Becoming An Author - The Master Class Series

This video introduces the series and explains why I know that I have something unique to offer you: a new step-by-step system that allows a good, or even just average writer to become and awesome author. I have had a successful career building and rebuilding organizations. I understand success processes and the value of a system, and how having one can be the difference between being okay, and achieving excellence. In late 2019 when I started writing, I sought help in becoming an all around great author. What I found were classes that taught the bits and pieces of punctuation and grammar, but failed to give me a system for producing excellence so that I could create my own brand that would attract an audience. The other thing I found is that writing the story is just the start, then I was expected to spend thousands of dollars on editing, more thousands on promoting, then even more to turn my manuscript into an audio file, which is where the biggest audiences are found. The average author only sells a few thousand books across a career, I find that to be unacceptable. I wanted to at least have a business that paid for itself and wanted to make money. In six years, while employed and operating my own business on the side, I wrote nine full length novels, have four more nearly finished, wrote a dozen short stories and novellas that I used to test this system in the "Free to post, free to read" sites on the internet. The results were astounding, earning me ratings like 4.86 or 4.93 stars with 50,000 reads. It wasn't that my story concept was so much better than the ones getting 3.8 and 4 stars, it was the system that allowed me to create work that was better to read. smooth, lacking the subliminal noise that comes from issues in the writing. That's the key, having a system that allows you to create greatness, and it is what I will teach you in Becoming An Author, the Master Class Series.

Working with the best tools is important in any craft. They don't determine the quality of your outcome, but working with archaic tools can make it more difficult to achieve greatness, and certainly can impede your productivity. One of the essential goals of being a great author is to eliminate the subliminal, subconscious "noise" that can interfere with a harmonious reader or listener experience. In this session we will discuss that aspect of your craft, and I will comment on what I feel is the best box of tools for a modern author.

This class will center around the skills of writing itself, in this session we will focus on the mental aspects of being an author. Learning how to use your mind as a biological goal seeking computer, to generate inspiration. The greatest inventions were inspired by the subconscious mind, we need to use ours to perfect our craft.

In this session of Class 102, I will share with you the method I use to develop a book or story from its raw beginning. I call this the structure of writing. It starts with an inspiration, then I developing a list of facts from which I can create a premise of reality that will allow me to create something an audience can relate to. After I have facts to work from, I create presumptions, and then my list of questions readers might ask. Answering those questions in the body of the work becomes the goal. At that point, I can create a premise that defines the story. Join us in class so I can give you specific examples from one of my new creations.

In this session we will use examples of work to explore how to begin your story by setting a hook. We will also discuss how to use perspective and tense to your best advantage as an author. These might not seem to be stimulating subjects, but they are principles that are often violated by authors.

Punctuation might not seem to be the most exciting subject, but it can be critical and I will give you some funny examples of punctuation gone bad! I am also going to have one of my AI audio assistants deliver part of the class so you can see one way of using text to audio technology.

The five sessions of Class 103 addresses the apps and programs that authors use in the modern day. No black typewriters are found here. For the purposes of this session I will assume that you are familiar with the basics of Word, so we will cover some of the hacks that authors can make the best use of, things like Read Aloud, formatting, fonts, and preparing your work for advanced editing skills using Grammarly in conjunction with Word. We will also discuss writing in advance of audio.

In this session we will explain how to use Grammarly in combination with Word to edit as you write. In the next class we will go over my book editing method, which I call the "drop back process." That system completely changed my journey in authoring.

This is the session that describes one of the biggest evolutions in the development of me becoming an author that result in high numbers of readers and regularly scores reviews in the highest number of "stars." Narakeet is a text to audio generation platform that we will be demonstrating through the next few classes.

Having characters with different languages, accents, slang, and dialects can make your work more interesting. In this class we will explore how to use tools like Word, Google Translate, Grammarly, and Narakeet to perfect that skill, both in your written and audio creations.

If your creations have large numbers of characters, locations, or lengthy timelines, you will need to manage those in order to avoid conflicts. This is especially true for those of us that have created a lengthy series with spin offs and sequels. In this session we will explore how to use Excel to manage those sequential or parallel plots, and how to create what I call a "Details and Ideas" document to refer to when you need a visual aid to describe elements a scene. We will also discuss some of the resources I use for performing research, if your need is for accuracy in weather, tides, or historic events.