Tag Archives: Barbara Wallace

July 4, 2014 · 10:06 am

Is your writing a hobby, a job, or a business?

The last habit in Barbara Wallace’s article “Seven Habits of Effective Writers” in the June 2014 edition of RWA Romance Writers Report magazine, is to treat your writing career as you would a small business. Businesses grow and do well when they evaluate what sells, market to it, continue to learn through conferences and networking, and give the public – (read READER here) what they want, and never stop producing.

My dream used to be to sell a book. One book. I figured I’d be happy with that. One book would be a legacy for me, proof that I’d done what I set out to do: write a good book and get it published.

I realize now this isn’t enough. When I get my first adult book into print ( notice I said when, not if!) I know I will not sit back and go gently into the good night, resting on my one publishing laurel. No. I will need to continue writing, continue marketing, continue networking, learning, and growing as an author. I will learn more about the changing publishing business – and it is a business, after all, because you want people to read your work and to do that they have to buy it – and will adapt, and change as an author myself along the way. This is a career for me. It is the next chapter in my life and I want to be as successful at it as I have with the previous chapters and endeavors.

Before my work is ever published, I already have my marketing plan for it in place. I have my networks, contacts, mailing lists. I’ve set up my website, my Facebook account, and lined up my Twitter followers. I’m LinkedIn and Pinned, Googled and Blogged. I have my capital budget set up and know the price of advertising. I’ve flirted already with interviews and guest bloggings, and I’m ready to launch a book tour – virtual and real.

When I get “the Call,” I will be ready. This is serious business to me. And it is serious business to every other successful, effective author.

Read the first chapter of my award winning new contemporary romance book Cooking with Kandy. Click on this link for a preview: https://peggyjaeger.com/about/read-all-about-it-2/

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July 3, 2014 · 11:29 am

It takes a village…

Writers need several things to be successful: imagination, talent, and drive being core ones. But they also need balance between their professional writing lives and their personal ones, and they need essential people  they can depend on and who are supportive of them and their writing needs.

Mega published writer Barbara Wallace, in her June RWA article, “Seven Habits of Effective Authors” makes the case that writers need balance between their two worlds: the writing one and the non-writing, or personal, one. We all work. Whether it is inside the home or out of it, writing full-time or part-time. But we can’t write/work 24/7. We would be zombies if we didn’t get away from the “work” aspect for a while. Why do you think employers give vacation days to employees? They know you shouldn’t be sitting at a job all day every day without a break.  You need a balance between the two. Being with family and friends and enjoying the time spent together, doing things and relaxing, strikes a good balance between the solitary work of writing and this need for social interaction.

Along with balance comes support. Writers must cultivate support on many levels and along many different avenues. Having a supportive family who leaves you alone while you work at your writing is great; it’s a gift, actually. Anyone who can do the laundry for me to allow me an extra couple hours of writing time is a blessed person in my eyes. But your friends and critique partners are solid support systems as well. They will listen, with friendly and critical ears, to your ideas, plot problems, deadline needs, etc. and are excellent sounding boards. They can offer advice, questions for clarification, and just point out inconsistencies in your writing that you may not have seen. And everyone needs a good old fashioned bitch session every now and again, and who better than your girlfriends to join you? Hopefully, armed with chocolate and adult beverages!

Writing is a solitary endeavor, even when you have a writing partner. Being able to balance your life and have good, solid support systems surrounding you, are very good ways for you to be more effective in your writing.

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June 27, 2014 · 9:11 am

Effective Habit IV: Marketing wisely

If you listen to anyone under the age of say, 25, they will tell you Social Media rules the world. People meet, date one another, share info – personal and not – buy things, and generally live by their media outlets. Most of these outlets are as easy to get to as typing in a few keystrokes into a cell phone, which is, literally, at the ready and with you all the time now. Words like Retweet, Like, PinIt, Hash-tag, are all now vital parts of our vocabulary. Using social media is also a way writers can get the word out about their most recent creations.

In multi-published author Barbara Wallace‘s article Seven Habits of Effective Writers in the June 2014 RWA magazine Romance Writers Report, habit no. 4 makes the case that writers who write effectively – meaning they get a lot of writing work done – use social media tools and marketing judiciously. They don’t jump on every band wagon out there and send off daily updates on blogs, websites, Pinterest, Twitter and GoodReads, to name a few. They aren’t trolling  review sites, writer blogs or shopping on Ebay.

No. Effective writers WRITE. They use their time to put words on the page. Yes, they market what they’ve written. When the bottom line for publishing houses and even self publishers is sales, you have to get the word out about your new opus. But the point is, you don’t need to be doing this as a full time job. Your job is to write.

Some mega-published authors are lucky enough to have people who work for them who will do all this marketing/media for them. From my mouth to God’s ears this happens to me someday. Establishing some sort of presence on social media appears to be a very effective way to drive buzz about your work. Even if two or three friends “share” your news with their other hundreds of “friends” – friends you don’t necessary have – that’s a few hundred more people who know about your book then did this morning. If you send out twitter alerts on a regular basis and ask followers  to retweet to their followers, well, there’s that domino effect again.

Before cell phones ruled the world, marketing consisted of advertising in magazines, on tv, on the radio. Authors were sent on multi-city book tours to promote, talk about and sell their books. Now, you can do several web interviews in a day from the privacy of your living room, or even guest host on a blog site, which I did just last weekend. The opportunities to get the word out about your writing is so much easier than it ever was due to the advent of Social Media.

Using it in a wise and shrewd manner is another effective habit that I am going to adopt, because really, my job is to write! An I would rather be doing that.

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June 26, 2014 · 9:36 am

More effective writing habits, Part III

Knowing yourself and what you’re capable of, is a smart concept for everyone, but especially a writer.  Personally, I know two solid truths about myself: I love to write, and I am a world champion procrastinator. Those two facets of my personality have, in the past, clashed, with procrastination taking the lead  and proving to be detrimental to my writing.

Barbara Wallace’s article in the june 2014 RWA Romance Writers Report, lists 7 effective habits authors should have. Number 3 is all about knowing yourself.

I’ve mentioned before that I work at a paying job that takes me out of my home three days a week. I have two days during the regular work week off and then every saturday and sunday. This may sound like a lot of time to be able to devote to writing, but in the reality called life, it isn’t. On my days off from “work” I need to: grocery shop, clean the house, do the laundry, ironing and putting of the clean clothes away; run errands to: the bank, post office, credit union, dry cleaners, in addition to scheduling all doctor, dentist, hair dresser/manicure appointments. Thrown in are my feeble attempts to get a continuous form of exercise, not to mention paying bills, checking on  family members and throwing a little time in for eating and sleeping. I can usually accomplish most of what I need to do in one of those 4 days off.

So that leaves 3 days to write, correct?

No, it actually only leaves 1 because the weekends are sacrosanct for family time. And that one day? If I get to write for that whole day – 8 hours or more, uninterrupted – that’s a modern day miracle. I usually have to do something that has occurred that needs my immediate attention not named on the above list, and which can’t-for-any-reason-possible wait.

So, in reality, I usually get about 4- 5 uninterrupted hours per week to write. Now, that is SO not enough time to pump out a book, much less a blog.

So, knowing myself and my schedule as I do, I started planning the time to write, everyday, for at least 1-2 hours, beginning in january 2013. The time is usually split – before work and after on the days I leave the house, and when I am off, I try to do 4-5 hours, again split between everything else I need to do. I set a weekly goal of the number of pages,  scenes, or plot points I want to accomplish, and then eek out a little of it every day. I never feel overwhelmed to get everything done, because any time I can set aside for writing is, in my opinion, good time. And I usually do make my goals every week.

By doing this, I was able to complete three full length novels in 2013, plus write a blog about menopause,  find the time to do NANAWRIMO,  enter several contests, and joined my state chapter of RWA .And my personal life did not suffer one iota. In 2014 I set up this blog/website, joined the Twitter-verse, and have already finished 1 book completely, the second, halfway. Not bad.

Know thyself and to thine own self be true. Words to live by.

If you have a moment, check out my new blog page, Read All about it!

 

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June 24, 2014 · 10:04 am

Effective Habits, Part II

So the second effective habit Barbara Wallace talks about in her article in the June 2014 edition of RWA magazine is about establishing structure as a writer. Structure, when used here, doesn’t mean how you construct your stories. It refers to being consistent and regimented in how much you want to write every day.

Writing goals are wonderful yardsticks when you write. They can be anything from a daily word count, to how many scenes you want to do a day, to how many chapters you want to get on paper in a given time frame. On the days that I don’t go to my paying job, I routinely set a goal of 1000-2500 written words. They don’t have to be perfect, they just have to get written down. This translates, when I’m working on my WIP, to about 8-10 pages per day. Some days I write a great deal more, but I never write less. And if I’m not pounding it out on the novel, then I’d doing it in this blog. Most of my blog entries average between 600 and 900 words, so that’s a fair chunk of writing still, on those days the WIP isn’t going smoothly. Every November a competition called NANOWRIMO occurs. The acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month, and the goal is to write AT LEAST a 50,000 word novel in the month. I’ve done it for the past two years and both times I’ve exceeded the word count simply by setting a daily goal and sticking to it NO MATTER WHAT. This is the key to structure: doing what you’ve set out to do no matter what.

Many writers who are lucky enough to actually support themselves with their writing and do not have to have outside employment to survive, will all tell you the same thing: they treat writing as their 9-5 job. It may not occur exactly in those hours, but the reality is they work full 8 hour days or longer on their craft. Sitting down at the typewriter/laptop, and producing words-sentences-pages every day is how writers ,who are successful, write.

I’m a terrible deadline-er. This means that, 1. I hate deadlines, 2. I have never, ever, made one, and 3. I hate deadlines.I was that kid in school who always had their summer writing assignment done before july 4, who always had the term papers ready to be handed in at least a month before they were due, and I never studied the night before an exam. Never. I always had the full studying done long before that. In my adult life this hatred of deadlines shows its head in similar ways:  I amortized my mortgage so my house was paid for decades before it was supposed to be. I pay cash for most things because I do not like that monthly credit card statements that says “minimum due now,” and I am always ALWAYS early for work. How does this apply to writing? Well, if you give yourself daily goals, you will never be in that deadline crunch when you are furiously typing those last, critical pages for submission, and you can have the luxury of reading, re-reading and revising the work to make it the absolute best you can do.

Structure is a good thing. To a writer, it is essential.

 

 

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June 22, 2014 · 12:38 pm

More words of wisdom

I am a voracious reader of my monthly RWA magazine TheRomance Writers Report. The minute it arrives into my mailbox I am all over it.  An article in the June 2014 edition caught more than my eye – it spoke volumes to me as a romance writer. For the next several blogs I’m going to be dissecting the piece as it applies to me and my writing career.

Multi-published and talented writer, Barbara Wallace, in an article titled “Seven Habits of Effective Writers,” details  specific strategies writers should incorporate into their writing lives. The first is, basically, to write.

This may sound like common sense, but there are many distractions that can come along to prevent you from writing on a regular schedule.  In truth, you can’t  pen the all american great novel if you don’t sit down, get your but in the chair and type away. You can’t say “puff!” and your novel will magically appear in print. It MUST first be typed onto the page – or laptop screen. Let’s face it, if you are not employed as a writer -as I am not – finding the time to write can be difficult. Work obligations, children’s and  spouse’s needs, grocery shopping, laundry, and just dealing with the everyday stresses that being alive comes with it, can make carving some time out to write your book troublesome and problematic.

But….

If you really want to be a writer, you must write. Even if it’s for twenty minutes every night between supper and putting the kids to bed. Even if it’s on your lunch hour. I used to get up at 4 am just so I had two hours to myself before I had to get the family up to start the day. Saturday and sunday mornings were great because the members of my household liked to sleep in on those days. I recently attended a talk by famed writer Lisa Gardner, who shared with the audience that when she was beginning her career, she would write every night at eleven p.m. because that’s when she had alone, free time.

Whatever schedule you can devise that allows you to be working on your manuscript is up to you. As long as you do it consistently, regularly, and productively. It makes no sense to tell the family you’re going upstairs to the home office to write for an hour and then answer emails, check Twitter and Facebook, or be recruited into a particularly tedious game of Candy Crush. No. you are there to WRITE and that is all.

Personally, I consider everyday that I don’t write SOMETHING, a wasted day. Be it my blog, a character profile, or a scene in my current WIP. I schedule time for myself, away from everything and everyone, just so I can create. And I don’t think this is selfish, as a former friend  once told me she thought it was. Did you see the word former in that last sentence?

There’s an old saying that goes, “happy wife, happy life.” I want to change that up a little and declare, “happy writer, happy woman.”

 

 

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