My next project

I remember a few years ago looking in vain for a good, lightweight book about conversation.

Making small talk, persuasion, body language and related topics all seem to get relatively little coverage in today's press, and I just couldn't find any decent 'how to' style books explaining the art of making and enjoying conversation.

There were books for salesmen, and plenty about public speaking, but not any that contained earnest instructions about up close, interpersonal communications.

So that's what I'm writing about now.

Choosing a standout subject to write about

  by  stevendepolo 

Right now there is a glut of low quality nonfiction books on the Amazon market.

A lot of them are pretty awful looking, many of them have MS Paint crafted covers, typo ridden descriptions, and uninteresting subjects.  That means newer writers who care about the quality of their work are tasked with rising above a tide of crappy ebooks if they want to find a readership.

One great way to start to exceed these lowered standards is to choose a unique topic.  I consider my first ebook, How To Take Over The World, to be a good example of this strategy.  The subject might not have sweeping mass appeal, but there are definitely people out there who are attracted to it, and I enjoyed writing about it.

Sure, there's more to success than just picking a neat subject, even a newbie like me knows that.

You need a decent cover, diligent proofreading, and solid research backing up your words.  Eventually, after you have the basics down, you probably need to do some self promotion.

But all of that is moot if your subject is boring and over covered.

The roots of our politically shallow culture

While I was writing How To Take Over The World it struck me just how politically disinterested popular culture is.

I've realized there are a lot of reasons for this, but none of them are any good:

1. Consumers don't like being exposed to political ideas or positions they don't agree with. 
2. Advertisers are sensitive to the messages they associate themselves with.  
3. Including political insight in popular entertainment is both difficult and risky.  

See, it's about profit, not informing and educating.  The profit motive isn't necessarily a bad thing, it doesn't need to work against a vibrant and exciting popular culture, but as of right now it clearly does.

It's just good business sense to avoid offending any of the many over-sensitive and permanently outraged members of your viewership.

Really, pop culture is whatever the mass media produces, and the mass media produces what the majority of the market prefers, not what some want or need.  That's why even news programming is so remarkably reluctant to cover governance, the simple horse race is easier to report on.  Even the parts of popular culture that are supposed to care about the political process (cable news, talk radio, ect) mostly reduce the sprawling actuality of the American process to a PR battle.

A neat little proofreading hint

  by  Niccolò Caranti 

I came across this idea a few years ago, but for no good reason promptly forgot about it soon after.

When you're tired of writing and fatigued from editing, it's tough to give your work a thorough proofing.  You read your writing, but in that state of mind the brain just doesn't do a good job of telling you what's actually on the page.  When that happens, you miss typos, and typos frustrate readers.

So try this: Read your own work out loud before publishing.  For some reason verbalizing what I've written always helps me catch embarrassing mistakes.

Political Neutrality is Destroying Pop-culture

  by  danxoneil 

I'm still thinking  about how odd it is that politics and pop-culture rarely intersect.

I don't think its always been that way.  I seem to remember Saturday Night Live used to take political stances, and the old-school late night TV guys got behind candidates and causes.  Hell, once in a while a song with a message got onto the charts, or a marginally ideological hero took to the silver screen.

Letterman and Leno still take sides now and again, but they're dinosaurs now.  The young guns, Kimmel, Conan, and that irritating chirpy one, they all avoid anything political like the plague.  They make thoroughly neutral TV, full of brain dead skits that appease (not appeal) to both conservatives and liberals.  Hollywood does the same thing, you still have your loner protagonists and evil doers, but even when the world is being saved nobody ever says what its being saved from.

The great social debates of our time are nearly completely abscent from our pop-culture, and pop-culture is the only national conversation that exists.

Politics and Writing

I'm the sort of person who has too many hobbies.

I like cooking, reading, and hiking.  I enjoy playing golf, lectures are always fun, and protests are exhilarating to witness.  Sometimes I'll run through a Python tutorial, or try to muddle through an introductory HTML exercise.  I have an underutilized easel in my bedroom.

See, I've always liked too many things, and I tend to want to be too many things.

So a few years ago, when I finally realized what I actually love, I found myself surprised at how little overlap there was between my twin passions in the real world.

I'm fascinated by the political process, and I'm transfixed by good writing.  After  a few years of understanding my passions I've noticed the two don't come in the same package often enough.  Occasionally I'll find a compelling piece over at Longform, and every now and again I'll pick up a political thriller and find myself lost in a narrative.

But good writing and political conversation should go hand in hand all the time, in both fiction and nonfiction. It's a question of frequency.

A new midnight mantra; Proof, proof, proof!

We're all familiar with the axiom "Edit, edit, edit!"

It's one of the great refrains of writer's across the English speaking world, and I expect it's repeated by writers of every language with an alphabet.  We tend to roll our eyes at these sort of expressions, because we all know writers right, its obvious.  And a broken clock might be right twice a day, but you can't tell when it's right!

In the heat of the composition process, after we've gone through one too many drafts and sit exhausted in front of our flickering computer screens, these sort of sayings are often the only thoughts left echoing in our heads.  In those happy moments writing platitudes are all that stands between us and the 'publish' button, the animal part of our brains urge us to post our work, the weary voice of reason fatigued and quiet.

Lets add one more guard on the picket of caution, one more gatekeeper between our work and the world.  At the end of a writing session, remember to "Proof, proof, proof!"  The next time you're itching to submit that story or publish that ebook, remember that there's another step after editing.

Yesterday I posted some thoughts about self publishing, formatting, and building Kindle ebooks at the welcoming writing community over on reddit.

Tonight I was wondering what I should write in my first post on this blog. It took a while, but I decided to go with a few recent thoughts on craft, motivation, and publishing on the KDP platform.  Then I realized I've already written that post...  

The following is my inaugural post both to r/writing and this blog.  Enjoy!

For a long while I've been hoping to find a book about how to go about building an empire. I thought it would be a fun, chilling, and interesting read. I looked high and low for such a book, and while I found plenty of discussions about how empires worked, I never found anything like a how-to manual for aspiring world rulers.

A few month ago I decided to write one, and the result was How To Take Over The World, which I put up on the Kindle store a few days ago. Finishing the project and finally clicking publish was unbelievably satisfying.

I had a blast writing it too, and learned way more actually writing it than I could have if I'd spent another year or two just reading about writing.

I thought I'd share some of the things I've learned so far with the r/writing community.

• Write about what you love. It sounds weird coming from someone who wrote what I wrote, but I never would've finished my project if I didn't enjoy the subject. I've always been curious about how imperialists were educated and how empowered megalomaniacs thought, so writing this was fun (even if I got tons of weird looks from people I told about it).
• If you haven't written in a while, your grasp of grammar and style might be rusty. Holy cow, I was rusty. I studied journalism and polisci in college, but since graduation I had barely written at all (just a few short stories and essays, and nothing publishable). Grammar and style are like muscles, if you don't use them you lose them. For the last few months I've been reviewing things like indirect objects and the proper way to format book titles. I have a long way to go, but it has paid off already.
• Know your tools. That whole time I was in college I was pumping out 20 page papers and properly formatted articles in... wait for it... Google Docs. I have no idea what I was thinking, at the very least I should have gotten my hands on Libre Office and learned how to use it. I've finally re-learned how to use a modern word processor (for the first time since 2003) and it's changed my writing world. Now I'm learning Scrivener. Brothers and sisters, I'm in from the cold.
• If you're not artistic, outsource the cover. A month or so ago I saw a post here about self publishing, and the redditor recommended using Fiverr to find cheap designers. I bookmarked the recommended provider, used her myself, and couldn't be happier with the result. This is her, and for what I paid, I'm thrilled with what I got. Also, since I'm using a pen name (I've always wanted a pen name) I got another Fiverr provider to make me a portrait for my amazon profile, which I think is hilarious. Just look at that dapper, thin lipped New Englander.

I'd like to add more about promotion, but I'm just starting to work on that. So far I've really only made a few submissions in appropriate, self promotion friendly subreddits. Even then, only posting after being absolutely sure I was following the rules of the subreddit. If you want to see what those posts look like, just check out this account's submission history.

Also, finishing this project seems to have given me some momentum. I'm well into my next book, and still loving it.

For anyone who wants to check out How To Take Over The World, its free through the 23rd. I'm pretty proud of it. (that promo is over, but more are coming!)

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