Adding personal style to dialogue
When it comes to dialogue and writing in your character’s voice, how do you add your own twist? How can you add your personality to the material without forcing the dialogue into an unnatural progression? How can you add style, interest, and your own pizazz to someone else’s words? Writing dialogue can be tricky, especially if you’re writing in an unfamiliar accent. Proofreading your work can help identify sneaky accent errors and help you add your own style back into the dialogue. There are several easy ways to place your touch to each accent, character, or place that you write about.
1. Imagine yourself as the character: If you sit down to write a scene between two characters, imagine what you would be thinking, feeling, talking about if you were them. Everyone thinks about scenarios differently and this process could be crucial in you letting your own ideas and voice shine. Taking on the mindset of your character in addition to your own views, opinions, likes, and dislikes will set you apart from other writers naturally. You’ll be able to create organic, flowing dialogue that sounds like your character with a touch of you. One of the biggest struggles I have as a writer is putting myself in my character’s shoes to write their dialogue. But once I manage to think about how I would feel in the situation and then think about the character’s similarities and differences to my own ideas, it becomes much clearer how and what I need to write; plus, I’ve added my own unique touch in the process.
2. Use slang and words that you commonly use in your character’s dialogue: The use of slang in dialogue brings your characters to live, shows setting, and shows their personality; but it can also show your own. If you’re writing a story about a southern gentleman who wants to run away to Brazil with a girl he met at Mardi Gras, think about what slang or broken words they would use to communicate. Think about how you would try to communicate in English to someone who mostly speaks Portuguese with small bits of English. Think about what Portuguese slang words are common that the female character would teach her southern mate and vice versa. Think about your own slang and where you picked it up. Would the southern gentleman or the Brazilian girl use any? Could you add some of your own in there and show your background? Yes, of course. You want to put your own jazz in the story. You can use your slang intermixed with theirs and create your own versions of multifaceted characters. Adding pieces of yourself into your characters through their dialogue is one of the best ways to create a unique story that’s all your own style.
3. Write in your own words: One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given was, “No matter what you’re writing about, write from your own mind in your own words.” When you write dialogue, try not to get bogged down in worrying over every little thing your character would do. Use your own mind; what would you do? How would you react? What would you say next? How would you solve the problem? Putting the story back in your own mind will easily give your story style because it’s all coming from you. You can pretend to be one of your characters or pretend that you’re an older Canadian woman with two cats moving to Belgium and don’t know the language; however, if you think about your reactions to the situation, your dialogue will not only be easier to write but shine with your own personal style and voice.
Remember that when you’re writing dialogue it’s always important to proofread your work. It’s extremely easy to make an error when writing in an accent or in your character’s voice. I like to use online resources for this because they’re fast, more accurate than Microsoft Word a lot of the time, and identify my most common errors and teach me how to avoid them. Grammarly is one of the most comprehensive proofreading tools I’ve used. It’s great for quick proofreading, grammar and punctuation checks, or learning more about avoiding errors. It also helps improve the style of my dialogue by suggesting more pungent words and adapting to the voice I’m writing in to find more specific errors. Proofreading your dialogue is essential to having a completely clean story. Even if you’re writing with a lot of accent marks, strange punctuation, or slang, cleaning it up to make it grammatically correct is important. When it comes to writing dialogue, using your own voice is the most important piece to adding your style to the character’s speech. Nobody can say it like you can.
Bio
Nikolas discovered his love for the written word in Elementary School, where he started spending his afternoons sprawled across the living room floor devouring one Marc Brown childrens’ novel after the other and writing short stories about daring pirate adventures. After acquiring some experience in various marketing, business development, and hiring roles at internet startups in a few different countries, he decided to re-unite his professional life with his childhood passions by joining Grammarly’s marketing team in San Francisco. He has the pleasure of being tasked with talking to writers, bloggers, teachers, and others about how they use Grammarly’s online proofreading application to improve their writing. His free time is spent biking, travelling, and reading.
How to create a fun quiz for your book
No matter what your book is about you can easily come up with ten questions that relate to your book. Authors of fiction can create questions about the setting, characters and events in the book. Ask questions about small town living or inner city hazards for your hero or heroine. Whether your book is about finding a partner in a romance or solving a mystery, create a quiz about the situation.
Authors of non-fiction can create questions around a topic that would build interest in readers. For instance, if you were writing a book about public speaking you could ask the following questions.
How do your overcome your fear of speaking in front of groups?
Where do you find places to speak?
How do you promote your book in small group settings?
The great thing about creating a fun quiz for your book is that it stops people for a few seconds and gets them thinking. If you post the quiz online, then offer a prize for answering all of the questions correctly or just for participating. Since your motivation is to build audience participation, it is better to make it easy for contestants to win.
The more interesting and fun you make your quiz, then the greater its chance of going viral. If you have problems coming up with questions, ask a friend to help you brainstorm. Sometimes authors get so absorbed in creating an unforgettable book that they forget the simple, basic questions that readers might have.
So what do you do once your book quiz is created and you have no visitors to your own blog? Take it on the road.
1. Offer it as a guest post to a site that gets more traffic than yours.
2. Share it in a Facebook comment to a post about a topic relevant to your book.
3. Share it on Goodreads. There is a section just for quizzes.
4. Tweet it on Twitter.
5. Pin it on Pinterest.
6. Google+ it.
7. Create an infographic.
8. Put it in your email signature
9. Create an adwords campaign around it
10. Promote it with a Facebook ad
11. Send an email to a friend and ask them to leave a comment
12. Post it on your Amazon author profile
13. Make a mini video about it and post it on YouTube
14. Send it as part of a news release to newspaper, radio, print or online media
15. Use the questions for advance publicity for book club speaking events
Take a look at your book and come up with a few simple questions about it. Ten questions is ideal but you can do as few as 3 good questions in a quiz. Then put it out for participation.
Improve your writing by adding dialogue
Including dialogue in your writing, even for nonfiction pieces, is a powerful way to move your story or article forward and keep the reader’s interest.
The appeal of including conversation is that it brings the level of your writing down to a human level. While you can always be obtuse and convoluted in your conversations, it is probably not your natural way of speaking. When you talk with someone, you leave out 90% of the wild, descriptive phrases and get to the point.
Compare “Hey, Mom, I’m going to the store!” to the writer’s penchant for superfluous information.
Most dialogue consists of short sentences sandwiched in between longer ones. So, adding dialogue not only makes your article more active and stimulated but also gives it variety. That’s a good thing. Plus, dialogue can add a measure of warmth, passion and even humor.
“Want to give it a try?”
That one sentence has only six words, but it gets the point across in an easy and conversational tone. You can sprinkle dialogue throughout an article like seasoning on a bland dish and immediately get an increase in readability and appeal.
Try adding a few sentences of conversation to your writing and see if it creates interest for your readers.
Most newspaper articles will often include at least one quote in the article. This tends to bring greater credibility to a story, rather than simply stating facts one after the other.
Conversation, dialogue and quotes can be just the ingredient you need to improve your next article.
Do authors need RebelMouse?
Rebel Mouse is a social media tool that pulls in your social media from many networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Tumblr, blogs and even your email, into your own personal RebelMouse page that can be embedded on any domain. Authors can use it to collect, connect and distribute information for research, writing and sharing.
Margaret Looney in her post The Year’s Best Social Media Tools for Journalists cited that IJNet (International Journalists Network) named RebelMouse as the number one tool of the year.
The idea behind RebelMouse is that it becomes your social front page. Everything you do across multiple platforms such as your blog, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. automatically gets updated on your page. Instead of repeating your content in a spin that is frowned upon you can add something new on each platform and share it all in one place.
Once the page is built, you can keep it private for your own use or share it with the world.
Private use can be helpful for doing research or following social information that you want to stay abreast of but may not be of particular interest to your followers.
On the other hand, creating a RebelMouse page can be a fantastic way to add extra value to your “About Me” page. Building a successful book marketing platform is all about creating relationships with your ideal target reader. With RebelMouse you can share the sites that you find helpful, fun and interesting with your followers. Providing a hub of vital resource information can be a great way to make your site more sticky.
A bookmarklet lets you post anything of interest as you browse the web to your RebelMouse page. You can post articles, videos, posts and links.
A small box to the left allows you to enter a few words to describe this page.
If you’re an author and feel stuck in your book marketing, get a jump start by learning about the best and latest book marketing strategies in the Authors Academy.
Why you should use your real photo in creating Social Media profiles
An important part of building brand awareness is image awareness. Like the golden arches of McDonald’s you want your face to be recognized as an expert. When people see your face, you want them to instantly say, “Yes! I know that person.”
Recognition builds association, which builds greater credibility.
The more your target audience sees you in different places and doing different things, the greater the image of “Oh my, that person is everywhere. They must be much more important than I realized!”
A photo tip is to use a unique personal image for different social applications. This way when your name is searched on Google, the page of images for your name will have more instances of “you” than images of other people with the same name.
When getting professional images taken, come prepared with different outfits and ask the photographer to use different background images. This way you get more mileage out of a single photo shoot. Use one shirt for Twitter, another for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Plan the outfit to match the platform you will be using.
When you share images on your blog or on social pages, make sure that you are in a significant number of them. People want to get to know you and the more you share your image the more they begin to link your name with your image. With today’s high face recognition technology you can be picked out of a crowd, but even so, include your name in the saved image format. It will ensure that your image does not get passed over or connected with someone else. Make sure you change the image name slightly such as yourname_athome.jpg or yourname_atwork.jpg so that it will show up uniquely in searches.
A final tip for building brand awareness is to choose photos that match the image you want to portray the most. If you want to be seen as an expert business coach, then wear business clothes in some of the photos. If you want to be known as a parenting expert, connect with images of your children or doing home activities as well as more professional speaking or presentation images. And finally, if you want to promote your latest book – why not get it in the picture?
Consistency is the key to book marketing success
It’s “the little drops of water, little grains of sand” system that creates wonderful writers.
It’s writing one sentence after the other and doing it over and over until you have 10,000 sentences and your book is done.
It’s writing a couple of comments every single day for a whole year until you have left your thumbprint on 100 blogs and over 700 posts.
It’s tweeting a tweet when you don’t feel like it, but you do it anyway and after days and weeks and months your name becomes known, your face becomes known and what you are writing about becomes noticed.
Consistency happens only with conscious, deliberate effort.
It takes an idea that is grand and glorious and breaks it down into steps and actionable moments. Step by step, day by day, in season and out of season you keep at it until the dream is manifested into reality.
Every author needs an author platform. This is the visible, viable proof through which people know you, follow you and buy your books. It is more than just a one day splash on the front page that is read and forgotten. It must be a steady accumulation of showing up and providing content that matters.
The best way to provide consistency is to make a public commitment to something that forces you to stay the course. Make it definite and visible. One person that comes to mind in doing this is the writer, Julie Powell, who made a bold commitment to cook all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a year. It was a challenge that took her out of the wading pool into deep water and it resulted in a huge following, a book deal and a movie.
Ask yourself what simple, consistent thing can you do every day for a year? One thing. Not ten or twenty. Keep it simple and stay the course.
“Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.”—Bruce Springsteen
Building your 100 book marketing gold list
If you are looking for a magic bullet to speed your book to greater selling success, creating a 100 gold contact list might be just the ammunition you need.
A gold contact list is simply a list of 100 people that would help you to sell more books. This concept comes from John Kremer of Bookmarket.com. Kremer explains that building a list of 100 key media and book marketing contacts will help you to focus your relationship building efforts where they will have the most punch.
The first thing you have to realize when you build your list is that you don’t have to already know and have a relationship with these people. Come up with a list of people in the field that you want to know and then try to build a relationship with each one.
This will take some time. It will mean finding out where this person is on social media and finding ways to slowly (emphasize slowly) build a connection. This may mean leaving comments on their blog, Twitter and Google+. It means reading their books and articles and writing favorable reviews. It may involve taking a workshop from them, going to an event where they will be speaking or better yet signing up for a coaching program where you pay to talk to them. If the contact is important, do whatever it takes.
Building your gold list does not mean you sit down and come up with 100 people immediately. Start with ten to twenty-five people. Make the number small enough that you can concentrate on building the relationship by contacting them in some small way at least once a month. Finding and following one contact will open up pathways to other influential people that you can add to your list.
It’s a good idea to put your list into some type of contact management program or spreadsheet where you can keep track of contacts you make each month. Unless you actively and purposely work on this, it won’t work. But by keeping it as an important part of your “To Do” list, your mind will surprise you by thinking of creative ways to keep in touch and stay on the radar of your new gold friends.
At Wheatmark, our work with authors does not stop once their books are published. In fact that is just the beginning. That is why we place an emphasis on educating our authors about book marketing.
Why print newsletters can be more effective in keeping your fans connected
The pendulum is swinging back. For the last five or ten years the push for authors to send out a digital newsletter was encouraged on every front. Turns out that it became so popular everyone did it. So much so that as email newsletters became more and more prolific, readers soon felt overwhelmed. In order to handle the load, people started filtering the emails into sorted files that rarely were opened or simply deleted them after a casual disinterested glance at the subject line.
Even though digital newsletters could be sent in full color, 84% of the browsers that received them had pictures and images turned off to guard against spam and viruses. An email with plain text has to be pretty amazing to be read in this day and age of short attention spans.
As email turned into a chore and a headache, the delete key started being used with greater ferocity. A mediocre headline meant instant banishment to the trash bin and a pitchy sales lead went into the spam folder. An email list of thousands might sound impressive but not with an open rate of less than 3%.
As snail mail was used less and less, readers started paying more attention to print letters that they received. An email letter might be tossed but a handwritten letter from Aunt Joan was tucked lovingly into a drawer for further reading. An animated message of super deals that bombarded the unsuspected reader who opened a digital sales catalog was clicked off without a thought, while a catalog of books and special offers tucked into the lonely mailbox at the end of the driveway was opened and casually perused for a few minutes.
Email is here to stay and it has its place but more and more retailers are finding that sending out quarterly or even monthly printed material is perceived as having more value and credibility. Authors may find that the so-called, old fashion advertising methods of using postcards, printed flyers and newsletters may entice their readers more than ever.
Personal profile picture sizes for major social media sites
While you can’t be everywhere and do everything, you can put your picture almost everywhere. Every social media site has its own perfect sizing for optimum display. Here are six of the major social media sites and the picture size your photo should be for the best display.
Facebook: The final picture that will be displayed is 160 x 160 pixels, but the picture you upload must be 180 x 180 pixels. If you want the most control over how your picture will look, then size it to exactly 180 x 180 before you upload it. Yes, you can upload a rectangular image and crop and resize it within Facebook, but it will not look as sharp as a perfect square picture. Check out this info page on Facebook for perfect dimension tips. Finally, when your image shows up on an update, within a comment or on someone else’s page, your picture will be reduced to 90 x 90 so make sure it looks good at that resolution as well.
Twitter: 73 x 73 pixels is the size that will be displayed when users see your initial page. However, when they click on that tiny image for a closer look, they can see an image up to 500 x 500 pixels. Upload a perfectly square image of 500 x 500 pixels for maximum crispness and exposure. When your picture is shown next to your tweets, it will be resized to 48 x 48 pixels and then to 24 x 24 pixels when you follow someone or retweet something. The best advice is to start with a 500 x 500 image and let Twitter resize the image. Check out this page on editing your Twitter profile.
YouTube: That tiny channel icon may be as small as 90 x 90 pixels on a smart phone and as big as 2560 x 1440 pixels on a large TV screen. Best advice again is to start big and work down. YouTube recommends uploading a square 800 x 800 pixel image as JPG, GIF, BMP or PNG. The maximum file size is 1MB which means you can upload a very high resolution image to show up well on a television screen. Here are two pages from Google to give you more information. YouTube Channel Guidelines and Channel Icon Help.
LinkedIn: The best size for your profile photo is between 200 x 200 pixels and 500 x 500 pixels. You can upload a very high resolution image with a maximum file size of 4MB. If your image is over 4000 pixels of height or width, it will not upload. Here is more information on how to add or change your LinkedIn profile photo.
Google+: Google+ is the new kid on the block and a very important kid to take note of. Put your best face forward and you don’t have to be “square” about it. Recommended size is 1080 x 608 pixels. The smallest image allowed is 480 x 270 pixels and the largest is 2120 x 1192 pixels. Check out this page for further details.
Pinterest: The profile picture will be displayed at 165 x 165 pixels. Once again, it’s better to upload a square image of 600 x 600 pixels for a nice display. If you upload a rectangular image, it will be automatically centered, resized and cropped and it will look weird. Put in the work before you upload so that you know exactly what the end result will look like. When you sign up for Pinterest using another social media site, such as Twitter or Facebook, Pinterest will use the profile image associated with that account. You can leave it that way to start with, but you will get more leverage and exposure if you use a brand new image for each social media account. Here is a site to give you some more help.
Gravatar: A gravatar is your personal picture or image that is displayed when you comment or post on your own blog or someone else’s blog. It will also identify you on web forums and emails. While kids and gamers use avatars such as warriors, fairy princesses and cute kittens, it is best to use your actual photo if you want to build a professional brand image. You can upload any size picture you want. Be aware, though, that it will be resized so if you want the most control over its final size, start with a square image. Here is some basic information.
Need more help? Check out the info and help section on each social media site’s Getting Started pages. This business site has some in-depth information for most business social media sites.
10 image providers that can be used for LinkedIn
If you are an avid LinkedIn user there may be times when you want to post or upgrade while on the go. Here are ten sites that LinkedIn accepts for bringing in tweets, photos and videos.
1. 23hq – Free to add 30 photos a month. $25.00 a year for unlimited. You can send photos to friends by email, post on LinkedIn and other media outlets. Photos can be private or public as you choose.
2. Mead – a photo site in Spanish.
3. Mobypicture – “Directly share your photos, videos and audio with your friends on your favorite social sites: facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, and more!” This is out of the Netherlands. The terms of agreement allow them to use collected information to market to you.
4. ow.ly – http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url – a part of HootSuite
5. HootSuite – Message management. “Improve productivity by managing all of your social networks within HootSuite.” Free for up five social media accounts. Upgrades start at $8.99 a month for up to fifty social media accounts.
6. Pikchur – “Upload your photos from your mobile device while on the go, we’ll make sure they get to the right place! WE’RE SOCIAL.” Free service – you can sign up with existing Facebook, Twitter, etc., accounts.
7. Tinypic – “A quick, easy, reliable, and safe way to share images for Twitter.”
8. Twitpic – Share photos and images as they happen on twitter. You can sign up with twitter account.
9. TwitrPix http://twitrpix.com/ – “TwitrPix gives you, your friends, family and co-workers the ability to upload and post photos on Twitter using your mobile phone, desktop web browser or by email. Along with a photo of your choice, you can include a message that will get Tweeted with it.”
10. Twitter – “Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.”