How to Think Sideways Lesson 6: How to Discover (or Create) Your Story's Market (How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School for Writers) [Kindle Edition]

Holly Lisle (Author)

Book Description

Simple Question: How do you figure out where to sell your books...and who will read them?

LESSON DESCRIPTION: Discover how you can write a book to an existing market, or build a market for your book--and how to write in any new genre quickly and effectively.

In Lesson 6: How to Discover (or Create) Your Story's Market, you will:

• Identify markets you never imagined (as well as the one you did) for the project you're creating.
• Learn how to write professionally in a new genre to rescue an ailing career, boost your numbers, broaden your readership...or just because you want to. (If more pro writers knew this technique, there would be a lot fewer dead careers).
• Learn how to create your own genre either professionally or for fun---because no, you don't have to want to make a fortune as a writer to want to be a better writer, and whether you want to take this course to go pro, or just to write kick-ass stories for your family and friends, you deserve the skills that will let you tell any story you want in a genre you hand-tailored to it.
• Discover one fast, simple, eye-opening way to do market research---in ten minutes, you can find not just genres related to your own work that you didn't know existed but publishers paying good money for books in those genres.

The public version of the course consists of these 29 individual lessons, and downloadable, printable worksheets included in the purchase price, and available from simple-to-type links at the back of each lesson.

Each lesson is taught in sequence, and builds on techniques taught in previous lessons.

TO AVOID CONFUSION AND FRUSTRATION, DO THE LESSONS IN ORDER.

STUDENTS SAY:

"Fantasy writer and teacher extraordinaire Holly Lisle (no relation!) earns my undying thanks for her online courses on writing and editing, without which this book might still be languishing in revision Hell."

--From the Acknowledgements in THE ALCHEMIST OF SOULS, by Anne Lyle

"My newest novel (revised with some of the methods I learned in this course) got contracted by the very best Fantasy-agent in Germany."
-- Katharina Gerlach, Germany

"I've been a professional journalist for 20 years... I was hoping to silence the editor. (And) I realized I'd written 5,000 words without going back to check spelling, etc."
-- Max Howard

"It is by far more detailed than I could have ever hoped. It's not just a collection of tips and tricks; it's a complex, complete system for getting that damn book done and done right. It's changed my whole approach to writing but in a way that feels natural, like, 'why didn't I think of doing it this way before?'"

-- K.T. Appleby

Each of the 29 lessons teaches one or more essential sideways-thinking skills that will allow you to write better fiction, find markets for your work, revise intelligently (and just once per book), sell what you write, and make every book you write better than the last. It includes both commercial publishing and self-publishing tracks: I have many years of experience in both.

HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS: Career Survival School for Writers is "How to write books you love for the rest of your life in ANY genres you wish to pursue, get paid for doing it, hit deadlines, crush writer's block, NEVER run out of ideas, and build a career telling stories you're proud of to people who love what you do.

The course is written exclusively for people who want to learn how to make a living from their writing, and my system is built around learning how to THINK sideways, and how to apply sideways-thinking skills to your writing---and while you will write, revise, and submit (or publish) a novel or novella as your course project, if you are unwilling to learn new ways of thinking, you will not benefit from the course.

---Holly Lisle

Editorial Reviews

From the Author

AN IMPORTANT NOTE: The private version of this course, which was available exclusively on my website and which I've now closed, sold for $455.40 in the 12-month version ($37.95/month X 12 months), and $407.70 ($69.95/month X 6 months).

3043 students took that course. Most graduated.

That version included the exact lesson and technique you'll learn in this lesson, but also included many handouts, some movies, some audio files, and membership in my private writers' community.

The private version did not include the worksheets I created specifically for THIS version.

When I decided to take How To Think Sideways public, my objective was to keep the course price as low as possible to reach writers on tight budgets, and not to spread the cost for community membership, site maintenance, and large-bandwidth downloads to people who will not use them.

While additional materials and live workgroups are available, this course is complete as it stands. No additional purchase is required to learn my process.

HOW "HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS" BECAME A COURSE

In 2008, a group of writers asked me how I'd managed to sell 30 novels to more than a dozen major commercial publishers worldwide, in half a dozen different genres, in a multitude of languages, all under my own name---and how I'd managed to make writing a full-time career with which I'd paid the bills and fed my family for (then) 17 years.

I explained that it wasn't luck---that I'd developed a system of "thinking sideways" that allowed my to see publishing opportunities other writers missed, and let me switch genres when I needed to, and allowed me to keep selling my work under my own name even in down markets and bad economies.

The writers I answered wanted to learn my system, and in 2008, my first class of 120 students, including journalists, editors, published novelists, a screenwriter, various computer programmers, a few accountants, a couple of doctors, quite a few stay-at-home moms, and many more, went through the private six-month course I built to SHOW them how to do what I did.

The public version of the course consists of these lessons, and downloadable, printable worksheets available at no extra cost from simple-to-type links included in each lesson.

As for my credentials for teaching this course, just click my name at the top of this page to see some of what I've done.

About the Author

MY FIRST EDITOR, Toni Weisskopf (of Baen), attributed the quality of my work and the success of my stories to my "twisty mind." At the time, I shrugged it off with a comment that it was something anyone could do. She vehemently disagreed. In the many years since, as I've read and not finished hundreds of books that lacked any sort of twistiness, surprise, suspense, or sideways thinking...

I've come to the conclusion that she was sort of right, and so was I. Clearly, thinking sideways is something most writers don't do, and in that regard she was very right.

But I still hold my ground that it's something anyone can do.

How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School for Writers, my complete "how to write MANY books and build a career writing fiction" course, teaches the skill to which I attribute the majority of fact that I have a career---my ability to think sideways.

Product Details

• File Size: 531 KB
• Print Length: 65 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Language: English
• ASIN: B008FYXZZA
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #544,776 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good information, even for those who haven't been published July 18, 2012

By Amy Keeley

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This lesson is fantastic! Even if you haven't been published yet, you're still writing, hoping that whatever you write will someday find a home among readers. And if you have friends, they'll likely tell you what they think will make money. So, you write a novel, start trying to sell it to an agent, and the genre you write in dies. Wouldn't it be better to figure out, in advance, other genres (or sub-genres) where you can sell it?

Even self-publishers can use these tools. I haven't tested it yet, but, in addition to what I described above, I can see where this would help figure out writing categories at places like KDP or Smashwords.

This lesson also helps a writer avoid the mistake some authors make who aren't familiar with the genre they've chosen: treading old ground. If you're new and think "Hey, that would be a great idea!", chances are someone else thought that, too, probably years ago, and just about every angle has been thoroughly explored by the ones who also thought it was a great idea. Sure, you can still try to use it, but it's important to know which aspects have been done to death before you try. Her technique for becoming familiar enough with a genre (or sub-genre) is a lot of work but it's very helpful. I'm using it to familiarize myself with a sub-genre I discovered in the past few months. She also has a nice, little section on what to do if you find your story doesn't fit any current markets.

A Word on the Worksheets: Print them out first. Though this lesson was straightforward, it still helped me a lot to see how she organized it. I would have liked an example table for the elements table so I knew for sure what I was doing but that's the only quibble I have and it's a pretty small one considering how much useful information/help this lesson contains.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good For A Newbie August 25, 2012

By Lucy Dashwood

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

There could have been more on creating your story's market than there actually was. If your work is somewhat off-genre, then this probably won't help you much. If you need to rethink your target audience that is easily identified, yes, this is probably help by pointing you toward categories that already exist.

More About the Author

Holly Lisle has been writing fiction professionally since 1991, when she sold FIRE IN THE MIST, the novel that won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. She has to date published more than thirty novels and several comprehensive writing courses. She is currently working on the second book in her Cadence Drake series.

Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer...which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows:

"So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we'd tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children's Home, where we lived.

"My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks.

"It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, "That's a bear footprint. From the size of it, it's a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear's still around."

"Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next.


" 'I don't have the gun with me that will kill a bear,' he told me. 'I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, I'm going to shoot him so he'll attack me. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.'

"The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, I'm sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down.

"We were not eaten by a bear that night...but neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life I'll ever forget.

"I keep that story in mind as I write. If what I'm putting on paper isn't at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra while I was carrying a bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesn't make my cut."

Cheerfully,
Holly Lisle