Technology
David Brewster
My book ghostwriting tools in 2021

Every now and then I’m asked about the various resources I use when I’m working on ghostwriting a book. These things change occasionally, so I thought it would be a good idea to share what I am using as my main book writing tools in 2021. So here they are: from recording interviews to organising to drafting to (almost) collaborating.

My book ghostwriting tools in 2021
Work Life
David Brewster
When to avoid showing your vulnerable side

Being willing to reveal a bit of yourself, especially through a bit of self-effacing humour, will lighten your text and give your readers something to connect to.

But this blog post is not about that sort of vulnerability.

No, this time I want to remind you of two of the less inspiring but just-as-important vulnerabilities every writer faces. Those vulnerabilities are backup and data security.

I was reminded recently about this by a rare computer crash that led to me losing a small amount of work. It wasn’t important and was easily recovered, but it could have been so much worse. Imagine losing a whole book to a hard drive crash!

When to avoid showing your vulnerable side
Write a book
David Brewster
No time, money or skill? You can still get your ...

If there’s one thing you learn from spending a chunk of your career in the world of books and writing, it’s that there are a lot of great stories out there. Personal stories of remarkable success against the odds. Business stories of risk taking and growth. Political stories of intrigue and persistence.

It would be great if all these stories could be told. As Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. Ideally, the stories would be recorded in books because books last. They go onto shelves and into libraries. They won’t disappear or become unreadable with new technologies.

Unfortunately, many terrific stories are never written down. Sometimes that’s because their owners don’t want to share them. Often

No time, money or skill? You can still get your book written
Reviews
David Brewster
The ghostwriter's nightmare scenario

Ghostwriter characters don't make it into fiction very often, but when they do they always seem to find themselves in jeopardy. 

In the 2010 Roman Polanski film The Ghost Writer, Ewan McGregor plays a ghostwriter working for a former British prime minister. In the end he knows too much and ... it doesn't end well. 

In the Netflix series House of Cards, Paul Sparks plays ghostwriter Thomas Yates who, after struggling to extract a decent memoir out of the president, fails to keep his professional distance, you might say. It takes a while – three seasons in fact – but it doesn't end well for him either.

And now we have Australian writer Richard Flanagan's latest novel, First Person, in which the narrator is a ghostwriter hired to author the memoir of a notorious conman. The story was inspired by Flanagan's own experience, very early in his career, of ghostwriting the autobiography of fraudster John Friedrich in 1991.

The ghostwriter's nightmare scenario
Writing
David Brewster
The joy of a good yarn

I love that my work as a ghostwriter gives me the opportunity to help people get their stories told. What I love even more is the fact that working on other people's stories gives me a front-row seat to those yarns.

Take Around the Grounds, for instance – a book that will be released by Finch Publishing on August 1. 

For this book I've been working with former ABC radio broadcaster Peter Newlinds. Peter's story is a celebration of sport, but from the spectator's side of the fence. This perspective gives the story a level of accessibility that most sporting memoirs, written as they are by former players, can't have. Few of us have the ability to play elite sport, but all of us are more than capable of joining in from the relative safety of the stands.

Of course we don't all have access to the commentary box as Peter did…

The joy of a good yarn

Distributing your ebooks has never been easier

Distributing your ebooks has never been easier

In my spare time I’m a keen photographer, so my ears pricked up when I heard during the week that photo book service Blurb has linked up with Amazon. Blurb books (photography or otherwise) can now be sold ‘print on demand’ via the world’s biggest bookstore. While this news relates to physical products, it is another example of the rapid rate of innovation occuring in the world of online bookselling.

In the last couple of years it has become much easier to distribute EPUB and Kindle ebooks globally and get paid locally. Using just two distributors, you can make your ebooks available via all the major online sources such as Amazon’s Kindle store, Apple’s iBooks store, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and others.

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Keep blog posts short to increase readability

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Keep blog posts short to increase readability

One of the most valuable things you can do for your readers is keep your blog posts short. Yes, it would be lovely if people took the time to read your entirely engrossing essay delving deep into the nuance of your latest self-growth technique or productivity idea. But chances are they won’t. After all, they have 100 other emails to deal with before they knock off.

What’s short? My ideal (seldom hit) is 400 words up to around 600. Eight hundred – the length of a typical newspaper opinion piece – should be the absolute maximum.

If you’re struggling to do this, here are a few things you could try...

 

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    3 ways to share documents without the generation gap

    3 ways to share documents without the generation gap

    Anyone who regularly shares digital documents with others will be familiar with the occasional cry of “Sorry, I can’t open the attachment”, or words to that effect. While document sharing is much better than it used to be, problems still surface from time to time due to incompatibility issues.

    The most common scenario I come across is with Microsoft Word. I send someone a file with the .docx suffix which can’t be opened at the other end. The reason? My correspondent is still running an older version of Microsoft Word that can only read.doc files.

    Ever listened to a bunch of teenagers talking on the train and wondered that they seem to be speaking the same language as you, but you can hardly understand a word they’re saying? To avoid going into the technicalities, let’s just say the software generation gap is analogous to this.

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    Write and publish your book in a year – Step 5: Re-write

    Write and publish your book in a year – Step 5: Re-write

    Perhaps the best kept secret of the book-writing fraternity is that – contrary to the belief of many non-writers – the vast majority of finished books are not written in just one draft. Few authors, including the best of them, have a ‘gift of the gab’ that allows them to churn out golden words like the mint churns out golden coins. It doesn’t work like that.

    What makes a ‘good start’ into a ‘good book’ is the re-writing. This is where you take your draft – your rough piece of clay – and shape it into something beautiful.

    The task of re-writing is easier than you might think. It is so much simpler to work with a draft than it was to work with a blank page.

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    Why I don't write for free – and nor should you

    Why I don't write for free – and nor should you

    The unedifying topic of artists and ‘creatives’ working for free has raised its head again this week. It was reported on the weekend that professional dancers were recently invited to perform in the taping of a music video for Kylie Minogue, “unpaid but [a] great opportunity and fun”. Apparently the budget didn’t allow for payment, but the producers promised “to feature as many faces as possible” and it would be great “exposure”.

    There have subsequently been denials that anyone appeared in the video without payment, along with contradictory reassurances that: “The atmosphere on the set was amazing and everyone involved was thrilled to be part of it”.

    Whatever the truth in this case, the general issue of people being asked to work for nothing but ‘exposure’ comes up all to often...

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    Overcoming writer's block – Part two

    Last time I wrote about overcoming perhaps the most common variety of writer’s block: mental inertia when confronted with a blank page or screen. This time I want to look another common form.

    Every person involved in a creative endeavour – writers, photographers, composers, film makers, painters and so on – can probably relate to this. It happens regardless of age and regardless of experience. It is the situation in which you come up with something that you think is pure gold: a picture, a riff, a subplot, a subject idea. For writers it might be a magical metaphor, a perfect premise or simply a beautiful paragraph, sentence or even phrase.

    You don’t know where this ‘gem’ came from – it feels like there was some form of devine intervention involved – but you do know that it is awesome.

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    Overcoming writer's block – Part one

    Overcoming writer's block – Part one

    Recently I was helping one of my daughters with an English essay she was writing. She’s a terrific creative writer, but can get stuck from time to time – as we all do. As it turned out, I was a fairly stuck myself on one of my own pieces of ghostwriting work. And, as so often happens, helping someone else was just what I needed to help me realise the error of my own ways.

    Between the two of us, my daughter and I had become bogged down in two of the most common quagmires a writer can find themselves in.

    I’ll deal with one of these forms of block this week, and the other next time.

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    Backup for writers. What's your plan for avoiding disaster?

    Backup for writers. What's your plan for avoiding disaster?

    Okay. If this blog post feels more like a dry lecture than an article, I apologise. Sort of. The thing is, on the topic of backup it’s hard not to come across all holier-than-thou. But believe me, if you ever have a hard disk crash, or your computer is stolen – and it does happen – you’ll be glad you read this and acted on it.

    We’ve all heard sad tales of people losing an entire PhD thesis or book draft because their laptop was stolen or somehow failed. And we’ve probably also been guilty of thinking “that’ll never happen to me”. Today’s computers feel so reliable. But they’re not really. According to research done by backup service Backblaze, 20 per cent of hard disks fail before they are four years old; many more fail in the year or two after that.

    How old is your computer and the hard disks inside it?

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    Write and publish your book in a year – Step 4: Writing tips

    Write and publish your book in a year – Step 4: Writing tips

    No one – well, hardly anyone – drafts a whole book in a month. So at this stage on your journey I’d like to remind you of a few of things you can be keeping in mind as you write, and give you a couple of new things to think about.

    Once you get into the swing of writing, it is easy to become buried in what you know and lose sight of what you want your book to achieve. It pays to constantly check yourself by revisiting the three major considerations raised previously:

    • Who is your audience? Who is this book for? Who will be reading it? How much do they already know about your topic?

    • What is your message? What is the single main thing you want to say with this book?

    • What is your purpose? What are you aiming to achieve with his book?

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    Introduction, preface, prologue or foreword. Say what?

    Introduction, preface, prologue or foreword. Say what?

    Most book writers like to start at the beginning. It is, after all, a very good place to start. (Thanks, Maria.) However, like many aspects of writing a book, working out where to begin isn’t always as simple as it seems.

    First-time authors often get stuck at the introduction. Until they have to write one themselves, most rookie book writers have never considered that introductions ain’t introductions. Some books have an introduction, but others have a preface, some a foreword and others still a prologue.

    What’s the difference?

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