How to Save Your Writing (and Your Sanity)

Q: How many writers have lost months or years of work due to computer problems?

A: Too many.

     This isn’t a joke– it’s a scary possibility (or reality) for anyone who depends on their computer to store their work. All writers should back up their work in multiple places. We’ve put together a list of the most common ways to save and store your writing. Ideally, you’d use each method. Please, for your sake, use at least one.

 

Note:  This article focuses on backing up text files and writing work, not videos or photos for personal use.

Online

      Both Dropbox and Google Drive have a free, basic plan that allows you to back up your work. These services let you access your work from any computer or supported mobile device. Here’s a handy chart for a quick overview of their different features.

      You can sign up for both services and use them for different purposes. Lila uses Google Drive for sharing and editing while Dropbox runs in the background to save any late-night ramblings or half-finished work.

PS: If you sign up for Dropbox through our referral link, we’ll both get an extra 500MB of storage.

 

Offline

      External harddrives and USB flash drives can keep your work safe in a different way. They provide a separate physical location (other than your main computer) for the storage of your work. The main problem with these items is that they’re susceptible to everything that kills computers: water, power surges, equipment malfunction, dropping, fire, bullets, lightning strikes, etc. And unlike Dropbox and Google Drive, these devices won’t automatically update. You’ll have to manually copy files to these external storage sources.

      USB flash drives and external harddrives can be useful if you want to back up your work but lack internet access (or visit somewhere that doesn’t have internet access). Also, USB sticks are cheap: you can usually find 8GB sticks for less than $10, and you might even find USB flash drives for two or three dollars during a sale.

      Of course, there’s always one last offline option: hard copies. If you want to feel like a spy, print out your manuscript and keep it in a safe deposit box. For a more realistic (and cheaper) alternative, print out a few copies. Keep one at your place and ask friends or family members to hold the others. It’s not a bad idea to invest in a fire- and water-proof safe. You’ll be able to securely store any writing work as well as delicate or important personal objects.

      The cost of printing hard copies can be prohibitively expensive for prolific (or graphomanic) writers. You can try to minimize cost by printing out only specific documents or using tricks to fit more words on a single page, like decreasing the font size, using a thin font like Arial Narrow, widening the margins, and putting poems into column. It’s a lot of work, but remember: hard copies are always compatible, no matter what happens to computer software.

Got ebook questions? Send them to admin@popularsoda.com. And if you liked this post, don’t forget to share it!

Why You Need to Trash More Writing (and How NaNoWriMo Can Help)

This is an opinion piece by Lila Moore, founder of PopularSoda.com

      I’ve said before that if you want to make money writing, you have to treat it like a business. Let’s add something else to that:

      If you want to perfect your writing as an art form, treat it like art.

      That looks pretty, but what does it actually mean?

      It means you need to write things and then throw them out. A lot of them. And often.

      In writing communities, I often see writers post snippets and bits of stories, wondering if it’s worth finishing or if it was even a good idea in the first place. It’s always worth finishing. It’s not always worth publishing. Voluntarily and creatively writing will strengthen your ability.

      You can learn from everything you write, even if you never show it to anyone else. I wrote a novel when I was thirteen and promptly lost it in a computer crash. But I learned. I found that I had the drive to complete a full-length manuscript, and I realized that you should never keep all your writing in one place. During a train ride from Boston to NYC, I wrote a quick (and admittedly terrible) story about vampires versus aliens. The story was a joke, but I learned that I could pump out a lot of words on a deadline. I write poems to my friend in Japan that follow the rhyme scheme of a certain pop song. The limited structure forces me to be creative in a way that free verse does not.

      I have hundreds of half-songs and paragraphs and little ideas and I learn from all of them (even if I’m learning what NOT to do).

      There seems to be such a focus on making things perfect for publication. Publication may be the goal, but you aren’t going to get there without a strong skill set. You improve your writing through practice.  Not every painting is a well-publicized masterpiece, not every song makes it onto the final album, and not every scene is saved from the cutting room floor. And like ice skaters falling on their bums and skateboarders wiping out, you’re going to make mistakes, but that’s okay.

      You’re just writing. Not publishing. 

      One of my favorite musical artists, Tori Amos, calls the process “noodling around”. She’ll sit at her piano and play without actively working on a defined song. Other musicians call it jamming. Visual artists doodle in notebooks. What’s the equivalent for writers?

      Do you noodle? Do you riff? Do you word-vomit? Do you bleed? Do you spit straight truth from the top of the dome?

      I write a lot of things just to play with words. I write a lot of things already knowing I won’t develop them further than a paragraph or a half-finished poem. If I’m writing an important scene, I write it more than once. I feel most comfortable when I write it once by hand, once on the computer, and then type up my hand-written notes, self-editing as I go, melding the versions into one, and deleting everything that doesn’t fit. Time-consuming? Most definitely, but we’re talking about writing as an art.

      Artists don’t suddenly appear. They work. The aforementioned Tori Amos started “noodling around” on piano when she was two, received a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory at five, got kicked out at 11, played bars at 13, failed with her first band at 25, and finally found commercial success at 27– 25 years after she started playing. Michaelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel when he was only 33 years old, but his artist apprenticeship started when he was 13– twenty years before. He completed the Pietà at 24 years old, only 11 short years after he started working full-time as an artist.

      Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hour rule: you must do something for ten thousand hours before you achieve expertise in the field. From the Beatles to Bill Gates, he presents a compelling case in his book, Outliers. In writing, some swear by a million word rule: you need to write a million words before you pen your best works.

      And that brings us back to NaNoWriMo. Fifty thousand words in a month is a great start. So write those words. Write more than the amount you need. Write everything that’s in your head. Write scenes that don’t fit and exposition that’s too long and conversations that are unrealistic. Write boring characters and major plot holes and top it off with a deus ex machina. Write  three novels’ worth of material and then gleefully turn your back on most of it.

      Because you have to. This is the practice before perfection.

How to Write a Book Review Like a Human (Cheat Sheet Included)

      Our post on scam reviews led to some great conversations and questions. However, there was one question that stood out above the rest. Over and over, we heard, “I think I sound like a scammer! How can I write a review like a human?”

      Well, you asked and we delivered. Here are our tips to writing reputable, honest, and real reviews.

If you bought the book, show it.

      Several ebookstores will distinguish your review if you purchase and review the book on the same site. This is the first step to setting yourself apart from the scammers.  Amazon has Amazon Verified Purchase: “Customers reading an Amazon Verified Purchase review can use this information to help them decide which reviews are most helpful in their purchasing decisions.” On Amazon, the Amazon Verified Purchase tag will appear below the name of the reviewer.

      Smashwords goes even further with its review system. Besides tagging reviews by Smashwords customers, the site adds additional information. For example, you can see if the book was “reviewed day of purchase”, “reviewed within month of purchase”, or if it was reviewed before the author started charging (“review of free ebook”). Same-day reviews of extremely lengthy books can throw up red flags. However, if you buy the book, take time to read the book, and use some of our other tips, you’ll create a strong and trustworthy review.

8 Common Types of Scam Reviews (with Real Examples!)

There’s been lots of talk about fake reviews in the ebook world in the past few weeks. Here are the eight most common patterns found in scam reviews. 

1. No Mention of the Contents

This should throw up an immediate red flag. A reviewer who praises a book without mentioning any specific details about the story has likely never read it.

2. Generic Superlatives

This goes hand-in-hand with the previous pattern. Best book, fantastic, masterpiece, these are some strong words. They’re weakened when there’s no evidence to support these claims.

Terms of Service: Vanity Publishing, e-publishing, and Self-Publishing

      Recent conversations about vanity publishing, e-publishing, and self-publishing got our heads spinning as we tried to advocate for self-publishing, only to find our points dismissed by someone who confused it with vanity publishing. So let’s go back to basics here.

None of us in the ebook sphere can have productive, progressive, and sometimes painful conversation about self-publishing if we don’t define self-publishing in the same way.

      We posted a comment on this blog about our view on the differences between the terms. Here’s the fleshed-out version of our view on self-publishing, vanity publishing, traditional publishing, and e-publishing.

Traditional Publishing

      For many years, this was the only way to be published. Stick with us for this history lesson:

      An author would write a book, polish the manuscript, and then send out query letters to agents. Any interested agents would contact the author for more information and a full manuscript. Then, it became the agent’s responsibility to send the manuscript to publishing houses and work out a deal. The publishing house took care of editing, cover design, and marketing for no money upfront: they took their cut from the sale of each book. The agent wasn’t paid upfront either, but only after the publishing deal went through.

      The process wasn’t totally transparent, and it was up to the individual author to choose a reputable agent who would best represent his interests. In addition, the process could take years and it was hit-or-miss. Some of the best-selling books of our time were repeatedly rejected for publication. It was nothing to do with the quality of the work; rather, the demands of the market, the views of the individual editor, and simple human error all contributed to this imperfect process.

e-publishing

      e-publishing is an umbrella term. It simply refers to things which were published electronically. Sometimes they have a corresponding print version. Sometimes they don’t. The New York Times has an electronic edition available for ereaders and tablets. So does The Onion, Star Trek Magazine, and Cowboys and Indians. JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy has an ebook version, and the Harry Potter ebooks are available through Pottermore.

     e-publishing is not disreputable in and of itself.

However, there is a very low barrier to entry in this marketplace. A major media corporation can spend millions of dollars on a beautiful electronic edition with corresponding app. Or someone sitting at home in front of his computer can blast his poorly written ebook across the internetscape. e-publishing is all of these things. In our eyes, e-publishing isn’t inherently bad, but there’s e-publishing done well and e-publishing that’s not.

Quick Questions: Using Copyright

      In the first part of our Quick Questions regarding copyright, we discussed establishing copyright. Now we’ll talk about using copyright, finding a copyright holder, defending your copyright claim, and how to use Creative Commons licenses.

      Please keep in mind that copyright laws can be specific to your country. Check with the office or department which oversees copyright in your location for the most accurate and relevant laws. This is a quick overview of copyright laws and not legal advice. Please consult a lawyer for specific and sensitive copyright-related questions. 

How do I find the copyright holder?

      Most mass-produced works (such as printed books, CDs, or DVDs) will have copyright holder information either on the packaging or in the work itself.

      If you’re looking for the copyright holder for an obscure, damaged, or local product, you’ll have to do some sleuthing. First, you’ll need to determine the copyright holder’s country of origin. A French author who was published in France will not show up in the US Copyright Office records. If the work’s creator followed her country’s process, her work will be listed in her country’s database.

      If the work was not officially registered, and you’re looking for a specific person, the only option left is search engines. People search engines such as Spokeo and Pipl can connect you to individals (for a price). Whois lookups can give you information about the owner of a particular domain name. And old standbys like Facebook or LinkedIn can provide you with other ways to track down copyright holders.

What is Creative Commons?

Quick Questions: Establishing Copyright

      In the second installment of Quick Questions, we’ll answer some of the most frequently asked questions regarding copyright.

      Please note: Copyright is dependent on the country of the author. We will try to speak only about the biggest issues involving copyright; however, even general points may be contradicted by country-specific laws. Please consult with your country’s copyright office for answers and clarifications on copyright within your government’s jurisdiction. This is a quick overview of copyright laws and not legal advice. Please consult a lawyer for specific and sensitive copyright-related questions. 

What is copyright?

     In its most general form, copyright is exclusive rights to original material. The Australian copyright office says “Copyright is not a tangible thing. It is made up of a bundle of exclusive economic rights to do certain acts with an original work or other copyright subject-matter.”

      This means you can copy it (you have the “right” to copy it), sell it for ten thousand dollars, sell it for ten cents, bequeath the work and copyright as a gift, or keep the material hidden in a cave like you’re Gollum squatting on the One Ring. Copyright is granted by the government, so many specifics on copyright law will be unique to your country (don’t worry if you’re a world traveler– we’ll get to that in a minute).

      At its heart, copyright tries to keep other people from making money on things you’ve created and don’t intend to offer for free.
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What does copyright protect?

3 Serious Questions About Your Self-Promotion Strategy

     Congratulations! Your ebook is finally out (or almost out). Now it’s time for a big marketing push. It should be easy compared to the odyssey of writing the book, right?

     Not so fast. We’ve seen money wasted, opportunities squandered, and readers alienated because indie authors failed to do due diligence before jumping into promoting their books. To help you create effective campaigns and avoid their mistakes, here are three serious questions to ask yourself before you start marketing.

 

1. What are your realistic, concrete goals?

     Becoming a best-selling author, having loads of adoring fans, and getting a movie deal are great goals. Unfortunately, they’re not realistic (and potentially unquantifiable- how do you measure adoration?). Set your sights on smaller, measurable goals. Smaller goals tend to have more straightforward paths: it’s easier and more proactive to work on getting 100 views for a blog post than to wait for a Hollywood studio to knock on your door with a movie deal.

      Bite-sized goals are also achievable. And where ultimate goals are all-or-nothing (you either have a book deal or you don’t), smaller goals can be modified at any time. Those 100 views on a blog post? Maybe you thought you’d get them all within a day, but it’s just as respectable to get those views in three days. Or a week. Realistic, concrete goals related to book promotion can be things like…

• 100 ebook sales
• 100 Twitter followers
•  Three genuine reviews from strangers
• Guest posting on your favorite ebook site
• Creation of a personalized media kit
• A book blogger’s acceptance of your ebook for review

 

What the Guardian (and Ewan Morrison) Got Wrong About Ebooks

      A recent Guardian article titled “Why social media isn’t the magic bullet for self-epublished authors” has been making waves in the ebook world. While many disagree with Morrison’s opinion, there were also multiple factual mistakes in his article. We understand ebooks and social media can be vast, overwhelming fields, so we’re here to correct some of the most glaring inaccuracies.

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“Self-styled eSpecialists such as Penn often invoke the 80/20 rule which advises that, as a sales person (in this case an author), you should spend 20% of your time writing and 80% of your time networking through social media.”

      We have been unable to find any articles on Penn’s site which espouse this particular 80/20 rule. To the contrary, Penn has an article detailing ways to fit writing into your schedule. In another post, she outlines time management strategies (with no mention of spending 80% of your time marketing).
      The 80/20 rule may have been a rewording of the Pareto principle. In business terms, it’s linked to the idea that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. It’s about refining your business to achieve better results, not a breakdown of an average day.

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“She claims that when tweeting and Facebooking you should spend ‘80% of your time posting about things other than your book, and 20% selling’….Margulies advocates that authors blog and tweet about hobbies and personal activities: things you like, and which you think will draw other people to you. Essentially, 80% of your tweeting should be about cats, food, sport, what’s happening outside your window – all the things that millions of non-writers tweet about.”

      This 80/20 rule is one of the principles of social media marketing. Morrison misses the boat on this one by implying 80% of the tweets should be about your personal life. This isn’t true; tweets don’t have to be only promotional or personal. With this rule, the 80% refers to tweets within your industry. For writers, that could be tweeting about the writing process, asking and answering publishing questions, participating in ebook-related Twitter chats, linking to industry news, or using hashtags such as #writetip to share advice. Certainly, talking about your pets and vacations can put a human side to your account, but those things are far from the focus. 80% of your tweet should serve to establish you as a credible figure in your field; 20% of the tweets should be links to your products.
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“Most self-epublished authors hold down a day job, so let’s give them three hours a day, after work, for author activities. That’s 1,095 hours a year. Reduce this to 20% (since you have to spend 80% of your time covertly self-promoting online), and you get 219 writing hours a year, which works out as 18 12-hour days to write a book.”

      This paragraph is based on a misquoted principle. These numbers are entirely irrelevant.

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“If you want to learn their methods, you can attend one of the hundreds of new courses that have sprung up, and pay hundreds of pounds to master your 140 characters.”

      True, there are sites which charge a lot to teach you about social media. There are many sites which offer free advice on tweeting and self-promotion, PopularSoda included. Our personal favorites include Duolit, Wise Ink, Jane Friedman, and Joanna Penn, as well as the Twitter accounts of Writer.ly, Jonathan Gunson, and Porter Anderson.
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“Book Tweeting Service will write your tweets for you. Its tweet plans start with a one-day plan at $29 (£18). While this frees time to actually write, the downside is that your tweets may not come across as particularly “you”, which might alienate any followers you already had.”

      Book Tweeting Service is just that: a service which will tweet about your books. They don’t write personalized tweets for private accounts (at least, not yet). The service is more like a billboard and less like a ghostwriter. They’ll blast sales links to your books on their accounts, which may be useful in conjunction with other social media tools, such as book tours and guest posting. They’re not intended to be a year-round service, which makes the exorbitant figure of £10,000 completely nonsensical. If there’s any confusion about the distinction, their Twitter profile should clear it up: “We promote your latest release, author website, book blog, book trailers etc to 60,000+ genuine followers on our Twitter accts. Please book early!”

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“3. Get family, friends and Facebook friends to post reviews on Amazon”

      The section under this bullet point starts off talking about Amazon, then shifts to Facebook, and inexplicably ends with a paragraph about social media in general. Let’s talk just about Amazon right now:
      It’s true that receiving a bunch of reviews at once will bump up your book in the Amazon rankings. However, we’ve not seen pleas for fake five-star reviews met with anything but derision. On reddit, a thread from last year involved a self-published author soliciting positive reviews for his ebook. Because of the backlash, he deleted his account.
      However, it’s possible to use these reviews in a legitimate way. In practice, we’ve seen writing communities band together in workshopping a piece, then reviewing the finished ebook as soon as it goes live on Amazon. We can’t think of better reviewers than people who are genuinely interested in it.
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“But does giving your books away for free work? A test case is another author I know who went on to the Amazon free deal for a day and entered the top 10 Kindle Free Chart. He had 700 downloads within four hours. However, over the next day, when the price had gone back to £4.99, and in the three weeks that followed, the total number of copies sold was zero. He had, somehow, failed to build his platform.”

      Morrison doesn’t mention the writer involved, so we can’t check his back catalogue. And the back catalogue is the yin to free ebooks’ yang. Yes, it used to be that offering a book for free was enough to stimulate sales. As the market became saturated, that’s no longer the case. These days, offering free ebooks is a strategy best employed when you have other ebooks which aren’t free. It seems strange, but it makes perfect sense. If you give away a book for free and impress your readers, what does that reader do next? If you have multiple ebooks in your back catalogue, the reader may go searching for more. But if you’ve only one book, the reader has no choice but to move on.
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“In publishing terms it has recently been revealed that 10% of all self-epublishers make £75% of all the money; that 50% of self-published ebooks make less than $500 a year (£320, or 87p a day); and that 25% doesn’t cover the costs of production.”

      We’ve spoken with dozens of authors who realize they will probably not become rich (or even solvent) through ebook sales. Besides that, though, these statistics don’t differentiate between high-quality ebooks and error-ridden (yet published) first drafts. Quality control is another issue entirely, but the point remains: not everyone should be making money from self-publishing simply because they have the ability to self-publish.

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“A small number of writers make a lot and everyone else wallows in the doldrums of minuscule sales. The only difference is that those at the top are selling 100,000 copies at 99p, not at £4.99, or £8.99 – which in real terms represents a massive shrinkage of the market.”

      We’re wondering what he means by “shrinkage of the market”. The sales seem to be the same. Only the price has changed, and that’s for the better. PaidContent has a great breakdown of author percentage profits using the example of Eric Goldman and Rebecca Tushnet. Goldman is quoted in the article:

            “[A] $150 casebook may have a $110 price wholesale (or less). At 10% royalties to the authors, Rebecca and I would share $11. At the $10 download price, Scribd takes $2.25 a download, leaving us author royalties of $7.75.”

      On the smaller scale of £8.99 and 99p, we can use similar math. It’s not uncommon for a writer to receive 15% from the sale of an £8.99 traditionally published book. This is about 60pp profit for the author. An ebook selling for £1.49 would net the author £0.97 from Amazon’s 70% royalty plan. The author makes more money per sale with the ebook.
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“A new study by Reuters shows that four out of five Facebook users have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on the social network site. Facebook. Facebook can’t prove that it can monetise its 900 million-strong base of users, and as a result it has lost 26% of its value since the IPO launch.”

      Facebook is only one site in the social media constellation. Besides Facebook, sites like Twitter, Goodreads, Pinterest, Smashwords, Tumblr, and independent forums provide online social opportunities to connect with potential readers or other selfpub authors. Besides Twitter and Facebook, no other social media sites were seriously discussed in this article.
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“There may be hundreds or thousands more Kindle authors out there who are not reporting their astronomic sales, but given that Kindle authors spend 80% of their time self-promoting, one assumes we’d have heard about them.”

      The 80% self-promotion idea has already been discussed here.
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“Or is [Amazon] protecting itself from the accusation that it is the only winner in an online market intended to skim millions from millions of hopeful new writers, who themselves will only ever see minuscule returns on their investment and effort? “

      We’ve already shown how authors can make more money per sale with ebooks than traditional publishing. The end profits will be about the same per unit. Of course, there’s the possiblity for hard-copy books to sell more units because of their bookstore presence. According to Morrison himself, though, “It also turns out that the ebook market now looks a lot like the old mainstream model. A small number of writers make a lot and everyone else wallows in the doldrums of minuscule sales. “
      This discussion ignores another issue entirely: writers who cannot get their manuscripts accepted and traditionally published. Agents do not accept all manuscripts. Amazon does. We’d rather have 100 sales of our books in a year than have our manuscripts sit abandoned in a desk drawer, rejected time and again.
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“Do you want to spend 80% of 80% of your time Facebooking about cats in the hope that you’ll make a 2.12% increase in sales on a book you had to write in 18 days? Do you want to spend 80% of your time creating unpaid market propaganda for the social media industry?”

      Again, these percentages do not seem to come from any of the named sources.

SHAPED Author Branding for Self-Published Authors

      It can be frustrating to pick the perfect author photo or logo for your personal brand. We’ve outlined some branding principles using our SHAPED acrostic. Of course, there are tons of ways to break the rules. Here are our basics for your breaking or following pleasure. 

      Your logos and photos should be SHAPED by your personality, your goals, and your readers’ needs.

S: Simple
H: High-resolution
A: Avoid generic images
P: Professional
E: Evidence of your personality
D: Distinctive

Explained in detail after the jump.