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Random Thoughts on Writing a Book

I’ve finished my second book, Branding Yourself, with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, and am working on a third book on networking with Jeremy Dearringer, CEO of Slingshot SEO, an SEO company here in Indianapolis. I also have a couple other writing projects in the works, although those are still under wraps. I hope to have some news about those by Springtime.

But I’ve learned a few things about becoming a book author, things that I thought were easy, and things that I learned are hard.

  • Copies of the book Branding Yourself by Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy
    In all my years, this is the 5th most beautiful sight I have ever seen.

    Writing a book isn’t really that hard, if you write on a regular basis. I used to think the advice “write every day” was stupid. “Who has time for that?” I thought. “I have work to do.” Turns out the work I was doing was writing anyway, and when I decided to write intentionally — to focus on new aspects of writing and become better at them — my writing improved.

  • Have a good editor. I learned a long time ago that while I’m a stickler about grammar and punctuation, I make a crapload of mistakes. Even though I catch them on second and third edits, I still usually find one or two that has to be fixed. Pearson just sent Kyle and me the “gathers” of the book. Individual chapters that we need to read over and mark any errors before the second printing. Believe it or not, with two writers and four editors, I found a couple errors. (What’s worse, they were mine!)
  • The hard part isn’t writing the book, it’s marketing it. In order to support the book, and sell copies, I’m starting to travel more to promote it during talks. Next week, I’ll be in Northern Indiana one night and Lexington, Kentucky the next day. I’m trying to do some paid speaking gigs, but am thinking about adopting Scott Stratten’s idea when he was promoting UnMarketing (affiliate link). Scott made an offer to any group: buy 100 of my books, and I’ll travel out to you. I’m thinking about doing that for anyone who buys 50 of my books, as long as you’re within driving distance. But compare that to writing. I could write at home, spend three hours, and knock out about 6,000 words, or almost an entire chapter. It’ll take me that long to drive to most of my speaking gigs.
  • Know your subject matter. Writing teachers love to say “write what you know” (which presents a problem for science fiction or fantasy writers). But this makes life so much easier when you’re writing a book. I remember struggling with a couple of chapters on Twitter Marketing for Dummies because I didn’t use some of the tools we were writing about. I had to spend a lot of time using them before I could write about them, which threw a huge monkey wrench into my writing schedule.
  • Have a writing schedule, and stick with it. John Grisham’s writing schedule, when he first started out, was to write from 7 am to 8 am, before he opened his law office. Christopher Moore’s schedule involves a lot of screwing around all day before he settles down after lunch and writes for 4 or 5 hours. Mine is to write at night, after the kids are in bed, and go for about 4 hours. Ignore the people who tell you to wake up early because mornings are more productive, or the people who tell you to stay up late because no one is awake then. Do what’s best for your body and your schedule. If you’re a night owl, stay up late. If you’re an early bird, get up and get that worm. But create a schedule and stick to it.
  • Shut off distractions. I love my Twitter network, and love chatting. But they are also the biggest interruption of my day, because they’re always more interesting than whatever I’m doing (even as I’ve written this post, I’ve sent 4 tweets). So when I’m writing, and have the willpower to do so, I shut off TweetDeck, close my Gmail, turn off the notifiers, and get to work. I can save myself 30 minutes of writing when I do that. My wife once asked me why I didn’t do that more, and I told her to “rephrase your question in the form of a tweet.”

Writing styles and processes are different for everyone. What are yours? Do you do anything special to get your writing done, to be more efficient and effective, or even to avoid distractions? Leave a comment and let me know.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

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How To Turbocharge Your LinkedIn Profile

Web pages are useless without traffic, and the same is true about LinkedIn profiles. It doesn’t matter if you are looking for new customers, a job or just more connections, no traffic = no opportunity. Here’s a simple strategy I used to increase the traffic to my LinkedIn profile page from 3-4 people per day to 70-80 people per day (that means 27,000+ visits in a year). Feel free to make it your own:

Step 1: Figure out what your goal is with your LinkedIn Profile.

This isn’t that hard. Your LinkedIn profile is a resume with a couple of places you get to be creative, and there are really only a few practical uses for LinkedIn. Most likely your goal is one of these four: [Read more…] about How To Turbocharge Your LinkedIn Profile

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3 Secrets of Creating Effective and SAFE Humor for Your Writing

I’ve been writing newspaper humor columns for over 17 years.

And I can tell you one of the hardest things to do is to be funny week after week. So hard that I can’t always do it. In fact, I slacked off for six months in 1998, but apparently no one noticed.

Sarah Schaefer at 92Y Tribeca Comedy Festival

But I have learned a few secrets about writing humor over the years, based on how humor itself works. These aren’t just the “rule of three” or “end words in a hard K” tricks, but the psychological motivation of humor. If you can learn how to write jokes using these secrets, you can start safely adding humor to your blogs, your articles, or your presentations.

(I have to give special thanks to my dad, Dr. Lambert Deckers, a psychology professor who studied the motivation of humor for a number of years, and Dick Wolfsie, fellow humor writer and features reporter for WISH-TV, for teaching me all of this. I totally stole all of this information from them.)

Humor Rule #1: All Humor is Based on a Surprise

The Purdue University linguist Victor Raskin wrote that all humor is based on a surprise, or a lie. That is, comedians lie to us by setting us up with one premise, and then lie to us (or surprise us) with the punchline. The laugh comes from the surprise.

Here’s an example: writer Dorothy Parker once famously said, “If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

Did you see it? As you started reading Parker’s line, by the time you got to “laid end to end,” your mind already started thinking about what was going to come next, like a measurement of distance: “they would stretch across campus” or something similar. But she surprised us by instead questioning the moral virtue of the girls who attended the Yale prom. And that’s where the laugh came from.

This type of sentence is called a paraprosdokian, which is from the Greek meaning “expectation.”

However, not all surprises are paraprosdokian in nature. There are times when endings are just unexpected, but didn’t require a single sentence to get there. Most punchlines to jokes are surprises, which is what makes them humorous.

If you want to add a joke to your posts, throw in a surprise thought or two, almost as a parenthetical statement, at the end of a paragraph where a punchline would typically sit.

Humor Rule #2: Good Humor is Based on Recognition

Writing a punchline that requires previous knowledge of the source material is a great way to get a laugh. If the audience is already familiar with the source of a punchline, the reason behind it, the source it references, or if it’s something they’ve experienced before, you’ll get a laugh. For example, telling computer jokes to a bunch of IT geeks will get a laugh, but telling the same joke to a bunch of fashion models won’t. The way Dick Wolfsie explained it, the reader feels like they’re in on the joke, which makes them feel good, and they laugh.

I can't help it, I was REALLY proud of this one.

Here’s an example: As I was writing this post, my friend Rhett Cochran started the #LessIconicMovieLines meme on Twitter. Several of us threw out suggestions based on memorable movie lines. The movie lines that did the best were fairly popular ones — you couldn’t use lines from a movie no one had seen, like Ishtar — and they were surprising enough to be funny.

This is also why “callbacks” work so well: they “call back” to something that was said earlier. A lot of standup comics use callbacks during their act. When the audience recognizes the joke, and remembers where it came from, they feel like they were in on it, and the joke scores.

A lot of character-driven sitcoms rely on recognition for their humor. You get to know their characters, their foibles, their tendencies, their likes and dislikes. Then, whenever they’re placed in a particular situation that draws on one of those facets, it’s funny. But when a different character is placed into the same situation, it won’t be funny.

Recognition is also why jokes often fall flat, especially when you tell inside jokes to someone who wasn’t there. If you have to say “I guess you had to be there,” that’s a good indication the joke won’t be funny.

Humor Rule #3: Humor is Based on Making the Reader Feeling Superior. Good Humor is Self-Deprecating

Making a reader feel superior is another key to humor. Basically, if I feel smarter, better, prettier, richer, or more successful than the subject of the joke, the joke scores. It can often piggy-back off Recognition. That is, if I understand the inside joke or the callback, then I feel smarter, like I’m in on something special, and I’ll laugh.

However, this is where a lot of humor can be dangerous, and I urge you to use it carefully. It’s why people are told to avoid using humor at all. People love to make jokes at someone else’s expense, and end up offending somebody (or a whole lot of somebodies). It’s one thing to make a joke about a single person, but then it becomes tempting to make a joke about a group of people — computer geeks, people from a neighboring state — which can then turn into jokes about race, disability, size, etc., which then creates all kinds of problems.

To safely follow this rule, never, ever make a joke at someone else’s expense, because it will promptly backfire. Don’t think it won’t happen? Think back carefully to that one awful cringe moment in your life where you made a joke about a friend, only to discover that the punchline was related to some childhood condition, sensitive subject they’re in counseling about, or the tragic death of a loved one. (Congratulations if you only have one of those.)

In essence, if your humor has to rely on someone else feeling bad, then don’t do it.

There is one exception where it’s okay to violate this rule: if you make fun of yourself, you are completely safe. By making fun of yourself, the authority, you’re making the audience feel superior to you. I used this in the last sentence of the first paragraph, “In fact, I slacked off for six months in 1998, but apparently no one noticed.”

This is a great trick used by public speakers. By being up on stage, speaking to the audience from a position of authority, they are in the power position. So good speakers will make fun of themselves, which makes the audience feel like they’re superior to the speaker, and the joke scores.

There are several other humor secrets you can use, like exaggeration, being outrageous, or absurd, that can also make your writing or speaking funny.

In a future post, I’ll discuss how to string a few small jokes together to make your next presentation or blog post rock.

At least from a humor perspective. If you suck at speaking, I can’t help you.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Sarah Schaefer, 92YTribeca (Flickr)
Twitter screenshot: Erik Deckers

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Your Best Editor Is the One Who Shreds Your Writing

I was just talking with Kyle Lacy’s and my editor, Katherine, about the editing of our book, Branding Yourself.

We were talking about the strong-arm nature of our development editor, Leslie, and the work she did for us on our book. Leslie was tough, asked a lot of hard questions, and really made us work. There were days I spent almost as much time fixing her edits as I did writing the original chapter.

“Would you ever want to use her again on future projects?” Katherine asked

“Oh absolutely. She kicked our asses.”

These people made Branding Yourself as good as it is.

That’s the beauty of a really good editor. They won’t let you get away with anything. They do whatever is necessary to make your writing the best it can be. And for me and Kyle, that was making sure our book wasn’t a piece of schlock that came across as one long hastily-written blog post.

A good editor will ask questions, point out errors, make corrections, show inconsistencies, and make you revise your work. A bad editor will read your work, tell you they liked it, and maybe point out a couple punctuation errors.

A good editor will make your life hell, a bad editor will make your life as easy as possible.

A good editor will make your writing rock, a bad editor will let your writing suck.

I can’t tell you the number of times I got irritated with Leslie’s questions and comments in the manuscript that personally attacked me and questioned my ability as a writer. I would work on them at my dining table at 1:00 in the morning, writing snarky responses to most of them.

It took the light of day to bring a fresh new perspective to her helpful questions and comments that showed me where I skipped an important piece of information or had a poorly-constructed sentence. I quickly deleted the snarky responses, happy that I had waited until the morning before I finished making the changes. (I learned to stop reading her edits when I was running on empty at 1 in the morning, but started making them during the day when I was fully rested. She became much nicer when I did that.)

I have learned over the years that editors are only there to make your work better, not to make you look stupid or to make you question why you ever pursued writing and didn’t just go into roadkill cleanup as a career. If you’re lucky enough to find an editor for your work, whether it’s a professional editor looking at a manuscript or a know-it-all friend with a hyperactive red pen, treasure this person. Hold on to them for as long as you can, and give them as much of your work if they can handle.

And when they hand you back your baby, filled with more questions and red ink than you think can fit in one pen, say thank you, get a good night’s sleep, and then make the changes they suggested.

After all, it’s your name and your reputation going on that piece. You look like a genius because of them, and all they get — if they’re lucky — is their name on an inside page of the book.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

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Inc. Magazine is NOT Charging You to Write Their Story

Hi Erik, this is Ken Lehman of Winning Workplace. You wrote that blog post about Inc. Magazine’s Top Small Company Workplaces.

Uh-oh.

I recognized the company name, even if I didn’t recognize Ken’s name.

Ken had read my blog post where I questioned the ethics of Inc. Magazine’s Top Small Company Workplaces story, and the fact that they were charging $149 for the application review just to be considered for the TSCW review.

Turns out I was barking up the wrong tree. And I have to thank Ken for patiently, and kindly, setting the record straight. Here’s what he told me:

Winning Workplaces is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by his family in 2001. They were the Fel-Pro family, a business that was started and run by his family for more than 80 years, before they were sold.

Winning Workplaces was created to help small and mid-sized enterprises to become great places to work. They have done this project for 8 years. This is their 9th year for the award.

2010 was the first year Inc. was their media partner. Prior to that, they worked with the Wall Street Journal, and prior to that with Fortune Small Business.

In other words, Winning Workplaces gives the awards, and they have a relationship for Inc. Magazine to write the article. From there, other journalists pick it up, and it gets published in other news outlets.

The fees that are assessed — and they didn’t assess for the first several years — are paid to Winning Workplaces, not to Inc. They are nominal and cover the administrative costs to do the project. They are not any kind of editorial or advertorial, as I had previously thought. No one needs to apply without seeing the application first, and on the website, you can preview the application before you put any money up.

Winning Workplaces is made up of a small staff and his family has put a lot of money into the project over the years. Ken doesn’t even get paid for this. He does it for the satisfaction of helping other companies.

Ken said that the people who complete the application will often tell Winning Workplaces that the process is very instructive to their own businesses, and it helps them think about their workplaces differently. It gives them ideas about how they can improve themselves, regardless of whether they win, become a finalist, or even miss the first cut.

This year, they have 28 people lined up to do the initial reviewing and screening. Some of them volunteer, and others get paid nominal amounts to follow their whole methodology to do it. That’s where the money goes, not to Inc. Magazine.

When Ken’s family started Winning Workplaces, they did it because there was no recognition project for smaller organizations. In the 90s, when Ken was working for Fel-Pro, they made Forbes list of one of the good places to work in America. And when Fortune magazine started its 100 best companies to work for list, Fel-Pro was #4. When Fel-Pro was sold in 1998, one of the things they did was to share what they had learned with others, so they hit upon starting an organization. That’s where WW came from.

However, in 2000, Fortune Magazine stopped accepting applications from companies under 1,000 employees, and there was nowhere for smaller companies to go for this kind of recognition. That’s where the Top Small Company Workplaces project came from.

Since that time, it has proliferated, and there are now a number of recognition projects and lists around the country.

But — and this is where Winning Workplaces is different — theirs is the only ones where you can win once. Then you go into their hall of fame, and you can’t repeat.

Everyone else, on the other hand, has a business model where they sell their feedback to help companies move up the list, and earn a higher number, or at least to not fall off the list. In other words, companies will “sell” you consulting to keep you on the list; Winning Workplaces purposely avoids that kind of contamination.

So, having learned all that from Ken Lehman, I can see how the Top Small Company Workplaces award is actually worthwhile and beneficial to companies. I have to say a special thank you to Ken for calling me and setting me straight.

And now I want to enter the contest myself. But since we just moved into our new space 2 days ago (and we’re sharing it), I don’t know that we qualify.

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Four Professional Secrets to Ignite Your Writing

Do you want to make your writing sing?

Do you want it to be passionate, emotional, and to move scores of people to action? Do you want to write your barbaric yawp! over the screens of the world? Here are four professional secrets I’ve used over the years to help ignite my own writing.

Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance

Writing can be memorable just with a little bit of alliteration. It can lighten the mood, and make a piece light-hearted without being silly or funny. Alliteration is where the first sound of a word are the same — crazy cars, beautiful beaches. Consonance is where internal consonants sound the same — Errant Erik — while assonance is where internal vowels sound the same — awful coffee, fair sherry.

One of my writers recently submitted a post about snow plows entitled “How Now Snow Plow,” which set a lighter mood for the entire piece, and we were able to do something a little lighter about something that’s usually very, well, not light.

Metaphors and Similes

Regular readers know I love metaphors. Metaphors are what give language its richness, its vividness. In the family of language, they’re the Wild Adventurer, that crazy uncle who lives exciting adventures searching for ancient treasure.

Similes, on the other hand, are the English teacher. The weak-chinnned, bespectacled, and slightly timid English teacher. They repeat, relate, and give you an idea of something, but they don’t actually do the thing they’re telling you about. (See, that there is a metaphor.)

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” said Forrest Gump. Meh. Sure, it’s nice, and it’s memorable, but it doesn’t bring anything to life.

But, “men’s words are bullets, that their enemies take up and make use of against them,” said George Savile in Maxims of State.

How sad, that life itself is reduced to a simple simile — a box of chocolates — while mere words can be bullets in the hands of our enemies. A well-turned metaphor can provide a thunderous impact to your writing.

Having said all that, similes can also be a powerful device. Think of any hard-boiled private detective story, when a sexy client entered the office — “She had legs like smooth alabaster towers that rose straight up to the heavens” — and you can see what similes can do for your writing.

While I recommend metaphors in your writing, similes will do in a pinch. But don’t rely on either device too much.

Hyperbole

Walt Whitman’s famous line from Leaves of Grass — his “barbaric yawp” — is surrounded by hyperbole. Hyperbole is an exaggeration that is not meant to be taken literally.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I love the hyperbole here: a hawk accuses and complains, Whitman shouts over the roofs of the world, and the last scud of day flings his likeness. He’s not saying the hawk’s cries sound like accusations or complaints (which would make it a weak-chinned simile). He’s not saying he wishes his cries would ring out over the roofs of the world, or that they can only be heard 100 yards away. And a scud in Whitman’s day was when a ship runs before a strong wind, but with little sail set. So can it really fling things, especially a person’s likeness?

Whitman’s hyperbole, and excellent use of metaphor, make Leaves of Grass one of the most memorable pieces of literature from the 19th century.

Action Verbs

While I normally hate business jargon that gets turned into verbs, I love using action verbs, or even taking similes and turning them into verbs.

Last year, I gave a presentation on “10 Techniques to Rocket Your Blog to Success.” The verb phrase “rocket your blog” was a whole lot more dramatic and powerful than “make your blog take off like a rocket.”

By using the word “rocket” as a verb, I was able to create an image of power and speed, and give the idea that this was something important and powerful.

Even the verb in this post’s headline — ignite — is a lot better than the others I could have chosen: improve, help, boost, embiggen. None of them gave the impression of, well, lighting a fire under your writing. (Five cool points to anyone who can tell me what literary device I just used in that last sentence.)

So, these are just four techniques that I use to help my own writing. What are some of the ones you use? How do you punch up your own writing, and make it memorable? Share your ideas in the comments.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.