by Pat Marcello on August 17, 2011
I’ve worked with traditional publishing for more than twenty years, and it’s been a real experience. I enjoy writing for publishers, but when it comes time for the royalty checks to come rolling in, they just don’t. 
What cracks me up is that the editors and production people make annual salaries, and they have to be paid. But writers? They expect to get them for a song and dance because there are so many of us out there willing to do it for peanuts, just to have their names on a cover. I get that. I remember when I felt that way, but there’s a better way to do it!
Self-publish. When you do it online, it’s not terribly complicated, though you will need some tech skills, mainly with Word, creating .pdfs and if you want a good cover, graphics. You can, of course, hire people to do these things for you, but I opted to do it all. So, you may see this book in your local Amazon.com!
The Tragic Secret of Cyrus Crowe is a story about two fourteen-year-old girls that solve a haunting. I wrote it several years ago, and with all the rigamarole involved with publishing traditionally, I just never had enough time to get it sent out over the past five years. So, I decided to just do it myself.
The Tragic Secret of Cyrus Crowe is available in paperback or for Kindle. If you have a kid between eight and ten, I know they’ll love it!
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by Pat Marcello on February 11, 2011
Writing a book is tricky. You have so much research, and well… You aren’t sure what you need and what you can do without when you look at it in a big heap. It can make you crazy and scare you from writing at all.
But don’t let it!
Image via Wikipedia
As you’re reading the first book or just beginning, you won’t know what’s important and what’s not, generally. If you’re writing a biography, you know right off that certain details will be important, such as the subject’s date of birth. No brainer right? Or, if you’re writing an historical piece, you’ll want to include the date it happened, who the major players are, etc. There are just some details that can’t be left out.
But what other details will you use that might or might not be important?
You’ll figure it out as you go along.
I write in the margin of my research books and highlight what I feel is important. It’s something in your brain that just finds interesting and that you feel your readers might be interested in, too. It’s a gut thing, really. But as you read more and more, you just know.
So, don’t worry about it too much to start, but as you’re going through the materials you gather, just pick out things that you know are important and that you FEEL are important. Then, by the time you get to organization, you’ll know.
by Pat Marcello on February 10, 2011
Today, I’m just going to boil down the steps I take to organize research when writing a book:
- Buy a 4-5″ 3- ring binder
Image via Wikipedia
- Insert tabbed index sheets with broad categories that apply to my work
- Print out everything I find from reliable sources on the Internet
- Highlight passages that I’ll want to use in the book, either for reference or for citation.
- File each page in a general category in the binder.
- Print out potential images and on the back, what they relate to. (My printer adds the URL to the bottom or the page where the image was found, but if you don’t have your printer set to do that, you’ll also want to record the URL.) [click to continue…]
by Pat Marcello on February 9, 2011
OK, OK… I know you’re like, “What so exciting about research, especially organizing it?”
Well, some of us like that. Really. I love it and have my own special means of organizing everything I find. I’m sure there are other ways, and maybe even faster ways, but the more I immerse myself in what I learn and the better I know the subject I’m writing about, the better my work turns out.
Years down the road it’s hard for me to dredge up details for an interview, if I don’t. I’ve had Australian newspapers and radio contact me about Ralph Nader over the past few years, a British magazine about Gloria Steinem, and various other journalists and writers contact me to ask me tons of questions about things I wrote a very long time ago. And you know what? Because I became immersed in the research and really “knew” these folks (at least from research, not so much from interviewing, though that was amazing), I was able to talk about them so far down the road without getting out my cheat sheets. It’s something to think about.
And isn’t being a celebrity fun, even if only a very minor one? 
So… prepare. Maybe you’ll be a major one and that will be really fun. LOL
Putting all the stuff I find together isn’t exciting, but what comes from the research that I do surely is. I can be writing about the most boring topic ever (not to suggest that either Nader or Steinem are boring — at all), and still readers come away amused by something cool they’ve learned and never knew before. [click to continue…]
by Pat Marcello on February 8, 2011
Life is complex and writing a book is a task that can seem terribly overwhelming. And regardless of whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, you have to do some research. You may think that’s not true, but think about it… If you’re writing location and get one of the details wrong, you’re bound to hear about it from one of the locals. So, never write anything without doing some homework first. If you do, your book is bound to be better than the next guy’s, even if the plot of the two books is similar — homework shines through.
Image via Wikipedia
When you write a nonfiction book, the research is even more intense. You have to be absolutely certain that every detail you include in that book is backed up by not one, but at least two, reputable sources and that often takes some digging. Newspapers often get things wrong, and people don’t like it, but that’s the biz. They expect things to be wrong now and again because the creation process is so immediate. The book biz is a whole lot different.
Anyway, your research may consist of charts, magazine articles that you’ve both gleaned from the Web and that you’ve read in the library and taken notes on. You’ll have several books that you’ve read on the topic and penned notes from. You’ll have all kinds of Internet information and potential images to recommend to the editor for use in the book, and whoa… It’s pretty intimidating when you put it all together.
What I do is [click to continue…]
