Long ago, I made a how-to video for formatting your novel manuscript. Unfortunately, when Google bought YouTube and connected everyone’s YT/G+ accounts, the video was somehow lost in the shuffle.
But you know what they say: when life deletes your YouTube videos – make musical versions!
So here’s what I’ve been working on all month. Its imperfections abound, but let’s hope they make it more lovable, eh?
Enjoy!
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If the embed isn’t working, here’s a link: How to Format Your Manuscript
Images from Amazon.
One of my pet peeves is book covers whose bylines are bigger than their titles.
I’m in advertising: I can see the practical reasons for a big byline. People are more likely to buy and read a book by an author they’ve read before, or at least heard of. They may not know the name of the new book, but they’ve come to trust the author. It makes sense to give more real estate to an established name.
But there’s just something about it that feels wrong in the gut.
First, fans are going to look for your name anyway. They’ll bookmark your website or follow you on Facebook or Goodreads to find out when your next book hits stores.
But more than that, it feels wrong that the publisher is counting on fame, instead of artistic merit, to sell books. Bigger bylines make the author a celebrity and the story an afterthought.
Other books earn attention with clever titles, unique cover art, intriguing hooks, and fantastic first pages, but these books are simply saying “You’ve read this author before. This book will be pretty much the same.”
It’s a mark of formula fiction.
Perhaps I shouldn’t complain. Perhaps big bylines are hazard signs to warn us away from junk food fiction back toward the books that actually take a few years, instead of a few months, to write.
And it’s not like these authors are pretending to be something else. They’re not tricking their readers into buying something they don’t want. They didn’t lie to earn their millions.
I just think it’s sad. They have the knowledge and the talent to tell stories; they’ve built a platform and an audience. They could do so much more than the Same Old Thing. But instead of looking for new and better ways to surprise and delight their readers, they’re settling for “whatever they liked the last time.”
I’m curious: if a new writer broke onto the scene and made her unknown name giant on the cover, would readers buy the book assuming she was a big time author? Maybe use a pseudonym that’ll be vaguely familiar?
Thanks to George Bannister for the photo.
Do you agree? Disagree? Or am I making something out of nothing?
Sorry for the late post – my eyes were so tired last night, I didn’t want to open them, let alone stare at a screen. Actually, I’m typing this with them shut right now. I know, I know, I need new glasses.
Shocking! (Photo by Morgan)
For those of us still in the depths of writing our first novels (I’m close to the twelve-year mark…what is wrong with me?), the publishing world is something of a mystery. Fortunately, there’s a lot of help out there: from authors who’ve been through it, to literary agents and editors who blog about their work, information abounds. Here’s just a sampling.
Do big publishers accept self-published work? What can traditional publishing offer that self-publishing doesn’t? Get answers to these and other questions from Alan Rinzler at the Book Deal.
What happens once you’ve hooked a literary agent, and that agent starts submitting your work to publishers? Did you know it can take editors up to six months to even reply? YA author Natalie Whipple can help you avoid going insane.
Darn it, Jim, I’m a writer, not a lawyer! Kristin Nelson, a literary agent and PubRants author, warns you’d better understand the legal jargon before you sign that publishing contract.
Children’s book editor Cheryl Klein explains why you’re going to have to wait a long time to see your book in print.
Greg Leitich Smith, a children’s/YA writer, has the down low on hosting a book launch party at a bookstore.
Fast Company explains how the New York Times Bestseller list isn’t based on actual sales so much as projected sales – and how Amazon is different.
Curious how many books the average self-publishing author sells? VictorineWrites.com tracks the sales of 45 different authors by the month (some also have notes about price changes, etc., informing the fluctuation in numbers).
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Want more publishing insider info like this? Literary agent-turned-author Nathan Bransford offers a rundown every week (or so).
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photo by Eamon Curry
In case any of you are agonizing over changes you have to make to your work in progress due to something you learned in the AIDA blog series, rest assured: I am drinking bucketfuls of my own medicine.
Title
I’ve been holding onto the same vague title for years. It sort of means something if you’ve read the book. Sort of. By itself it is unremarkable. I know I can do better.
First Chapter
Second Chapter
My second chapter is actually the beginning of the alternate story – one that connects to the main story but not perceptibly until much later. I offer no explanation at this point. We are simply following one character and one story in the first chapter, and an entirely different character in a different setting in the second. Mere days after realizing this egregious error, I heard one of my beta readers found it disorienting.
Why is it beta readers never seem to tell you what’s wrong with your work until after you’ve figured it out yourself?
Anyway, I added some explanatory narrative at the beginning to introduce the new story and hint at the connections without giving anything away. I also cut a few hundred words.
The Entire Middle of the Whole Bloody Book
In the midst of my quest for tips on writing a page-turner, I realized something life-changing and consequently left this sentence in my Evernote app:
ONE AT A TIME, DUH!
Translation: the order in which I introduced the five characters in the main story was all wrong. I’d made my main character the last to join the group, which meant she met all four others within paragraphs of one another, and I had to pour out oodles of backstory about who each one was and how they got there and where “there” was and what they all thought of each other and how they reacted to meeting her.
I was shooting myself in the foot with a bazooka.
So I’m both changing the order and spreading things out. She’ll spend a few days with the first person she meets, actually experiencing a couple of things I only summarized in previous drafts, and meet additional characters over the next few chapters – instead of over the next few sentences.
In short, I’ll be permanently cutting several scenes I’ve rewritten dozens of times, and adding other scenes I have never written before. I’m angry, excited, exhausted, and relieved all at the same time.
In case you missed it here’s a rundown of the whole series:
Attention
Interest
Desire
Action
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Has the AIDA blog series led you to make any painful changes to your WIP? Rant in the comments!
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Photo by Leah Tautkute
Did you take the leap with me last week and admit to yourself that your writing is what needs improving–not your friends’ tastes? Are you ready to find out how to fix it?
Meet AIDA.
No, AIDA isn’t the personal writing coach I’ve hired to help you turn your novel into a bestseller, but if you want to think of it that way, go ahead.
AIDA is an acronym for Attention > Interest > Desire > Action: a basic formula marketers and salespeople use to guide them through each phase of the sales process. It goes like this:
Attention: Get noticed. In a media-saturated world, this is hard to do.
Interest: Once you have their attention, prove you have something worth their time–by giving them the most compelling part of your message in as brief a form as possible.
Desire: Once you have their interest, show them how the product will meet a need they have.
Action: Once they know they want it, tell them how to get it.
Getting a friend’s attention could be as simple as letting them know you’re writing a book (“Really? What’s it about?”). For a literary agent you’re querying, it’s spelling their name right and following all the submission guidelines. But for your toughest audience—the book store customer who’s never heard of you—it’s a lot tougher. You need a cover and a title that stand out among hundreds of others. We’ll talk more about this in the coming weeks.
What makes this worth the time of the friend, literary agent, or customer? This one’s a bit trickier, but it follows the question your friend asked you when you got their attention: what’s it about? You have to summarize your story in the most compelling way possible, in a few sentences. This is known as your elevator pitch or “hook”—it’s how you’ll describe your book to people at cocktail parties, how you’ll begin your query letter, and what you’ll give to the writer or intern who’ll craft the copy for your book cover. This is the part that makes your friend ask to read it, the agent to request a full or partial manuscript, and the customer to flip to page one. I’ve actually already covered the hook extensively:
I’m gonna do a flip-flop on you and talk about Action first, because before we can understand the Desire phase, we have to understand what action we want our audience to take. For a friend it might just be to finish reading the book. For an agent it’s to offer representation. For the book-store customer, it’s to buy the book. It seems like three very different stages, but really it all boils down to the same thing: you want them to keep reading. You have to suck them in fast. You have to make them want to know what happens next. Which brings us to:
How do you convince a reader this piece of fiction is something they need? Ask yourself—why do you read? Is it an escape from reality? An alleviation of boredom? A hunt for truth? A search for someone who understands you?
It’s sure to be one of those reasons. It may be all of them.
Those are the needs. And it takes the whole book to meet those needs. But the promise—and the evidence—that you can meet those needs happen in the first few pages. That bookstore customer is not going to keep reading to see if it gets better—you must grab them in the first paragraph. And to keep all your readers reading, you have to keep sucking them in deeper and deeper throughout the entire book.
A variety of factors affect this “sucking in.” But there are two main things you absolutely can’t succeed without:
If your reader relates to, or identifies with, your hero, you’ve begun forging an emotional connection. When you add conflict—which usually involves threatening the thing that hero loves most—you create the reader’s need to find out: “What happens next? Does the hero overcome the conflict?” And, since the reader relates to this hero, the subconscious question: “Could I overcome that conflict?”
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Discover the Whole AIDA Series:
Attention
Interest
Desire
Action
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How to get people to read your book.
