An Old Review, and Draft2Digital

In today’s Journal

* Quotes of the Day
* Sentence Length
* An Old Review Is New Again
* You DO Know About Draft2Digital, Right?
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Quotes of the Day

“For whatever weird reason my mind wanted to write a ‘sweet romance’ genre story and it grew into a [short novel of 26786 words] of all things. Go figure. I stayed the hell out of the way and let this character tell her story…. I’ve never written romance and I don’t write romance—I’m strictly a speculative fiction guy—but there you go.” George Kordonis

I love testimony like this. Thanks, George.

“I must think I get paid by the ‘and’. I’ll work on that.” Anonymous (a writer friend’s response after I mentioned how breaking up longer sentences can help with pacing)

Sentence Length

Remembering that

• longer and less-punctuated sentences convey more and stronger emotion, that
• shorter sentences evoke a sense of drama, and that
• overdoing either one will dilute the effect,
• shorter sentences, like shorter paragraphs and shorter chapters, enhance pacing.

An Old Review Is New Again

I’ve long held that real poetry is nothing special, meaning it isn’t something the reader must work to understand. It isn’t something that must be “interpreted,” for example.

Through the words the poet chooses and the arrangement of the poetic lines, the poet strives to convey a message.

What a poem “means” is whatever the words convey, altered slightly by the experiences of the reader. So one poem, read by 100 different people, probably will have 100 different meanings, or at least 100 different shades of meaning.

With all of that in mind, when my Intimations of the Shapes of Things was released by WMJ Press in Chadd’s Ford, PA back in the 1990s, one of the reviewers we sent it to was Professor Joseph S. Salemi, PhD.

Dr. Salemi was known as a tough critic, one more likely to do a hatchet job than to offer even the slightest bit of praise. But that’s what we (the publisher and I) wanted: a true test. And we got it.

My wife recently found the review among some other old papers, scanned it to PDF and sent it to me. I thought I’d offer it on the Free Archives page. I hope you’ll download it and read it.

If you are one who stopped reading poetry because you believe you “can’t understand it,” I hope you’ll try some of mine. It is neither boring nor haughty nor pretentious. And as such, it’s accessible, not obscure.

Good poetry is written for people who are interested in seeing the best possible words put in the best possible order to convey a message.

Dr. Salemi wrote a great review. To download and read it, click here.

You can also find the review in a centered link below the Other Gifts on the  on the Free Archhives page. and then click on the centered link below the Other Gifts.

And if you’d like to read the collection, Intimations of the Shapes of Things, email me and let me know which eformat you’d like. I’ll send it out. Free.

You DO Know About Draft2Digital, Right?

I was browsing the Kill Zone blog comments this morning, and ran across professional writers who still don’t use (or apparently even know about) D2D as a distributor. Of course, that also means they aren’t using Book2Read’s universal link. Frankly, I was amazed.

Unless you’re enrolling your books in Amazon Kindle Unlimited (a program that requires exclusivity for 3 months), you should be distributing through Draft2Diginal, period.

If I had it to do over again, here’s what I would do, and this is what I strongly recommend:

1. Enroll every novel, as it is completed, in Amazon KU.

2. When the 3-month exclusivity period is over, pull the novel from KU (not from Amazon completely) and upload it to D2D for extended worldwide distribution through other sellers in addition to Amazon.

3. For short stories, I would offer them only in five- and ten-story collections (either, not both), and yes, I would also go with them to KU first, then D2D. I wasted a ton of time publishing my stories individually.

Hint: If you do upload separately to Amazon, after your book is listed on D2D, click the universal book link (UBL) provided by D2D to be sure it also points to Amazon. If it doesn’t, you can manually add the Amazon link for your book to the B2R universal link.

Hint: If you have that kind of mindset and can WITD, you might also serialize your novel and upload segments to Amazon Kindle Vella. I haven’t done this yet, so I don’t know whether it requires exclusivity or how it would work with Amazon KU. Once I’m writing again the way I used to, I intend to serialize via Kindle Vella.

I suspect my friend Vin Zandri knows. Maybe he can enlighten me.

Any questions about D2D? Please don’t just skip over this broad distribution avenue. Ask me your questions (or ask D2D directly) so one or the other of us can ease your concerns.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

See “How AI-Generated Books Could Hurt Self-Publishing Authors” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/how-ai-generated-books-could-hurt-self-publishing-authors/. Check out the comments.

See “AI Training Permission” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/ai-training-permission/.

See “I Hear A Symphony” at https://killzoneblog.com/2023/08/i-hear-a-symphony.html. All about structure. Read, absorb, forget.

See “Kurt Vonnegut explains stories” at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nathan-baugh_in-4-minutes-kurt-vonnegut-explains-stories-ugcPost-7099399500183597056-iruG. My son sent me this.

The Numbers

The Journal……………………………… 900

Writing of Blackwell Ops 9: Cameron Stance
Brought forward………………………… 4087

Day 1…… 1595 words. To date…… 5682
Day 2…… 2101 words. To date…… 7783
Day 3…… 2573 words. To date…… 10356
Day 4…… 1588 words. To date…… 11944
Day 5…… 2135 words. To date…… 14079
Day 6…… 2019 words. To date…… 16098

Fiction for August……………………… 22614
Fiction for 2023………………………… 137161
Fiction since August 1………………… 22614
Nonfiction for August…………………… 19380
Nonfiction for the year……………… 169280
Annual consumable words………… 306441

2023 Novels to Date……………………… 2
2023 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2023 Short Stories to Date……………… 4
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………… 73
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)… 232
Short story collections…………………… 31

Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.