Z = The Final Step of Writing a Novel and the End of the A to Z Challenge

Z is for the end, both of writing a novel and this blogging challenge. It's been an interesting ride this month (and this is the only time I've ever completed the challenge). Camp NaNo ended up derailed so I wrote less than 1/10 of what I had planned to. But at least I'm excited about going back to my novel again so the end should be written soon.

I hope all of you have enjoyed reading the various posts linked throughout the month. And the giveaways have been fun (you've got until midnight to enter for Angel Eyes). I'll probably not be quite as active over the next two months due to all the logistics of moving to another country to start my job, but that's life.

Enjoy the last article and please do click through to M J Wright's website to read the rest of the article.

One of my favourite writing tips is so well known it barely needs repeating. When you’ve written your first draft manuscript, stick it in a (metaphorical) drawer for a month and don’t look at it.

The idea is that you come back with fresh eyes.

The other problem is that it’s too easy to re-awaken the old ideas – to lock back into the old thinking. Sometimes the ‘novelty factor’ lasts about a page and a half. Sometimes those old thoughts can creep up on you without you even really noticing.It sort of works, but like all cliches there are two problems with the idea. One is getting that month, especially if there is a deadline and the work has to be juggled between half a dozen other writing projects, along with all the impecunious demands of everyday life.

But there are ways around it. Try this. Print the manuscript off and look at isolated pages, making sure you don’t start with the first one.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Y = A Map to the Land of YA Publishing

The people over at YA Highway have created an interesting visual map of the publishing process complete with links to articles on various subjects. Click the image below to view the full map on their website.

Click here to enter the Angel Eyes Giveaway! Only one day left!

X = 7 Reasons Agents Might Give Your First Chapter an X

The dreaded first chapter, or even the first paragraph of your novel. That's all the time you have to impress an agent into asking for more. So here are some tips on what not to do, unless you like seeing how fast an agent can lose interest in your novel.

Previously, I attended the Writer Idol Event at Boston Book Fest. It was not for the faint of heart, but for those willing to brave public ridicule, it was a great way to get helpful feedback.

(How to Support an Author’s New Book: 11 Ways For You to Help)

This is how it worked: An actress picked manuscripts at random and read the first 250 words out loud for the panel and the audience. If at any point a panelist felt he would stop reading, he raised his hand. The actress read until two or more panelists raised their hands, at which point the panel discussed the reasons they stopped, or in cases where the actress read to the end, they discussed what worked. Helene Atwan (Director of Beacon Press) and agents Esmond Harmsworth, Eve Bridburg, and Janet Silver (all from Zachary Shuster Harmsworth) served on the panel.

These panelists were tough! I’d say less than 25% made it to the end of the passage. Here are some of the common reasons panelists stopped reading.

1. Generic beginnings: Stories that opened with the date or the weather didn’t really inspire interest. According to Harmsworth, you are only allowed to start with the weather if you’re writing a book about meteorologists. Otherwise, pick something more creative.

2. Slow beginnings: Some manuscripts started with too much pedestrian detail (characters washing dishes, etc) or unnecessary background information. 

Click here to read tips 3-7 at Writer's Digest.

Click here to enter for a chance of winning Angel Eyes until the 30th!

W = 13 Ways to Scare People Away from your Website

Website building is not my forte, nor that of most writers. We try many things to create a website which looks good but keeps people coming back. However, here are 13 ways to make sure no one ever comes back, courtesy of Author Media.

This can be a scary time of the year.

Here at Author Media, there is nothing that scares us more than bad author website design.
Here are 13 proven ways to scare people away from your author website.

1. Music

Many people surf the web while listening to Pandora, Spotify or iTunes in the background. If your website starts music when someone arrives, it will create chaos in their headphones as two songs play at the same time. For bonus points, hide the “pause” button so the only way to stop the music is to leave the website.
To turn your website into a horror show, make the song restart every time users load a new page. This way you can bludgeon your readers over the head with the first few bars of the song.

2. Focus on Yourself

People don’t care about you, they care about them. So, focus on yourself. You are the author after all. Fill the website with photos of you and your family. Talk about personal details of your life that have nothing to do with your book. Blog about irrelevant topics. Avoid giving away any helpful information.
Avoid the things in our list of what readers want from your author website.

Click here to read tips 3-13 at Author Media.

Click here to enter the Angel Eyes Giveaway!

V = Victory at Last!

Well, at least for one writer. His story and perseverance are amazing! Most people would have given up long before then.

If your novel has been banging on agents’ doors for years and got nowhere take heart from Berwick Coates, an English author who this week nailed down a $130,000 deal and a two-book contract at age 80.

His historical thriller The Last Conquest was snapped up by one of the world’s largest publishers Simon & Schuster after Coates had failed to impress agents with several previous novels. “They were clearly not being read,” he said.

A retired history teacher, Coates succeeded only when he caught the eye of agent Jim Gill, who was recommended to him by a fellow author. Now Coates is finishing his second novel The Last Viking and can hope to see both in book stores at an age when most authors might have given up or resorted to vanity publishing.

Click here to continue reading his heartening success story at The Writing Village.

Click here to enter for a copy of Angel Eyes!

U = US Tax Treaties for Writers

Taxes. Yes, even writers have to deal with them and they only get more complicated once you throw living out of country into the mix. I've been sniffing around for information related to this due to my going overseas soon and I thought I'd share the information I found with you, my readers.

Thank you Stina for allowing me to take over your blog today. I hope that I may bring some knowledge to those who plan on doing business in the U.S., but may reside elsewhere.

When I was paired with an illustrator on an anthology project, I had no clue where Maldives was located, but I knew I needed to work with Rimi no matter the consequences. Working with others who reside outside of the U.S. requires knowledge of certain tax laws.

Are you thinking of publishing in the U.S., but live in another country? Maybe you are working with someone else in another country on a collaboration, perhaps even a business partnership? Regardless of whether you plan on self-publishing or going the traditional route, if your work will be published in the U.S., you’ll need to understand certain aspects of our tax laws.

The U.S. government requires companies to withhold 30% of royalties made in the U.S. and paid to entities residing in other countries…unless the U.S. has a tax treaty with your country. 

Click here to continue reading at Stina Lindenblatt's blog.

Click here to enter for a chance of winning a copy of Angel Eyes!

T = Twitter: How on Earth do you Become Successful?

Twitter is a powerful social media tool for sharing your writing (you might even have come to this post via my tweet about it) but it can be difficult to figure out how to grow your following. Here is one writer's experience on how to attain a massive following.

I wasn’t planning to write this post. It more came to be as a matter of chance. It all started a few days ago when author, editor and blogger, C.S. Lakin (@cslakin and @livewritethrive on Twitter), contacted me via my website to ask, “How did you get so many followers?” As I’d done in the past with a few others who asked, I emailed C.S. and explained my process. In response she came back, suggesting this should be a blog post and even offered to put my email into blog format, leaving me with only whatever fine tuning I desired. I said, “Cool,” she said, “Here you go,” and voilà, here it is, I’m coming clean about my Twitter success.

When I joined Twitter in August 2009, I went with the simple logic that the more followers I had, the more people would learn about the thrillers I wrote. With that in mind, I got busy with an easy process requiring little account management time which I’ll now share with you. The basic plan was to follow people, some of whom would follow back. Those who didn’t, I would unfollow. All I did was repeat this process over and over again. It obviously works because I now have almost 250,000 followers.

Click here to continue reading at Live, Write, Thrive.

Click here to enter for your chance at winning a copy of Angel Eyes!

R = Random House Contract Missteps

We all know about Random House, one of the huge publishing companies which puts out a huge number of books each year through all it's various imprints. But it looks like Random House is trying out a new tactic: mimicking vanity presses. And this is not good news.

This week, Random House generated controversy among writers over the terms of their contracts for two of their new digital-only imprints: Hydra, which focuses on science-fiction/fantasy genre and Alibi, which focuses on the mystery and thriller genres. These imprints were launched last November, along with Flirt, which publishes college-age stories. Loveswept, an ebook-only romance imprint, was already in existence.

The controversy became more widely discussed when leading professional organization Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) declared that works published by Hydra (which is not to be confused with Hydra Publications) would not be considered eligible as credentials for membership.

Click here to continue reading at Huffington Post.

Click here to enter the Angel Eyes giveaway!

Q = Rejecting Agents You've Queried

Is it even possible to think of such a thing happening as having to reject an agent? It seems like it's usually the other way around with the rejection letters streaming in. But, once you have an offer of representation you do have to let the other agents know. Here's how you can do it politely.

Congratulations! You’ve received an offer of representation!!!

But there are more agents considering. Possibly agents you submitted to at midnight on a Friday after a glass of wine or two and noticed your rejection pile was growing and your submission list thinning and good GOD you need to GET IT OUT THERE MORE AND INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF AN OFFER JUST TO KEEP UP THE HOPE….!

I.E: definitely not dream agent material, but worthy of settling for.

Yeah, yeah; maybe I should have rose-colored glasses on here and say that EVERY agent an author submits to is TOTALLY his/her dream agent but…I know better. And it’s ok; this business is so subjective, just as not every author is right for every agent, not every agent is right for every author. Doesn’t make either party less awesome – just not the best professional fit.

So what do you do when you receive an offer and (as you should) want to be fair and notify any other considering agents to give them a chance…but don’t necessarily WANT to give some of them that chance, or KNOW that even if one of those agents you were being fair to offered, you wouldn’t go with them?

Maybe this is just a problem in MY eyes; I certainly can’t fault an author for wanting ANYONE to read his/her manuscript and fawn all over it, even if s/he doesn’t really intend to go with that agent. But truly, it’s a waste of time; and it really sucks to let an agent possibly fall in love with your manuscript if s/he doesn’t stand a chance.

So what’s the best approach?

Click here to continue reading at Adventures in Agentland.

Click here to enter the giveaway for Angel Eyes!

P = How Not to Kill Your Story in the Opening Paragraphs

The beginning of a story or novel is one of the hardest parts to get right. I know I've agonized over many a beginning. Did it have the right punch? Was the hook sufficient or even present? But here are a few tips to help you along the way (make sure to click through to whole article to read the rest of the tips).

Ever driven a car round a bend and seen another one heading straight at you? At 60mph? It happened to me last week. I swerved into a ditch and it clipped my wing mirror as it bulleted past. Not a good way to start a day but a great place to begin a story…

Why do so many writers get their opening paragraphs wrong?

Here are five big mistakes new authors make - and how to avoid them - based on my experience of judging 3500+ entries to date in the Writers’ Village story contest.

Mistake #1: A start that has too many characters

Good opening passages typically involve just one or two main players. Don’t bring in a cast of thousands or tell the whole history of Renaissance Florence before the action begins.

The UK crime writer Ruth Rendell typically has more than 30 named characters in every novel. Too many? Yet her novels are successful. Why? She limits her characters to just three per scene and makes each character highly memorable the moment she introduces them.

Slip in your minor characters and details of back story naturally, a fragment here and there, as the story proceeds. Limit the cast list at the start!

Click here to continue reading at Writer's Village. 

Click here to enter the giveaway for Angel Eyes until the 30th!

G = What in the World is Google Authorship?

You know those words you’ve been writing? The ones on your blog that you’ve spent countless hours carefully crafting?

Yeah, you don’t own those.

Not really. Not according to Google. This may be the biggest thing you haven’t heard of…yet.

Before you get upset, let me tell you a quick story.

Last year, David Cohen, a brilliant marketer, SEO, and mentor invited me to a small Google+ Hangout with other writers interested in SEO and Authorship. He also asked if he could use my personal website as an example during the meeting.

I said sure. Who doesn’t like free feedback from an expert?

But while we were on air, he said something that wrecked my day.

“Caitlin,” he said. “According to Google, you didn’t write any of these posts.”

Snap. I was mortified. Embarrassed. And more than a little bit angry at Google. Over 300 blog posts and none of them mine? That just wasn’t right.

I’ll never forget the day I first learned about Google Authorship.

Read more at Author Media.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway until the 14th!

F = The Financial Reality of Being an Author

The reality of writing is that authors don't make a lot of money. Oh sure there are the successful, rich authors but they make up only the tiniest fraction of actual published authors.

If you have dreams of selling your science fiction, fantasy or horror novel and getting filthy rich, you need to adjust your expectations. We’ve collected three testimonials from genre writers below to help aspiring writers to maintain realistic expectations.
Horror novelist Brian Keene gave a speech at Towson University’s Borderlands Boot Camp recently, laying out some frank statistics for aspiring genre novelists. Here is an excerpt:

The average advance these days, for a genre fiction novel, ranges between $2,500 and $10,000. That’s right. The novel you spent a year working on only earns you between $2,500 to $10,000 at first. When the book is published a year later, that advance will have long been spent. And you probably won’t see a royalty check until another year AFTER your book has been published (provided enough copies have sold to earn out your advance). So it will actually be two years from that advance check before you get paid again.

Read more testimonials at Media Bistro..

Enter The Eye of the Sword giveaway until the 14th!

E = Excel is Your New Best Friend, Self-Publishers

After the writing, editing, layout and publishing in general is done, the sales begin. Hopefully, that is. But let's assume that you're selling a few here and there at least. But you're a self-published author without a sales or marketing department to keep track of your sales. What do you do so that you have a track record to show to literary agents, convincing them you're a best seller in the making? Why, you make best friends with that helpful tool known as Excel!

I’ve discovered that in general, authors are not numbers people. They tend to have vague idea of sales and revenue earned. In fact, most authors probably don’t scrutinize their royalty statements like they should (with a few exceptions of course). And I get it. Authors are creative folks. Math uses the other side of the brain. But if you are digitally self-publishing, then you are your own publisher. And given that, you should be generating your own royalty statements in an excel spreadsheet. Here’s what you should track and why.

TO TRACK:

1) All Price Points – sales especially

2) All editions — including audio/shorter works

3) Copies given away for free

4) All distribution venues where editions are available

5) Percentage splits/royalty

6) Cumulative totals

Continue reading to find out why at Nelson Agency.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway until the 14!

D = Deadbeat Clients and One Freelancer's Solution

Let's face it. All writers are, in a sense, freelancers even if we don't actively run a business with that as the focus. But what happens when we get the short end of the money stick?

It started out innocently enough. A potential client liked my work, and had one of his employees contact me to see if I’d be interested in meeting to discuss some potential projects he wanted my help on. Several weeks after the initial meeting, he contacted me needed some emergency last-minute work done. He told me the terms over the phone and asked to meet in person the next day.

I’d had some misgivings about the client in the first place for various reasons, and a second red flag was when I learned he’d fired the full-time employee working on the project. My third red flag was when it took him five hours in our in-person meeting to explain what he wanted, and all I had walking out of that meeting was an outline I’d created myself. Start-up companies are often very disorganized, but this was excessive.

Still, I proceeded against my better judgement. I created a shared Google doc so that he could observe my work in real time, due to the time crunch, so that I could immediately make corrections. We didn’t have the luxury of a prolonged revision process.

I spent six hours putting together the manual, as requested, based on the outline I’d painstakingly compiled amidst a chaotic environment with constant interruptions. And I got feedback asking for more pages of information, though I had no idea what else to include, and for images, though copyright was an issue and we’d never discussed procuring images in our scope of work meeting.

My concerns and questions were never addressed, but were instead greeted with hostility. And so it was that midway through the project, the client decided to complete it himself. I was actually relieved at this point, and let him know that I’d simply bill him for the work I’d completed up until that point.

His response was, ”Bill? Are you kidding? For what? You did not provide me with any services. Good luck with your bill-sending exercise. All further emails will be automatically deleted.”

Continue reading to hear how he fought back at Yael Writes.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway until the 14th!

C = Authors as Assistant Cover Artists

So Camp NaNoWriMo finally started for me yesterday. I had a rough start and am still very much behind at 727 of 30k but it is a start at the least. And it constitutes at least one more blog post worth of material for the Kagerou's Journal story. Yay for getting ahead!

Every book needs a cover and the cover design process starts with the author. But what of those of us who aren't good at art or Photoshop?

Have you ever designed your cover in your mind? I used to design covers in sidewalk chalk while my preschool-age children drew flowers and monster faces. They were about as good as you'd expect with sidewalk chalk, which is to say about as good as I'd be able to produce even in a professional art studio with the entire contents of Oil Paintings And More at my disposal. I'd splash my title across the top and my name along the bottom and then some stick figure bit in the middle.

Then the rain would come, and the world was thankfully spared my artistic genius, assuming anyone even recognized that as a drawing in the first place.

You can't tell a book by its cover is the truism, but of course we judge books by their covers all the time. It's the face your work presents to the world. Your book cover is the introduction you're making to a potential reader.

My first novel's cover arrived in the mail one day. I was given no opportunity for input, but I thought it was okay (it grew on me later). Since then, working with small presses, I've had the opportunity to design four covers, and if this happens to you, you should know what to do. (Because at least one of those cover artists probably put a picture of me on a dart board.)

First, your book is a multifaceted work filled with interlocking meanings and chained symbols overlaid over a theme and a mood. And before you step any further, you need to know: a cover won't capture it all. You thought a 250-word query letter was insufficient? You're going to be longing for those 250 words.

What that means is you can't ask the cover artist to cram every bit of meaning in the book onto the cover. I've seen covers where the author and aritst seem to have plotted out every molecule of space: We'll put the main character here and the love interest looking in the opposite direction over there, and we'll superimpose that over the image of a rose, and beneath that we'll have the images of a locked treasure chest and a kitten, and in the background we should have an old Victorian house with birds flying overhead.

(I pulled that out of thin air, by the way. If I accidentally nailed your cover, my apologies.)

The problem with a cover like that is while you might think your book cannot be encapsulated without the rose and the kitten and the treasure chest, someone else's brain can't process it all in a glance. We don't know where to look first, and we don't know what the story is about.

So back up. The most important thing you can keep in mind when working with your cover artist is that the cover art is a selling tool.

 Continue reading at Query Tracker.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway until the 14th!

B = A Side Perk of Blogging

Fact one: Blogging is time consuming. (I see all you fellow bloggers nodding your heads in agreement.)

Fact two: Blogging on your personal blog is not connecting with a paycheck.

Shouldn't time + writing = more than just something to put on your resume?

They say the way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a large one. But not for everyone. Some authors get more money from their blogs than from their royalties.

Here is how they do it. 

Step One

Before you can start to monetize your blog you need traffic. You need thousands of visitors coming to your blog each month before you can expect to make money. If you sign up for our free Author Tech Tips newsletter you will get a free ebook on how to boost traffic to your blog.

The equation is simple: more traffic = more money.

 Read more tips here.

Enter The Eye of the Sword Giveaway until the 14th!

Weekly Roundup for 2/4/13

Did you enter the contest I mentioned last week? I did. Sent it in less than two hours from the deadline. I do hope my email made it through on time. If you entered, tell me in the comments! I'd love to find out.

But you're here for some useful links. Today's post features several helpful articles all the from the same person. I became "acquainted", to a certain degree, with John Yeoman through a fantasy group I joined on Yahoo ages ago. I've posted links to his site before, but I thought I'd mention this time the quarterly writing contest he runs. It costs fifteen pounds (he lives in the UK) to enter but you get personalized feedback no matter if you win or not. Consider looking into it! Here's more information. If you don't win, this might be a helpful post.

John posts many articles on wooing readers, and this one is no exception.

Here's his take on how to write a bestseller. Don't think it has anything to do with writing just anything you like.

A while back, he ran a mini-contest for the worst sentence in a published book. Want to know the winners? They certainly are hilarious!

And finally, try downloading and reading his free ebook "21 Wicked Ways to be a Better Writer" for 20 + "recipes" for writing better.

Looking to wow an agent? Why not try branding yourself?

I hope you enjoy his posts as much as I do!

Until next time.

First Weekly Roundup of the Year

It appears that the new round of interviewees have been met with a good deal of interest (thanks to all the people promoting it). But now it's time to resume the weekly posting of links. I've got several good ones for you today on several interesting topics.

I'm sure hidden among your writerly New Year's resolutions is a line about querying that manuscript you're working on as a goal to apply bottom to chair and actually finish it. But, before querying, please do put on your polite hat. You might want to take a few hints from this rant by Fizzygrrrl about how to react when (yes, when, not if) you receive The Rejection. (Hint: blowing up is not an option.)

Before querying, you need a query letter, right? But how do you follow all that advice on the web of 'writing in your novel's voice' when your novel is written in first person? Jane Lebak of Query Tracker has a few excellent warnings to read before going down that route and embarrassing yourself.

However, once you've achieved that bottom to chair fusion that typical results in a completed first draft as well as second, third and so forth, you might want to enlist some fresh eyes to copyedit before sending it out. Marcus Trower has a few good reasons why a pair of fresh eyes is a price well worth paying.

But, we've deviated slightly. New Year's resolutions. We all have them. But Stina Lindenblatt thinks that this is also the time for laying out business plans. You might say, wait, do business plans belong in the same sentence as writers? Stina says yes and I think she has a point.

Ash Krafton has four major resolutions which she hopes to hold to this year, not least of which is wrangling herself into setting goals and deadlines.

Finally, Jane Lebak has some good advice about the types of writer's groups out there and how to choose the right one for you. Isn't it a writer's dream to find the perfect group of critique partners? I know I'd love to find the right group.

Now for the fun bit! I only found out about this today or else I might have tried to enter. I'm sure everyone's familiar with Amazon's breakthrough novel contest (which is currently accepting submissions and which I may never enter because, have you read the fine print?!!) but I found another smaller contest with a similar reward. The contest is sponsored by Curiosity Quills Press and they only accept NaNoWriMo novels. There are three rounds, each with prizes and the grand prize winner is offered publication by them. Right now, the voting for round two is going on. Sadly, the only thing the readers can vote on at this point is the cover concept but each of the remaining entrants has a synopsis, cover concept and excerpt up on the site. Go here to read and vote (they give out prizes to readers/voters as well!). I'm quite keen to enter this contest so it looks like I know where my NaNo novel later this year will end up!

Until next time!

NaNoWriMo 2012: Linktastic Day 29

So, since I'm not reporting on my writing any more this month, I thought I'd make a stab at a normal post schedule, aka the Weekly Roundup! Here below lie all the links which have accumulated whilst I typed furiously for NaNo.

A few NaNoWriMo related posts to start us off:

Errol (of the NaNotoons and NaNomusical adventures) brags, I mean, explains how he wrote 50k in one day and didn't die. And then his equally interesting post on Quantity Begetting Quality explains the reasoning behind NaNoWriMo and why it works.

And once you've finished with your novel and are trying to make heads or tails of it in order to edit there are a few things you should check.

1) Is it told episodically? Anne R. Allen gives a few tips on how to avoid this problem while mooderino points out the difference between episodic and non-episodic on Moody Writing.

2) Is it told step by step where you tell every single detail? Amy Deardon outlines the advantages and disadvantages of this method and how to eliminate it safely.

3) Does your story have a voice? If it doesn't then the story will feel disconnected. Ash Krafton explains the importance of voice in her post on Query Tracker.

When finished editing, it's on to the agents! This is where you'll need to Learn to Love the Pitch (by Sarah Pinneo) and if that doesn't work, find out why you were rejected (by Mike Wells).

And then once it's time to start all over with a new novel, here are a few places you could start:

Dogs in Elk (the misadventures of a few dogs when introduced to an Elk carcass)

Murder or Suicide? (the curious case of a dead man)

Until next time!

Weekly Roundup

3 DAYS TILL NANOWRIMO! It seems like yesterday that I was logging onto the newly refreshed site at the beginning of October. Where has this month gone...

So, this will be my last regular "Weekly Roundup" until the end of December/new year. NaNo will take over this blog as usual during November and then I've got something interesting planned for my Christmas Picture Countdown in December. I'll still try to post links once in a while, but I can't promise anything.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to teach writers to turn off their inner editors and allow themselves to write a really terrible first draft. Carolyn Kaufman over at Query Tracker gives her input about the first "Skeleton draft" in her article here.

But on the other hand, is NaNoWriMo for every writer? Jane Lebak thinks not and isn't doing it this year for herself. Hear her out and read her reasons though. You just might find yourself agreeing.

Once you have this novel done at the end of NaNo (or whenever you finish editing), what do you do with it? Pursue traditional publishing? Hang it all and self-publish? However, you might want to think ahead about the consequences of choosing the latter. Many agents, like Janet Reid (the famous query shark), aren't too happy about not having first bite at your novel. Janet explains why poor sales can sink any possibility of a second book.

Until Thursday and the beginning of NaNo!!