I was commenting on a friend’s blog post about author branding (linked below), and it got me thinking. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts with you all and see what you think as readers and writers.

Since the Internet opened ways for authors to have more control of, and responsibility for, marketing their books, writers at all stages have been told to develop a brand, something that would be tied to their books in readers’ minds.

On the surface, this makes a lot of sense because you want your name or titles to come to mind whenever a particular concept is mentioned. This is what advertising attempts to do with other types of products, which has proven successful. Marketing journals often talk about how what matters is name recognition, which is why good and bad attention serves a purpose. When someone is scanning the shelves, they’re more likely to pick up the book with an author they have heard of, even if they don’t remember where or when that connection was made. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I received a spam with the above title, but a moment before I confirmed it to be spam, it got me thinking.

I hear people complaining about the hoops we have to jump through to submit our manuscripts, or talking about this or that exception who managed to ignore all the requirements and still get an agent, publisher, or sale.

To them, I say, “Looks matter.”

When you’re at the grocery store and there are twenty different zucchinis in the stack, do you just randomly grab one, or do you take the one that looks healthy? Maybe you’re not the type to poke and prod your way through the whole pile, but it’s rare that someone doesn’t at least check for tears or soft spots. No one wants to waste their money on something rotten.

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Or A Day in the Life of a Writing Parent

Most novel writers have a few stories that were started long ago and never finished. Some of these stories continue to poke and may eventually see the light of day, but it’s usually with a sense of “when the time is right.”

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On one of my writing listservs, the question came up about alternate locations to avoid clichés. There are several writing books that
mention no kitchen, no coffee shops, no bars, no whatever.

The point of those mentions is not so much the setting as that these places tend to have low potential for conflict. The characters are most often sitting down and musing over things with their friends. Read the rest of this entry »

I drive my son and another student to school in the morning, a commute which brings us through rush hour traffic complicated by a lot of road construction with varied speed limits. This morning, as I was accelerating out of a 55 MPH zone up to the now 65 MPH speed limit, a silver sedan cut sharply over from the right.

Now the driving behavior was obvious. She hadn’t expected me to accelerate, and there was a truck right in front of her going even slower, so she wanted to move into the faster lane ahead of me (still slow moving in her mind) rather than behind. No problem, though she cut it a little close.

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I drive my son and another student to school in the morning, a commute which brings us through rush hour traffic complicated by a lot of road construction with varied speed limits. This morning, as I was accelerating out of a 55 MPH zone up to the now 65 MPH speed limit, a silver sedan cut sharply over from the right.

Now the driving behavior was obvious. She hadn’t expected me to accelerate, and there was a truck right in front of her going even slower, so she wanted to move into the faster lane ahead of me (still slow moving in her mind) rather than behind. No problem, though she cut it a little close.

Read the rest of this entry »

The spell check really is your friend. No, your word processor doesn’t know how to spell everything, and it may suggest some bizarre alternatives, but again, it’s pointing out possible problems. Now here’s the trick. When you’re writing an otherworld piece, a fantasy, science fiction, or other variation, you can run into a lot of words that are not in the default business dictionary. However, all is not lost. Word (and most word processors) offers the option of custom dictionaries, text files that contain words you choose to put in there. This serves two purposes: you only have to verify the spelling once by adding it to the dictionary instead of using ignore. Second, when you’re done with your spell check, you can open the text file and compare the entries to make sure the main character isn’t Kitath in most instances but Kiteth whenever followed by an “‘s” for example. In my most recent copyedit, a minor character’s name changed spelling (an “i” to a “y”) in the last thirty pages. Without the custom dictionary, I might have missed the change since that character had been off-screen for some time before those thirty pages. It also provides a simple way of collecting the “unique” words if you choose to have a glossary for your work. All you need then is to define the terms.

To create a custom dictionary in Word 2003 (works with modifications for later versions of Word, and concepts should be similar for other word processors).

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First of all, the good news. I managed 16,500 on Dry Boiled, give or take a few words, for the March Madness (MM) challenge at Forward Motion. I’ve found challenges are a good way to jump start a novel and get me rolling so I can keep up a reasonable pace all the way to the end…not that the 6k a day I’d been planning for MM was at all reasonable. The just over 2k average is much more so, but in general I go for 1k a day average when I’m not in a challenge.

The story is an interesting one for me to write, mainly because of the point of view. A flip comment from a friend when I was talking about how this voice is a new one for me (neither serious nor sweet) led me to start out in first person, and even more than that, first person present tense, something I’ve never done in a novel before. So far, this is working out quite well. My main character has a strong personality that she throws around the page with a delightful effect, at least I think so. Which is to say, I am enjoying the novel quite a bit as it comes together…or at last I was until an epiphany last night.

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