Mary Jo Tate, Editor & Book Coach
Great books have a powerful influence on our lives.
Check out the Great Books Week Blog Tour for readers’ stories of how books have affected their lives.
As a writer, how do you hope to impact your readers? Do you write to inform, instruct, inspire, educate, entertain, encourage, motivate, or some mixture of these reasons?
Just read an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal: “Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard.”
Lev Grossman says the key to the 21st-century novel is “the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.” He spends a good bit of time slamming the early 20th-century Modernists for being too difficult to understand.
Does it really have to be an either/or choice between the challenging Modernist novel and the easy-to-read plot-driven novel?
I think there’s a place for both. That’s why both Faulkner and Grisham have a place on my shelves.
Take a look at the article and let me know what you think.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574377163804387216.html
“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
We hear it all the time. But the fact is that books ARE judged by their covers. A cover can make or break a book’s sales–regardless of the content. (As a content specialist, it’s hard for me to admit that . . . but it’s true.)
Check out Jacqueline Church Simonds’ autopsy of a book cover:
http://smallpressworld.com/blog/?p=166
Very informative!
On May 28, I attended Rick Frishman’s Author 101 University in New York. I highly encourage you to attend this fantastic event next time it rolls around. Rick is hosting 3 this year.
Meanwhile, I’ll post highlights from my notes to jumpstart your thinking.
Mark Victor Hansen, co-author of the bestselling Chicken Soup for the Soul series and host of Mega Book Marketing University, shared the following:
Writing helps you know you.
Oprah says 2 things made her successful:
1. journaling every day
2. reading 2 books a week
Being an author gives you:
1. instant credibility (opens doors)
2. fortune (defined any way you want)
3. fame
Writing is crystallized thinking.
marketing x exposure (PR) = sales
greatest risk = greatest opportunity
Buckminster Fuller: real wealth = ideas x energy – RW = I x E
3 skills of infopreneur:
1. find addicts / hungry fish (find an itch no one else is scratching)
2. tap into a universal want or need
3. create lifetime customers
Keys to your WOW (World of Wealth) factor:
1. goosebumps
2. happy tears
3. weak in the knees
4. change in perception
5. instantaneous behavioral change (for nonfiction)
Dream team – co-author with someone who does the stuff you can’t do.
Have goals that thrill and scare you.
Set your goals as if you have unlimited time, money, and contacts.
My biggest takeaways:
“Writing is crystallized thinking.” It’s easy to think in a vague, amorphous way. Putting our thoughts into writing forces us to be clear and specific–to choose one word rather than another, to put one sentence before another. Thinking without writing and writing without thinking are both incomplete.
“Have goals that thrill and scare you.” Getting out of my comfort zone is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur, and I’ve worked to teach this to my four sons. I’m on the brink of some thrilling but scary major new projects, so this was a timely reminder.
Which of these nuggets from Mark resonates most for you?
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