Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Fans are one of the greatest rewards of being a writer. It wouldn’t take much, since there’s so little money in publishing, but still. A loyal following of readers provides many benefits beyond book sales. Fans can provide a warm welcome at a convention, or a couch to crash on during a book tour, or a seething army to smite your critics online. Inspiring this loyalty doesn’t happen overnight, even for bestselling authors. Let me show you what it takes:

Business Cards: First, print some business cards listing all the places your fans can interact with you–your website, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal…wow, Livejournal’s still around, huh? You may as well list a Hotmail address…oh, you’ve got one of those too, huh? Wow.

Business cards double as bookmarks, and are great to give out at readings, as tips at restaurants, to the cashier at the grocery store. One trick I like to use is to print them on the back of coupons. Even if they don’t buy your book right away, they’ll forever associate you with that one time you got them 20% off a pint of Chunky Monkey.

Social Media: Twitter, Facebook, and blogs allow you to reach your fans without having to actually be in the same room with them, proving that there has never been a better time in history to be a writer. Set up a discussion board on your website so fans will have a place to praise you while they get into screaming matches over unrelated minutiae. Ask readers to Instagram your book in different places around the world, whether that’s in a far-away pub, on a tropical beach, or next to the toilet. Get in Twitter flame wars with nincompoops who misunderstood the Christ symbolism you put in Chapter 7 that should have been INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS, JERRY!

Fan Fiction: You’ll know you have some dedicated fans when they start writing fan fiction about your work. If you want to encourage it, publicly state how flattered you are that your fans care enough to write a nonsensical alternate ending or a poorly conceived spin-off. If you really want to encourage it, tell them that you hate fan fiction, and create a pretend law firm to threaten legal action. Pro tip: Set yourself up for success by planting clues in your manuscript about which characters might make good slash fiction pairings.

Sponsorships: Make your fans feel like they’re part of your book by naming characters after them. All you ask in return is a lot of money. For $1,000, I’ll name a character after you. For $1,500, I’ll make it an interesting character. James Patterson does an auction, then donates the proceeds to charity. You know what a good charity is? Working writers like yourself. If you could afford to spread money around to the unfortunate, you wouldn’t be reading this article.

Contests: Ever wonder what a movie adaptation of your book would look like? Don’t wait around to sell the movie rights. Have a contest for a fan-made film! Having trouble fleshing out a character? Give away some random bauble from your desk for the best fan art. Staging a contest combines the exhilaration of finding diamonds in the rough with the dedication and production costs of a sweatshop.

Live Readings: You can buy a book, download an ebook, and photocopy an entire novel at your office copy room after 5 p.m., but you can’t download the feeling of seeing your favorite author give a live reading. If you’ve already had a book launch party, set up some “just because” readings in local bookstores, with whom you’ve probably already got a working relationship. “Jeez, it’s that guy again,” they’ll say. Coffee shops are good spots, too—they have to conduct at least one open-mic night a week to maintain their coffee license. If they’re nice, they may let you leave some copies to sell by the cash register. Make sure to give them the business, though. Tip well, and order something complicated enough that they can make fancy foam art with it. This is what they live for.

If you’ve followed my advice, you should now have a fandom that would rival Firefly. If not, clearly it’s because your writing isn’t that good. That is the only other possible explanation. Good luck!

Have any tips for building your fan base that you want to share? Let us know in the comments!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Every author strives for greatness. You’ll have to invest thousands of hours honing your craft and dealing with rejection, though, if you want to be mentioned among the immortals. Or just find one of the immortals and punch them.

Ernest Hemingway vs. Wallace Stevens. John Updike vs. Salman Rushdie. Mary McCarthy vs. Lillian Hellman. A good literary feud can be as exciting as the authors’ books. You may think you already need to be a famous author to have a noteworthy spat. This is the twenty-first century, bub. Between cons, book tours, and social media, it’s never been easier to harass your idols in public.

Step 1: Choose Your Opponent

If you already have author enemies, this will be easy. If you don’t have enemies, make some. With a personality like yours, trust me, you’re waaaaaay ahead of the game on this one, pal.

Many a feud has resulted from personal slights; Paul Theroux fantasized daily about V.S. Naipaul dying in a fire because Naipaul auctioned off a personalized copy of Theroux’s book. Think back to when an author offended you. Did a famous author once flag your blog comment for spam  just because it was blatant advertising for your self-published memoir? Sounds to me like Mr. Famous has let fame go to his head. The Internet has expedited personal slights the way the Panama Canal sped up international shipping. Somewhere, my special little snowflake, there’s a writer who irritates you in ways you never thought possible. When you find them, you’ll know your mutual loathing was meant to be.

Step 2: Get Ready to Rumble

You’ve got your target, but it’s not a feud until both parties attack. You need to provoke a response. Start with a snarky review of their book. It is not necessary to have read the book beforehand. In fact, the more incoherent the review, the more likely you’ll goad them into battle. The Faulkner estate was very quick to respond when I said “A Rose for Emily” would’ve been better if the zombies had won.

Feuds occasionally happen over innocent misunderstandings, but you’ll have a better success rate with willful misunderstandings. Go ahead and read sinister intent into your opponent’s behavior; you can safely assume their protagonist’s love of peanut butter crackers alludes to severe flaws in the author’s character. It’s hard to properly antagonize a person of letters over a difference of opinion. It’s much easier when you realize they’re really a crypto-fascist baby-eater.

Step 3: Attack!

Shots have been fired and the feud is on. Time to make your battle plan:

• Let slip the tweets of war. The Internet is a big wrestling ring where the ref’s been knocked out, and your Twitter followers are your manager sneaking behind your opponent with a steel chair. Let your followers know what an ignoramus your opponent is, then sit back, tent your fingers, and chuckle to yourself as they swarm like angry hornets. Once your opponent is softened up, engage them directly.
  • If you have more Twitter followers than them: Inform them that the marketplace of ideas has deemed you more relevant and important. The inferiority of their ideas is a foregone conclusion.
  • If you have fewer followers (much more likely; I’ve read your tweets): Your opponent is a sheep who caters to the lowest-common denominator. They probably like Nickelback and prefer McDonald’s over Five Guys burgers, too.
• Subvert Godwin’s Law. If your argument takes place online, at some point, one of you will call the other a Nazi. This is a law of the Internet. Just remember there are a variety of dictatorships, military juntas, and kleptocracies to which you can compare your opponent, so don’t pigeonhole yourself.
• Hit them where it hurts. If they write literary fiction, say their work is pretentious and boring. If they write sci-fi, say that their work is a landfill of genre cliches. If your arch rival is a poet, you need to raise your standards.

Step 4: Finish Him! Or Her! Or Something!

Your opponent is dazed and stumbling around the ring. Time to hit them with the People’s Elbow and claim your prize. Use any or all of these tactics to finish them off.

• A legendary zinger. Words are a writer’s best weapon. Norman Mailer beat Gore Vidal senseless and lost because of Vidal’s quip, “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.” You need something just as pithy. Something like, “There’s two kinds of people: rubber and glue. And you’re looking pretty sticky, my friend.” Not that one, of course. That’s mine.
• Pour your drink on their head. The most writerly way to dis someone without writing anything. Self-explanatory and easy to execute; you’re a writer, so you’re probably holding a cocktail right now.
• Updog them. If you successfully updog your opponent, you are declared the winner, and are entitled to receive non-stop high-fives for the next ninety minutes. (If you’re not sure what updog is, please visit their website.)
• Technical knockout. No matter how cogent their argument, how scathing their rebuke, it is entirely invalid if they make a single spelling or grammatical error.
• Declare victory. Talk about how viciously you’re owning them. Do this as early in the feud as possible. It will annoy them, which plays right into your hands.

You now know the basics of authorial antagonism. If you want more practice, for a small fee I’ll be happy to feud with you. For a slightly larger fee, I’ll let you win. Go forth and antagonize! Someday soon, you’ll be world renowned as the jerk who keeps picking fights with other writers. We should all be so lucky.

What’s your go-to move in a literary feud? Who would you like to feud with? Let us know in the comments.

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

They say book tours don’t sell books. In fact, they can actually cost authors a lot of money. So why bother? Well, you’re making connections with readers and building your brand and a bunch of other slick-sounding, unquantifiable marketing-speak. If you want to be a big-shot author, you need to act the part, and that means taking your show on the road. Think of a book tour as a tax-write-off-able vacation where people tell you how awesome you are every night. Plus, you have a few days away from your family and those brats of yours, so you can hear yourself think for once. For that kind of payoff, you can’t afford not to go. Here’s everything you need to know to book your own book tour.

Six Months Prior to Tour

• Set a budget.
• Ask your publisher about kicking in some money for—wow, that was a faster rejection than when you sent that butterfly erotica story you wrote to the New Yorker.
• Adjust budget, start buying packs of ramen noodles.

Five Months Prior to Tour

• Choose cities. Do you mention any cities in particular in your book? Make sure to hit those. If you set your book in a faraway city, maybe ask your publisher one more time for—okay, still no, that’s fine.
• Contact venues and explain to them that you’re a famous author who wants to have a reading/signing in their establishment. Tell them how many people will be there. You’re not lying when you say fifty people, you’re demonstrating the power of positive thinking. Besides, you’ll be long gone before they can do anything to you. Contact the following types of venues:
  • Bookstores. Duh.
  • Schools. Kids have disposable income, and best of all, it’s a captive audience. They literally can’t leave! Also, they’ll find your unremarkable adult achievements like owning a car and wearing a sport coat as the hallmarks of a successful author.
  • Libraries. Just kidding! Screw them. Sure, library patrons love books. What they don’t love is paying for books. You’re far too busy for those moochers.
  • Disneyland. Shot in the dark. Maybe they’ll let you in free? I dunno, worth a shot.

Two Months Prior to Tour

• Rope a friend into being your tour manager. You’ll immediately seem more important—it’s the makings of your own entourage! Choose your tour manager carefully. It should be someone who has good people skills, or a really nice car. Make it clear that you have full control over the stereo at all times on account of your creative process.

A Week Prior to Tour

• Think back on all the stuff you forgot to do in the last few months.
• Start packing. Check the weather and carefully plan the outfits you’ll wear at each reading. Plan inexpensive meals like sandwiches and trail mix so you can have maximum energy on a minimum budget.
• Maybe finally get around to telling your boss you’ll be out for a couple weeks.

One Day Prior to Tour

• Realize you put off packing all week. Grab whatever clothing is within easy reach and stuff it into a plastic garbage bag. Buy whatever chips and Little Debbie snacks catch your eye at the gas station.
• Maybe finally get around to telling your kids and spouse you’ll be out for a couple weeks.

Day One

• Have a signing at your local bookstore to kick things off. Feel a sense of smug superiority to all those poor suckers who have to get up and go to work tomorrow.
• Have drinks with friends and well-wishers to celebrate a great reading, and weeks’ worth of great readings to come.

Day Two

• Wake up two hours late, panicking that you’re already behind schedule.
• Cajole your tour manager into driving faster than advisable in order to make your next tour stop on time.
• Kick yourself for scheduling your next reading 400 miles from home the very next day.
• Show up at the bookstore seven minutes late. Give your reading in a cold sweat. Have your tour manager smooth things over with store management.
• Sign books, receive congratulations from attendees.
• Go out for drinks with your new fans, toasting a great night, and even better nights just down the road.

Day Three

• Damn it, not again.

Day Four and Beyond

• Notice that you’re spending money faster than you thought you would—you’d counted on more sales and more fans buying you drinks, rather than having to bribe people with drinks to get them to go to your reading.
• At each reading, have your tour manager quietly ask around about couch surfing at a fan’s house. Remember there’s an unspoken expectation that if a fan lets you into their house, they’re tacitly approving a party, and giving you full run of the fridge. Don’t worry about mentioning this to your hosts, they already know. All they ask in return is that you leave a signed copy of your book next to your pile of wet towels and soiled sheets.

Coming Home

• Fight off encroaching depression over returning to your daily life and obligations.
• Apologize to your tour manager. Trust me, you’ll need to.
• Notice how many unsold books you still have. Wince as you look at your credit card statement. Buy mouth guard to prevent grinding your teeth.

And that’s it! You’ve done your first book tour. Time to start work on that next book, so you can go out and do it all again!

What are your bright ideas for planning a book tour? If you’ve been on tour, what are your survival strategies? Let us know in the comments!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Story is driven by conflict and action. This, of course, does not necessarily mean fisticuffs and car chases. But it should. If books weren’t meant to have lots of violence, then they wouldn’t have coined such a high-fallutin’ literary word like “defenestrate” to mean “chuck somebody out a window.” Here are the steps you’ll need to add some punch to your fight scenes.

Before We Begin

First, how about giving me a high-five for that “add some punch” segue right there? Was that on point or what?

Get Fired Up!

To write a proper fight scene, you need to be in a fightin’ frame of mind. Queue up Guile’s Theme from Street Fighter II to set the mood. (Side note: I’m listening to Guile’s Theme as I write this column. It’s the soundtrack to everything I write. Sonic boom!)

Research

Those three months of karate you took after school in fifth grade are finally about to pay off! Learning a martial art is the culmination of years of practice, discipline, and hard work. If you had that kind of work ethic, you’d have already finished writing this book by now. When it comes to turning your hero into a martial artiste, here are some basics:

• Wisecracks are standard in the curricula in most martial arts, so make sure your character uses them when showing off what she’s learned.
• When in doubt, just imply that your hero knows ALL martial arts. How or where your hero found the time to learn them all while getting straight As in school, raising her kid brother by herself, and inventing a time machine is beside the point.
• If you don’t know enough details about any particular martial art, just make up your own. The Spinny Flip Kick is a common move for a black belt in flip fighting. That’s the martial art my characters use in my WIP, Flip Fighting.

Training

It is sometimes necessary to show how your hero became such a badass in the first place. Whether your hero is a misfit teen from Reseda, a misfit teen from a Tatooine moisture farm, or a misfit teen living in a NYC sewer with his fellow mutated freaks, it’s time to learn valuable lessons from a wise, inscrutable, and maybe racially problematic sensei. Cliché you say? Try classic, bub. It’s the tried-and-true training montage you’ve seen a bajillion times before. There’s no better way to reduce years of grueling practice and serious personal sacrifice to a few moments’ breezy entertainment.

And what’s a montage without music? How often do you work out without music? Your characters should be no different. I know just the tune.

Violence Builds Character

A fight is a story in itself, which means your characters should grow between the beginning of the fight and the end. For instance, if your hero starts the fight as a taciturn badass, by the end of the fight he should be a taciturn mega-badass. That’s something we writers call character development.

Timing

Real-life fights happen very quickly—often less than a minute from start to finish. Who wants that? That’s not even enough time for the combatants to properly flip tables and throw their opponent into the shelves of liquor bottles behind the bar. Go ahead and stretch your fight scenes out. Remember that violence sells. Even if it’s bad, people will keep turning pages. As I’ve learned from watching Dragon Ball Z, the first five minutes of a fight is just two combatants staring at each other. Sometimes, two fighters will just stare at each other for three solid episodes. This technique comes in handy if you need to pad out your book, or if you’re writing a series.

Choreography

Readers can’t see what’s happening, so you’ll have to help them out. Catalogue every punch, kick, and sword strike so they know what’s happening. Some pedant out there is just waiting to criticize you because your character didn’t know the EXACT RIGHT FORM for Eagle’s Claw style. The only way to fend him off is to show your work. And I do mean work, because it’s going to feel like a slog to write. And probably to read. The important thing, though, is that you preemptively shut up critics who may or may not exist and may or may not ever read your work.

Let’s Get it On!

When the fight begins, your characters should be in an emotionally heightened state. Adrenaline is flooding their systems. When your brain senses danger, it hands the controls over to your lizard brain, the amygdala, which invokes responses like fight, flight, and awesome one-liners.

Setting

Don’t forget the silent participant of every fight, the setting. The world of entertainment is full of fights set in generic gray industrial areas that add little to the fight itself. This probably means there’s an important reason for doing it, so you should do the same. Writers also love to stage fight scenes in bars. This derives from the classic bar game, “Punch the Author.”

Aftermath

Fights hurt. People are left bruised and broken and bloodied, and that takes time to recover. So make sure to write in a magic healing potion that completely resets them after every battle. Don’t forget about emotional scars—remorse over breaking someone’s spine; fear that your hero attacked the wrong guy; your hero second guessing whether he’s a good person. These reactions have no place in your book. It’s crucial that there are no consequences to violence whatsoever. If there were, then your hero might not be able to handle the eight more fight scenes you’ve plotted for him. Better get ready.

What are your secrets to writing a good fight scene? Share your best finishing moves in the comments.

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Your career is taking off–someone asked you to blurb their book! Yes, you! No, I can’t believe it either! I mean, out of all the authors available who have better sales and a bigger following and…well anyway, they picked you, so nice job.

This is a big opportunity. Blurbing a book lets you seize a chunk of someone else’s life’s work and make it all about you. Furthermore, if people are asking you for an endorsement, you’re now a tastemaker, subtly steering the zeitgeist toward works of true literary quality. The resemblance of said works to your own books is purely coincidental.

Like any important endeavor, there’s the distinct possibility you might screw it up, thereby trashing not only your own career, but that of a fellow author whose only crime was believing in you. Not sure what to do next? Aren’t you lucky you have me to tell you!

Step 1: Agree to Blurb Every Book You Possibly Can

Remember when you were desperately begging every author you’d ever met to say just one nice thing about your novel? Just one?! Don’t make other writers go through that. You can be sure that if someone’s asking you for a blurb, they’ve already been turned down by half the RWA. When you come across an author who’s so, shall we say, highly motivated, you can ask for a few perks. I don’t mean anything fancy, just get the author to promise that your blurb will appear before any other author’s on the jacket. You’re doing them a favor, after all, so it wouldn’t kill them to work with you a little, amirite? No need to be pushy, but don’t be bashful either; with the right combination of charm and passive aggression, they’ll let you pick the font and weigh in on the cover design.

Step 2: Read the Book

Now that the author has agreed to your demands, it’s time to read the book. This is of utmost importance, because who would ever blurb a book they haven’t read? It’s unthinkable, even though such a thing would be impossible to prove, and even if it wasn’t, the offender would face no consequences whatsoever. Oh yes, you’ll definitely read every word.

Step 3: Writing the Blurb

We all only have so many good words in our brains. Do you really want to use your literary wordlotment on someone else’s work?

Save your precious brainpower by making a template for your testimonials. Use a structure like the one below and the headache of endorsing a book will be as fun as doing Mad Libs.

[TITLE] by [AUTHOR] is __________

(choose one)

1. an emotional tour-de-force
2. a pure laugh riot
3. a chilling vision of things to come
4. a rollicking adventure
5. a non-stop rollercoaster ride (the loop-de-loop kind, even; don’t get me wrong, though, wooden coasters are cool, too)
6. more suspenseful than when your in-laws’ car won’t start just as they’re about to head home
7. a cry for help
8. sturdily bound, printed in an inoffensive typeface

that will leave you __________

1. on the edge of your seat!
2. behind at the scene of the crime, police sirens rapidly approaching.
3. begging for more!
4. drowning in your own tears :'(
5. staring blankly into the void, waiting for death.
6. mentally casting the movie adaptation.
7. reaching for a stiff drink.
8. home alone on Christmas, defending the house against incompetent burglars.

Do yourself a favor and __________

1. buy this book.
2. buy two of this book.
3. at least pirate the ebook version.
4. call up the New York Times and politely ask if they could please help you understand why they only gave the author’s last book two stars despite its obvious brilliance, and could they perhaps run a correction and apology.
5. maybe also pick up my book, which is kinda similar and has a 3.81 on Goodreads.

To show that I practice what I preach, I will happily volunteer to blurb your book using the template above. Just think what an endorsement from famous author Bill Ferris can do for your career! You don’t want to overtax your brain, though, so don’t think too hard.

Have you ever blurbed someone’s book? Want to blurb this here column? Indulge yourself in the comments section!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Twitter dot com contains several hashtags designed to unite authors, agents, and editors in publishing bliss, or failing that, contractual obligation. You too can launch your publishing career by tweeting. Simply cram 100,000 words and six years of hard work into 140 characters. I’ll show you how.

Anatomy of a Twitter Pitch

A Twitter pitch consists of a concise hook to trick entice people to read your book. It’s accompanied by a #hashtag specific to each particular pitch event–examples include #pitmad, #pitchmas, and #pbpitch. Editors and agents search through tweets bearing that hashtag to find thousands of thirsty authors hoping somebody, anybody will want to read their book. If an agent or editor stars (or, in Twitter parlance, “favoritizes”) your pitch, you win the grand prize of getting to submit a query directly to their own private slushpile just like everybody else does.

Important note: Another popular hashtag is #MSWL (Manuscript Wish List), which is NOT a Twitter pitch contest. Rather, it’s where editors and agents list what types of manuscripts they’d like to read. You know what kind of book they’d REALLY like to see? Yours. Just go ahead and send it to them. They’ll admire your initiative.

Crafting Your Pitch

A good Twitter pitch reduces a story to its juiciest, most primal elements. It’s gotta have a protagonist, a conflict, and most importantly, the correct hashtag. Here are some examples to give you an idea:

The Lord of the Rings
The chosen one fulfills the prophecy to defeat the evil overlord. #pitchmas

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The chosen ones fulfill the prophecy to defeat the evil overlord. #pitmad

Now that you know the format, write pitches for other popular media for extra practice:

“There’s a Hole in the Bucket”
Liza and Henry relate a recent spat to their marriage counselor. #pitchthing

“A Boy Named Sue”
A son overcomes a lifetime of adversity to reunite with his estranged father. #pitchandcatch

Ulysses
An MFA student tries to impress girls at a party by pretending to have read a literary masterpiece. #pitfall

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
The chosen one is filled with metaphysical microbes, becomes the evil overlord. #pitachips

Advanced Pitching Techniques

• Twitter lets you post images, so just upload a photo of your full query letter, synopsis, and first five pages. Did I just blow your mind? In fact, I did.
• Take your query letter and break it into several tweets. If serial novels are a thing, why not a serial query letter? You’re so creative!
• Don’t address pitches directly to specific agents. This is a rookie mistake. Instead, call their office to let them know your Twitter pitch is available online.
• Tweet encouragement to your fellow writers by sending them good vibes via @ mentions. For example, “@author_sapien1942 your premise is pretty…interesting. Sounds like you’ve probably spent a lot of time on it.” Or perhaps, “Hey @burgermaxxxxx that sounds like a really good start. Keep writing!”

You’re now ready to pitch your own book. Remember that it’s a crowded field, so you may need to tweet your pitch a couple dozen times or so. These pitch contests happen several times a year, so you could end up sending hundreds of these. Any one of them could be the one that gets you signed, so think positive and get your hopes sky-high each time.

Do you have any pitching success stories to share? What are your best tips? Don’t be stingy, spread your knowledge in the comments!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Here’s the good news. You’ve sold your book! The bad news: Your publisher needs a photo of you for the jacket. Now before you get mad that I’m calling you ugly, rest assured I’m not. All I’m saying is that you’re an incompetent photographer who doesn’t know the difference between focus and an F-stop (or whether that analogy I just made even uses real photo terminology).

I talked briefly about author photos before, but now I’m sharing the primo tips that’ll mean the difference between looking like a successful famous author, or some poseur who ironed some elbow patches onto a thrift-store suit jacket.

What is an Author Photo?

Let’s start with why we’re going through this rigmarole. An author photo is a selling tool designed to let your fans know what you look like so they can properly throw themselves at you when they see you. To do that, you’ll need to…

Hire a Photographer

No, that blurry selfie you use for your Twitter avatar isn’t going to cut it. It’s time to go to a professional. That means someone with AT MINIMUM 500 followers on Instagram. This will not come cheap, but it’ll be the best twenty-bucks-plus-a-case-of-Pabst you’ll ever spend.

Any reputable photographer should be able to guarantee you’ll get some action as a result of this photo. Ask them about this specifically.

Set the Mood

The best time to take a photo is during the “magic hour”–the time just before sunset, when the light is redder, softer, and more flattering. Basically, around happy hour. Knock back a couple brewskis in during the shoot to turn yourself from a dour, desperate, struggling writer into a delightfully eccentric raconteur.

What to Bring

Create your own “author photo booth” and bring a variety of writerly props so you’ll have options. Some suggestions to get you started:

• coffee mug
• typewriter
• quill pen
• assortment of pipes, with tobacco
• jacket with elbow patches
• no fewer than three hounds
• Gibson Flying V guitar
• fake Hemingway beard
• working wood fireplace
• Suit and tie fashioned from pages of Finnegans Wake
• Agatha Christie’s Remington Home Portable typewriter, with certificate of authenticity.

Say Cheese!

When the shutter starts to…I don’t know, shut, I suppose…put on your best face. The key is to smize. I learned this from watching America’s Next Top Model. Smizing means to smile with your eyes. If your mouth is grinning but your eyes look like a dead, soulless void through which you watch your life passing you by, people can tell, so make sure to look at happy things like people high-fiving each other. Your eyes can do lots of facial expressions, including

• Frize is a mashup of frown and eyes. It’s an easy expression to pull off if you concentrate on how much this photoshoot is costing you.
• Winze is wincing with your eyes. Achieve this expression by stabbing yourself in the leg with a pushpin.
• Blize means to blink with your eyes. Just wink both eyes at once.
• Sneepers is sneezing with your peepers–basically, shutting your eyes reflexively so they don’t pop out of your skull.
• Brizebrows is brooding with your eyebrows, I guess.
• Grimince Pies combines grimace with “mince pies,” cockney rhyming slang for eyes. Get this look by listening to Dick Van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins.

Final Touch-up

Ah. That awkward moment when you see the proofs, and it’s apparent that as your fame has grown, so too has your waistline. I recommend calisthenics. Simply open your photo in PhotoShop and streeetch it vertically. Now you’re thinner and taller!

You’re ready to take an amazing author photo. Now your biggest problem is how you’ll have time to write your next book with all those hotties fawning all over you.

Do you have any secrets for getting your good side? Share them in the comments!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

I heard you’re taking some time off to celebrate Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanza / Winter Solstice / Festivus. You might think it’s time to recharge those batteries and take three naps in front of the A Christmas Story marathon.

But Santa knows you’ve been complaining for months that you’d finally finish writing your book if you ever got some free time. Well here it is, buddy, a great big box of time, gift wrapped in the December and January pages of your calendar. Whatever your plans for vacation were–a simple cup of egg nog by the fire; or racing down hills on a flimsy plastic sled with your laughing children; mayhap a New Year’s kiss with a new love–none of them compare with the edification of sitting alone at your keyboard, grinding out a short story you’ll one day sell to a small journal for ten bucks and a contributor’s copy. Today your real work begins.

• Set goals. The first day of your vacation, write down three things you want to accomplish before heading back to school or work or wherever. Aim high. Write a short story every day! Query twenty agents! Hey, you wrote an entire novel in November; you’re now ready to write one in two weeks. Shoot for the moon! If you miss, you’ll land among the stars in the cold, infinite void of space.
• Resist the urge to sleep in. Instead, wake up at your usual time, as if you were going to work—because you are going to work. And just like you do at the office, you’ll knock out a few pages in between surreptitiously checking Twitter and Facebook.
• Who are we kidding, we both know you’re not going to do that.

• Schedule a specific writing time during the day when you’ll be free of other distractions. Tell your roommates, spouses, children, mistresses, the mailman. Consider this time sacred. The fact that you scheduled it at the same time as your parents’ Hanukkah dinner party is purely coincidental.

• Do writing prompts. For example, write a piece of flash fiction based on your kids’ Christmas list. Fun, right? Delight them by letting them read it. Take the kids to the mall to sit on Santa’s lap. Ask them to read the story to Santa. See if he thinks the prose has enough zip.

• If you haven’t already, drop some hints that you want a little Moleskine notebook so you can jot down your ideas at any time. Oh, you got socks instead? No, no, those are just fine. Very practical. Of course, the notebook would’ve been practical, too, and useful every day. But these socks that’ll get worn once every two weeks before developing a hole are really just as good. Thanks so much.
• Go writer-caroling. Head door-to-door, full of Christmas cheer, reading your work to people. Ask for their input. They may misinterpret some of your ideas. Point out what they got wrong in a jolly voice.
• Stay up late. Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except you, clacking away at your keyboard while all those other chumps are nestled all snug in their beds, unproductive. You really kinda feel sorry for them as you sip your lukewarm coffee, struggling to stay awake.
• Happy New Year! As an exercise, write about your friend’s New Year’s Eve party and all the fun you’d be having if your invitation hadn’t apparently gotten lost in the mail.

When it’s time to head back to work or school or your normal routine, expect to feel a sense of wistful melancholy that you didn’t accomplish everything you wanted to, and that you’re more wrung out than at the beginning of the holiday season. There’s always more you could have done; harness this sense of perpetual dissatisfaction to spur your career. As Dr. Seuss said, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” If you follow my advice during your vacation, you’ll be able to cry for both reasons. Happy holidays!

What’s your holiday writing routine? Let us know in the comments!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Let’s talk literary awards. Specifically, your tragic lack thereof. It happens. Vonnegut never won a Nebula. Nabokov got snubbed so many times he had to create the PEN/Nabokov Award so he wouldn’t feel like a failure. If these greats can’t win, what hope do you have? Wait, that came out wrong. I meant to say, here’s how you can succeed where they failed. I’ll guide you through the complete awards process, from campaigning your way onto the ballot to gauging how lit up you can get at the awards show after-party.

Step 1: Getting on the Ballot

You’ve got some award-eligible work, but you don’t want to look like a greedy, self-promoting shill. I get that. Let’s start by looking at some classy ways to get your name out there.

First, write a thing on your blog listing what you have eligible. For instance:

My name is Joe Schmo, and my short story, “The Nine Dead Grandmothers of Vincent LeRoy,” is eligible for—and fated to win—the Super Fancy Award for Best Short Story. Please send my prize to [insert PO Box number]. If shipping costs are prohibitive, I will accept the cash value of the award statuette.

Some writers like John Scalzi and Charlie Stross have dedicated spaces for listing your award-eligible work. Remember, the writing community likes to help its own, so go ahead and do this at every writing website you can find. If they don’t have a thread specifically set up for this, simply use whichever of their posts has the highest Google search rank.

Back to your own blog, you can generate good will by magnanimously highlighting other people’s work. Don’t be afraid to go outside the mainstream, either. If you’re looking for names, here’s one: me, Bill Ferris, the guy who went to all this trouble to write this helpful article. Stop making that face, it’s a swell idea. Advocate for some new, edgy authors, too. People will think you’ve got your finger on the pulse of innovative lit, and you’ll be doing yourself a favor by talking up a bunch of patsies who stand no chance of finishing ahead of you.

Step 2: Get out the Vote

Congratulations! You’ve made it onto the ballot! That’s quite an accomplishment by itself! These are the things you need to say publicly to lull your opponents into a false sense of security.

Your next move, obviously, is to look at all your peers who didn’t make it onto the ballot and indulge in what the Germans call schadenfreude (pronounced SHAY-den-frood). Make a list of people in whose faces you want to shove your good fortune. People may tell you this is childish and petty. You can tell them there’s plenty of room for more names on the list.

Meanwhile, you’ll be out there stumping for your work by going to conventions, pounding the pavement, working the room, pressing the flesh, kissing the babies, buying the drinks, and generally showing what a great person you are. And oh by the way, I could really use your vote in the upcoming–oh, you’re not a voting member? Oh, I see. Yeah, well, I think I’ve got a panel to go to. Enjoy that small-batch microbrew I bought you. Man, can you believe they charge that much for a beer? No, no, it was my pleasure. Really. It’s fine.

As the voting deadline approaches, consider asking other writers if you can write a guest post on their blog, or if they’d like to write a glowing puff piece about you. Most writers would shoot their own mothers in the face for even a scrap of recognition, so they’ll be thrilled to have a big-shot like you grace their backwater website. If they refuse, no hard feelings, they can’t help being dumb. But don’t give up too easily–remember that President Jackson, President Grant, and President Franklin can be pretty persuasive. It’s not a bribe, it’s paid commercial time. Perfectly ethical, kinda.

Step 3: The Moment of Truth

For the awards ceremony, acquire the following items:

• Fancy duds
• Liquors, hard and soft
• A teeth grinding guard

Time to prepare your acceptance speech. Get your list of people to thank: Your agent, spouse, editor, writing group, friends, kids, mistress, landlord, the guy whose money you stole to buy your new laptop, your cats, your boss for not firing you for writing your book on the clock. Then, write your concession speech. Be gracious, and be thorough. When the winner is talking, it’s your turn to read yours so everyone can see how gracious you are in defeat. Yes, this goes against protocol, but they can’t do anything to you when you’ve quite literally got nothing left to lose.

After that, there’s nothing to do but drown your sorrows at the after-parties. Don’t read much into it if you don’t get an invitation or nobody will meet your gaze or if they give you phony directions to the shindig.

And if by chance you do win, just remember what got you there: hard work, a good editor, and this article, which you are now legally bound to mention in your acceptance speech.

Are you eligible to win anything this year? What’s your plan to become an award-winning literary darling? Let us know in the comments!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Fans are one of the greatest rewards of being a writer. It wouldn’t take much, since there’s so little money in publishing, but still. A loyal following of readers provides many benefits beyond book sales. Fans can provide a warm welcome at a convention, or a couch to crash on during a book tour, or a seething army to smite your critics online. Inspiring this loyalty doesn’t happen overnight, even for bestselling authors. Let me show you what it takes:

Business Cards: First, print some business cards listing all the places your fans can interact with you–your website, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal…wow, Livejournal’s still around, huh? You may as well list a Hotmail address…oh, you’ve got one of those too, huh? Wow.

Business cards double as bookmarks, and are great to give out at readings, as tips at restaurants, to the cashier at the grocery store. One trick I like to use is to print them on the back of coupons. Even if they don’t buy your book right away, they’ll forever associate you with that one time you got them 20% off a pint of Chunky Monkey.

Social Media: Twitter, Facebook, and blogs allow you to reach your fans without having to actually be in the same room with them, proving that there has never been a better time in history to be a writer. Set up a discussion board on your website so fans will have a place to praise you while they get into screaming matches over unrelated minutiae. Ask readers to Instagram your book in different places around the world, whether that’s in a far-away pub, on a tropical beach, or next to the toilet. Get in Twitter flame wars with nincompoops who misunderstood the Christ symbolism you put in Chapter 7 that should have been INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS, JERRY!

Fan Fiction: You’ll know you have some dedicated fans when they start writing fan fiction about your work. If you want to encourage it, publicly state how flattered you are that your fans care enough to write a nonsensical alternate ending or a poorly conceived spin-off. If you really want to encourage it, tell them that you hate fan fiction, and create a pretend law firm to threaten legal action. Pro tip: Set yourself up for success by planting clues in your manuscript about which characters might make good slash fiction pairings.

Sponsorships: Make your fans feel like they’re part of your book by naming characters after them. All you ask in return is a lot of money. For $1,000, I’ll name a character after you. For $1,500, I’ll make it an interesting character. James Patterson does an auction, then donates the proceeds to charity. You know what a good charity is? Working writers like yourself. If you could afford to spread money around to the unfortunate, you wouldn’t be reading this article.

Contests: Ever wonder what a movie adaptation of your book would look like? Don’t wait around to sell the movie rights. Have a contest for a fan-made film! Having trouble fleshing out a character? Give away some random bauble from your desk for the best fan art. Staging a contest combines the exhilaration of finding diamonds in the rough with the dedication and production costs of a sweatshop.

Live Readings: You can buy a book, download an ebook, and photocopy an entire novel at your office copy room after 5 p.m., but you can’t download the feeling of seeing your favorite author give a live reading. If you’ve already had a book launch party, set up some “just because” readings in local bookstores, with whom you’ve probably already got a working relationship. “Jeez, it’s that guy again,” they’ll say. Coffee shops are good spots, too—they have to conduct at least one open-mic night a week to maintain their coffee license. If they’re nice, they may let you leave some copies to sell by the cash register. Make sure to give them the business, though. Tip well, and order something complicated enough that they can make fancy foam art with it. This is what they live for.

If you’ve followed my advice, you should now have a fandom that would rival Firefly. If not, clearly it’s because your writing isn’t that good. That is the only other possible explanation. Good luck!

Have any tips for building your fan base that you want to share? Let us know in the comments!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Every author strives for greatness. You’ll have to invest thousands of hours honing your craft and dealing with rejection, though, if you want to be mentioned among the immortals. Or just find one of the immortals and punch them.

Ernest Hemingway vs. Wallace Stevens. John Updike vs. Salman Rushdie. Mary McCarthy vs. Lillian Hellman. A good literary feud can be as exciting as the authors’ books. You may think you already need to be a famous author to have a noteworthy spat. This is the twenty-first century, bub. Between cons, book tours, and social media, it’s never been easier to harass your idols in public.

Step 1: Choose Your Opponent

If you already have author enemies, this will be easy. If you don’t have enemies, make some. With a personality like yours, trust me, you’re waaaaaay ahead of the game on this one, pal.

Many a feud has resulted from personal slights; Paul Theroux fantasized daily about V.S. Naipaul dying in a fire because Naipaul auctioned off a personalized copy of Theroux’s book. Think back to when an author offended you. Did a famous author once flag your blog comment for spam  just because it was blatant advertising for your self-published memoir? Sounds to me like Mr. Famous has let fame go to his head. The Internet has expedited personal slights the way the Panama Canal sped up international shipping. Somewhere, my special little snowflake, there’s a writer who irritates you in ways you never thought possible. When you find them, you’ll know your mutual loathing was meant to be.

Step 2: Get Ready to Rumble

You’ve got your target, but it’s not a feud until both parties attack. You need to provoke a response. Start with a snarky review of their book. It is not necessary to have read the book beforehand. In fact, the more incoherent the review, the more likely you’ll goad them into battle. The Faulkner estate was very quick to respond when I said “A Rose for Emily” would’ve been better if the zombies had won.

Feuds occasionally happen over innocent misunderstandings, but you’ll have a better success rate with willful misunderstandings. Go ahead and read sinister intent into your opponent’s behavior; you can safely assume their protagonist’s love of peanut butter crackers alludes to severe flaws in the author’s character. It’s hard to properly antagonize a person of letters over a difference of opinion. It’s much easier when you realize they’re really a crypto-fascist baby-eater.

Step 3: Attack!

Shots have been fired and the feud is on. Time to make your battle plan:

• Let slip the tweets of war. The Internet is a big wrestling ring where the ref’s been knocked out, and your Twitter followers are your manager sneaking behind your opponent with a steel chair. Let your followers know what an ignoramus your opponent is, then sit back, tent your fingers, and chuckle to yourself as they swarm like angry hornets. Once your opponent is softened up, engage them directly.
  • If you have more Twitter followers than them: Inform them that the marketplace of ideas has deemed you more relevant and important. The inferiority of their ideas is a foregone conclusion.
  • If you have fewer followers (much more likely; I’ve read your tweets): Your opponent is a sheep who caters to the lowest-common denominator. They probably like Nickelback and prefer McDonald’s over Five Guys burgers, too.
• Subvert Godwin’s Law. If your argument takes place online, at some point, one of you will call the other a Nazi. This is a law of the Internet. Just remember there are a variety of dictatorships, military juntas, and kleptocracies to which you can compare your opponent, so don’t pigeonhole yourself.
• Hit them where it hurts. If they write literary fiction, say their work is pretentious and boring. If they write sci-fi, say that their work is a landfill of genre cliches. If your arch rival is a poet, you need to raise your standards.

Step 4: Finish Him! Or Her! Or Something!

Your opponent is dazed and stumbling around the ring. Time to hit them with the People’s Elbow and claim your prize. Use any or all of these tactics to finish them off.

• A legendary zinger. Words are a writer’s best weapon. Norman Mailer beat Gore Vidal senseless and lost because of Vidal’s quip, “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.” You need something just as pithy. Something like, “There’s two kinds of people: rubber and glue. And you’re looking pretty sticky, my friend.” Not that one, of course. That’s mine.
• Pour your drink on their head. The most writerly way to dis someone without writing anything. Self-explanatory and easy to execute; you’re a writer, so you’re probably holding a cocktail right now.
• Updog them. If you successfully updog your opponent, you are declared the winner, and are entitled to receive non-stop high-fives for the next ninety minutes. (If you’re not sure what updog is, please visit their website.)
• Technical knockout. No matter how cogent their argument, how scathing their rebuke, it is entirely invalid if they make a single spelling or grammatical error.
• Declare victory. Talk about how viciously you’re owning them. Do this as early in the feud as possible. It will annoy them, which plays right into your hands.

You now know the basics of authorial antagonism. If you want more practice, for a small fee I’ll be happy to feud with you. For a slightly larger fee, I’ll let you win. Go forth and antagonize! Someday soon, you’ll be world renowned as the jerk who keeps picking fights with other writers. We should all be so lucky.

What’s your go-to move in a literary feud? Who would you like to feud with? Let us know in the comments.

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Earning an MFA in creative writing comes with benefits that will last a lifetime. You’ll be qualified to teach college fiction-writing classes, much like buying a lottery ticket makes you qualified to win a million dollars. You’ll learn the craft of refining your craft. You’ll develop a network of peers you can seek out for advice and obsessively compare yourself to until you one day die in a fit of envy and alcohol poisoning. The more prestigious programs have career benefits as well; the day you graduate from the Iowa Writers Workshop, your unpublished short story collection will magically appear in hardcover on the shelves of Powell’s Books. Success, fame, and fortune are the easy part. The hard part is getting in. Here’s how you can.

Step 1: Research

To find the program that’s the best fit, you’ve got to do your homework on prospective schools.

• Look up their acceptance rate, which at some schools is so small that they can only be seen by microscope. Less selective institutions might have an acceptance rate as high as 20 percent, meaning your odds of failure are only four out of five! Those are lousy odds, but if numbers were your thing, you wouldn’t be applying to MFA programs.
• Do they have famous faculty or alumni? This is crucial for name-dropping purposes at cocktail parties.
• How much financial aid is available. Are there fellowships? Teaching assistantships? There are always student loans; as your MFA pays dividends the rest of your career, so too will you write checks to Nelnet for the rest of your miserable life.
• Map each campus’ proxmity to ponds, woods, mountains, or other writerly thinking spots for when you need to retreat from your three-year-long writing retreat.
• Create a detailed spreadsheet of local bars and coffee shops, including house blends, tap lists, Wi-Fi passwords, drink specials, jukebox content, and the condition of their respective foosball and shuffleboard tables.

Step 2: Assemble your Application

Your application will probably include the following elements:

• Letters of recommendation. Writers find it incredibly flattering to be asked to write letters of recommendation, so don’t be shy. If you know any published writers, approach them first. Be courteous, yet direct. “Dear Mr. R. R .Martin: Hi, I’m that guy who writes witty replies to all your tweets. I’d have a lot less free time if I got into graduate school, if you catch my drift.” If you don’t know any published authors, maybe ask a writing-advice columnist whose work you enjoy but who is secretly insecure and needs constant validation from readers to stave off the feeling that all his work is naught but meaningless bleating into the void. Yes, that’d be an especially good option.
• Statement of purpose. This is a trick. Schools weed out pretentious jerkwads by baiting them into rambling about “artistic vision,” or confessing that an MFA program provides a legit-sounding excuse to break up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Your statement: “My purpose is to get into your MFA program, duh.” They’ll appreciate a straight-shooter like you.
• Portfolio. Most schools ask for up to thirty pages of original fiction. They’re trying to be nice and spare you the expense of excess postage. If you’ve got the financial means, or a non-maxed credit card, go ahead and ship your whole novel (unless you’ve written a series, in which case only send three or four of the books, you don’t want to overwhelm them). On the other end of the spectrum, are you a witty raconteur on Twitter dot com? Think how many tweets you can fit into thirty pages! Each one is a story in miniature, and with so many to choose from, the readers are bound to like two or three of them.
• Include an SASE. So they can send you bad news more easily.

Step 3: Applicate

It’s time to submit. Stick all that stuff into a manila envelope and send it on its way. Nothing to do now but wait for all those acceptance letters to roll in. This is the most nerve-wracking part of the process. Most applicants deal with it in the following ways:

• Lament that you declined to pay extra for delivery confirmation.
• Reread your portfolio pieces and spot two grammatical errors.
• Track your failure in real time via MFA blogs! Some websites allow applicants from all over the country to post when they got an acceptance or rejection letter. Remember how, in The Hunger Games, every night they fired a cannon shot for each child that had been brutally murdered that day? That was a trick question! If you’re reading and writing stuff like The Hunger Games, you’re not cut out for an MFA, you poseur.

Step 4: The Verdict

Prepare yourself to receive one of the following three letters:

1. You’ve been accepted! You can’t wait to get to campus to work with these brilliant literary minds.
2. You’ve been waitlisted. That’s okay, the faculty is just so-so, and it was a fall-back school anyway.
3. You’ve been rejected. Better luck next year. Don’t feel bad, you just didn’t read this article as closely as you should have, nor did you get your hopes high enough. There’s always next year, when you’ll apply to a creative writing PhD program.

Have you gotten into an MFA program? Well la-di-da! The comments section is a great place to share your advice. Or to, you know, ask any famous authors who might be writing this column to write you a recommendation letter.

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Think of your favorite author. Now think about how much better they are at their craft than you are. Wrong, they’re even better than that (and if we’re honest, you’re a lot worse). Fear not, though. Just because you’re currently a worthless hack who couldn’t write a good grocery list, that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to a haunt slushpiles for eternity. Even literary giants like Hemingway, Rowling, and Tingle all went through the same growing pains you’re going through. They learned from their mistakes. Now you can learn from their mistakes, too. Here are the most common mistakes new authors make.

[pullquote]If you want to build an audience, you’ve got to do your homework. Get to know your readers by approaching strangers in bookstores. [/pullquote]

Beginning in the wrong place. A lot of newbies have perfectly good stories, but don’t start them in the right place. Where’s the right place? I recommend you begin writing in a nice coffee shop so everybody can see what a busy and creative author you are. It’s the perfect atmosphere to pen the 10,000-word prologue about your protagonist’s great-great-grandparents.

Not knowing your audience. If you want to please readers, you’ve got to do your homework. Get to know your readers by approaching strangers in bookstores. “Hey!” you’ll say in a loud, cheery voice. “I see you’re perusing the erotica section! I myself am working on an erotica novel! Can I run some ideas by you? No need to get the manager, this is market research!” When the security guards inevitably show up, pick the officers’ brains about what they look for in a police procedural.

Doing it for the money. We can’t all be Stephen King. You’re never going to live in a solid-gold house or earn eight figures. Start with a modest six-figure income and work your way up from there.

Not having a distinctive voice. Voice, of course, refers to the voices of your characters. Give them all your distinctive voice so people will know it’s your writing. It’s perfectly fine for every character to say your personal catchphrase. That’s branding.

Not using all of the senses. Writers lean too heavily on sight when writing descriptions. You’ve got five or six senses, make sure to give each of them something to keep them interested. For instance, taste and smell are drastically underused. Babies stick damn near everything into their mouths, so we humans are hard-wired to evaluate things based on flavor.  This works great for food and sex scenes. I don’t recommend describing firearms this way, however.

Writing unlikeable characters. Nobody wants to spend four hundred pages with a big jerk. Give readers someone to root for! To make your characters likeable, do what you do in real life; make your character suck up to people, doing whatever anybody asks them to do. Have them pick up neighbor’s dog poop. Make your protagonist wash that pretty girl’s car (yeah, she’s dating that other dude, but she’ll come around). Who couldn’t like and respect someone like that?

[pullquote]Your relationship with your book is like the bond between an island village and its angry volcano god. [/pullquote]

Too much backstory. There’s no good place for an infodump. Instead, put all that stuff into a short story. Give yourself a couple of months to get that into shape, then get back to work on your book. You may accidentally take out too much, but that’s okay; if anyone asks why a character is underdeveloped, you can say, “Oh, it’d make more sense if you’d read the prequel short story. No, it’s not published anywhere.”

And the biggest mistake new authors make:

Believing writing is all fun and games. Fun? Oh please. Your relationship with your book is like the bond between an island village and its angry volcano god. You’ll sacrifice time, energy, friendships, and marriages to keep your book happy, knowing all the while it will ultimately destroy you anyway. If you don’t hate yourself by the time you finish your book, you’re doing it wrong. Now get back to work!

Got any mistakes people should watch out for? Let us know in the comments!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

National Novel Writing Month is almost over, but your writing got stuck in a…a thing that…you see?! Your novel needs a tow rope to pull you out of Writer’s Block Swamp. I’m here to throw you one.

Prepare Mind, Body, and Soul

• Eat lots of leftover Halloween candy. You never know what your brain will come up with after colossal amounts of chocolWHEEEEE!
• Take a walk to clear your head and find some inspirado. Maybe go somewhere dangerous or haunted. You can write the story in real time! Okay fine, scardeycat, you can bring a friend for strength in numbers. Make sure this friend is slower than you in the event a wild animal starts chasing you.
• Give yourself permission to write badly. Just be sure you fill out the proper BW-1593 bad-writing permission form. Don’t make the rookie mistake of forgetting to have it notarized.

Add New Story Elements

• Introduce a wacky sidekick. This is the oldest, most overused trick in the book. Because it’s awesome. With luck, you can create a character as iconic as Scrappy Doo.
• Find a change of scenery. I like to get characters out of their comfort zones by putting them in unfamiliar surroundings. For example, take your hard-case gumshoe and put him at the bottom of the ocean with no oxygen tank. See what happens.
• Write someone you hate into the story and have your protagonist beat them up. Just a good, old-fashioned curb stomping. It’s cathartic, and the harder you hit them, the more you’ll fill your word count. Use lots of detail. Don’t be ashamed by the urge to write yourself into the victim’s role here. You’re not alone.
• Add a guest appearance by the Harlem Globetrotters.

• Remind your characters, in the booming voice of God, that you can kill them at any time, so they better make with the drama. Let them know you mean business by causing a passerby to suddenly drop dead.
• Hey, you now have a dead body! This can jumpstart lots of stories ranging from murder mysteries to Weekend-at-Bernie’s-style hijinks.
• Add a gun. This is metaphorical, as you can’t add a gun to your medieval fantasy (or can you? That would certainly be a fun plot twist!). The important thing is to add something that can instantly destabilize the situation. If you’re writing sci-fi, it can be a blaster. Thriller? A bomb. Horror? Add a Dracula. Literary? A Frankenstein.
• Reveal that your antagonist was really Rollerblade Rob, owner of the abandoned roller rink. And he would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for the fact that you control his every action and thought.

Break Glass in Case of Emergency

• Talk through your plot with a friend, loved one, or coworker. No, wait, it’s a safe bet you’ve already exhausted these resources. Talk about it with your therapist. You say you don’t need one? Oh, bless your heart.
• Think about when and where you did your best work. Were you outlining at the coffee shop? Did you skip your lunch break to finish a chapter? Did you set your alarm for 5 am and work till the sun came up? Reminisce fondly about those days. They were a good times. Simpler times. Well, those days are never coming back, and tomorrow will be worse than today. Channel this newfound existential crisis into your work.
• Road trip! Have your characters ditch work and head to the beach. Along the way, they’ll learn that the greatest journey of all is one of self-discovery. The road trip also works for authors. Your epiphany may be that you should just get in the car and keep on driving, leaving your novel, your cares, your old life behind. Miserable-author you is gone. You can’t fail if you no longer exist.

How do you get your novel unstuck? Share your ideas in the comments!

Whoa, where did this year go? It seems like only yesterday you were popping a champagne cork and making a lot of crazy promises. But you’re a writer, that’s pretty much a normal Friday, amirite? Unfortunately, about this time last year, you read a bunch of articles on New Year’s resolutions for writers, and you thought it’d be a good idea to set yourself up for failure with unrealistic expectations about what you could accomplish. Just in the nick of time, I’ve made a list of popular writerly resolutions and how you can check them off your list before the ball drops on your year’s worth of dropped balls.

• Back up your computer. Oh, you actually kept this one? I’d assumed the reason you haven’t gotten anything done this year was because your computer crashed. Well. Nice job, I guess. That’s one resolution down.
• Finish your novel. Oh dear God…okay, we’ll come back to this one.
• Consistently make time to write. Did you forget to do this? Well, it’s time to make up for lost time. You want consistency? I got your consistency right here, pal. Try writing from sunrise to two hours before sunrise for the rest of the year. Hey, I never promised this would be easy. Or fun. Or realistic–but if you cared about what was realistic, you wouldn’t have made all those resolutions in the first place.
• Stop taking criticism personally. Lucky you, you’ll be in such a haze of caffeine and sleep deprivation, you wouldn’t notice if a tiger took a bite out of your rump. If you aren’t yet sufficiently dead inside to do this, you can ease the pain of criticism by ignoring all advice.
• Stop doubting yourself. If you’ve let things slide enough that you need this article, this one’s pretty much out the window. Just kidding! The good news is you have every reason to believe in yourself. The bad news is that the thing you should believe is that you’ll consistently disappoint yourself and your loved ones. See? Your self-doubt is gone.
• Submit to 100 magazines. Two words: email blast. Done and done.
• Get at least one story accepted. This may be mutually exclusive with the previous resolution on this list. If you REALLY want to cross this off, though, I’ll publish your story on my blog for you. In return for you generously donating content to my website, you’ll receive the satisfaction of helping me add content to my website.

• Read 100 books. Audiobooks are a great way to power through books during your commute to work, or when you’re sleeping. That still won’t give you enough time to read everything, so you may need to read 100 Cliff’s Notes.
• Keep a journal. Hey, Twitter is like a journal, kinda. It’s a way to record your thoughts and feelings. It seems this year you spent a lot of time thinking about what you had for breakfast and how many five-star reviews your book got on Amazon. Whatever, it counts.
• Join a writers group. A good writers group consists of kindred creative spirits with whom you can share your ideas and push each other to heights you couldn’t have imagined. Since you’ve only got a few days left to make that happen, though, joining that Facebook group where people write angry screeds at each other about gun control will have to do.
• Exercise. Last-minute panic can elevate your heart rate almost as much as a fifteen-minute run. You’re covered.
• Finish your novel. Oh God, oh God, how did I get so far behind? Okay, we can fix this. Well, you’ve heard of National Novel Writing Month? Then prepare yourself for Personal Novel Writing Week. It’s pretty much the same, except without the clever name, camaraderie with other writers, three weeks’ worth of writing time, and any fun whatsoever.

And if for some reason you’re still not able to keep all your resolutions:

• Make brand-new resolutions for next year. Just remember that, even though you’ve never kept a single New Year’s Resolution in your life, next year will be different for some reason.

Did you accomplish your New Year’s writing resolutions? Well, aren’t you fancy?! Please share your genius with the rest of us in the comments section.

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Okay, real talk here.

Do you call yourself a writer? A capital-R-W Real Writer?

Sure, you spend your lunch breaks pecking away at your novel. You’ve got a blog and a Twitter you suspect people read. But is it really safe to label yourself a writer? Should you sell a short story first? Publish a book? Is the mere act of putting pen to paper enough, like how you only have to kill one person to be called a murderer? Or do you need to go to school for it, like a doctor or ninja? If so, fancy-schmancy writing workshops and MFA programs only accept a handful of students every year, leaving most writers out in the cold.

This week, the illustrious Neil Gaiman tweeted an endorsement of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, a pricey, six-week writing retreat in California:

https://t.co/KxqDo9CY9y is where you apply to go to Clarion. If you want to be a writer, you want to go to Clarion, NEED to go to Clarion.

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) January 15, 2016

Whoa, wait a minute! Did he mean “need” in the same sense that we need oxygen to breathe?

The answer is yes, that’s exactly what he meant, and if you don’t have six weeks and a few thousand bucks to spare, there’s no daily word count that will save you, poseur.

This revelation ignited a firestorm among the common rabble. Many writers argued that Famous Author Neil Gaiman had forgotten that not everybody goes to bed with a rock star on top of a pile of money, and that many writers have various personal and financial obstacles preventing them from attending such programs—obstacles that Gaiman works tirelessly from the shadows to keep in place. Tough job market? Rising child-care costs? Debilitating disease? If you knew how much power and influence he and his fellow Real Writers have over your day-to-day lives, you’d never pick up another book again.

The most shocking thing about this whole kerfuffle is that Gaiman revealed even that much. Real Writers guard their secrets closer than [TOP SECRET ANALOGY ONLY VISIBLE TO REAL WRITERS]. Don’t believe me? How many people bought Stephen King’s On Writing? A million-billion. Yet only a fraction of those folks got published. Now do you see what I mean? King served up a salad of low-hanging fruit, such as setting a daily word count—and how brazen is it to sell a book that basically tells you that the secret to being a good writer is writing a lot of words?—but he kept all the arcane incantations and blood rites to himself.

Being a Famous Author myself, I’ve known this stuff for a long time. I’d wanted to write a tell-all book about it, but this is obviously the sort of thing that the publishing world doesn’t want to get out. At the risk of my personal safety and under penalty of banishment from the Real Writer Annual Picnic, I’ll share what tidbits I can.

The bad news is that the fancy workshops and schmancy degrees are just the first step, the equivalent of the first day of school where they make the seating chart and tell you when you go to lunch. There are so many other requirements to being a Real Writer. There’s the Reading of the Tome of Fate, a volume bound in unicorn hide, thicker than the entire set of 1991 World Book Encyclopedias you saw at the thrift store, which foretells how many books you will write and how many figures your book deal will be (to keep pace with the times, it’s available on e-book now, which weighs only seventy-eight pounds). There’s the Eyes Wide Shut-style masquerade where writers are tempted to permanently delete their latest draft in exchange for wicked, unspeakable delights—I’m looking at you, George R. R. Martin. There’s the Cleansing Fire, a pyre of silver flame that will burn away the dead wood of bad ideas to make way for a forest of epiphanies. Like The Velveteen Rabbit, a faerie is involved, but she is tricksy; do not believe her lies. And throughout it all, so much blood. So, so much.

The good news? I never promised good news.

Yet after all that, it still may not be enough to make you a Real Writer. There is no ceremony. There is no certificate. But then one day, you’ll make an innocuous comment that causes thousands of writers to stop working on their manuscripts, instead using their precious few hours of writing time to yell at you on the internet. A day will come when you are so successful that people willfully misunderstand your words as proof that you’re an elitist snob.

Then, only then, will you know you’re a Real Writer.

Think you’re a Real Writer? Crow about it in the comments section!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

How do you expect to get any writing done with all these distractions and responsibilities getting in the way? You’ve probably missed out on a dozen literary awards due to the hurly burly of modern life. There’s only one solution: a writing retreat.

But wait! Don’t retreats cost a boatload of money? Alas, attending a snazzy writing retreat costs more than the resale value of my Hyundai Accent. Thankfully, you can host your own writing retreat by following these steps:

Plotting

• Poll your writer friends to see who wants to join you on your quest to find the muse. Being starving artists, they’ll jump at the opportunity to sleep under a non-leaking roof.
• Search the Internet for deals on places that’ll host a group your size. Proper writing retreats are held in secluded spots surrounded by nature. How about a nice woodland vacation cabin? How much space do you need? Are you cool with rooming with somebody? Remember, your roommate is not family, you can’t just let ‘er rip when you get gassy.
• Divvy up meal responsibilities. Any retreat worth going to will be outside of the Domino’s delivery radius, so you’ll have to plan ahead. One person does breakfast, another does lunch, a third does dinner. A fourth does the 2 a.m. bacon and eggs when you’re all drunk. You will jest that you’re responsible for killing a wild animal for the feast. Everyone will laugh, it seems so silly, ha ha!
• Tell no one where you’re going. You want to minimize distractions. I promise, your life will be waiting for you when you come back, no matter how much you wish it wasn’t.

When You Arrive

• Spend the first hour socializing with your fellow writers. You will know a great many things about each other before you’re through.
• Take a quick hike through the woods to get the lay of the land. Smell the fresh air. Relieve yourself as the animals do; there’s a reason forests are known as God’s toilet. This will also mark your territory in case a wandering pack of writers tries to horn in on your retreat.
• Vow to just let things happen. “Retreat” implies surrender. Submit yourself to the muse, let her take you where she will. Listen to her whispers—Immerse yourself in the mossy pond, she says? Then thrill as the cold water awakens every nerve in your body. Withdraw to the kitchen for a craft beer at 9 a.m., she says? There’s a bottle opener in the kitchen drawer, the one with all the knives. Trust the muse, she knows her work.

Your New Daily Routine

• Eat a proper breakfast of pancakes, flapjacks, hotcakes, johnnycakes, griddlecakes, and crepes. You’re a writer, you should know the difference between all of those. Grab a knife and dig in already!
• Observe how slowly the words flow without deadline pressure to squeeze them out of you. Nature cares not a whit about deadlines or word counts. Here in the wild, blood and bone are coin of the realm.
• Begin to notice how you could slip out of your normal life as easily as shrugging off your winter coat in April. Your regular cycle of work and home already feels old, a chapter of your life you’ve wrapped up.

Your New Nightly Routine

• Build a bonfire. Let the flames burn away the constraints of your old life, releasing your primal self. Let it run free. It may whisper to you to kill an animal and feast on its flesh. It makes a good case. Attuning your mind to mysterious inner voices is a critical part of a writing retreat.
• FYI, remember you’re at a remote cabin in the woods, so there’s a non-zero chance you might’ve stumbled into a horror movie. Keep your eyes peeled for anything spooky. “Listen up, all you Sasquatches and Draculas! Stay away, or I’ll write you into my novel, ha ha!” you say as you take a mental inventory of the knife drawer.

Packing Up

• Your belongings seem superfluous, do they not? It’s not hard to imagine stepping into the forest and keep walking. Just you and the clothes on your back and your sharp knife, wild and free.
• You find yourself staring at the open knife drawer. You have no memory of how or when you came to it, yet you are not surprised. This feels right.
• Drive home. The taste of meat and blood is in your mouth. You’re pretty sure it’s venison.
• Make plans to do it again next year. You may have to follow up with your friends more than once, they don’t seem to be responding to your emails.

Have you set up your own writing retreat? Share your story in the comments!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

I’ve got some bad news: It’s only a matter of time before everybody finds out you’re a fraud. Those publications of yours? A fluke. Your story that got a good review? The reviewer was drunk. That time your crush blew you a kiss? Totally meant for the person standing behind you.

And the good news? I never promised good news. Have fun circling the drain!

Ha ha! Just kidding! That was all a delightful jape! You’re not a phony, you’ve got a raging case of impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is the sense of dread you feel that all of your success, achievements, and accomplishments were acquired through luck, nepotism, and pity. It has hamstrung the careers of many writers whose names I’m too lazy to look up. But it doesn’t have to ruin yours. There are many ways to beat impostor syndrome. Some folks will tell you impostor syndrome is merely the result of leveling up, or will reassure you that you really have earned all those accolades. That’s easy for a bunch of famous, successful authors to say from atop their ivory towers. Well, Famous Author Bill Ferris is offering you some different strategies from atop his throne of skulls:

1. False positive. Many folks who say they’re afflicted with impostor syndrome don’t have it, because they have not accomplished anything worth faking. You can’t call yourself a criminal mastermind for stealing packs of gum, and you can’t call yourself an impostor because of your “success” at earning $10 plus contributor’s copies in that literary journal. You’re not a fraud, you’re just mediocre. What a relief!
2. Re-gift it. Impostor syndrome is like an earworm; it gets stuck in your head till it drives you crazy, and the easiest way to get rid of it is to give it to somebody else. Mention to a friend how similar their novel is to one of your favorites, the one that everybody has read and is now sick of. Point out how the magazine that published their latest short story is going under because their terrible stories made their subscribers set themselves on fire.

3. It’s impostors all the way down. I’m gonna let you in on The Big, Dirty Secret of Adulthood. The thing is, we’re ALL frauds. EVERYBODY makes it up as they go along and hopes nobody notices. Every one of your favorite authors felt like they were phonies just like you. Your creative writing teacher who inspired you to be an author is wracked with guilt over encouraging impressionable youngsters into a dead-end career. Your parents were once screw-ups just like you who had no business raising another human being. This is bigger than your measly writing career. The whole of human history is basically Wile E. Coyote stepping off a cliff — everything will be just fine as long as nobody looks down. What I’m saying is that impostor syndrome is your desire to look down, and that you indulging your self-doubt could literally trigger the end of civilization.

Those will all do the trick. But I’d now like to recommend my favorite way to tackle impostor syndrome:

4. Embrace it. Forget about curing your condition. If you feel like a fraud, I say lean into it. Relish your role as a charlatan! Pretend you’re a charming rogue, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me if You Can. Don’t live in fear that they’re going to find you out. Instead, sip your brandy and puff on your imitation-Cuban cigar, cackling that you’ve flim-flammed the rubes yet another day. By the time they uncover your literary long con, you’ll be across state lines and out of their jurisdiction, your suitcase bulging with your ill-gotten Pulitzers and Pushcarts. You’ll want them to discover your ruse just so you can see the look on their faces when they realize how thoroughly you’ve bamboozled them. And while they’re gnashing their teeth and cursing your name, that’s when you’ll switch genres, take a nom de plume, and start the grift again from the beginning.

Have you beaten impostor syndrome? Share your home remedies in the comments section!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Tax day comes three days late this year, which means you’ve got a couple extra days to remember all the deductions you can take as a writer.

What is a tax deduction? It’s when you deduce a convincing way to justify classifying your purchases the stuff you bought as writing expenses. Doing so will magically lower your tax bill. How does that happen? Nobody knows. We just trust that it works. There are a lot of tax rules regarding how much you can deduct based on whether the IRS classifies your writing as a business or a hobby. It’s way too late to worry about that, so you’re probably better off just winging it and hoping for the best.

Please note that I’m not a tax accountant, so nothing you read hear should be construed as financial advice, wink-wink ;)

As a writer, here are some of the expenses you can deduct:

• Design fees for your book cover.
• Professional editing services.
• The electricity, calculated to the last watt, consumed by your laptop.
• Getting beers with your writer friends. This is networking.
• A professional author photo.
• The high-end mustache wax you needed to look good for your author photo.
• Pens—this includes both the pack of Bic ball-points from Office Depot, as well as the wood blanks, pen kit, wood lathe, and a six-week adult-education course on pen-turning you took.
• Any magazine or website subscriptions you’ve bought, especially if you’re planning to submit work to them. Based on your browser history, it looks like you may have to start writing some erotica to pull this one off.
• While you may have gotten caught cheating on your spouse, that trip to NYC you took with your new lover totally counts as novel research.
• Not that this would ever happen to YOU, of course, but maybe a friend sent money to a scam artist posing as an editor or agent. That’s tax deductible, probably.
• Those coffee mugs that say cute things like, “Be nice to me or I’ll put you in my novel.” That’s writing inspiration, and it works both as a business expense and as a warning to the IRS in case they start thinking about auditing you.

• A copy of a rival author’s book, which you will feed to the shredder a page at a time. Don’t forget to deduct the shredder as well.
• Mileage to and from the bookstore. Amazon is based in Seattle, so…
• A big-ass jar of candy for your desk for when reporters drop by for long sit-down interviews with you, which is due to start happening within the next few fiscal years.
• Your fancy typewriter, the one with the secret characters, the ones that only the adepts can read, and when spoken aloud, only God can hear. As if you’d use a mere word processor like a peasant.
• The $1,100 in Forever Stamps you bought.
• The private eye you hired to gather dirt on the guy who left you a one-star review on Amazon.
• The two days of work you missed to track down George R. R. Martin at his favorite breakfast joint so you could pitch him your manuscript.
• The bill for George R. R. Martin’s breakfast, which you ruined.
• Advertising via Google Adwords.
• Advertising via the crazy person you hired to stand on the street corner with a sandwich board depicting your book cover.
• Gas money from when you were fleeing town after writing that tell-all book about your family.
• Every damn espresso you drank at Starbucks.

What do you deduct in order to save money on taxes? Share your tips in the comments section!

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

You’ve tried everything—publishing, self-publishing, vanity publishing, e-publishing, third-person publishing—but you just can’t achieve the breakthrough success you’ve always desired. No mere mortal can climb Slush Mountain of their own accord; you must become something more. You must encase yourself in a foolscap chrysalis and emerge even better than your best self. You must summon all your creative power, all your skill, all your life experience to give life to—then take it from—the greatest literary mind of the twenty-first century: yourself.

Stage 1: Create Your Ideal Author

The first thing you’ll have to do is create a pen name. What, you thought you were gonna get to keep the loser name you’ve done nothing with? Names are important, which is why you must ditch that anchor of a moniker that’s been weighing you down your whole career. Imbue your new persona with every virtue you wish you had for yourself–not just talent, but good looks, charm, a spotless criminal history. You’re not creating a Mary Sue, you’re creating a Virgin Mary Sue who will give birth to the salvation of your literary dreams.

Stage 2: Logistics

1. Republish your entire catalog under your new identity. (Don’t worry, no one will notice that the books were previously released by a nobody like you.) Yes, all your future works will be under this new nom de plume, too. “Wow, this new me must be an amazing writer if she writes as well as I do,” you say, meaning it as a joke…but unable to ignore that it’s surprisingly truthful.
2. Sign copies of your back catalog under your new name to use as memorabilia later on. As you practice Your Ideal Author’s signature, it starts to feel as natural as cracking your knuckles.
3. Build a website, blog, and social media presence. No, not to build a brand or increase sales. It’s to document Your Ideal Author’s adventures and derring-do. Now’s the time for your pseudonym to blog about their charity work, collection of priceless artifacts, travels across eight continents, etc. You may feel slightly jealous of this new persona. This is perfectly natural, as is the fear you’re going crazy because you’re jealous of someone who doesn’t exist.

Stage 3: Murder Your Darling

Now that you’ve created this literary monster, it’s time to unlife them. This should be easy; ever since you read Game of Thrones, you’ve taken a fiendish delight in butchering your characters in your books. Yet this feels different, does it not? More personal, like one of those spy movies where the hero has to kill a rival agent who is also their lover. Just be kind and make Your Ideal Author’s death a quick one. And glorious, like a train derailment off a mountainside or something. Just like your mermaid samurai in your sci-fi epic came to learn, being a hero means making sacrifices. Except you don’t feel like the hero, do you? Your Ideal Writer was far more heroic, more noble than you could ever…well, never mind that, now. In time, you’ll learn to forgive yourself for what you’ve done

Stage 4: You Am Legend

It’s funny how all the color has washed out of the world now that your other half is gone, isn’t it? When an author as sublime as Your Ideal Writer passes on, it’s up to you to promote their work far and wide so that everyone can experience the greatness they accomplished during their short, imaginary life.

Writers join the ranks of the immortals through the work of literary champions who take up their cause. They write magazine articles, publish literary criticism, organize tributes, and other grunt work in service of their idol. You will sacrifice a great deal of your time, energy, friendships, and children’s college fund to start a charitable foundation in the name of someone who never existed.

But what of your books still to be written? Will you have to reassume your shabby old identity to write your haunted-courthouse legal thriller? Perish the thought! One day, you’ll “discover” Your Ideal Author’s unpublished work. You’ll release “posthumous” books that become instant collector’s items in the wake of “your” “death.”

It’s a lot of work, but you’ll reap a reward not even Shakespeare could—to behold your authorial legacy, and its impact on generations of readers to come, while you still live. It has cost you much, including any hope of finding success under your own name, but it will all be worth it to see Your Ideal Author—your greatest work of all—mentioned among literary legends. To be in such rarified air, you may even wish you were dead.

Got experience killing your alter-ego? Have tips on establishing your legacy from beyond the grave? Share your wisdom in the comments!