Tag: conversations with a self-publishing writer

Conversations with a Self-Publishing Writer, Royalene Speaks, Uncategorized

Conversations : The Best of Royalene Doyle (part 9)

Celebrating the Best of Royalene Doyle

and her fantastic Conversations

farewell goodbye waving

We’ve spent several weeks now examining some of Royalene’s banner series for Self Publishing Advisor. But what about standalone posts? Do any leap out at us?

Why yes, yes they do. And the first such post we’d like to mention today is one in which Royalene admonishes us to feed our minds, bodies, spirits … and imagination! The reminder to do so is an important one, as we’re all prone to privileging certain notions of productivity–or quantity, or speed–over the quality of the finished product. And ultimately, as Royalene reminds us constantly, writing is about savoring the experience of life. This post really sinks its teeth into some of the ways we can get started doing just that! This post is absolutely worth coming back to, time and again!

When we think of relaxation, we often think of a welcoming armchair and a mug of hot coffee, tea, cider, or something along those lines. And with all the wisdom of decades of experience, Royalene uses this post from April of last year to re-center us all on the virtues and value of contemplation, of relaxing into the reflective mindset when it comes to re-envisioning our work. (And working out its flaws.) There’s a reason why the path to success looks different for every person, of course, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to any thorny issue in the craft of writing. But we’ll all get just a little bit closer, Royalene suggests, if we take a moment to step back. And consider. We simply love this post, and find it a useful reminder on our busiest weeks that sometimes … the most productive thing we can do is slow down.

And in this, our last featured post for the week, we wanted to point our readers back to Royalene’s “Coffee and Mulled Cider” celebration from September of last year, in which she explored ways in which to “mull over” your book and emerge from the process with an even stronger, more powerfully compelling, book. A hint? The sense play a role, as does C.S.I.

No, not the now-defunct television show–the systematic examination of the details in order to construct a working hypothesis of why some things are working and some things aren’t! Royalene also taps into the wisdom of opportunities, and on the stick-to-it-ness which is often required to make a success of the things we really love.

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That’s all for this week! We’ll be back next Friday as we detail more of Royelene’s greatest hits, as determined by our blog’s analytics. You can follow Royalene’s further adventures by checking out her Twitter feed (her handle is @RoyaleneD) or her website at www.DoyleWritingServices.com. We miss you, Royalene! ⚓︎

Royalene

ABOUT ROYALENE DOYLE: Royalene has been writing something since before kindergarten days and continues to love the process. Through her small business—DOYLE WRITING SERVICES—she brings more than 40 years of writing experience to authors who need “just a little assistance” with completing their projects. She developed these blogs for Outskirts Press (OP) a leading self-publisher, and occasionally accepts a ghostwriting project from one of their clients. Her recent book release (with OP) titled FIREPROOF PROVERBS, A Writer’s Study of Words, has received excellent reviews including several professional writer’s endorsements given on the book’s back cover.
Royalene’s writing experience grew through a wide variety of positions from Office Manager and Administrative Assistant to Teacher of Literature and Advanced Writing courses and editor/writer for an International Christian ministry. Her willingness to listen to struggling authors, learn their goals and expectations and discern their writing voice has brought many manuscripts into the published books arena. December 2017 marked the end of Royalene’s tenure at Self Publishing Advisor. and we will be spending the next few weeks celebrating some of her all-time hits, her most well-received articles for our blog, in thanks for years of generous service.
Conversations with a Self-Publishing Writer, Royalene Speaks, Uncategorized

Conversations : The Best of Royalene Doyle (part 8)

Celebrating the Best of Royalene Doyle

and her fantastic Conversations

farewell goodbye waving

The “Trees” Series

Last week, we examined one of Royalene’s all-time best series–on connecting with experts–and this week we’re back with another one of her banner collections. This time, the subject is … wait, what? Trees?

Ah, but you see, Royalene had a way with metaphor, and a personal dedication to craft which focused on growth and opportunity, rather than all of the negatives and trials and hardships which might plague lesser humans (and let’s face it, we all live in fear of Writer’s Block … except for, magically, Royalene!). When it comes to envisioning a metaphorical framework for the discussion of growth, what better image could there be than a tree?

In this, the first entry in this series, Royalene starts with the beginning–and by that, we mean the beginning of every project. What is its seed? How does it germinate? How can an author plant and then successfully cultivate a new work? As always, Royalene is not just ferociously positive, but also thoroughly practical, and here she provides several tips and tricks for getting started.

In this, the second installment in the series, Royalene continues to track the progress of a work from seed to harvest, with a special emphasis on growth patterns. How do we measure the progress of a work? And how do we survive both the rainy and the dry seasons when it comes to our writing?

If you never expected to discuss tree life expectancy as a parallel to your work on your next book, well, that makes all of us. But as unexpected as this framework for discussion is, it’s also thoroughly brilliant! Royalene’s advice? “Research the details.” And of course, she provides a checklist for doing just that.

What happens when character development and plot lines intersect? Well, several things can happen, some of them good, and some of them challenging. Not every intersection may prove a fruitful one for your particular work, and Royalene has some thoughts on how to parse and structure your book so that this intersection is a real, organic, and powerful space for development and beauty.

Last but not least, Royalene wraps up her series with a reflection on the nature of perspective. Trees, the central metaphor of this series, happen to have rather a lot, and to provide a convenient imagistic parallel as you wrap up the creation of your next book. For Royalene, as with many others, trees provide or provoke an intense emotional reaction. They’re the locus point of a number of different thought processes. And they’re real and physical objects which exist outside of our conversations about metaphor! When it comes to the insights which this seemingly–perhaps deceptively–simple image can provide, trees will always have a lot to offer. Many thanks to Royalene for teasing out such a fine and robust line of reasoning!

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That’s all for this week! We’ll be back next Friday as we detail more of Royelene’s greatest hits, as determined by our blog’s analytics. You can follow Royalene’s further adventures by checking out her Twitter feed (her handle is @RoyaleneD) or her website at www.DoyleWritingServices.com. We miss you, Royalene! ⚓︎

Royalene

ABOUT ROYALENE DOYLE: Royalene has been writing something since before kindergarten days and continues to love the process. Through her small business—DOYLE WRITING SERVICES—she brings more than 40 years of writing experience to authors who need “just a little assistance” with completing their projects. She developed these blogs for Outskirts Press (OP) a leading self-publisher, and occasionally accepts a ghostwriting project from one of their clients. Her recent book release (with OP) titled FIREPROOF PROVERBS, A Writer’s Study of Words, has received excellent reviews including several professional writer’s endorsements given on the book’s back cover.
Royalene’s writing experience grew through a wide variety of positions from Office Manager and Administrative Assistant to Teacher of Literature and Advanced Writing courses and editor/writer for an International Christian ministry. Her willingness to listen to struggling authors, learn their goals and expectations and discern their writing voice has brought many manuscripts into the published books arena. December 2017 marked the end of Royalene’s tenure at Self Publishing Advisor. and we will be spending the next few weeks celebrating some of her all-time hits, her most well-received articles for our blog, in thanks for years of generous service.
Conversations with a Self-Publishing Writer, Royalene Speaks, Uncategorized

Conversations : The Best of Royalene Doyle (part 7)

Celebrating the Best of Royalene Doyle

and her fantastic Conversations

farewell goodbye waving

The “Connecting With Experts” Series

Those of us who’ve spent much time in the world of self-publishing will understand instinctively just how difficult it can be to scrape by unassisted. The same is true for many of those who publish traditionally, of course, and who find themselves neglected by publishing houses who tend to focus on their blockbuster successes and not their struggling midlisters. No matter whether you’ve pursued a traditional or a self-publishing path in the past, this series by Royalene may prove revolutionary as you set out to publish your next book!

Here, in her first post for the series, Royalene examines the topic of Ghostwriters and other assistants to the writing process, including Editors and Coaches. As Royalene goes on to explain, plenty of people have great ideas for books, but not everyone has the desire or the confidence to write it alone. For those people, there are experts ready and eager to help–and they can mean the difference between no book and a beautifully-written, finished manuscript ready to publish! How do you know if you’re ready for an editor, a ghostwriter, or some other form of writing assistance? Royalene walks us through some of her own story and some of her own past partnerships as she explains just what makes for the ideal writing relationship.

In this, the second post in her series, Royalene takes a look at Publishing Consultants. When do you need them, and what do they do? Royalene goes on to share some of her own publishing story, a story which showed her she needed “a personal guide who would explain all the publishing options (services) their company offered—someone who would hear what I told them about my book and the audience it could reach—and then help me select the perfect combination of services to achiever my publishing goals.” That person, as it turns out, was a Publishing Consultant (in her case, someone at Outskirts Press)! But this is only the first post in her series ….

In her third post in this series, Royalene zoomed in on Book Cover Designers, those intrepid few who know how and why certain covers make us tick, and how to make more covers which both reach their readers and reflect the content, spirit, and the individual needs of both book and author. That’s a lot of work! And it requires a great deal of skill, skill which truthfully often deserves compensation. A good book cover can be the difference between poor and good book sales, and Royalene walks us through why that’s the case.

Last but certainly not least, Royalene dug into the thorniest of all issues in which writers often require assistance–marketing. How will you know you need help? Well, sales figures have something to do with it. But so too will your own desires and attitudes, and here as always Royalene demonstrates that she truly understood the needs and hopes of those many authors she has walked through the publication process. Marketing is hard, and knowing when and how and who to reach out to for help is even harder. Luckily, we have Royalene’s words to guide us, and in this closing installment of this particular chapter of her writings, we may have one of the most useful guides to seeking marketing assistance out there.

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That’s all for this week! We’ll be back next Friday as we detail more of Royelene’s greatest hits, as determined by our blog’s analytics. You can follow Royalene’s further adventures by checking out her Twitter feed (her handle is @RoyaleneD) or her website at www.DoyleWritingServices.com. We miss you, Royalene! ⚓︎

Royalene

ABOUT ROYALENE DOYLE: Royalene has been writing something since before kindergarten days and continues to love the process. Through her small business—DOYLE WRITING SERVICES—she brings more than 40 years of writing experience to authors who need “just a little assistance” with completing their projects. She developed these blogs for Outskirts Press (OP) a leading self-publisher, and occasionally accepts a ghostwriting project from one of their clients. Her recent book release (with OP) titled FIREPROOF PROVERBS, A Writer’s Study of Words, has received excellent reviews including several professional writer’s endorsements given on the book’s back cover.
Royalene’s writing experience grew through a wide variety of positions from Office Manager and Administrative Assistant to Teacher of Literature and Advanced Writing courses and editor/writer for an International Christian ministry. Her willingness to listen to struggling authors, learn their goals and expectations and discern their writing voice has brought many manuscripts into the published books arena. December 2017 marked the end of Royalene’s tenure at Self Publishing Advisor. and we will be spending the next few weeks celebrating some of her all-time hits, her most well-received articles for our blog, in thanks for years of generous service.
Conversations with a Self-Publishing Writer, Royalene Speaks, Uncategorized

Conversations : The Best of Royalene Doyle (part 5)

Celebrating the Best of Royalene Doyle

and her fantastic Conversations

farewell goodbye waving

This week we’re celebrating more of Royalene Doyle’s fantastic Conversations posts; it’s hard to believe that it’s already been more than a month since her last new piece for our blog here on Self Publishing Advisor, and we miss her terribly. Do you know what we miss most of all? Royalene is such a force for encouragement and inspiration! Whenever we find ourselves discouraged and looking for ways forward, we delve into her old posts or dig into our email inboxes for her latest email.

Royalene understood the practical applications of encouragement for the self-publishing author, and our first post today really underscores that. Do you need some ideas to shake off Writer’s Block? Do you need a couple of ideas to shake loose those thoughts in your head which are so difficult to capture on paper? Take a look at this conversations post from 2014, in which Royalene talks about how to “plant the seed” and cultivate a work-in-progress. This is an invaluable post and one we return to frequently when stuck!

If you still find yourself stuck after that first post, it’s time to bring out one of Royalene’s more weird and hilarious anecdotes: the time she borrowed a skeleton. You heard us right … a skeleton! It turns out that Royalene was just as profound and out-of-the-box of a thinker as a high schooler as she is now, and her research unfolded into a lifelong conversation about generating motion (and momentum) in her writing by way of plot and characterization, dialogue and balance. It might be a bit unusual of an anecdote, but it really works! A life in motion can only ever be truly captured on the page when the writing evokes that same sense of motion, and as always Royalene provides concrete tips and tricks in order to help you make that happen.

So much of what we manage to get on the page as writers is dependent on how we treat our bodies and the brains which house our minds. It’s difficult to concentrate and write sentences that flow, for example, if we are tired or haven’t eaten decent food in a couple of days. Our ability to write characters who make sense in context is affected by the health and dynamics of our own personal relationships with the people around us, as authors. Here, in our final reflection for the week, we wanted to highlight Royalene’s 2016 post in which she encourages us to “feed mind, body, and spirit”! She describes her own ideal setting (quiet background noise, people around but not invading her space) as well as one of her go-to ways for feeding her mind (reading nonfiction) and then goes on to describe some ways in which her readers (her fellow authors) can go about creating their own ideal settings … including the ideal bodily and emotional settings necessary for peak performance. As always, Royalene finds a way to remind us that what we do, both on and off of the page, matters … all while striking an encouraging, insightful note!

***

That’s all for this week! We’ll be back next Friday as we detail more of Royelene’s greatest hits, as determined by our blog’s analytics. You can follow Royalene’s further adventures by checking out her Twitter feed (her handle is @RoyaleneD) or her website at www.DoyleWritingServices.com. We miss you, Royalene! ⚓︎

Royalene

ABOUT ROYALENE DOYLE: Royalene has been writing something since before kindergarten days and continues to love the process. Through her small business—DOYLE WRITING SERVICES—she brings more than 40 years of writing experience to authors who need “just a little assistance” with completing their projects. She developed these blogs for Outskirts Press (OP) a leading self-publisher, and occasionally accepts a ghostwriting project from one of their clients. Her recent book release (with OP) titled FIREPROOF PROVERBS, A Writer’s Study of Words, has received excellent reviews including several professional writer’s endorsements given on the book’s back cover.
Royalene’s writing experience grew through a wide variety of positions from Office Manager and Administrative Assistant to Teacher of Literature and Advanced Writing courses and editor/writer for an International Christian ministry. Her willingness to listen to struggling authors, learn their goals and expectations and discern their writing voice has brought many manuscripts into the published books arena. December 2017 marked the end of Royalene’s tenure at Self Publishing Advisor. and we will be spending the next few weeks celebrating some of her all-time hits, her most well-received articles for our blog, in thanks for years of generous service.
Conversations with a Self-Publishing Writer, Royalene Speaks, Uncategorized

Conversations : The Best of Royalene Doyle (part 4)

Celebrating the Best of Royalene Doyle

and her fantastic Conversations

farewell goodbye waving

Today we’re going back over a few of our favorite posts by Royalene on what to do when times get difficult, and you need a fresh burst of inspiration. Some writers call this “Writer’s Block,” but in all the years Royalene wrote for this blog, she never ONCE used that expression. Why not? Because for Royalene, there’s never a block that couldn’t be overcome or erased by reframing the conversation. In this, our first featured “Conversations” blog of the week, we wanted to dig into the most hopeful of all Royalene blogs—a blog in which she focused on what makes us write in the first place! “Sometimes we just must shake ourselves from normal patterns,” she writes, “like turning the soil around rosebushes and adding fertilizer—to allow the best writing that is within us to COME OUT!” Wiser words have never been said, and the rest of this post is equally enriching.

Next up is another fabulous, life-affirming “Conversations” post, this one a rallying cry for poets and other wordcrafters looking for a boost. Here, Royalene goes back over three key tips given to her by author and poet Lois Beebe Hayna. Hayna pointed out, and Royalene expounds upon, the idea that “you must be in love with words in order to be an excellent writer.” But how to make this happen? That’s the real trick. Hayna and Royalene also note that writing about the things which interest you (instead of being crushed beneath the pressure of writing for popular acclaim or other peoples’ expectations) as well as diving into research can be some of the best ways to free yourself from the weight of insecurity and fear—two of the greatest killers of good books everywhere. Of course, Royalene said it much better than we could ever summarize here, and we recommend you take a look at her original post!

We’re cheating a little bit with this one, as it was originally posted to Self Publishing Advisor as a three-part series focusing on reaching out for help when things are just too difficult to go it alone. Royelene titled this series “Helping Hands, Minds and Hearts” and you can find the three parts here, here, here and here.  If you’ve ever wondered whether your work would benefit from a ghostwriter, and how that relationship might play out, this series is a masterwork packed with useful information! From start to finish, Royelene walks you through weighing the expenses versus the benefits, deciding upon your options, and navigating the process of self-publishing with a ghostwriter. As Royalene puts it, two really is better than one, at least for some of us. And she helps us figure out who those “some of us” are. And when it comes to battling Writer’s Block and other difficult times as authors, putting your head together with someone else is always a good plan. And since we can’t all have Royalene … well, we can still make good use of her fantastic words, memorialized in this series.

***

That’s all for this week! We’ll be back next Friday as we detail more of Royelene’s greatest hits, as determined by our blog’s analytics. You can follow Royalene’s further adventures by checking out her Twitter feed (her handle is @RoyaleneD) or her website at www.DoyleWritingServices.com. We miss you, Royalene! ⚓︎

Royalene

ABOUT ROYALENE DOYLE: Royalene has been writing something since before kindergarten days and continues to love the process. Through her small business—DOYLE WRITING SERVICES—she brings more than 40 years of writing experience to authors who need “just a little assistance” with completing their projects. She developed these blogs for Outskirts Press (OP) a leading self-publisher, and occasionally accepts a ghostwriting project from one of their clients. Her recent book release (with OP) titled FIREPROOF PROVERBS, A Writer’s Study of Words, has received excellent reviews including several professional writer’s endorsements given on the book’s back cover.
Royalene’s writing experience grew through a wide variety of positions from Office Manager and Administrative Assistant to Teacher of Literature and Advanced Writing courses and editor/writer for an International Christian ministry. Her willingness to listen to struggling authors, learn their goals and expectations and discern their writing voice has brought many manuscripts into the published books arena. December 2017 marked the end of Royalene’s tenure at Self Publishing Advisor. and we will be spending the next few weeks celebrating some of her all-time hits, her most well-received articles for our blog, in thanks for years of generous service.