The Top 5 Editorial Mistakes I’ve Seen… and How to Fix Them, Part 4.

I call Editorial Mistake #4 "the George R.R. Martin Effect" because Game of Thrones and works like it have made POV shifts very popular, especially among my sci-fi/fantasy clients.

In GOT, it makes sense. Martin has a broad cast of characters carrying out a geopolitical saga over three different continents. This leads to a slow burn that assumedly will end up with all of those perspectives converging in one place as they fight for control of the Iron Throne.

This is the reader’s reward for slogging through all the weird names and mysterious backstories: seeing how beloved and reviled characters will interact with one another.

There are some downsides to POV shifts, though, that you should keep in mind for your own writing.

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The Top 5 Editorial Mistakes I’ve Seen… and How to Fix Them, Part 3.

Characters lacking in agency often don’t have many motivating factors to help them think, speak, or act. Instead, they passively accept the things happening around them.

This can make it difficult for the reader to empathize with your characters, often because it seems the characters are doing nothing to help themselves. As a result, you may risk losing your reader’s interest in your novel.

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The Top 5 Editorial Mistakes I’ve Seen… and How to Fix Them, Part 1 of 5.

If you’ve taken a creative writing workshop or even a high school composition course, you’ve likely heard the advice: “Show, don’t tell.”

When we’re writing fiction or creative non-fiction, we want to show instead of tell, which translates to telling our story through a series of interconnected scenes, instead of summarizing the events that happened.

If a character needs a raise to pay the rent, the writer shouldn’t explicitly state, “Bob needed a raise to pay his rent,” at least not without also providing supporting details. Instead, she may place an important conversation between Bob and his work best friend in a coffee shop, where Bob explains that he’s having his second triple latte of the day at 10:00 a.m. after pulling an all-nighter with the quarterly earnings report.

So, yes, “Show, don’t tell.” You know that intuitively. But I’m here to explain part of the “why” behind this age-old adage.

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Book Sales Tax Responsibilities for Indie Authors

In a previous post, I discussed how indie authors can reduce their tax burden by reaching consignment deals with local bookstores.

But what about situations where you do owe sales tax? If you’re an indie author, I hope this post will help you make sense of the relationship between your book sales and your sales tax burden.

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