Legal disclaimer time! The FTC is requiring US bloggers, as of December 1, to disclose the receipt of free products. 

1.  Please assume that every novel and comic book I review has been given to me as a promotional copy. 

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Hello. If you haven’t taken my survey yet, I would really appreciate if you gave me 10 minutes of your time. That will help me get published. You can take it by clicking here or by reading under the fold.
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Hello!  Here are some of my favorite posts from the bloggers on my radar screen…

The Creative Penn

• Seven Weekly Tasks for Writers— most of which don’t entail writing!
• What Is An Author Platform and Why Do I Need One?–platforming is one way to enhance your publishability. 
• Three Steps to Start Building Your Platform–just what it sounds like. 

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If you’re up for a starkly depressing perspective on how hard it is to start out as a writer, Writing Full Time– A User’s Guide is an excellent resource.  (Also, Robert Weinberg gets major kudos for being a dual novelist/comic book writer– hooah!)  It is depressing, but I think that it’s important to have realistic expectations.  Even if your manuscript survives the 99% rejection rate gauntlet and somehow gets published, you’re only looking at maybe $5000 for a typical first-time novel.  (He focuses on horror, but Tobias Buckell finds that the median advance is about $6000 for an agented first novel and $3500 for a first novel without an agent). 

Now, if you’re one of our readers in the 13-18 range, you’re probably thinking “whoa, that’s way more money than I’ve ever made before!”  Probably true, but when you have to cover your own rent and food and transportation and school loans, you will discover that $5000 is wholly inadequate for at least half a year worth of work.  By comparison, a 22-year-old college graduate  working for the US government starts at a GS-5 (~$35,000 a year and benefits) and moves up to GS-7 after two years.   Also, the government guy doesn’t have to pay an agent 10-15%.  (Indeed, if a government employee started giving agents money, it would probably prompt a federal investigation). 😉   

I don’t have any magic bullets to the problem that authors get paid so little starting out.  However, here are some suggestions. 

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Synopses that are just a sentence or two long are intensely useful because 1) they’re often required as part of the query process and 2) they convey a lot of information in very little time.  The editor or agent reading your manuscript has a thousand other manuscripts in his pile and you have maybe a minute or two to impress him before he tosses you.  The synopsis is your best opportunity to do so.

Here are a few tips about how to write an extremely short synopsis.

1. It’s usually more effective to refer to characters by their profession and/or key traits rather than by name. Calling him a “neurotic detective” tells us more about the character than calling him Adrian Monk. Unless the name adds something critical, I’d recommend leaving it out. (For example, if you’re writing about a real person, you obviously need to name him).

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What’s your story about?

That question usually sets off a rambling and unappealing description of the novel or comic book.  As part of your query, you need to describe your book in 1-2 sentences (I’d recommend 10-30 words).  New authors often have a great deal of trouble doing so– they’re so intimately familiar with all the details of their work that it’s hard to see what the big picture is.

As a writing exercise, I’d like you to boil down a lengthy work into 1-2 sentences.  That’s not easy.  It forces you to make tough decisions about what is absolutely essential to the core of your novel or comic book.  It also provides you an response when someone asks you what your book is about. Having a simple, elegant introduction available is crucial.

Here’s an easy way to write a two-sentence synopsis.

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