Auntie Deborah is Still Giving Writing Advice

Dear Auntie Deborah...

I wrote a story using another person's characters, even though they said not to. Can I publish it since their book isn't copyrighted?

If the author has published their story in any form, it’s copyrighted. That, however, is beside the point. It’s just plain unethical to do what you suggest. It’s a great way to make enemies in your genre and create a horrible reputation that will haunt your career, assuming you still have one after such a bonehead move.

Create your own characters. Write your own stories. Treat your colleagues and their work the way you would like to be treated. Pursue your career with integrity and generosity.

Are self-published books inferior to professionally published books?

It all depends.

Not that long ago, self-published or vanity press books were assumed to be of inferior quality, that is to say, unpublishable by “real” (traditional) publishers. There were exceptions, of course, but that was the conventional wisdom.

Today, however, many self-published books go through the same rigorous editing and quality standards as traditionally published books. Some genres, like romance, are especially friendly toward self-pubbed projects.

With modern publishing technology (ebooks, POD printing), there are many reasons why a pro-level author might want to self-publish, including:

• Niche projects, like memoirs or family histories.

• Series that were dropped by trad publishers but that have an enthusiastic fan following.

• Well-written books that don’t fit into the NY “best-seller” model.

• OP (out-of-print, rights reverted to author) backlist.

• Great books that straddle genres or otherwise confuse traditional marketing/sales departments.

That said, many self-published books are dreadful. They aren’t good enough to attract the interest of an agent or publisher to begin with, they aren’t professionally edited or proofread, the covers are amateurish, and so on. The challenge for the reader is to sort out those books that are truly a wonderful reading experience.

Does reaching a certain number of reviews increase your indie sales?

The short answer is that nobody knows. Theories abound, usually to line the pockets of the “experts.” “Gaming” the Amazon system is a losing proposition. What might have been true 2 years or 6 months or last week no longer works — because thousands of self-published authors have tried it, thereby flooding the system with meaningless tweaks.

If you want to increase your sales, write a great book. Publicize it. Get stellar reviews on Publishers Weekly and the like. Write an even better book. Rinse and repeat. Even then, there are no guarantees when it comes to sales, but you’ll have the satisfaction of writing really good books.

[personal silliness] On The Size of Ears

Some people agonize over the size and shape of their ears. Babies don't care, but kids who have unusually shaped ears or ears that stick out can (and are!) made to feel self-conscious about them. People even have surgery to flatten ears against the skull, or I assume their parents do. I never thought about ears -- my own or those of my friends -- when I was a kid.

So it came as a surprise to me when I was an adult that my mother was self-conscious about the size of her ears. The outer ear is mostly cartilage, which continues to grow -- albeit slowly -- throughout your life. Older folks generally have bigger ears than youngsters. I suppose the self-consciousness came from "my ears show my age," but I never asked her. I just observed the lengths she went to in styling her hair in order to cover part of her ears.

It also came as surprise to me as I achieved senior citizen status myself that my own ears were not as I remembered them. They looked like my mother's ears. They're neither pretty nor ugly. They're bigger than when I was a child (I think -- I'm relying on old photos here) and somewhat longer top to bottom. There's a funny crease in the skin of the lobes that I assume is due to decades of wearing pierced earrings. But maybe not. It might have done that, anyway.








Mostly I think it's cool that my ears look like my mother's when she was my age. Sometimes it's puzzling that a body part up and changes itself, but that seems to be happening to more than my ears. Every once in a while, though, it bothers me. I have discovered a solution:

I don't look in the mirror.

From the inside, my ears feel just fine. And then I think of the images of the Buddha with long, long ears. And I giggle.

Janni Lee Simner on "Telling the Wrong Story"

This is from Rachel Ann Hanley's interview with the wonderful YA author Janni Lee Simner.

"The first draft is the one where I pretty much tell the wrong story. By writing the wrong story--and seeing why it's the wrong story-- I learn things I need to know about the right story."

This is so true for me! I need to hear it over and over again, because the gremlins that live in my brain insist that I have to get it right the first time. If I listen to them, the result is the most insipid pap you can imagine, because I'm terrified of making a mistake.

Somewhere I read that Dick Francis wrote his early novels in ink in school composition books. He didn't know that you could change things, so he worked hard at thinking through every sentence before he put it down. If I did that, I think I'd get maybe one or two sentences into the story before I freaked out. I used to think this meant I would never improve as a writer, that I was terrible and hopeless and would never produce anything that wasn't drek. Where do such notions come from? I'd like to have a word or two with whoever's responsible!

For some reason, this reminds me of something my calligraphy teacher, Lloyd Reynolds, used to say. He wanted us to hold the pen softly, to create a supple and responsive connection between the center of our bodies and the words on the paper. Isn't writing like that? We want to be fluid, sensitive, nimble in the sense of being able to perceive the deeper promptings of our creative selves and then to act on them. He said that the clenched fist cannot receive any of life's gifts -- only the open hand. Only the open heart.

Thank you, Janni, for reminding me that not only is it okay for me to write the wrong story, but that it's a necessary step in the process of writing the right one!