Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Pony Wish

Picture by Gato Azul
Anyone who has sent or is about to send their project or product out into the world has experienced the pony wish. The term pony wish comes from this blog post by entrepreneur advisor, Bernt Patak. This excerpt explains what I feel are the key points of the pony wish problem:

"You know the story...you bust your butt for weeks or months grinding out your minimal viable product, dealing with endless technical issues, raising money and keeping the lights on, finding, managing and motivating a kick-ass team and so on. Then suddenly the big day arrives and you launch your baby into the world. But eventually the beer and wine glasses are empty, you go back to your shared desks and realize that that moment of elation is gone and a bit of an unpleasant reality sets in...this is the start of the hard work, not the end! Four weeks later the hill you're climbing seems as steep as ever. What happened? 

You didn't get your pony wish, that's what happened. We all have them, especially if it's our first start-up. Like the little kid who wishes for a pony and doesn't see it under the Christmas tree, you secretly, immodestly, expected that your killer product would be the next Dropbox or Kik or whoever and just take off out of the starting gate, passing a million users at the end of the first month."

Don't we all have a secret hope that our book will be the pony under the tree? I sure do! We work very hard on our novels or screenplays and we want to believe that once it's out in the world, readers will love it and buy it and the money and acclaim will flow in.

That situation is extremely rare.

But what we don't appreciate, because we're so disappointed about the pony, are the riding lessons. Yes, there's more work to go into promoting and fine-tuning the masterpiece but we also get to interact with readers, agents, editors and other writers as well as learn about a whole new aspect of publishing.

The start-up analogy is even more apt for writers in these days of digital publishing. If we get feedback about a problem with the novel we can easily change it just by editing a document then uploading the new version of our masterpiece. Easy for us and makes readers happy with a quick response time.

I'm very interested in this idea of authors as entrepreneurs and running their book-writing-and-publishing business as a lean start-up. In future blogs I plan to investigate the topic in more detail.

To be honest, sometimes I feel I have been working on the novel for so long that I just want to get it out the door. Then I can get feedback from readers in the real world and move on to the next project. I hope it will be a pony but I know in my heart I need a few more years of riding lessons before the pony appears. But I won't make progress unless I take that first step of putting my work out there.

What have been your experiences with the pony wish?

Monday, March 28, 2011

Review: The Best Laid Plans


The Best Laid PlansThe Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I have to admit that I do not enjoy reading or talking about Canadian politics. I avoid it like a zombie invasion. So when I read the first few paragraphs of the prologue, my heart fell to my ankles. Since it was book on the book club reading list, I decided to stick it out. And I am SO glad I did!

TBLP is hilarious as well as informative and heart-warming. I kept saying to my sweetheart, "I can't believe I'm enjoying a book about politics!" Fallis' writing is fresh and upbeat, his characters complex.

An excellent novel and deserving winner of Canada Reads 2011.







View all my reviews

Review: Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood


Getting Revenge on Lauren WoodGetting Revenge on Lauren Wood by Eileen Cook

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I could not put this excellent book down! I choose it because a reviewer on Amazon said it was 'wickedly delightful' and they were right.



The hilarious and intriguing opening sentence drew me right in to the story. Cook did a superb job of characterization for all her main characters; they were unique and realistic. I sympathized with the protagonist, Helen, and was eager to see how her revenge plan would turn out. The story itself moved along at a good clip and was entertaining throughout.



I gave the book five stars because I can't think of anything that could be improved. :)



View all my reviews

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Structure Shall Set You Free

Picture from US National Archives
Worked on my pitch this week in preparation for writing my first ever query letter. In the past I have attempted to write query letters and ended up bogged down in the details of my world. This is despite following QueryShark for the past 2 years and reading a ton of blogs about distilling your story to it's key elements and themes. Reading about something and actually doing it are not the same. Who knew??

Lucky for me, I met a fabulous local author at a writing and publishing workshop at the Vancouver Public Library the other week. During the morning panel discussion, I really admired how she was honest, witty and confident in her comments. She was very unapologetic about being a slush pile find and I loved the fact that she was living (Local! Female!) proof that it actually happens. And she was about to quit her day job and write full-time! Her name is Eileen Cook. I purchased one of her young adult fiction novels the other day and could not put it down. Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood - a great read. And she likes Castle too.How cool is that?

And so, the query. With my brain unable to get away from the need to explain the elements of my novel's world first, I sent a 'please help me!' email to Eileen in the form of a big barf of world-building words on the page. And she wrote back.

Structure. Eileen gave me a structure and it set me free. The structure forced me to pick out only the key elements of my story and immediately I saw that I did not have my protagonist making enough choices. Brilliant! Now, because I had a simple, three sentence paragraph instead of a 250 page novel, I could play with the story concept until it worked and not get bogged down in details. Super-brilliant! The body of my query was done. All it needs now is a hat and some shoes, and off it goes.

I am aware that sending a query before the novel is completely polished is frowned upon. But since every writer and agent says new authors should expect to get rejected a lot, then I'm really just getting ahead of the game, right? I'm hoping that my query letter will be good enough to get feedback from agents at least and I can use that to improve my query and my novel.


Conference Alert!

Write On, Vancouver is May 13 - 15, 2011. It is an "Intensive Conference for Fiction and Screen Writers" and comes highly recommended.

The four presenters are: Micheal Hauge, Eileen Cook, Allison Beda and Lee McKenzie.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Indie publishing here I come! Maybe.

Picture by George Eastman House
After two years, I woke up. Two years of writing a novel and always hearing in the back of my mind the little publisher's voice saying "When this is done you can work on your query letter then send it off to 500 agents and maybe get found in the slush pile. Or you can spend big bucks at conferences and maybe meet an agent there. And then wait another year for a publishing house to accept your book and maybe another year until it is in print."

I've lived with that voice ever since I've started writing. Even more annoying is the fact that the voice sounds like a bossy 3-year-old kid.

Last week, that voice was silenced, thanks to writers like Amanda Hocking and Kait Nolan who are not waiting around for someone else to control their creative works. Writers have the tools available to get our work out to readers. If you aren't a famous writer already, a publishing house is not going to give you a big marketing budget so you'll have to do a ton of book promoting yourself anyway. Why go through the process above when you can put your book out online, do the promoting and see if it sinks or swims? Not wait two or three years for a publisher to pick it up.

People may say that the quality isn't as good as if a writer polished and polished their novel until it shone enough that an agent picked it up. If no one is buying your book or writing good reviews, you'll know soon enough. Then you take the book off the internet and/or write another. Just a simple click of the mouse.

Fail fast, fail often. The entrepreneur's mantra. And get your product the heck out there!

Having just received an e-reader for my birthday, I now understand the draw of instant book gratification. And they are so cheap! Wow! I can buy more books now because they are cheaper. I'm way more willing to try new authors if their book is $2.99 and I can get it on my Kindle in less than 5 minutes.

This is not to say that I don't see the point of publishing houses. I am still going to query agents because of course getting my book on a bookshelf will help sales and also going through the query process will improve my writing skills. When my book is good enough to receive feedback from agents that is!

It's an exciting time to be a writer! What do you think?