Eight lessons Jeffrey Archer can teach you about writing

Image courtesy - Bjørn Erik Pedersen of Wikimedia

If you don't know, Jeffrey Archer is a writer based in England who has written several novels, short stories, autobiographical books, plays and even screenplays. He is best known for his novel Kane and Abel which sold more than 34 million copies and is under its 94th reprint. 

I'm his fan and when I came across the following interview, I found some good tips in it for writers which I'm sharing below. Although this interview is not entirely about writing. He is speaking about other things too like movies and cricket, but I have extracted only those points which I think will help writers.

The complete interview ran in two videos, which are embedded below.

Part 1 of the interview
  

Part 2 of the interview

 

1) If your one book becomes a bestseller, others too will

After loosing all his investments in a Canadian company, he was left with a debt of £427,727 and was on the verge of bankruptcy.

So he sat down to write his first novel Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less but managed to sell only 3,000 copies. But he didn't give up. He kept writing and his fourth novel, Kane and Abel became a huge success.

But here's the big deal. After this success his first book too picked up on sales and sold 27 million copies!

Takeaway - There are very few writers who become bestsellers with their first book. An excellent way to sell your one book is to write another one. After you pass a threshold, after even if your one book becomes a bestseller, others too will see increase in sales.

When readers start to trust you that your reading won't disappoint them, they will buy even your other books.

For example Kane and Abel was the first Archer book that I read. Since then I have bought three more of his books just because of his name on the cover page. 

2) Keep exploring new people and places

Archer travels a lot. In fact he visits Italy twice a year just to see the paintings of that city. Though he said he goes there for paintings, I'm sure the experience he gains by travelling to a new place must help him in his writing.

And here's what he does when he meets new people:

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - book review

         

Fiction; HarperCollins Publishers India; 177 pages; translated from Portuguese by Alan R. Clarke

My rating - 1.5/5

The outstanding sales of the book (over 20 million, according to the publisher's blurb) made me interested in The Alchemist. Google search revealed the summary, which was not bad; and the book cover, which was impressive.

But after finishing the novel I found it to be utterly nonsensical. This is a fiction novel bordering on, and many times even crossing into, the fantasy genre which seem to be a construct of a confused and scattered mind. (In his early age, Coelho was put into a mental asylum thrice, by the way.)

Rules of reality are sometimes obeyed, sometimes bent, and sometimes broken without any explanations as to how and why that is being done.

Summary of The Alchemist 

Santiago, the protagonist, is a shepherd in the Andalusian part of Spain who is a traveler presently taking shelter in a ruined church. He has a recurring dream, authenticated to be true by a gypsy, that he will find a treasure in the pyramids of Egypt.

The king of Salem (and we are not told where on earth this Salem is), offers him his help because Santiago has discovered his destiny and he was unaffected by the "mysterious force" that convinces people to not to discover it. The king says when someone really wants something it's because the desire originated in the "soul of the universe". 

Perhaps the line (very absurd, by the way) which has become most famous is:

"When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." 

This sentence, like some others, is unnecessarily repeated again and again in the book. (Just for the record, the Bollywood movie Om Shanti Om used the above line several times in the movie without any reference to Coelho.)

Santiago loses his skepticism after the king proves his wisdom by telling him his private secrets and embarks on the treasure hunt after selling away all his sheep, taking careful notes of all the omens that the king said will lead his path.

Other bloggers have said everything, what now?

Image courtesy - Yellow-Dog of stock.xchng

All the popular niches are crowded. There are tons of blogs in niches like technology, business, news, writing, etc.

The uncrowded niches are uncrowded because there is little money there. Lesser people want to know about how to use a parachute and land safely on earth but larger people want to know how one can exercise and stay fit. And the less traffic your blog gets the less money it will make. 

It is, therefore, wise to choose a popular niche for your blog. But the crowd of the popular niche has already said everything there was to say.

You think of a topic to write a post on and when you do a Google search for that phrase you find hundreds of results on that topic. Then you think that this topic is already exhausted in the blogosphere and hence you switch to a different topic within your blog's niche and the Google search again gives the same amount of results.

You sit back, disheartened to find that all the good ideas have already been taken. And perhaps you even start to think that did you make a mistake in starting a blog in that niche?

This has happened to me and I found that the answer is "No".

Freelance writing is a heavily crowded niche and there are millions of freelance writers out there. Yet I earn a fair income from my freelance writing work with my blog serving as my portfolio. And that too when I work only for about three or four hours per day. (Okay I don't play video games the rest of the time; I read as that gives me joy.)

I also own two other physics based websites and they are older than this blog. I started them because I found that there are almost zero websites for high school physics and I will be the first one to initiate the revolution of teaching physics online.

Yet I haven't earned a dime from them. (In fact now I have stopped working on them.) It took me long to realize that the uncrowded niches like physics have little scope for monetization. At least for now.

But this blog is certainly paying off and that too with not too much effort on my part. The reason is simple - a crowded niche implies a crowd of people willing to sell but also a crowd of clients looking to buy.

Good grammar implies good promotions - study

Image courtesy - Merala of stock.xchng

The popular online grammar checker Grammarly recently conducted a research on people's grammar abilities and their job statuses.

It was published in the Harvard Business Review. 

100 LinkedIn profiles of native English speakers in the consumer packaged industry were analyzed. For the first 10 years of service, half of them were promoted to the director level while the other half were not.

Here is what Grammarly found:

Higher positioned professionals made fewer grammar errors

Those who failed to progress to a director level position within the first 10 years of their careers made 2.5 times as many grammar mistakes as their director-level colleagues.

More often promoted professionals made fewer grammar errors 

Professionals with one to four promotions over their 10 year careers made 45% more grammar errors than those with six to nine promotions in the same time frame.

I must emphasize that 100 is not a big number and so the results are not rigorous. Also, there could be some unknown reasons like the people who were promoted to senior positions had a bigger reputation to keep and hence they became more careful with their use of grammar after getting promoted.

But I must also add that I was not surprised with Grammarly findings because all the successful people I know personally, are very careful with their grammar usage whether they are writers, physicists, or historians. What has been your experience? Let me know in the comments below. 

The article of HBR goes on to say that grammar skills indicate several valuable traits such as: