How important is it to have a unique author name?

There’s a very talented author of (if what I’ve seen is right) romantic comedies. I’m afraid I haven’t read any of his work, but I’d like to. He seems a very well-liked and talented guy. He has a lot of loyal readers who enjoy everything he writes.

What does this have to do with me? Well, it’s his name. He’s called Andy Jones.

Not a surprise: it’s a common name. I’m sure we’re both not the only two authors with that name. But in the short list of established authors called Andy Jones, he’s the biggest of us all. And well done to him.

When I wrote my second book, Back in the Shadows, I was privileged enough to spend time getting advice from an imprint group of one of the world’s largest publishers. I’ve discussed this before, but simply put, their view was that Andy Jones was too common a name and I should replace it with a pen-name. I went along with that idea, and used “Drew David” as my pen-name.

TLDR, it was a mistake. My readers didn’t realise the book was written by me. So, for my third book, Stone Dead, I went back to my original name. And will happily to do so, because all was fine once again.

Ah well, you live and you learn! Should you have a unique name? Maybe. But I’m not sure it matters as much as I was lead to believe it was.

Succession of Power: The Audiobook!

Yes! It’s here! My first-ever audiobook, from my first-ever novel, “Succession of Power“. I’ve been waiting to show this to you. It’s been a labour of love, but one I have enjoyed no end. It really has been one of the most creatively fulfilling things I’ve ever done.

This is my 2016 action-packed high-octane political thriller set in the streets and backrooms of Washington D.C. We follow the relentless Secret Service Agent Mike Stevens, as he uses all of his nine lives to get to the truth of the nation’s worst-ever atrocity, all while a newly-appointed president battles prejudice and treasonous ambition to try and defeat the enemy without the country that she loves losing its principles and falling apart.

I really hope you enjoy listening to this (nearly thirteen-hour) tome as much as I did recording, editing and producing it.

The links are in my store or here below, or can be found around the world on Audible, Amazon and Apple Books, just by searching for “Succession of Power”. Don’t forget, you can get the book free with a US Audible free trial too, and it’s yours to keep forever. That’s also the case via this link in the UK, too.

Thank you – and enjoy!

AUDIOBOOK EDITION:

On Audible.co.uk

On Audible.com

On Amazon.co.uk (Also with Whispersync)

On Amazon.com (Also with Whispersync)

On Apple Books (UK)

On Apple Books (US)

End chapters by not ending them

Okay this post has a stupid title, granted. But trust me, I’ve got a point I’m trying to make!

Many people talk about the benefit of chapter-payoffs, and I think that’s right. You want people to WANT to keep reading, even as they come to the end of a chapter.

So how do we get to that?

I think this tip might be harder for people who write in scenes and rearrange them around into whatever chapter and order they need, later.

But if you’re like me, and you write in chapters, you probably are more relaxed about breaking scenes up.

The reason why I named this post “end chapters by not ending them”, is because that’s really the big secret. There might be an “oh my god” climax partway through a scene, that then gets resolved. Why include all of that in the chapter? End the chapter on the “oh my god”, then come back to the scene’s resolve in the next chapter.

Why break it up? Well if you don’t finish the scene, and leave them hanging, they will just HAVE to keep going.

If they need to stop, and they put your book down begrudgingly, your work is done! They’ll be picking it up again very soon.

So end chapters, by not ending the scene.

Choosing a character name

Just a quick one. How much thought do you give to character names?

Charles Dickens was the master of charactonym: That’s to say a name that is somehow descriptive of the character who bears it.

But we don’t have to be that deep most of the time. However, you don’t want a load of “John Smith”s as well right? So is there a middle-ground?

There’s a lot of ways of approaching this, but one is to get into the etymology of the names.

How about naming character something that they can live up to? Check out this site, behind the name.

It’s not just a database of names (as useful as that is), it gives you the etymology of names. Conventional as well as more interesting.

It’s just a nice tool to pick names with a little more intention that you otherwise might.

Another tool in the toolbox. Enjoy!

Figuring out a novel’s word count

Happy New Year! You know, I think I’m the only weirdo who likes to know the word-counts of other novels. I don’t even think I can articulate why I like to find how many words are in a book.

I wonder if it’s when I read something I love, I want to know how many words it took to achieve something so special? Or for example, if I was so engrossed that I read it quickly, it’s interesting to learn that actually, the book was longer than I thought.

The more I look back at those two paragraphs the more I think that yes, this is probably just a strange obsession I have!

Anyway, if you want a reasonably reliable way of figuring out the word count of a book, I’ve got you covered.

Amazon in the US used to have word counts for thousands of books, but that information has long-since gone. But if you are curious like I am, Amazon and Audible can still help.

Go to Audible/Amazon. If there is an unabridged audiobook version of the novel you want the word-count for, click on the page for it. It’ll give you the running-time somewhere.

Convert the running-time into minutes. So for example, a book that’s 12 hours and 35 minutes long = 755 minutes.

The rough average speaking-speed is about 150 words a minute. I can tell you that’s a standard in the voiceover world, having worked in the VO business for many years. So multiply the number of minutes by 150 and you have a fairly decent approximate word count. So in our example, 755 x 150 = 113,250 words.

And there you are!

How David Baldacci writes

Here we are, another year over. Is 2024 the year where you’ll write your first novel?

Here’s a nice little vid on thriller writer David Baldacci’s process. Just a little fast and breezy, but you might enjoy it:

Fight!

“You come here to read the blog post or are you startin’ something?”

We love tension in our thriller and action novels, and sometimes in the story, words spill over into actions.

And depending on the type of novel you’re writing, there’s a chance your readers love a good fight. The climax of the tension that’s built up, or something unexpected and explosive, that warns them more could be around the corner at any moment.

But what makes a good fight scene in a novel? There’s no rules to this, but Here’s some suggestions that might help:

• Location: All of your scenes take place SOMEWHERE, and your fight scenes are no exception. The location can be a great way of spurring creativity in terms of finding out HOW the fight will go? Is the fight in a bar? Glass bottles, as hand-to-hand weapons? A penthouse apartment on the top of a very tall building? The window ledge might add extra jeopardy?

• Prior information: Does a character have a talent or ability you established earlier? How can it be deployed to creative effect in the fight scene?

• Taking the time: Yeah, this is important too. Allow yourself the time to describe what’s happening in a fight, or what the fighter you’re following closely is thinking. But remember the pace of a story. Fights are fast, so try and resist overly verbose language. You don’t want a fast-paced moment to be forcibly slowed down for no good reason.

Just a few thoughts of the top of my head anyway!

Being a storyteller, not just a writer

We don’t use the term “storywriter” do we? We say “storyteller”. Why teller and not writer, when most stories are written down before they become anything else?

I think that it stems from our ancestral routes. We had stories before we wrote anything down. We had stories before we had a way to saving them anywhere. So we did the only thing we could. We told them.

The best storytellers back then were exactly that: story TELLERS. The ones who could captivate the tribe around the fire with the best performance, were the ones who we listened to.

Fast forward a several thousand years, and there’s better opportunities for story tellers to spread their talent far and wide than ever before.

If you can TELL a story as good as you write one, why not do exactly that? Record yourself telling a story? Add music, sound effects, whatever? You can create a podcast for free these days, so why not?

A podcast of short stories. Doesn’t have to be regular, just an occasional thing whenever you have a fun idea. It trains the writing part and the, well, telling part too. They can be a good outlet for your creative side, and who knows, maybe introduce you and your work to a wide audience? I’ve done a few now (which you can check out in previous posts in the blog), and I love the experience. The whole process really.

If you fancy it, why not give it a go, see how it feels?

Pantsing vs preparation

If you’re a novelist who’s got to the end of the first draft of at least one novel, then you already know if you’re either a pantser or preparer.

If you haven’t come across these terms before, they describe writers who plan out what they’re going to write before they write it, and those who might have an idea in their mind but just “write into the dark” and see where it goes.

You only really know what side you’re on by getting started.

But keep in mind that it’s not a fully one-side-or-the-other situation. For me, I certainly lean more on the pantser side of the spectrum. But it is a spectrum.

I have a rough idea of the story, so I write a few notes on that. I have a rough idea of the main characters, so write a few notes on them. And I have a rough idea of how it’ll plot out. As my readers will read in chapters, I like to plot out in chapters. I write a few lines, maybe a paragraph or two on each chapter. And that’s it. That sounds like a lot of preparation, but if you saw it, you’d realise it isn’t.

No, REAL planners are those boys and girls who write 150,000 words of a 100,000-word novel before they have started writing the words “Chapter One”.

Whichever side of the spectrum you sit on, it’s important to just get started.

Then you will find out what kind of writer you are in time.

ChatGPT: A brainstorming tool for novelists?

There’s been a ton of videos showing the ways that ChatGPT can give YouTubers, podcasters, and others ideas for stories. Could it work as a creative tool for novelists as well?

So ChaptGPT is an AI, which I believe is based on a form called GPT-3. There’s already a GPT-4 in the works, that’s apparently next-level in its conversational style.

Just on a side-note. I think one of the reasons a number of people are excited by this system can be explained by the software programming community. I saw on Twitter a while back a bloke who was programming something in the Python language, and chatted to ChatGPT about what he wanted. After just a few sentences, ChatGPt wrote it for him. It got a few things wrong, did some pieces of the routine in a funny order, and there were a few specifics he hadn’t told it about, so it didn’t know to do.

After a few more minutes of tweaking, ChatGPT was finished. He added the routine to the software, made a few changes, tested, tweaked, and it was done. It took him half an hour of chatting and fixing up. But that’s a job that would have taken him 6 hours if he did it himself.

Imagine in the future an ambitious software project, that today has 60 programmers working 12-hours a day, 6-days a week for 9 months to get it all done. Fast-forward five years from now, and maybe it’s one programmer, and an AI chatbot. They finish it all in two weeks. The same software. A fraction of the cost. A fraction on the time.

“So what?’ you might say. “That’s just software.” But EVERYTHING is software these days. It makes the world go round. Ergo, the world will go round faster. AI bots have been able to recreate data modelling scenarios that took humans a few years in less than a month. Modelling revolutionary drugs for candidate trials that took years could be done in a fraction of the time. We might be on the cusp of an exponential growth curve. Post-scarcity, the works.

It’s important to hold back on the hyperbole though. We’re in danger of getting overly-excited only to see the pace of change dip for a while before realising its potential. But still, in five or ten years, this could all be very exciting indeed.

And what could this mean for novelists? Given its potential, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a minor thing. But as of now, I think ChatGPT is still free to use. To create and account. Brainstorm some ideas. You never know, you might be surprised with what it’s got to say.