scott king – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

SFFMP 174: Outlining Your Novel for More Efficient Writing and Starting New in Epic Fantasy

March 27, 2018 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

Today, we were joined by return guest Scott King, the author of Outline Your Novel: The How To Guide for Structuring and Outlining Your Novel and The Five Day Novel, as well as numerous fantasy and young adult adventures. He recently jumped into epic fantasy with the first book in his Elderrealm series, Wrath of Dragons. We grilled him on outlining and also how he found starting out in epic fantasy this year after publishing in other genres previously.

Here are some of the specifics that we talked about:

How an outline can help an author become more efficient.
Whether pantsers can get anything out of outlining.
Outlining a single novel versus doing a series.
Starting with a pitch and then developing an outline.
Mistakes authors make with outlining.
What to do if the story diverges from the outline as you write it.
How tough it is to break into epic fantasy today as an author new to the genre.
Whether Kindle Unlimited/KDP Select is a good idea for epic fantasy.
The pros and cons of mailing list swaps.
The challenges of genre jumping.

You can find Scott on his website or Twitter, and grab his first epic fantasy novel Wrath of Dragons or his outlining book, Outline Your Novel.

Also, check out his Creators Cast podcast.

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epic fantasy, outlining, scott king

SFFMP 106: Writing a Novel in Five Days with Scott King

November 8, 2016 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

Since it’s NaNoWriMo month, we invited Scott King to talk about how he wrote a novel in five days (and then wrote a book about how he did it, also in five days). In addition to holding down a day job as a board game photographer, Scott is the author of several middle grade fantasy novels, a thriller, and a couple of non-fiction titles, including this newest one. We asked him what his process was for writing the novel in five days and tried to milk some tips out of him too.

Some details of what we covered:

What’s the state of the middle grade fiction market when it comes to self-publishing and ebooks?
Why Scott shifted to adult epic fantasy and thrillers.
Whether outlining is important when writing a novel quickly.
Staying excited when you’re struggling to get past the middle point of the novel.
Getting in the habit of finishing projects.
How you optimize your workflow to be more efficient.
Whether mindset matters when it comes to writing and finishing novels.
How much of Scott’s five days go to prep and revision.
How long it takes to refill the creative tank after writing a novel so quickly.
How to keep novels shorter and simpler to make them easier to finish (and why you might want to, even you epic fantasy folks).
Dealing with distractions and writers’ block.
Some of the challenges of genre hopping.