Our evening began with a change of plans: Cadence Coffee Company now has new business hours and we ended up moving the meeting to the old trusted Rembrandt's Coffee House. We would make Rembrandt's our usual place year round, but it's a favorite of a lot of other people and conversation can become difficult at times, so we've reserved the pleasure of having the meetings there for times when the weather is fair and warm.
First order of business was our schedule for this year. We unveiled the reading list, which is the result of synergy between the volumes on our shelves, the books on writing available at the Chattanooga library, the combined Goodreads and Amazon ratings, and my love of spreadsheets. While the books were chosen according to a highly scientific formula (ahem), the prompts were to a fair degree the work of chance: I went to NPR's Three Minute Fiction site, Easy Street Prompts and Pinterest to find ten prompts to inspire and challenge us this year. Then I wrote down a list of ten genres. Then I rolled the dice, literally. So if some prompt/genre combinations seem particularly random that's because they were. Thanks, Fortuna.
Last year we talked about missing the Meacham Writers' Workshop, and this year we have a chance of remembering to attend it, and other literary events in the area, thanks to our Area Events list. We might even venture out to Nashville for the Southern Festival of Books!
With all the planning matters aside we moved on to our read of the month: The Art of War for Writers by James Scott Bell. Mr. Bell has a ton of good, sensible information in this small book, and some of our favorites included finishing the novel because that's the best way to learn how to write one, establishing a routine, and taking writing as seriously as a job. Some things we weren't as keen on: his statement that the writer of potential greatness settles not for "mere fiction" struck us as potentially paralyzing, snatching writing time might work for those who are not mothers running households (what mother has time to snatch, after all?), and the fact that most of the successful authors in his examples were men. And yes, I do recognize the irony of most of the books on our reading list this year being written by men. What can you do, they earned the highest marks by readers, and we do want to learn from the best.
Once we shared our writing prompt pieces we moved on to the star of the show: Carol's talk about her trip to the Georgia Romance Writers meeting where she learned about self-publishing. The speaker, Beverley Kendall, shared her experience in self-publishing and her research of the subject with the audience, and was generous enough to share a 30-page PDF of the results on her website. Check out the Self-Publishing Survey link on the home page for the document. After glimpsing the pie charts and the graphs and tables I can say with confidence that Ms. Kendall is a woman after my own heart, and I look forward to reading the results of her research.
From what Carol told us the takeaway is this: 1) Genre matters, and writers of romance make the most; 2) "Series" and "free" can be keys to success, but you've got to be clever in using them; 3) The more prolific you are as an author the better for your bottom line; 4) You must give your book a professional edge: start by writing the best book you possibly can, then hire a professional editor and cover designer to present it to the readers in the best possible way. Bottom line: becoming a successful author is a business venture, and those who want to succeed must approach it as such.
We wrapped up on this sobering note, and made plans to meet at the Northgate branch of the library on February 8th for a write-in. We'll be there at 10, join us for a couple of hours of writing. We know the library will be open, unless there's a blizzard, then all bets are off.
