Matthew Bin

One of the many superpowers Word has that writers will often need to use is the find and replace tool. You probably have used it yourself–for example, when you’re changing a character’s name and want to make sure you get every instance in the manuscript changed.

Let’s look at that example to start. The character you named Wesley is going to be called Lance now. So you hit ctrl-h:

and click Replace All. Simple.

Oh, but wait. You called him Wes most of the time, didn’t you? Better replace those too.

And then you proofread, and find this:

Whoops. Time to unleash the power of search and replace.

Start by clicking the “More” button at the bottom left corner of the dialog box, and behold:

Many more juicy options! In this case we’re going to select two of them:

• Match case will make sure that only instances of Wes will be replaced. That means westerly and awesome won’t be affected.
  
• Find whole words only will ensure that only Wes will be replaced. West Egg won’t become Lancet Egg.

This will take care of almost all of the instances of Wes in your manuscript. Just to make sure, though, we’ll search for Wes without the Find whole words only option, and see…

Crap.

So you’re still going to have to go through the manuscript with the search tool and scrutinize every Wes that appears. It might even be worth looking for wes, just in case. But by using the search and replace features that Word provides, your task is much easier.

Next up: Searching for and replacing special characters.

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Recently, a somewhat successful writer demanded to know where all his money is:

This past summer, my novel, “Broken Piano for President,” shot to the top of the best-seller lists for a week. After Jack Daniel’s sent me a ridiculously polite cease and desist letter, the story went viral and was featured in places like Forbes, Time magazine and NPR’s Weekend Edition… My book was the No. 6 bestselling title in America for a while, right behind all the different “50 Shades of Grey” and “Gone Girl.” It was selling more copies than “Hunger Games” and “Bossypants.”…

From what I can tell so far, I made about $12,000 from “Broken Piano” sales. That comes directly to me without all those pesky taxes taken out yet (the IRS is helpful like that)…

The book sold plus or minus 4,000 copies.

Many writers, publishing for the first time, assume that the rewards will be far greater than they actually are. Because the book exists, their thinking tends to go, people will buy it; the inevitability of huge cash rewards must therefore follow.

And most learn in short order that the reality is different. If they’re lucky, they’ll get a handful of sales a month on Amazon. Four thousand sales in a week is a great total. But it’s still penny-ante stuff. How much money did the author expect to make from those sales? Why is he mystified that he’s not rich?

He sold more copies than the year-old 50 Shades blockbuster franchise. That series has sold 65 million copies, through every store in every strip mall and airport in the industrialized world. Outselling it for a week on one website? A blip in the statistics. Believe me, the 50 Shades stakeholders didn’t notice it.

No, the real lessons here seem to have passed the author by:

• It only takes 4,000 sales to be a best-seller on Amazon. That’s fewer sales than it takes to be a best-seller in all of Canada. It’s not a lot of sales.
• The traditional publishing and distributing model is still master of the publishing world. Will it change? Maybe — probably — but it hasn’t yet. More books in more stores equals bigger sales.

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My SF novel Brendan’s Way has been selected as a quarter-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Woo! It is one of 100 SF/fantasy/horror novels selected as a quarterfinalist, which is a list whittled down from 500 second round selections.

The quarterfinalist entries were selected on the basis of a 3000-5000 word excerpt from the novel. If you’re interested for any reason, you can download mine to your Kindle-enabled device here. And you can also add your reviews to the excerpt as though it were a real, live, Amazonian book. Please do so, especially if you have five stars hanging around looking for somewhere to go.

I’d love to share the enthusiastic and, I admit, embarrassingly orgiastic comments that the reviewing judges provided for my excerpts; unfortunately, they are not yet available, because of some kind of error on Amazon’s site. But when they appear, and provided that they are as unequivocally positive as I am assuming, I will post them here.

In the interest of pedantry (and no one is more interested in pedantry than am I), I note that quarterfinalist should be hyphenated. I don’t like this unhyphenated compound word, no, not one jot. It’s spelled correctly in the contest rules but they’ve removed the hyphens on the announcement web page. Odd. As long as I make it to the semifinals or semi-finals, though, I will withhold my complaints to the management.

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If you’re a non-US writer, and you’re selling books with an American e-publisher, you’ll know the big annoyance we all face: American e-publishers (like, oh, say, Kindle and Smashwords–the biggest ones) withhold 30% of non-US citizens’ royalties for tax purposes.

To get that money back–or more importantly, to avoid their hanging onto it in the first place–seems like a difficult problem. The labyrinthine series of forms to submit to nearly everyone involved, faxes to send, flaming hoops to jump through, and bricks to hurl through government offices’ windows is just a little bit difficult to sort out. And if you’re like me (lazy, jaded, hung over) you tell yourself that it’s not worth the onion, and sigh and play yet another game of Bejewelled Blitz.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as it turns out. Don’t worry–you can still play Bejewelled Blitz (try to stop me!) and you can still be lazy, jaded, and hung over (ditto!)–but you can fairly easily get those royalties in your pocket instead of the IRS’s.

Here’s how.

A lovely Irish writer, Catherine Ryan Howard, posted some clear and understandable, yet precise and detailed instructions devised by another lovely Irish author, David Gaughran, about how to finish the process quickly and painlessly.

I don’t use the word “hero” very often–for which I am often myself considered heroic–but these are real heroes living in our midst. They ought to be showered with the most fragrant rose-petals and lily-stems and rhubarb-leaves and pumpkin-husks that the gardens of the world have to offer.

Thanks to you both, and good luck to all those other authors who will now have approximately 30% added to their e-publishing income. I don’t know about anyone else, but that better than doubles my monthly budget for rye whiskey.

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I’ve been reading the archives–the incredibly extensive archives–of the Query Shark, a literary agent who selflessly tears apart people’s query letters and posts them on her blog. It’s a lot nicer and more useful than I’m making it sound, I think.

So I came across this one, where she says:

One of the very first things to remember about any query is you’ve got to make sure your protagonist sounds like someone I’ll want to spend some time with. Either cause I like them, am rooting for them, am fascinated by them, or can’t wait to see if they get eaten by wolves.  What they can’t be is a two dimensional cartoon.

This did two things for me. First, it pointed out what I’m supposed to be doing with my queries in a way that I’ve never really figured out before. Make the reader want to spend time with the character. Excellent.

And second, it immediately pointed out to me what I could do to improve my own query.

Not that it’s a bad query, I’ll add: I got an e-mail from an agent, asking for pages, just last Friday. So it’s not a lost cause or anything.

But it could have been better, and now it is. All I have to do is read through the other two hundred queries posted by the Query Shark, and then I can send in my own.

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I find it hard to disagree with this article. The strongest point is here:

If we were to universally accept the Oxford comma, there would be no instances where you would suddenly have to omit the Oxford comma for clarity.

The Oxford comma is more consistent and more clear. That just makes the tech writer in me ache to use it. A lot of the article is argument from authority, but this point actually gets to the meat of it.

I didn’t know that the Oxford comma is an American standard, though. Now if only we could get Americans to put their dates in a logical order, we’d be getting somewhere…

Incidentally, if we do go to war for the Oxford comma, I intend to be a profiteer.

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A writer on Reddit asked the following question:

How much of being a great writer is natural talent?

I just finished reading Stephen King’s “On Writing” and I’m having second thoughts on pursuing anything related to writing. Although the book was inspiring, I found it to be somewhat depressing, especially King’s thoughts on improving as a writer. He mentions the possibility of becoming a better writer, but rejects the notion that anyone can become a good writer, even with lots of practice.

What do you guys think about this? Does it really come down to natural talent?

I’ll answer the question with a “no”, but I’ll add the caveat that I think that there’s a problem with the word “talent”, as well as with the word “great”.

What is a great writer? Where’s the bar? It’s kind of a meaningless distinction. If by “great” we mean a huge seller like King or Rowling, eternal popular success like Tolkien, or eternal literary respect like Shakespeare, it’s probably not even worth having the conversation; these writers’ careers are all combinations of ability and luck that don’t really translate into success for the rest of us.

But if by “great” we mean successful, then it’s really all about goals, isn’t it? It might be worth spending more time considering what our goals are–and revisiting the question from time to time as well, because your goals might change over time–than it is considering what “great” might mean.

As for “talent”, I hate to bring up the old cliche, but it’s funny how the more you practice, the more talented you get.

Talent is such an indistinct concept, and so many things feed into it: the stuff you read, the stuff you write, the things that happen to you in your life, the things you do in your life, the people around you, the way you think about things… all of these affect your writing. Are they, taken as a whole, “talent”? What do we mean by “talent”, and if it exists, is it more important than all those other things?

It’s probably a lot more useful to take the time we would spend discussing and thinking about the things we lack as writers, and use it to read, or write, or do anything that will actually help us improve as writers.

We don’t want to find excuses for why we can’t write well enough; let’s use our energy to write better instead.

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A user on Reddit’s r/writing board posted a link to George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” with the headline “Awesome writing tips by George Orwell”.

I would suggest that the value in Orwell’s essay is not the list of “tips” or rules, but in understanding his point. The important things to learn from this essay, to me, are things like this:

This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

It’s important to start to recognize when one’s writing begins to slip into this kind of lazy mode, where one starts to use phrases not because they are right, but because they are easy.

I absolutely believe Orwell is correct in thinking that our language affects our thoughts, and our thoughts affect our language. We need to be on guard, especially, when we talk about the things that we believe in most strongly. We get into the warm bath of friendly ideas and it’s easy to just say the things that confirm them; they keep us from thinking, from challenging our assumptions, from doing the hard mental work that has to be done sometimes.

Poor writing is often a product of poor thinking. That’s what Orwell is really talking about in this essay. The list of “tips” are pointless if we do not acknowledge and seek to address this root problem.

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