Being The Hero - Story Writing Strategies and Techniques

Writing Screenplays, Novels and Other Stories from the Hero’s Point of View

Controversy Surrounds New Novel Release

August 16th, 2009    Subscribe To Our Feed

With the ongoing financial crisis, the world’s population transfixing, restart a new controversy over the novel who are the real puppet masters. Even the Church of England form the secret society is located in thriller. While the authors, Marie H. Cohen and Thomas jie wacker, claim, one of the secrets of the novel, a simple and others don’t so sure.

This fiction novel revolves around the DeSwan bloodline and how they- through proxy- control government leaders while continuing to cause confusion in a type zero civilization. Twisted in his thinking, this dark warrior, Duncan DeSwan, that his actions will continue to reach a civilian in a civilization of peace and harmony can once again rule the world.

Where the novel a realistic response across groups selected from a novel easy-to-read, but the work of clever novel. Often the truth hides in plain sight, an act sparingly featured in the fiction novel download which in itself is full of secrets.

According to the New York Times, America’s FBI in conjunction with the British MI6 will both claim they do not comment on potential threats made against authors, but some sources state privately that a shadow-type world leadership does exist- is based in London and featured in the new fiction novel.

Both Crain and Wacker, authors of Secrets One - The Series, were unavailable for comment while their business attorney’s office, Philipp C. Theune, Esq. In Denver, Colorado, only will reaffirm the novel is a fictional novels. Names, characters, places and events products or use the author’s imagination fictitiously. In any event, the place with practical, or personnel, living or dead, completely is a coincidence.

The characters are some of the most solid I have read in the best thriller books in a long time. You actually find yourself enjoying Creel and listening to the inner workings of his mind. A real anti-hero, what kind of character you can see in the other books.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Furl
  • del.icio.us
  • Slashdot
  • Smarking
  • NewsVine
  • SphereIt
  • blinkbits
  • Reddit
  • Blue Dot
  • StumbleUpon
  • BlinkList
  • Spurl
  • Netscape

Posted in Novels | Top Of Page | Leave a Comment »

Site Search Tags: No Tags
Technorati Tags: No Tags
Related Tags: No Tags

Novel writing skills - how do you find time to write novels?

August 16th, 2009    Subscribe To Our Feed

Whenever an aspiring writer speaks to me about fiction novel writing tips, one of the most frequently asked questions is: how do you find the time to write?

The answer I want to give, “just do it,” doesn’t quite suffice. So in this article, we’ll examine the matter in a little more detail.

We live in a busy world, with numerous demands on our time: jobs, spouses, children, draining work commutes, TV shows we want to watch, emails to read and respond to, phone calls to family and friends. When you look at your daily schedule, it may appear that you simply don’t have time to write.

Well, I’ve got both good and bad news for you.

The good news: Even in a very short time, you can still complete the work. The bad news? Something in your lifestyle will have to suffer, or change, to accommodate your fiction novel writing.

There is no shortcut, no easy answers. You’ve got to get creative–and motivated.

For example, do you get a lunch break at your job? Notepad and you started to use the time - even if only 30 minutes - work on your story. You work through the commuter carpool, bus, or subway? Not read newspapers, listen to music on the iPod, plug in your novel.

One of the keys to productivity is to learn how to identify those pockets of free time during the day, and then benefit from the use of their. This is not like you may want to. In fact, when you really check your schedule, you may be surprised at how much can be achieved.

Can you do some new fiction book writing while your children are playing, eating, or napping? You can not smear or a decision a few paragraphs, while waiting in line somewhere? Zip out some prose as you wait for dinner to cook?

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Furl
  • del.icio.us
  • Slashdot
  • Smarking
  • NewsVine
  • SphereIt
  • blinkbits
  • Reddit
  • Blue Dot
  • StumbleUpon
  • BlinkList
  • Spurl
  • Netscape

Posted in Screen Play | Top Of Page | Leave a Comment »

Site Search Tags: No Tags
Technorati Tags: No Tags
Related Tags: No Tags

5 Copywriting Tips To Boost Responsiveness

August 16th, 2009    Subscribe To Our Feed

Here are five simple, yet effective tips to help you write more persuasive copy.

Number One:
Your copy should relate well to your reader and speak their language. Always write ‘to’ your reader and not ‘at’ them.

The best copy will relate to your prospective market… understand thier fears, problems and desires.

Number Two:
Grab your readers’ attention right away!

It doesn’t matter if your writing a promotional email or a sales letter, you have a short period of time to convince your readers’ to keep reading.

Highlighting your product’s or service’s benefits are important. You need to focus their attention on the headlines and subject lines if you want to captivate your readers.

Number Three:
Use bullets that highlight benefits and not just features.

Many readers’ will scan your copy rather than read it word for word. This is why it’s important that you get right to the heart of the matter and tell the reader ‘what’s in it for them.’ Using short ‘bullets’ helps your reader find out what’s important.

Number Four:
Use time-tested persuasion tactics to boost response rates.

While there are many things that can improve your response rates, two tactics have been proven to work again and again.

First, you want to ‘reduce risk’ by offering a genuine satisfaction guarantee.

Some marketers may want to shy away from this but the truth is, your customers are likely to get a refund if they complain to their credit card company anyway so you might as well offer a great guarantee.

A good guarantee will reduce concerns, and remove a barrier that will result in increases in conversion rates.

In addition to this, anything you can do to add an element of ’scarcity’ to your offer will boost responsiveness as well.

You might consider offering a limited number of items, running a sale with a definitive ending date or anything that can cause your readers to ‘lose out’ if they don’t take action right away.

Number Five:
Make your ‘call to action’ clear and obvious.

This is where many marketers blow it!

They write a pretty good piece of sales copy that highlights the benefits of the product and then they ‘chicken out’ when it comes time to ‘ask for the sale.’

Don’t be afraid to ’spell out’ exactly what you would like the reader to do next! Don’t make this mistake… make your calls-to-action clear and assertive.

Whatever you are trying to sell or promote, these five copywriting tips will help you write copy that will get read more often and make more sales! To learn more make sure you check out this site Copywriting Help.

 

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Furl
  • del.icio.us
  • Slashdot
  • Smarking
  • NewsVine
  • SphereIt
  • blinkbits
  • Reddit
  • Blue Dot
  • StumbleUpon
  • BlinkList
  • Spurl
  • Netscape

Posted in Novels | Top Of Page | Leave a Comment »

Site Search Tags: No Tags
Technorati Tags: No Tags
Related Tags: No Tags

Writers & Reading Conditions

July 19th, 2009    Subscribe To Our Feed

You’ve worked hard to capture your thoughts and write them down. But don’t stop now, because you should also exercise your communication skills in determining where your writing will be read.

Let’s say you’re writing for people who work in a manufacturing plant, so you’ll have a plan for that. On the other hand, if those people are administrative staff working in offices you’ll likely take a different approach.

More specifically, if you’re writing for difficult reading conditions, such as a factory floor, you’ll focus on simplicity and ease of reading. Given the noise and distractions in such areas, you’ll focus on just a few key points, use larger font sizes, and so on.

People in offices enjoy a more reader friendly environment, so you have the liberty of stylizing your document. Fonts can be smaller than those used for communication with the factory floor, for example. Color is a useful tool in office environments, but on the factory floor plain black and white will be more effective.

Don’ overlook the issue of lighting. High gloss paper may look good, but it may reflect and make reading harder in brightly lit offices, and harder reading means the document won’t get as much attention as one that is easy to read.

For example, if you publish a printed newsletter, you should ask yourself where it will be read. If a majority of your readers are in harsh or very bright reading environments, then go with non-glossy paper.

One other note: Will your document be an email message, or a printed document? Recipients generally treat email as disposable, but written letters as permanent records. That may not be your view, but write for posterity when you write for print.

In summary, don’t assume your printed message will necessarily be read. Instead, think of the reading conditions involved, so you can structure your message and medium to make it easy for your readers. Make it easy for them, and they’re far more likely to respond.

Get more great communication ideas at Business Writing Skills .

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Furl
  • del.icio.us
  • Slashdot
  • Smarking
  • NewsVine
  • SphereIt
  • blinkbits
  • Reddit
  • Blue Dot
  • StumbleUpon
  • BlinkList
  • Spurl
  • Netscape

Posted in Screen Play | Top Of Page | Leave a Comment »

Site Search Tags: No Tags
Technorati Tags: No Tags
Related Tags: No Tags

A Clear Strategic Vision for Your Writing or Speaking

July 6th, 2009    Subscribe To Our Feed

How can you develop a clear, strategic vision for your writing or speaking project? In other words, how can you find a clear path to your goals? A couple of the following tips will help:

For starters, remind yourself you’re investing time and or money into this communication exercise, and so you should expect a return of some kind. In other words, what is the objective? Now, go one step further and articulate that objective in terms of reader or audience response. Write down what they will do if you successfully use your communication skills on them.

Follow up by clarifying for yourself why your audience should do what you’re asking of them. It’s one thing to have objectives, and it’s quite another to serve readers’ objectives as well as your own. You need to make your audience or readers aware of WIIFT – What’s In It For Them.

Does this sound like a lot of work? Well, it is. But, ask yourself how much value you get if you rush off and do something without thinking it through.

Consider the case of the publisher who published two newsletters. The first went ahead quickly, with little strategic planning. Instead, the publisher was concerned with matters like color, typefaces, and so on. That was a mistake; the newsletter died after perhaps six or eight issues, and accomplished little.

Before starting the second newsletter, the publisher carefully worked through all the strategic issues. In fact, he started on the newsletter project in May and didn’t publish the first issue until September. He didn’t work full time at it, but still a lot of hours went into clarifying the strategy.

And, it worked. More than five years later, he was still publishing it every week, and it did the job it was developed to do.

In summary, your communication project has a greater chance of success if you take time up front to identify and articulate your objectives, as well as the desired reader response.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Furl
  • del.icio.us
  • Slashdot
  • Smarking
  • NewsVine
  • SphereIt
  • blinkbits
  • Reddit
  • Blue Dot
  • StumbleUpon
  • BlinkList
  • Spurl
  • Netscape

Posted in Screen Play | Top Of Page | Leave a Comment »

Site Search Tags: No Tags
Technorati Tags: No Tags
Related Tags: No Tags

Online Book Marketing - How Many of These 5 Rules Are You Breaking?

July 6th, 2009    Subscribe To Our Feed

Online Book Marketing

The more I work with writers to help them get the ins and outs of online book marketing, the more I realize that there are five basic and fundamental mistakes that 90% of authors consistently make.

If you don’t fall victim to these five book marketing fiascoes, you’ll be ahead of the pack…light years ahead. So, here are five things to avoid when marketing your books online:

1. Flawed Keyword Research

This is the #1 big kahuna and the place where 99% of authors quite simply stuff it up.

Most authors — including the ones I’ve worked with — haven’t had success using the Internet to market their books simply because they don’t approach the process the way someone who’s used to selling things online would do it. Namely, there’s almost never a plan put in place that will allow them to find, target and eventually dominate a set of keywords that are related to their books.

In order to have success online, you need to familiarize yourself with the concept of long-tail keywords; to understand how to analyze your competition; and how to know, with almost certainty, how much traffic a particular keyword gets.

Lucky for us there are tools available that will do all three. You can find that at the bottom of this article — just follow the links. Make sure you check them out.

2. Too Little Content

Surprisingly enough, even prolific authors with many books to their credit — gifted authors who can write volumes on their area of expertise — somehow think that they can skate by online with just a couple pages (or even paragraphs!) of content.

Untrue.

Here’s the deal: Google and the other search engines LOVE content-rich sites.

This is why mega-sites like Wikipedia and others are able to get all that traffic. Google’s index includes millions of pages from their site.

How many pages from your site does Google know or care about? A guess would be somewhere between two on the low end and five on the high end.

You’ll never rank well for anything other than your name with that kind of site. Bottom line: if you shortchange people online, you’ll destroy your reputation in a heartbeat.

Stop looking at your site as though it were a high-tech dust jacket. Solve a problem for someone — that’s what your book does, right? So do it online, and do it for free, before you start asking people to buy your book.

3. Not paying enough — or any — attention to Social Marketing & Web 2.0

If you haven’t noticed, the Internet is changing. In the past few years alone, outfits such as YouTube, Digg, Squidoo, Facebook.com — and, of course, Twitter — have dramatically shifted the way we interact online.

We’ve been through a seismic shift in the way news and information is not only delivered, but also in how it’s filtered — the “average guy” sitting in a cubicle in his office can catapult a story to the top of the news, no matter what some out-of-touch editor somewhere happens to think about it.

You should be using the sites mentioned above. If you’re not, you’re missing out on one of the biggest opportunities for authors in generations.

(Just check out the links I’ve given you below for the resources that will make it easy to find tons of sites that can help you sell more books.)

4. Ignoring the Importance of Building a Fan Base

It’s amazing how many writers don’t jump on the most powerful online marketing tool there is — the ability to build a base of support and loyal fans through tools like mailing lists, or “followers” on Twitter, or subscribers to an RSS feed, or any number of other methods that traditional Internet marketers use all the time.

Why is this important? Because it’s always true that people who already know your work and like it will be much easier to sell more “stuff” to.

If someone has been won over — if they’ve gone ahead and bought one of your books — then selling them books two through four (or more) is that much easier.

But when you don’t have a system in place to reach those people who bought your first book, you’ll be going through the entire process of attracting and acquiring new readers over and over and over again.

Wouldn’t it be much more efficient to just write and send an email or two to people who are already fans of yours?

Or simply to create a blog post to announce another book?

This is how authors are able to build empires.

5. Trying to Sell Your Book

Huh? This is a mistake? But that’s the point, isn’t it?

Sometimes.

The argument basically goes like this: Of course you want to use the Internet to sell copies of your book. BUT, you don’t want to ignore the relationship-building aspect of what you’re doing, because it’s these relationships, and the loyal fans you’ll naturally develop out of them, that will wind up being the base of people who buy basically whatever you put out (without being “marketed to”).

What would you prefer — selling a couple of books a day now, or selling thousands of books every day to throngs of adoring fans a year from now?

Stop all the struggling.

There’s no reason why you can’t build an information empire the same way thousands of Internet marketers have done. You might want to think about how you could benefit if you stopped trying to just sell one or two books every now and then. Start focusing on creating killer content and getting it out to the very people who need your expertise.

Sales (like you’ve never experienced before!) will inevitably follow closely behind.

If you’re not making a full-time income selling your books online, you’re missing something.

There’s no doubt in my mind that at least 9 out of 10 authors make vital — but ultimately avoidable — mistakes when trying to market books online.

Want to find out if you’re one of them? Visit this free online book marketing blog and finally realize what the “Ten-Percenters” know that you don’t.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Furl
  • del.icio.us
  • Slashdot
  • Smarking
  • NewsVine
  • SphereIt
  • blinkbits
  • Reddit
  • Blue Dot
  • StumbleUpon
  • BlinkList
  • Spurl
  • Netscape

Posted in Novels | Top Of Page | Leave a Comment »

Site Search Tags: No Tags
Technorati Tags: No Tags
Related Tags: No Tags

« Previous PageNext Page »