Image by davereid2 via Flickr

Bookbuster, aka Marcy Sheiner, is offering a holiday gift of professional consultation on a project of your choice. I will discuss your project with you via telephone or email, OR I’ll read written material and provide feedback for (1) one chapter of fiction, OR (2) in the case of nonfiction, an outline and/or notes (no more than 20 pp. total for either).

Offer good for the first three takers until December 31^st only!

Email marquest@earthlink.net with your specs, and we’ll take it from there.

I must have had a life two months ago, before I began work on the project I finished Friday – but what was it? What exactly did I do every morning after I got out of bed?

I’ve heard people express this sentiment after taking the bar exam, or completing similarly difficult endeavors. I’m not comparing the book I just wrote to becoming a lawyer, but it was all-consuming. I’d get up early, get to the computer almost immediately, and stay there for five or more hours, after which I’d decompress for an hour or so before moving on to the mundane chores of the day. Now that I’m finished, and I don’t yet have a new gig – a topic I’ll get to momentarily – I have no idea what to do with myself. During the past two months all sorts of things fell by the wayside, but I can’t even remember what they were. Which just goes to show, a lot of busywork we think is vital can be pared from our lives and eventually won’t be missed.

What’s particularly hard for me are these early morning hours, the time when my mental energy is at its sharpest. I’ve always used these hours to write, whether I’m working on my own writing or clients’. Which is what I should be doing: hustling up new work. The rewards of the last job won’t last forever, or even half of forever.

Yesterday I was surfing my freelance sites and found a blog with assessments of various job sites, including one I use regularly, Guru.com. I’ve gotten a few jobs via Guru, one of which led to a connection outside the service that’s been fairly lucrative. Other than that, however, the pickings on Guru are mighty slim. According to the writer’s research,which he describes step-by-step,

It is not worth a freelance writer’s time to be an active member of a site that will generate a whopping 14 projects that do not pay the bottom rate…

I always knew this was true, but since I did get a few gigs from Guru, and there aren’t that many job sites that are any better, I kept using it. After reading this, though,  I wonder where I should be looking.

That’s the hard part about freelancing, well, one of the hard parts, maybe the hardest: finding work. It used to be easier, when print media was a hungry maw that needed constant feeding. Now that print’s on a permanent starvation diet, a book review here and a news story there just don’t occur with regularity; the primary outlet for most freelancers is the Internet, which pays abominably. That’s why I try to stick to full-length books. So…

Need book, anyone? Contact me at marquest@earthlink.net.

I believe this is the first time I have heard the noun trend transformed into a verb, a practice that’s been running rampant for at least two decades and that never fails to make me crazy.

Impact.

Journal.

Incentive.

All have been tagged with an ing or ize to turn them into cringe-worthy drivel.

Mark my words, we shall soon see trending everywhere: it begins with television, leaps over to radio, crawls  into common everyday speech, and finally bursts into print media. The journey is complete, and everyone is impacting their journaling, incentivized by the trending of idiocy. As we move forward.

Napa Valley / Joan Greengrass

Writing book reviews, whether online or in print,  doesn’t pay enormously, but it pays something, and it comes with a few perks. What better way to spend one’s time, if you’re a writer and a reader, than reading, forming opinions about what you’ve read, and publicly spouting those opinions? Plus there are the freebies: the books.

I rarely review a book that I totally hate, unless it gives out false information that I want to reveal and correct. I almost never trash a novel — I can think of only one I’ve ever reviewed negatively, and for the same reason: it put out false information and engaged in stereotyping. I figure it’s so hard to write a novel, what’s the point of trashing it? It’s like criticizing someone’s baby. So if I can’t say anything nice about a novel, I just say nothing.

Below are tips for writing book reviews.

Considerations When Reviewing Fiction

• Are the characters developed? Interesting? Believable?

• Does the story make sense? Does it pull you in?

• Does the novel or story present a fresh perspective? Does it put a new spin on an old situation? Does it move you to see the world in a way you hadn’t before?  Did you learn anything?

• Was it well written? Did it paint a vivid image? Could you feel it with your senses? What about the rhythm of the language?

• Why did you like/dislike it?

• What scenes stand out?

• Does it deal with universal themes?

• Whose point of view is presented and how successfully?

• Does the author give any clues to the ending?

• How does it compare to author’s previous work or other books on similar topics?

• Does it convey any message/values/politics/philosophy?

Additional Considerations When  Reviewing Non-Fiction

Note the qualifying word Additional. By this I mean that you should address some of the same issues as you would with fiction – those that seem appropriate to the particular book/topic under review — as well as the following list.

• What are the author’s credentials to write on this topic? What are yours?

• Does the book explore new territory; if not, how does it  compare to other books on the topic?

• Does it accomplish what it sets out to do?

• Is the information accurate? If not, how do you know?

• Is there a compelling reason that people need the information presented in the book?

• Does the book convey any message/values/politics/philosophy?

If anyone has any tips or tricks of their own, feel free to post them in the comment box.

Is there any sight sweeter than a boy reading a book?

In a recent post about the pay scale for online writing, I mentioned websites that put up articles by anyone who wants to contribute, and pay according to each writer’s number of hits. I call them communal writing sites, since they don’t seem to have an official title yet. There’s revenue sharing site, but that includes blogs that sign up with Google Ad Sense and other advertising plans. Allvoices (recently proven an official scam) calls themselves citizen-powered media, but the Internet itself is citizen-powered. In any case, these kinds of venues are popping up every day. There’s The HUB, Associated Content, and Environmental Graffiti, to name just a few. More can be found here. Which are for real I don’t know, but you might check in this article about scams.

Since money’s no guarantee on these sites, they lure inexperienced writers with over-the-top hype like this:

Benefits of joining Allvoices:

1. Exposure – instantly publish your news and content around the globe

2. Engagement – ability to engage and reach others from more than 167 countries

3. Global reach – social networking and sharing features to connect with others inside and outside the Allvoices community

4. Control – You own your content which enables you to post/promote it on other sites and link or cross post your content from your blog or external website

You have to be pretty inexperienced and hungry to get excited over this kind of garbage. Anytime a company offers writers “exposure” as in, “No pay, but great exposure,” I run the other way.

A few years ago, knowing nothing about communal sites, I decided to try one, and signed on to The HUB.  In addition to paying by number of hits, they rate writers according to some mysterious system that includes, among other criteria, level of participation in “the HUB community.” I opened at Number 62, but soon jumped past 80 merely by posting in the forums.

The process of putting a post up on the HUB is much more involved than WordPress (You Are Here): each block of text, visual image, or video must be pasted into a separate capsule. The first few times I went through this painstaking process, I ended up with ads in the middle of sentences. I was less than thrilled.

After putting up a couple of posts, I became obsessed about numbers  – mine and everyone else’s. I wondered what people with higher numbers were earning, and found myself constantly comparing, which soon gave me a super-sized knot in my stomach. I was filled with the anxiety of competition and the terror of not measuring up. I was definitely not enjoying the experience, but I told myself to give it more time, at least to see if I could make some money.

I wrote a post about Joni Mitchell focused on Shine, her latest album, in which I referred to several of her other albums. While I wrote it in less than an hour, the HUBbing process took a good three hours. I ran into all kinds of glitches, and couldn’t get it to look the way I wanted. As I entered the fourth hour, I decided it would have to do, even with an ad for a tattoo parlor smack in the middle of the first paragraph.  Half an hour after HUBbing, I received an email from the staff: they censored the post because it was “overly promotional.”

I can understand not wanting writers to use the HUB as a way of drumming up business for friends’ artistic or entrepreneurial endeavors. But did these guys notice who I was writing about?  I mean, Joni Mitchell doesn’t need me or the HUB to sell her CDs. Did they bother to read the actual content, or did my enthusiastic buzzwords trigger the censors?

After firing off a note telling them they were insane, I read the rules, and figured out the problem: I had put in “too many links to the same site”— to Amazon, where I’d linked all the albums referred to in the post. But we were supposed to be making money from Amazon sales on the HUB. It turned out that it doesn’t matter where the link goes —any HUB post with a lot of links to the same place is automatically bumped.

The irony was, I’d noticed a lot of HUBbers shrewdly promoting their business ventures: one touted their posts as fitness advice, and linked up to his own exercise book. Another wrote about ethnic cooking with a link to her self-published cookbook. You get the picture. Yet I was unHUBbed for promoting Joni Mitchell’s music!

I’ve been censored for dirty talk, I’ve been censored for radical politics. This was the first time I’d been censored for promoting music. Thus ended my venture not only on HUB, but with all communal writing sites.

These sites advertise on Craigslist; by now I can smell one a mile away. I imagine some people are earning money on them, but they have to be working their butts off and doing the competition dance at warp speed. More likely, novice writers are using these sites for the exposure, which is what they tout as their big benefit. For some people that’s fine: the teenage son of a friend of mine writes a column on Bleacher Reports. BR isn’t exactly like other communal writing sites; for one thing, they pay nothing. No revenues, no point systems – although you can become one of their “featured writers” if you prove popular. Because I only began writing about baseball a few years ago, and I’m no expert on the game, I didn’t mind writing for free in this case, and did a few pieces for BR myself. But since I write primarily about the Yankees, I didn’t get many readers, and was soon bored.

Ever since the dawn of the Internet, everyone, including me, has been trying to figure out how to make money here. Because of that, it’s an easy place to get scammed and/or exploited – and those who’ve figured out how to get rich online are, unfortunately, the kind who seem to be good at exploitation.

If I’m going to write for free, I’m sticking to my own blogs, where there’s no anxiety and I control everything: content, timing, appearance, comments. To me, that’s the joy of blogging. I can promote Joni Mitchell. I can promote myself. Maybe I’m not getting rich on my words — but neither is anyone else.

Related Articles

• Writing job scams: a quick guide on what to avoid (writtenwings.wordpress.com)

The most helpful thing a client can do for a ghostwriter is to supply him or her with a detailed outline of the book to be written. Working from an outline makes the job of ghostwriting ten times easier than starting with a blank slate. From the client’s point of view, an outline gives your book a much better chance of containing exactly what you want in it.

An outline puts the client and writer onto the same page from the get-go. If the writer fails to include something, and the client doesn’t like how it’s going, an outline is concrete proof of your original vision, and a tool for getting back on track. Without an outline, a writer is working blind – unless, of course, the client can verbalize just as thoroughly as write an outline  – but most people aren’t able to speak in such an organized way.  It’s much more efficient to write the outline.

What To Include

Remember, first of all, that this is not the kind of outline used for submitting a book proposal to an agent or publisher. We’re speaking here only about the working outline, a tool to be used primarily by the ghostwriter. It need not, therefore, follow a precise formula. Nobody but you and the writer need ever see it.  Proposal outlines have different requirements.

A good working outline should first of all include the subject(s) to be addressed in each chapter. If you already know some or all of the chapter titles, include them; if not, use descriptive phrases as working headers. Underneath each chapter head enter sub-topics and, if you have any, notes. If you’ve done any writing, include it under the notes only if very short (no more than a paragraph); if you’ve written longer passages, clearly mark where they belong in the outline, and attach separately.

Organization

Maybe you’ve developed all your ideas of what’ll be in the book, but you’re not sure in what order to put them. In that case, you can either list the topics without denoting chapters, or just let the ghostwriter know that s/he can play around with the order. Most writers know how to segue from one topic to another, and how to write openings and closings of chapters in such a way that they smoothly connect, each one to the next. The same goes for sub-topics.

If you do have a specific order in mind, indicate it, but be aware that the writer might suggest changes. When it comes to this and other suggestions from the writer, don’t feel like you absolutely must follow everything he or she comes up with. You should, however, be open-minded, since your ghostwriter not only has more experience than you, but probably also has a more developed sense of what works.

Even if you don’t use chapter names and numbers, the outline itself should be logically organized (see sample below). And if the book itself ends up looking very different from the outline, as long as you like the end product, don’t worry about it. This isn’t school: you won’t be graded on how well you stuck to your outline.

Outlining is a Skill

Like editing, proofreading, indexing, and other skills used in creating a book, outlining is a skill, and can be learned. Books on outlining are available in the library or in bookstores. There are different kinds of outlines, and definite rules. It’s best to keep it simple, especially if you’ve never written an outline before, like this:

Chapter Heading / Subheadings / Descriptions / Notes, if any / Short Writing, if any

I was taught how to write an outline in school – I think it was in elementary school, but it might’ve been high school. Apparently not everyone was, though, or perhaps, like so many skills, public schools no longer teach it. I make this observation based on some of the outlines people have given me.

The following is a simple outline of what I’ve written here so far:

How to Write an Outline

I. Introduction – Why do an outline? Benefits.

II. What to include

A. Main subject and/or title of chapter

B. Subtopics of each chapter

C. Notes

D. Writing

1.  short

2. longer

III. Organization

A. Order

1. If you know the order

2. If you’re not sure of the order

B. Role of ghostwriter in organizing, responding to ghostwriter’s suggestions

IV. Outlining Is a Skill  –  like other writing skills, can be learned

This is a basic outline, and works well as a tool.

Remember: you can’t have an “A” without a “B” or a “1” without a “2”. If you have subtopics that reach beyond the small numbers, as in II-D above, use lower case letters (a), (b), (c). It isn’t necessary to make it any more complicated than that, though.  If you feel a need for sub-categories beyond this format, you’re probably overdoing it.

Any questions? Feel free to place them in the comment box and I’ll get back to you.