Instead of having a separate Word document for each of your chapters, I would highly recommend instead writing your manuscript as a single Word document with chapter breaks. Otherwise, changing even the smallest details will be a nightmare. (For example, if you want to change a character’s name, you’d probably have to Find-Replace every chapter). That’s a huge waste of time, particularly since most novel manuscripts undergo hundreds of changes. If your chapters are in a single document, you just have to Ctrl+F once.
Fortunately, Word makes it extremely easy to break your novel manuscript into easily navigable chapters. Once you’ve gotten the hang of how to add chapters in Word, this should take fewer than 10 seconds a chapter.
A professionally-published novelist usually makes only $1 in royalties per paperback sale. Typically, I’d guess that a well-tailored cost-per-click Adwords campaign could get the costs per incoming reader to somewhere between $.05-.20.
If you’re selling a single book, you almost certainly can’t break even with ads*. If you spend $20 on cost-per-click advertising, you have something somewhere between 100-400 prospective customers and need to get 20 sales to break even. That almost certainly will not happen. If your material is good, I think you’d probably convert 1-3% of your readers into buyers. So attracting 400 readers would probably generate between 1-12 customers. You probably couldn’t break even with that.
However, there are several situations that might shift the numbers in your favor.
1. What do I need to do to copyright my work?
Nothing, if you’re an American, Australian, Brazilian, British, Canadian or Irish author. Your work is automatically protected by copyright as soon as you write it. You don’t need to register your work or do anything else to copyright it.
However, if you wish to sue somebody for copyright infringement, you’ll probably need to pay a small fee to register your copyright with your national copyright office first ($35 in the United States). I’d recommend leaving that to your publisher, because suing somebody is almost always impractical before you get published. There are more cost-effective ways of defending your work and/or dealing with plagiarism than spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer.
An independent filmmaker is raising funds for a documentary about American comic book culture. Superhero Nation: The Documentary is not affiliated with me or this website in any way, but if you’re interested in this sort of cultural work, please feel free to donate here. ($2 gets you a shout-out on Twitter).
Also, one brief note on titles… When you pick a title for your project, I’d recommend taking something that isn’t already being used as a URL. It’ll make it easier to place high on Google searches for variations on your name.
When you send out queries asking agents or editors to look at your work, it may help to have an e-mail address devoted to your writing career.
1. It reduces the odds that you’ll lose crucial e-mails. Don’t let an agent’s request to see your manuscript get lost in a torrent of spam!
2. It’ll be easier for you to find old e-mails. For example, you might need to check which agents you’ve already submitted to. That will be much harder if you have to sift through hundreds of unrelated e-mails.
3. Your default e-mail address might not be professional enough for business use. No offense, “SuperheroBoi24,” but “JohnBryant” will raise fewer eyebrows in the editor’s office. Also, it makes it much easier for me to tell at a glance whose email is whose. As a rule of thumb, your work e-mail address should be based on your first and last name (or possibly your pen-name).
4. You can give out your writing e-mail address to strangers without compromising your privacy. If you have a website, that will help keep you accessible to your readers without making your default e-mail address public. For example, you can contact me at superheronation-at-gmail-dot-com.
Asaya’s Blog: How to Write and Draw the Supernaturalis a blog similar to this one. It offers writing advice focused on supernatural fiction. Quick question. What kind of stories would you consider to be supernatural fiction? It strikes me as a slightly more open-ended category than, say, “superhero stories.”
Both Chicago and comic books are pretty awesome. Hence Sequential Chicago, for all of your Chicago comic book needs. Hmm. Is this a half-baked idea or a well-targeted niche? What do you think?
1. Make it clear what you offer and why readers should stick around. For example, if you wandered across Superhero Nation, you might stick around because you wanted superhero writing advice or because you want my observations about writing. The trick is to make this as blatant as possible: for example, I repeat myself in the title, in the header art, in the page headings, in the side-bar, etc. Everyone focuses on different elements of the page, so it pays to be redundant.
2. Stay away from adspeak and flowery language. For example, our title includes the phrase “how to write superhero novels and comic books.” That’s much more user-friendly than something like “superhero writing insights.” What’s an insight? Don’t make readers struggle to translate what you’ve written.
Site titles play an important role in search engine optimization. A site named “Superhero Nation: a writing advice site” has a much better chance to place for a search like superhero writing advice than a site named just “Superhero Nation.” Site titles also helps draw people into your website by explaining what viewers will get out of your website.
For example, check out how a typical search for Superhero Nation appears on Google. The site name plays more prominently than the name of the article does.
We’re mostly satisfied with our header, so now on a monthly basis we experiment with major site-design changes. I’ll let you know what happens in a month.
This trailer sells an unusual premise effectively. It also makes a skillful pitch to its target audience with reviews that specifically say that geeks will enjoy the book. I found its comparisons to other works of geek-culture helpful. However, I thought that its emotional cues were a bit mixed. The book-cover makes this look like a light-hearted comedy, but but the only clear emotional image in the trailer is her sobbing as mushroom clouds loom in the background. There isn’t very much in the trailer that suggests the book is actually funny, or what kind of humor it uses. For example, if this is a dark comedy about the protagonist and her failure friend trying to survive, it might have helped to show us a glimpse of the comedic relationship between the two characters.
The cover-art was very eye-catching, even though it rips off a famous scene from Dr. Strangelove. My main question is that she appears to have wings on the cover, but the trailer doesn’t mention that strange detail at all. (My guess is that it’s a nuclear mutation).
Microsoft Word automatically corrects common spelling mistakes. It also allows users to tell it which words should be autocorrected. Here are a few ways you can use autocorrect to make your life easier.
If you use the same long phrases repeatedly, you can use autocorrect to create a macro. For example, our book repeats phrases like Agent Orange and the Office of Special Investigations, so we told autocorrect to turn the “word” [OJ] into Agent Orange and the “word” [OSI] into Office of Special investigations. When you set up macros, I recommend either using a combination of letters that will never come up naturally (like OJ) or a bracketed phrase. That way, you will reduce the odds of accidentally setting off your macro.
If you change a character’s or location’s name, you can use autocorrect to help remind you not to use the original. If you change your hero’s name from Hiro to John, suddenly referring to him as Hiro will confuse readers. Autocorrect will help you from adding more mistaken references to Hiro. (However, it won’t fix instances of “Hiro” that are already in the work– use “Find and Replace” to hunt those down).
This can help you maintain stylistic consistency. For example, sometimes authors forget how they spelled the names of minor characters. Mr. Merriman might become Mr. Merryman. Mrs. Busch might be married to Mr. Bush. If you notice that this is a problem, you can use autocorrect to prevent future occurrences by telling it to turn Merryman into Merriman.
“It’s the most heart-warming phone ad of the year!” I’m not sure that heart-warming is the best fit for NFL Live. I think that the average American man likes his humor a bit more robust and, umm, funny.
UPDATE: We’re in the second quarter now and the ad has played three five times.
SECOND UPDATE: The ad ended up playing nine times, by my count.
The site is http://www.annecordwainer.com/ . Anne is a friend of mine and I would really appreciate if you would check out her site, particularly if you’re a fan of real-world magic stories. Does the site work? It feels like there’s something not quite clicking, but I’m not sure what.
Tobias Buckell gathered some data describing how much authors make on their first advance. The median author in SF or fantasy makes $5000. The average in both categories is slightly higher (about $6500), but that’s probably distorted by a few superstars that skewed the distribution curve.
He also broke the data down by agented vs. unagented submissions. The median advance for an unagented manuscript is $4000, compared to $5500 for an agented manuscript. You might think to yourself “aha! I will make more if I have a superior negotiator on my side!” That’s probably true, but please also consider that a novelist that is good enough to convince an agent to work with him is probably better-than-average to begin with. In addition to that selection bias, you’d also have to factor in the agent’s share of the advance.
That said, I think an agent can be a powerful ally and (all things considered) one that will probably pay for himself.
Some authors are now marketing their books with videos (book trailers). Frequently they emphasize Hollywood-lite visuals over elements that would speak well of the book. For example, this one for Christine Feehan’s Dark Curse uses a live-action dragon and bats at a decent production level. But the trailer’s writing is atrocious. There’s no dialogue and the text that shows up on the screen is almost too bad to believe.
FROM New York Times BEST-SELLING AUTHOR CHRISTINE FEEHAN.
If you have a list of links in your sidebar or site-map, test the links once a month. It amazes me how often we change the permalinks without updating the sidebar. The monthly link-test is easily the most productive minute I spend on website design.
Archives are not a particularly effective way to organize your website’s content. A list of years and months doesn’t help readers figure out what sort of content your site offers. In contrast, listing a few of the categories you post in most frequently will help readers understand what your website offers. Archives are also inadequate because they’re daunting and impenetrable for new viewers. I wouldn’t recommend placing archives high in your sidebar, although you may that they are useful at the bottom because returning viewers like using them.
I recommend placing index pages ahead of archives. For example, readers that click on the entries in our Top Categories sidebar get sent to an index page where we tried to lay out our content intelligently. For example, our index of writing guides organizes 30 writing articles into seven sections, such as Characterization and Common Writing Mistakes. Readers can navigate through an index more easily than through a flood of articles thrown at them in no particular order. If readers can easily find the content that interests them, they are far more likely to actually read it.
What do you think? Which sites do you find particularly easy to navigate?
Fans of trippy science-fiction novels everywhere can rejoice that Neuromancer is getting a movie. In other good news, the movie poster shown by i09.com looks pretty stylish and suggests that it won’t be a remake of Swordfish.
The bad news is that Hayden Christensen, the same “actor” that ruined Star Wars and Jumper, is starring as Case. Dare I say that John Travolta could do this better? Egads. How could we have come to the point where John Travolta is the lesser of two acting evils? Hayden [censored]ing Christensen.
I’m particularly fond of Gosmick Sans and Agency FB. Stay the hell away from Comic Sans, Times, Impact, and Helvetica. None of the default Microsoft Word fonts are particularly attractive. I recommend browsing through a free-font website like 1001 Free Fonts. I’ll have more thoughts on this later.
The Batman was terrible. If you’re mainly watching this for comedic potential, I’d get as many Spanish-speakers or gringos as you can find, and let’s learn about the difference between “el” and “la” with Batman. –There’s a spectacularly strange scene where Batman tries interrogating Riddler and Riddler bursts into a soprano rendition of Ave Maria. […]
–There’s intense violence but not a lot of feeling here. It’s not a very exciting movie. But it’s functional. It’s frequently tedious but rarely boring. Only the political sermons and Weasel are viciously bad. It’s definitely a huge improvement over the first movie. –Most of what sucked about Suicide Squad 1 was an overfocus on […]
1:30 – 6:55: Cyborg sees his Mother Box acting up. Then Mera sees her Mother box acting up. Then Amazon guards see their Mother Box acting up. Also there’s a Lex Luthor flashback where the computer shows him that Mother Boxes are plot relevant in case you missed that. PS: In the first 8 minutes […]
–Wonder Woman 1984 is not nearly as good at the original. Pluses: the cast is still very charming, and a few of the fight scenes are effective. I did actually like most of the first hour of the movie. –Setting: In the original Wonder Woman, the WWI setting contributes to a hard bleakness which effectively […]
1. I don’t know where to start with Captain Marvel. So many things went so wildly wrong that we’d need a presidential commission to get to the bottom of it. It’s like the Chernobyl of superhero movies. 2. If at any point you feel like your action movie would benefit from a character whose main […]
1. This version of Spider-Man is a useless toolbox who actively avoids doing interesting things, and what he does attempt is usually wimpy and/or incompetent. 2. Unlike most main characters, his choices don’t matter much. For example, he chooses to leave his supersuit at home (but his aunt sneaks it in anyway) and he tries […]
We’re up to 72 superhero movies since 2000 (current as of November 2017). You can download the full data here. Some observations: R movies are making up the quality gap with PG-13 movies. Superhero movies are improving. Over the last 5 years (2013-2017), the average superhero movie is averaging 70% on Rotten Tomatoes, up […]
