Tag Archives: Amazon

I Published a Book in 10 Hours

5 Replies

Jimmy the burgler

I did it!

Families inspire us and intimidate us.  Jimmy’s mother, father and brother are all members of the Burglars Union Guild (BUG), and he is expected to follow in their footsteps.  Jimmy has slippery fingers and not in the slick, pickpocket ways; he drops things.  That lack of dexterity is just the start of his struggles to gain entrance into the most elite thief organization.  The story of his life is now immortalized in electronic bytes.  I published a book.

I didn’t do all that writing in one day, as I proposed in my original challenge.  I also spent more than 10 hours writing Jimmy the Burglar.  Regardless, I completed the challenge.

I feel really good about that because this is my first fiction piece in a long, long time.  Fiction is easier to write than memoir because I could make up whatever stuff I wanted.  Fiction is also harder to write than a memoir because I had to make up whatever stuff I wanted.

This is my third self-published book, and I learn new elements with each effort.  This time, I experimented by writing the first draft in longhand.  At 2 hours and 56 minutes of writing, I hit a wall: great story elements, but no tension.  Typing that first part in gave me time to think about the story I wanted to tell here and now and in 10-ish hours.  I initially focused on the entire family history as related to the evolution of the Guild, but in that writing, I developed incredible backstory fodder for future Jimmy short stories.  The tale worth telling today is the evolution of Jimmy’s final exam for BUG membership: his MOTH (Modus Operandi Thesis Heist).  After the humiliation he experienced working with Big M, it is vital that Jimmy’s MOTH get all the details right.

At 7 hours and 42 minutes, I was having Too Much Fun writing. So much fun that, I forgot to reset the timer at one point.

After 16 hours (approximately) and 5100 words (23 pgs.), you can read Jimmy the Burglar’s first adventure on Amazon.com.

How did your story turn out?  If you completed the challenge, post your link below.  If you didn’t, share your thoughts now about the experience for all of us so we can learn from it.  And for me, I’d love to know your thoughts about my book. Whaddya think?

If you’re looking for some inspiration and encouragement to complete a book like this, there is a day-long workshop planned for early 2015 in the metro Detroit area.  Stay tuned for the details.

Even if publication isn’t your goal, doing a challenge like this is immensely satisfying. I have typed “The End” on a piece of my writing and am now moving on to “The Next.”

Paper’s First Mass Extinction

7 Replies

The digital age is upon us, it’s everywhere we look today. Literally, no industry is safe when doctors can now print 3-D parts for a heart valve repair minutes later. What possible chance do printed books have by the year 2025? Slim to none, sorry to say.

By then, publishers will only print Limited Edition books that authors and illustrators will sign and that collectors and fans will treat like trophies. Books will only be purchased – and thus printed – for their beauty or their collector appeal by 2025. Attractive, leather bindings with inlaid gold designs touting popular titles will command hundreds of dollars, but the “trade editions” will all be ninety-nine cent digital versions.

Text books – all learning material for that matter – will fall like dinosaurs during the first mass extinction of pulp. These books will die out because of their sheer weight alone, but so, too, will all sci-fi, suspense, mystery and romance stories. Novels will lose out because they hold no advantage on paper. They are more expensive and take longer for everyone involved, from author to publisher to seller to readers. In the end, economics rule. Without some other inherent value, there will be no reason to keep a novel once you’re done reading it. If that’s the case and e-books remain cheaper, then print is dead. Long live E!

Some genres should survive until 2025. Children’s books will still be in print because they are illustrated, but their days are numbered, too. Biographies with their childhood photographs, documents, maps, and other such supporting evidence have a home on the future bookshelf for those very reasons, at least for a while longer. Religious material will continue in print because you take this Book with you to Church to read along with the faithful. Even so, at some point, churches, too, will be distributing prayers, sermons and missals on e-readers left in the pews.

Cookbooks and other reference material – the kinds of books that people dog-ear and write in the margins of – will continue to be printed because we treat them like tools while working on related projects. It’s hard to see other formats surviving, though. How are you going to convince today’s youth to put down their iPhones and pick up something printed on paper?

The year 2025 is only a decade away. For the first mass extinction of paper to come true by then, all these dire predictions will need to travel at the speed of light.

Exactly!

A decade from now, authors, Amazon, and the publishers who are sure to follow, will be too busy translating their e-novels into other languages without making embarrassing mistakes. That will be everyone’s main concern. The war over “cover price” will be long over. Free market enterprise will set the price. It always does in the end.

I think third world countries will be the new marketing frontier ten years from now, not just for books but for e-everything. Authors and publishers could thrive with the Polaroid Theory of Marketing in those countries by providing them with cheap e-readers and free internet.

Dr. Edwin Land’s marketing strategy in the 1960s was to effectively “give away the camera to sell the film.” This was akin to financial suicide in an industry where cameras cost hundreds of dollars and the photographic film costs pennies to turn into pictures. But Land had a theory, which was this: people will pay dearly for instant gratification.

Land priced one version, the Polaroid Swinger,  under $20.00. Cameras were not household items in the 1960s until Land’s affordable entry pricing made them popular. But, where 35mm film was cheap – $4.00 to develop a roll of 36 photos – it had to be mailed to a company to be turned into pictures. It took about a week to process, and sometimes you got someone else’s pictures back instead of your own. That could get embarrassing. Polaroid sold ten pictures for $7.00, but you held your Polaroid picture in your hand one minute later, while the moment was still fresh. It was our first taste of instant gratification, and we showed great marketers like Edwin Land, Bill Gates and Steven Jobs just how much more we were willing to pay for it.

Create a $20.00 e-reader today and the Polaroid Theory guarantees that everyone of age in Africa, Asia and the poorer parts of the Americas will have access to all kinds of books. With today’s technology, all it requires is a few drones parked in the sky to gain access to millions – billions – of potential e-book buyers. This means instant global gratification for e-books and global extinction for print. A $20.00 e-reader could conquer the world with ten books for seven bucks instead of ten pictures. Everyone from author to publisher makes more money with the Polaroid Theory because millions of more copies are sold. The costs to create more copies spiral down with the economy-of-scale, and if the novel never catches on, the cost of failure is survivable.

Think bigger than that. It is possible bilingual e-books could give rise to English as Earth’s common language by 2025. It almost is now. Think of what that means to all fiction authors, regardless their native tongue.

Printed matter’s second life is destined to become firewood at some point during in the next decade. Even something as sought after today as a first edition of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I’m sorry to say. As an antiquarian dealer, I worry about this a lot. I’ve stopped investing in modern classics produced after 1980.

Tomorrow’s bookshelf is today’s trophy cabinet. By 2025, we’ll keep our treasured tomes locked behind glass and out of direct sunlight. When someone asks if they can take one out, we’ll smile and say, “I’ve got that book on my iPad, too, if you’d like to read it.”

Next Month: Back to the topic of writing. If the future of fiction novels is strictly digital, how will that affect the way authors pace their stories? Are we headed for the 140-character novel? Will an author need to work with an illustrator to have any chance of success? Is writing a novel morphing from solitude to team project? And, if so, then whose e-voice is this, anyway? Stop by next month and explore these thoughts with me.

You can write and publish your story in 10 hours

4 Replies

I dare you.

Do you remember when writing was fun and carefree? I do. As a kid, I would pull out a notepad and write stories just because that’s how I chose to pass the time. I mostly wrote fantasy stories, some science fiction without all that technical mumbo-jumbo. My dragons had their own rules of behavior and almost every character had an apostrophe in their name.

I created bizarre plot twists. I didn’t fuss with grammar or sentence structure. I didn’t care if the stories were proper writing; I just wrote a rough draft that I always thought was complete. I had fun.

Somewhere along the way, writing became structured and proper. Because of that formal format reality, I look at those drafts now and I think, “What silly little creations.” Why did I bother? Why did anyone or I care?

I expect that if you’re reading this blog, you remember that feeling, or you know someone who has. You, as a reader, can tell when the writer was having a good time and when it was an assignment. I invite you to rediscover that freedom and write with abandon. No doubt, you still have one of those stories down on paper or in your head. This month, I dare you to complete it and publish.

I talk a lot about self-publishing as if it’s gospel. The fact that I’ve done it twice–soon to be three times–does not make me an expert, but I feel confident in it. I know the powerful feeling of control, a feeling that comes from writing, editing and finishing a piece of work. Hitting the Publish button on Amazon is a daring and satisfying moment. I want you to experience that feeling.

Why should you?

Even if you don’t dream of publishing, I challenge you to do this. It’s a sense of accomplishment to write a draft, to edit that draft and by publishing it that means you finish something that you’ve started. Maybe you just have a story to tell, say it’s a letter to your parents, and wouldn’t it be cool to download it onto their Kindle for Christmas? Maybe you have a story about you and your friend. How cool would that be?

When you were in school and had an essay exam, the class eventually ended and you handed in your work as-is. At that moment, you were done. It was a relief, wasn’t it?

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is coming up in November. The concept behind NaNoWriMo is to kickstart you into completing a full-length first draft, but writing 50,000 words in 30 days can be intimidating. Even though that breaks down to 1667 words a day, or 69 words an hour, that finite number may be too large to be comforting. I suggest something doable.

My idea is a spin off from JA Konrath’s blogpost back in August 22, 2013.  The idea mingled fun with structure. Pretend writing is your business. Sit down at the beginning of your 8-hour business workday and write a story, edit it and publish it online. It can be that easy.

My two published short stories have been a result of that challenge. My approach was to start at 8am with a cup of coffee and an open Word document. I write one sentence so the screen is no longer blank. Then I just write, completing my first, rough draft by 12noon. I take a typical hour lunch break. From 1-5pm, I rewrite and edit my text. You can format and upload your text in that timespan as well, but consider taking a dinner break, and then work an hour or two of overtime creating an account, formatting the text, uploading it to the site, and adding cover art.

True, each time I began with a vague story idea and direction, but that was it. There was no outline, no structure, and no definitive plan. I could just as easily have pulled out one of my silly little fantasy stories and see what I can do with it now.

My first e-Book experience was my memoir about a trip my mom and I took. The book–Mom, Star Trek and Las Vegas: A Grand Adventure required research because Trekkies or Trekkers will know if a name is incorrect or a date is wrong. I thought I could sit down in one eight-hour stretch, but I did not. I wrote an hour here, two hours there, made 20 minutes for research here and so on. I was committed to finishing it, whatever the timeframe.

Writers who took the 8-hour challenge, published by August 30. That was eight days after the issued challenge. I’ve read some of the published work and some of them read as if written in 8 hours. But so what? The author wrote, edited, and completed the work. That was the fun of it.

On October 6, after 18 hours and 45 minutes, give or take, I was an officially published author. That was 45 days after the initial post. Final word count: 5657 words, about 22 pages.

My mom memoir e-Book won a national award: third place in the NFPW 2014 Communications Contest.

My second eBook–Lessons from Dad: A Letter to You–was a prelude to my upcoming novel memoir. I released it on June 14, 2014: Father’s Day. I counted it by the number of edits–four, including initial draft–rather than hours, which I estimate took 12 hours. That book is 5111 words, or 21 pages. For 99cents, both books are a bargain read.

What’s the number one reason people don’t do this? Without conducting scientific research, my personal experience is “I don’t have the time.” Wrong. You don’t make the time.

You say you’re too busy, that there are too many other tasks distracting you? You have dinner to cook. Your kids have after-school activities and you’re the driver. You volunteer at the library. You work a 9-to-5 job and commute an hour each way. You have a report to write. There are weekly soccer matches to attend, so you wake up at 6:45am every Saturday. You go to church. You have a monthly date night with your spouse. Your favorite TV show has begun a new season. Repeat week.

Excuses. All excuses. They are reasons, but they are also excuses.

I will attempt this by my next blog post. So, what does my life look like? I don’t have kids to factor in, but I picked up about five extra shifts at my part time job between now and then. I’m traveling out-of-state, teaching Zentangle classes, co-hosting a monthly art group, having a Halloween scrapbook crop at my house, celebrating my 11th wedding anniversary, and raising funds to dance in February’s THON.

I am madly editing my dad memoir novel for ePublication on November 20, my father’s birthday. I’m promoting that book on Twitter, Instagram and my Facebook Author page. Let’s not forget that I have my own blog to maintain, including my annual Halloween blog hop post.  There are articles to write for Michigan Scrapbooker Magazine. I’m editing posts for this blog, critiquing submissions for this writers group, and writing the follow-up November post of this challenge. In utter madness, I also signed up for NaNoWriMo this year.

And there are the daily mundane To-Do items: doctor appointments, cooking, grocery shopping, laundry, mailing birthday cards. Did I mention I was married and have a husband to not ignore?

If I can find time in that, then you can make time in your schedule.

This is not a setup. I don’t have a finished work sitting in the wings planned for this blog challenge. I have ignored my Jimmy the Burglar story for way too long. I mentioned it first back on this blog in March and haven’t touched it since. That’s seven months. I’ve written segments in my head but nothing on paper.

Do you feel that if you don’t write for X-minutes at a time then you’ll lose your flow, and focus and might as well not even start? If you choose to accept this challenge, make it work for you. Don’t have a whole day? I bet you can find an hour a day for 8 days. Maybe 30 minutes for 16 days. Does it take longer than 10 hours? So what? Don’t let the timeframe freeze you, but use it as a guideline, an incentive, a strong deadline.

Don’t be embarrassed by it. Don’t expect best-selling material, although you might surprise yourself. It’s most likely a short story, and there is nothing wrong with that. My books are the length of approximately three of this 1650-word blog post.

What’s in it for you is a sense of accomplishment and completion. As writers, we are always in the middle of something. Or, we write that first draft and never go back to it. I’ve done NaNoWriMo for three years, and I have yet to continue one of those 50K drafts. Unfinished work is a plague on would-be writers.

Stop whining.

You raise kids and release them into the world after 18 years. You write that college essay in 50 minutes and then submit it for a grade. You plan a wedding and eventually the bride walks down the aisle. At some point, there’s that moment of letting go. Stop the mindless edits and let your writing be that free.

As an incentive, I promise to download your book and read it and review it, even if it takes me a few months to get through them. Add your link to the comments section in my November 18 post, or share your thoughts about the overall experience.

Discover what kind of book you can to write in 10 hours!

Amazon, Hachette and “the wretched $9.99 price point”

8 Replies

Print is dead.

At least, that’s what the Big Five publishing houses fear. One company is fighting the potential loss of sales and its possible demise in a public battle that affects readers and writers alike.

Before 2007 or so, the only way an author’s story was read was through a print copy in brick-and-mortar bookstores. The only way to get into a bookstore was through a major publisher. Knowing their control, these large publishers chose the stories and genres people read, the prices at which books were sold and what the authors got paid.

Now that snippy digital upstarts like me are snooting our way in and circumventing the system they so strategically designed, publishers are no longer needed. With digital formats, there is no gatekeeping; I can write and publish any book at any length in any genre I choose and at any price.

Without hardcover or paperback books, the publishers’ choking grip on the market disappears with the turn of a page. The Big Five lose all public prestige, respect, expertise, control and sales. Especially sales.

Welcome to the battle between Hachette and Amazon.

Hachette wants to charge high e-book prices to discourage electronic sales and boost paper sales. Amazon wants to keep prices of e-books favorable to consumers. This dispute has been going on for years. To understand the impact of today’s feud, let’s go back in time for a brief history….  (Shout out thanks to J.A. Konrath’s timeline for the format inspiration that I use.)

NOVEMBER 2007

Amazon releases the company’s Kindle e-reader.

NOVEMBER 2009

Barnes & Noble introduces the company’s Nook e-reader.

Retailers continue buying books and e-books using “wholesale pricing,” an agreement in which publishing houses charge half the printed cover price to those retailers. The booksellers then compete with each other by discounting books or offering sales. At this time, hardback book prices range from $15-30.

Amazon is a large company with a large share of the e-book market. They rarely sell at full price, offering book titles below the printed cost, even as far down as $9.99 for bestselling novels. The Big Five publishers make a lot of money through the sales of higher priced hardcover books, and this consumer-friendly price point might encourage more digital sales than paper. These companies didn’t want that to be the standard that consumers would expect to pay.

JANUARY 2010

Apple prepares to release its iPad, but if they offer books in their iBookstore at a price to compete with Amazon, the company will lose money. A publishing executive blames Amazon’s “wretched $9.99 price point.” Apple and the Big Five publishers work out an agreement that benefits everyone. The publishers switch book distribution away from wholesale pricing to the new and improved “agency pricing” model. In this agreement, publishers control the price of the e-book rather than the retailer. Sales percentages are split favorably, as well: 30% to Apple and 70% to publishers. In this scenario, consumers who choose to buy e-books instead of physical copies are, in a sense, be punished for affecting paper sales.

The only caveat is that all publishing houses have to sell this way to all of Apple’s competing retailers, including Amazon. Amazon pushes back, but with everyone else agreeing to this method of distribution, the company has to accept these terms. Book prices on Amazon’s site rise to $12.99 and $14.99. The term “colluded” is later used when referring to this agency pricing arrangement.

APRIL 2010

Apple releases the iPad.

JULY 2010

Amazon reports that digital e-books outsell hardcover books for the first time in history. The agency pricing continues for two years before the U.S. government steps in.

APRIL 2012

The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) accuses Apple and the publishers of conspiring to raise e-book prices and filed a civil antitrust lawsuit. By developing and utilizing agency model, “the publishers prevented retail price competition resulting in consumers paying millions of dollars more for their e-books” especially for the most popular titles by big-name, best-selling authors.

Three of the Big Five publishing houses, which include Hachette, settle immediately. Retailers resume discounting and offering sales. The publishers pay financial restitutions to consumers and are “prohibited for two years from entering into new agreements that constrain retailers’ ability to offer discounts or other promotions to consumers….” The DoJ settled with two other publishers and Apple by 2013, yet Apple appeals the decision.

Now fast forward to the present year. Apple’s appeal is ongoing as of this post.

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2014

The 2-year contracts are ending, so new ones need to be negotiated or extended. Amazon sends a contract to Hachette. Because they do not receive a response from Hachette, Amazon removes the site’s pre-order buttons and stops discounting Hachette titles.

MARCH 2014

Hachette’s contract to sell books with Amazon expires, but Amazon extends it into April while both sides negotiate. Because the outcome is uncertain and shipping dates cannot be guaranteed, Amazon reduces the print inventory of Hachette titles.

APRIL 2014

There is now no longer any contract for Amazon to sell Hachette titles on Amazon. Hachette finally makes counter offer, Amazon rejects it.

MAY-JUNE 2014

Hachette authors notice slower sales, so Amazon makes several proposals that they and Hachette offer financial provisions for the authors during negotiations. Hachette declines all of them.

JULY-AUGUST 18, 2014

Here’s when media runs wild with statements, press releases and proposals, oh my!

Hachette compiles its press releases and statements regarding Amazon here.

Propaganda or perspective? Article from Random House editorial assistant Alison Herman with intriguing links at the end.

Big Five authors want print to thrive. Who can blame them? Without physical books, bestselling authors like Stephen King, John Grisham and James Patterson lose their dedicated personal assistants and vacation beach houses. They each become “just another little writer” in a writer’s ocean.

There is a letter from Douglas Preston, a Council Member of the Author’s Guild, signed by authors supporting Hachette. As of August 9, the letter had approximately 900 signatures, published as a full 2-page $110,000 advertisement in the New York Times as “A Letter to Our Readers.”

There is a petition by Change.org urging readers and writers to support the company who supports readers and authors. As of August 9, the petition reached 8000 electronic signatures. (8466 as of my post)

On August 9, The Amazon Books Team releases a letter discussing their point of view from within the negotiation. There are some good links at the end. It’s worth a read through.

The email reply from Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch in response to Amazon’s August 9 letter request for consumers to contact executives about the negotiations.

Amazon releases a statement justifying the $9.99 price point: “For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000.”

And here we are, readers and writers, reeling in the wake of potential propaganda from both sides. Marketers in any company can spin numbers any way they want to make the numbers show in their favor. I don’t necessarily believe in Amazon’s exact number or those calculations empirically, but the rationale behind it is solid. If I had $15, would I spend it on one book? Am I more inclined to buy a $9.99 book and a coffee and muffin to enjoy while reading the book? If a purchase like that gives me that pleasure, then I’m encouraged to buy another similarly priced book for a similar experience.

“Why should e-books cost as much as, or more than, a printed copy?” my husband asked me. “There’s no shipping or printing.” He’s a chemist and not in the publishing industry. If this is so elementary to someone outside the industry, how is it lost on someone in the publishing business?

I’m not necessarily pro-Amazon, but I am pro-information. Some people do not have the drive or desire to do it all, so turning their work over to a Big Five publisher is the best option for them. But how is Hachette assisting and nurturing its authors when it let their contract with Amazon expire, and thus all its authors’ contracts as well?

If Amazon wins this battle, they will dominate the market…for now. At some point, all Amazon authors could be stuck with a business model that no longer offers today’s benefits, and then Amazon becomes the Big One publisher. If that happens, authors are not stuck.

Unlike print, where the only way to publish was through a publisher, there are now numerous electronic options. No doubt any number of smaller publishers and retailers will develop online stores. Any author can sell directly from their website. These were options never available before.

Who needs who more, Amazon or Hachette?

Who, or what, do authors need?

Print may be dying, but books and stories never will.

Plot, Plot, Plotting Along

3 Replies

An architect needs a solid plot of land to build his house. Only a plot can render a view. All of the detailed plans and beautiful drawings are just pretty pictures without it. The same can be said about all fiction. No matter how well rounded and sympathetic – or just plain pathetic – the characters are, if the story isn’t built on solid ground, it won’t stand upright when finished.

Any story can carry tension, from a school girl’s pimple on a first date to a megalomaniac’s rise to infamy. What makes any fiction interesting is how events unfold, how the heroes conquer any obstacle thrown in their way. That’s called a Plot. Let’s build a simple suspense plot that anyone can relate to.

Our protagonists, Auggie and Clair Knight, have been filing taxes on time and more-or-less correctly all 15 years of their marriage. Our story is about the Knight’s audit.

We’ll use Gustav Freytag’s Narrative Structure and his five parts to a plot to construct our story. They are:

Exposition
Rising Action
Climax
Falling Action
Denouement

In the Exposition, we draw out the motivations and goals of our protagonists. We learn the Knights are just barely getting by on Auggie’s day job as a security guard at the marina. We get a sense of what might happen if he lost his steady income, or the home’s septic system backed up again. Exposition rounds out the main characters and gives rise to the inciting incident, that one event in the story that throws down the challenge.

In our story, the Rising Action begins when the Knights get an audit notice in the mail. Tension is introduced when Auggie can’t find some of the receipts the IRS has asked him to produce. More tension comes when Clair, an accounting grad who’s done their taxes all these years, reminds him that they’ve never reported his moonlighting income from helping friends sell boats on eBay. Some years, that amounted to $4,000 of extra, undeclared income.

The length of your piece gets determined right here. If you want a longer story, you could, for example, introduce an antagonist. Say, one of Auggie’s boat buddies or an old college pal of Clair’s. But we’ll keep this story short. You – the writer – continue to pull the threads tighter and tighter as Rising Action builds towards the day of the IRS audit. Let’s say you paint the protagonists in the beginning as mostly likeable characters. Their only real flaw is a little cheating on their income taxes. Auggie and Clair trod along, blissfully hoping the IRS doesn’t know about the boat sale commissions. The closer they get to that date, the more the Knights learn of the dire consequences they’d face – huge fines, penalties, possibly jail time and certainly a federal criminal record – if they got busted. None of which they can afford, and Auggie reminds her that he can’t hold his security job with a federal record. The Knights try to stay calm on the surface, but they worry and act nervous. Their tension increasingly rubs off on their relationship with each other, with their kids and the rest of your characters.

Freytag’s third element of plot is Climax. In our story, that would be the IRS audit. The Climax should be confrontational, a spell-binding scene that is both drawn out and shattered into sharp shards of action. This is not the end of your story, and far from the end of the action, but it should be your most realistic, best drawn scene in the story so far.

Then the author introduces the twist. Say, a slip of the tongue by Clair about how easy it is to sell stuff on eBay. This raises the IRS reviewer’s eyebrows, and both Auggie and the reader see it.

The Knights are only too glad to pay $124.50 for the few receipts they can’t produce and get out of there as fast as they can. Clair and Auggie high-five in the car and start to think they’ve dodged the bullet. They start laughing about it and bragging to each other how easy that had been. The reader feels for them, one way or the other.

What follows the Climax is called the Falling Action, and this where your story can take several twists and turns with the events you first brought out in the Exposition. Falling Action can take any direction the author likes so long as it advances the story forward.

This is the real fun stuff to dream up. Say, our heroes celebrate that night in a fancy restaurant and then get all lovey-dovey after the kids go to bed. Three days later Auggie comes home and tells Clair he’s just had the best day ever at work. Clair tells him that the septic’s just backed up into the kid’s sandbox again. Oh, and they got another IRS audit letter. This one for unreported income. Later that night, Auggie freaks out when he finds himself locked out of his eBay account. The Falling Action is the back-and-forth between winning and losing battles with all of these elements, with the ever-present IRS always looming. Our heroes fight on through the Falling Action to eventually claim victory over some, if not all, obstacles. Or they get their due comeuppance on every turn of the page, or Auggie gets very foggy and Clair becomes very clear, depending on which way you want to say goodnight to your readers.

Caution: don’t let any of your subplots take over your story. Resolve all of them, but always stay focused on the main event.

The last part of Freytag’s structure is called Denouement, or the finale. This is where all of the accomplishments of the story are summarized. If the author has done his job right, in suspense anyway, Denouement is reduced to a page or a paragraph. Why? Because all of the accomplishments will have already been shown in the Falling Action scenes. There’s no tension left, just afterglow. In our story, that would be Auggie and Clair sitting on the pier toasting warm beer under a starry night and saying it could have been worse. Period.

There’s one plot line, start to finish. Just flavor with mouth-watering prose, give it a tasty title and a satisfying ending. Let it stew in suspense for a few thousand words and you’ll have it.

Freytag’s formula is not parsed equally. In all my writing, Exposition is painted with a wide brush and is never more than 10% of the story’s length. The details of these broad strokes come out in the Rising Action, which is about 40-50% of what needs to be said. The Climax is about 2%. Falling Action is usually another 40-50% because all the Exposition and conflicts created during the earlier parts now need to be resolved. Anything not resolved by this point is Denouement.

Think of our architect friend presenting the keys to this great house when finished, after every detail has been polished. If the plot is beautifully landscaped, then what more could he possibly say?

Next Month, Minutiae. ‘Nuff said.

Note: from August 1st through August 7th, Amazon.com is promoting a sale on my two novels in their Kindle bookstore. This is a great opportunity for those who likes to e-read fiction to save a couple of bucks. Both Seoul Legacy, The Orphan’s Flu and The Freya Project will be available that week for just $0.99. (67% off Retail of $2.99) So, please tell two friends to tell two friends to tell two friends. You can read the synopsis (Amazon’s “Book Description”) by following the links above. Please note this sale is on e-books only. First edition print books are also available through Amazon. Since all print versions come from BirchwoodBooks.com, I’ll be happy to sign or personally inscribe any orders for print. Enjoy! –Phil

Print books:
Seoul Legacy, The Orphan’s Flu (trade paperback)
The Freya Project (hardcover, trade paperback, ltd. ed.)