Story Sensei

This article originally appeared as a series of blog posts. Because of the nature of the web, blog tours have become an effective marketing tool. However, like most marketing strategies, it’s hard to quantify how effective it is in terms of sales. Regardless, blog tours are low cost and get the word out (buzz) about you and your book, and that’s never a bad thing. Also, if you’ve got a website contest going on, a blog tour is a great way to get the word out about it, because you can mention the contest at each blog on the tour. Please use the following guidelines to help you schedule the time you’ll need for the blog tour. You’ll need time the month before the tour in setting it up (contacting people, writing guest blog posts or answering interview questions), and you’ll also need time during the tour to email reminders, to post the daily stops on the tour, to comment on each blog on the tour, and to correct any mis-posts. Setting up a blog tour: You can hire a publicity co...

This article is a collection of the Deep Point of View blog post series. Deep Point of View, part one The point of going deeper in your limited third person point of view is to stick the reader in your character’s skin. This will often result in a more powerful emotional experience for your reader. There are some tips to follow that pull the reader deeper into the character’s point of view. Often a judicious word choice does the trick for you without changing the text. These things will work to pull the reader into the story world and experience the story through the character’s eyes, in the character’s body. It usually gives more intensity to the reading flow. Eliminate emotion words. Many times, when a writer names an emotion, it distances the reader from the character. For example: Anxiety trembled in her stomach. Anger coursed through her. She shivered as fear tiptoed down her spine. It’s not that it’s wrong to name the emotion—in fact, sometimes it makes the ...

This article originally appeared as a 12-part blog post series. Many beginning writers are confused about the concept of point of view. I’m hoping this series of blog posts will help you out. After I finish the series, I’ll condense it into one blog post article. What is point of view? It’s the type of narration of a story. For the purposes of a writer, it’s easiest to think of it as the eyes through which your reader sees the scene. There is third person, second person, and first person point of view. First person is told from the character as the narrator. I’ll be covering that later. Second person is not used often. It’s the type of narration where the character is referred to using personal pronouns, which serves to make the reader into the character. I remember this type of narration in the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Third person is most often used. In third person, the characters are distinct from the storyteller, who is essentially the author. Most readers...