How Reading Can Help You Become A Successful Teen Fiction Writer by Jane Sandwood

Children’s literature and young adult fiction books are enjoying massive popularity nowadays. Apart from JK Rowling, young adult and children’s literature authors and their publishers are raking in the profits as it was reported that John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars” earned Penguin UK more than £4 million, and in 2014, the Children’s Category earned £336.5m. And it’s not only secondary schoolers who are fans of these books—a study revealed that 55% of YA fiction readers are adults. If you’ve got an idea for a great YA novel or series, you may want to dive into the worlds created by Rowling, Green, Suzanne Collins, Rick Riordan, and others to prepare to write your novel. Having a good read can benefit your writing in so many ways, and here’s how reading can help you become a successful teen and YA fiction writer.

It helps you get in touch with your teen self

There’s a reason why so many adults love reading YA books—it reminds older readers of their childhoods and teen years, making these books the perfect escape from their busy adult lives. One of the benefits associated with reading YA is that it helps you get in touch with your teen self, which can be incredibly useful once you begin to write your novel. The more you read, the more you develop an authentic teenage or young adult voice. This makes your book more convincing and relatable to readers who are fans of this genre.

You get to immerse yourself in popular teen culture

Reading YA books set at the present time allows you to immerse yourself in popular teen culture, especially if you need to get caught up in current British teen slang or Millennial slang. If your novel is set in the 2000s, you may need to know how to use “bae” in a sentence, why something or someone is perceived as “goals,” why being “thirsty” has nothing to do with needing a beverage and why “throwing shade” is considered to be rude behaviour. Moreover, reading helps you learn about the latest in teen culture, and a little pop culture reference in your novel can go a long way.

You get to take a productive break

If you’re experiencing a raging case of writer’s block, you might as well re-read “The Hunger Games,” “The Giver,” “The Chronicles of Narnia,” or your favourite YA book of the moment. Reading allows you to take a productive break and manage stress while you’re writing your novel, and taking the time to read may give you some ideas on how your story should continue.

When choosing YA books to read or re-read, pick ones that you think you’ll learn from and enjoy. Remember that everything that you learned while reading will be somehow reflected in the way you write. Pick up a YA or teen fiction book today and see how it can benefit your writing.

Ration your research

By Susanna Beard, author of psychological thriller, Dare to Remember published by Legend Press

Research can be fun! Yes, you read that right. It may be daunting at first, when you need to get going from a standing start and you really don’t know where to look, but researching for a novel can add real depth and interest to your story – and it’s deeply satisfying, too.

Some people absolutely love the process of researching their story idea. They might start online, as I did, and soon find themselves deeply immersed. It’s easy to get side-tracked. Some writers, anxious about getting down to the writing, spend a huge amount of time researching, delaying the moment of putting fingers to keyboard. Their research might be stunning, but it’s no good if they struggle to get to the writing.

I prefer to do it the other way round – I start writing, and when I reach a point when I need to research, I do it then. But even then I don’t let it take over from the writing. I might go back and add to the research later, but as long as I’ve confirmed that the key elements of my story are believable, I plough on.

Let’s assume you have, broadly, your idea for a novel. The story comes from your imagination and your personal experience and has a beginning, a middle and an end. (Well, possibly not an end – yet - if you’re anything like me. Or even a middle!). The research adds to and enhances the story, and you’re gathering knowledge in addition to your own to give it authenticity.

Without authenticity your story will fall at the first hurdle. That first hurdle comes when your reader stops believing in your character, event, place, business, historical period or theme. Your reader will be turned off the story and may never finish. So you need to research the facts around your story to give it depth – to make it believable.

Even if your story is a fantasy, it needs authenticity, through character development, a sense of place and time, and consistency. Your research might involve how people react, or how a material, like wood for example, might behave. It won’t matter if your monsters from outer space behave like humans but it will matter if your humans – all of them - behave like monsters from outer space. Our imaginations can soar, but our stories need to be grounded by (some) research.

If your character suffers from depression, you need to know about it. You need to know how she would look and speak, what her thought processes might be. My protagonist in my debut novel, Dare to Remember, Lisa, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, and she has therapy throughout the book. I researched this by reading about depression – case studies were particularly useful – by talking to therapists, especially those with experience in PTSD, and by listening to their language. It’s all in the book.

But at the same time, it’s not all in the book. One of the big dangers of researching for your novel will be that you’ve put all that time and energy into finding out the facts around your story that you don’t want to waste it. You feel compelled to put it into the narrative. Don’t. The danger is that it will change the pace of the story, bring the reader up short and look like you’re trying too hard to prove you know all about your subject. As a reader I can see when a writer wants to demonstrate their knowledge – about language in a historical era, about the geography of a place, about a real event from the past – and I tend to skip over it.

We need – as writers and as readers – to inhabit our stories. That means, as writers, we need to absorb our research, bringing it in to the story with a light touch and only when it’s appropriate. It needs to be an integral part of the backdrop of the story.

A simple example: my therapist, for example, in Dare to Remember, has a certificate on his wall, showing that he was qualified. I knew he would, from my research. I also knew what he would have needed to do to gain his qualification. But I didn’t need to tell my readers all that – it would have been too much information. All they needed to know, obliquely, was that he was ‘proper.’ He became more real because of that small detail.

So research is important, yes. It gives you credibility and confidence, and your story authenticity. But it needs to be handled with care, woven into the story where it can demonstrate its value in subtle ways. Your readers won’t even notice it, but they will believe your story.

Writer’s walk

By Susanna Beard, author of psychological thriller, Dare to Remember published by Legend 

Press

For me, walking has always had a therapeutic quality. There’s something about putting one foot in front of the other, even if you’re plodding along with your hood pulled up over your head and your eyes on the ground, which helps the mood. And since I’ve started to write novels, walking has become a crucial part of the writing process.

There is a time-honoured link between long-distance running and writing - Joyce Carol Oates ran every afternoon, Louisa May Alcott felt that she "must have been a horse or a deer in some previous state" because she enjoyed running so much, and Murakami said his “real existence as a serious writer [began] on the day that I first went jogging.”

I’m not a runner – it hurts too much, in more ways than one. But walking, for me, clearly has the same effect as running has for these authors. As a writer, it’s when I walk that I wrestle with the twists and turns of a plot that won’t settle down, or the traits of a character who just doesn’t seem real.

Sometimes the walking just clears the mind; sometimes it offers the creative jolt that a new story (or a stuck story) needs.

Even when the weather’s out to get you – when it’s cold, wet and blustery, when the wind brings tears to your eyes and you can barely move your feet through a sea of mud, walking is ‘worth it’ time. The process of wrapping up against the elements, leaving the house and heading for the countryside (or a park, or a quiet lane) is in itself, I believe, good therapy for an overcrowded mind.

And if you add good weather, the countryside, wildlife, birdsong and air untainted by diesel fumes – then even better. Nothing raises the spirits as gently.

Except, of course, the presence of a canine friend or two. The unbridled, unselfconscious enthusiasm of a dog on a daily walk, the excitement of seeing another of the species - or quite often, just another human - repeats itself daily. Same place, new smells, sounds, dogs, people. Cats and birds. Squirrels! Such delight in the routine. It’s infectious.

It was on one of my daily walks by the Thames a couple of years ago – I’m lucky, I can get there in less than ten minutes – that I bumped into another dog-walker, a little late on her daily perambulation. When I remarked on this, in a friendly, dog-walking way, she replied that her husband had died in the night. What a shock! Of course, I did my best to comfort her, offering to tell people I saw who I knew to be her close friends, and went on my way.

When we parted, though, I couldn’t get the incident out of my head. The fact that she was walking on the morning after this terrible thing had happened to her fascinated me. Of course, when you have a dog, it needs walking. But it was more than that – it was the beginning of her recovery from the trauma: telling friends, getting out of the house, exercising, the fresh air by the river. The idea of walking as therapy struck me as a good theme for a novel.

I didn’t want to mirror my friend’s experience in my story. So I needed to come up with a reason for my protagonist’s need for therapy. Was there something in her past which needed to be resolved? It went from there. I wanted to explore the idea of a dog, and walking, helping to bring someone back from the brink, creating a new, safer world for that person.

That’s where my debut novel, Dare to Remember, began. It went through two working titles, some interesting critical discussions with my writing group and many drafts before I felt that it succeeded in doing what it was supposed to. But all through the novel my protagonist is supported by walking, and by her dog, Riley. The dog gets her out, meeting new people - however reluctant she is to talk - while the walking gives her space, room to think, to ponder over her life, to recover from her trauma.

I value my daily walks with my dogs, both for my health – physical and mental - but also as a way to continue working on my stories. I clear my head, problem-solve, get descriptive ideas and make friends at the same time.

Almost always I return with a sense of purpose for my writing as well as muddy boots and pawprints in my hall.

How To... Write a Killer Blurb

By JJ Marsh

Authors swear the blurb, or back cover copy, is ten times harder than writing the novel it describes. Which is understandable. You know all the nuance and detail of 100K words and cannot possibly reduce its essence to 250.
Or can you?

Having written cover description for all kinds of material – from cookbooks to crime, from erotica to executive summaries – I have a few tips.

Here’s a ten-step plan to creating an effective blurb for fiction.

Ready, Steady...

 

 

Start with bare branches. In Techniques of a Selling Writer, Dwight V. Swain offers the basic framework for a blurb. Write one sentence and one question, containing character, situation, objective, opponent, disaster. It works for every genre.

Eg: When humans begin to grow to twelve-feet tall (situation), John Storm (character) must find out why (objective). But can he defeat traitors in high places (opponent) who want to fake an extra terrestrial plot and will kill anyone in the way (disaster)?

Research I. Read the blurbs of similar books in your genre. (Yeah, I know, yours is unique, but bear with me.) If you had to describe it in the most reductive terms, would it be Anna Karenina meets Bridget Jones (as Adele Parks described her first novel to attract her agent)? Or Hotel Rwanda meets Million Dollar Baby? Choose your comparisons well. You may not use them in the blurb but they might still be useful for your elevator pitch.

Research II. Key words. Which words will help your target reader find your book? Which words do they search for? Look again at those blurbs. Make a mind map of all those vital clues. For Rise of the Golden Aura by Chanrithy Him, I had a hit list: vampire, Asia-America, romance/love, myth, supernatural, underworld, beauty pageant, queen, series. We got every single one into the final draft.

Mood, style and tone. Cover copy reflects the book within. If is wise-cracking, hard-boiled noir, so must be the blurb. I always ask clients for three chapters of their book so I can get a sense of the way they write. On reading, I make notes: ethereal and whimsical / sardonic and dry / cosy and humorous. When you begin to write the text, keep these words in front of you.

Patterns. Be aware that blurbs, just as much as covers, are part of your brand. Jane Davis is not writing a series, but readers keen to discover more of her work will appreciate the similar style across her entire canon. So I kept notes on length, format, style and phrasing to avoid repetition but enabling the maintenance of a 'Davis' tone.

... Go!

Add leaves and flowers. With all the ammunition above, take your Swain frame and start expanding. Use powerful nouns and verbs. Avoid the passive voice. Vary sentence lengths. Aim for the essence. Pack every sentence tightly and make every word earn its place. Remember the power of threes. Here's a sample extract from an upcoming novel by Luna Miller.

Gunvor may be in her sixties, her hands might be too shaky to continue performing operations and her body complains every time she works out. But her mind is as sharp as ever. She’s curious, intelligent and experienced – perfect qualities for a private detective.

As the agency’s rookie, she gets a surveillance job. A straightforward case, they said. A domestic. Suspicions of infidelity. Follow the husband.

Rewrite. Keep paragraphs short and remember how it looks online. You need some white space for ease of reading. Aim for five paragraphs and around 200 words. End each sentence and each paragraph on a high-impact word. Here's the opener to The Beauty Shop by Suzy Henderson.

England, 1942. After three years of WWII, Britain is showing the scars. Circumstance brings three people together, changing their destinies.

Sell. Tell the reader how this book will make them feel. Don’t be afraid to use an element of drama. This is your punchline. David Baddiel makes this point in Time for Bed. His character Gabriel is choosing a video. The review on the back of Beaches says, ‘And at the end you cry, goddamit, you cry real tears’. Gabriel wells up right there in Blockbusters.

Tagline. Read the blurb again and sum it up in one line. Think film posters.  
‘In space, no one can hear you scream.’ 
‘The true story of a real fake.’ 
‘She fell in love with him the day he decided to marry someone else.’
I find it helps to try them out in the voice of Morgan Freeman.
When you've got it, put it right at the top of the blurb, but check it doesn’t clash. My tagline for my own Book 2 was 'You Never Know Who's Watching'. Lovely! Until I noticed the word 'watching' in the first line. Not lovely.

Puff quote. Ideally, end your blurb with an endorsement from a well-known writer or enthusiastic reader. Choose carefully and don’t be afraid to edit out cliché. A current client has this: “What an amazing capture of unadulterated raw humanity, in all its shades of light and darkness. I read it over a few days. Couldn’t put it down. Really, really enjoyed it.” My advice was to trim. The stuff in bold is where the power lies.

Read the whole thing aloud. If you stumble, there’s a reason. Polish, rewrite and hone till it sings, then share with respected opinions.

This may sound like a lot of work, but your blurb and the cover are what sell your book.
So take your time and get it right.

How To Write Subtext

By Libby O'Loghlin

Subtext

• What’s its purpose?
• How do we spot it?
• How does it work?
• How do we write it?

Exercises

From Wikipedia:

Subtext or undertone is any content of a creative work which is not announced explicitly by the characters or author, but is implicit or becomes something understood by the observer of the work as the production unfolds. 

1. What’s its purpose?

When a character’s actions, mannerisms or words don’t quite ‘sit right’—when they don’t match that which we perceive as their intentions—it raises questions in a reader’s mind. And when a reader has questions, it generally leads to that golden action known as Page Turning. This is to be encouraged!

Psychologically speaking, readers like to think we can tell when there is incongruity between a character’s intentions and their actions. In evolutionary terms, it’s necessary to be aware of inauthentic behaviour because it might mean there's a threat from those outside our tribe ... so we’re wired to be able to spot it.

Of course, reading isn’t exactly what you'd call a survival situation, but we learn an awful lot about the world and humanity when we read a good book, and we do like to think we can tell when something fishy is going on. And—if a story is written well—we will hang in there to experience that a-ha moment when our suspicions are proven correct.

2. How do we spot it?

Subtext can be found on two levels:

Between characters within the story (screenwriters call this ‘diegetic’); or

On the meta level: how the story is being told/the narrative voice (‘extra-’ or ‘non-diegetic’).

Jane Austen was a master of subtext. Her characters are full of innuendo and blushing cheeks and restrained civility: Austen’s was an environment in which one could not air one’s opinions nor say what one most desired, so characters had to find ways to say things to each other in a coded fashion.

One of the easiest ways to spot meta level subtext at work is to think of it as a joke or secret—something revealing—between the narrator and the reader; one that the characters themselves may not be aware of.

3. How does subtext work?

Level 1: Character

Level 2: Meta

1. Character. In storytelling terms, every character has at least two forces at work from within: fear and desire. Push and pull. They want something, but something is getting in the way. They fear something, but something propels them forwards.

This is story currency. It happens at every level: sentence, scene, chapter … It’s the only way to reach a state of change. (And we all know by now that without change, there’s no story.)

Luke Skywalker desires to get off the planet Tatooine and go on an adventure … but he’s an adolescent and he’s afraid of what’s out there. How could these conflicting forces manifest as subtext? Luke speaks with bravado, but we hear the tremor in his voice.

Frodo is loathe to take the ring all the way to Mordor … but he desires to do the right thing by his friends, by Gandalf, and by All Things Good. Frodo continues bravely, but we see the weariness in his step.

You see the pattern: Character does one thing … Reader/Audience perceives something different. There’s a gap.

2. Meta level: For subtext to work on this level, the writer should be utterly clear about the distinction between what’s going on in the the story and how the story is being told. It’s also critical the writer understands exactly what the character does and does not know (or need to know) about themselves and their environment. Clarity is key!

You can most often spot this kind of subtext where the narrative voice is an unreliable narrator (e.g. Huck Finn tells the story but over time we wonder if we can trust his judgement or credibility), or it can also work with a neutral third person narrative, where the narrative voice reveals information about a character’s context that changes the value of how we view the character. (Usually by juxtaposing the seen with the spoken.)

4. So how do we write it?

Level 1: Character

Level 2: Meta

1. Character. For subtext to work best on this level, we need more than simply a theoretic fear or a desire. We need to propel them into the realm of action.

1. What does each character desire? What do they fear?

2. What do they know? What are they trying to hide?

Once we can answer these questions, we can work on how to best mete out clues to the reader that all is not as it seems ...

Body. We have our character’s whole body to work with. What are their gestures and body language? How are they holding themselves? Does their expression fit with the words they are speaking?

Words. Think about the language they use. Are they trying to hide something? Or send a coded message? Do they therefore use words they wouldn’t otherwise choose? What's their tone of voice?

Objects. With which objects do they set the table when they loathe their guests? A vase of flowers to make them sneeze? An object that would incite a fit of jealousy?

In all cases, we’re looking to disrupt. To drop in something unexpected.


2. Meta level. The same questions can be applied to the narrative voice:

What does the narrator desire? What do they fear?

What do they know? What are they trying to hide?

This is where the selection and arrangement of story elements matters. The reader needs to get the message that despite the action in the scene, something else is going on. We can do this by manipulating choice of:

Objects and environment. (Mise-en-scène.) Does their chaotic home speak volumes about their state of mind, despite their neat attire?

Qualitative language. Intentional use of value-loaded verbs (‘ugly’ vase; ‘beautiful’ sofa) can tell us a lot about how reliable a narrator is.

Ultimately, the meta level of subtext is about holding the mirror up to the narrator or even the author. (The two are not to be confused with each other!)

Exercises

Exercise 1: Subtext in Dialogue

Coffee drinkers will go to great lengths to get a cup of coffee. Write a scene where a young woman is late for work. She dashes into the office kitchen and sees a hot guy reaching for the last coffee pod. She thinks he’s a 10 ... he thinks she’s incredible … but, more than that, they both want that coffee pod. What do they say to each other? How can you ‘show’ us they have an ulterior motive? What element of deceit or knowledge can you add to the mix to heighten the story stakes? (e.g. she knows he’s the new boss; he’s trying to hide that he’s been living in the office.)

Exercise 2: Subtext in Narrative Voice

Our protagonist has finished a painting and is hanging it on the wall in anticipation of presenting it to their spouse. Using a third person narrative voice—no dialogue—how can you let the reader know that, unbeknown to the protagonist, the painting is terrible? (You can also try with first person.) Remember, the same rules apply here to the narrative voice: what does the narrator know? What are they trying to hide?


Have fun!

--


Libby O'Loghlin is an award winning short story writer, novelist and ghostwriter. Her independently published YA mystery adventure, Charlotte Aimes, was longlisted for the 2015 Bath Children's novel award. Her latest project, a co-written literary thriller, will be released at the end of 2016. She is co-founder of The Woolf Quarterly, an online cultural publication based in Zürich, Switzerland. 
https://rowinggirl.com/

Donkeys and vodka: the mad science of proofreading

by Perry Iles, Chamber Proof (www.chamberproof.moonfruit.com)

Proof readers, proofreaders or proof-readers? We can’t even agree on how our job titles should be written down. What total bellends (bell-ends or bell ends) we are. But then no two proofreaders think alike anyway, because we’re all maverick geniuses, frustrated novelists and deeply flawed garret-dwelling paupers with nothing better to do than use our combination of OCD and Asperger’s Syndrome to pick apart the work of others. And we’ll never get it right because there is no right. Language is fluid—especially English, because the world’s greatest superpower speaks it all over the globe. There are those who think that America has dragged the English language kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, and there are those who think that America has dragged it into a dark alley and beaten the living crap out of it. Who in the hell ever thought to use the word “disrespect” as a verb? It wasn’t one of our chaps, I’ll bet. Either way, an assault has been mounted, and the proofreader’s job is to defend a book against the slings and arrows of error and change. Which of course means that while I’m fending off mediaeval English weaponry with a stout oaken shield, some American in a sharp suit and sunglasses will pop up in front of me and shoot me in the face. While dictionaries and manuals try to pin down the elusive butterfly of correct prose and grammar, off it goes in a different direction, raising either two fingers or a middle digit at you, depending upon which side of the Atlantic you’re on. Language flows elegant and smooth like a glacier, changing shape and form as it goes.

Which means that for some words there is no right or wrong. When you get into your car, do you put on a seat belt, a seat-belt or a seatbelt? When you can’t be arsed to cook, will you have a take-away a takeaway? There is only consistency, which is the First Rule of Proofreading. Be consistent. Check the preferences of your author. It’s their book after all. Maintain an open channel at all times, dash off query emails. They’ll love you when you find a spelling error or some missing punctuation, but they’ll hate you when you overrule their preferences with your own when rules don’t apply. It takes only a moment to ask an author if their main character eats hash browns, hash-browns or hashbrowns.  

And don’t even talk to me about punctuation. Go talk to Lynne Truss, she knows it all. She’ll tell you when to use the Oxford comma and when to eschew it. Read Strunk and White, they’ll tell you when to use colons and semi-colons instead of full stops. Then try to act on what they say in a real life writing situation. Often you’ll find they’re talking bollocks. Or they’re trying to be clever buggers by shoehorning correct grammar into a sentence that needs changing anyway because it hasn’t been written right in the first place. These books are to writing what the Highway Code is to driving. They’ll tell you the rules, but they won’t make you a good writer. They’ll just teach you to run over fewer people, rather than less people. So here’s the Second Rule of Proofreading: If you’re stuck on the punctuation, the chances are the wording is wrong, because if the wording was right, you wouldn’t be stuck on it, would you? There you are, happily proofreading away without a care in the world, and then you get to something that stops you in your tracks with one of those comedy skid-noises they use when Fred Flintstone brings his car to a standstill using his feet. Here:

“Honestly, darling, I went to Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Marks and Spencer’s but I couldn’t get those socks you like; perhaps you should try shopping on-line.”

The author (and the proofreader) is all in a lather about the use of semi-colons in dialogue, Oxford commas, possessive apostrophes, the double-use of “and” and that unnecessary hyphen in “on-line”, when they should be worrying about the ghastly dialogue instead. You could proofread that sentence until your brain started dribbling out of your ears. Go on, knock yourself out. But rather than just checking the grammar, the proofreader should offer a gentle nudge and tell the writer that people don’t really speak like that, and that it might be better to re-write the sentence along the following lines:

“Listen love, I went to every bloody supermarket in town and none of them had your socks. Try online, OK?”

There, that’s better, isn’t it? A good proofreader would underline that first sentence and suggest rewriting it a bit more like the second, because that sort of light copy-editing is part of a proofreader’s job. It’s part of mine, anyway. And when punctuation stops me in my tracks, re-wording the sentence will improve matters nine times out of ten. So before you start dicking about with the semi-colons and the fiddly shite, read that sentence out loud in front of a mirror or a loved one. Chances are you can say it better and more simply without, as Cormac McCarthy puts it, “peppering your writing with all those unnecessary marks”. Think about what punctuation actually is. It’s not writing, it’s not poetry, it’s not great literature. It’s instructions. Stop here, pause there. Add emphasis! Are you asking a question? Oh gosh, someone’s about to say something. Here come some speech-marks, look! In good writing, most of these things come naturally anyway. Punctuation should be light, unobtrusive and minimal. Punctuation tells the readers what your writing should be showing them. You don’t need exclamation marks. Get rid of them. All of them, unless you’re writing children’s fiction. Adults know when someone is shouting, and it’s your job as a writer to show people being angry, not tell us they’re yelling their heads off. Get rid of colons and semi colons in fiction. They’re horrid little nasty half-hearted things anyway. They’re not big and they’re not clever. They are to punctuation what adverbs are to prose. Write your way round them and your writing will be better for it. Declare war on commas, use “and” more often. Write shorter sentences. Write longer sentences. Free your prose. Let it dance about without being tied down by unnecessary punctuation. Be more colloquial. Be free. You’re a writer. It’s fun. You’re dancing with the wind in your hair, not tapping out two-fingered sludge.

Proofreaders are there to polish your little red wagon, to make sure your book doesn’t go out into the world with its skirt tucked into its underwear. We do that not only by finding errors, but by making suggestions—small, light and often. Editors will tell you to make structural changes, to write out unnecessary characters altogether, to revise entire chapters. Proofreaders won’t do that, they’ll just buff up the details and offer a light copy-edit. They aren’t there to check out the shape of your forest, they’re there to examine the bark on the trees. And even then, there will be errors. There WILL be errors. I bet there are errors in this article if you look hard enough, and if there aren’t errors, there are things you’d have written differently. I once wrote and self-published a book in which it got cold in my car so I turned the heather on. This was doubly embarrassing, as Heather is my wife’s name (she was not in the car at the time. We were not dogging. Honestly, officer. Look at the moon, my mother would have understood…) The point there is that you read what you want to be there. You read what makes sense. As an author, I not only wrote that error, but on the dozens of rewrites and re-reads I let it stay there until it became encysted in my head, part of the manuscript. A friend read it once, after I’d published it, and said “You’ll never guess what you’ve written here…” so I had to kill her. A simple proofread and that poor woman would still be alive today.

Which also applies to names, by the way. Rule whatever (I’ve lost count) of proofreading is to google every single one of the fictional characters’ names in the book you’re working on, just in case the author hasn’t done that first. That way you’ll be able to check that they aren’t the same as famous people in fields you’re unfamiliar with, or a name you perhaps heard on the news and has stuck in your mind to re-emerge seven years later as the name for your baddie. You may not be familiar with football, movie stars of the 1930s or death metal, but some of your readers will be. Remember that the bad guy in Double Jeopardy was called Nicholas Parsons and that a book by English romantic novelist EV Thompson had a leading character called Tom Hanks in it. So before you use a cool name like Harry Styles or Matt Bellamy or Frank Black, go and google it, or people will point at you and laugh.

Your book is the God to which its creators bow down. The author is the prime creator, but there is a host of others who help dress your book up and make it look nice. The proofreader is but one of many, he’s the final polisher, the one who buffs the lacquer on what Stephen King calls your little red wagon. But proofreading is an inexact science. Pinning the English language down into a static form is like a pin-the-tail-on-a-donkey game in which you’ve been rapidly spun ten times and then force-fed a pint of vodka. And the donkey is real and moving and wants to kick you very hard because some cruel bastard has cut its tail off. The best you can hope for is that your book is enjoyed, recommended, critically acclaimed and sells by the warehouse-load. But one day, when you’re relaxing on your yacht in Monte Carlo harbour surrounded by women made of silicone or men with abs you could bounce marbles off, you’ll come across an error in your latest manuscript and suddenly you’ll feel like Madonna falling downstairs at the Brits, and your screams will echo from the mountains that surround the bay, and the head you’ll call for will quite possibly be mine.

Social Media Book Teaser Images by Courtney J. Hall

 

Courtney J. Hall

Teaser images can be one of the best marketing tools at an author’s disposal. Studies show that Facebook posts and tweets containing images result in at least 87% engagement. Compared to about 4% engagement for posts that are all text, and taking into account how simple the concept, you might wonder why more authors aren’t using them.

A common reason – “I don’t know how to make them.”

While it’s true that an author should leave the cover design and website building to a pro, trust me – you don’t need a degree in graphic design to create eye-caching and appealing teaser images that will entice readers to find your books. All you need is image-editing software like Photoshop or Serif PhotoPlus, a stock photo, and an intriguing line from your book.

The line is, hands-down, the most important part. It has to be one that will give potential readers no reason not to want to read your book. It shouldn’t be too long, but it should be interesting. It shouldn’t give away any major plot points, but it should reveal enough of the story to be enticing. Take your time and hunt it out. Don’t rush through this step. And if you can’t decide which one to use, you can always use your tagline.

Once you have your line, you need a stock image to go along with it. Think about the mood you want to create and use that as a jumping-off point. For spooky or mysterious, go dark and shadowy. For romantic, go bright. Use a photo with scenery, buildings, or people – whatever complements the line you chose to showcase. You also don’t want it to be too busy, because you will be adding text to it. But perhaps the most important thing to consider when choosing your image is ownership. Don’t just grab any old photo from Google’s search results and use that to create your teaser. You’ll almost certainly end up with something you don’t have the necessary permission to use commercially, and it could also be pretty low-quality. You don’t want a blurry or pixilated teaser. Your best bet is to buy a stock photo from a site like Shutterstock, iStockphoto or Dreamstime. However, depending on your budget and how many images you plan to make, the cost can add up. So you can also use free, high-resolution Creative Commons-licensed photos from sites like Pixabay and FreePik, or use the Creative Commons search engine to find something from places like Flickr and Wikipedia that grant permission for commercial use.

Once you’ve chosen your image, open it up in your photo-editing software. If you don’t have anything on your computer besides Microsoft Paint, you can certainly use an online resource like Canva or PicMonkey – they also have stock photos – but I find them to be a bit limiting. And if cost is a concern, many companies offer free trials, like Adobe Photoshop, or even totally free versions of their software, like Serif PhotoPlus (you’ll just have to sacrifice certain functions, most of which you won’t even need to do your teaser images).

Apply any effects or filters until you have your desired look. Then use the text tool to add your line. Make sure your text is clearly visible against your photo. And make it pretty! Use an interesting font – again, being careful to use only a font that’s approved for commercial use, or one for which you have a commercial license). Use a bright color that pops against the background. Make it stand out! You want people who are mindlessly scrolling through their Twitter feed to stop on your photo, click on it, and buy your book.

When your image is as good as you can get it, save it as either a JPEG or a PNG file. And there you go! You now have an enticing image that will tease readers into wanting to read your book. Upload it to the social media page of your choice, and watch your sales explode!

Contact Courtney J. Hall via social media:

Facebook

Twitter: @courtney_j_hall

Retail Links for Some Rise by Sin:

 

Amazon

Barnes and Noble 

Kobo

128 Words to use instead of "VERY"

Working with a Book Cover Designer

I've covered various topics on the subject of book cover design over the years, from How to Sell More Books with Great Book Cover Design, to giving talks on the design process. 

What follows are a series of case studies by authors who I have had the great pleasure to work with on their books, to give an insight and flavour into the relationship between author and designer from a writers' point of view.

Rohan Quine

Of the five titles by Rohan Quine so far, The Imagination Thief was the first to be published, by EC1 Digital and the Firsty Group. Its cover was designed by Andi Rivers at Firsty. The novel is essentially literary fiction, but with a touch of magical realism and a dusting of horror; and since the secret  of how to market even “pure” literary fiction has always been more elusive than most secrets, it was decided the cover should tend more in the direction of the novel’s magical realism and horror credentials instead. 

Then when Jane at JD Smith Design designed the covers for The Platinum Raven, The Host in the Attic, Apricot Eyes and Hallucination in Hong Kong, the brief included ensuring a continuity of branding, to match the same cross-genre categories. The branding elements that all five covers share in common include the use of Rockwell font in a consistent layout, along with imagery themed around eyes, faces and skyscrapers at night. The depicted locations relate to the five tales’ urban settings around the globe – as will be the case when Jane is most enthusiastically brought back on board (subject to her availability, of course) to design tale number six, which is provisionally being referred to as the Hollywood canyons novel, to be published later in 2016. A prequel to the existing five, this title will feature the same branding elements, including the Los Angeles skyline. It’s been a pleasure to see these publications adorned by Jane’s and Andi’s brilliant work, large-format displays of which are at

http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media

and

http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media

Gabriela Harding

I didn't fully appreciate the importance of a cover designer until I started working with Jane. At that point, what I had in my hands was a rough, editable manuscript (in fact, she was the one to put me in touch with a great editor, so never underestimate an artist's web of contacts) which I hoped to publish traditionally. With several positive responses from agents under my belt, I suppose creating a cover was more of a caprice - something I had to do for myself, to give my work 'a face' or identity. Or maybe I knew, deep down, that I would self-publish (which I did, using the cover Jane and I worked on, which everyone loved - in fact, it's the first thing they say about my book: 'Wow, the cover!')

When I contacted Jane I had no idea what to expect. I thought Jane was some sort of a magician and that it would be dead easy to make something that will stand the test of time, or maybe even outlive me. I was right, in a way. Jane was a magician - but even a design god needs to know what is the exact wish they are expected to fulfil. I was in trouble. I was a writer, not a designer. As I flicked through the images Jane sent me, I started having cold sweats, already suspecting that I was as wrong about cover designing being easy as I was about book writing being a walk in the park. Writing is hard, editing is harder, marketing while competing with so many good books, a team of sharp warrior publishers behind them, gives you a real taste of the big bad D. You taste blood, but you carry on. And the cover is the first thing you have - the one thing people see even before reading the blurb. Unknown to me, I would find the cover design the most difficult part of writing and producing a book.

That's where Jane's role was crucial. I've lost count of the many combinations we tried. We put pictures together, and they made sense, but they just weren't MY BOOK. I started to get a little taste of the agony writers experience when the cover is being done for them by traditional publishers ( something my traditionally published friends complain about, not having a say about the cover). The agony, but also the relief. They didn't have to feel like attempting a million combinations to a stubborn safe. When Jane produced the image that would become my cover, I knew straight away it was 'the one.' And having gone through the labour of choosing got me closer to my book. It was the magic touch that changed a manuscript into a real book.

Ian Atkinson

The suggestion to write my first book, actually came from my mother. I had previously mentioned that leaving the Royal Navy after more than 32 years was going to leave me tinged with sadness and hopefully I wouldn’t forget it. Mum simply said, “Why don’t you write all your adventures down, so you can look back on it.”

Taking her advice for once, I had been doing this for about 2 years, on and off, before I even realised that I might just finish it. Up to this point, I didn’t even have a title or a cover and the prose was in a very rough, unedited format on my word processor. Having never published anything before, I didn’t know what to do and always considered publishing a book to be an expensive luxury. I simply didn’t have thousands of pounds to waste on the vain publication of my ramblings.

A chance e-mail from indie author Cathy Kirby to the Submariner’s Association wishing to research life on board a submarine was the key to the advice and the assistance that would finally see my work in print. It also served to give me a richly deserved kick in the pants and reignited my motivation to get it finished.

Cathy belonged to an on-line forum of writers who freely offered advice, support and recommendation on the writing, publication and advertising of the finished work. Amongst others, she pointed me in the direction of Editor, John Hudspith and the talented and very lovely cover designer, Jane Dixon-Smith.

After some thought, I had a cover idea formulating in my head. The title was still a work in progress, but I wanted to convey that the content covered my service on both ships and submarines. I am also intensely proud of the submariner’s ‘Dolphins’ and also the White Ensign. This seemed a tall order to include all of this and well outside of my skill set.

An e-mail to Jane followed by a phone call, trying to convey my ideas, set the ball in motion. Jane then asked for some decent quality images that she could try to work her wizardry with.

The first draft was always going to be a starting point as I couldn’t actually see what I wanted in my mind. I knew I wanted colour, it to look eye-catching and to really convey the contents. I pointed Jane in the direction of a list of already published covers to gain an idea of the sort of thing I was looking for.

This prompted an exchange of e-mails between us over the coming weeks with me providing honest feedback and Jane trying her hardest to interpret my vague description and turn it into art.

I am sure Jane was getting fed up with me nit-picking in the end, but maintained cheerful and helpful. It was as if she really cared about the cover as much as I did. Perhaps she did, after all, it would become an advertisement for her work after it had been published.

Finally, the front cover was everything and more than I could have hoped for. All of my wishes for images had been encompassed. Some of my suggestions, were tried, but they didn’t look right, on reflection, so Jane tried something else.

This email exchange continued until I was delighted with the result.

Now I needed the back cover, as the book was intended as paperback. I fudged together a blurb (yes, that’s really what it’s called) and allowed John, the Editor, to tinker with it slightly and then it was a simple matter for Jane to format it into the back cover design. I can’t remember whose idea it was to incorporate a photograph of young me, but I like it and the finished cover and the ramblings within are something that I will always be proud of.



For an in-depth look at the design process including:

- How to select and work with a designer
- What works and why
- Where to find images
- How to make informed decisions
- Why formatting matters
- What branding means to you
- How to give your book the best chance of success 

The Importance of Book Cover Design is available on Amazon.

How to fix Blogger Facebook image and description

This has annoyed me for months. When I share a blog post on Facebook the images within the post usually appear as a thumbnail beside the link. As of a few months ago I would share a post from my blog and get a random image from the site instead - sometimes the site logo, sometimes a social media icon that appears somewhere on the blog. And the description underneath the blog post title would be a random piece of info from the site such as the privacy statement.

So I went in search of a fix ...

Image Issues

I found several posts on the internet. This is the code which worked for me and I'll provide some step by step instructions below.

<b:if cond='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl'>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl' property='og:image'/>
<b:else/>
<meta content='http://www.yourdefaultimage.jpg' property='og:image'/>
</b:if>

Copy and paste the code above into Notepad and replace http://www.yourdefaultimage.jpg with a URL to an image that you would be happy displaying next to your blog link on Facebook if you HAVEN'T included any images in your post. For example, it might be your company logo, or a generic image. If you have your logo on your website simply right click and copy the image address, and paste it into the code above.

Next you need to add the code to your template. NOTE, always back up your blog template before making any changes, just in case anything goes wrong.

Go to your Blogger blog>Template>Edit HTML.

Hit Command>F and search for /head.

Next, copy and paste from Notepad the code from above having changed the URL to an image you would like as a default, and paste it directly above the

tag.

Hit Save template. 

This will work for all future posts. You can force old posts to work by using Facebook Debugger https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/ but I've found this to be temperamental and doesn't always work for old posts. And it can take a little bit of time for the changes to filter through.

Note that images within a blog post generally need to be over 200 pixels in size to be picked up by Facebook.

Description Issues

Now onto the problem of random descriptions appearing underneath your Facebook blog post links.

Go to Settings > Search preferences > Description. Select 'Yes' and then enter a default description you would be happy to have under your posts. This description will appear under all posts where you don't follow the next step. 

If you want a specific description, go to your individual blog post and click Search Description. This is a really Google friendly place to enter a description packed with keywords. This description, if completed, will appear as the description under your posts on Facebook. 

Happy blogging!

Question Corner - February 2016

Lorraine Mace answers a plea for reassurance

George from Somerset sent in the following plea for reassurance: I have been writing for a few years, but have never managed to get anything published. The only people who read my stories are friends and family. They all say they enjoy them, but if they really are any good, why can’t I get them published? I started writing a novel last year, but feel so disheartened I don’t think I’ll ever get round to finishing it. I often feel like giving up, but I really enjoy writing, so don’t want to do that. How can I get my stories published so that I’m not just writing for people who know me?

I receive similar emails every month. So many writers worry they will never be published and hover on the brink of giving up. Some do, of course, but the majority continue because they cannot imagine a life where they no longer write.

In your case, you at least have family and friends who read your work and encourage you to continue. Some writers don’t even have that kind of support system. I know that doesn’t answer your question, but I wanted to make the point that true writers never give up and the fact that you have sent in your email shows you are a long way from throwing in the towel – even if you think you’re close to doing so!

The most important point in your email was that you enjoy writing. So why not take a moment to look at why you write. We all want to be published and strive to fit publishers’ guidelines, but ironically we are more likely to be successful if we write what makes us happy – prose or poetry that makes our own hearts sing stands a better chance of being chosen than something written to conform to rules.

So, having accepted you are not going to give up, what can you do to ensure a greater audience than family and friends?

Be self-critical

You are getting despondent because you haven’t yet had success and fear you’re not good enough, but are you sending out work too soon? How many times do you rewrite your stories before submission? No matter how good a writer you are, first, second or even third drafts are unlikely to be polished enough to win prizes or be picked for a magazine.

Put your work away for at least a week between drafts and edit from a hard copy, not on the computer. It is much easier to spot clunky sentences, repetitions and plot holes on paper than when reading on a screen.

Get critical feedback

One of the problems with friends and family is that they are unlikely to tell you the truth about things they don’t like and will only mention the good points. This is not helpful in the long term. Are you a member of a group where you receive feedback from other writers?

If there isn’t a group in your area, or the timing doesn’t work for you, join an online group. If only one person mentions a problem it’s still worth thinking about it, but probably not something to worry too much about. However, if several mention the same issue, you need to find a way to correct the flaw.

Read, read, read

One of the best ways to improve your writing is to read the works of others. I don’t mean to copy their style or content, but simply to immerse yourself in good writing. If you read well-written books, you will subconsciously absorb the things that make the writing stand out for all the right reasons.

Start a blog

Pick a subject that interests you and write a short piece on it each week. You may not have many readers at first, but if you pick up even twenty followers, that is twenty more readers than you currently have.

Try to word the ending of each post so that you invite comments. Imagine how thrilled you will be when perfect strangers engage you in conversation about something you have written.

Invest in yourself as a writer

If success remains elusive, it could be that you are not yet ready to be published.

Read books, blogs and magazines on writing. Think about taking a writing course – either online or in the real world. Attend a few writing events where you get to listen to established authors giving the benefit of their experiences. Go to festivals where agents and publishers are talking about what excites them.

Never give up

The important point is that you should never give up. Many authors achieve success after years of rejections. Imagine where some of the best-known names in literature would be today if they allowed a few rejections to put them off?

Real writers never give up and your cry for reassurance puts you firmly into the real writer category. Good luck!

Lorraine Mace is the humour columnist for Writing Magazine and head competition judge for Writers’ Forum. She is a former tutor for the Writers Bureau, and is the author of the Writers Bureau course, Marketing Your Book. She is also co-author, with Maureen Vincent-Northam of The Writer’s ABC Checklist (Accent Press). Lorraine runs a private critique service for writers (link below). She is the founder of the Flash 500 competitions covering flash fiction, short story and novel openings.

Her debut novel for children, Vlad the Inhaler, has now been followed by the second in the trilogy, Vlad’s Quest (LRP).

Writing as Frances di Plino, she is the author of four crime/thriller novels featuring Detective Inspector Paolo Storey: Bad Moon Rising, Someday Never Comes, Call It Pretending and Looking for a Reason (Crooked Cat Publishing).

Writing Critique Service

www.lorrainemace.com

www.flash500.com

www.francesdiplino.com