We haven’t done a “which one are you” quiz here in a long time. And when I found this one, I thought many of you would enjoy it as much as I did. (Of course, if you’re a devoted fan of the series, as I am, you’ll be able to stack the answers in the favor of the character you want, pretty much. But do try to be as honest as possible!)

Click below to go to the quiz (it will open in a new tab/window), take the quiz, then come back and report your results!

My results (no surprise here!):

You are the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith). You do not suffer fools gladly. In fact you do not suffer anything at all because you refuse to entertain any form of discomfort in your life whatsoever.

Have you ever heard/read one of these self-publishing gurus say or write something to this effect?

Avoid all legacy publishers. You can do everything they can, faster, and you don’t have to give away the majority of your income.

That’s a quote from this post from Joe Konrath’s blog where he proselytizes for self-publishing.

Let me take issue with a few things he says in this blog post that get under my skin:

I don’t see any noticeable sales boosts when I’m mentioned in some major periodical. The best media attention I ever received didn’t account for more than a few hundred extra sales. I’ve sold almost 700,000 ebooks. A few hundred doesn’t mean diddly.

Really? A few hundred book sales don’t “mean diddly” to you? Well, for a traditionally published author whose sales put me squarely in the midlist category, a few hundred sales are huge! Most traditionally published, midlist authors can expect to sell anywhere from between 5,000 to 20,000 books. A “few hundred” books to us represents a huge bump in sales and can mean the difference in whether or not we’ve sold enough to earn back our advances so that we actually start making royalties.

The majority of self-published authors would kill for a “few hundred” sales—because most self-published authors are going to do well to sell a “few hundred” in total.

Look at my Amazon reviews. I’ve got thousands.

Um, yeah. Because you got your start as a traditionally published author who, through the marketing/publicity efforts of your publishing house (and your own efforts, too, I’m sure), became a best-selling author with name recognition and a dedicated fanbase—from which you made a good living (I’m assuming)—before you moved into self-publishing.

But I didn’t make $140k in the last 30 days because of thankful writers, old fans, or a mention in the Guardian. I made it because I positioned my titles properly.

And you were able to pay to position your titles properly because you’re making money from already being a best-selling author and making money from your previously published books. The majority of authors, whether traditionally or self published, will never make that kind of money.

2. Focus, as always, on writing good books and presenting them in a professional way. The more, the better.

3. Social media and word of mouth are helpful, but you have to reach a lot of people before these become a factor. Less tweeting, more writing.

Totally agree with these two points!!!

And, back to the quote at the beginning of my post:

Avoid all legacy publishers. You can do everything they can, faster, and you don’t have to give away the majority of your income.

Um, no, actually, Joe, WE can’t do everything a traditional publisher can do (though if he’s truly making $140,000/month and believes everyone else e-publishing is too, then I can see how he could be under this misconception). Most e-published/self-published authors are lucky to make between $100 and $200 per month. Traditional publishers have so many more resources, so many more contacts in the industry, and so much more MONEY than we authors do to effect promotion of our books. Oh, and that’s not to mention the expense that self-published authors must (though some don’t) go to for professional editing, typesetting, copywriting, cover design, etc.

We can do it “faster”??? Not hardly. We could spend twelve to fifteen hours a day working on production and marketing and never make the impact that having a traditional publishing house behind us has.

“You don’t have to give away the majority of your income”???? How does he think we’re going to pay for all that editing and marketing and promotion that traditional publishers do for us after they’ve PAID us to write the book? Even traditionally published authors have to put some of our own money back into the promotion effort on top of the money our publishers are putting into getting our books out in front of (hopefully) the right people to try to increase sales.

The truth of self-publishing that most people considering it don’t get told is that once you go down that path, you’re going to find yourself struggling for time to write because if you really want to make money from book sales, you’re going to have to put hours and hours and hours of work every day into marketing. I still have to do this, too, even with the marketing efforts of my publishing houses doing what they’re doing.

There’s an old adage from the sales industry that is also true of the publishing industry: You have to spend money to make money. And in our industry, you also have to spend time to make money. The question becomes is how much are you willing to spend to ensure you have a quality product that will go a long way towards assisting your promotion efforts?

And don’t just do the minimum that will get you by. Do your best. Work from the heart for your real Master, for God, confident that you’ll get paid in full when you come into your inheritance. Keep in mind always that the ultimate Master you’re serving is Christ. The sullen servant who does shoddy work will be held responsible. Being a follower of Jesus doesn’t cover up bad work.
Colossians 3:23–25, The Message

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth taking the time to do it right.

So I have my real-world fiction books categorized by genre and, within each genre, alphabetized by author and title. My nonfiction books are separated into categories: writing books; school textbooks I couldn’t part with; a large shelf of U.S. Civil War books (I did minor in that in college, after all); Bibles, Bible studies, devotionals, commentaries, and hymnals (I have three: Broadman, Baptist, and Methodist); books in German (some my dad brought back from Germany, some I got while I was taking German in high school and college); and “miscellaneous” nonfiction.

Yikes, I need to do some re-shelving/organizing!

Organizing an E-Book Reader
I’d been using the Kindle for PC app on my computer for quite some time before I got my Kindle. Well . . . I’d downloaded the program and downloaded some free e-books (classics, mostly). But I did already have some content which downloaded to my Kindle when it arrived. And I realized very quickly that if I ever wanted to find anything on it, I’d have to figure out a way of organizing that works for me. So I started setting up collections. General collections at first: Classics. Romance (included historical and contemporary, general market and CBA). Nonfiction. Other Fiction.

But then, when I got to the point at which I was adding more content to my Kindle than to my paper-and-glue library, I realized I’d have to start getting even more specific with my collections. Splitting out contemporary and historical romance. Splitting those even further into general market and CBA collections. Splitting “other” into more specific categories: mystery, speculative fiction, young adult, general fiction, historical fiction.

There’s a second screen containing another four or five collections.

Just last week, I made another organizational decision and split my general-market historical romance category and put all of the samples I’ve downloaded into their own folder (and with 95 samples, this was a good decision).

But as I was going through and looking at the titles of the books in that historical romance category, one of the (several) gripes I have with using an text-based e-reader came back to me . . . I’m a visually oriented person, and the first thing that draws me to a book is the cover. The second thing is the back-cover blurb. And I get NEITHER of these on my Kindle. (I know, many e-readers are now full color and have this capability. I, however, am a poor author and can’t afford one of those.) I have wireless at home and it’s a 3G model Kindle, so I know I can look up the book description online. But I still can’t see the cover in color and it’s sometimes slow and/or freezes up on me when I do so.

No pretty covers.

I thought about, and actually started, setting up boards on Pinterest with the covers and the back-cover blurb for each book on my Kindle. But . . . not only was that taking FOREVER to look up each book and pin it, once it was on Pinterest, I couldn’t arrange/sort them. So I deleted the few boards I did manage to get through.

For a few weeks, I pondered this. I could set up a spreadsheet, copying over the cover images and cover blurbs. But, again, there was the issue of time.

So I finally figured out what I needed to do. I opened up a new account on Goodreads with a secondary e-mail address and set up bookshelves there correlating to the collections on my Kindle.

Now, when I get ready to start a new book, and scrolling through the Kindle isn’t, well, kindling interest in any of them, I have a tool I can use to look at all of the content on my device, in the way I have it organized on my device, to help me make my choice. Of course, this means remembering to update Goodreads whenever I download something new. But since I almost always do that at the computer anyway, it should be an easy habit to form.

How do you organize and/or keep track of your books/e-books?

Book covers below link to the series page where you can find out more about each book.

The Ransome Trilogy

The Matchmakers

The Brides of Bonneterre Series

At forty years old, I think I’ve finally figured out why I’m not only still single, but why I’ve never been out on a date!

(“One Hundred Easy Ways” from Wonderful Town, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green)

And now you know the secret to my (singleness) success!

Sherrinda asked: You said you did not know what you would be writing Sunday. Do you not have a plan…an outline…of what you are writing?

Debra wrote: I’ve been doing the 1k1hr challenge once or twice a day but I can only do it if I list the three or four things I need to get done in each chapter. Then I have no problem hitting that mark.

Best-selling author Tom Wolfe once said:

What I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I’m feeling inspired. It’s mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.

Because I’m at the point in my novel in which I’m in the middle—the section where I’m supposed to be upping the ante for my characters, complicating/thwarting their goals, and driving them toward the climax at the end, I’m also at the section of the book in which I had the fewest ideas for specific scenes when I wrote the synopsis for the proposal (which, let’s remember, was about eighteen months ago).

About four or five months ago, right after I signed the contract and knew for sure this was what I’d be writing, I pulled out the synopsis and my big Post-it Notes and wrote scene cards for the scenes I’d already written (prologue and first three chapters which went out with the proposal) as well as for the specific scenes mentioned in the synopsis. Though I stuck them to a table-top A-frame flip-chart easel, and not to my office wall (which no longer has this space available), here’s a reminder of what that process looks like:


Scene cards from Ransome’s Crossing

However, once I get into the middle of the book like this, I’m not always certain what specifically comes next when I sit down to write. Much depends on what happened in the previous scene, and much depends on what specific scenes toward the end I know I need to work toward. But most of the time, when I sit down to write, I don’t have a specific scene in mind.

There are those occasions when I will suddenly hear the dialogue in my head or I will see a scene play out in my mind’s eye and have to scramble to transcribe it onto the page. That did happen to me with one of my 1k1h sprints last weekend. I’d already begun writing the scene (about 300 to 400 words) of which I’d had a very clear vision the day before. So when I sat down to just write, write, write for that one hour, I knew exactly where that scene was going—what the action was, what they characters needed to say to each other, and what the motivations/reactions/goals of each of the three characters in the scene were. But part of the problem of having that scene so clear in my head was that it slowed my ability to write it because of the fear that I’d never be able to get it down in words the way I envisioned it.

The next afternoon, when I started the next 1k1h challenge, I’d already started a new scene—and shortly after starting to write, I knew where it was going and what hook I was working toward for the end of the chapter. Which I got to with plenty of time to spare in that hour. So I started the next chapter, really not sure exactly where it was going.

How did I start the next chapter if I had no idea what came next? Well, I thought through my four or five POV characters (I’m still not sure if I’m keeping all of them, but I am allowing myself to write a first draft, so I’m experimenting with viewpoints right now) and picked the one who hadn’t had a POV scene in a while. I started with his name. Andrew. Then I figured out where he was. In his cottage. What time of day it was. Afternoon. What he was doing there at that time of day. About to look at the thing wrapped in cloth that Meg handed him in the previous scene. But, as an experienced author, I know I can’t just have him sitting in his house alone thinking. A knock on the door. So . . . who’s on the other side?

As soon as I figured out who was at the door (his rival for the heroine’s attention), then I had my scene—and I was able to write more than 1,600 words in one hour. But if I hadn’t made myself sit down and write, I probably wouldn’t have (a) come up with that scene or (b) gotten any progress made on my word count that day.

When that hour was up, I walked away—and left off in the middle of a sentence (and with a misspelled word at that!). So the next time when I sat down to write, I was able to immediately pick up where I left off and keep writing. Which resulted in another almost 1,500 words in one hour.

Though I didn’t get anything written yesterday, as I was exhausted from having been kept awake until almost 3:30 in the morning by the tornado sirens the night before, I am planning on doing at least 1k1h challenge every afternoon this week to see just how much progress I can make on this manuscript this week. And, no, I won’t know what I’m going to write every day when I sit down to do it . . . I’ll simply know that I must write. And trust that my creativity will kick in and illuminate my path.

Which brings me to my favorite quote about writing from author E.L. Doctorow:

It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.


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