<span class="vcard">Adam Stemple</span>
Adam Stemple

Making an Amazon Ad

To make it as an independent author, you need to bust out of your own social circle and into the wider world. There are millions of readers for your books out there — you just need to get their attention. Advertising, especially on Amazon, is an excellent way to find your readers. Amazon vs. Facebook The only other site with the reach and effectiveness for advertising comparable to Amazon is Facebook. And though FB ads are useful, especially for direct sales and Kickstarter campaigns, the big difference in converting viewers to purchasers is that people are on Amazon to buy....

This content is for members only.
Join Now
Already a member? Log in here

How to Know When Its Done

At some point, after all the writing and revising, your book will be done. Unfortunately, no one knows when that will be. Every author has to figure that out for themselves—and sometimes figure it out anew with each new book. It is more of an art than a science, but I will try to help you with what I know about when to pull the trigger and publish the thing. Most of us know what a first draft looks like. Some are sloppier than others, but most have flaws of some sort in the structure or the prose. Sections might...

This content is for members only.
Join Now
Already a member? Log in here

Some Random Writing Tips

Not everything deserves an entire article. Here are a few things I’ve learned from my time in the trade that have helped me. Develop Your Own “Manual of Style” — When writing, you are faced with a lot of choices. From the big choices of plot, setting, and voice, all the way down to whether to put a comma in or not. It can be daunting to face down these questions in every sentence you write. That’s why I made some choices early on to winnow down the list of questions I have to answer. For instance: Save Early, Save...

This content is for members only.
Join Now
Already a member? Log in here

Crazy Few Months

Been pounding away on the site for a while now, and we’re finally ready to show it to a select few people. No public showing yet, just a few trusted industry friends to get their opinion. We’ve got three full genre guides done, which is north of 35,000 words on just those few genres. With the essentials guides on novel writing, advertising, and digital tools; and 20+ other articles on a variety of subjects, we’ve already got more than a novel’s worth of material online—and not a short novel. And we’re just getting started. I couldn’t be more excited about …

Why Writing is Different

Good art—of any kind—contains three things at a high level: concept, composition and technique. Writing is unique in all the creative arts in that there is no physical element to the technique part of that equation. Sure, there’s typing—or handwriting if you’re one of those mad folk who write their first draft longhand—but it has nothing to do with the final representation of the work. Probably won’t even be in the same font it was written in. Dance, painting, sculpture, music—all need good physical technique to complete the triumvirate required for good art. Being entirely cerebral has some weird repercussions...

This content is for members only.
Join Now
Already a member? Log in here

Worldbuilding: How Much is too Much?

There is no such thing as too much worldbuilding. The greater the depth of the author’s knowledge of the setting of their book, the better. There is no detail too small or universe too big to be fully fleshed out in the author’s mind—or more likely, in extensive notes, maps, timelines, character bios, Plottr portfolios, and whatever else the often chaotic mind of the author chooses to store this information in. Unless you put it all in the text of your book. Hemingway said, “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above...

This content is for members only.
Join Now
Already a member? Log in here

Em Dashes, Semicolons, and Other Less Used Punctuation

Once you get past the basics, punctuation starts to get weird. That’s because a lot of the less used punctuation are more about personal preference than prescribed usage. Even the basics can be this way; commas can often be placed or removed without violating any grammar rules or affecting comprehension. But that doesn’t mean they’re not important. All punctuation helps give your writing rhythm, give it a voice unique to you. And the odd ones even more so, as they are distinctive yet often overlap in meaning so that the choice of which one to use is esthetic rather than...

This content is for members only.
Join Now
Already a member? Log in here

The Hero’s Journey

The Hero’s Journey is a story structure based on Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where he lays out the commonalities to stories, myths, and legends that have been told for thousands of years. The structure works because of that: there is something in the structures and archetypes contained in the Hero’s Journey that continue to resonate, even in the modern mind. 50,000 years is an evolutionary eyeblink; we are not so different from our ancestors who told these tales around the life-giving fire, or scrawled them in pictograms on cave walls. Campbell’s work was adapted...

This content is for members only.
Join Now
Already a member? Log in here

Crafting a Magic System

If you ask a thousand fantasy authors what makes a good magic system, you’ll get a thousand different answers. I am not going to give you answer one thousand and one. I’m not going to do that simply because the details of your magic system don’t matter. It doesn’t even matter if your system has details. Or if there’s a system at all. Some authors—and their characters—treat magic like a science. If magic is common enough, it seems human nature that it would be studied, codified, even standardized to some extent. Spells are like recipes or language, things to be...

This content is for members only.
Join Now
Already a member? Log in here

Genres for the Independent Author

Genres are a fascinating part of the writing profession. They mean nothing and everything; they are both limiting and freeing; they are arbiters and arbitrary in near equal measures. I began my career as a traditional author. As such, genres were the purview of publishers and booksellers. I wrote the book and then they told me what genre it was in. That didn’t mean I didn’t know what genre my books were in; it just meant I didn’t care if they decided it was something different. It was their job to sell those books, and if they thought it would...

This content is for members only.
Join Now
Already a member? Log in here