Although writing is often called “storytelling,” it should actually be renamed “story-showing.” And that’s done through dramatization, so that the reader has a sense that he or she is living the experience instead of just reading about it. We need to drop into your characters and experience the world and their reactions to it as they do.

As Oakley Hall says, “What is not rendered, dramatized, is merely reported. Thus it is secondhand. It does not happen before the reader. He is only told about it after the fact. What is not shown is merely told. What is rendered will sprint to life off the page and capture the reader’s emotions. What is merely stated, reported, told, is inert, dead matter.”

Telling the reader that something is painful evokes nothing—no image, no reaction. Describing pain or a character’s emotional state in a way that the reader can experience and/or relate to allows him or her to participate and become part of the story instead of simply being a spectator.

How do you allow the reader to share an experience with you and bring it to life instead of simply reporting the experience? You make the scene active.

One way to do that is through dialog.

Another is through action.

A third is through detail, both in terms of descriptions and in terms of characters’ emotions. You want to emphasize the details and let them speak for themselves. Writing that a mother disapproved of her daughter’s hair, for example, is not as strong as showing that disapproval—the emotions that crossed her face, the way she tugged at the girl’s hair as she wrestled it into the rag curlers, etc. Similarly, writing that a man felt unaccepted by his peers is not as strong as letting the reader share his loneliness and feelings of rejection.

In short, telling your readers that something is painful evokes nothing—no image, no reaction. Describing that pain—or any other physical or emotional state—in a way that readers can experience and/or relate to allows them to participate and become part of the story instead of simply being spectators.

So remember this simple rule when writing fiction: Show Don’t Tell. When you write your story, don’t just settle for story-telling. Go for story-showing.

If the story below were being told on paper, I’d want a lot more story-showing than story-telling. I’ll write about that next. Until then, the video below is a great example of story-telling. Brad Phillips blog, which arrived in my mailbox thanks to PRWeb, explains why. Just one warning: I watched this at 6:25 a.m. and found myself in tears. I’m weak that way, but by the end of this moving little video, I bet you will be, too. Enjoy. And if you’re as moved as I was, you can contribute to Caine’s scholarship fund. After donating my $10, I got an email of thanks from the videographer with this news:

Also, due to the overwhelming support, and the spark of inspiration that Caine’s Arcade has ignited, we are now building the “Caine’s Arcade Foundation” to help more kids! The Caine’s Arcade Foundation will help discover, foster, and fund creativity and entrepreneurship in young kids like Caine. The Goldhirsh Foundation is generously matching your donations to Caine’s Scholarship Fund dollar-for-dollar (up to $250,000) to help us get the Caine’s Arcade Foundation off the ground.

That’s the impact that a single well-told story can have.

The 6 traits of great storytelling—in one adorable video

By Brad Phillips | Posted: April 19, 2012

What makes a video go viral?

A video featuring Caine, an imaginative 9-year-old boy living in East Los Angeles, spread like wildfire over the past week. It’s easy to see why.

This video features all six of the critical elements of great storytelling (more on those, below).

I’ve never posted an 11-minute video before, but this one is that good. I recommend you watch it before reading on.

In their terrific book, Made to Stick, authors Dan and Chip Heath identified six critical traits that make stories memorable. They used the acronym SUCCESs to summarize those elements (the final “s” doesn’t stand for anything.)

It’s no surprise that the video above went viral so quickly, as it had all six of the Heath Brothers’ “SUCCESs” sticky traits:

1. Simple. A boy. An idea. Some boxes. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

2. Unexpected. This video had at least four unexpected things: An unusually creative boy; a video maker who accidentally stumbled upon the boy’s arcade; a flash mob; and Caine’s surprise at the flash mob. Even though the video’s title (“9-year-old’s DIY cardboard arcade gets flashmobbed”) gave away a lot of the premise, it didn’t matter. We wanted to see how the unexpected played out.

3. Concrete. There’s one moment that stuck with me more than any other: Caine manually feeding prize tickets through a hole in the box. If there’s a second moment I remember, it’s the claw machine. If there’s a third, it’s the calculator he used to track legitimate “Fun Pass” users. All three of those details are concrete, and the story was more effective for its total absence of abstractions.

4. Credible. Totally. Not a single false note.

5. Emotional. Before my wife showed me the video, she sheepishly admitted that it had made her cry. I mildly teased her. Then I watched it and teared up, as well. It felt deeply satisfying to see the boy’s industriousness rewarded. And the father’s pride in his son’s achievement? How wonderful to see a struggling businessman in East L.A. enjoy such rich satisfaction.

6. Stories. Back to the first “S:” a boy, an idea, some boxes. Stories can’t get stripped down much further, proving that good stories don’t require complexities to work.

Made to Stick stands at the top of my recommended reading list. You can order the hard cover here, soft cover here, Kindle edition here, or audio DVD here.

Brad Phillips is the author of the Mr. Media Training Blog and president of Phillips Media Relations, which specializes in media and presentation training. He tweets at @MrMediaTraining.

Social media can make or break you. So it’s a good idea to brush up on basic protocol  before you start tweeting. This article by eReleases’ Mickie Kennedy should help:

As you probably know, Twitter can be a powerful PR tool for your company.

The primary goal, of course, is to get as many targeted people to follow you as possible. That way, not only will you have plenty of “fans,” but you’ll also have people sharing your content.

While it makes perfect sense to try to acquire as many followers as possible, it’s shortsighted to focus solely on this task. Retting them to click follow is only the first step. Once you’ve hooked them, you have to take special care to keep them.

So what can you do to keep your followers?

Here are eights ways to increase the odds that your followers become loyal.

Tweet often … but not too often.

As with all other things in life, moderation is key and timing is everything. You need to find a healthy balance when it comes to how often you tweet. You want to stay active, yet you don’t want to overdo it.

Here’s a tip: Try a service like TweetDeck to schedule your daily tweets in the morning.

Share content relevant to your industry.

If you sell tires, you should probably stick to tweets about automobiles. More than likely, customers are following you for useful information in this category. They probably don’t care much for your views on political candidates or healthcare. In other words, think about what your target market expects from you and give it to them.

Be concise to make it easier to retweet.

The idea is to facilitate the sharing process. If your tweets use up the character limit, your followers will have to manually shorten your words to retweet them. This will likely be too annoying for many people, which means they’ll stop sharing what you have to say. Instead, keep your tweets to about 110-120 characters. That way they have room to add their own comments

Think before you tweet.

Twitter can make or break you. One wrong word and you might hurt your brand. So before you say anything at all, ask yourself, “Is it wise to say this to the entire world?”

Talk to your followers.

Social media is all about engaging one another in conversation. So make it happen. Talk to your followers. Tweet questions. Look at what they are saying and reply every now and then. Doing so will make you more likable and more approachable.

Inject a little personality.

No one wants to follow someone who is boring. Liven it up. Building a brand requires a bit of personality. Ley yourself shine through in your tweets so you seem more human.

Comment on your retweets.

Too often people just click “retweet” on a bunch of links and think they’re doing a good job keeping up with their Twitter account. Wrong. Make sure you add a comment, no matter how brief, to introduce the links you’re retweeting.

Say thanks.

Finally, when people follow you, let them know you care. In other words, send them a direct message, say thanks, and introduce yourself. And if you send an automated message, for the love of God, don’t let it read like one.

Mickie Kennedy is the CEO and founder of eReleases and blogs at PR Fuel, where a version of this article first appeared.

The debate about how to sell a book is sure to go on and go on. Publishing houses may fail or disappear completely. Hardcover and paperback books may wind up being considered cute vintage items. Even then, we will still want to figure out how to get our words in front of as many readers as possible. Freelance writer and editor Meghan Ward followed up her February Writerland blog post about the merits of publicity with a post titled “Does Publicity Sell Book? The Debate Continues.”

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post titled “If Publicity Doesn’t Sell Books, What Does?” in which numerous published authors offered insider tips on how they publicized and marketed theirs books, and numerous writers responded. This week, Paul J. Krupin, a publicist who blogs at Direct Contact PR, offers his perspective on the publicity debate. Paul’s post will make you want to jump out of your chair and join Toastmaster’s. Welcome, Paul!

Response to Publicity Doesn’t Sell Books
By Paul J. Krupin

Quite a number of authors express great frustration and anguish over the fact that the publicity they received didn’t result in lots of book sales.

In fact several of them conclude that publicity doesn’t work.

Their experience with media may be due to a lot of things. But to me what appears to have happened is that whatever the media published certainly didn’t result in them “turning their people on.” I don’t see that as a reason to conclude that “Publicity Doesn’t Work.” I see that a failure to make effective use of any number of golden media opportunities.

In the middle of February, one of my clients, JJ Smith, did one interview on The Steve Harris Morning Show, and sold over 6,000 books and made it to the top of Amazon’s best seller list ahead of The Hunger Games trilogy. Sure, it was only for 24 hours or so, but it was a single talk show interview that did it.

One of my favorite authors, Vince Flynn, did an interview with USA Today on Feb 6. He’s a best selling author of 13 books. He was asked three questions, and he spent one to two minutes more or less, answering each question. I was tickled to see how he handled the last question from the USA Today interviewer, one that he apparently had never been asked before: “What is it about your stories that brings the reader in?” BTW, it worked since I ran to the local bookstore and bought a copy.

For those of you who have worked with me, I challenge you with this very same question: “What do you do that turns people on?” Whenever we seek get media coverage whether it is for a review, a feature story, or an interview.

Think about what happens—just for example, when was the last time you read the newspaper or a magazine or watched TV and grabbed your credit card?

It probably doesn’t happen very often., does it? In today’s world, it may actually happen more often if you read something on a trusted blog or on a friend’s Facebook and they say, “This is cool. You gotta have it.”

Think carefully about the times that it does happen. How did you feel? Weren’t you amazed, galvanized, and stunned? Wasn’t your attention riveted?

Well, if you want publicity or any other marcom (marketing communications) that you create to do that, then you’d better figure out what is happening when it happens to you first. Then you have to learn what you can say and do to make it happen to others.

Realize that if you want to be a successful author, you not only have to write a really good book, but when you get in front of media you need to turn your audience on. You have to learn how to do that or else people won’t respond the way you want them to.

Now I’ll share with you something I’ve learned doing publicity for a few tens of years.

I believe that you can learn to do this anywhere. I call this the miracle of the microcosm because I’ve found from working with real people, from all over the country, that it really doesn’t matter where you are. You can learn what to say that turns people on one person at a time. Yes you can.

You just have to keep talking to people and pay attention to what you said when it happens!

You can ask people at a speaking engagement to tell you. You can have a partner watch the audience and take notes while you are speaking. You can record your talks and track sales or how many people raise their hand or come up to you after your talk. You’ll find hints in your reviewer comments and testimonials where people tell you why they love what you do.

The miracle is that once you learn the magic words that produce the action you want, you can then you can use all the media and other marcom technologies as a force multiplier to repeat the message and keep reproducing the effect.

In a nation with 330 million people, you have very good reason to focus on that message. Even if you are successful in reaching and converting an itsy bitsy tiny percent, you can be phenomenally successful.

Before you think that doing publicity or any other marcom technology is going to help you, you really need to learn what you can say and do that turns your people on. You need to develop a script that produces action.

Can you stand in front of 50 people and talk for three minutes so that half the people come flying out of their chairs and hand you money? That is what you need to be able to do. You need to hit their hot buttons by being the very best you can be. You need to give people a transcendental emotionally engaging experience. Learn how to do this in a small audience and then place that script into your interviews and feature story proposals.

The same is true by the way with social media. The real promise of social media is only achieved when what you’ve done is so good people rave about it to all their friends. If it’s not good enough, it’s just panned.

If you learn how to turn people on, and then use that in your targeted communications so that you help the people you can help the most, you’ll see your success with the media hit maximum levels. This isn’t easy to do. But if you are strategic and test, improve, and prove your communications systematically, it can be done.

Make sure that the content you offer is like candy. Create a recipe that tastes so good that people just can’t get enough of it. and they want the whole bag.

BTW, I’ve created a five minute, self-serve Prezi that describes how to do this process in a highly entertaining and visual way. Here’s the link.

Enjoy.

Another writing coach client has completed and published a book. Dr. Surender R. Neravetla wanted to make his case about the dangers of salt. Now he’s taking that case out into the world. In next week’s blog, I’ll talk about everything he’s doing to promote his new book Salt Kills (HeathNowBooks, 2012). For now, I just wanted to share the first media release I wrote for him.  Not that I want to brag, but it caught the eye of a woman writing an ebook about how to write media releases, and she asked if she could use it as an example.Talk about a nice pat on the back for me and a little extra free publicity for the author!

MEDIA RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Sharon Cook – Cook Public Relations

(707) 633-5547

The Killer in your Kitchen

Springfield, OH – March 1, 2012 – The title of heart surgeon Dr. Surender Neravetla’s book tells most of the story: Salt Kills (Health Now Books, 2012). But that’s only if you’re lucky.

Many people know that salt causes high blood pressure, but they don’t appreciate just how debilitating high blood pressure can be. In his new book, Dr. Neravetla—Director of Cardiac Surgery at Springfield Regional Medical Center—explains in easy-to-understand language how high blood pressure silently inflicts damage on multiple organ systems, including the heart. That damage is often irreversible. Enlarged hearts, for example, do not tend to shrink or get better. Instead, they lead to heart failure.

The damage caused by the simple consumption of salt, however, doesn’t stop there. Salt Kills points to research data that shows how easting salt also significantly contributes to:

• Dementia
• Asthma
• Osteoporosis
• Obesity
• Stomach cancer

A whopping 56 million Americans suffer from conditions either caused or aggravated by salt intake. And that’s not even counting the 130 million Americans who are overweight or obese. Those shocking statistics prompted Dr. Neravetla to label salt as Public Enemy Number One. “We have grown accustomed to salting our food without realizing how dangerous the consequences are,” he says. “But salt is permanently disabling or prematurely killing millions and millions of people every year.”

Dr. Neravetla began to look into the dangers of salt consumption after visiting his parents in India. Even though their typical diets include no animal protein, virtually every single member of his family over the age of 50 suffered from very high blood pressure. Since they ate no animal fat, that couldn’t be the problem, he realized. But what was causing their cardiovascular problems along with a host of other related diseases?

The more he dove into the research, the more he realized that eating salty foods had triggered their conditions. No wonder so many of the heart patients upon whom he had already performed surgery ended up back on his operating table. Worse, while he could save many lives, he couldn’t improve the quality of those lives already debilitated by disease.

“We simply have to place a much stronger, higher priority on prevention than on treatment,” says Dr. Neravetla. “And since our salt habit is our number one preventable health problem, by far the most important and urgent change we need to make in our diet in order to improve our health is to put down the salt shaker.” It’s never too late stop this insidious habit. Salt Kills should help convince people to do just that.

For more information about Dr. Neravetla’s new book Salt Kills, visit http://saltkills.com/ or call Sharon Cook at (707) 633-5547.

##

Freelance writer Meghan Ward wrote a terrific blog post late last month titled If Publicity Doesn’t Sell Books, What Does?

A friend/client sent it my way. In the ongoing attempt to make sense out of how to  go about selling a book, I thought I would share it with you. There’s a follow-up, which I’ll post soon.

One of the advantages of working out of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto is all the wonderful conversations—about writing, about publishing, and about marketing—that take place over lunch and on our listserv. Last month, a blog post by Joe Konrath titled “The Value of Publicity” and another by Michael Ellsberg, titled “The Tim Ferriss Effect”, sparked an e-mail thread about what sells books. According to Konrath, the publicity he got in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the LA Times, etc. did nothing to increase his book sales. According to Ellsberg, a spot on prime-time CNN and an editorial he wrote for the New York Times did little to increase his book sales. So, if publicity doesn’t sell books, what does?

It’s time to clean out your closets. Don’t worry about the clothes. Just dust off those manuscripts that haven’t gone anywhere and start submitting them to various writing competitions. I’ve pasted in the email I just received from the Writer’s Digest about the ones they have coming up. But there are plenty more.

When I Googled “2012 writing competitions,” I got 30,700,000 results. Ha! Naturally I didn’t check them all out. But safe to say, there are a ton of opportunities out there.

For now, here’s your chance for recognition courtesy of the Writer’s Digest:

Get Valuable Exposure for Your Memoir!

You’ve already written your memoirs or an outstanding personal essay. Now all you need is the exposure that could lead to publication.

That’s exactly what you’ll get when you enter your memoirs or personal essay in the 81st Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition!

One grand prize winner will be featured in the December 2012 issue of Writer’s Digest, along with the names of the winners in each of ten categories.

This is a great way to gain access to agents, editors, and readers – and get a little recognition for all your hard work.

Early Bird Deadline: May 1, 2012

Enter Now!

For details, including a complete list of prizes and categories click here.

Upcoming Competitions:

Self Published Awards Deadline: April 20, 2012
Annual Competition Deadline: May 1, 2012
Popular Fiction Competition Deadline: Sept. 14, 2012
Short Short Story Competition Deadline: Nov. 15, 2012
Poetry Awards Deadline: Dec. 3, 2012

Good luck! Let me know how it turns out.

If you’ve ever had—or tried to get—a book published, you already know how arbitrary the publishing industry can be. If you find that irritating, you might want to take some deep, calming breaths before you read the New York Times News Service article “What’s In a Name? Publishing Deals“, which was republished last month in The Bend Bulletin.

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but apparently the byline can color an editor’s opinion about a manuscript in a less than positive way. We all know how tough it is to get published if you’re an unknown author. It turns out that unknown author bylines sometimes trump those of published authors if book sales turned out to be less than stellar. The bottom line? Sometimes a pen name is the name of this game.

Every once in a while, a book really makes you sit up and take notice of the inequities in the world around us. I wish I had thought to write Barbara Ehrenreich’s bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001). On the other hand, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to leave my home behind (along with my ID, my checkbook and my credit cards) and spend a year working in some of the country’s lowest paid jobs. But having been a maid and worked almost every possible restaurant position except dishwasher and high-end cook while in my teens and twenties, I sure could relate to what she wrote. The fact that conditions are worse for most of the people working these menial positions than they ever were for me made me want to run up and hug the nearest worker-bee I saw.

A new arrival, The American Way of Eating takes up where Nickel and Dimed left off. Author Tracie MacMillan, who has written for such prestigious food journals as Saveur, decided to go undercover at places that grow or sell food to the nation’s working poor. Whether picking grapes, peaches and garlic in California fields, trying to make tired, second-rate produce look fresh at a Walmart in Detroit or working in the kitchen of a Brooklyn Applebees, she writes of dismal working conditions, of trying (often unsuccessfully) to make ends meet on wages that are too skimpy, and of the substandard food that is sold to those of us in the country at the bottom of the economic ladder.

“What would it take for us all to eat well?” she asks. The answer includes looking beyond the fare on our tables to the conglomerate behind the food. As a New York Times review says, MacMillan “delivers a brutal takedown of corporations that, in her view, pretend on their sunny Web sites to treat workers well but in practice use labor contractors that often cheat them. She names names. Here’s looking at you, the Garlic Company in Bakersfield, Calif.”

In short, MacMillan’s book challenges corporate America’s priorities of profit over people. I’ll drink to that.

Whether you’re trying to market a book, some other product or yourself and your business, it’s all about getting noticed by your potential customers not just once, but over and over again. In short, you have to brand yourself successfully.
In her article “Live Long and Market: Small Business Branding,” Marketing Coordinator Jamillah Warner has some terrific tips on how to do that both online and offline.

When you’re ready to bust a move on the branding front, just remember that the One Stop Writing Shop can help you write whatever you need or do it for you.

Now go forth and brand yourself!