Build Your Platform, No Wood Needed

An annual book fair called Book ‘Em North Carolina brought more than 75 authors and publishers together February 22, 2014, in Lumberton, NC at Robeson Community College. I attended the conference and attended presentations by experts in writing and publishing. A subject discussed often by several of the participants on different panels was the need to build a platform.

This platform is not a raised area that’s higher above the floor level. It’s not a type of shoe. It’s not a list of principles used by a political party. It’s not a part of a deck attached to a house. The platform that authors need is a combination of methods to publicize their books. It’s advertising.

Social media are ideal methods of creating an author’s platform. The sites most often mentioned at seminars are Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Linkedin and Pinterest. These are only a few of the social networks available, and more are appearing all the time.

The sites are similar to each other in the ways you can publicize your books, stories and yourself. Presenters at this recent conference mentioned that you should use only sites you appreciate and use comfortably. Otherwise your efforts will appear strained.  

One participant at the conference talked about the need to use a blog and a website.  Once you generate some interest in your writing, a website and blog tie it together by offering ways to buy your book. The same author mentioned she often hears from budding writers that the creative part is what they want to do. Selling their books is not fun, they say. Well, talking about you book is both fun and interesting to your audience. Promotion is a natural sequence to writing short stories and books.

Offering a sample of your book on a website is an effective way of creating interest about your work. It will stretch your creativity and offer you feedback from your readers. Most importantly, you will sell more books. I rotate samples of my book, “The Device”, on my personal website in an effort to share my writing with site visitors.

Successful writers mentioned the advantage, some call it a need, of a website and blog to tease readers about a book that is not ready for print. Writers plant seeds about their upcoming books months ahead of time. This is when a sample of a short story or an interesting section of your novel will encourage readers to look for the book after you offer it for sale. Obviously, a site such a Facebook can go a long way to publicize an upcoming book.

This publicity, called advertising, is often required by publishers. After submitting your work to a publishing house, the exciting callback from the publisher often includes a question about how you will help in the advertising. Publishers want us to be responsible for part of the promotion of the book by using websites, blogs and social media sites.

Building your platform is necessary and fun. The best part is that you won’t need wood or nails to build it. I promise you won’t hit your fingers with a hammer.

I briefly touched on the changes in the publishing industry though this is a complex subject to explore in a future blog. Check my website at www.joevlatino.com. Thanks for your attention and keep writing.

Use Backstory, Not Prologue

This blog gives authors information to help them write better short stories. Readers of fiction can use this information to help them enjoy this art form.

Grabbing your readers’ interests at the beginning of your story is critical. If the story gets bogged down by too much explanation before action takes over, the reader will say “ho hum” and put the book down. Boring exposition is the result of a prologue. It’s an introduction or preface to the story that is about to begin. A prologue gives a narrative about the protagonist and background about main characters. For short stories, this is a waste of space, and it distracts the reader.

Short story writers weave a backstory into the plot to add some history to the main character. These stories usually have one main character or two at the most. Flashback, the main plot development technique used in short stories, works with the backstory to give the reader the character’s history with a minimum amount of words.

Your short story needs to start with action to identify character, one of the five elements of a story. The backstory then develops the other four necessary elements of motivation, conflict, change and resolution. You can read about these five necessary parts of the story in my blog dated January 25, 2014.

The short story “Sticks and Stones” uses backstory to move the plot. It’s in my book of short stories “The Device” that was published in 2013.

“Sticks and Stones” starts immediately in the middle of action that gives us location and one of the main characters of the story. A hired killer surprises a bar owner after closing time.  The owner co-operates with the armed man who is there to rob the bar, he thinks. The owner finds out he was condemned to be killed for not obeying the local mob’s extortion demands.

Phil, the bar owner, promises he will pay the extortion money as he begs for mercy. The hired killer responds calmly: “I’m afraid it’s too late for that. I’ve enjoyed our conversation. I’ll make it quick and painless.”

The backstory begins to reveal the killer’s history. We learn he is very proficient at his gruesome profession. He even perfected a technique of keeping his pistol quiet when it’s fired.

“The small-caliber gun made very little noise. Phil’s head served as a silencer. The stranger was smiling as he picked up the two small casings and put them into his pocket.”

The story gives the reader background about the killer by showing, not telling. That’s necessary in any story. I’m using two more characters in “Sticks and Stones” as examples.

One character is Susan Thompson, a licensed investigator. She has a backstory that explains her short career as a police officer. Her interesting tale is dominated by her unusual physical condition. The backstory shows that she was wounded during a police shootout during a convenience store robbery. She survived a bullet that went into her heart.

Susan’s client asks her about the incident that resulted in her being wounded before she retired from being a police officer: “I was shot in the heart during a convenience store robbery. My partner was killed. The doctors decided to leave the bullet alone. It’s still in me.”

Susan’s good friend and counselor, psychiatrist Dr. Johns, describes the story about the killer who is now her patient. Dr. Johns shows the relevant facts about the killer and helps to advance the plot.

Using backstory and flashback made this action story flow and stay short at 24 pages. Prologues are unnecessary writing tools that only make a story slow at its most important part—the beginning. Using the cumbersome technique of a prologue will drive off readers and, worst of all, editors who might buy our stories.

Thank you for reading this blog. A new one will be posted in about one week. My web page at www.joevlatino.com has information about “The Device.” 

Vowels and Consonants

This blog provides information to help authors write better short stories. Fans of fiction can use this information to help them increase their understanding of this art form.

“The alphabet is made of vowels and consonants. The vowels are A E I O U and sometimes Y. All the rest of the letters are called consonants.”

This is my best recollection of a lesson given to my first grade class in 1952. The teacher was Sister Mary Denise. I was six years old. Our teaching nun used repetitive drills and flash cards to teach us reading and language skills.

I remember watching our teacher at the front of the class as she showed us different words on five by seven cards and telling us to “sound it out.” She dominated the room in her black-and-white habit that included a coif (tight fitting cap) and veil. Picture the nuns in “The Sound of Music” for a visual.

Naming the vowels and consonants was simple enough, but I was always at a loss why the letter Y was only sometimes a vowel. Also, it was many years later that I learned the specific use of the two types of letters.

I personally feel Y is a vowel most of the time.  It carries an I sound into words that don’t have another vowel. Examples are my, why, try and shy.  An exception is the word gypsy that doesn’t have an I sound and uses two Ys, both vowels. The letter Y is all over the place as a vowel. We need to identify it in the list of vowels as usually Y, not sometimes Y.

In its use as a consonant, letter Y starts or ends a word as in the few examples of yes, young and yoke.  The twenty-six letters of our alphabet put vowels and consonants together to create the sounds of our English words. They work differently to create the sounds of our words.

A consonant sound is produced by a partial or complete obstruction of the air stream from our lungs into our mouths. A vowel sound comes from the open configuration of the vocal tract.

Every word in English must have at least one vowel to produce the sounds of our words. Consonants guide us to use our lips to create explosive sounds such as P and B. Our teeth and tongue make the consonant sounds of S and F.  The many combinations of consonants and vowels make the sounds of our English language, according to Sister Mary Denise.

Here is an interesting fact about the number of letters our language uses that Sister Denise never mentioned. Our alphabet consisted of twenty-four letters for more than 700 years after the Roman Empire created it. In approximately 100 AD, the letters Y and Z were added from the Athenian Greek alphabet. That allowed bringing more Greek words into the Roman language.

I want to single out the importance of two more letters—S and X, both consonants.  More English words begin with the letter S than any other word. Conversely, the letter X begins the fewest number of English words.

This blog includes components of our language that I could expand to many pages. As authors, it’s important we explore our words and always keep learning about our craft of communication through creative fiction. 

Thank you for reading this blog. Another one will appear here in about a week. Until then, visit my web page at www.joevlatino.com