Authors labor long and hard over a book, and once it’s been written and published, the next part takes a bit more work: promoting it. One of the best ways to entice readers is through offering excerpts.  

The Great American Novel

I won’t touch on how to pick the right excerpt from your book today. Instead, I’d like to show you a technical tip for posting them in a readable fashion. Fonts and special characters can cause real problems, especially when transferring them into email to send to a group.

Have you ever come across an excerpt that looks like this:
&*%$He loves her&*%$ it&*%$s obvious.&*%$

 It should read: “He loves her; it’s obvious.”

How easy was it to read that in the first sample above? Imagine an entire page like that! How long would you read before giving up and going to the next one?

When posting excerpts or quotes on a group message or bulletin board such as Yahoo! Groups, the service strips out curly quotes – the kind that curl one way in front and the other way in back. Many email programs replace these with the ascii code for that command.

A font that readers don’t possess can cause the same thing. For example, something frilly and fancy like a handwritten-looking font changes to courier with all the codes as above.

When posting, use Arial, Times, or Times New Roman, and turn off the curly quotes feature on your word processor. This will ensure your excerpts and posts come out readable and clear. I’m sure they look lovely on your computer, but how will they look online?

If you have questions or problems with posts, feel free to share them. If I can answer them, I will. If I can’t, I’ll do my best to find out from someone else. When you leave a comment, it will trigger a notice via my email, and I’ll drop in as soon as possible to post a response.

Seven Things to Avoid in Writing

Everyone writes books about how to write. You can find books on characters, plotting, grammar, and even how to murder. So there’s no point in me telling you about that stuff. So here’s what I’ve learned to avoid in order to write efficiently. Follow these important “do not’s” and you will be on your way to finishing that manuscript!

1. Do not let your cat sit on your keyboard. I can’t speak for all cats, but I can tell you that mine cannot write. She’s great at abstract poetry though. She once wrote “qwsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.” Doesn’t that speak to you? However, she also removes the keys from my keyboard. I can still type without the keys, as long as I remember what they were. Who remembers where that squiggly line used in Spanish words is without looking? I might need that, and the cat probably stole it.

2. Do not become an aerospace engineer. I mean this in the kindest way because I have engineers in my family. I tried AeroE, as we called it, in college. But let’s face it: anyone who would be interested in the gear ratio of an ultralight airplane is unlikely to write the next bestseller. Especially if you write romantic suspense like I do. This does not sound like a scene I’d want to read:

“Check out the gear ratio on my ultralight,” says Steve, the hero, flexing his gears.

Jane, the heroine replies, “Ooo. Your gear ratio is so sexy.”

3. Do not have a paying job. Fine, you may have one if you are Nora Roberts. She has made writing a profitable career choice. But you? You are an artiste, a creative soul, yet unpaid. Working sucks the soul out of you. Who needs money? When you work, you are too tired to write. After a day on the job, my energy level is only high enough to let my fingers crawl over the remote keys, or find the pizza delivery guy’s phone number. Let’s not get into staring at a screen for another three or four hours, when that’s what you did all day (unless it was trying to keep your eyes open during a marathon PowerPoint meeting).

4. Do not celebrate holidays. Right around Halloween, when the Christmas carols start playing in the department stores, you must be strong and resist the urge to shop, write cards, and make seasonal treats. It takes hours, days and weeks to do all these things. It’s like having another job, and you already have one: writing. Short holidays, like St. Patrick’s Day are okay, because it doesn’t take long to recover from a hangover.

5. Do not have children. I love children, I have two myself. But if you sit down to write and they’re home, it’s as if you made cookies. They instantly gather around. “When’s dinner?” or “Can my ‘screamo’ band practice here tonight?” is slightly better than one of them flipping on the TV, which happens to be showing your favorite romantic comedy, Pretty Woman. So, of course, I—I mean, you—must watch it. There went two hours of writing time down the drain. So maybe you should not have children or a TV.

6. The corollary to number 9: Do not have a husband. Okay, you can have a husband, but he can’t be at home anytime you’re writing. He’ll have to work opposite hours. Because as soon as you start writing, he will need to discuss some very important household thing. “Do you think we need more of that carpet cleaning stuff? You know, the kind that cleans up dog barf?” And whatever you do, don’t let him ask you to help with outdoor work. There is no such thing as a “15 minute” job when your husband is involved. Eight hours later, sunburned and exhausted, you will collapse in front of the TV. (Hopefully Pretty Woman will be on and you’ll kill two wasting events at once.) I’m sure there’s an equivalent to this for guys. It likely involves shoe shopping.

7. Do not eat or work out. These two things are paired because if you eat, you need to work out; and if you work out, you need to eat. Eliminate them both. Working out requires going to a gym and sweating. Eating involves shopping, preparing and sitting around the table with family, who do not want to talk about your latest romantic scene. In fact, if one of the family members is your college-age daughter, she doesn’t even want to read your books because she wants to maintain the illusion that she was created in a vacuum, not by her parents doing…well, you know.

Having friends is also another thing that interrupts writers. But, good grief, giving up friends crosses the fine line between being professional, and just being plain crazy.

I’m sure other writers can add to these important rules. What advice do you have?