that I use every day but didn’t find in the writing and publishing books

Okay, I’ve had enough!

I am sick and tired of the virtual sharks and even the virtual parasites out there in the land of indie publishing. If you have come anywhere close to the world of authors and publishing on Amazon in the last few years, you’ve seen them. Chances are you’ve even been at least nipped by one, if you’re a writer.

These days there seem to be as many scams out there to part writers from their money as there are writers.

There are sharks who will take your rights for a song and a promise of marketing that they never intend to fulfill. There are parasites who will eat away at your meager savings (or get you into debt) with some very convincing words about “lifting you out of obscurity.”

Peddling hollow dreams to people who have slaved at soulless day jobs all their lives to earn meager moments to write is big business. And lucrative!

There are even authors who were once not that different from the rest of us, who realized the market for dreams is bigger than the market for fiction (or else realized that their writing craft isn’t all that developed and they didn’t want to put in the effort to improve it), so they’ve taken to preying on their fellows.

I’m a little irritated… in case you hadn’t noticed.

But there is an antidote to this problem (beyond ranting). And that is to share the real nitty gritty of writing secrets with one another.

I’m not a newbie at this. I was a journalist for ten years. I have put in my proverbial ten thousand hours in fiction and then some. I have three books published and three more on the way. In the past twenty years, I’ve read a lot of craft books and a lot of publishing books and a lot of marketing books. So, I know what any writer trying to learn the trade is going through.

You are told that you can’t live without a bunch of how-to books, whether they are about writing craft, publishing or marketing. There is usually a little real info in each of these how-to books - usually about enough for a blog post, very rarely enough for a book. There is almost never anything revolutionary in them and yet they are advertised as life savers for writers.

And the books will tell you that there are no secrets and you have to just “go write” and if you are talented (and wealthy and connected to the advertising/publishing industry like the author of whatever book you’re reading) you’ll do just fine. You’ll finish the latest new must-read book for indie authors feeling mildly upbeat but having learned very little of real value.

And you know what is worse? They’re lying.

First, there are secrets to the trade. These are rarely in the books at all and if they are they are buried among a lot of fluff.

The secrets of the trade aren’t special passwords or names to drop or formulas to put into your next plot. They are resources, things that experienced writers use every day. These usually either aren’t included in the indie publishing guides or they are lost in such long lists of parasitic options that you have no way of knowing which are the real goods, until you either spend some time in the trenches or run across a good-hearted and experienced friend.

I’m not even saying that I know all the secrets of the trade. I am sure there are some I don’t know yet. But I do know quite a few that make my writing life immeasurably easier than it would be otherwise. I remember the days when I didn’t know these things and I feel motherly and tender toward my former self. I want to take her by the hand and give her these tools.

Because that’s what they are. They’re like hammers, nails, screw drivers and power saws, and I was trying to build a house with my bare hands. I know a lot of writers who are still trying to do that.

I’m told I should save all these tips and tricks and write my own “how to write and publish and make a million dollars” book and capitalize on the market.

But I won’t. I won’t because I love my readers and I know that this is basic, simple stuff. It is mostly free and it should be free. I got most of it from friends and I don’t own it. (And by the way, the “make a million dollars” part is the scammiest part of that sort of advertising.)

These tips won’t turn you from a hack into a brilliant writer and they won’t make you into a bestseller overnight. (When you find a tip that will, would you please drop it in the comments section for me. :D ) But they will spice up your prose, polish your best work and make it easier to turn out professional writing fast.

That is why I have decided to start a series of posts on the super secrete tips and resources for writers, the real ones that I actually use to do the writing job. They are free because we’re in this together. I’m not selling to you and I'm not your competitor. I’m your colleague and I’ll tell you when I find something that works.

Well, and because you were really sweet to read this far into my rant.

The first super secret trick of the trade

Today I’m going to start right off telling you about one of the power saws in my tool chest because you shouldn’t miss this one for a moment longer.

This is one tip that I didn’t get from a friend or a book at all. I discovered it entirely on my own and I haven’t seen any other serious writers using it, so it may actually be a real super secret that only I know about and I can’t wait to tell someone.

The secret is Quora - to be known hereafter as writing research on steroids.

I think Quora is technically called a social network, but it would be more accurately called a content generation system that may eventually rival Wikipedia. Quora is basically crowdsourced information gathering and research at its best.

Here is the thing that is revolutionary for writers. Quora can give you the tricky obscure facts that are hard to find on Google or in a library, but that is nothing yet. Quora will also give you what you can’t get on Wikipedia and what you could find only after exhaustive research in books and interviews - the personal experiences of people who have lived exactly what your specific character is going through. And if that isn’t enough, Quora tells you what the world - particularly the typical picky reader - thinks about ANY topic imaginable.

Here’s how it works.

Quora users sign up for an account and list their areas of expertise. I listed mostly writing, journalism, linguistics, Eastern Europe and blindness, because I happen to be legally blind. I started getting requests from other users to answer questions such as “Why does English have so many verb tenses?” and “How can a blind person live alone?” I answered a couple of them for fun and lo and behold I earned points. You earn points by answering questions, especially those that someone specifically asked you to answer. I discovered that Quora also gave me 500 free points to start out.

Now comes the fun part. You use the points you earn to ask people with the expertise you need to answer your own questions. Just asking a question is free. It doesn’t take any of your points and it can even earn you points if other people want to know the answer to your question too.

What takes points is sending a message that will put an email in the inbox of an expert in the field you want or a person with a specific experience that you need information about.

This is why I call it writing research on steroids. Recently, I discovered that one of my major characters is gay. I’ve had gay friends but I don’t have any close gay friends at the moment. I have a few lesbian friends but I specifically wanted to know what it would be like for my teenage male character to realize that he is gay, get rid of his own denial on the issue and deal with his parents about it. This is deep stuff and a few words of an embarrassed answer from a friend might not give me nearly enough to make the character’s experience ring true.

So, I asked on Quora and I specifically requested answers from men who listed LGBT as one of their areas of expertise. I got five essays back within a few days full of thoughtful, emotional, real-life experience from five different men with different takes on exactly the issue my character was dealing with.

Wow! I’m floored. My beta readers are ecstatic over this character because his experience is so vivid and his emotion is so right on.

Since discovering Quora I have written way more involved, accurate and suspenseful action and weapons scenes. I write contemporary fantasy thrillers, so I need to know a lot about police and military operations of the modern world. I was a war correspondent briefly way back in 2001. A lot has changed since then and I never was actually the kind of old hand who could tell what kind of mortar that distant boom was just by the sound.

So, I need a lot of help with the details and there are a lot of police and military people on Quora who are bursting with the information and the first-hand experience that I need. This is way better than googling weaponry or military tactics. You get the smell of things, the details, the emotions as well as various facts.

And yes, given that this is crowdsourced sometimes you need to do a little fact checking, but by and large I have found the answers to be accurate for the particular place and time the person answering is talking about. They don’t know everything but they do know what Wikipedia will never tell you, what X or Y feels and smells like. That is what a writer really needs, the sensory details and Quora is extraordinary for this.

The other thing Quora will tell you is what your most critical readers are likely to say. The type of people who use Quora today are intellectual, argumentative and love to write lengthy rants. They are the kind of people who would give you a terrible book review if you wrote something about their field that doesn’t make sense in their practical experience.

In many fields, it doesn’t entirely matter if the facts are guaranteed. What matters is that if you ask about a technical detail of how a police scene would play out for a thriller and half a dozen police officers and former police officers and other specialists get back to you and generally agree on the answer, you’re not going to get nasty reviews about that particular thing if you follow their advice. Common wisdom can be wrong, but it is what people think and if you want your book’s facts to check out with readers in a particular field, it is a good idea to check with them as well as with the encyclopedia. Quora is the fastest way to check with people with practical experience in just about every issue, line of work and life situation imaginable.

Some questions do fair better than others on Quora. I asked for experiences of attending an elite boarding school at the age of eight. I didn’t get a lot on that because as it turns out, it’s very rare for elite schools to accept boarders that young. But still I did find out that I need to make it clear that the situation I’m describing in my story is uncommon.

I don’t make a big deal out of the fact that I am asking questions on Quora for a book. Sometimes I mention it if the question is particularly convoluted and involves a whole scenario. But often there is no need to mention it. People ask the weirdest things on Quora all the time, just for fun and people almost always answer them. This wasn’t even a network that it took any appreciable time to get into and I am a notorious introvert. I would almost say Quora particularly appeals to geeks, nerds and introverts.

Still I don’t see many other writers on Quora. The only other writer I actually did run across there recently was someone posting their full short story and asking for opinions on it in a somewhat demanding way. I desperately hope that will not become common practice among writers as it would make us very unpopular on Quora. “Is this a good story?” is not really a legitimate Quora question. The writer in question did actually get some gentle and insightful responses, which I felt was extraordinarily generous of the Quora crowd, but this isn’t really the place I’d go to find beta readers in that particular way.

That said, I did find a beta reader on Quora. In fact, I found the kind of beta reader it never even occurred to me to dream of having. The fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series has a main character who is the son of a Burmese immigrant in the US and as the story progressed I realized that his relationship with his father is actually pretty significant to the story. And I don’t know much at all about Myanmar. I only said the guy was Burmese on a whim because I saw a picture on-line of a Burmese guy and thought, “There’s my character’s personality in his eyes!”

So, I was a bit stuck on a couple of Burmese cultural things and I started asking questions about it on Quora. I got into a short and friendly exchange with one Burmese guy who answered and he said, “Now I want to read what you’re writing.” So, I wrote him a PM and offered him the chance to be a beta reader, a chance he happily jumped at and he quickly ironed out all of the cultural issues.

Oh, and another neat feature of Quora is that you can both ask and answer anonymously while still both earning and using your points. You will have a screen name and it is in your interests as an author to use your author name, but if for some reason you need to ask a question or answer and you don’t want your author name to be associated with it, there is a handy little “anonymous” button and you switch to anonymous use. I wouldn’t post anything illegal by doing this as I would bet the authorities could bypass it if they really wanted to, but it works in terms of other users or someone searching the internet to see what you area associated with or finding spoilers about your next book.

So if you are stuck for details, whether factual or experiential or simply want to run a scenario by a group of people with specific knowledge, Quora is the trick. I have even found plot twists when temporarily stumped by asking “What do you think should happen if…” types of questions. You can ask just about anything on Quora and I’m shocked at how many active and engaged answers you get in a matter of hours or days.

As an end note, I'll also mention one other way that Quora might be useful. I hesitate to do so because if Quora becomes commercialized and a forum for spam like Twitter and Facebook it will lose its effectiveness. But if you have read this far in my post, I'm assuming you're a serious person. So, think on this. Remember that the people who are asking you to answer questions are actually seeking your expertise. If you happen to write non-fiction books there is an obvious side benefit. You can answer their specific question and include a link to your book at the end of the post. You've just provided something wanted to an ideal reader. Think you might make a few sales?

I have even used this for fiction books. I was recently asked to answer a question about how to improve high school English classes. I gave my answer actually based on my experience as an ESL teacher, but after giving a very exciting new method, I also mentioned that I write YA literature and included a link to my fantasy thriller series. A few high school English teachers might just have a new book to recommend to their students from someone they feel like they like and trust because I gave them an awesome teaching tactic. The same goes for topics within my books like herbs or Pagan spirituality. If I answer a question on those, I can legitimately put in a link at the end and if I do a good job on the answer, I have got an audience that has true interest in the work I'm talking about.

So use Quora well and wisely. Good luck and happy writing!