reading - Steven R. Southard (Poseidon's Scribe)

Home » Tag Archive: reading

Love the Books, Not Their Author?

Have you ever enjoyed an author’s books, then found out something disturbing about that author? Did the revelation spoil your appreciation of the books?

I suspect we’ve all been let down by a hero. Perhaps a favorite actor, athlete, politician, or artist did something unsavory, and that detracted from your experience of their work. It stains their reputation, at least for you. You’re no longer able to separate performer from performance.

The works of Jules Verne, my favorite author, come across today as antisemitic, racist, and sexist. His anti-Jewish sentiment is evident in both Hector Servadac (also published as Off on a Comet) and The Carpathian Castle where he depicts Jewish characters in a bad light. He includes characters of color in many novels, but never as the hero and often in stereotyped ways—servants or cooks—subordinate to the white hero. At least he includes them, unlike those of the female gender, who rarely appear at all in his works.

I could excuse these ‘isms’ and rationalize my continued reading of his works, by observing that this 19^th Century French author reflected the prevailing biases, prejudices, and privileges of his time. I could say it’s unfair to impose my modern standards on a man no longer around to defend himself.

But I believe that lets both of us—me and Verne—off the hook too easily.

Consider that reading represents a form of communication, and that it involves a sender (the writer) and a receiver (the reader—you). Your appreciation of the written work occurs at that interface where you interact with the text.

Therefore, you bear a share of responsibility here and you can’t shrug it off. Your love for or hatred of the book is an individual reaction you own, an experience you share only with the writer, whether that person is alive or dead.

All written material to which we have access was written by humans. All humans suffer from faults, frailties, and weaknesses of some kind. You lack the option of reading books written by angels. Sorry about that.

Knowing this, you face a choice. You might refuse to discover anything about the author. That spares you from any knowledge of skeletons lurking in their closets. But it sets you up for profound disappointment if you ever find out your favorite author slipped off the mental pedestal you erected and fell short of your moral standards in some way.

On the other hand, you can read with full understanding that you consume text produced by a flawed author—a human. You can research the author and discover some distasteful truths, and read the work anyway.

Here’s where I stand with Verne. I can’t claim ignorance of his backwards attitudes. If I choose to enjoy his novels, I must decide that the good outweighs the bad. Further, I must recognize this as an individual choice. Other readers make their own choices.

I like to read Verne’s novels, most of them. I don’t excuse his faults, don’t condone his biases. I wince at his stereotypes and cringe at the prejudiced opinions. I don’t idolize him. I’ve decided, for me, his strengths outweigh his weaknesses.

You face similar decisions whenever you read anything. Does the good exceed the bad? Do the delights of the book surpass the poor behavior or faulty value system of the writer?

When you read a work, only you can weigh good against bad. Nobody else can do it for you, not reviewers, critics, or even—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 3, 2023Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Do You Log Your Reading?

Writers should read. I’m rather organized about it, maybe bordering on anal. This week marks twenty years since I started keeping a log of my reading.

My spreadsheet started in January 2003. Since then, I’ve read 637 books. Fiction comprised 67% of these. Over those two decades, I’ve averaged 12.6 days per book.

In my spreadsheet, I note the date I finished, the title, author, and whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. For text-type books (print or ebook) I enter the number of pages and compute pages read per day. For audiobooks, I note the number of hours and compute the hours listened per day.

For print and ebooks, I’ve read an average of 16.7 pages per day and averaged 31.6 days to finish a book. The average audiobook took me only 6.9 days to complete, listening for an average 1.5 hours a day.

In an average year, I read 31.9 books, but that varied a lot. One year I only read 8, and another year I read 58.

I’ve consumed books in various formats—178 print books, 21 ebooks, 301 audiobooks on CD, 85 audiobooks on cassette (not many of those lately), and 52 downloaded audiobooks. Therefore, I’ve listened to 69% of the books and read the text of the remaining 31%.

If it sounds like I’m bragging, believe me, I’m not. I’m disappointed I didn’t read much more. This is an admission of failure, not a proud boast.

What sort of books do I read? I don’t note the genres in my spreadsheet, but much of the fiction is scifi. In nonfiction, I’m eclectic—all over the map.

In addition to the log, for the past 9 of those 20 years, I’ve posted reviews on Goodreads and Amazon of the books I read. That totals about 244 reviews. I’m not always kind in my reviews, but I try to be fair, noting strengths and weaknesses of each book. If I support other writers by reviewing their work, perhaps some will return the favor. Any review, whether good or bad, can help sales.

I’ve noticed my reading habits changing over the years. I used to read during my commute to and from work, either reading on the subway or listening to audiobooks in the car. I also read on the plane when traveling for work. Since my retirement, I’ve begun reading before breakfast, and still listen to audiobooks when traveling by car and I read on the plane when I fly.

Do you keep a record of the books you read? If not, should you start? Up to you, of course, but let me caution you first. Human nature is such that you get more of what you measure and less of what you don’t. If you start logging your reading, you will read more, but only at the expense of something else you’ll be doing less.

How does my reading data stack up against the average person? According to Gallup, the average American reads 12.6 books per year, the lowest average in 30 years, down from a high of 18.5 in 1999. The Penn Book Center found CEOs read a great deal, with Bill Gates reading about 50 books a year—a good goal.

There’s an app called Basmo that will log your reading for you. I’ve never tried it, but it looks easy to use, and it does all the spreadsheet calculating stuff. Using that app might inspire you to read more.

Without much effort, and with the aid of a log or logging app, you should be able to read much more than—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 29, 2023Poseidon's ScribePermalink

The 3 Types of Readers

In a 1920 essay, author Herman Hesse postulated there are three types of readers. Perhaps they’re more like stages of reading styles, since a person develops them sequentially. Or perhaps they’re more like modes, since a person will often switch between them. Let’s examine each one.

Reader 1

Hesse called this the naïve type. Here the reader follows the book, accepting every word without critical analysis. There is only the book and the reader, no author. The book stands above the reader in a hierarchy—the book leads, the reader follows. We all start out reading in this way, but often revert back to this method in later life.

Reader 2

A reader of this type is aware of the book’s author. This reader by turns loves or hates aspects of the book, and by extension, praises or blames its author. Hesse considered this reader both critic and interpreter, for this reader judges and creates meaning from the book’s text. This reader faces the book (and author) on the same level, in a hunter-prey relationship, with reader as hunter. Although you may call this a stage of reading, a level more advanced than Reader 1, it is also a mode, to which a reader can return at any time.

Reader 3

For this reader, a book serves only as a jumping-off point. Meanings, associations, connections, and fanciful interpretations arise in the mind, inspired by a paragraph, a sentence, a word, or the small arc capping the letter ‘r.’ A reader of this type thus transcends both book and author, leaving them beneath and behind. This reader needs no books at all, and finds them all equivalent. Of what use is a book when you can grasp eternal and infinite truths from the words on a gum wrapper?

Maria Popova provides a more in-depth description of these types in this post.

I’m indebted to Davood Gozli for his Youtube video where he expresses the three types in the vertical hierarchy I mentioned above.

Hannah Byrd Little, in this post, laments the decline of reading in our age of cellphones and social media. She believes young people today too often linger in the Type 3 Reader mode, with tweets and texts constituting the bulk of their reading matter, and serving only as springboards for connecting with online followers. The decline of reading deserves its own blogpost, and I’ll leave that for the future.

If we accept Hesse’s three-mode system, the question is, do you move from mode to mode, as he imagines most people do? If so, what percentage of time do you spend reading in each mode, and does that percentage vary by the subject matter you’re reading?

I’d estimate I spend about 20% of the time as Reader 1, absorbed by the book, oblivious to the world, willing to go where the book takes me. About 80% of the time I’m Reader 2, thinking critically about what I read. Maybe 2% of the time I enter Reader 3 mode, and then most often with poetry. I suspect the 4-to-1 ratio of time between Reader 2 and Reader 1 is consistent whether I’m reading fiction or non-fiction.

How about you? Do you accept Hesse’s classification of reading modes? Do you cycle between modes and, if so, what fraction of time do you spend in each mode?

I’m guessing you remained in Reader mode 2 while going through this post by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 27, 2022Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Don’t Read in Bed!

Many people read in bed at night. Researchers tell you it’s good for your sleep and overall health. I disagree. Let me explain.

First, I know all the reasons people urge you to read in bed. It helps you relax, stimulates your creativity, gives you more empathy, and makes you smarter. I’ve read blogs and articles by Maddie Thomas, Lilianna Hogan at WebMD, Jodi Helmer, and Dr. Michael Breus. Molly Cavanaugh even inflicts this practice on her children.

These people have it all wrong. Reading in bed is bad. No, I’m not talking about the blue light hazard. The danger I speak of is present whether you read ebooks or paper books.

No, I’m not talking about the supposed harm of reading horror stories or other unsettling books that might cause nightmares or insomnia. I’m talking about a peril lurking for you no matter what you read.

I’ll concede that science has shown reading in bed helps you sleep. True. I get that. But that’s not the point. Those researchers have it all backward.

My concern—my deep fear—isn’t about how reading affects sleep. I’m terrified about how sleep affects reading.

There’s not much research on that subject. Oh, there’s a paper called “The relationship between self-reported sleep quality and reading comprehension skills,” where scientists found a surprising result, that longer sleep times led to lower verbal efficiency, and poor sleep quality led to better reading comprehension.

But I’m not even talking about that. It’s not the amount of sleep that bothers me.

Here’s my scary theory. Our brains seem wired for pattern recognition. That skill enables us to form habits and cement them into routines and rituals.

If you read every night before bedtime, if you’ve developed and ingrained that habit, your brain has formed a solid link between reading and sleep.

That’s right. Your brain knows the pattern—seeing words means going night-night. You’ve made it a pleasurable pattern, thus a self-reinforcing one.

How do I know this? Where’s my research? Well, okay, I don’t have any studies to cite. The world cries out for experimental data on this vital subject. For all I know, researchers have tried, but as soon as they read their own paper, they fell asleep.

Where, you ask, is the danger? Who cares if your brain links reading with sleep?

Go ahead and think that, but don’t come crying to me when, during a meeting at work, you drop into slumberland when your boss displays a text-filled PowerPoint slide.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re driving, see stop sign, and pause to read it, only to fall asleep at the wheel.

Worst of all, and I can hardly bear to mention this unspeakable horror, it’s possible that, someday, you will fall asleep while reading a book written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 23, 2022Poseidon's ScribePermalink

How to Read an Anthology

The subject of this post might seem silly, even condescending. You already know how to read, or you wouldn’t have gotten this far into my post.

Perhaps I should have titled it ‘How to Get the Most Enjoyment Out of Reading an Anthology,’ but that’s too long and cumbersome.

I have some experience with anthologies. I’ve read many dozens of them, my stories have appeared in sixteen of them, and I’ve recently co-edited one. Allow me to share my recommended eight steps for thoroughly enjoying an anthology.

Read one of the stories. For most anthologies, the order doesn’t matter. The editors had reasons for organizing the stories as they did, but you can read them in any order.
Ponder the story you just read before going on to the next one. You might need this pondering time to ‘get’ what the author was saying, since it’s not always obvious right after reading.
Jot down some notes about the story, including its most memorable aspects and whether you liked it or not.
Repeat Steps 1 through 3 until you’ve finished the anthology.
Pick your favorite stories. Perhaps there are as many as five or as few as one, but I’m sure you’ll have favorites.
Write and post a review of the anthology online, perhaps at Goodreads or anobii or at the site of the bookseller where you got the book. In your review, don’t be afraid to mention your favorite stories by title and author name. Consider including brief comments about why you liked these stories. If you have comments about the anthology as a whole, include those too.
Look up, online, the authors of your favorite stories. See what else they’ve written that you might want to read next.
Contact those authors who are still alive and let them know how much you enjoyed their story, or ask any questions you may have. Most authors love hearing from fans.

I know this eight-step process seems much more difficult than simply reading the anthology and going on to the next book on your extensive ‘must read’ list. But the act of taking notes on the stories will help you remember them better. Writing reviews will, in time, make you a more discerning reader, able to extract more meaning and enjoyment from stories. Contacting favorite authors could result in good additions to your ‘must read’ list, books you’re sure to enjoy.

Now that you know how to read an anthology, may I recommend one? It’s 20,000 Leagues Remembered, co-edited by yours truly and just released by Pole to Pole Publishing. It’s a sesquicentennial tribute to Jules Verne’s amazing undersea masterwork, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. You can purchase it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, or Kobo.

You have to admit, the process I described is a fine way to read an anthology. You might even call it The Anthology-Reading Method of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 12, 2020Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Getting Through the 3 Filters

Let’s say you have a thought in your brain, a thought you want me to have in my brain also. Since you and I lack mental telepathy, we must settle for some other communication method. For our purposes today, we’ll say you’ve chosen written communication.

You convert that thought of yours into words of a standard language, a language you can write and I can read. You put those words into tangible form, either electronic or printed. Someone conveys your written document to me by some means. I read it, converting the words I read into a thought.

Will the thought in my brain match the one in yours exactly? Probably not. Considering the signal loss in the filters through which the thought passes on its way, it’s amazing two people can communicate at all.

The process is usually not as bad as the way I’ve dramatized it in the accompanying image. Still, it’s a less efficient transmission method than mental telepathy would likely be.

The part I’ve depicted as the “writing filter” consists of many things standing between pure thought and actual words. These include the clarity of your idea, your understanding of the meaning and connotation of words, your mood, your skill with language, your vocabulary, etc.

I’ve named the filter in the middle the “copying filter” and it represents any errors that creep into the text between the time you write it and the time I read it. For e-books, there could be a transmission error and some text becomes scrambled. For paper books, there could be smudges, spills, or torn pages that make some of the text difficult to read. Luckily, this filter usually results in negligible signal loss.

The “reading filter” is akin to the writing filter, but it’s everything between the words I read and the thoughts they cause in my brain. These include my understanding of words, my mood, my vocabulary, my ability to interpret meanings on several levels, my attention span, my life experiences, etc.

Remember, your goal was to create a thought in my brain matching the thought in yours. What can you do to increase the likelihood of the thoughts being identical? You can’t do anything about my reading filter; that’s solely up to me. You usually can’t do much about the copying filter, and it’s not much of a filter anyway.

Your focus needs to be on the writing filter within you, the only part of the process under your control. Work toward clear ideas, firm understanding of word meanings, mastery of language, increased vocabulary, and keeping your passing emotions from distorting your writing.

The best authors have nearly transparent writing filters resulting in negligible signal loss. That’s your goal.

I touched on this topic in a previous post, and neuroscientist Livia Blackburne explored these transmission filters in the context of getting bad reviews, in a guest post on Joanna Penn’s website, well worth the read.

Good luck, Writer! Improve the transparency of your writing filter so you can convey thoughts crisply to the world, and especially to—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 30, 2017Poseidon's ScribePermalink

As Hobbies Go…

For me, writing fiction is a hobby. Maybe it’s the same for you. I figured I’d do a little comparison of writing to other hobbies you (and I) might have chosen instead.

Wikipedia defines a hobby as “an activity, interest, enthusiasm, or amateur pastime that is undertaken for pleasure or relaxation, typically done during one’s leisure time.” The entry categorizes hobbies as Collection, Competition, or Observation hobbies, with indoor and outdoor subsets of each. Writing, though it usually occurs indoors, doesn’t fit cleanly in any of the prime categories, since it’s not really about collection, competition, or observation (though it has elements of each).

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a definitive study of the most popular hobbies, and the various website lists are all different. On the lists I’ve found, the following hobbies seem to keep cropping up as the most prevalent: Reading, Watching TV, Family time, Fishing, Going to movies, Gardening, Computer activities, Walking, Team Sports, Exercise, Renting movies, Listening to music, Golf, Traveling, and Entertaining.

I was intrigued to see Reading as #1 in a couple of lists; great news for writers! I also noticed how the most popular hobbies are low- or no-cost activities; no wonder they’re popular!

I found a list of hobbies that actually make money, and writing comes in at #3 on that list: Web design, Photography, Writing/Editing, Crafts, Coaching sports, Playing guitar, Organizing, Baking, Walking Dogs, and Shopping.

By definition, hobbies are for pleasure and relaxation, not necessarily for earning money, but it is an added bonus if your hobby pays you. And writing certainly can. For many writers, their dream is to shift their hobby to their livelihood, and that is possible.

How, then, does writing stack up against other hobbies? Some may consider these to be its disadvantages:
• It’s solitary
• It’s sedentary
• It requires some talent, or the willingness to develop talent
• It may take years before you’re published, or paid for your writing

Regarding those first two, you could always supplement with another hobby to make up for them.

On the positive side, writing has the following advantages:
• As discussed already, you can earn money
• It’s relaxing
• It’s a wonderful outlet for creative impulses; you create people and worlds
• There are few joys that can compare with getting a story accepted, and then seeing your name in print

As hobbies go, writing may not be for everyone, but you might end up loving it as much as—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 23, 2014Poseidon's ScribePermalink

The Trick Is…

Remember the TV show ‘Cosmos?’ No, not the new one starring Neil deGrasse Tyson (though I enjoyed that too). I mean the original Cosmos, starring Carl Sagan. There’s a brief part of one episode that’s stuck in my mind for all the decades since that show first aired.

You can see the episode here and the part I recalled is from time 41:45 to 42:30.

In the clip, Carl Sagan is standing in a library. He says, if you read one book a week, over a normal human lifespan you can read only a few thousand books. (50 books per year times 70 years would be 3500 books.) He then paces off a distance across some library shelves to indicate that many books.

After remarking on how that’s only a tenth of a percent of the content of a library, he then says, “The trick is to know which books to read.”

That’s it. No follow-up. He goes on to discuss other things.

Thanks, Dr. Sagan, for clearing up that mystery of the universe.

How about telling us which books? Is there a list somewhere? Don’t just leave us with “the trick is…” without solving it for us!

Okay, okay. I do really like Carl Sagan, and loved the show. And I get what he was saying. His main message is that our lives are too short to permit soaking up all of human knowledge. As you choose books to read, go in with the understanding that you ain’t gonna read ‘em all.

Moreover, there can’t be one right answer to the question of which books to read. There are billions and billions of answers. (Yes, I had to say that.)

But allow me to take up Dr. Sagan’s challenge, and to set up some criteria for selecting books to read, given that you can’t read ‘em all. Here’s my answer to “which books to read:”

Read books you think you’ll enjoy. This is the most important criteria, since if you don’t like reading, you’ll stop. You’ll never come close to reading a book a week for life.

Read some classics, on occasion. They represent the greatest wisdom of the ages, and they have persisted because their value and relevance is timeless.

Read way outside your interest area, on occasion. This helps broaden your knowledge, and you never know when one such book might spark a new passion for you. Try to eventually cover the whole Dewey Decimal System, and all fiction genres.

Read both fiction and non-fiction. You can choose the percentage of each according to your preferences, but I think there’s value in both.

Read books by authors you enjoy, and also give different authors a chance. There’s a strong temptation to keep reading books by the same author. After all, you liked the previous one; chances are you’ll like the next one. That’s fine, but it’s okay to read books by authors who are new to you, every once in a while.

Give each book you select a chance, but don’t be afraid to abandon it. Read past page one; often the value of a book won’t become apparent until later. However, if you’re well into the book and getting nothing out of it, stop and get another. Your lifespan is too limited and there are too many better books for you to slog through reading a bad one.

That’s it, my attempt to respond to Dr. Sagan’s challenge to all of us, to figure out which books to read. They may not be the best criteria in the cosmos, but they’re good enough for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 9, 2014Poseidon's ScribePermalink

The Publishing Times, They Are A’Changin’

To distort a line from a Bob Dylan song, times are indeed a’changin’ in the publishing industry. In the long march from storytellers to clay tablets to papyrus scrolls to bound books to electronic books, each technology has brought a revolution and we’re now in the middle of one.

After Gutenberg’s printing press and right up until the Internet, the book publishing industry had optimized into a fairly lean and stable operation, full of specialized tasks. Each task was fairly well understood.

The writer wrote, and sought an agent. The agent sought a publishing house and handled all the contractual details for the writer. At the publishing house, of which there were only a few big ones, the editor polished the prose. Upon agreement about the text, the publisher took care of cover design, printing, distribution, and marketing to booksellers. The bookseller catered to the reading public, offering books for sale from their stores.

Despite all the middlemen, that process had been pretty well honed such that readers could still obtain books inexpensively.

With the advent of the Internet, much has changed, and it’s got all of the middlemen wondering what their future role will be, if any.

For the writer, there are software word processors and Internet research options, but not much else has changed. A writer still must create the prose.

At the other end, the reader has more options, including e-readers and audiobooks, but for the most part reading is unchanged.

But agents, editors, cover designers, marketers, distributors, and booksellers are all left wondering what’s going to happen to them. These days, writers can connect directly with readers, bypassing all the former steps. An author can work with a single website such as Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, and others, to get e-books directly to the reading public.

These websites offer many services, but the writer must do most of the tasks formerly accomplished by middlemen. This includes reviewing the contract, editing, cover design, and marketing.

So where is all this going? At what sort of equilibrium state will all this turmoil settle out?

It may be too early to tell, but I think there will be places for all the publishing middlemen in the future, assuming they adapt to an Internet-based world. Some writers still need agents, editors, cover designers, and distributors. Some readers still want bound books. Much like the continued (but low) demand for horseshoes and oil lamps, there will be niche markets for all these functions.

As for me, I have yet to take the full plunge into self-publishing. So far, with my short stories, I’ve been dealing with an independent ebook publisher, and with publishers of anthologies.

If Bob Dylan’s right, and the times they are a’changin’, where do you think the book publishing industry is headed? What change would you like to see? Leave me a comment and perhaps we can change things together, just you and—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 29, 2013Poseidon's ScribePermalink

The Life Story of a Short Story

Hello. I’m a short story. Since Poseidon’s Scribe never got around to blogging about the whole short story process, he invited me to guest blog today. My title is “Alexander’s Odyssey,” and I was written by Steven R. Southard. My life story is typical of other tales, and might be obvious to many of you, but the steps weren’t clear to Steve when he started.

1. Idea. I started as an idea. You did too, I suppose, but with stories you only need one human with an idea, if you know what I mean. Getting a story idea isn’t as difficult as most believe. Ideas are all around you.

2. Outline. This can take many forms, not just the standard I-A-1-a-(1) type. It can be a mind-map, for example. An outline can keep you focused as you write, but don’t be afraid to deviate from it if the story takes off in a different direction. Steve used an outline for me, but if you don’t want to, just skip this step.

3. Research. You might have to conduct research for your story like Steve did for me. Use the most authoritative sources you can. Steve didn’t include all the researched data when writing me, just a tiny fraction. You might enjoy research, but don’t get stuck at this stage. At some point, enough is enough.

4. First Draft. Steve wrote my first draft fast, without caring about quality. He didn’t even stop to correct typos. He got it all down, the emotions, the drama, and the character interactions.

5. Edit. Steve did several drafts of me where he corrected typos; deleted extraneous stuff; added in foreshadowing, metaphors, similes, and symbolism, etc. Don’t get stuck at this stage either; some stories never even get submitted.

6. Submit. Steve located a suitable market, and had to modify me a bit to conform to the submission guidelines. After much hesitation, he submitted me. These days, you writers have the option of self-publishing us stories, so you could skip this step.

7. Rejection. Actually, I didn’t get rejected the first time, but I know the feeling. I don’t understand why writers take rejection so personally; the editor is rejecting me, not you. Just shake it off and submit your story to some other market. Keep us moving!

8. Accept. I was pretty happy when an anthology editor accepted me, but Steve was positively giddy. I’d never seen him so thrilled and, frankly, the details are embarrassing, so I’ll just move on.

9. Rewrite. The editor suggested Steve change me a bit. He agreed the changes would do me good, and made them. I’ve seen Steve agonize over suggested changes to other stories, though. I’ve even seen him push back against the editor. In the end, they always reach agreement and Steve signs the contracts. I guess he could always refuse and walk away if he wanted.

10. Launch. These days, publishers don’t just publish us, they launch us. It does make me feel like a rocket going off, sort of. Again, Steve seems really happy when a story launches, and again it’s awkward to watch.

11. Market. If I’d been picked up by one of the top publishing houses, they’d spread the word about me. Steve didn’t send me there, so he had to do it. Boy, does he hate that part, though I’ve heard some authors like marketing. Use social media, newsletters, writing conferences—anything to advertise.

12. Read. My favorite step. When a reader buys me and reads me cover to cover, that’s what I live for.

13. Reprint. When the rights to me reverted back to Steve, he submitted me for publication as a reprint. After three rejects, another market accepted me, but asked for significant changes. My reprint version states where and when I was published the first time.