writing

Book Trailers Are More Effective Than You Might Think

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

What you just saw was the trailer we made for Blake Colby’s Blood Shot, which we made back in 2017. And while the main reason I posted the trailer for that book is that D&E earns all the proceeds from Blood Shot as Blake Colby has died and had no next of kin, I also do it to show just how effective a book trailer can be.

This web series has been about many things—exorcising my personal demons, giving me something to do while I recovered from eye surgery, making horny and desperate middle-aged female readers know that I’m single—but the biggest thing I’ve tried to teach you is how you can promote your work in many different ways. In an overcrowded marketplace, a book trailer is another great way to get eyes on your work. But unlike a movie trailer, you’re going to need to actually put some effort into this. We’ll use heartbreaking piano motifs and make words fade in and out on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, the first question you have might be… is a book trailer really worth it? I mean, what kind of nerdy loser actually watches book trailers? While that’s a very legitimate question, it’s important to remember that nerdy losers are probably your target demographic. After all, since they have no friends, they have a lot of extra free time to spend at home reading, and never going on dates and being so agoraphobic they need to forgo eating out, traveling and all live entertainment, means they’re the type of people with enough disposable income to spend on an unknown author’s book.

And an author needs to remember that they should get the most bang for their buck. This is why I get my unpaid interns to do double up and do custodial duty and also why I turned my third wedding into our company team-building retreat. As for your trailer, once your book launches you can easily repurpose this trailer as an ad for your book on Amazon.

With all that in mind, we still need to create this thing, and reading the entire first chapter, or putting a bunch of porn next to your book cover isn’t going to cut it. To illustrate how to really do this thing, I’m going to take a famous book and I’m going to create a trailer for it step by step. Because it’ll be helpful to do a book everyone knows, I’m going to make one for J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Step 1: Think of a good hook

Remember, in a hook you do these three things. You introduce your main character, explain their goal and tell us what’s stopping them from getting it. It’s exactly like being on a first date.

For The Catcher in the Rye, it might be something like “Holden Caulfield is just a regular kid, trying to get laid and prove he’s better than everyone else, but a world of phonies has made it their mission to stop him.”

But beyond just the plot, you want to think of other things that might hook readers. A unique setting might work. A place like Ohio, for instance, will draw readers who want a book that’s really depressing. If you want to sell that your book is really scary, use a jump scare that shows a horrible disgusting creature.

Step 2: It should contain your voice

It’s always good to remember that this whole thing is about you. You are the star. If you lack confidence to admit that, you need to practice in front of a mirror, preferably nude. Look yourself in the eye and tell yourself that you are a star. It’s gotten to the point I can’t fall asleep without doing so.

And your reader should get a sense of your personality from your trailer, just like they do with your writing. If you’re funny, tell a joke. If you’re poetic, make sure things rhyme.

Your viewer needs to make a connection. They need to follow you on a journey. When I see a terrible ad like this, I hate it because I can tell it was written by a committee. But an ad like this speaks to me, makes me think a guy just like me wrote it. I’ll follow that person’s lead. Anyway, if this were The Catcher in the Rye, I would hope that at least half the audience would walk away wanting to kill John Lennon.

Step 3: Get images and video with thematic connections

This is honestly the most important part and almost everything else I said in the video was probably pretty pointless. Because a trailer is essentially visual. Obviously, stock footage is the cheapest and easiest option, even if most of it makes no sense. But if you have the time and a decent camera, get experimental. When I made a spy thriller, I was trying to convey a sense of fear and paranoia so I decided that CCTV footage of my employees leaving work late at night when that serial killer was on the loose was a great way to do that.

Since The Catcher in the Rye is mostly about trying to get laid, I would obviously have lots of prostitutes in the trailer. But it’s a bit empty to say that only sex sells. If I were J.D. Salinger, I might just fill my trailer with dead-eyed dolls to symbolize all the phonies.

Step 4: Find the right music

There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that we as a society have basically decided that music is free. Except for, like, Metallica, you can pretty much steal anybody’s music and put it in your trailer.

The bad part is that sound editing is hard as hell. Which not only is time consuming, but also makes you feel bad for stealing this music in the first place.

How to Build Your Author Brand… and start getting some recognition

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

I want you to imagine walking into a bookshop one day with nothing particular in mind to buy. You pull a book at random from out of the shelves and start reading the back cover. You discover it’s about a cabal of murderous cardinals trying to kill the pope or something and only some renowned history professor or art critic or whatever can stop them. You assume it’s a satire or at least a pulpy adventure story with a good sense of humor, but the first few pages reveal it to be an overly serious, 500-page slog. You put the novel back on the shelf and never think about it again. What you don’t realize is that, with proper author branding, the book I described sold millions of copies and wowed readers worldwide. We’ll learn how author branding can establish a deep emotional connection between readers and authors and eliminate the need to always write good books on this installment of Stories’ Matter.

Author branding is essentially how you are perceived by your audience and your identity as a writer. As an author you’ll need some unique hook beyond the pages of your writing to capture your audience’s trust, respect and admiration. 

Before you start building your brand, I suggest asking yourself three questions:

1. How am I unique?

I realize this is a tough question. Very few of us are truly exceptional, and most of the exceptional ones are devious sexual predators who wouldn’t blink an eye about poisoning the water supply. Still, if not you, think hard about what sets your work apart.

For me, I had to consult with family and neighbors, who were the only people who read them, to find that connective thread. It wasn’t until then I realized that, aside from brutal violence against women, almost all my books depicted heroes overcoming great odds in unexpected ways.

Now, personally I’m not especially heroic. Just to give an example, spiders terrify me and also I’ve watched three different people drown in lakes without swimming in to save them. Still, with successful branding, people often see John Lazarus as synonymous with atypical acts of heroism. 

2. What is the psychology of my readers? What do they need from me?

Except for the desperately ugly, retirees whose children don’t love them and literal bibliophiles, most people don’t consume books compulsively. The average American only reads 1.3 books every year. So how can you make sure you’re that one book and not that .3 book? Well, think about value you hope to bring to your readers through your work.

Will they learn how to manipulate someone into sex? Will they get to experience a story that involves action AND comedy? Will they discover that licensed psychologists can’t report past crimes to police regarding drowning bodies?

3. Am I attractive? Can I make myself more attractive?

There’s good news and bad news with this one. The bad news is that most fake beards to hide your lack of a jawline won’t stay on long enough for book readings, signings and meet and greets. The good news is that for writers, the bar of attractiveness is pretty low.

But while Henry James and Emily Dickinson could blame it on typhus and tuberculosis, you’ll have to at least attempt to make it look like you didn’t emerge from a long shift at White Castle in the Louisiana bayou. I suggest applying as much makeup as possible. Women think Kylie Jenner, men think Disintegration-era Robert Smith. Lose weight by walking at least 500 steps a day. If all else fails, hide your face and body behind oversized cowboy hats and Mexican ponchos.

Once you answered these questions, it’s time to start building your brand identity.

Step One: Write an author tagline.

Just like your books, your author brand needs a tagline, a catchy slogan by which your audience can identify you. This can be posted on social media accounts, at the end of blog entries, even on book covers. Here are some from other famous authors: Live Free or Die Hard (Benjamin Franklin), Sex, Drugs and Drugs (Hunter S. Thompson), The Thinking Man’s Dean Koontz (Stephen King), Your Favorite Psychotic’s Favorite Psychotic (Philip K. Dick).

Now, as I said earlier, try to tie this to your connective thread I mentioned earlier. That’s why I ended up with the tagline “Small stories. Big heroes” after the publisher rejected my first attempt “Bloody stories, bloodier women.”

Step Two: Build a visual identity

Unfortunately, authors of today have to be graphic designers as much as writers. Sure, 100 years ago, you could focus on the words, do cocaine with Freud and ignore the signs of impending fascism, but today’s literary landscape demands more. Visual identity means things like color schemes, fonts, icons, logos, watermarks, headshots, capitalization. Improper line spacing on a press release can make or break an author. Hiring an outside firm’s your best bet, but if not possible, use these tips. Black and white never misses, especially on those headshots. It gives you a classic professional look and will cover up any skin blotchiness from excessive drinking. And If you’re using acronyms, make sure to avoid slurs. This almost killed Jesmyn Evelyn Ward’s career before it took off.  

Step Three: Build your brand any way you can

Finally, use any and every online platform you can to market yourself. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Reddit, Amazon, 4Chan, 8Chan, Erowid, Liveleaks, Rotten.com, all online forums you can. But don’t ignore the power of offline marketing. When I was starting out, I’d drive around the country to different towns, hire a dozen local actors to be my audience and set up a book reading at the most popular café I could. I’d pay small children to write my website URL in chalk on the sidewalk. I’d steal all the books from Little Free Libraries and replace them with copies of my own.

Just remember: You’re an American and that means every party, every cookout, every dance recital, every family funeral, every is a chance to network and market yourself.

These Are the Biggest Mistakes New Fantasy Authors Make

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Fantasy: the refuge of the obese, teenage boys with skin conditions, and people who want an escape from reality without devoting themselves to the violence that being a member of ISIS or a K-Pop fan necessitates.  Still, fans of fantasy literature are a tough nut to crack. While I’m not much a fantasy writer, I was a long-time fantasy reader who read dozens of fantasy manuscripts from up-and-coming authors before my publishing company was shut down for siphoning electricity from the building next door. And I can’t tell you how often I’d spend a cozy evening in that office, draped in six or seven Afghans, reading under the light of a dozen candles, ready to be taken into a new world, only to have cliches, stereotypes and paper-thin backstories bring me back to the real world and remind me of all the blisters on my hands from pulling copper wire out of the walls. Anyway, we’ll look at the biggest mistakes fantasy writers make on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, in this video there’s a lot of common mistakes that could be applied to any type of fiction that I won’t go over. Everybody knows a good book has little expository dialogue, has characters that are three dimensional and doesn’t use words like “rizz,” “spankbank” and “beer-o-clock.”

Mistake One: Using Info Dumps and Having Inorganic Worldbuilding

Does this sound familiar? “At the start of the Fourth Age, during the reign of King Vailor the Wise, the worlds of men, elves and grogs were divided…” You get the idea. The only good thing about books like this is they usually burn long enough to provide adequate heating for your office once the city cuts your gas line.

Sure, one of the selling points of fantasy is the history and the worldbuilding. But it’s got to be organic, to relate to the characters and their struggle. While history is important, the average person doesn’t have a great grasp on it. In America for example, people think history is a bunch of granite statues of traitorous slaveholders, instead of, you know, things educated people wrote down in a fucking book. Anyway, my point is, I don’t think about Sir Walter Raleigh every time I open the office window to have a smoke.

So, instead of starting your fantasy novel with a history lesson or a lore dump, start with some immediate action, like a bar fight, a house burning down in the middle of the night or two home intruders trying to hide the corpse of a man they killed on accident. Your reader will relate to this more because, if they’re anything like me, something like this has happened to them in real life.  

Mistake Two: Overreliance on the Hero’s Journey

Easily the greatest of Joseph Campbell’s crimes against humanity, several generations of fantasy writers have been doomed by the hero’s journey. Though Campbell’s not to blame entirely: if Homer, Tolkien, and Boll hadn’t been so successful, we wouldn’t have a million hacks trying to copy them.

But, you might be asking, what I am supposed to write about it, if I can’t write about a farm boy who sets off to fight a great evil, is tutored by an old sage and finds a special weapon to help him on his journey? Well, what I’d do, is take the plot of any other kind of movie and convert that into fantasy.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to read a fantasy retelling of films like Bio-Dome, How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days or The Squeeze? I went in a more artsy direction with my first fantasy novel, a retelling of My Dinner With Andre, about two monks having dinner in a tavern after one comes back from sabbatical. It was actually my best reviewed book of the 2000s even though it sold poorly and was partially responsible for my business partner’s suicide.

Mistake Three: Having an Inconsistent or Incoherent Magic System

The great thing about being a fantasy writer is that, unlike drama, mystery or historical fiction writers, you don’t have to be smart enough to think of logical reasons for things to happen. But just because you can write yourself out of a corner doesn’t mean you should.

Your system should be well-defined. Maybe, like in Harry Potter, the use of magic takes decades of study, though why it takes decades to learn how to flick your wrist and say, like, ten different goddamn Latin words, I guess I don’t know.

And you need to put limitations on your magical system. If your monks are able to immaculately conceive children while keeping their vows of celibacy, what’s to stop any pervert from impregnating every fair maiden in the village? Of course, I explained this in my novel, though, as I’ll show later, it led to a whole other list of problems.  

Mistake Four: Giving Your Characters Shitty Names

Just look at some of these names. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to pronounce most of these. And don’t go the other way and give them common every day names. No character should ever be named Greg. Hell, no person in real life should be named Greg.

There are a few hacks for people who have trouble with names.  Dead tongues are always a great choice, but don’t make the same mistake I did and try to use ones from the Voynich manuscript.

Portmanteaus are another solid option, which is where you put two words together. This is how George RR Martin came up with the name Daenerys and how I came up with the name Dickswayne Heathersmash.

You could also use your take the people in your own life and slightly modify their names, but that’s not always a good idea, which leads me to the final mistake…

Mistake Five: Making it a thinly-veiled confession of your personal debauchery

Fantasy often works best when it’s an allegorical response to modern day issues, like the British class system or how a power vacuum can lead to religious fundamentalism.

It works less well when it’s an allegory about how you impregnated your business partner’s wife on a trip to Mexico and you’re hoping she leaves him for you. And even if you can convince your fans that your Stephen King diet of corn, milk and pure fishscale cocaine was to blame, you’ll probably burn a lot of bridges and need to move to a cheaper office in a part of town where drug dealers hide bodies of rival gang members.

The main takeaway: Fantasy is about escape from the disaster that is your personal life. Keep it that way.

How To Write About Family (and exploit personal trauma for quick cash)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

From Johnathan Franzen to Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Dominic Toretto, many of the great writers and poets throughout history understand the power and importance of family.

Families are the most essential social unit for human beings. They mold us, shaping our interests, values and worldview. And even though most of us spend our life trying to replace them with fantasy football leagues, work units and creative writing workshops where no one is allowed to question the patriarch, there’s really no substitute for family.

Families are a great tool, then, for a fiction writer. Writing about family is one of the easiest ways to generate conflict that’s relatable and grounded. And for a writer who is suffering from writer’s block, your own family can be a great source of inspiration. In my own career I’ve written characters, scenes and whole books about the family I grew up in and the several I’ve created and since moved on from. We’ll explore everything from abandoned children to being partly raised by a whore on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

From the Bennetts to the Boltons to the Berenstains, literature is chock full of compelling families who love each other but also harbor terrible secrets.  When you write about family, you should first ask yourself three questions:

Question 1: What is the composition?

Just like every good woman asks herself once she finishes secretary school, you need to decide if you want a small or a large family. Is this a nuclear family of four from Indianapolis? Or a four-generation Catholic household with 12 children, somehow all of whom survived measles and SIDS?

Question 2: What are the relationship dynamics?

You need to ask yourself who in the family is most closely connected to whom. Is your teen protagonist more closely connected to a doting grandmother than her parents? Do two of the siblings share a special bond?

Question 3: What is the source of conflict?

Think about how the decisions each character makes affect the rest of the family. Addiction, jealousy and infidelity are reliable go-to’s, but try to be unique. Maybe the children are bitter at being physically deformed because their dad was an aging rock star who used his damaged semen to conceive them at age 77.

Now here are a few tips to improve your family stories.

Step 1: Learn as much about your own family as you can

If you’re anything like me, work and other things has made you not know your family as well as you should. Take time to sit down and talk with siblings, parents, grandparents, aunt, uncles, cousins and even your own children if you can bear it.

Ask about your family history. Ask about stories of migrations, divorces, weddings, graduations, weird surgeries. Ask their names if you have to.

If these types of conversations take you to uncomfortable places, don’t worry. You can try wiretapping or spying on your own family to gain information.

You might learn some interesting information. To give a quick example, for years I thought the woman who lived in our house from the ages of four to nine was my dad’s sister, but after a little digging, I discovered she was just a common prostitute.

And sometimes, you’ll have side benefits unrelated to your writing. When I studied my family tree, for example, I learned that I should get screened for pancreatic cancer as that killed a lot of women in my family, and for syphilis, which killed a lot of the men.

Step 2: The Past is the Present is the Future

A great man once said, “Our life story doesn’t begin and end with our birth and death. It overlaps with that of our ancestors and descendants.” That man was actually my father, and it’s a shame lots of people ignored his wisdom just because he died in a Fourth of July fireworks accident.

Masterpieces like East of Eden and A Thousand Splendid Suns (and possibly Absolom Absolom, though I’m not entirely sure on that one) show us how trauma can almost be genetic. You could, for example, trace the actions of an abusive father down the line and see how has caused his grandchildren to be socially isolated.

In my sci-fi thriller, There’s No Place Reich Home, my protagonist goes back in time to kill Hitler, only to erase himself from existence and discover that he was one of Hitler’s descendants.

Step 3: Go the non-traditional route

Not all families have to start with the five-beers-deep patriarch nutting inside the matriarch. As my own publishing company has taught me, if you try hard enough, you can make any group of people into a family.

You could always try exploring the dynamics of queer families, though I’d hurry up on that, because Project 2025 will probably get all those books removed from libraries and bookstores.

But go beyond parent-child families. As a lot of us get older, we drift away from our traditional families, either due to things like death caused by nephrosis or a very busy writing career and YouTube channel. But as we do, we often look for replacements to help us overcome our crippling loneliness.

Your family could be anything: an organized crime syndicate, a subreddit, a group of eight male flat mates who are also male strippers. As long as you follow all of my other advice, everything will be fine.

How To Use Symbolism in Your Writing

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

From Golding’s Conch Shell to Frost’s Two Paths to Goyer’s Batman’s Mother’s Name, symbolism is an essential component in all forms of fiction. Symbols give authors a way to convey complex ideas and beliefs while providing the reader a rich, sensory experience that’s open to interpretation. Without them, stupid people would have even more trouble convincing the book club they actually understood the text. We’ll look at ways to incorporate symbols in your writing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

What is Symbolism?

Symbolism has been around for as long as humans have told stories. You can even see them in cave paintings tens of thousands of years old in southern France, where you’ll find women depicted fornicating with oxen, likely symbolizing the chieftain “bull” who was allowed to make cuckolds of the weaker men in the tribe.

Symbolism can elevate your writing, adding layers of complexity and letting you say more with less. A blood stain can hint at an entire life of guilt. A dilapidated house like Sutpen’s Hundred in Faulkner’s Absolom Absolom can serve as a potent symbol of a character’s state of moral ruin. And while you might not be able to think of great ideas like blood or a house, the great thing about symbols is they can really be anything. 

Before we get into the advice, it will be helpful to look at some evocative symbols from famous works of fiction. We’ll look at four types: colors, objects, places and characters.

The color green is a recurring symbol in The Great Gatsby, meant to symbolize the other characters’ envy for hero Jay Gatsby’s financial and moral superiority.

For objects, we have the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter, which symbolizes every teenage boy’s desire to sneak into the girls’ locker room.

In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien clearly designed the hellish nightmarescape that is Morodor to be a symbol for Luton.

And though you might not have picked up on it, the animals in Animal Farm are symbols of different political ideologies.

So how can we use this in our own writing? What kinds of symbols do we use and why? Is everything a symbol for something else? Let’s simplify things and look at four ways we can use symbols effectively.

Step One: Use symbols to show emotion, instead of telling

Aside from lurking around their house at one in the morning, this is an editor’s next biggest pet peeve. And while if you’re like me and verbalize intimate feelings during book signings and first dates, your fiction will be more interesting if you can hint at emotional states through symbols. Instead of having your character say “I’m so full of grief right now because my dad died,” you can have the character describe a broken baseball bat they find when cleaning the garage. Instead of your sexually repressed adolescent boy talking about girls or watching porn, be subtle and have him slide a tube of tennis balls into a rain gutter.

Step Two: Use symbols to establish recurring themes

Let’s say your story is about a character’s search for freedom. The specifics don’t matter. Perhaps they’re a slave in bondage, perhaps they live in a repressive household, perhaps the government is trying to repress your character’s ability to own a weapon that can take out of room of fifty terrorists. Throughout the book, hint at the theme of freedom with images and extraneous events: a bird flying out of a cage, tits escaping the confines of a bra, cereal escaping the confines of a sealed package.

Step Three: Use symbols to hint at darker ideas

Throughout history symbolism has also been necessary way to skirt censorship and overcome cultural taboos. Artists have had to resort to using bananas and stalagmites and oil derricks to symbolize sexual desire. But even in the relatively open-minded present-day, editors are reticent to publish 30-page scenes of hardcore anal penetration or graphic, detailed descriptions of what it sounds like when you run over a horse with a tank.

So, instead of writing a sex scene, which often makes readers uncomfortable, hint at it by describing the jelly doughnuts your couple eats the morning after. Instead of literal depictions of the horrors of battle, what about a tense scene between two soldiers’ wives back home mud wrestling?

Step Four: Leave your work open to interpretation

This is the best part of using symbols. Having trouble writing a satisfying conclusion to your book? Just make up something about a sunset or a strange dream.  Or make your character walk toward a bright light that could be heaven, a nuclear explosion, or a titty bar outside Pittsburgh.

Fiction is not a science like physics or taxidermy: there is no right or wrong. Luckily, readers don’t know that, and an open-ending drives engagement as they flock to social media to shove their interpretation down other’s throats.  

I used this to great effect in my 2019 Western Lone Mountain. The protagonist Colt Action, a late-19th century Texas Ranger, makes it his life mission to massacre the Comanches after they failed to save his son from a snakebite. The novel ends with Colt burying his pistol in his yard.

Has he renounced his violent ways? Or does he now prefer the intimacy of knives? Or is he leaving helpful clues for future archeologists? Or maybe hoping the lead somehow improves the health of his tomato garden? And to be honest, I don’t have an answer. Each of those theories I just found on my fan page could be right. That’s the beautiful thing about it.

Sick of Traditional Publishers? Start Your Own Publishing House

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

If you’ve ever seen someone drive down the street with a beautiful luxury car, or seen an unattractive person arm-in-arm with a woman who’s obviously a high-class prostitute, you’ve probably daydreamed about starting your own business. Lots of authors like the idea of being their own boss. After all, when you’re an author, you get to boss your characters around. You force them into uncomfortable situations, commit assaults against them, even murder them. It’s a rush and it can translate well to managing a workforce.

Of course, starting a company is an even bigger endeavor than writing a book. You have to consider things you may not have considered before, things like paying taxes or employees stealing from you because you didn’t get them a Christmas gift. So if you’re not sure this is the article for you, still read it to the end to boost our profile, but feel free to ignore it if you meet one of the following criteria:

  1. You only want to publish one book in your lifetime just to prove to your bitch ex-spouse that you aren’t a complete failure.
  2. You don’t like the idea of publishing the work of an author who’s clearly better than you.
  3. You think everyone should be paid a fair wage, regardless of their work ethic or personal attitude toward you and the way you dress.

Before we start, a quick legal disclaimer: this advice is not coming from a legal professional, and any potential business ventures should abide by local laws and fire safety codes. The advice expressed in this video is not legally binding and may contain fictitious elements that belong to John Lazarus and not D&E Publishing, LLC. By listening to this disclaimer, you are absolving D&E Publishing, LLC of any wrongdoing or civil liability relating to workplace safety, including mixing and storage of dangerous chemicals, building evacuation preparedness and electrocution.

Now, if you’re intrigued by the prospect of a corner office and exotic strange, but still aren’t sure if starting a publishing company is right for you, I’m going to cover a few benefits and drawbacks.

Benefit 1: Reducing Legal Liabilities

The first question any author should ask themselves before they write a book is “Can anybody sue me if I write this?” Fiction writers are generally well protected, though going through someone’s trash to do character research can be a legal gray area depending on where in the process you intercept the garbage.

However, for nonfiction writers, especially in health-related fields, your personal liability becomes much greater. To give an example, I once wrote a weight-loss guide, and well, long story short, losing more than two liters of blood sometimes results in death. While jury nullification saved me in that instance, it’s better to avoid this entirely by starting an LLC. In this case, a lawsuit against your published materials can only go after the assets of the company and not you personally. So even if you get sued, you can usually offset the loss by taking snacks out of the breakroom or making one unpaid intern do all your accounting.

Benefit 2: Increasing Your Sense of Legitimacy

All authors go through an awkward infancy where they feel like a fraud. Most of you probably told a potential sex partner at a party that you’re an author, but once you clarified that you’re self-published, that person either walked away, laughed in your face or banged your slightly more attractive best friend. Having your own publishing company completely flips that dynamic. Pretty soon, half of the people at any party you attend will at least offer you third base if you promise to publish their terrible book of poetry.

Benefit 3: Collaborations and Licensing

But beyond sexual favors, you can also collaborate with legitimately great authors. And the legal powers of your company will prevent that person from stealing your work, taking all of the credit and riding that success to the New York Times bestseller list while you’re stuck making ends meet at Panera bread in Columbus, Ohio.

Also, now that you’ve got your own company, you can print, sell and profit from any book in the public domain. And while I may have overestimated the general public’s demand for James Fenimore Cooper, you could potentially make money without doing anything at all.

Drawbacks of Creating Your Own Publishing Company

Drawback 1: Startup Costs and Expenses

When I first started D&E Publishing in 2011, it was a great time to be a small business owner. Because of the housing crash, property was cheap. But the costs can sneak up on you. Things like fire extinguishers, printing costs for building maps that reveal evacuation routes, the dozens of extension cords you’ll need to plug all of your computers into the same outlet… that stuff adds up.

Drawback 2: Managing Employee Conflicts

Most businesses ensure worker compliance through sheer apathy. Employees having absolutely no investment in the success of their company means people put in the bare minimum, but in general they don’t actively try to sabotage the company. A publishing company is a different story.

You’ll be working with lots of creative types in your company: authors, editors, graphic artists, advertisers. These types of people strongly value their labor, which is generally bad for business. At the start, it seemed D&E Publishing could hardly go a month without an artist punching a prospective author in the mouth for rejecting their cover design. I even had to stop having office birthday parties because people kept being poisoned. It took me several years to learn that the anarchy that such an environment breeds requires the boss to rule with an iron fist and closely monitor employee conversations to ensure peace and harmony. But this kind of business authoritarianism is not for everyone.

Drawback 3: Workplace Accidents Are More Common Than You Might Think

Fans of the channel will know that D&E Publishing’s first office building went up in flames in 2021 due to siphoning electricity from a nearby building. Thankfully, the courts decided that no one could possibly be that negligent and it was clear that my former business partner did it as an elaborate way to commit suicide so fire insurance covered the loss.

But even if you are protected by the law, workplace accidents generally aren’t great for morale or productivity. I had three editors need to go on leave because of uneven stairs and two others need maternity leave because of a faulty toilet seat. In a literary landscape where book trends come and go in the snap of a finger, you can’t fall behind.

Why You Should Consider Becoming a Ghostwriter

Daniel Madison1 Comment

RL Stine

Franklin W. Dixon

James Patterson

Besides being people whom I’ve followed to their homes late at night for an unsolicited interview, these are authors well known for implementing ghostwriters. They, like many others, hire people to write for them and release their work without attribution. In fact, Franklin W. Dixon is a completely fabricated person entirely, which explains why the Franklin W. Dixon I followed shot at my car tires when I wouldn’t stop honking in his driveway. Ghost writing can be a great source of work for an aspiring author, and from singers who dropped out of middle school to businesses that, as a guiding principle, dehumanize all their employees, there’s a high demand for a competent ghost writer. We’ll look at the pros and cons of ghost writing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Before we get started, I should point out that if you are reading this article in the year 2027 or later, you can adjust your stillsuit that climate change has forced you to wear and move on to the next video, because it’s almost certain that AI has rendered all this information completely useless. This article is solely for those in the narrow window between 2024 and 2027, who still have some time to earn a little extra cash before the billionaire class unleashes their sentries to exterminate anyone making less than 50k a year.

All right, so this article will be broken into three parts: reasons to be a ghostwriter, career paths for a ghostwriter and some general advice in how to find work as a ghost writer.

Reasons to Be a Ghostwriter

The first thing you might be thinking is: John, I became a writer to become famous, so people would respect me, so everyone in high school would finally have to apologize for selling me a crushed-up bag of poison ivy and telling me it’s weed. Why the hell would I want to write a book without my name on it?

Well, for starters, fame can be a double-edged sword. For every kind, adoring fan, there will be another who pours maple syrup all over your windshield because you won’t grant him an interview for his book blog. Let’s look at some other reasons.

Reason 1: You’ll Probably Make More Than You Would On Your Own

If you’re watching this video, you’ve probably haven’t even made enough money writing this year to buy the rope to make the noose to hang yourself for your constant failure. Youth, inexperience, an overcrowded self-publishing market and ugliness are all big obstacles to overcome. But people will consume anything released by a celebrity. They’ll listen to any corporate speaker who they think will make them richer.

A successful ghost writer can easily earn 50K for a book-length project. I didn’t earn that much from my own books until two decades into my career, when I coincidentally came up with a book title identical to another popular work at the time.

Reason 2: You’ll Learn the Business

Most writers think that writing is done in alone, in a cozy bedroom, with a nice cup of tea or coffee on the desk, a loaded pistol at your side just in case. But the majority of a writer’s work is done in office buildings, it’s in done in conference rooms and it’s done with the piles of human excrement that are literary agents and publishers. As an unknown, these people wouldn’t even take the time to spit on you, but as a ghostwriter you can make connections and learn to manipulate them in the hopes that someday, you might publish something under your own name.

Reason 3: You Can Learn Other Voices Besides Your Own

This one’s tricky because to start as a ghost writer, you have to already be able to do this to some extent. Experience has taught me that, for example, corporate blogs about risk management in finance don’t like jokes about sucking dick for meth. (The Wolf of Wall Street lied to me). But, in any case, your skills as a writer will grow and develop as you’ll need to adopt a different voice for each client.

Career Paths for a Ghostwriter

When most people think of ghostwriters, they think of celebrity autobiographies. There’re a lot of reasons a celebrity or politician might use a ghostwriter: some are lazy, some are downright illiterate, some have busy schedules and can’t take time away from tweeting about how immigrants are poisoning our blood. Or they might just need someone who actually knows and can convincingly describe what consensual sex with a woman feels like.

You have other options, though.

For example, Alan Dean Foster got his start ghostwriting the novelization of Star Wars under George Lucas’s name, before piggbacking off this success and becoming the patron saint of 70s, 80s and 90s science fiction novelizations under his own name. I tried a similar thing recently, but it turned out Dune already was a book.

You can also write: blog posts for tech companies, speeches for firearms manufacturers after a mass shooting occurs, online course materials for educational institutions that want people to know not all slaveowners were bad and film scripts for North Korean cinema.

How to Succeed As A Ghostwriter

Step 1: Build your portfolio

While it’s not as much of a struggle as proving to a Big Six publisher that your book will sell, you still need to prove to the client that you can write. Starting a blog or website is a good start. It could be on any topic, really: gardening, investment strategies, a guide to age of consent laws around the world.

Guest blogging is the next step. You’ll need to build some ties in the community. Though I wasn’t a ghostwriter, I did a lot of guest blogging in the early days of blogs just to hone my skills and do a little self-promotion. I mainly wrote about how to have a successful marriage and I had a lot of fun doing it until I had to stop once my first wife went missing.

Step 2: Read all legal documents carefully

If you do land a client, it’s important to have your lawyer pore over all the contracts. Many celebrities and organizations will make you sign NDAs or follow specific guidelines in the project. Maybe, for example, you aren’t allowed to mention that Willem Dafoe is descended from swamp people.

Step 3: Publish long-form content

Finally, if you want to make the big bucks, you’ll need to ghostwrite a full-length book, but you’ll need to prove you can do that in the first place. Self-publishing a novel shows you have the focus and commitment to devote to a several-month project.

The aforementioned James Patterson hires ghostwriters to write full-length novels. In fact, because I had so much experience writing thrillers and crime fiction, I almost considered working for him. This was after my second divorce, when I needed some spare cash for booze money. But I chickened out at the last second because I was worried James would eventually find out I was the one who kept putting print-outs of his office floorplan in his mailbox.

The Secret to Writing a Great Mystery

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Death surrounds us everywhere. Of course, how we react to it differs. Children getting blown up half a world away or elderly coworkers not showing up one day usually provokes no reaction. A rich uncle leaving behind an inheritance might inspire a jubilation that better sense tells us to quell. But let’s say you wake up one morning to find a friendly, healthy, financially comfortable neighbor has drowned in your pool. Now that’s intriguing. And intrigue is at the heart of all mystery. We’ll discuss how to become the next Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler or Dorak Seng on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Mysteries are some of the most popular books on the market and have been for centuries. But, unlike my high school science teacher, just because they’re popular doesn’t mean they’re easy.

Before we get into the advice, let’s look at some mystery subgenres and their attributes.

First, we have the hardboiled mystery, the province of snoops and private eyes, popularized by writers like Dashiell Hammett and Bill O’Reilly. The protagonists in these stories are famous for cracking wise, having a cynical outlook and having a bad relationship with police. (Which contains some kernel of truth, as it turns out police don’t like snide comments while they fish your dead neighbor out of your pool.)

Cozy mysteries represent the flip side of the coin. These are lighthearted mysteries that take often place in bucolic settings. The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency and Miss Marple books are some excellent examples. And while these stories often revolve around murder, they usually don’t dwell on gore or scooped out eyeballs or torn scrotums. Like the title suggests, they’re meant to be comfort reading. Murder She Wrote was a famous cozy mystery TV series that was originally meant to have a harder, darker tone, but producers quickly realized test audiences were uncomfortable with the idea of an elderly Angela Lansbury getting sexually assaulted in every episode.

Capers are another popular mystery subgenre. Here we’re often focusing on the other side of the law, and we’re not looking back and asking Whodunit, but looking forward and asking How will they pull it off. Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight is a highwater mark of the genre, as is my 2016 novella Slight of Hand, about a group of pygmy circus performers who try to steal Stonehenge.

Let’s look at some tips to make our mysteries their most mysterious.

Step One: Develop your sleuth

While the hook of your crime is probably the most important element, your reader won’t stay engaged unless you’ve got an interesting sleuth to follow through the crime-solving process. They don’t have to be all that complicated. Sherlock Holmes, after all, is just a really smart guy who hates Mormons and loves cocaine. But while simple, that also makes him very relatable.

You should also give them a reason for wanting to solve the crime. This could be a personal connection boredom, or it could be political.

Step Two: Plan your crime

Before you start anything though, you need to plan your crime. You need to know who did it, why and what clues they left behind. Don’t worry about it being believable. In the real world people kill because they got cut off in traffic, because God or a dog told them to, or because they didn’t show respect for where the property lines are drawn, so you can give your killer any motive you want.

It’s best to do your research, too. Look up how long it takes a body to decompose. Look up how one might remove traces of DNA from a corpse. Go to your local pharmacy, grab different medications and ask how many will get a 70 kg person to stop breathing. (However, it’s probably not the best idea to do this research if you a suspect under an active police investigation.) But speaking of…

Step Three: Make a list of suspects

Half the fun of a mystery is guessing which from a gallery of vibrant personalities is the real killer. Is it the wife who, though only 90 pounds, easily could’ve brained her husband from behind with a bottle causing him to fall in the pool? Is it the 13-year-old son who purpose fully mislabeled his drug stash in the hope that his dad would take the wrong kind, suffer heart failure and plummet into a neighbor’s pool? Or maybe it’s the person you least suspect, the guy with an airtight alibi, the cocky type who knows he’s smarter than the police and even leaves clues about it on the internet?

Step Four: Choose a unique setting

Post-war urban America and the idyllic British countryside are both fun playgrounds if you want to mess around with the tropes, but I’d go for something less explored. I’ve set mysteries in 30th century incestual generation ships (It’s All Relative), radical Antifa enclaves in middle America (The They/Them Murders), and I even did an espionage mystery set in caveman times (Ook The Spook).

Step Five: Leave trails of clues

It won’t be fun for the reader if they don’t feel like they can play along. Clues should not only provoke the reader, they should ratchet up the tension in the narrative. New developments can both lead the reader closer to the answer while putting the characters in more danger.

For example, imagine you’re writing about a sleuth who thinks she’s found the murderer because the same pills found in the victim’s stomach were found in the neighbor’s medicine cabinet. But when she goes to ask the pharmacist about the medication, the suspect sees her there asking questions. And she later thinks she can see his car following her home and she regrets living alone in a house with such thick walls but she doesn’t see his car on her street so she goes to bed not realizing he learned how to pick locks at the learning annex last year and with her diabetes it would be easy, oh so easy, to make her death look like an accident. 

Why You Keep Getting Exposition Wrong (Blame Freytag!)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Let’s start with a little thought experiment. Would you have sex with any random man? You might be thinking, I’m not sure John, there’s a lot of information I need. I have so many questions. How many partners has he had in the past two years? Will he get needy or is he just looking for a one-time thing? Is he of good breeding? I’m totally not gay so can we just try watching each other jack off so I can prove I’m not gay when I only get a little bit hard?

Of course, I can’t answer all the questions. There has to be a little mystery to keep it spicy as well.

This is a thought experiment I always do when I teach writing classes at the learning annex, and when I bring in Dale to the classroom, I do it to illustrate the importance of exposition. Much like your decision about whether or not you’d bang Dale, your reader won’t follow your characters through your story unless you can answer some key questions about their background, but if you give too much information away, they might get bored and lose track of the narrative. We’ll explore the correct ways to utilize exposition on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Exposition is a literary device that communicates background information to your reader. Now, according to Freytag, exposition happens at the beginning of your story, but as we’ve talked about before, Freytag was a dumbass who didn’t know shit about shit (and who also thought Polish people could only become proper human beings through German colonization and by forcing them to stop speaking Polish).

Exposition can take place at any time in the story and will often be effective if it’s sprinkled carefully throughout your narrative. There are two kinds of exposition: direct and indirect. Let’s look at an example of direct exposition.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Latifa who lived on 198th Street and Lenox Avenue. Latifa’s grandma lived across town in a rat-infested project with the dope fiends, gangbangers and Mexican pimps, and every day after school, Latifa was responsible for bringing her a fresh brick of cocaine so she and the other old ladies could cut it before it went out on the streets.”

I’ll admit this lacks immediacy. I only did it because I was going for a fairy tale vibe, as this was a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in modern-day Harlem that I wrote with one of my black friends (And I only refer to him this way because, in the end, he asked to have his name removed from the project.)

Now let’s listen to an example of indirect exposition from the same story.

“Dan reached into the drawer to find the pistol and touched the spot smeared with Janet’s lipstick. What was that shade—she must’ve mentioned it a dozen times? Mars sunrise, or something like that. Dan grabbed the gun and walked across the empty living room, peeking back as he stepped out into the hall. A year ago this would’ve been a place worth protecting, he told himself.”

This says a lot while keeping the story moving. As I explained in this video, it shows instead of tells. We learn Janet was someone important to him, either a girlfriend or possibly his mom, and we know that she’s no longer in his life, something the emptiness of the apartment clarifies. The subtlety provides a bigger emotional impact as well.

Now, we’re going to look at four different ways to provide exposition in our writing with more samples of my writing, now available for purchase on Amazon.

Example 1: Exposition through conflict

“Sally had planned everything perfectly, tied up every loose end–she even shaved all her head hair and pubes–but still she woke up Thursday morning to the police knocking on her door.”

That’s how I began The They/Them Murders, a thriller about the woke left mob involved in a series of disappearances in the suburbs of Branson, Missouri. Because it’s tied to some immediate action, it doesn’t feel like telling and while it reveals the past, a lot is still shrouded in mystique, which entices the reader. Why did she shave her pubes? Was she sliding naked through some kind of cramped tube and wanted to avoid the hairs getting ripped or pulled out?

Example 2: Exposition through dialogue

“You seem anxious. What’s wrong?” “Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just that I haven’t been in this hospital since my brother died from sepsis.”

That’s from an early scene in Heartland, a coming-of-age story about one teen’s decision to become an organ donor. Dialogue can be one of the most natural ways to reveal backstory. But when you do this, make sure you don’t have people talking about something they both already know, like in… all movies. Find workarounds to this dilemma. Instead of a man explaining how he got his scar to his wife of 20 years, rewrite the scene so he’s explaining it to a prostitute.

Example 3: Exposition through newspaper articles, diary entries, emails and other epistolary devices

“Pa lost the farm today. Said we’s gon move to Arkansas soon as grandpappy funeral get over wit. Can’t say I miss em’ much myself, though.”

From Ode to Adelay, about a rural family struggling through the Great Depression. Devices like these are great ways to get across a lot of background information without it feeling like telling and without the reader losing interest. And you’d be surprised by the vast number of things you can use to convey information. Just take a look around your house: for me, that includes things like horse race results, warning labels for sleep medication, threatening letters to the IRS.

That’s all for this time. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe.

An Easy Way to Come up with Great Book Titles!

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Let me ask you a question? Do you think Pride and Prejudice would have been as successful with its original title: First Impressions? What if To Kill a Mockingbird had just been called Atticus? Or if A Clockwork Orange had just been called Alex and the Fantabulous Adventures of the Bowler Boys Brigade?

Titles are some of the hardest things for writers to come up with. In fact, I once wrote a 200-page mystery novel in two weeks and spent the entire next month thinking of a title before settling on The Woman in Red. We’ll look at some ways to speed up the process on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

So, what does a good title need to be? First off, it needs to be unique. Yes, it’s true that you can’t copyright titles, but this is one case where I wouldn’t condone outright plagiarism. Early off in my career, I was struggling to earn some extra cash so I took a popular book at the time and stole its title for my psychological thriller. But not only was The Satanic Verses a bad fit for my novel, it led to a whole other set of problems that I had to deal with.

A good title should also give a tiny glimpse into your style, tone, genre or content of your novel. People should have some idea what the novel is about. A straightforward title like Naked Lunch, for example, lets me know the book is erotic and promotes midday copulation.

Finally, a good title needs to be something you can Google at work. It should be obvious that titles shouldn’t be extremely profane, but it’s worth checking on Urban Dictionary to see if your title is a thing some men call their mistresses or a term for Welsh men who have sex with animals. Unfamiliar with British slang, I learned this the hard way when I titled my 2003 romance after the main character, Minge Jefferson.

Now let’s look at some steps to write better novels.

Step One: Use a character name

Lolita

David Copperfield

Anne Frank

All great works of fiction that were named after their titular character. Names can be evocative and memorable. Or, like coworkers at a company orientation, you might forget them two seconds after you hear them. So if you pick a name, try to pick one that will stick in people’s brains. Naming your book Daryl probably won’t get you a Pulitzer.

Think of names with pleasing sonic qualities or that allude to the classics. Heck, this is even the reason I chose John Lazarus as my pen name.  Well, that and my birth name is the same as one of the worst serial killers in American history.

Step Two: Be vague

Sometimes it’s good to go the other way and establish an aura of mystery with something very broad and simple. Think of something like The Old Man and the Sea or The Road. The simplicity suggests something mythic, something basic in human nature that suits the stories well. Some of my biggest successes have been with titles like these, especially The Boy and Chair.

Step Three: Mention the Setting

Cold Mountain

Last Exit to Brooklyn

Revolutionary Road

These titles already tell you a great deal about the book. If your book has a particular place that’s unique, memorably named and essential to the themes and plot, why not use that? The Butchershop on 92nd Street was probably my best-selling mob story for this reason, even though my publisher insisted it was because we tricked Joe Pesci into endorsing my book at an autograph signing.  

Step Four: Use an online title generator

With these AI tools, all you need to do is upload the complete finished draft of your manuscript, your pen name, genre, ISBN of any other books you’ve written, five books similar to yours, your address, social security number and do a quick retinal scan.

Some great titles I’ve gotten from these AI tools: I Know Where You Live, The Futility of Flesh, 1400 Pounds of Pressure Shatter a Human Skull

Step Five: Alter A Popular Phrase

Finally, one last way to create a catchy title is to take a common phrase and flip it on its head. Writing a book about overfishing in the Caspian Sea? How about A Water Out of Fish? Or how about this? Weather the Under, about a gambling addict who always betting the under on football games.

I have more. Grudge a Bear, about a hunter who becomes paralyzed after being attacked by a grizzly and spends the rest of his life trying to get revenge. Or Easier Done Than Said, about a genius mathematician who has to overcome the challenge of being born with no tongue.