A Book From Start to Finish: The Farewell Masterclass | The Exceptional Scribble Show, Episode 261

This is the complete interview hour from Richard Lowe’s final appearance as monthly expert panelist on episode 261 of The Exceptional Scribble Show with host Sage the Poet, joined by co-host Warrior Queen of Poetsalm, broadcast live on May 21, 2019, lightly edited for readability. Segments outside Richard’s hour are omitted.

The farewell introduction

Sage the Poet: Episode 261 is a main event: on this third Tuesday in May, The Writing King gives us his final night on the show’s panel. We’ve had a wonderful time with him as expert panelist; we are better and more well-informed about becoming a self-published author because of him. We will miss him on the panel, we’ll continue our affiliation, and his contact information will always be available here. Tonight’s topic: what it takes to do a book from start to finish. Welcome, Richard.

Richard Lowe: Thank you for that great introduction.

Start with research, then pick your lane

Richard Lowe: Writing a book is a straightforward process if you have a plan, and I’ve done quite a few of them. Start by figuring out what to write about, and research how well it will sell and which categories it belongs in. Go to Amazon, use a product like KDP Rocket or do it by hand, and look at what’s at the top and how much it’s selling. What you want, especially for a first novel, is a category that’s neither super-competitive nor totally dead: a few very popular books at the top, and the rest not selling so fast. You’ll never compete against runaway sellers without a big marketing budget or super luck, which I wouldn’t count on.

Then write the book, and know which kind of writer you are. A pantser writes by the seat of their pants, a basic outline at most, and the book kind of writes itself; I tend to be that way. A plotter wants every detail outlined before starting. Both work, and there are shades of gray between. Pantsers tend to write character-oriented stories, because they start with the characters and the plot unfolds from there; George R.R. Martin is more or less a pantser, and you can tell from how convoluted Game of Thrones gets. Tolkien was probably a plotter: very plot-driven, this happens, then this, straightforward. Choose whatever works and write.

Set your goal like it’s a job

Richard Lowe: Set a daily word goal, and don’t set it low. Pretend writing is a job: your boss would not be happy with half a page a day. What would your boss be happy with? Two thousand words, five thousand, whatever, but set it high, and count only words in reasonable shape: a good draft, ready for an editor or a second pass, not journals, not letters, not promotion. My goal is about 5,000 words a day, and that takes a good solid six to eight hours every single day.

And don’t do those hours straight. Sitting all day is bad for the back, and it fixes your stare on the screen, which produces writer’s block. I write for an hour or two, then take a half-mile or mile walk, go to lunch, come back. And on the walk: break the fixed stare. Look at butterflies, flowers, people; talk to people; extrovert a little. That breaks writer’s block.

The other big cause of block: editing and writing at the same time. Don’t. Do a brain dump, a chapter at a time; just throw up on the page, so to speak, then go back and edit. If you write a line, hate it, delete it, rewrite it, an hour later you’ve got three paragraphs and a locked-up mind, because writing and editing are two different kinds of creativity. My rhythm: write a chapter, editing pass; next chapter, editing pass; every three or four chapters, a bigger pass; and at the end, the whole book.

Environment matters too. Make your writing space as perfect as you can. I like a quiet room: butterflies and acrylics on one wall, books on another, pictures on the third, door shut. If the door is shut and nothing’s burning down and nobody’s bleeding on the floor: leave me alone. Interruptions break the stream of consciousness and lock you up. Some writers want music or headphones; whatever your perfect environment is, build it. And don’t fight your computer. A Chromebook is an excellent writer’s machine: two or three hundred bucks for a nice one, fast, efficient, everything stored in the cloud so a crash costs you nothing. Office 365 online is free in its reduced form, as is Google Docs; or pay the yearly fee for the whole suite.

Editing, beta readers, and the tool verdicts

Richard Lowe: Halfway through the draft, start planning promotion, and we’ll get there. When the draft is done: hire a real professional editor. For a 100,000-word book, that’s probably a few thousand dollars, and worth it. Editing is not proofreading: a copy editor finds the holes in the plot and helps you rewrite sections that don’t make sense, not sections that are grammatically wrong. After the editor, maybe a second editor. And build beta readers into your team, with one rule: their feedback must be specific. “The plot didn’t make sense to me” is a worthless comment; ignore it. “You missed that the spaceship is exceeding the speed of light in chapter six”: that you can find and fix. Writing critique groups are great too, just slow, a few pages a week. Then, at the end, proofreading; I like two proofreaders on a book.

Sage the Poet: Would you recommend Grammarly?

Richard Lowe: For editing, no; automation can catch gross basics, but that’s proofreading territory. And for fiction, AutoCrit is a far, far superior product. You load your novel in, and it analyzes: show me every passive-voice construction, and it lists them all; strong words, weak words, adverbs. You’ll discover, oh boy, I write in passive voice a lot, that’s why it sounds boring. Or you’re drowning in adverbs, “he said angrily,” which is telling, and frowned upon. Grammarly tells you none of that. AutoCrit is not meant for nonfiction, though; I’ve tried, and it just gets confused. There’s also Hemingway, cheap or free, which does a better job than Grammarly for what it does.

And notice something about all of this: the heavy editing, critiquing, and grammar work happens at the back end. Which is why sweating over each paragraph at the front end is wasted; those paragraphs will be gone over 50 times before you’re done. Sweat at the back end.

The launch: 700 church members and a category push

Richard Lowe: Around the halfway point of the book, start building the promotion machine. I used to interview writers weekly, and one lady I interviewed had 700 people from her church each putting in a couple of hours a week posting about her book on social media, with a couple of people managing the whole process so she didn’t have to. That’s what you want: a team. Contests, free copies, steady buzz building well before the book is done, because it takes a while to get steam up.

Then the launch. Pick a publication date and have your group build buzz toward it: first chapters posted here and there, synopses, hints, character pictures, and the date everywhere. You want as many purchases in the first week or two as possible, because hundreds of sales in the first few days push the book toward number one in its categories, you can have two or three, and being number one even for a day or two builds momentum. Make the launch a whoop-de-doo event: a Zoom gathering, speeches, a discount to drive the copy count up. Do all this and you’ll sell a few hundred copies, maybe a thousand, and that’s exactly what you want. It sounds like a lot of work because it is; you’re treating it as a profession, not a hobby.

Afterward, keep the buzz rolling, mention volume two coming, and fill out the formats: ACX audio on a royalty split costs you nothing up front, paperback, Kindle, and don’t miss Apple Books like most authors do. You can’t upload there from Windows, but Draft2Digital will place it there and on Google Books for you. And notice: most of the work is promotion. I’ve mostly stopped promoting my own books while I focus on the ghostwriting, and they sell accordingly, a few hundred bucks a month, and I don’t mind. If you want sales, you promote, constantly.

The rants: ads, group spam, and webinar hypnosis

Richard Lowe: Now the warnings. Don’t buy ads: not newsletter ads, not Facebook, not Google, not Twitter, not LinkedIn, unless you are genuinely an expert, and you’re probably not. I have wasted so much money: $20 for a newsletter ad to 10,000 people, two books sold. Facebook ads are so convoluted that you either get fully educated or hire an expensive expert, and to become good you’re going to burn money; you can burn a thousand dollars a month on Google ads without even thinking.

Don’t dump your book into 50,000 Facebook groups either. You’ll eventually get banned, and nobody reads those posts anyway. Here’s the test: look at the comments. If no post in a group has comments, nobody is reading the group, and it’s worthless. Real groups have comments, likes, interaction. Be personal instead: your page, your group, and your writing team posting to theirs, which looks human instead of automated.

And watch out for the webinar trap. There are affiliate marketers, and I’m technically one, but I stick to quality and my own products, running schemes: write a book in two hours, sell 10,000 copies, only $9.95. Garbage. And at the other extreme, the free webinar with ten free tips: they give you a few mildly useful tips, and then half the webinar is a sales pitch for a product anywhere from $29 to $10,000. Here’s the mechanics, and I know because I’ve run webinars: early on they ask everybody to type yes. Can everybody hear me? Say yes. Does that make sense? Say yes. By the time the product appears, you’ve been saying yes for an hour, and you buy a product you never wanted. You genuinely got hypnotized. If there’s a credit card anywhere near you, you will lose; they’re that clever. I’ve bought thousands of dollars of products that sit on my hard drive. Occasionally a webinar product is actually good; I got one genuinely useful course on library placement through one, and my trick now is recording webinars and skipping everything I don’t want. But how will you know the good from the trap in advance? You won’t. So for training, go somewhere accredited: a college, a university, a real online school. The Dummies books tend to be pretty good, and Writer’s Digest training is good, inexpensive, and, most important of all, you get to it through a catalog page with no salesy junk in the way. If you see salesy junk: be aware.

Consignment, open mics, and career questions

Sage the Poet: A friend sells copies on consignment at a high-traffic gas station. Have you done something like that?

Richard Lowe: Yes, my coloring books, in local cafes with lots of children, and it did okay. The caveats: you buy the copies first, say 100 copies at your author price; the venue takes a percentage, roughly half; and you accept returns on what doesn’t sell. If you can afford the copies, spreading them around doesn’t hurt. You can also donate to local libraries; there are real ways to get books into libraries, and there’s actually one good online course on it.

Sage the Poet: Would you recommend an unknown writer test their manuscript at an open mic?

Richard Lowe: Writing critique groups first, and meetup.com will surface open mic and writing groups near you. Open mics are probably the wrong audience unless you’re doing poetry, but the concept is sound: find the right audience. And if you want to learn to speak, I highly recommend Toastmasters; I couldn’t get on a stage until I went there and got over the fear.

Sage the Poet: What about a technical writer, professionally published in papers and magazines, writing a first novel?

Richard Lowe: A couple of writing courses at the local junior college, or Writer’s Digest’s inexpensive ones. You don’t need a lot; you need things that make you write. Critique groups are great for that. And read a lot in your genre: writing science fiction, read science fiction, and you’ll learn to write it better.

Book coaching: the short-story-first method

Sage the Poet: For a first-time author with an outline who needs a writing coach: published examples first, or trial and error?

Richard Lowe: Well, I am a writing coach; that’s one of the services I offer. And here’s an approach I’ve used successfully: one client came in to write a novel, his first, and it was turning out to be too huge for him. So we stopped the novel and wrote a 3,000-word short story instead, set in the same universe. He learned much faster at that scale. Then another story, and another, and after three or four of those, he was able to confront the novel, and we worked through it. In coaching, we do one-hour sessions, two or three hours a week depending on what you can afford, month to month, tailored to whatever’s needed: outline, chapters, editing, promotion. When you’re done, we part ways, no strings.

Sage the Poet: And for writers changing to a genre they’ve never written?

Richard Lowe: I actually have a goal to write at least one book in virtually every genre, all under pseudonyms, because you build a brand under each name: one name for Westerns, another for romance, another for mythology. To enter a new genre cheaply: use Amazon’s Look Inside feature on the top books. You don’t have to buy them; read the opening chapters, study how the book reads, the plots, how the characters work. Then write a few short stories in the genre, then the book. I call it genre hopping.

And for young writers who don’t know their identity yet: pick the genre you actually read and love, reading, not movies, because that’s what you’ll write well. One exception: not fan fiction. Write a Game of Thrones story and you can’t publish it; HBO owns it and won’t let you. Practice on it if you like, but if you want to be professional, skip it.

For your millennials specifically: don’t start with something as hefty as a novel. Pick a theme inside your novel idea, vampires versus werewolves in an alternate universe, whatever it is, and write a short story in that world. Then another, and another, then the novel. Short stories teach you to write tighter, because there’s no room for the unneeded subplots that bloat first novels. You can even sell them to magazines. And here’s the bonus: after your novel becomes a minor hit, take those ten short stories, polish them, and publish them as an anthology. Already written. Larry Niven did that constantly, and Isaac Asimov, the old greats.

The farewell

Sage the Poet: Richard, you’ve been such a great asset to the Exceptional Scribble Show. If we had millions, we would compensate you for all you’ve done. More than that: we will never forget you, and the door of this show will always be open to you. Please share your courses and contacts one final time.

Richard Lowe: Go to fictionmasterclass.com for the individual courses: how to write a mystery, romance, fantasy, science fiction, the five idea books with 500 prompts each, and the show-versus-tell book with lots of examples. The full bundle is at the number-one heckofawebsite.com for around a hundred dollars, a fraction of the normal price, and it won’t be there much longer. And thewritingking.com/ has a contact form: for book coaching, or honestly just to talk. I’m always happy to have a 30-minute conversation with a writer. I love talking to writers.

Warrior Queen: I remember you teaching us that libraries pay royalties every time an ebook is read. Information to know. Thank you, Richard, and people will still know how to find you.

Richard Lowe: Just go to my website and use the form.

Sage the Poet: Peace, blessings, and success. We won’t forget you. Don’t forget us.

Richard Lowe: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.