Blogger: Mary Keeley
My daughter made up a crazy, mixed-up story for her two young children. My granddaughter laughed with delight at the silliness of a school bus taking her to her brother’s school and the messed up order of the rest of her day. My grandson stopped his mom early into the story with a pained expression and urged, “MOM! Stop! I don’t like things to be out of order.” Which reaction best describes your natural response to new and different?
I tend toward my grandson’s reaction to change and dread having to learn new ways of doing things. But the reality is that writers—and agents and publishers—need a perfect balance of both these two reactions to thrive, and resiliency is the fuel that gets you there.
Celebrate your resiliency because it enables you to embrace change.
I’m continually amazed at the creativity and ingenuity of God’s creatures. By his grace and blessing we have come a long way since the first hand-duplicated copies of the Bible and other books. And aren’t we all grateful for that. When a need arises or demand for a product declines, something 
eventually comes along to renew or replace it.
Case in point.
Subscriptions for eBooks didn’t do well in 2015. Subscription services for music are doing well. Why not for eBooks? Some speculate that it relates to consumer lifestyle. You can subscribe to a lot of music and listen to it while you’re doing many other things. But they point out that in today’s fast-paced lifestyle, people can read only so many books in a given time frame. That’s a valid point. As a result Oyster and Entitle shut down operations toward the end of last year, leaving only Scribd, which provides both audiobooks and eBooks, and Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited.
The future was looking grim for this revenue stream. But hope sprang anew. Enter Playster to the US at the beginning of this year. Playster, based in London, is a global, multi-content entertainment platform providing one-stop shopping for TV shows, movies, and video games, along with eBooks. The diversification of their product offerings makes eBook subscriptions viable. By April, all of the BIG FIVE publishers had signed on to partnership with Playster. Hope renewed.
Here’s another example. James Patterson has a new line of books, BookShots Books. They come in print and digital form through his publisher, Little, Brown. You’ve probably seen them in bookstores, on Amazon, or in big-box stores. He designed these short, heavily plot-driven novels to attract people back to reading who have abandoned it in favor of watching TV, movies, playing video games, and spending hours on social media. At 150 pages or less, they are a quick read, like watching a movie. Eventually, he plans to expand distribution to grocery stores and drug stores if these books catch on. They sell for $4.99 in the US. His ingenuity could open up a large new market of readers.
Nurture resiliency. It opens the door to free the flow of your creativity.
We don’t have to look far to see the ingenuity of others in their realm. What about you? When you’re discouraged or unsure about your writing future, muster your own resilience. God plants it within you because he knows writers need it. It shows itself first in the form of hope and trust in him. Creativity flows freely from there, and who knows where he may lead you when you act on it. Maybe to that unique approach for your topic. Or to a creative, low-cost way to market your next book. Whatever the need you face, resiliency is the mother of ingenuity.
How easily do you embrace change? Which tools and innovations have made your writing life easier and more productive? Share an example of creative innovation that you have put into action.
Like you, Mary, I am amazed at the resiliency and ingenuity of mankind. We have worked with many emotionally battered children over the years–I am often astounded at the resiliency that keeps them going and the ingenuity that helps them do so. But that same ingenuity sometimes frustrates me and distorts their worldview–it can be a blessing and a curse.
BookShots ingenuity? A blessing, I’m sure. Write on, Mr. Patterson!
Christ
Holds
A
New
Glorious
Enterprise
* Change for its own sake is the wee and dull bairn of boredom, but life without purposed change would be static, a musty museum with our hopes stuffed and mounted behind slack velvet ropes and enshrined by a silence mired in a past whose graces are long-forgotten.
* My resilience of late has been that of the old-school boxer beaten into the ropes by a lithe and lightfoot hard-jabbing adversary. That smug toedancer doesn’t know it, but this venerable mauler is going to rebound out with a haymaker that comes from my bootlaces and is aimed through a slit of purpled eye. And it’s gonna shatter his glass jaw, leaving me the last man standing. That’s all that counts in the end.
Mary, I hope you don’t mind me going off-topic for a moment, but I’d like to ask for a round of applause for my wife Barbara, who won the Halloween Costume Contest at her office yesterday as WW2’s ‘Rosie The Riveter’. She beat out Jean-Luc Picard, Donald Trump, and Hilary Clinton, among others, but the Energizer Bunny ran second.
* Come to think of it, the mobilization of women in war work and other areas IS really a testament to the resilience of a decent and just society forced into conflict.
* Barb created a ‘tribute’ display to Rosie, the WASPS, and her grandfather, a WW2 veteran; I’m proud of the effort and thought she put into this. If anyone would like to see a picture of just how close she got to the original, a picture is up on my current blog post –
http://blessed-are-the-pure-of-heart.blogspot.com/2016/10/your-dying-spouse-224-hard-to-go-on.html
Barbara=Rosie. Symbolically. How beautiful!
Reminds me of an old neighborhood story. Hot nights, we’d relax on our front stools and gab. Bob, a young father, brought out the WW2 model airplane he’d just finished. Our new neighbor, a delightful older widow, smiled. “I built the real ones.”
We all stopped. Silent admiration. A hero in our midst.
Love that story, Shirlee! Thanks!
Applause for Barbara, a true Rosie The Riveter at heart.
Your grandson’s reaction describes me perfectly. I asked my husband once “What makes me happy?” And his answer was something like, “When things go smoothly and according to plan.” I think being an orderly person, a list-maker and a scheduler, can be a great quality, as long as your need for order doesn’t spoil your ability to be flexible when the situation calls for it or to enjoy surprises. That balance is something that I am continually striving towards. I think that need for control sometimes hinders my writing because I constantly have to fight the urge to immediately edit and get discouraged when things aren’t progressing the way I pictured them.
Indeed, Jordan. I resonate with all you said. Balance is the working goal.
LOVE change, as you know, Mary. The last two years have been a test of my resiliency on every front, but God created me to change and evolve (and honor Him in the process), so I soldier on. I remember setting type by hand (letter by letter) when I worked at our local paper during college. Then I had the first generation of Wang word processor when I started my business in the early 80s. So the computer—even when it misbehaves—is a joy to me. A lot of people don’t consider a computer an innovation now, but they have never set type by hand either. (Did I mention that most of the department were Harley Hogs? I think I skipped that part.)
I never thought I could actually fulfill my dream to be a writer before computers because I was terrible at typing. The first electric typewriter that let me backspace and make changes was like a miracle to me! And now I do things with the internet and software I couldn’t have imagined doing even twenty years ago. Sometimes changes, including those in real life, are difficult for me, but if everything always stayed the same, life would be boring.
The backspace key is a gift from God, isn’t it?
Great perspective on embracing change, Norma. I don’t think any of us would want to go back to setting type. Young writers starting out can thank innovators that they don’t need know what setting type means…unless they caught it in history class.
*I worked for years in research. Whenever something unexpected happened, there would be a joyful surge of adrenaline because you might have found some exciting new path for the research. When it happened late on Friday, that was best because you could spend the weekend thinking you’d discovered something new until you discovered on Monday that it was an experimental artifact because the equipment wasn’t’ set up quite right.
*To use my novels for missions like we want, I need to keep the rights and self-publish. That frees me from the need to have 5000+ social media followers before the first book can ever get to market. I’m building my platform off a Roman history site aimed at teachers and Romanophiles who should be a natural audience for Roman historical novels. B&S has told me many times to know my audience and target it. I’ll start marketing the site when the first book comes out (within the next two weeks) so if someone only visits the site once, they can find the book. I should know within a year whether I’ve taken a fruitful path or not.
*I’m also not putting all eggs in one basket. I’ve started the more conventional approach with a blog site. (I alternate links here.) I’ll be tackling social media to get those 5K as well. Creative risk requires a backup plan.
An FYI about ebook subscription services. Draft2Digital still distributes to two subscription services: Scribd and 24Symbols. It also distributes to Tolino, which markets primarily in Europe. It will be interesting to see if a European distributor can tap into Roman interest among Europeans that Amazon isn’t tapping. Like you always tell us: search for where the audience might be and go there!
Cheering you on here, Carol. Being strategic is a key element of an innovative plan. And a backup plan balances the risk. Thanks for mentioning.
True confession: I don’t embrace change easily. I need a little time to process it, and then I can take it on. I’ve definitely had to deal with lots of change in my life, especially as a military wife, and most of it has turned out well in the end. I’ve learned that being open to change is the key to benefitting from it. Our mindsets will determine how well we manage change, won’t they?
*One innovation I’ve used is Scrivener. I really like writing my first drafts using this. I can store all my research (plus links) there, along with character photos and bios, and I can transfer my rough draft to Kindle if I want to read it there. Scrivener is my friend. 🙂
“…being open to change is the key to benefitting from it.” So true, Jeanne. If you’d never tried Scrivener, you wouldn’t be as efficient. I’m going to repeat that phrase to myself when I need the proper mindset.
Hmm. Change. Resilience. Creativity.
. I’m not sure what popped into my head fits with your point, Mary, but it sure fit for me. I started my latest release as a nonfiction help/guide for family caregivers. It wasn’t working. It was painful. It wasn’t getting the points across that I really wanted to get across, and even if it did so, it would be too harsh. I couldn’t bring myself to work on it even though I wanted too write it and publish so much.
. Then from “somewhere” I got the idea to make it fiction–a murder suspense/mystery. What?! I started writing. The plot flowed. The story flowed. The research flowed. I even got all but a couple of minor details right the first time around.
. The book I was supposed to write wasn’t meant to be a nonfiction helpful guide. Such a guide would never show the reality burning my fingertips. I know I wrote what I needed to write, what I was supposed to write. If I had not followed that idea, that urge, neither book would have ever seen the light of day.
. That book may never be a seller, much less a best seller, but I have to believe someone needed it, and if so, that someone will find it. My personal moral of this story: If it isn’t working, there must be a reason. Find the reason, fix the reason, write the book.
. Oh, and thanks for reminding me of this. I forget it often because the other side of me still would like to see it become a best seller! 🙂
A publishing house might need to sell at least 10K copies of each title to survive, so they’d better be very careful about what they buy from authors. God doesn’t need anything we write to reach 10K people for it to have an eternal impact. Even 10, even one who needs what we write makes it totally worth the effort. I’d be willing to bet your novel has already reached at least that one and made a difference.
Sylvia, good point. We need to pay attention to those prompts from “somewhere.”
Thanks, Carol and Mary.
I think James Patterson’s plan is brilliant. 🙂
I agree. I hope he succeeds in bringing thousands of people back to reading. They may enjoy his short novels so much that they go on to read full-length books. We’ll have him to thank.
Mary, what does the size of Patterson’s short novels translate to in approximate word count?
Approximately 25,000 words.
I’ve probably shared this here before, but change is not easy for me. I like to follow rules. One year, my husband told the girls they could color on our table … underneath it. Where no one could see. Hee hee. Everything inside me wanted to hold up my hand and say, “Halt everything.” But I let them … and now I’m so glad I did. I was glad then, too. Change can be good and a memory maker. But I’m usually resistant in the beginning. 🙂 I’m getting better though.
*I love the “find” feature on Word … 🙂 And I love that my girls teach me how to use my phone from time to time.
Just a quick question…
James Patterson’s plan is brilliant, commendable… However, is it allowed to say the approach would yield because he’s a branded author?
Can a newbie release his debut novel as a two-part of 45,000 words each to attract people?
Michael, it takes a big name like James Patterson to get a publishing partner for a risky undertaking like this. They hope his target audience materializes, but there is no guarantee. He plans to release 2 to 4 books per month and will have selected authors writing some of them. A debut author with a short BookShots-type novel would not get an agent’s or editor’s attention.
Thank you very much Mrs. Keeley for your response. Clarifies some thoughts for me.