“I am very disapointed (sic) that future individual episodes will be $2.99 each as opposed to $0.99.
I can see paying $6.00 for the book via kindle, but $18.00 is WAY TOO MUCH for the six episode packages. Even Stephen King doesn’t go for that much
I won’t be buying them, and hope I don’t lose too much interest or forget by the time the third installment comes out as a package.

The authors should really re-think that concept”

It seems that the reader interpreted this part of our product description to read that we’d be charging $2.99 for each episode for future series. That is NOT the case.

(On Feb. 21, you can buy the full season book at one low price, and single episodes will be going to $2.99)

In my attempt to be succinct on the product page (where I would rather talk about story than pricing strategies), I probably wasn’t clear enough.

So I want to take this opportunity on the blog, where I can more fully explain our pricing, and that single episodes will NOT be seeing a price increase during the seasons. I’ll also explain our pricing strategy for serialized fiction, and why it is what it is, to give you a better understanding of the challenge of pricing and how much thought we put into it.

Our Yesterday’s Gone series is released like TV shows — in seasons. Those seasons consist of six books (which we call “episodes”), with each episode being about 24,000 words.

Ideally, we want you to experience the books in weekly serialized installments. And .99 per episode is a great price for a new book each week!

However, there’s a tiny problem with this model…

PRICING

Simply put, we’d go broke releasing at .99.

Amazon offers two royalties to authors. If your book is less than $2.99, you get a royalty payment of 35%. On a book that is .99, that equals to about .35 cents per book … split two ways between Sean and myself.

If your book is between $2.99 and $9.99, you get a 70% royalty. So, for most people, the choice is pretty easy … sell at $2.99 or more, right?

However, if we did that, we’d be charging $18 for a full season of a 600 page eBook, not something we’d feel comfortable with, even if readers were willing to fork over that much.

The SMART thing for us to do would be to abandon serialized episodes and just release the books as 400-500 page standalone titles in a series and make 70%. That is what most series do, after all.

HOWEVER…

WE LOVE AND BELIEVE IN SERIALIZATION

• We love that you are taking this ride with us each week.
• We love leaving you hanging with killer cliffhangers.
• We love to provide you with content every week.

We started serialization because we LOVE the format and very few people are doing it. In fact, most people we saw talking about serialization said there’s no way to make it work.

Well, thanks to you, we proved those people wrong. As of this season, we are making a living from our fiction!

SERIALIZATION CAN WORK

But there’s no way we could do that at .99 a title, unless we sold a lot more books.

You see, while we’re willing to take a hit for six weeks, selling the episodes at a loss (compared to just selling them as full-length books), we can’t LEAVE the books at .99 and make a living at this.

And quite frankly, we LOVE this job and being able to release a new book for you every week!

So, we found a compromise, something we call season pricing.

SEASON PRICING EXPLAINED

Each time we start a new season for a series, the CURRENT SEASON’S books will be priced at .99 during that season’s run of six weeks.

One week AFTER the final episode of the season, we release a FULL SEASON compilation, (currently priced at $4.99). So you can get ALL SIX episodes in one convenient download.

We take in less money for six weeks so you can experience the seasons as you want to — by the episode or all at once. But, AFTER EACH SEASON, we raise the prices on the single episodes, essentially pushing people to buy the full season instead.

This is a win-win. You get an option of how you buy, and as long as our books are good, we continue to sell full seasons and make a living at this.

It’s not an ideal fix.

We’d love to simply charge .99 and get a 70% royalty. Then we wouldn’t have to raise prices, or worry about people who bought four books when we flipped the switch to $2.99, and who were then forced to buy the full season if they want to finish the story, or spend $5.98.

Which is why I’m writing this post, and will probably write about this in the future books, so there’s no confusion and everyone realizes that they have options.

In the end, this is all about you, the reader. We love that you choose to read our stuff, and that you’ve made serialization work! We aim to give you as many choices as possible, and hope that this pricing structure makes sense now that I’ve explained it. If we come up with something better, or if Amazon changes its royalty structure, we’ll certainly consider new pricing options.

Thank you for reading,

David Wright

P.S. For those who have been asking … Season Three of Yesterday’s Gone will be coming out on June 19th.

Nobody was doing it (or so I thought) and I’d make a name for myself. Hell, I’d be the next Bill Watterson!

I loved comic strips. As a child, I used to get lost in the world of Peanuts. As a teenager, I loved the satirical wit of Bloom County. And then I discovered the magic that was Calvin and Hobbes.

So I created the comic Todd and Penguin, and waited for the world to take notice.

And not knowing anything about anything, I then spent a few years in relative obscurity. After a glowing review from Eric Burns at Websnark and getting picked up by Keenspot in 2005, the comic started to get some attention and a decent following.

But something interesting happened in that space of five years.

As hosting got cheaper, a handful of companies sprang up offering free webcomic hosting, suddenly ANYBODY could put a comic online. And it seems like almost EVERYBODY did.

Seriously, there were thousands upon thousands of new webcomics!

And HOLY SHIT, the crap floodgates had opened!

It was as if anyone with a scanner and a pen was putting a comic on the web and calling themselves an artist. And there were some awful, AWFUL comics out there. Stuff that made you cringe in embarrassment for the creator and cry just a little bit for the form.

Technology’s blessings are also its biggest curses.

Suddenly, people who never would have thought to draw a comic before suddenly think that they can. They see marginally decent artists getting acclaim without understanding WHY those artists are getting praised.

And they rushed into webcomics thinking they’d be the shit.

But for every 7,000 or so bad webcomics, there were also a few success stories—comic creators who were able to leverage an online audience for print deals. And still others, who said screw syndication, and bypassed the gatekeepers to make their own fortunes.

And their success caught the attention of some traditional cartoonists—the ones in the newspapers who made money. These “real artists” started to see webcomic artists as the enemy, devaluing art by (gasp!) giving it away for free on the web! They were feeling threatened.

Sound familiar?

EBooks are the new webcomics.

Thanks to technology, artists (writers) suddenly have the capability to bypass the gatekeepers (the publishing companies) and directly build and speak to their audiences with very little upfront cost. And some writers and publishers are feeling the heat.

Like webcomics, I’m sure we’ll see an explosion of bad books out there. Embarrassingly bad books.

But that’s okay.

Because good content (if you know your space and can build an audience) will rise to the top. And bad writers will either get good or give up. Just like a lot of the bad cartoonists.

THE ONE BIG DIFFERENCE

The biggest difference between webcomics of the last decade and eBooks now is a significant one. There is finally an infrastructure in place to sell to your readers.

This was not the case 10 years ago when webcomic creators were struggling to find a way to make money for their work. Sure, they could self-publish, create tee shirts, sell ads on their websites, or beg for donations, but those weren’t sustainable methods of making a living for most artists.

Thanks to Amazon, iTunes, and a few other players, readers now have a CONVENIENT way to download eBooks to their devices. And with Print On Demand, writers can also satisfy the diehard print fans.

While there are still some difficulties in easily formatting comics for an eReader, and the quality sucks on some of the devices, technology will change that, I’m sure.

WHEN THE WALLS COME DOWN

Remember how I said that everyone and their sister was suddenly putting out webcomics? And a lot of them were bad?

Well, include me in that number.

My first comics were horrible. Thankfully, I was blissfully unaware of just how bad they were.

But I knew enough to know they weren’t good enough.

(see the proof below)

A Todd and Penguin comic from 2001 - Click to see full size

A comic from 2008 - a bit better

Another from 2008

I didn’t compare my work with other crappy webcomic artists. I compared my work to the best on the web and in print. And I kept working at getting better. I was learning on the job, while also learning how to build an audience and interact with readers.

And eventually, I got good enough to get a job as an editorial cartoonist at a newspaper—remember those things?

ARE YOU READY TO DO WHAT IT TAKES?

So, yes, the competition for writers is going to increase.

And there’s gonna be A LOT of crap out there.

And maybe you (or maybe me) will be writing some of that crap.

But keep at it.

Don’t be afraid to experiment.

Don’t be afraid to learn on the job.

If you’re really new to writing, maybe you can try a pen name so you don’t do long-term damage to your brand.

The most important thing, though, is to keep writing. The competition is gonna be stiff.

Fortunately, a lot of writers will think they can just show up. They can mail it in. That it’s enough to simply throw a book out there, and magic will happen.

We know better, though.

We know if you want to make it as a writer, you treat writing as a job. You bust your ass and put in the hours. And you pay attention to what’s going on in your genre and the publishing industry.

That’s what the successful webcomic artists did. And that’s what successful writers are now doing…

Working. Hard.

We’ve gone back on our word. For that, we’re truly sorry.

But there’s nothing to do now except lean away from the monitor and hope you understand.

Though we have decisive, exciting plans for the Inkwell, we simply cannot feed them our attention right now.

Dave and I are working tirelessly to do some remarkable stuff, both behind the drawn curtains of our own projects and with our awesome new friends at REV.

We have an official product in the works and have enlisted the brilliance of Danny Cooper to make it happen. It’s so impossibly awesome I can hardly stand it.

We’re still working on Available Darkness and were thrilled to meet our first deadline in a month with a new issue published last Friday. However, work on getting Penny to print has ceased, as has most of our other author work.

Not only do we have a deficit of minutes with which to write about the shifting plates of the publishing world, for the time being we are no longer immersed enough to provide authentic perspective.

This means the Inkwell must make a temporary return to its roots.

Before we knew what we wanted the Inkwell to be, Dave and I were sure of one thing – we wanted a place to unify our talents, where we could each rely on the other to help turn our combined efforts into something remarkable.

We didn’t know what we would write, exactly. Only that we would continuously share the duties and always put our best ink forward.

And so it is again.

I’ve no idea what I’ll be writing when it’s my turn to press publish, though I’m sure it’ll probably have a lot overly eager and slightly scattered enthusiasm. Dave’s posts will probably be a bit on the glum side, we might even change the site design back to black on his days.

We’ll play a little Tag, You’re it!, passing the baton and keeping our best writers in touch with another, while keeping ourselves connected with you.

Give me a shout if you have an opinion about what you’d like to read first. I’ve been dying to write about how freaking awesome LOST is and how much I’m enjoying this final season. Yeah, I’ve written about it twice before, but that show is so hellz yeah, I could fill a NaNoWriMo with my thoughts for this season alone.

I’ve also been wanting to write a rant about the 900 teacher layoffs in my school district. I could write about it over at Writer Dad, but then I’d have to omit highly effective words such as piss and shit.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking about simply starting out with some version of Once Upon a Time, then seeing where the next 500 words or so take me. There’s not been a lot of creative writing in my work these days (though a creative brief I finished last week was referred to as “A Work of Art!”), so it might be a wonderful shifting of gears.

Would love to hear what you think.

Tag – you’re it Dave!

(As Collective Inkwell evolves, we’d like to take an opportunity not only to interview other writers but to also spotlight their work. This is an excerpt from the forthcoming debut book Sugar Milk by Ron Mattocks of Clark Kent’s Lunchbox. Ron is a longtime friend of ours, a great writer, and all around nice guy, even if he looks like a male model. If you’re not familiar with Ron, check out his site and of course, his book, which features one of the best book covers we’ve seen in a while! )

With the start of the school year, Allie and Avery’s school hosted its annual, Parent Orientation Night. Even though this was Avery’s first year of school, she had already been well-versed on what to expect, having spent most of her summer being drilled by Allie on the nuances of elementary school. As a testament to Allie’s thoroughness (or fledgling neuroticism—we’re not sure which, at this age), her instruction included full dress rehearsals, complete with a mock schoolroom in their bedroom. Eavesdropping on snippets of interaction, I noticed that Allie took her role of teacher seriously, exhibiting all the dedication of a method actor immersing herself into the character to achieve utmost believability.

“Does the teacher really yell at you like that?” Avery asked from her seat in the bedroom/classroom.

“Yes! She does!” Allie screamed, reminding me of a totalitarian nun carrying a large ruler adorned with the notches and names of students gone missing. “Is your arm broken, Miss Avery? Because, if you’d like to speak, you. Raise. Your. HAND! Now, tell me the Latin breakdown for the word monochromatic, or you can forget about recess. And don’t you dare cry this time; there’s no mommy to wipe away your sniveling tears anymore. Not in kindergarten.”

I have to admit, I was impressed to see that Allie’s lessons on how to be the perfect kindergartner covered not only pedagogy and content material, but classroom rules and behavior as well.

“You certainly can’t do that! Now, put your skirt down.” The way Allie rolled her eyes when she’s exasperated is so cute. “And don’t even think about doing the thing with your nose that you like to do when you think no one’s looking. They’re always watching, Avery. Remember that, or you’ll never make it to where I’m at.”

Sure, Allie’s regiment seemed demanding on the surface, maybe even cruel, but I let it continue with the best of intentions. Allie was establishing an impossible standard for her younger sister to live up to, so the real thing would be a breeze. After all, wasn’t that how older siblings showed love?

During these sessions, Avery slumped her shoulders and let her eyes sag to the floor. “Then what can I do in school?” she asked.

In response, Allie unfolded her arms and held out two fingers. “Number one is to listen,” she said, closing her pointer finger and leaving the middle one prominently displayed three inches from her sister’s nose. “And two: shut your pie-hole!” Allie left the finger up for a moment before folding her arms again and resuming the lesson on photokinesis.

My wife referred to Allie as a Kindergarten Life Coach, but I thought she was closer to a battle-hardened sergeant running fresh recruits through their paces in preparation for the rigors of combat. Like war, kindergarten, is hell, or at least it was for me thirty-some years ago. Allie sounded just like the teachers of my early childhood—eerily so. Because of the similarity, I took no issue with her rants spurred on by the discovery of an unsharpened crayon among Avery’s box of 64 colors or a half-eaten, jelly donut hidden in her backpack.

Let me see your “school face,” Avery! AHHHH!

Ashley, however, being a big, liberal softy, finally interceded after Avery came to the dinner table wearing a sign, designating her as “Private Pile.”

“How would you feel if your teacher did that to you, Allie?” her mom asked. “I think your sister’s going to be perfectly fine at school, without your help.”

“Nice job decorating the sign with American flag stickers, though,” I added, in a veiled show of support for her methodology.

Despite all of Allie’s zeal, in the end she only meant to look out for her little protégé. I’m sure that, at kindergarten graduation, it would be Allie who sheds the first tear and gives the longest hug to the latest member of the family to achieve this educational milestone. Unfortunately, such a touching moment was a long way off, and getting further by the day, as it appeared that all of Allie’s guidance had been for naught.

During the first few weeks of classes, Avery got in trouble several times for talking out of turn, lying to her teachers, and bringing a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook (it’s her mom’s) to share time. Learning of her sister’s sub-par behavior discouraged Allie. When they got off the bus, Allie shook her head in bewilderment, a stark contrast to her cheery little sister, who handed me yet another note from the teacher, explaining that Avery had missed part of recess for pointing out her vulva to classmates who had already filed one harassment complaint against her. Avery’s actions were so blatant, I wondered if it represented a passive-aggressive form of retribution aimed at her older sister for the summer months of humiliation. If my theory was true, the strategy appeared to be achieving its objective, because Allie hardly ever mentioned kindergarten, except to say how much she missed it. Then again, Allie may have purely been struggling to adjust to the first grade, and her sister was just destined for a lifetime of medication and a long list of military academies.

* * *

If you’d like to read more from Sugar Milk: What One Dad Drinks When He Can’t Afford Vodka, you can go to the book’s official website, SugarMilkBook.com, where Collective Inkwell readers can find out how to receive a copy before the official release date.

If you’d like to read some rather vague clues about what’s going on, you can read this week’s “Content Marketer’s Diary” over at Ghostwriter Dad.

David and I will be off the grid this week. We’re flying cross country to meet a new collaborator, as well as one another for the first time ever.

Wonderful stuff is in store and we are eager to share it. However, we’ve nothing in the Inkwell bank and nothing prepared. You deserve the very best and we don’t want to waste your time.

We will be taking this week off and will return to the Inkwell on Monday with some piping hot goodness.

Thank you to everyone who emailed or tweeted wondering what happened to Available Darkness. Your concern was unexpected, a bit surprising and wonderfully validating.

As always, if you have questions we’d love to answer. Just leave them in the comments or shoot us an email and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

See you Monday!

David and Sean

You are an author. You just need to get your book finished and get it out there. However, like all of us, doubt has seeped into the cracks of your foundation.

Maybe others have said you couldn’t do it. Perhaps they told you there was no use in trying. Maybe they even gave you a few reasons you shouldn’t write your book.

All the great ideas have already been done
You’re not a writer
Nobody reads anymore
You’re a boring person who can’t possibly have anything of interest to write

There are a million and one reasons not to write – if you dwell on the negative.

However, there are also a million and one reasons you should.

You have it in you. Despite predictions otherwise, books aren’t going anywhere. They might change format a bit as eBooks and podcasts increase in popularity. However, a story is a story, no matter the format. You are a writer, dammit.

We are all unique, each of us with a story burning inside us. Whether you have one story or 100, there is something in you yearning to be freed.

It burns. You beg it to quiet. Sometimes it listens, sometimes it doesn’t. However, even in its hush you know it is there.

Do want to live the rest your life wondering what could have been?

I hope the answer is no. Life is too short for clipped wings and broken dreams.

William Faulkner was told, “Good God, I can’t publish this!”

Lord of the flies, the landmark allegory on the failure of man-made society, was referred to as, “An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.”

“It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA,” they said to George Orwell.

The eight-year-old daughter of a small London publisher’s CEO is the only reason we got to read “Harry Potter and the Philosopher‘s Stone,” a book that had been rejected by 12 other publishers already. How much do you want to bet those 12 people cry themselves to sleep every night for missing out on the most successful series in forever?

Original consideration for “The Diary of Anne Frank” was, implausibly enough, that “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift interest above the curiosity level.”

“I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.”

Yes, Rudyard Kipling.

The turn-of-the-century literary blockbuster, “War of the Worlds,” by H.G. Wells, was “An endless nightmare,” and Wells’ other book, The Time Machine, was considered “not interesting enough for the general reader.”

Moving into modern days, Judy Blume, one of the most influential children’s authors of all time, received nothing but rejections for two years straight. And one of my favorite books growing up, Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” was turned down 26 times before someone said yes. “A Wrinkle in Time” went on to win the Newberry medal in 1963.

Two of the most successful authors of the twentieth century, Stephen King and John Grisham both had difficulty getting to print. Before “Carrie,” King was told, “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.” Of course, millions of readers proved that prognostication wrong. Grisham went through 16 agents and a dozen publishers before finding success with “A Time to Kill.”

And my favorite rejection of all time?

Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel, who I consider to be the finest children’s author ever, had his first book, “And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street” rejected 27 times before finally being deemed worthy for ink. An excerpt from just one of his many rejection letters reads, “This is too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.”

Things whisper inside us for a reason.

Sometimes it’s okay to ignore the murmur as passing fancy or a maybe someday. However, other times the whisper is right, even if everyone else is wrong. Sometimes the whisper is insistent for a reason.

Write the book inside you.

We can’t wait to read it.

Be your best writer and see your book to print. Subscribe to the Inkwell for free updates by RSS or Email.

Don’t worry. I used to think the same thing.

But if you’re writing online for anything more than a hobby, you do need to worry about SEO, authors included.

In case you don’t already know, SEO stands for search engine optimization. You know how Google has an answer for all our questions? Well, if you’re searching for an answer that a lot of other people are looking for as well, then chances are excellent the link you see at the top was written by someone who knows their SEO.

Whatever you’re writing, you probably want people to find you. This means you need to be using the same language that they are. Think of it as picking up the dialect of your ideal client or reader. Because you’re a writer, you might be thinking that altering your language to fit SEO is a bad thing.

Again, I was once there and I was wrong.

Blending SEO naturally into your copy is like building specific roads that will help lead your ideal reader directly to you.

Good news is, SEO is a lot simpler than you might imagine.

The purpose of optimizing your copy for search is to help Google (or other search engines) determine which sites are most suited to searcher needs. Search engines do this through a combination of analyzing the keywords in your copy, the title tags on the page, the organization of your internal linking and, most importantly, what others think of you (the quantity and quality of your incoming links).

For a more thorough explanation, read the SEO series on Copyblogger. If you’re not already subscribed to their free updates, you should be. You might not think of yourself as a copywriter, but if you’re trying to get known online, the time you spend reading their posts Monday through Friday might be the best 10 minutes you spend each day.

Because you are a writer, you already have an advantage over most people, even if you didn’t know what SEO meant until the top of this page. You’re a natural when it comes to language. You know how to articulate yourself well. SEO isn’t about stuffing a bunch of keywords into your copy, or gaming the system in any way. Google wants to please their searchers. As time passes, semantics will continue increase in importance. Again, you as a writer have a clear advantage.

With a little bit of help, you can easily express yourself in a way that pleases both Google and all extra visitors that find you with their help.

The better news is, if you’re an online writer using WordPress and either Thesis, Headway or the any theme with the SEO All in One Plugin, then there’s a brand new tool that just made your life a LOT easier. It’s called Scribe, and it is nothing short of remarkable. I’ve been using it for the last few weeks.

Scribe analyzes your copy. Then, a few seconds later it gives you a report along with a percentage grade for your copy. The report tells you what the search engines will think you’re writing about, then it suggests tweaks to improve your page based on SEO best practices.

It gets better.

I’ve been writing SEO copy for a while now, and scored a perfect 100% on every one of the first 10 pages I analyzed. Yet Scribe still helped me improve my copy by giving me keyword suggestions and a gentle nudge in the right direction.

Using Scribe is like having a hand to hold, helping you tweak your copy to SEO perfection.

There is a free version of Scribe as well as a paid one. The free version will allow you to analyze up to 5 pages each month. You can find out more here.

If you are making a living with your words, I cannot recommend this plugin enough. And if you don’t have a compatible WordPress theme, I can’t say enough nice things about Thesis. David and I have built a lot of sites over the last year and between its SEO friendly architecture, ease of customization (without having to code), and now Scribe, it could be the best $97 you could spend online.

If you have any specific questions about Scribe, I’m happy to answer them either by email or in the comments.

Be your best writer and see your book to print. Subscribe to the Inkwell for free updates by RSS or Email.

Doesn’t make for much of a story, does it?

Yet, some authors are writing stuff just like that. Only they’re taking 400 pages to do it. YAWN.

Think about all the great stories you’ve read and the unforgettable movies you‘ve seen. No matter the genre, they all have one thing in common—conflict.

Without conflict, there is no urgency. Without urgency, there is no compelling reason to keep turning the pages.

Twist the vise and pages will turn. Build the tension as a symphony builds to a swell.

Your hero needs conflict. Conflict can come from a number of sources, whether it be physical (in the form of other people or the environment), emotional, sexual, or even internal. The best way to provide conflict is by constantly giving your protagonist barriers to cross, boundaries to crush and hurdles to jump.

Swing the scythe, tighten the noose, drop the grand piano. Do everything you can to bring pain to your hero and exhilaration to your reader.

But it’s not enough to throw barrier after barrier at your characters. You must also make their pain relatable to your reader. You must either find a way to make the reader understand what the hero is feeling or experience the pain right along with them.

This means you must ground their conflict in a shade of reality.

Don’t get me wrong, you can have a purple dragon soaring through green skies on her way to a land made of mushrooms and chocolate, but if the rider on that dragon’s back has nothing in common with the reader, your book might end up on the nightstand moonlighting as a coaster.

Fantastic and unrealistic are not mutually exclusive.

Did you ever read Spiderman?

readers clung to Peter Parker because he was someone they could relate to

Spiderman is one of the most memorable, recognizable and popular superheroes of all time. His character was an immediate breath of fresh air from the moment Marvel Comics introduced him in 1962. It wasn’t because of his cool powers or his flashy suit, though. No, readers clung to Peter Parker because he was someone they could relate to, a high school outcast who didn’t fit in. This combination of external and internal conflicts would prove popular with Spider Man’s target audience, teenage males.

Peter Parker had bills to pay, classes to study for and girls to impress. He hurt, bled, wisecracked, and, at times, felt terribly alone.

Just like you.

Don’t detonate the drama all at once. Start your story by giving your protagonists something small to overcome. This could be a missed appointment, a speeding ticket or perhaps a false alarm.

For Peter Parker it was unpopularity and facing the school bully.

Next, give your hero some breathing room just before you ratchet up the drama. Give them a gift, and then take it away. Let your main character think they’re getting a promotion before they get fired, come home on their anniversary to another person in their bed, or have the BIG deal that will change everything crumble at the final moment.

Shortly after Peter is bitten by the spider and given this incredible gift, his uncle Ben is murdered. Murdered as an indirect result of Peter using his powers for selfish reasons, no less! How about some guilt to add to your plate full o’ conflict?

Love your characters, but don’t be afraid to punish them.

Love your characters, but don’t be afraid to punish them. Beat them up, run them through the emotional wringer, visit things unto them which you wouldn‘t wish on your worst enemy. But draw your reader into the human side of their pain and you will be building a bridge between the words on the page and the human experience inside the soul of you reader.

If it ever seems as though the tension might be too much, feel free to add a little more—so long as you’re making it believable and it helps the story.

The cheating spouse isn’t sorry and the man never gets his job back.

Uncle Ben doesn’t rise from the grave.

And sometimes the hero dies. That’s fine, so long as you have found a way to resolve the conflict.

Just be sure not to betray your reader with a simple solution. Resolution will come, but it should be a twisted road to get there. You are both the engineer of your hero’s life and the reader’s experience.

Learn to punish the one and you will please the other.

5 Tips to Create Good Conflict

1. Make your readers care about the protagonist. Make this person someone they can relate to on some level.
2. Introduce the conflict early. You don’t have to spell the whole thing out on page 2, but plant some seeds of what’s to come. If you wait too long, you lessen the impact and believability of what follows.
3. If your conflict is coming from a bad guy, make your readers understand the antagonist’s motives. It’s not enough to introduce the villain. Today’s readers want a peek inside the minds of evil. They want to know what makes the bad guy tick. Show them.
4. Make your readers care about the antagonist! If you can find a way to make them care about our hero‘s nemesis, or perhaps even feel a bit torn about their allegiances, you can deliver a complex and powerful story.
5. Deliver the goods. If you’re going to start a conflict, you’d better resolve it. If you fail to do so in a satisfying manner, then you are breaking the bond of trust with your reader.

Please, spread it if you like it and link it if you love it!

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You can’t believe it’s done. Too many weeks turned into too many months. It took several seasons, seven broken dishes, one bruised knee and two of your oldest child’s baby teeth before you typed the last page.

Sweat and soul, blood and bruises; you said you would do it and you did.

It could be awesome.

However, it might be terrible.

Yeah, you think, it’s probably terrible.

But what if it isn’t?

Writers manage the impossible by juggling opposite thoughts. How many times have you written something you thought was awesome and terrible, equal in tandem?

Many times for me.

At some point in the writing process, a writer needs perspective. Yet this can be difficult. What someone else says about your work can send you sailing or sink your spirits. Though some writers are more fragile than others are, the feedback will surely affect you in some way.

The worst kinds of criticism come from readers who don’t really know what you’re looking for. You need to tell them.

If you are clear from the beginning, then you can get a sharper critique without having your feelings hurt.

Pick any of the 51 following questions to help your reader or readers help you.

1. Did the book grab your attention from the first sentence?
2. By the end of chapter 1, did you feel confused in any way?
3. At any point in the book, did you feel an urgent need to turn the page?
4. Did you feel connected to the book?
5. Could you explain what the book was about in under a minute?
6. What would you say was the book’s greatest strength: writing, story, or characters?
7. Did the book touch your senses? Did you feel like you were there?
8. Were the characters unique?
9. Were the characters layered or one-dimensional?
10. Did the characters seem like real people?
11. Were characters consistent or did they stray past borders established by the writer?
12. Were characters individuals or did personalities seem to bleed into one another?
13. Could anything have enhanced the personality or believability of the characters?
14. Did you like the main character?
15. Was the dialogue believable?
16. Was dialogue ever used in the book solely as a means to deliver back-story?
17. Was the dialect used well?
18. Was the setting believable?
19. Were the characters with their setting?
20. Was the narrator’s voice or style distinctive?
21. Was the narrator’s voice or style consistent?
22. Did the story maintain its first, second, or third person narrative?
23. Was the plot easy to follow?
24. Was the language clean and clear, or wordy and difficult to understand?
25. Was the plot believable?
26. Did the writer seem confident?
27. Did the book remind you of any another book you have read?
28. If you could describe the book in three words, what would they be?
29. Was the villain layered? Did he/she seem realistic? Sympathetic?
30. Did you think about the book when you were not reading it?
31. Did the book contain enough description?
32. Are there parts of the book that need to be fleshed out more? If so, which parts?
33. Which parts of the book, if any, would you remove?
34. What was your favorite part of the book?
35. Was the book easy to get through? If not, what made it difficult?
36. Did you notice any factual errors?
37. Did you feel there was anything missing? If so, can you put your finger on what it was?
38. Did you enjoy the subplots? Did they add or subtract from the story?
39. Was there anything you found confusing?
40. Did you think the book was predictable?
41. Was the storyline worthy of your time and attention?
42. Did you enjoy the book in general?
43. What books or authors would you say are similar?
44. How did you feel about the book’s length?
45. Would you pay to read it?
46. Were you sad when it was finished?
47. Would you ever want to read it again?
48. Would you recommend it to a friend?
49. Were the themes of the book relevant to your life?
50. Was the theme too preachy, simplistic, or obvious?
51. If you could make one suggestion for improvement, what would it be?

At some point, you will want to share your work. By controlling which questions you give your reader, detailing what you want to know will help you to prepare for the answers.

Knowing what to expect will help you know what to accept. Which means you can more easily improve.

That means you can use the second draft to knock it out of the park. Of course, if you would like another pair of eyes on the book, eyes with experience in writing and storytelling, then you might consider hiring us to read your work.

Thanks for reading!

Spread it if you like it, link it if you love it!

Be your best writer and see your book to print. Subscribe to the Inkwell for free updates by RSS or Email.

But it’s true. Writing with a partner can be magical.

At its best, writing with a partner will sharpen the quality of your work and allow you to glide through a manuscript with greater speed. But it will also lead your brain to places it would never have gone alone.

Before David sent me the first few hundred words of Available Darkness, a little more than a year ago, I wouldn’t have imagined that the process of collaborative writing could have ever worked so fluidly.

Though one of my favorite Stephen King books, The Talisman, is actually co-written by Peter Straub, and my favorite series as a twelve year old boy (nerd alert!) was the Dragonlance series by Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman, I imagined those writers had access to some secret sauce of collusion that I did not.

But it’s not true.

Not for me and not for you.

You’re a writer.

Being a writer means you’re an excellent communicator.

If you find a writing partner you can vibe with, then you can focus your already excellent skills into a sharper point. David and I managed to keep the pages of Available Darkness bouncing between the borders of a lot of other projects without dropping the ball.

You can too.

5 Ways Having a Partner Will Help You Write Faster and Better

1) Accountability

We had a busy year.

With the many things we tried to pull off in 2009, Available Darkness could have easily faded to vapor. And if the project had been either one of ours individually, it might’ve easily ended up in the bottom drawer of the desk (or forgotten folder of the hard drive) like so many of the world’s other unfinished manuscripts.

But it wasn’t.

Available Darkness was published each week, with only a couple of holiday exceptions.

We never wanted to let our readers down, nor did we want to disappoint the other.

2) A Way Out of the Rabbit Hole

Writing can make you feel like you’re alone in a basement with only the echo of footsteps trip trapping across the planks above to keep you company.

You sit and stare, then blink and type, then lean and stare some more.

It is a different process to have someone else with whom to volley ideas. Your ideas don’t have to be perfect because you are not reliant upon your creativity alone. Your partner can help carry the story forward even when you’re not feeling up to the task.