that we think are so cool, we have to include them in our stories. However, most of us do a bit of research first to determine just how viable the idea really is. A few years ago I read a story which was set on the Moon where large colonies existed. As a right-of-passage, | ||
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- | You can't hold your breath even if you wanted to - the air would literally explode out of your mouth and nose, and your lungs would probably explode too. The intense cold of the vacuum would start freezing your skin and causing irreparable damage within seconds. Your eyeballs would expand, and it would be a race to see whether their internal pressure caused them to explode or the liquid inside them froze and through its expansion rupture the eyes - either way, permanent blindness. The lack of pressure would cause all the gases to boil out of your blood, giving you the worst case of bends in history. | ||
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- | For one of my own stories, I calculated the position of an aerostationary orbit (the Martian equivalent of a geostationary orbit). I knew my calculations were correct, but I decided to fact-check anyway. It turns out that aerostationary orbits are a really bad idea. You can read the story of how I discovered this in the article [[: | ||
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- | ===== Remember the Medium ===== | ||
- | One novel, available only as an eBook, had a dozen pages at the front of the novel listing all the characters involved. At the back of the novel, there was a glossary of all the slang words the author had invented. As a reader, you had to constantly flick to the beginning or the back. That's a good way to break immersion in a story when it's in paperback form, but doing this kind of thing in an eBook is terribly difficult, especially when, having looked up what you need to know, you have to find your way back to wherever you were. The author didn't make the book available through print-on-demand, | ||
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- | ===== Info-Dumps ===== | ||
- | Writers are often told that info-dumps are bad and to avoid them. The fact is though, they' | ||
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- | The one exception to this is in science-fiction and its brethren - cyberpunk, steampunk etc. For example, your MC may be waiting for a transportation system they' | ||
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- | I read a story earlier this year, where the first sentence introduced us to the MC. The next sentence began the info-dump, and for the next twenty pages we got her life-story to the present day. It wasn't even interesting, | ||
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- | ===== The Good News ===== | ||
- | If you're a writer and you've got this far in reading this article, then you are someone who cares about your craft. You've probably been nodding at some of the things I've been saying, and most likely heard it before or come to the same conclusions yourself. | ||
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- | Traditionally published novels have been through the triple filters of an agent, a publisher and an editor. Self-published novels only go through the author and perhaps an editor. The good news is, there are plenty of self-published novels out there that have the three things every novel needs to succeed: [1] A Great Story, [2] Great Writing, [3] Tell the Story Well (not the same as [2]). | ||
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- | I only started reviewing novels late 2018, but if I'd started doing it a decade ago I'd have written many reviews of excellent stories by now. I don't demand perfection. If the story is good enough (and well told enough) to shine through its flaws, I'm happy to review it. I'm a writer myself, so I know how hard it is to tell a story, and I also know that writers who care about their craft will never sit back and say "I know it all". We'll all struggle to improve for as long as we live. That's what we do. | ||
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- | Keep writing and never give up! | ||
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- | ~~socialite~~ | ||
- | ~~DISCUSSION~~ |
blog/articles/info/self_publish_traps.1564583013.txt.gz · Last modified: 2019/07/31 14:23 by Phil Ide