Timothy's Thoughts

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...

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...

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 t’s a funny thing. As I was writing my latest book, I had an image of one of the characters in my head, but when I designed the cover, I didn’t quite match the image I had in my head. It was close, but it wasn’t quite the same. The nose was different. The eyes were different. The hair was different. But now, with the cover in front of me, the woman on the cover is the person I think of when I think of Amber. I suppose that’s one of the nice things about being able to design your own cover. If someone else designed the cover, they would’ve grabbed some stock picture and that would’ve been it. I wouldn’t have been happy with the cover and there wouldn’t be a thing I could do about it. But since I designed the cover and I designed the woman on the cover, the cover is as much a form of communication between me and the reader as anything else. But I will say that I considered using a stock photo. I found some I liked. Some showed a mother and daughter in which they were both smiling. Th...

Y ou might not believe this if you pay much attention to writer’s blogs, but Windows is the hands down favorite operating system of writers. How do I know? 85% percent of the people who visit my blog are using a Windows OS. Only 9% are using a Macintosh. Yeah, I know Macs are cool and all of that, but Windows is about getting the job done. The funny thing is, I hear far more complaints about Macs from the 9% who use them than I hear from Windows users. But I’m not sure that Word 2010 is even available on the Mac yet. If I owned a Mac, I think I would buy a Windows PC just so I could run Word 2010. You won’t look at cool, but I think writers are better off with Windows.

I n the process of revising a manuscript I went through a list of commonly confused words, searching for each one in my manuscript to verify that I had used the word correctly. I skipped a few, such as to and too , simply because there are too many of them. And some of the words didn’t appear in my manuscript at all. Overall, it was a helpful activity because even though it didn’t find that many mistakes, it did find some that I could’ve easily overlooked while reading through the manuscript. And since Word 2010 lists each word it finds along with some of the context, it doesn’t take that long to move through the list. There were about a hundred words or so and I managed to get through the list is a few hours. My most frequently confused words are where and were . It isn’t that I don’t know the difference, but I think it is a case of a lazy finger. I found a number of occurrences where I had used the word were when I should’ve used where or vice versa. Consider the statement, “He ...

O ne of the great promises of the vanity press industry is that it gives good books that were rejected by traditional publishing a chance. If I remember correctly, that is the argument Thomas Nelson used when they began the WestBow Press vanity press. I think it’s a valid argument, but finding those books is like looking for a needle in a haystack. As I looked through the books published by one vanity press, I noticed book after book that were inferior. One book was about why we should all be obeying the traffic laws. By not doing so, we’re endangering people’s lives. I can’t disagree with that, but it’s hardly a book I would expect to sell. Several of the books were novels with titles that did nothing to encourage me to read the books. In one book, the author attempted to defend Samson against the attacks of theologians of our day. Essentially, she wanted to say that all the stuff that Samson did wrong was by God’s will. She’s so far off on what she had to say that I don’t think it’s...

W hen I was a kid, I knew what artists were like. I suppose Tom Runnels was the archetypical artist for me. He was a local artist who was somewhat well known because he had a column in the local paper which included a pencil drawing along with the text. He also did sculpture. You can see an example here . Our art teacher at school was his niece. She is quite talented in her own right. I’m sure she must have sighed a great sigh of relief when she finally taught me that the sky touches the horizon and there isn’t a big white gap between the two. But as you can see from the picture taken at Tom Runnels’ Cat Ranch, he was just a down to earth guy who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. The thing about art in any form is that most people don’t get rich at it. For that matter, most people are doing good if they make money at all. Art is a passion, it isn’t a profession. On top of that, there are always the critics. You pour your life into your work and there are always people there who wi...

I saw a video online that I’m sure was put together by an atheist. A cartoon atheist was hit by a city bus (ironic considering what the atheists paid for in Fort Worth this month) and he stood before God. I won’t go into all the discussion between the two, but the atheist as the question, “if all that’s required to get into heaven is that a person believe in you, why can’t I just start believing in you now?” It’s a question that many people, even Christians, have asked and I think it is worth our consideration today. The basic question seems to be, if God is good, why does he allow people to go to hell? Before we answer this question, I think it’s important that we avoid the temptation to assume certain characteristics of God and then question why such a person would do what the Bible says he will do. For example, we might assume that since God wants to give us all that’s good, he would never send us to hell. We should instead approach it from the other way. Given what the Bible tell...

F ollowing the big announcement about the “Good Without God” campaign here in Fort Worth, I stumbled across an atheist site. The folks there were talking about DART not approving the ads on the side of their buses because they reject all faith-based ads. One of the things I’ve observed about atheists is that they don’t see atheism as a matter of faith. The assumption that many of them make is that all matters of faith deal with our understanding of God. Since, atheists don’t believe that God exists, they don’t see their beliefs as being a matter of faith. I think it’s great that Christianity is so influential that even atheist think that any mention of faith-based things is probably Christian in nature, but it is a result of a misunderstanding of what faith is. Faith, in its most general form, is the belief that something someone has told you is true. Some children believe in Santa Claus. They’ve never seen Santa, but they have faith. Their faith is based on what their parents, books ...

S urely, I’m not the only one who does this, but when someone comments on a blog and mentions they have a book, I have a tendency to go looking for their book. I may not buy the book, but I may look for it to see what it’s about. Sadly, it is often harder than you might think. If I go directly to Amazon.com and type in the author’s name, I have pretty good luck most of the time, but sometimes that comes up with nothing. Sometimes I can follow the link back to the person’s blog or website, but you’d be surprised how many authors don’t provide links to their books on their websites. I sometimes resort to Google and even that yields results that are less than desirable. It’s no wonder they aren’t selling books, no one can find their books. While it won’t guarantee book sales, one thing that we need to do is to make sure that people have easy access to our books. The more times people to click before reaching the product page for a book, the fewer people who will click through to the pro...

Y ou may have heard of the page 69 test. I’m not sure who deserves credit for thinking of it. I’ve seen similar tests before. The premise is that you can open any book to page 69, read what is there and know whether you want to read the book or not. I think there is some truth to the premise. Page 69, in many books, comes before the break into the second act, so we’re still identifying the problem to be solved, but we’ve gotten most of the introductory stuff out of the way. Page 69 is likely to be the climax of the problem definition. I applied this test to my WIP, The Unwanted Mother (or whatever the title is by the time this post airs). It turns out that on page 69 of my manuscript, Fox is talking to his wife about the two guests that have shown up unexpectedly. He has taken his wife breakfast that was prepared by the woman and he discovers that while his wife had initially accepted the girl the woman brought with her as her granddaughter, she is rethinking her position. During the...

I f the number of comments is any indication; the most controversial topic in writing is the use of the F-bomb. On a blog I follow, one of the writers brought up that topic and there were several times the comments they usually get. Though I don’t think we can completely divorce the word from the pornographic connotations, I think the reason many writers feel comfortable using it is because much of its usage in common language is to express frustration upon the realization that something isn’t going the way one might hope. I choose not to use the F-bomb and a number of other offensive words in my writing. Some authors have the idea that we use it because it adds realism to our dialog. Personally, I think that’s utter nonsense. The author who writes truly realistic dialog writes boring dialog. Compare reading trial transcripts with reading a novel about a trial and you’ll see that they are far different. One is completely realistic while the other communicates the information and a way...

H ave you noticed how much we try to live up to the expectations of others? Authors have a lot of expectations placed on them. There are the expectations of the family. If you write a book, people expect you to get it published and make millions or at least thousands. There are the expectations of other authors. There are the expectations of agents and publishers. All of these expectations are driving toward one thing. The author is expected to write the next Harry Potter. The fact is that we can’t live up to the expectations of others. We must determine our own goals and strive to achieve them. I think of all the computer books I have sitting on my shelves at home. Some are great books and others leave something to be desired, but there’s not a one of them that has been hugely successful for the publisher. There are some very solid performers. There are some that almost any software engineer or electrical engineer will recognize, but there are no huge successes. The thing is that th...

T oday, I want to continue the topic of Cinderella from yesterday, but I want to discuss Cinderella’s magic. Where does it come from? We don’t normally think of Cinderella having magic of her own, but magic is used to give her gifts. It appears to be in the control of a fairy godmother or a tree, depending on which version you read. Indirectly, the magic appears to come from her mother, who is watching over her from heaven. None of the stories make a huge deal about her mother, but some do talk about God and her mother looking down on her. In the Gimms’ version, the tree is planted on her mother’s grave and watered with Cinderella’s tears. Even the fact that some versions reference a fairy godmother alludes to a higher power. I don’t know much about godmothers, but my understanding is that they are to help protect their godchildren. In terms of storytelling, the power comes from none of those things but from Cinderella. Had Cinderella not been “pious and good,” I don’t think it woul...

S everal days ago, they topic of Cinderella came up on another blog. I won’t go into the details of that discussion, but one of the things I mentioned was that in all of the versions of Cinderella we see a selfless girl of humility and quiet strength. Some of the other commenters disagreed with that. I didn’t say that there, but I’ll say it here that to disagree with that is like arguing with a sign post. In all of the versions (not just the Disney version), Cinderella is treated like a servant by her step-mother and step-sisters. In the Grimms’ version, when her father wishes to bring the girls a gift, her sisters ask for fine things, but Cinderella requests only the first twig that brushes her father’s hat. She plants the twig at her mother’s grave and waters it with her tears. She is described as “pious and good.” While the stories don’t come out and say, “Cinderella was humble,” they don’t have to. The stories show us her humility and selflessness. As storytellers, there’s much ...

I t’s official, my top five posts for the past week, the past month and for all time are: 1. Review: WestBow Press 2. How to Describe Beauty 3. An Example Book Outline 4. The Meaning of the Cinderella Story 5. A Sample Synopsis I tried to post that same list in a comment on Michael Hyatt’s blog the other day, but it didn’t take. I think it must have gone in his spam file or something. His blog doesn’t like me very much. I think you can see the pattern. This blog is attracting aspiring writers more than it is attracting anyone else. Of course, that also means that this blog is a waste of time in terms of trying to sell books. I keep saying that I’m going to move this blog in the direction of attracting readers rather than authors, but the fact is that I don’t really know how. I tried Fiction Friday for a while. As you can see, none of those posts appear in the list above. They aren’t in the top ten either. In fact, the only post in the top ten that isn’t aimed at writers is...