Join me on May 12 at 3 PM for an online chat about my novel Murder in Ocean Hall. My mystery about the murder of the world’s most famous ocean explorer is the first book club selection of the Independent Author Index. This new site is a place where “readers meet authors” and is a good example of how communities are forming online to discuss books.

Looking forward to answering questions on May 12!

There’s a reason why Amazon is such a titan in the e-book world – it delivers income to writers. It does so seamlessly, easily and without authors having to do anything. You don’t have to hound publishers for checks or wait for the results of some sort of mysterious accounting process.

Amazon posts sales results weekly. For me, it’s just beer money, as I watch my two novels sell in dribs and drabs. Still, it’s something. My work is getting out there and I’m making some cash, even if it’s not going to get me more than a six-pack or two.

And the company constantly innovates, like with their Amazon Prime program. Among other benefits, you can borrow select e-books for free. And authors get a share of a pool of money set aside for the program. In March, it was $600,000!

Each time one of my Kindle titles got borrowed last month, I received $2.18, according to the Amazon press release. That’s a nice royalty, considering one of my novels is 99 cents and the other is $2.99.

So if you’re an Amazon Prime member, borrow my books please! You don’t need a Kindle either. There are Kindle apps for the iPad, iPhone, Mac and PC.

Murder in Ocean Hall is a great read if you like mysteries set in DC. A reviewer wrote that it will take you behind the scenes of the city and show you how things work – or don’t work. It’s a mystery novel written by someone who actually lives in Washington and knows the neighborhoods beyond the monuments.

Looking for something fast and fun? Then check out Don’t Mess Up My Block, a satire of the self-help biz. Follow the adventures of Laurent Christ as he pursues success across an American landscape littered with greedy consultants, social media frauds and incompetent bureaucrats.

Check them out! And remember, borrowing my books will keep me in beer, an essential element of my creative process

In honor of my Irish heritage, you can get Kindle versions of both of my books for free all this weekend.

Don’t Mess Up My Block is my newest novel. It’s a funny parody of self-help books that examines the American faith in gurus and easy solutions.

Murder in Ocean Hall is my first book. It’s a mystery and is ideal for anyone who wants to learn about Washington beyond the monuments.

And you don’t even need a Kindle to read them for free. You can also read them for free using the Kindle app on the iPad, iPhone or computer.

Booksellers and publishers criticize Amazon for destroying the clubby old world of publishing. Yet, for readers and writers, the online retailer is constantly rolling out new features to expand the reach of books and the power of authors.

Case in point: Amazon’s Lending Library. Amazon Prime members can borrow one book a month for their Kindles with no due date. And unlike your library and its e-book service, thousands of books are available now and you don’t need to download complicated software to read them. All you need is Amazon Prime and a Kindle (or the Kindle app on an iPad). This is a tremendous service for readers around the country, who now have access to a vast library of books.

How this works for authors - I’m an Amazon author, having used their Kindle Direct Publishing service for Murder in Ocean Hall. When the lending program rolled out, I was given the option of enrolling my book. I did. As incentive, Amazon set aside a $6 million pool in 2012 to be divided up by authors who participate. So, if there are six million borrowed books in the year and a hundred of those borrows are Murder in Ocean Hall, then I get $100.

There’s a lot of experimentation going on in the e-book space, as the market adjusts to this new world of publishing. But what I like about these changes is that more power has been given to writers, and more choice is available to readers. That’s something to cheer about.

Did you get a Kindle for Xmas?

Get my book Murder in Ocean Hall for just 99 cents in this holiday offer exclusively for Kindle owners.

My novel is a murder-mystery set in Washington, DC. Inspired by my experience in the city, Murder in Ocean Hall follows a veteran detective as he investigates the death of the world’s most famous explorer.

My book takes you behind the scenes of our nation’s dysfunctional capital, revealing the real place beyond the monuments.

Amazon reviewers call it:

“a fun, quick read”

“a howdunit with some good research on the author’s part.”

Get Murder in Ocean Hall today!

Get my book Murder in Ocean Hall for just 99 cents in this holiday offer exclusively for Kindle owners.

My novel is a murder-mystery set in Washington, DC. Inspired by my experience in the city, Murder in Ocean Hall follows a veteran detective as he investigates the death of the world’s most famous explorer.

My book takes you behind the scenes of our nation’s dysfunctional capital, revealing the real place beyond the monuments.

Amazon reviewers call it:

“a fun, quick read”

“a howdunit with some good research on the author’s part.”

Get Murder in Ocean Hall today!

Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the very few personal improvement books worth the money. It’s been superseded by the awkwardly-titled StrengthsFinder 2.0 but the message is the same in the new book:

You should concentrate on what you’re best at. Don’t try to improve your weaknesses, instead sharpen the skills that you do better than anyone else. It’s a countervailing message in this age of self-improvement. It says to drop what you suck at (I’m never going to be a great basketball player) and work on what you do best (writing and photography).

The two books contain surveys to identify your unique strengths.  You’ll probably experience an “ah-hah” moment at the results, confirming what you already knew.

The same principle of concentrating on your strengths can be applied to social media efforts. In this new and ever-changing field, how do you determine what to spend time on? Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, FourSquare, Digg, SlideShare, Scribd, Flickr… and on and on and on. You could spend twenty-four hours a day in front of an overheated laptop updating social media sites.

I worked with Janice Hall Booth, a very interesting woman who wrote an inspiring book, Only Pack What You Can Carry. She’s an “adventurista” and an excellent role model for young women who want more out of life than Sex and the City.

Janice had a problem. She wanted to use social media to promote her book but had a full-time job. I’ve seen some of the social media plans for authors – they’re comprehensive, exhausting affairs filled with exhortations such as “get 20 new Twitter followers a day for 30 days.” How do you compel people to follow you? These plans treat all social media channels equally and require herculean efforts to complete.

Also, social media experts are extroverts; writers are not.

I took a different approach. I advised Janice to concentrate on the social media channels that she was most comfortable with. She was more likely to stick with something she was really passionate about and enjoyed. For Janice, this was blogging. Not surprising, since she’s a writer.

For my own social media efforts (for me and Murder in Ocean Hall), I’ve concentrated on blogging and Twitter. I like the constant newsfeed of Twitter, as well as the back-and-forth wittiness with friends. And for writing longer than 144 characters, I have this blog.

There’s a thousand other ways of promoting a book online. GoodReads is a really interesting online community. Facebook marketing ties yourself to the whims of a single online service. A book trailer (like a movie preview) on YouTube is a good idea for graphic novels. An email newsletter is something I’d like to do at some point. I post a lot of photos on Flickr, though they’re about my life in general, not just my book. FourSquare – why do I want people to know where I’m at?

My other piece of social media advice: evaluate after 30 days. What’s working? What’s not? Most social media, like media in general, does not reach a mass audience. You will not have thousands of followers overnight.

Instead, I’d look at your social media efforts based upon your individual strengths. Do you have blog posts that you’re really proud of? Have you made new connections that you treasure? Have you learned something new?

Passion and authenticity are rewarded in social media. Don’t try to do everything. Concentrate on what you enjoy.

We live in a magical age, where I can write a book in Washington, DC, and then readers in Paris can download my work to their e-readers.

Murder in Ocean Hall is now available in France. It’s available in la boutique Kindle, which is an adorable name for an e-book store.

The book is in English, BTW. Technology can do many amazing things but language translation requires the subtleties of the human mind.

And what did I do to publish my novel in France? Uh, nothing. I just made the e-book available on Amazon and they did all the rest.

Everyone writes. In this digital age, we’re creating more words than ever. Whether it’s an email to a client, a persuasive blog post or the Great American E-Book, the ability to explain yourself in writing is the critical skill of the Internet era.

Despite this profusion of words, people often encounter writer’s block when attempting large or significant projects. They can fire off tweets and snarky Facebook comments all day long but their fingers stall when it comes to crafting something that really matters.

After I wrote my novel Murder in Ocean Hall, the question I got most was, “How?”

How did I muster up the patience to devote so much time to a single idea? How did I keep at it? How did I overcome the inertia of writer’s block to get started?

Writer’s block happens to everyone. But it can be overcome.

Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

I’ve met a lot of creative folks with ideas for books or blogs or screenplays. Yet, many of them fail to ever put pen to paper. Why? Because the idea is perfect in their head; the reality of the thing is never going to match their vision. They do nothing, preferring to keep their fantasies pristine rather than sullying them with reality. But isn’t it better to have something that actually exists, no matter how flawed, to an ephemeral vision? To write means to express your ideas, imperfectly.

Steven Pressfield calls this reluctance to get started, “Resistance” in his book on creativity and courage, Do the Work.

outline for this blog post

Outline

Would you go out into the wilderness without a map? Yet, many people will just dive into a project without a clue where they’re going. Once the rush of enthusiasm ends, they get stuck. It’s better to take some time and create an outline. An outline can be really simple – a list of chapter titles, points you want to make, things you want to mention. It’s something that you can turn to when you run out of steam.

No Editing

Don’t edit as you go. That can be done later. The purpose of the first draft is merely to get your ideas down on paper. It’s about collecting all the disparate thoughts you have and recording them, without judgement. You can clean them up and make them coherent when you edit. The first draft is more about collection than craft.

Reward Yourself

You can’t boss your mind around. It’s really adept at avoiding commands. In fact, telling yourself that you “must” do this or that virtually guarantees procrastination.

A better strategy is to reward yourself when accomplishing important milestones. When writing Murder in Ocean Hall, I gave myself a small present (a bottle of gin, a Wii game) for every 10,000 words I wrote. We all respond better to carrots instead of sticks.

Find a Quiet Place

One of the worst developments of the 20th century is the open office. Noisy and filled with distractions, these low-walled spaces are terrible for any type of work that requires concentration. Find some place quiet to write, like your favorite coffee shop, the neighborhood library or an empty conference room. And turn off the Internet.

Simple Tools Work Best

I like Pages by Apple. It’s a simple word processor that gets out of the way. If you must use Microsoft Word, turn off all of its autosaving, autocorrecting gimmickry – “features” that are designed to interrupt your concentration.

First Things First

I am not a morning person. Despite this, I do most of my writing first thing in the AM. Why? Zenhabits had the excellent advice to do your most important work at the beginning of the day, lest it get lost in the press of other demands.

writer’s block vs Writer’s Block

I was on a panel on with Claudia Myers, a professor who teaches screenwriting at American University. She made a distinction between writer’s block and Writer’s Block. The lower-case variety can be cured by the methods listed above; it’s largely a matter of getting started and keeping the momentum going.

However, Writer’s Block (upper-case variety) indicates a structural problem – perhaps there’s something wrong with the way that your communicating your idea. For her screenwriting students, she recommends explaining their script out loud to a friend. Sometimes by talking things out, you can identify what’s wrong with your story. If your audience seems puzzled or confused, then you’ve gone astray.

So, what do you do with an idea that’s not working out? You have three choices:

1. Press on, because it’s your idea, dammit.
2. Figure out what’s not working and fix it.
3. Quit and start something new.

Not sure which option to take? See the excellent The Dip by Seth Godin, a book about knowing when to quit.

When writing, nothing is ever really wasted. At the very least, working on a failed project is good practice. And that effort may come in handy later on. For example, I tried writing a novel about gentrification in DC. I got about fifty pages into it and got hopelessly stuck. A few years later, the characters and the story I worked on were the basis for my award-winning screenplay, Mount Pleasant.

Summary

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Writing is making a dream come true. It’s about taking your idea and communicating it successfully. Writer’s block is an inevitable part of the process, a difficulty you encounter along the way. But it can be overcome.

My book Murder in Ocean Hall can now be found in the Kindle online store in Germany. For less than a euro, readers in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg or elsewhere in the country can download this DC mystery.

What did I have to do to publish my work in Germany? Nothing. I had already published my book in the USA with Kindle Direct Publishing. Amazon did the rest, creating a new Kindle store for German users.

If a few years ago you had told me that I would write a mystery, publish it electronically, and that people would actually read books on e-readers, and that my book would be available in Europe…. That sentence involves so many improbabilities, but all of these things are now true. Makes you really hopeful about what comes next.