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The best piece of advice I ever got was to

• look at all the comments overall. See what they have in common.
• look at the extremes, see what they’re honing in on.
•  and use that to develop and shape my writing.

You don’t want to lose your voice, so don’t take every comment that every judge says and change every single place. All that will do is cause your writing to sound like someone else. But what you want to look at across the writing contests, and from one contest to another, one judge to another, is what is being said consistently.

If you’ll do that, you’ll be able to get the most out of the comments of every writing competition and whether you win or not, use it to help you grow as a writer.

Sound Off: I’d like you to share some of the most useful comments you’ve received from judges or critique partners. Also, what are some great lessons on craft you’d like to share?

Read the previous posts on writing Contests:

Writing Contests: A Judge’s Perspective

Writing Contests: How to prepare

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

Sarah Sundin lives in northern California with her husband and three children. When she isn’t ferrying kids to soccer and karate, she works on-call as a hospital pharmacist and teaches Sunday school. She belongs to American Christian Fiction Writers and Christian Authors Network. Her first novel, A Distant Melody, the first book in the Wings of Glory series, was published by Revell in March 2010, A Memory Between Us came out in September 2010, and Blue Skies Tomorrow comes out August 2011.

 The Wings of Glory series follows the three Novak brothers, B-17 bomber pilots with the US Eighth Air Force stationed in England during World War II. Each book stands alone.

 A Distant Melody, Revell, March 2010

Lt. Walter Novak flies a B-17 bomber in battles over Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, while Allie Miller serves in the Red Cross against the wishes of her wealthy parents and controlling fiancé in California. Walt and Allie meet at a wedding and begin a correspondence. As letters fly between Walt’s muddy bomber base in England and Allie’s mansion in an orange grove, their friendship binds them together. But can they untangle the secrets, commitments, and expectations that keep them apart?

 A Memory Between Us, Revell, September 2010

Major Jack Novak has never failed to meet a challenge—until he meets army nurse Lieutenant Ruth Doherty. When Jack lands in the army hospital after a plane crash, he makes winning Ruth’s heart a top priority mission. But he has his work cut out for him. Not only is Ruth focused on her work in order to support her orphaned siblings back home, she carries a shameful secret that keeps her from giving her heart to any man. Can Jack break down her defenses? Or are they destined to go their separate ways?

Sarah took a few minutes to talk about publishing from a writer’s perspective with Writing Career Coach.

Writing Career Coach: What are some ways you prepared to market your book before you were published?

Sarah Sundin: As a debut author, I had a lot to do. When I got a contract in 2008 for my first book, A Distant Melody, my on-line presence consisted of an e-mail address. Since I’m graphically challenged, I had a website professionally designed, then I started blogging, joined Facebook and Twitter, and started a quarterly e-mail newsletter. Any time I saw a request from a blogger for author interviews, I responded—I’ve found blog interviews a wonderful way to connect with potential readers. Locally, I set up book signings and speaking engagements. Speaking at the Women’s Club was unexpectedly helpful—I ended up with two newspaper interviews because of that one speech. I also hired a publicist, who set up a blog tour linked to a drawing for a basket filled with items related to the story. Just for fun, I hosted a launch party—primarily to thank family and friends who supported and encouraged me through the long rejection-letter years.

WCC: Tell us about your book.

SS: A Memory Between Us: During World War II, dashing B-17 bomber pilot Maj. Jack Novak has never failed to meet a challenge—until he meets Lt. Ruth Doherty, a striking nurse with a shameful secret. Can they confront their deepest sins, face their greatest fears, and learn to trust and to love?

WWC: How do you plan and write your book?

SS: I’m an outline-oriented writer. That’s the science nerd in me. First of all, I do lots of research beforehand—to find out if my story idea will even work historically, and for ideas for scenes, problems, and characters. Then I fill out character charts (I love character charts!) and a plot chart which helps me track subplots and story arcs. Then come scene lists with everything from the date, the weather, what characters are wearing, goals and conflict, what’s happening historically, and an outline of the scene. Finally I get to my rough draft.

WWC: What is it like working with editors? Do you have tips for getting along and building a great relationship with them?

SS: I have been so blessed with the editorial staff at Revell! My acquisitions editor, Vicki Crumpton, also does the content edit on my books. She catches my boo-boos, makes very funny comments in track-changes, and helps me grow as a writer. And though my manuscripts are clean as far as grammar, punctuation, and spelling, the copy editors always catch errors. My biggest tip is to keep your deadlines. I say I don’t like to beat deadlines—I like to beat them to a pulp. I try to turn my manuscripts and other assignments well before deadline. Why leave them worrying? I also like to collect several questions to send Vicki at once, so I don’t annoy her. And any hysterics? I save them for a dear writing friend who has full whap-me-upside-the-head privileges.

Read more of Sarah’s interview at Examiner.com and find what it is like to work with an agent and how Sarah maintains balance between work and home.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

I, as a writer, completely understand how painful it can be sometimes to receive those critiques from the judges. I also understand how painful it is when you have one judge who gives you straight perfect scores and another judge who rips you apart. You wonder how you can even use this information to develop your writing. We’ll talk a little bit about that in the next blog, but for today I want you to think about using the comments the judge says and recognizing them as individual readers because once you’re published, the readers are going to be just as subjective as the judges are.

Understanding that people are going to have wildly different opinions and that there is some validity in each perspective, can help you grow as a writer. Understanding that judges are there to genuinely try to help you as a writer will help take away that animosity that we sometimes feel when we get those harsh critiques.

If you have questions that you’ve always wanted to ask a judge, I’d love for you to put them in the comments and get a dialog started. As I said, I’ve judged a number of categories in both published and unpublished writing contests, large and small and I’d be happy to give you the point of view of a judge and help you with your writing.

Next time we’ll be talking about how to use those comments to help you develop your writing.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

One way to effectively prepare for a writing contest is to have a professional edit done. If you have a crit partner that’s great. Not everyone has the time. I myself have to hire someone to do my edits because I simply don’t have the time to give the feedback to the other person. I always urge people to get a critique done first or a full edit because this is putting your professional foot forward. You wouldn’t go in to a job interview wearing jeans and likewise you don’t go in to a writing contest with a first draft.

Research some places. Writing Career Coach, of course, offers editing and I usually offer specials around the times of large writing contests. But beyond that, find either a critique partner, someone who is knowledgeable in the industry or a professional editor, to go through your writing and give you some feedback.

You can get a detailed edit where they will pick apart every little piece, or have somebody just do an assessment and give you an overview generalizing areas of strength and weakness. Either way, make sure before you go in to a writing contest that you’re taking the time to learn about the craft and build a strong showing in the contest.

Once you’ve toughened your skin and polished your writing it is time to get it out there. Find contests that have trained judges who are going to give you feedback on your work. While we always want to win writing contests in this subjective industry that won’t always happen. We need to be able to get something out of the contest no matter what. That is why feedback is so important. I’ll talk more about using the judges’ comments to improve your writing, but for now simply focus on finding good contests that provide real feedback.

If you’ve entered some good contests I’d love for you to share below. I know the Genesis Contest [unpubbed] and Carol Award [pubbed], both of which are sponsored by ACFW are good contests. The Daphne du Maurier Award from the RWA KOD chapter also has a good reputation and excellent feedback.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

This is particularly helpful when you look at the new way that social media is developing over the last year to five years. Consider things like
• blogs
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• White Papers
• ebooks
• vlogs
• and all of these various forms of social media.

All of these appeal to a different segment of your population. We learned this in our previous blog on tone. And all of them appeal to different senses. We talked about this in our previous blog engaging the senses. What I’m talking about today is focusing our style to different people and different segments in different ways.

To clarify, people who read blogs are not necessarily people who read newsletter articles, whether e-newsletters or print newsletters. Likewise people who follow Twitter are not always the same people who follow Facebook. While there is overlapping readership, each of these areas appeal to a specific kind of consumer. Therefore, whenever you’re working on marketing copy, if your target market is found in any of these areas you need to make sure that you’re using copy that will appeal in each of these areas

For example, blogs are more conducive to more up-to-date information or expounding on an issue or linking to things. (Like the blogs that I’m doing here.)

Tweets, on the other hand, are more short bursts but are very well suited to finding a relevant article. These are for the person who is frequently reading up on the industry. You want to be the first to inform your customers of updates and innovations. Twitter lets you do that.

Blogs are designed for fairly contemporary information that can be used as a reference later.

Twitter would appeal more for if there was a new industry update I wanted to get out to my readership immediately. That’s when a Tweet would come in.

Enewsletters are more about developing relationships over time, making business connections and getting to know people. Ebooks and digital downloads, or e-newsletters, are better suited to expounding on a particular topic with a company that you’re either in relationship with or developing a relationship with.

Therefore, each of your customers is at a different stage stages, whether just finding out about you, or wanting to be on the cutting edge of what’s happening in your industry through Tweets, someone who wants to continue to learn gradually through your blogs, or someone who wants to see that information expounded on through your newsletters, each person has a different preference in their interaction with you. Therefore using all of these kinds of networking tools are imperative to helping develop your complete customer base.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

That certain something that makes each story a little bit different.

To help you understand what this is, consider the difference between a term paper, a newspaper, and a love letter. All the words are different. The phrasing is different. Consider how the approach and the kinds of things that you talk about are different? All of these things speak to tone.

Business owners need to consider tone when writing marketing copy or hiring someone to write their marketing copy because your writing needs to appeal to different people, in different places, even within your target market.

While your target market may all be, for example, moms with toddlers, the needs of a mom with a single toddler versus the needs of a mom with twins or two young children that are a couple of years apart will be slightly different. So adjusting your tone to your target market and saying different things in different ways, restating things throughout your marketing copy, to help engage different segments of your target market, will help you to better engage your reader.

In a previous blog we talked about the senses. When you’re writing your marketing copy you’ll integrate senses here in tone using those different emotional ties incorporated with tone to appeal to each reader. This is just another way that fiction techniques help with marketing copy.
Now it’s time for all of you to sound off. Let’s try to see if we can do some writing practice. If you were going to write a 1 paragraph blurb to market my writing career coach program to someone how would you do it for an author, a business or a parent of a young aspiring writer?

 Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

Lena Nelson Dooley is a multi-published, award-winning author who loves to mentor other authors. With her 25th book release, she has close to 650,000 books in print.

Lena has spoken at conferences and writers’ meetings in four states. She also speaks at women’s retreats and event of all kinds. She lives in Hurst, Texas with her husband of over 45 years.

Lena’s door and heart are always open to those God places in her path. She seriously considers her ministry as a mentor, prayer warrior, even a champion of the downtrodden, her life’s work. 
 
Love Finds You in Golden, New Mexico: It’s 1890, and Golden, New Mexico, is a booming mining town where men far outnumber women. So when an old wealthy miner named Philip Smith finds himself in need of a nursemaid, he places an ad for a mail-order bride—despite the protests of his friend Jeremiah. Hoping to escape a perilous situation back East, young Madeleine Mercer answers the ad and arrives in town under a cloud of suspicion. But just as she begins to win over Philip—and Jeremiah himself—the secrets she left behind threaten to follow her to Golden…and tarnish her reputation beyond redemption.

Writing Career Coach: What are some ways you prepared to market your book before you were published?

Lena Nelson Dooley: Before I was first published, we didn’t have the Internet to help us. With my latest book, I have a very active blog . I’m also a regular contributor at this blog www.bustlesandspurs.com. I have a Facebook profile as well as an Official Fan Page on that site.  In addition, I’m on Twitter and on Shoutlife, a Christian Internet Community.
 
I also booked a Book Release Party at the local Mardel Christian Store.
 
WCC: How do you plan and write your books?

LND: Although in most other things I do, I’m a planner, with writing, I’m more of a Seat Of The Pants author. I believe most SOTPers do almost the same work as detailed plotters, but we do it in our heads while the story percolates. I know the starting point and where we’re going. I also know many of the events along the way. Then I pray every day before I sit down to write, and sometimes stop in the middle of writing and pray. I couldn’t write a novel without the Lord.

WCC: What is it like working with editors? Do you have tips for getting along and building a great relationship with them?

LND: Early in my career, I was intimidated by editors. Not their fault. Mine. But when I realized that we were on the same team, wanting to make the books the best they could be, I’ve developed some real friendships with many of them. Remember an editor wouldn’t have a job without writers. And writers couldn’t get books published without editors. I also learned that I don’t have to accept every suggestion that is made. But I make sure there’s a real reason to disagree, and I let the editor know what that reason is. We can always work out a compromise that pleases both of us. Just as with rearing children, as an author, I pick my battles. I accept almost all the suggestions. Only where I think it affects what I’m trying to do with the story do I disagree. But always without being disagreeable.

Read more of Lena’s interview at Examiner.com

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

For example, I recently needed to purchase tires. What are some of the senses associated with purchasing tires? You need to give a sense of safety. You need to give a sense of reliability. You need to demonstrate understanding of the needs of the individual tire purchaser. Therefore, building a scenario that causes the reader to think of these kind of things immediately causes them to think of what qualities they really want and need in tires. The same is true for say, business consulting. You want to help the potential client to see themselves accomplishing their goal, because when they see themselves there, they can see your role in helping them get there.

It is all about engaging the senses, but I don’t necessarily mean talking about what something will smell like or taste like. I mean using those five senses, like feeling the cold, sensing the slip of the tires when you’re driving. But what I mean even more than that, is how we interact with our environment.

An excellent writer will be able to take those five senses, connect them to an emotion, and draw the whole picture together. That’s what you need to do in your marketing copy. Not dreamy promises, not try to catch somebody with a jazzy jingle.

What you need to do is show them how that product is going to interact with their life. How it’s going to help them get to their goals, whether that goal is

- getting safely from Point A to Point B

- or growing a business

- or selling a book

- or whatever it is.

Knowing how to use the senses and knowing how to create a story world, a picture, an image in a customer’s mind, helps them to actually have a mental symbol of your product and will make them more likely to want to purchase from you and develop a relationship with you down the road.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

You’ve heard the phrase in publishing, The first line of your story sells this book, the last line sells your next book.”

It’s more than that.

Your first line needs to introduce the story, introduce the character and point to the climax of the plot. The last line of your story needs to give a satisfactory resolution to that plot and also, if you can tie it back to the beginning, where your reader goes “Ah, now I understand what he meant there”. That is how you leave a great impression with your reader.

Think about ways you can do that as you’re working on your writing this week. What are the ways that the first line of your story is pointing to the climax of your book?

What is the way that the last line of your story is bringing the reader back to that very first line?

That’s your assignment for this week. If you have any ideas on how to do this we’d love to see your comments in the comments section.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.