Writers in the Storm

by Jenny Hansen

I had a tooth pulled last month -- my very first -- and it did not go well. I had pain, nausea, swelling, and all those apparently usual things. Three or four days later, the pain went from about a four or five out of ten to “someone is chiseling my face from my jaw to my eyeball with a rusty drill bit.” I'd developed something called Dry Socket,

Frankly, when my primary care doctor texted me that term, I thought he'd gotten autocorrected. I had no idea what he was talking about. But what you don’t know can indeed hurt you, both in your mouth and in your manuscript.

Read on, my friends. You can let me know how I do at bringing my hilariously sad story back around to writing. Plus, I could sure use some sympathy down in the comments for yet another unfortunate health experience.

What is Dry Socket?

A quick definition... Dry Socket is a dental complication, involving exposed bone and nerves, that can happen after a tooth extraction, especially for an upper tooth. I had a perforated sinus to go with mine, which means five people wanted to come look in my mouth when I went to the dentist for pain management. It would have been hilarious if I hadn't felt like I wanted to divorce my face.

I heard things like:

• "I've never seen anything like that before."
• "Look at how far that hole goes up."
• "So that's her sinus?"
• "How do you fix that?"
• WHOA.

It felt like a dental school in my cubicle.

Speaking of lessons...

#1 – Never Forget About Murphy

Murphy’s Law says that “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.” Writers know this law well.

For example, we know the NaNoWriMo challenge comes in the very worst month for those in the US. There are several holidays in November, including the labor-intensive Thanksgiving holiday. Plus, it’s cold and flu season right around that time.

I literally never won NaNoWriMo until I did the following three things:

1. Got a NaNo Buddy (Julie Glover rocks!) who incentivized me to show up, and who dragged me across the 50K finish line when I fell behind.
2. Stockpiled my words earlier in the month, so I could enjoy my birthday and those aforementioned holidays.
3. Found a reliable dictation tool. I "talked" my story out on days when my energy or creativity was low.

At the end of the day…

Since I’m optimistic, I generally plan for the worst and hope for the best. But sometimes, something (like stupid Dry Socket) is so unexpectedly craptastic that there is no way to plan. Then you must employ Lesson #2.

#2 – "This Too Shall Pass"

My mama gave me this one early in life, while my parents were going through a fairly vicious divorce. She was right.

We all have those no good, terrible, awful days. Days so dreadful that it would be easier to just go back to bed and start over. Weeks when we truly don’t think we’ll get to the weekend. Months marked by angst and strife.

They pass. They might bring lingering hurt or grief or anxiety, but they pass.

As Winston Churchill said, “If you're going through hell, keep going.”  And “never, never, never give up.”

#3 – Seek Out Advice (early and often)

New writers tend to spend a lot of time on learning and development. I’ve talked before about all the time I spent bumbling around as a newbie, and all the things I wish I’d known much earlier. If you were or are like me, you might not even understand some of the writing lessons you learn until many years later. That is normal and a necessary part of the process because new knowledge is usually built on old knowledge.

Back to my Dry Socket…

I don’t know about you, but I am useless when medicated.

According to my husband, the nurse who walked my sedated self to the car put the post-operative care instructions in my hand. Four days later when my extraction site exploded with pain, I had no memory of this. I'd have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I never got them.

It went like this:

All weekend, I alternated between leaving desperate messages at the only number I had for the dentist, and wishing I had the man's cell phone number.

When my sainted Hubs said, “Let me double-check to see if it’s listed somewhere on the instructions,” my answer was, “What instructions?!”

“The ones they handed you after the surgery," he said. "I thought you read them.”

That’s when the fight started.

Plus, I called the office bright and early the next day on Monday and brought the fight to their door. "Those instructions should have been sent to me before the procedure. And, by the way, can someone look in my mouth TODAY and make this pain go away?"

[For the record, it took at least another two weeks for the pain to dial back from "fourteen out of ten" to a four.]

#4 – We can do hard things.

Writing isn’t for sissies. Neither are health challenges. I know I’m not the only one here who's had both.

These are three tried and true mechanisms that help me get through stalled manuscripts and trying health moments:

a) Do at least a tiny piece of your to-do list every day.

Sometimes, all that means is thinking about your story, or re-writing the list so the tasks are broken into smaller pieces. Sometimes that means half, or maybe even a whole scene. But usually you will feel better if you have done at least one thing on your list, even if it’s not a great day.

b) On really hard days, give yourself grace. Trust that you will get back to it.

c) It’s okay to do other work.

Some days you hate your story. You want to throw it in the toilet and go write something new. You can’t think of a single thing to say, or a scene just isn’t working. Those are the best times to use your creative energy in a different way. Some of my favorite alternatives are cooking or baking, gardening, knitting, reading, or writing a bonus scene.

Often those things will let off my frustration enough that I can do the thing I set out to do. If not, give yourself that grace and know you'll get back to it another day.

#5 – Stress Wastes Time

Time is finite and so is your sanity. You can’t get time back you’ve lost, wasted or misused…but adding anxiety on top of it wastes more time.

I’ve stressed about time for as long as I can remember. Did I use it wisely? How could I have used it better? How much more could I have gotten done if…

I’ve also wasted plenty of time worrying about time.

Worrying about being productive can paralyze you with stress, to the point that you’re less productive. And all the cortisol dumped into your system from all that stress causes even bigger issues.

During my cancer battle last year, I let that unproductive habit go. Wasting time by stressing out about time seemed colossally stupid when I was spending all my time trying to stay alive. I spent hours each week in the infusion center, days in bed, months recovering from surgery. I’m still here so I consider it time well-spent.

Imagine how worse off I'd have been if I'd added worries about time to my recovery. Imagine how much longer your manuscript will take if you add worry to your creative process.

Joy is what makes your muse sing, not stress.

Back to all of you... Have you had dental, health, or life challenges that provided valuable writing lessons? Have you ever had the dreaded Dry Socket? I can't wait to hear your stories down in the comments!

About Jenny

By day, Jenny Hansen provides brand storytelling, LinkedIn coaching, and copywriting for accountants and financial services firms. By night, she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction, and short stories. After 20+ years as a corporate trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

Find Jenny here at Writers In the Storm, or online on Facebook or Instagram.

Top photo purchased from Depositphotos. Artist's portfolio here.

By Becca Puglisi

Stakes are a crucial part of your story because they define what will happen if the protagonist fails. To build reader empathy, you need this piece in place because when the reader sees what’s at stake, and they recognize why it matters to the character, the story becomes important. It matters. 

Stakes also create tension when the reader realizes what’s on the line. So when the stakes are referenced early on, readers are more likely to be drawn in and root for the character’s success.

But that empathy connection only happens if the reader can see what’s at stake. And that can only happen if the author knows what’s on the line. Sometimes, it’s obvious. What are the consequences if Sheriff Brody doesn’t catch the shark in Jaws? Death and dismemberment. In the original Inside Out, if all of Riley’s emotions aren’t acknowledged and won’t work together, her identity is at risk. 

But other times, it’s harder to identify what’s at stake in a story. So I’d like to share a simple method for figuring that out.

Outer Motivation + Inner Motivation = Stakes

All you have to do is figure out a couple of key elements for your story.

The Protagonist’s Goal

First: the protagonist’s goal. This is their overall objective. It’s what they’re hoping to achieve: getting the girl, enacting revenge, catching the criminal, etc. This is also called the Outer Motivation because it’s what the character is visibly working toward; everything he or she does is in pursuit of this objective. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s goal is to destroy the one ring. In An Officer and a Gentleman, the protagonist’s goal is to become a Navy officer. The story goal should be pretty obvious because it’s what your character is actively seeking and pursuing.

The Protagonist’s Inner Motivation

But, often, there’s also something internally driving your character toward their goal. This is called the Inner Motivation because its private and is usually related to self-esteem or personal fulfillment. Figuring this out requires some digging into the character’s psyche and their past, but on a basic level, you can simply ask: Why is the goal so important to them?

In An Officer and a Gentleman, why does Zach Mayo want to become a Navy officer? There are lots of possibilities, but the true reason becomes clear when you know his backstory. His mother committed suicide, abandoning him as a ten-year-old. He was sent to live with his father, who was an excellent drinking buddy but not good for much else. And his dad’s military career had them moving all over so he could never put down roots. What Zach craves more than anything is belonging, and becoming a military officer will provide that for him. This is going to meet an internal need that’s missing. Belonging to a group is his inner motivation.

One interesting connection to note: the inner motivation will often point back to a missing human need.

If you’ve followed Angela and me for long, you’ve likely heard about Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and how it fits into character arc. The full explanation is here, but to summarize, there are 5 needs that are common to all human beings. If any of these are missing, people become vulnerable, and they’ll take action to fill the void. 

So, when we’re thinking about how to create meaningful stakes for a character, it’s helpful to zero in on which need is missing or most important to them—and be sure it’s tied to their inner motivation. For Zach, he’s missing love and belonging. He’s chosen a goal that, if he succeeds, will usher him into a ready-made community. So what’s at stake if he fails? Not belonging—continuing to live in isolation, alone.

SIDE NOTE: It’s important to note that not every protagonist has an inner motivation. This happens a lot in stories that are plot-driven rather than character-driven: thrillers, action/adventure, etc. Think: Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, and vintage James Bond. Those stories are all about the character achieving the goal rather than them growing and maturing, so that internal piece isn’t necessarily needed. In stories like these, the stakes will be very obvious: the end of the world, someone dying, the Nazis getting the Ark of the Covenant and becoming all-powerful, etc.

Bonus: You Can Start from Anywhere

The cool thing about this method is you don’t have to know all your story elements at once; you can start with the inner or outer motivation to figure out the rest of the pieces.

Example 1: Start with the story goal. You know you’re writing a romance with a protagonist who’s looking for true love. What missing human need will be filled if they succeed (inner motivation/human need)?  What’s at stake if they fail?

Example 2: Start with the human need/internal motivation that’s driving their behavior. You know your character inside and out, so you’ve already identified their wound and the human need that’s been compromised. Let’s say it’s Esteem and Recognition. What story goal might they pursue that would fill that void? What’s at stake if they fail to reach their objective?

And now you know how to figure out what’s at stake for your story. Convey that to readers early on, and you’ll show them why the story matters, making it engaging and difficult to put down.

Have you identified the stakes for your protagonist? What’s on the line for them externally and/or internally?

About Becca

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and other resources for writers. Her books have sold over 1 million copies and are available in multiple languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online resource for authors that's home to the Character Builder and Storyteller's Roadmap tools.

By Piper Bayard

Some of you may recall my previous article where I explored some of the challenges of book marketing and announced that I was going to seek professional help. I would love to come back to you now and tell you that I found the perfect arrangement that led to phenomenal sales without me having to create one more ad on some program that changed its format yesterday, causing me to spend hours I didn’t have trying to figure out the update. However, I only tell you the truth.

What I found was that I didn’t hate marketing enough. I’m sharing my journey, hoping you can benefit from my experience. I also want to learn from the WITS hive mind down in the comments.

What did I buy?

I got the whole package from my professional media company:

• Amazon Ads
• Book Bub Ad
• Pimping to Reviewers
• Goodreads Giveaway
• Blog Tours
• Coaching

Biggest Lesson: The Cost of an Advertising Campaign Is Not the Cost of the Advertising Campaign

I basically bought all the bells and whistles. It cost around $7500 up front. However, that price was not actually the price for the campaign. Let me explain...

The Amazon Hustle

Hiring someone to do our Amazon ads is not the same thing as buying the Amazon ads.

Amazon ads are designed to make money for Amazon, and not necessarily to make money for us. We are just the cash cows to be milked by Amazon, especially because Amazon is literally in competition with us with its own publishing endeavors.

The pros set up three Amazon ads for me on the same book to run concurrently.

One was Automatic, meaning Amazon algorithms determined where it would appear. The second was based on Keywords, which appear according to the search terms shoppers type in. The third was an ad targeted at Products, and it appeared to potential customers based on their searches for other people’s books.

The real hook of Amazon ads is that Amazon only charges for clicks.

In other words, Amazon shows the ad far and wide, but authors are only charged if someone clicks on the ad. Sounds great, right?

The amount an author is charged, called a “bid,” varies and can be set by the author. However, Amazon algorithms make recommendations for bid amounts that can vary from a few cents to a few dollars per click. In my experience, if an author strays too far below the recommended bid, the ads simply don’t get seen. Bids were frequently over $1 and even over $2 per click for my Bayard & Holmes thrillers.

Authors can set daily limits on the ad spend, but $20/day was recommended by the pros. Those charges were in addition to the money spent on the ad campaign.

The pros said it takes around seven impressions before most people click on an item.

It can then take more than one click to sell a book. One advertising pro told me that one sale for every three clicks is an excellent rate.

Amazon keeps a tally in the campaign account online of how much money was spent on ads and how many sales were produced. If an author pays for three clicks at $1.52 per click and makes one sale, the record will show $4.56 spend and $12.99 in sales. Yay! Making money! . . . It looks great on the page and inspires people to create more ads and spend more money. 

However, it’s entirely likely that each book sold makes much less in royalties than it cost to pay for the three clicks it took to sell it. Add to that the fact that almost always, authors put their books on sale for ad campaigns (I did), and every three-click sale loses even more money. As a result, running the three ads cost me an additional $650/month above any return. 

What did the pros have to say about this? They said that the only way to change this trend is to keep those ads running and make sure the keywords are updated regularly. They were happy to provide that service for me for another $400/month if I so chose.

In Summary 

Look closely at Amazon ads and make sure you are not spending more to sell a book than you will make in royalties, or that if you are, you’re doing it with a reasonable expectation that things are going to turn around before you go bankrupt.

Review and Promotional Copies

Another added expense of a campaign are the review copies and promotional copies for giveaways. The reviewers that I met almost always wanted hard copy.

Author copies take a solid ten days to two weeks to arrive. If you’re like me, you like to strike while the iron is hot so occasionally I sprang for retail copies of the things I didn’t have on hand already. Books I had on hand to send cost the price of the author copy plus the cost of postage. By the time I got royalties back for the retail books, sending them was around the same cost as buying and shipping the author copy. That was true even if the author copy was sent directly.

Do that fifteen or twenty times, and there goes another $200.

Reviewers

An option the pros gave me was to hire a paid reviewer. I was willing to try everything so I did. In my case, this was a total waste of money. I don’t think he even read the book. He wrote it up on his website, which I can’t tell that anyone reads, and he put about three sentences over on Amazon for me. That’s it. Definitely do not recommend that!

One positive experience with reviewers, though, was that I met several reviewers who do not charge and who have excellent websites. I have made friends with a few of them, and I look forward to working with them in the future.

Goodreads

The pros set up a Goodreads account for me and put my books up for a giveaway. They also provided me with how-to instructions to continue engagement and build an audience.

The giveaway was successful in that I had a few thousand people enter. It’s on me, though, that I did not continue Goodreads engagement so I cannot speak to how that would have turned out over time. I would love to hear what your experiences are with Goodreads.

BookBub

The pros ran a BookBub ad for me that garnered more than 54,000 impressions and rendered exactly nothing.

I spoke with a couple renowned indie authors I know, and they told me that BookBub is very hit and miss these days. Some had had the same experience as me, even though they had experienced great success with BookBub ads in the past. Do with that what you will.

Blog Tours

The pros also set me up with several bloggers who ran either articles or interviews. Blog comments are down everywhere, so I could not tell that these appearances amounted to much for me or anyone else. These days, the real action seems to be over at Substack.

Overall Takeaway

As far as I can tell, there is no way for an indie author to hire their way out of spending substantial time and money on marketing. The pros say that "it’s a long game," and they aren’t kidding.

My best advice after my dance with the marketing pros is to first be clear with the fact that while writing is an art, publishing is a business, and businesses take time and money for marketing. The extra twist to the business of publishing is that successful marketing tactics change faster than the weather in the Rockies. What works brilliantly this month might not work at all in another six months.

The pros can definitely help get things started and point us in the right direction at a steep cost, but unless there’s a trust fund to throw down what is potentially a black hole, the bulk of marketing work is still on us authors. There must be ways to do it, but as best I can tell so far, successful marketing is a second full-time job no matter how great the books.

Best of luck, my fellow writers. If any of you hit on the magic marketing formula that makes authors "J.K. Rowling Rich," please do share.

Questions for the WITS hive mind:  What marketing efforts work for you? Does anything work consistently? Has anything worked in the past that no longer works now? Do you see any upcoming trends? Please share your valuable tips in the comments.

About Piper

Piper Bayard and Jay Holmes of Bayard & Holmes are the authors of espionage tomes and international spy thrillers. Please visit Piper and Jay at their site, BayardandHolmes.com. For notices of their upcoming releases, subscribe to the Bayard & Holmes Covert Briefing. You can also contact Bayard & Holmes at their Contact page, on Twitter at @piperbayard, on Facebook at Piper Bayard, or at their email, BayardandHolmes@protonmail.com.

Though crafted with advice and specific tips for writers, SPYCRAFT: Essentials is for anyone who wants to learn more about the inner workings of the Shadow World.

“For any author, this is the new bible for crafting stories of espionage.”

~ James Rollins, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Demon Crown

All post photos purchased from DepositPhotos by the author.