A writer’s life…

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Yet again, I was party to a discussion about traditional publishing fiction vs. self-publishing fiction. The question was if self-published authors are any good? And yet again, the discussion had several flawed assumptions:

– If you are traditionally published you write well. If you write well you will be traditionally published.

– If you self-publish, you can’t write and you did a poor job of preparing your manuscript. People who self-publish do so because they are not good enough to traditionally publish.

As in most such discussions, there is some truth to all assumptions, but when the generalizations become gospel thoughtful discussion ends. So what is the truth of the matter?

First, by one count, 70% of traditionally published authors fail with their first book and are not offered a chance to publish a second. Said another way, 70% of the time the agents and publishers are wrong about a given book becoming successful.

Second, on the other hand, we all know the many, many stories of authors whose books became bestsellers but were rejected by scores of agents and publishers.

Third, sometimes agents and publishers may just be incompetent. Speaking from personal experience, a couple decades ago I sent a full manuscript unsolicited to a highly regarded medium-sized publisher of history books and asked them if they were interested. They were trying to get into fiction. My historical novel seemed like it would be a good fit. They responded to my manuscript a month later with contracts and advances for it and two more. Obviously, they loved it. We spent about a year editing it during which time they launched about 15 more novels, all of which failed. I eventually got a letter telling me they were exiting the fiction market. So was my novel really that brilliant or just another bad choice they had made because they did not know how to discern good from bad?

(To digress and finish this story… By the time they gave up on getting into fiction, I had an agent with JCA, and we submitted my novel to a few other houses and got a couple of near misses. The consensus seemed to be “Too violent for general literature and too literary for ‘men’s adventure'”.  Cormac McCarthy, where are you when I need you?)

Even though getting an agent only loosely correlates with being a competent writer, unless your writing is a debacle, getting an agent and subsequently a publisher is really a function of odds. And I very much believe that anyone who has sent a novel through a site such as CritiqueCircle.com for community review and feedback at least twice and has had it professionally copy edited is well positioned to get an agent, the qualifier being that the more unusual the work is the more agents you might have to engage to land one. 100 may not be near enough.

IMHO the only way we will know if our writing does not suck – no matter how we publish it — is if we get generally positive reviews (and at least 30 of them) once it is published. Whether or not it sells well and generates a lot of cash is another discussion altogether.

I’ve reviewed a number of self-published books. Some were good. Some were not so good. I’ve also started thousands of traditionally published books. Many I’ve stopped before I finished because they were very poor.

We can say that on average, traditionally published books are better than self-published books. Trying to generalize that into absolute truths is foolhardy and will result in flawed conclusions. And you’ll miss out on some great self-published books.

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I have written about grammar checkers and style checkers before. I continue to believe they are a powerful tool in a writer’s tool bag. AutoCrit has revised their editing software product and has an active marketing campaign underway. I signed up for their trial membership for $1 for a week. Yesterday I spent about 3 hours working on my upcoming novel with their cloud-based app. In the end, I had two strong opinions about their updated writing software.

Before I go on, I want to emphasize that I do not have any affiliate relationship with anyone. So everything I say below is my own opinion without any influence from any third parties. 

The new and improved AutoCrit:

First, I have always been impressed with AutoCrit. It is one of the more helpful writing apps. Not only does it offer sophisticated analysis, it has (IMHO) the nicest user interface going. For one thing, as an online book editor, it allows you to work on chapters that you can assign to a book that you save at their website, which is a nice way to group your work and deal with your work in manageable sizes.  Of course, you can use it as a short story editor as well, dealing with your stand-alone pieces.

Below is an example of the feedback I got from their Summary Report when I had it look at my entire 116K word novel:

Attractive, clear and helpful. And when I say it is helpful, I mean that literally. It tells you exactly what you need to hunt down and change. Their tool even goes so far as to give a prioritized list of tags that you should use less often and if you click it, the text will move to exactly where it is so you can go to work on it. Sweet!

AutoCrit has many such tools: Overuse of pronouns, passive voice, repetition (of both words and phrases), etc. In addition to running summary reports and statistical summaries, here is a list of the reports you can run and how they are grouped:

Pacing and Momentum:

• Sentence Variation
• Pacing
• Paragraph Variation
• Chapter Variation

Dialog:

• Dialogue Tags
• Adverbs In Dialogue

Strong Writing

• Adverbs
• Passive Voice
• Tense Consistency
• Showing vs. Telling
• Clichés
• Redundancies
• Unnecessary Filler Words

Word Choice

• Initial Pronoun and Names
• Sentence Starters
• POV Consistency
• Generic Descriptions
• Homonyms
• Personal Words and Phrases

Repetition

• Repeated Words
• Repeated Uncommon Words
• Repeated Phrases
• Word Frequency
• Phrase Frequency

AutoCrit is an impressively powerful, helpful and easy to use writing application and proofreading tool. I have no doubt that it will help every author with their fiction writing. However…

Don’t even think about buying it. At $59.97 a month, the price is outrageous for typical freelance or occasional writers.

I wrote Jocelyn at AutoCrit. I’ve traded emails with her several times over the last few years. She has always been helpful and clear. When I suggested to her earlier this week that the price was very high, she wrote back and said:

“Our new membership level at $59.97 / month includes more than just the software.  We have courses on the things we cover in the software, separate weekly sessions on how to rock your revisions (covering things like revising for plot, characters, setting, etc.) and bonuses.

“You can also get just the software for $29.97 /month.  Our customers have been asking for a monthly option for a long time – and now we have delivered.

“As for the AutoCrit software, our latest updates take it to a whole new level.  Digging deeper into fiction writing and the specific genres.  We also added our new Summary report that gives you customized recommendations on where to start and what needs to be done in each category.”

In contrast, ProWritingAid offers a comparable editing tool for an advertised price of $45/year. That is less for a year than AutoCrit charges for a month (for their full offering).

I do want to be clear that from a follow-up email Jocelyn sent me, it seems that AutoCrit does offer their SW for months at a time. That is: 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, etc. So that is nice in one sense, but it also creates another dilemma. Though $30 for one month allows you to pay for just the time frame you want — and $30 is reasonable for a burst of work — my experience with editing is that it always drags on longer than you expect, and when you are done, you might forget to shut down your subscription, so even if you are not using it, your credit card is getting charged. So again, compared to PWA’s pricing…kind of hard to get on the AutoCrit bandwagon.

In fairness, PWA does not have as clean and as an intuitive interface as AutoCrit has, but it actually has more features and more ability to customize what you want it to find for you. And if it matters to you (it may not), PWA also has a Microsoft Word Plugin, which AutoCrit does not have. On the other hand, AutoCrit will be offering courses to help writers, according to Jocelyn. In short, though different, they are both powerful and extremely helpful writing apps.

Related, if you want a powerful, free editing software, see my article on how to combine the free versions of the Hemingway App and Grammarly. Not as powerful as either AutoCrit or ProWritingAid, but damned impressive results for free if you need some editing help when writing fiction.

As a courtesy to both AutoCrit and PWA, I will let them both know of this blog and invite them to comment.

The post The New AutoCrit editing software: A Review appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....

Writers always need help with editing, so this is pretty damn cool: Two of my favorite tools are now working together for free. The Hemingway App has always been free, and Grammarly has a free version. But now, with the Grammarly Chrome extension, not only can you use both of them, you can use both of them together. It’s not the same as having a human editor, but if you are trying to figure out how to write a book, this combination can be a big help. Let me explain…

I’ve long been fond of the HemingwayApp because it is a simple, free, very easy to use tool to help you spot and address long, complex, convoluted and adverb-heavy prose. Such sentences can wreck havoc with your creative writing.

Grammarly checks your grammar. They claim it is the best there is at doing such things. I’ve always been a bit skeptical, but it does catch a lot of issues. It is not flawless, though, so when you use it be attentive to what it calls out. Sometimes it is wrong.

But be that as it is, these two writing apps now work together in powerful, simple ways that can help any aspiring writer, and do so for free. Let me show you.

In the screenshot below you can see that I have gone to the HemingwayApp site and that I have already loaded the free Grammarly Chrome Extension from the Chrome store. I then typed in a sentence with a couple issues. You can see that Grammarly is already working; it is reporting in the red circle that it has spotted two issues.

When I click on the red circle, look at what comes up (see below): a new Grammarly screen on top of the Hemingway screen (which you can still see in the background).

I’m going to accept the two corrections Grammarly proposes (in green to the right) simply by clicking on the green text. Doing that approves the proposed change. Once I do that, it looks like below. The sentence is now grammatically correct. And also look in the upper left-hand corner to see a button that offers me the opportunity to return to the HemingwayApp.

When I click on that button…wow…what is loaded in the HemingwayApp now incorporates the changes that Grammarly recommended and I approved without me having to do any work to copy and past or otherwise transfer the (hopefully) grammatically correct copy to the HemingwayApp.

From here I can go to work on the things that the HemingwayApp is good at flagging and Grammarly is not. In my one-sentence example Hemingway did not flag anything, but in a longer entry, it would.

Very nice! Simple, free, easy. And powerful. For any writer in need of such support (I always am!), this is a new way to help you improve your writing. No matter which creative writing prompt you start or what level your creative writing skills are at, you will need to polish your prose.

Of course, once you do publish your novel you will need great reviews to help you ramp your sales, so I’ve also written another easy-to-follow guide that you can use to get reviews from top Amazon reviewers.

And this combination of Hemingway App and Grammarly is not just for writing fiction or writing a nonfiction book. If you are writing college papers or even a high school student writing a paper, together the Hemingway Editor and the Grammarly Chrome extension are powerful tools.

Good luck with it, and pass it on to another writer! Though they were not working together when I wrote my Amazon bestselling novel, I did use them both, and now I’m using them together as I work on my next novel.

PS: I don’t have an affiliate or any other relationship with either company. I just think this is cool and wanted to pass it on.

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