This probably belongs in the as-yet-nonexistent general writing forum, but I had to choose between this and Original Fiction Discussion for now.

I stumbled upon this StoryBundle thing going on right now, which is a Humble Indie Bundle-style deal that includes a bunch of writing ebooks:

http://storybundle.com/nano

The minimum price is $5, which includes the following six ebooks:

Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing by David Farland
Million Dollar Productivity by Kevin J. Anderson
Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing by Dean Wesley Smith
The Pursuit of Perfection and How it Harms Writers by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Million Dollar Professionalism by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta
Shadows Beneath by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells & Howard Tayler

But if you pay at least $15, you get six more:

Million Dollar Outlines by David Farland
21 Days to a Novel by Michael A. Stackpole
Charisma +1: The Guide to Convention Etiquette for Writers, Geeks, and the Socially Awkward by Jessica Brawner
The Freelancer's Survival Guide by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
500 Ways to Write Harder by Chuck Wendig
The Non-User-Friendly Guide for Aspiring TV Writers by Steven L. Sears

I'm probably going to drop the $15 for the whole set, even though I'm only sort of interested in half of the upper tier books (and even then I can read all of Wendig's stuff online), but I figured you guys might be interested. We have two months to get in on it, so no rush.

What are your thoughts on writing books in general? Have you used any of them? The only one I've seen is the free NaNo for the New and Insane by Lizette Gifford (link), which I enjoyed even though I never stuck with her planning method.

 

I've read most of these, and, well, I'm something of an okay writer.

A lot of the advice you'll have heard before, a lot of it actually got me excited about how better to tell stories and optimise what I do write.

Million Dollar Outlines is particularly useful in genre fiction. It breaks down why successful stories may be successful. Is it three arc structure? Is it tension rising to a climax? You increase your chances of getting the reader to turn the page by introducing conflict at this point, and that point, and so on...

Wendig repeats the same old shit in delightfully entertaining ways.

Hell, I would recommend anyone looking to improve their craft to read these books. What they won't teach you is motivation to sit in the chair and churn out words, however. That can't be found in a book.

At $15 you're getting a helluva lot of useful knowledge about stories and writing. I'm picking it up, because there's about 4 I haven't read and to buy them individually would exceed the more than fair price.

Two thumbs up.

 

Reckon I'll go for it too. Sounds pretty good.

 

Thanks, Joe. I actually found this by Googling for a legit epub version of that...no need to artificially support Amazon Kindle dominance if I'm just going to convert it in Calibre. If it was in the $5 tier I might have saved $10, but you can't be mad about the price (that's in USD by the way, I always forget many DLP regulars are outside of the US).

And your first bit is what I meant about the one I read. I didn't really use it, but it got me thinking about my story and excited about writing it, which the NaNo pep talks don't do for me. I'm looking forward to digging into Farland's books, and maybe trying out Stackpole's for my NaNovel, the novel followup to my soon-to-be DLP anthology entry.

 

While a lot of these have useful, entertaining information, I can't forget that there exists a very peculiar and very distinct class of writers who only ever write books on how to write. I've met far too many of these writers to ever feel comfortable buying books like this without doing a bit of a background check to see if they've ever written anything else.

They are the epitome of arrogant, elitist, resistant-to-criticism hack writers, and I've spent far too much time repairing the damage they do to my students' egos.

tl;dr - beware of how to write books in general, but this seems like a decent bunch

 

'Your students', CareOtters?

 

I 'teach' writing classes, workshops, that sort of thing.

 

I got myself a bonus pack. Hopefully, it'll be worth it.