Timothy's Thoughts

F ear often accompanies change, so it should be no surprise that many people fear some of the changes in the publishing industry. Self-publishing appears to be the wave of the future. In fact, more books were self-published last year than were published through traditional publication. Big publishers are moving to provide self-publishing avenues. Many people fear that the market will now be flooded with self-published books. Some people are afraid that books won’t have to go through the vetting process and readers will have to sort through a bunch of junk that looks like a slush pile. Some people talk about how there will be fewer big successes in publishing. All of this fear comes from not knowing what the future holds. A lot of people’s worries are because they don’t really understand where this change is coming from. The current changes we are seeing are driving completely by technology, but people don’t understand the technology, what the technology can do and what it can’t. The cu...

O kay guys and gals, I’m looking for self-published novels, specifically from WestBow Press, CrossBooks Publishing and (I’m sure I’ll regret this) from Harlequin Horizons (or DellArte Press or whatever they call themselves). Authors with a book published through one of these imprints or if you are in the process of publishing a book with one of these imprints, please attempt to persuade me to read you book by leaving comments to this post. If I select your book, I may be writing comments about it on this blog in the near future. Also, tell me which publishing package you chose and why. NOTE 1: You may want to peruse this blog and consider what kind of books I am likely to like and what will offend me. Failure to do so may result in a flaming review. NOTE 2: This offer stays open until…well, until I decide to close it.

P ick one of the arts, it doesn’t matter which one, and you’ll find that it’s hard to make money at it. O, you’ll find a few people who do well, but the vast majority struggle at it. Writing is a form of art and most novelists struggle to make money at it. Painting is an art and most painters struggle to make money at it. But ironically, a skilled house painter can make a steady living without too much trouble. How do we reconcile this disparity? And why is it that it’s easier to make money with non-fiction than it is with fiction? This won’t be popular with some people, but part of the problem is that anyone who wants to do it can do it. It takes no special skill to complete a painting and call it art. Other people may look at it and say that call it ugly, but they can’t say you didn’t complete the painting. Contrast that to a house painter. If he finishes his work and he has paint on the glass windows and the old paint is still showing through the new, we can say he didn’t complete t...

W e assume that our work will be scrutinized. Why would we write if we didn’t think people would read it and why would we do revisions if we thought people could discern the story from our ramblings in the first draft?  No, as we write, we assume that someone will come back later and question why we wrote something.    Of the four writer’s drafts, the third draft falls under the most scrutiny from readers. This is the draft in which we are primarily concerned with sentence and paragraph structure. Just the other day, I saw an article about Dan Brown's 20 Worst Sentences . I’m sure you’ve probably seen it. It mentions sentences like, “ Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop's ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué. ” (The Da Vinci Code, Chapter 5) And this one from chapter four: “ Five months ago, the kaleidoscope of power had been shaken, and Aringarosa was still reeling from the blow. ” While I laug...

F irst, let me say that I’ve got nothing against Thomas Nelson. I have several of their books in my library and if they were to offer me a publishing contract, I would certainly consider it, but recently there has been some discussion about big name publishers like Thomas Nelson and Harlequin venturing off into the self-publishing business because that appears to be the wave of the future. The question came up about what the world would be like if we didn’t have publishers like Thomas Nelson and all authors self-published. It’s a very good question, so as of today, I’m announcing that Thomas Nelson is closed. I’m locking the doors and all of its employees have been laid off, permanently. All of you authors who have manuscripts ready to submit—don’t bother. The age of self-publishing has begun. In this new age of self-publishing, everybody gets published. No more rejection letters and you can do it for as little as $0. No, that’s not a misprint. You may have to get some sof...

H ow often have we heard someone say, "I'm a writer and I hope to one day be an author?" The implication is that we are all writers, but we don’t become authors until we are good enough or we get that publishing contract or whatever. My claim is that anyone who has ever written something that comes from his own creative thought is an author. The author is the originator of the literary work. So maybe we have it backwards. Instead of being so focused on becoming an author, our goal ought to be to become a writer. I don’t mean to say that we must become a writer in the sense that we aren’t currently writers. If we write, we are writers, but we should focus on becoming better writers. We can’t become better authors. Either we are an author or we are not. Either we initiated the creative work or we did not. There is no in between. There is no better. But we have a lot of room to become better writers. I authored my first book in kindergarten by dictating it to a sixth g...

O n Facebook the other day, I saw a conversation the made me think. You may have seen it too, but an author who is in the process of revising a book based on an editor's suggestions asked the question of whether it would be better to say "came barreling out of nowhere" or "barreled out of nowhere." The author had originally written "came barreling out of nowhere," but the editor had flagged it and suggested that he write "barreled out of nowhere" on the grounds that barreled is a stronger verb. I think the author finally decided to go along with the editor , but I’m going to make the argument that the author should have suggested the editor go take a hike . The first reason we should favor came barreling over barreled in this case is that we would never say “barreled out of nowhere” in everyday speech. I’ll get to why we wouldn’t say that in a moment, but for now, if normal people wouldn’t say something then our characters probably wou...