Timothy's Thoughts

   Pencil Drawing  P ublishing a coloring book seems like it might be a fun thing to do. I saw an article on eHow [1] in which Lesley Barker gave a process for doing it, starting with purchasing ISBNs from Bowker. From there, the article pretty much gave the general self-publishing process, with the exception of number two, which said to scan your artwork into the computer and save it as a jpeg. Lesley Barker’s article falls well short of a complete description of what must be done to publish a coloring book. Obtaining an ISBN and selecting a publishing company (a choice that will determine whether you even need to purchase an ISBN or not) are the least of your worries if you plan to publish a coloring book.  Ink Tracing of Pencil Drawing  The heart of a coloring book are the pictures. Creating a coloring book isn’t as simple as grabbing some of the free coloring sheets you find online and binding them in a book. Not only would it be illegal for you to copy ...

N ick Harrison made an interesting comment on his blog concerning an author he rejected a few years back, “Alas, Harvest House has not had much success with genre fiction (other than Amish historical romance), so I had to say no.” [1] Realizing that I have a few books at home with Harvest House on the spine and knowing that I don’t read Amish historical romance, I kind of wondered at this. So, to satisfy my curiosity, I went over to Amazon.com to see what Harvest House had to offer. The first seven books they displayed were Amish and so were the last two of the remaining five. What were the other three? All were books written by Lori Wick, including The Princess , a book that I own. I’m not sure what to make of this. I’m sure the folks over at Harvest House are scratching their heads as much as I am, wondering why Amish is the only thing they can manage to do. It becomes almost comical when you do a search for Harvest House books that aren’t Amish. Ten of the first twelve are by Lo...

A ll you folks out there who have been looking for a place to submit your work, you really need to check out this site. http://www.math.pacificu.edu/~emmons/JofUR/ I considered waiting a couple of months to post this, but I felt it just couldn't wait.

S ometimes I hate Amazon.com. While you can’t find every book on the planet there, they come close enough. I sometimes peruse their stacks to see what other authors are writing in my topic area. I’ll see a book and think, “I was going to write about that.” I’ll look at the one next to it, “well there’s another one.” You don’t have to look at Amazon.com very long to realize that all the good topics are already taken—and most of the not so good topics. Let’s face it, with over 1 million new books published every year, every topic has to be covered by someone. But what does that mean to those of us who have chosen to join this fray? Other writers aren’t going to politely defer to us so that we can write our book. Nor can we defer to them. What that means is that we are going to find ourselves writing books that have significant overlap with what other authors say about the same subject. It isn’t what you say, but how you say it. You’ve heard that all your life, but it is no more evide...

M y latest book is now available on Amazon.com. It is called Book Cover Design Wizardry:For the Self-Publishing Author . This book give detailed instructions on how you or anyone else can create a book cover for very little money. In fact, the primary tools are free. This book is printed in full color with more than 250 illustrations.

W hat makes a great self-publishing project? Novels typically don’t. We know that the most successful self-publishing projects are usually those in which the author is a speaker and can sell his books at the back of the room. Well, a friend told me about another kind of project that seems like it would make a great self-publishing project. He told me that his mother works in children’s ministry at church. As part of the ministry, she make use of puppets. She has been writing her own scripts—hundreds of them—and giving them out to other people to use. I believe this makes a great self-publishing project because the work of writing the scripts is already done or would be done anyway as a part of her ministry. All that really needs to be done is for someone to bind them in books and make them available for people to buy. The editing is already done. There is no need for her to try to convince a publisher to take on the project. She can put the scripts out there for very little cost to ...

W hat’s next? For the first time in a long time, I’ve finished a project without knowing for sure what I want to do next. Perhaps that is the problem with finishing a project so quickly. I didn’t have time to think about projects I would like to be working on instead. So, I’m not sure what I’ll be writing next. I think I would like to try my hand at mystery. I’ve always loved a good mystery and I’ve got a plot that is beginning float around in my head. I would also like to finish out Sara’s series. It currently has four books in it, but I want one more. I started one last year, but it seemed too weak and I put it aside. I want to finish the series strong. Maybe now is the time to just let thing simmer for a while and then go to work on what floats to the top.

A re you finished? Finishing a project is such a strange thing. I think it is especially strange with self-publishing. I recently finished another book or perhaps you can say that that I’m in the process of finishing it. I had some time away from my regular job around Christmas, so I made use of that time to write. It is amazing how much you can accomplish when you have eighteen hours a day that you can use for whatever you want. I didn’t spend all of that time writing, but enough of it that it gave me a good start. Then in the days that followed that, I used whatever time I could find to continue the project. It was all just hard work. There were things that needed to be done. I finished the first draft and I started on the cover. It took me a good 36 hours of labor to complete the cover. I figure that means I saved myself at least $500 by doing it myself, but at last, I finished it. I went through the book, correcting the mistakes I found. Then I created the PDF files from the cover ...

S ometimes I wonder why I can’t keep my big mouth shut. On Sunday, I got into a short discussion with writers Cheryl Hodd and Diann Hunt over the use of stock photos on their website. Diann seemed to take it fairly well, but I got the impression that Cheryl was a little upset with me. The thing is, I could’ve gone on my merry way without saying a word and not upset either one of them. But here’s the thing, there seems to be a misunderstanding about the use of stock images. Most of the stock images you find online fall into a category that is known as royalty free . The confusion is that people seem to think that because the image is royalty free they don’t have to pay for it. That is not the case. Royalty free means that licensed users of the image don’t have to pay royalties. In other words, once they have purchased the image, they can use the image as many times as they like without having pay any additional fees. If you were to use such an image on a book, you could print 100 o...

S itting there among your new e-mail messages, you see a name you don’t recognize. And though the wording is always different it is always the same, “I need your advice.” What do you do? I ask that as a rhetorical question. Of course, you respond to it. It’s the right thing to do. You don’t turn your back on someone asking for help. And yet, that is exactly what we see happen so often. I’ve lost count of how many blog posts I’ve read in which a literary agent is arguing that he/she shouldn’t be expected to respond to every e-mail and query they receive. While their logic sounds correct, are they right? I’m reminded of the parable Jesus used to address the question of “who is my neighbor?” We know that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, but who is our neighbor? We usually call this the parable of the good Samaritan . A man fell among thieves and was in great need, lying half dead on the side of the road. First, a priest came, but seeing the man, he passed by on the other side. ...

W riting a post for Girls Write Out , Kristin Billerbeck recently wrote, "As any author with tell you, reviews can be unfair, scathing and downright rude. As a writer of frothy, romantic fiction, it does make me wonder how such things can make a reviewer angry, especially when they get the book for free, but angry, some of them are." She went on to suggest that publishers should "nix these reviewers from [their] cache" and to say that she doesn't read most of her reviews because they keep her from doing what God wants her to do. She states, "every book that gets published has SOMETHING worth saying or the pub wouldn't have produced it. The reviews on the other hand? Cost a person nothing and no one holds a reviewer accountable for ugly, scathing words."   First, let me say that I mostly agree with her assessment of the situation. I'll also have to admit that I've been fortunate and haven't have many truly scathing reviews, but I don...

W hen you think about the 1,000,000 books published last year and the 1,000,000 more that will be published this year, do you feel like you’re fighting the tide? You want your book to succeed, but it is literally one of a million. Even with approximately 230 million book readers in US, the competition for book sales is tough. We can’t help but envy authors who are selling more books than we are. Or can we? I would like to submit that this envy is a result of having the wrong attitude. Imagine, if you will, that you are a rancher with many head of cattle. It is a cold winter day, so you have to go around and break the ice to give the cattle something to drink. You go to work doing that, but your son decides he will help. Of the ten watering troughs, you break the ice in three, but he rushes around and is able to get to seven. Do you envy him because he accomplished more than you? Of course not. The cattle will have water either way and you can get out of the cold sooner. Suppose we lo...

S trange though it may seem, I’m nearing completion on my work in progress. Last year, I worked on a novel for much of the year, decided the story wasn’t working and pulled an old manuscript out of the closet. I did significant rework on it, so I wasn’t sure I would publish a book at all in 2010, but on December 18 Mother Not Wanted was published. Tomorrow marks the one-month anniversary, so maybe I shouldn’t allow myself to feel that frustration that my post on Friday showed. But already I’m talking about releasing my latest work in progress. We aren’t even a month into the new year. It is to my advantage that this book is non-fiction. I’m optimistic that this book will sell more copies than Church Website Design: A step by step approach . If you’re keeping tabs, Church Website Design is my bestselling book and is keeping my publishing endeavors in the black. But the market for a book like that is much smaller than the potential market for this new book. This new book is aimed at s...

W riting is fun. Selling books is frustrating. I suppose the thing about writing is that you don’t have to rely on anyone else to accomplish your goals. Sure, you may have come critique partners or an editor who has some input into the project, but if they’re too busy to look at it, you don’t have to wait on them. You can keep writing and in time, the project is complete. Selling books isn’t that way. At some point, we put our books out there in the world. We want people to buy them, but there’s really nothing we can do. We tell people about our book. “Hey, here’s a link to Mother Not Wanted .” We beg people to buy the book, “Please, please, please, buy my book .” Of course, we don’t actually beg. We want to maintain the aloofness of being an author. We’re supposed to be above that. We aren’t, but we don’t want people to know that. We add a link to the book on our blog and our website. Surely, our blog readers will buy the book. We tell our friends and family about the book. Sure, o...

D on’t write the stuff that I don’t want to read, or so seems to be the admonition of Nick Harrison’s mom [ 1 ]. In what he wrote, he was talking about chapter length. Personally, I think chapter length is a rather arbitrary indicator, but we do need to be careful about writing stuff that people don’t want to read. I think we run into problems because we are trying to fill in the gaps. We aren’t really saying anything interesting, but we’re not willing to stop writing. In part, that could be because we’re looking to fill out a chapter. If our goal is ten pages per chapter and we are four pages in, our temptation will be to keep beating the dead horse until we get our ten pages. But being willing to end our chapters sooner doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eliminate the stuff people don’t want to read. I’ve seen books with whole chapters that I didn’t want to read. We often feel the need to explain things that don’t need explaining. On that note, I will end this post.

I s there no respect for the dead? Is there no respect for the great loss that our country has suffered? The dead weren’t even in the ground when people started trying to turn the Arizona shooting into something that would give them a political advantage. Why must we turn this tragedy into a fight over gun control? The great tragedy is that people went out to take part in the political process of our country and were gunned down because of it. We mourn because of this tragedy. Give us time to mourn. Can’t we set aside the political rankling for long enough for our country to reflect on this tragedy? The choice of weapon doesn’t matter. We should all be appalled that anyone would attack our country by attacking one of our elected leaders. Whatever the gunman’s reason for hating her, he not only attacked her and those around her, but he attack us and our country. This isn’t a Democrat or Republican thing, this is a United States of America thing. Let’s not make it anything other than tha...

L eadership is a favorite topic of people these days. I suppose we all want to think of ourselves as leaders and to feel in control. I follow a number of blogs, including that of Michael Hyatt. He often writes about leadership and I’ve noticed that some of the people who follow his blog write about leadership. There’s a lot to be said about leadership, but today I want to cover a topic on leadership that I don’t expect I’ll see on Michael Hyatt’s blog or that of most of the people who talk about leadership. To state it in the most simple terms, Leaders have no business drinking alcohol. I’m sure you recall that Paul gave the qualifications pastors and deacons in I Timothy 3 and Titus 1. Of the pastors he said “not given to wine” and of deacons he said, “not given to much wine.” And you may be thinking, “I know what it says, but I don’t really think that means pastors aren’t supposed to drink at all and it certainly doesn’t mean that other leaders shouldn’t drink.” You wouldn’t be alon...

T he magic number on word count seems to be 80,000. When I outline a book, I base the word count goal for each section on that number. Some genres tend to be longer than that. Some genres tend to be short than that. For me, that is about the length of book I want to read. If you self publish, you can use whatever word count you want. But for traditional publishing, I figure that if I submit a manuscript complete at 80,000 words I have the option of going either way with it. If the publisher wants more, I can put in some work and add more. Adding another storyline could easily add 20,000 words, putting the number at 100,000. On the other hand, if the publisher is looking for a novella, removing one of the two storylines in an 80,000-word book might be enough to bring the total word count below 50,000. But if you must know, I tend to exceed my word count goals. I do pretty well on first drafts because I can just quit writing when I reach the limit of a section, but in revision the word ...

M ost blogging literary agents discuss the proper way to write a query letter at some point or another. Some literary agents dedicate their blogs to that purpose, reviewing query letters and redlining anything they see wrong. Authors seeking publication seem to hang on every word. However, in response to a post by Rachelle Gardner that stated that she had received 10,000 query letters last year and had taken on 0 new clients as a result of those query letters, an Anonymous commenter said: That's why it's so funny - it's like the lie has been put to the whole query thing. What I always thought I knew instinctively about this aspect of publishing is true - the query system is a fruitless endeavor. The stats bear this out. All the blog posts, and all the discussion, and all the fussing about what particular agents prefer in a query - it amounts to nothing. It demonstrably amounts to nothing, according to these statistics. There is a little truth in what this person said. ...

I ’ve been putting this off for some time, but as I mentioned the other day, the trend seems to be away from blogs and back toward newsletters. The belief seems to be that real readers are more likely to sign up for a newsletter than what they are to follow a blog. I can believe that most readers would prefer to receive information less frequently and are looking for different information than most of the people who follow author blogs. Most readers aren’t interested in hearing the struggles of getting published or how to outline a story or what the writer is doing to get a character out of one conundrum or another. Readers couldn’t care less about the differences between the POD printing process and the offset printing process. So, I’ve decided to follow the trend and I am initiating a newsletter that will include none of those things. Instead the primary focus will be on things that I believe people who read books as a hobby will enjoy reading. As I write this, I’m still working on ...

A few weeks ago, I received a request from someone who had come across the popular Review: Westbow Press post. This reader requested that I look at Raider Publishing . After asking this reader a few questions via e-mail, I learned that she had used them to publish a book and was disgruntled with them. One of her complaints was that Adam Salviani was not responding to her e-mail and he was “unavailable” when she called his office in New York. This was brought on by her concern because she had not received an advance copy of her book and found that it had been published without her being informed. In her e-mail, she stated that she had been in contact with other customers and they had received the same treatment. I did what I normally do when I receive a request like this concerning a company I don’t recognize. I looked for as much third-party information as I could find on the web. Interestingly, I did that search before I realized she was disgruntled and I found relatively little to...

Then said he also to him that bade him, When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor [thy] rich neighbours; lest they also bid thee again, and a recompence be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just. – Luke 14:12 T his is one of my favorite sayings of Jesus. I remember hearing it as a child and it has stuck with me. Now, I don’t believe that Jesus is saying that we should never invite our friends, or influential people over for dinner or supper. He isn’t saying we shouldn’t take our co-workers to dinner and pick up the tab, if we feel so inclined, but he is making a point about the reward we will receive. And I think it can apply to more than just eating. Look at the things we do and why we do them. Often, when we invite our family over for a meal, it is bec...

B ook covers are an important part of the book. We know that the story will be just as good, no matter what the cover looks like, but covers are an important part of our marketing strategy. We often think in terms of a brick-and-mortar store. A reader would have a hard time finding a book if he walked into the store and they all had white covers with black text. So, our main objective with a cover is to convince the reader that he wants to consider the book. Often, a reader will reject a book because of its cover and occasionally a reader will purchase a book because of its cover. In reality, most of us need not be concerned about what the reader sees in a bookstore as much as we’re concerned with what the reader sees online. Even if your book is in a bunch of bookstores, it may be hidden among the stacks and no one will notice it unless they are looking for it. More and more readers are discovering books online before they decide to make a purchase. That means that they are making p...

E diting is one of those things that is a staple of the publishing industry, but what is its purpose and how should it be handled? We’ve all heard stories of editors who went through a manuscript and changed just about everything. We’ve also heard authors talk about how they look forward to working with an editor because they know that writing is a cooperative effort and their manuscript will be improved with the input of others. Personally, I think that is mostly aspiring authors trying to impress agents with how grown up they are, but they say it nonetheless. My question is, should we even be looking at editing in that way? Publishers Want Good Work If you want to make a publisher’s day, walk into his office with a flawless manuscript that includes a great story and the name of a well known author on the cover. He’ll love you even more if it is already typeset and ready to go to press. But walk into his office with a great story that still needs quite a bit of editing and he’ll pass....