The ultimate goal of an anchored author's career strategy - Part III

The ultimate goal of an anchored author's career strategy - Part II

The ultimate goal of an anchored author's career strategy - Part I

And Yet More Reasons to Stick With Your Writing Schedule.

Microsoft Outlook for Writers - 7 Tailored Uses - Part 7

I'm having ...er... a "discussion" with a narrow-minded author who is insisting, amonst other things, that authors should only be published by New York publishers, and readers should only buy books from brick & mortar stores, and (worse!) borrow from libraries.

He doesn't seem to have much respect for the community of writers and readers you find on the Internet.

If you have a moment, please swing by my blog, and add your opinion:  www.anchoredauthors.com.  You can also stop by his original post, and add your opinion to his post, so other less-experience authors and readers don't accept his words as holy writ.  http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977375671.

BTW, you're free to disagree with me, if you think I'm wrong.  I'm trying to open up the discussion, simply because he's insisting his way is the right way.  I think he's 180 degrees wrong, but I also am willing to listen to reasoned argument. 

Have at it.

This week's round-up of posts at www.anchoredauthors.com

Was blown away this week by Kevin Kelly's blog, "1,000 True Fans".  I'm not the only one.  Do a search on Google, you'll find that everyone is talking about this blog entry, and it's only 3 days old.

I got very excited, reading it.  It wasn't just a light bulb going on over my head.  It was a whole fireworks display exploding inside my head as a hundred ideas spontaneously blossomed.

I have for years struggled with the have/have not aspects of the publishing industry (and the dichotomy is particularly bad if you write genre fiction as I do).  Kelly's idea is a whole new way of approaching a creative career (note, it doesn't just apply to authors).

I won't go on about it here, because I'm still turning it over in my own mind, and analysing the possibilities.  But I do urge you to read it for yourself, if you're at all creatively-minded.

2008 so far as been anything but a stellar year.  What's more shocking is that most people who know me tend to use words like "strong", and "calm, capable, clever," whenever I'm in earshot, yet a couple of personal crises, and I'm down and out for the count.  And for months at that!

Still, there's something about have the slate wiped clean that makes life refreshing, over and over again.

That's where I'm at.  For the last few months, I've been in a quiet place where I've been trying to find the joy in...well, just about anything, really.

But I was actually trying to remember why I started writing in the first place, and getting some of that enthusiasm back.  I'm glad to say I found it.  I actually stumbled over the clue that unravelled it all quite by accident. 

I love readers!

I have a monthly newsletter that I send out to readers every month.  And back in November, I offerred to write a serialized book for them – anything they wanted.  They just had to tell me via a survey what they would like to read.

Using the survey results, I built a story and started writing chapters and sending them out.  Chapter Five of A Time For Love went out in the wee hours of this morning.

My primary goal was to entertain the readers.  And that's why I love 'em.  Because for once in a long, long, long ad infinitum while, I got to write purely to please the readers.  There wasn't some demanding editor in the back of my mind, waiting for the manuscript with her toe tapping.  There wasn't a set of publisher's guidelines I had to conform to.  The book could be anything that my readers and me felt like building.

And I'm having the time of my life.  I'm getting fabulous feedback from readers, and I've even had a great review on the published chapters.  

Contrary-wise, this is probably one of the most challenging books I've ever written.  It's a sprawling epic with a cast of hundreds, involving three races of man: human, vampire and psion, and covering the span of human history from ancient Sparta to the 25^th century – the future.

It's got a major romance that runs through the spine of the book, and lots of little ones in between, and a suspense/action story line that, amongst other things, deals with time paradoxes, and an interspecies war that threatens human existence.

This is not a small book.

But despite, or perhaps even because of the scale of the thing, and because I'm writing to please only the readers, I've remembered why I got into writing in the first place.

It's great to be back.

It's now September, and for the last few weeks most North American schools have been trying to attract new and more students to their roster.  Everywhere in my city, black mobile sign-boards with their multi-coloured neon lettering have blossomed on the sides of major routes, extolling the virtues of one school over another. 

What a school considers a selling point has provided me with drive-time entertainment for a month.  One in particular, though, has been bugging me.  The signboard is for an elementary school, and exclaims Small school with a focus on literacy!

At first it seems like a well-crafted message.  Succinct, and definitely a selling point.  But…don't all schools focus on literacy?  Doesn't any school, anywhere, aim to teach every student how to read?  For elementary schools, especially in the lower grades, the three R's (Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmatic) are pretty much the entire curriculum.

If a school trumpets that they're focusing on literacy, it's another way of saying they're making it a priority.  I don't think I'd be too far off the mark if I generalize and say that the vast majority of parents are under the impression that literacy is already a priority.

Which begs the question; what are the other schools focusing upon instead?  Are they so deficient in literacy-teaching ability that this school thinks it's a value-added enticement that they're going to teach people to read?

I'm doing a column in my September newsletter on some of the more interesting, romantic, bizarre or just plain funny places writers get to write, either regularly, or one-off occasions.  For instance, there's been writers who have converted garden sheds, others who write in stables and barns, attics, or gorgeous 19^th century libraries complete with leather desktops and ancient typewriters.  Some write on their laps on the sofa, or lying on the floor.  And yes, I'll be mentioning Hemingway's macho writing position, too.

I know that Stephen King once had a writing session at the same desk that another famous writer once wrote…and died at.  I myself have written on planes, buses, boats, and Australian beaches.  

If you have any memorable writing situations or surrounding, or stories that you'd like to share, please send me an email with the details (tracy at sasha productions dot com), and your webpage, and I'll link back to your page in the newsletter.  Deadline, this Saturday.

If you'd like to know more about the newsletter, click here.

When I moved to Canada, I got to experience four seasons in one year.  I grew up with one season with variants:  Summer; when it was stinking hot.  Then there was a brief period during the year when it was cooler and rained a bit (usually, not enough).  Technically, winter. 

Here in Alberta, you get four distinct seasons, and you can literally smell and feel the change between them from one day to the next.  It's fabulous.

Summer, though, lasts a mere heartbeat.  As a result, people are apt to go slightly crazy during the summer season;  the need to get out and soak up the sun, to squeeze in all the summer fun activities before the long days are gone, is an instinctive drive. 

I'm sure it's this form of seasonal silliness that created one of the phrases I most despise in the publishing world:  light summer reading. 

There's all sorts of implications in that phrase that rile me. 

Sometimes the phrase gets shortened down to summer reading, but the implications remain.  The absence of light doesn't take away the meaning, because when they hold up a book as an example of a good summer read, they're not holding up the equivalent of A Tale of Two Cities, or a volume of Shakepeare or Tolstoy.

The phrase implies that it's perfectly okay during summer to read light, frothy novels that you wouldn't be seen dead reading at any other time of the year.  By extension, they're also implying that at any other time of the year you should be reading heavy-hitting, "serious" novels.

I'm sure the phrase is intended as a great marketing ploy to sell more novels, but what it really does is prove that the publishers themselves believe that fiction written purely to entertain the reader is somehow deficient, and shouldn't be read unless you can justify it.  "It's summer, after all!"

Bullshit.

You should read what you want to read, when you want to read it.  Period.  Reading for entertainment is not a crime, and books should not be categorized as entertainment by anyone other than you, who wants to read them.  If Kurt Vonnegut tickles your funny bone, then he's your summer reading.  He's also your winter, spring and fall reading.  If Nicholas Sparks does it for you, it's his books that you should pick up when you want to read.

Don't let the "summer reading" tag make you believe you're inadequate because you'd actually rather read thrillers or romances (or whatever) throughout the year. 

I know writers have a tendency to gush about their latest cover, so usually, I try very hard to let the cover speak for itself, as it is supposed to do. 

But I just got the cover for MASQUERADE'S MATE, which comes out on July 4, and while it's 100% not what I was expecting, it absolutely does the job it's supposed to do. 

It grabs you.

It conveys character, mood, tone.  You know you're going to be reading a thriller, based on this cover.  And you know it's going to be moody.  You also know you're going to be reading about at least two incredibly strong characters.

I just did a quick test run around the office -- and the immediate reaction from all the women was "Wow!" and 95% of them added "When's the book out?".  Exactly what you want to hear.

Designer:  Les Byerley -- my new best friend.

Please comment!

Book covers are an interesting part of the publishing business, especially for authors.  Readers love them.  They sell books by helping the reader pick it up and look through it.  One of the most interesting covers out there at the moment is the latest Laurell K. Hamilton book, with the torso wrapped in a leather corset.  That's all you see, but it's so highly suggestive of the contents that it makes you want to read the book just on the cover alone. 

So it would be fair to say that covers can be important, right? 

It might surprise you to know that authors have no say in their covers.  Good, bad, or downright awful, the author must simply clamp her jaw together.  If she's smart, she'll smile widely and exclaim "How lovely!"

Sometimes you just can't manage that, though.  One of the most famous really bad covers in recent history is the one with the heroine with three arms -- Christina Dodd's book, Castles in the Air.  Christina didn't stay silent about that one.  Go here for her cover horror story, and to see a bigger version of the cover.

All About Romance reviews covers, too, and have a Worse Cover award every year. Scrolling through these is like watching an accident happen.  You can't look away despite your horror and despair.

Contractually, authors have no input into their covers.  All decisions are left with the marketing department in consultation with the editor.  You do get to fill in a cover questionnaire, and depending on how thorough the questionnaire is, how detailed you make your answers, and if the art department reads it, you stand a good chance of the cover coming out looking like it has something to do with the story inside.

I'm exaggerating a bit to make my point.  Although it sounds like an odd process, the building of covers for novels works very well most of the time.  Marketing departments do actually know what they're doing. 

Sometimes an author can very tactfully point out a mistake, after the cover is done ("he's supposed to have blond hair, not black".)  This happened with one of my covers; The Case of the Reluctant Agent.  If the reader had read the first book of the pair, Chronicles of the Lost Years, the cover on Case of the Reluctant Agent gave away whodunit.  That's not something you want in a mystery, so I did try politely to point this out.  The marketing department told me that they had decided to leave the cover as is.  So Agent went out into the world with its secret revealed on the cover, and I held my breath and hoped that readers wouldn't notice.  So far I haven't had any grumpy fan mail about it.

However, occasionally, if you have a very good relationship with your editor and the publisher in general, an author can have more than minimal approval of the cover.  The cover for Lucifer's Lover came about this way.  

My son needed to design a commercial graphic for a graphic arts course he was completing, and he offered to design a cover for me, for Lucifer's Lover, which had just been sold to Archebooks.  I gave him the synopsis, he asked me a few questions about what I had envisioned for a cover, and went away.  The cover he came up with was simple, delightful and perfect for the book.  It said it all, and I was over the moon about it.  I was so thrilled, in fact, that I sent a copy to my editor, and very politely asked what they thought about it.

They thought it was fabulous, too, and it was shipped off to the art department, pronto.  Then came the bad news; the image my son had used had limited copyright, and couldn't be used for commercial purposes.  But the art department liked the cover so much, that they built a similar cover, using commercial images.

Here's the cover that was published:

And here's my son's version:

I just love my local book superstore.  All those thousands of titles to drool over, and a coffee store, too!  But lately, it's become a mildly frustrating experience.

On most Saturday nights, Mark and I head down to the book store to have a coffee and watch the world go by.  We're habitual people-watchers, for a number of reasons including the collection of potential novel characters I scribble down once the more interesting people are out of sight. 

But after the coffee is done, we wander the shelves of books, and soak in all the titles.  For this stage we actually split up and go our separate ways.  I am not all that keen on finding out which professional wrestler has released his autobiography this week, and Mark has just as much interest in the how-to-write section (which is far too small for my taste!). 

Once I've done circling through the non-fiction shelves, I head for the really big fiction section.  And it's here that I always start to laugh at myself.  I'll see at least a dozen titles I want to buy…but I won't buy them, because honestly, truthfully, I-swear-to-whatever-deity-is-yours, I'd much rather read them electronically.

It's like all the books I bought back from the RT Convention in Houston, earlier this month.  I can see the pile from here, if I lean over the top of my laptop a little....  There's easily 40 books there.  (The irony is, I intended to avoid collecting free books this year, to economise on suitcase space, so you can imagine what previous years were like.)  All those books, and guess what I'm reading?  Yeah, the novels I have on my Palm Pilot.

I can't explain how this preference for electronic developed, because (also honestly, truthfully, etc) I thought I preferred to read actual books. 

I do love looking at them.  Whenever I see decorating magazine photos of a room with a case full of books, I stop for a second glance.  Rooms with books in them look lived-in, welcoming and warm.  I always check out the titles of books on the shelves of anyone's home that I visit. 

I love turning a book over and reading the blurb, admiring the cover, even dipping into the prologue or first page a little.  I really enjoy running my eye over a long shelf of books to see if anything interesting jumps out at me.  And I also get a great kick in finding a friend's books on the shelf of the bookstore, looking over my shoulder, and quickly re-arranging the shelf so my friend's titles are face-out (shh!! – it's one of the privileges of having written for so long, that most of your friends are writers, too).

But these days when I'm drooling over the books on Saturday nights, I just can't make myself buy them.  There's a resistance, a foot-dragging, that makes me put the book back on the shelf, get out my Palm Pilot instead, and scribble down the title and author info, so that I can find the electronic version on-line, later. 

In an earlier blog entry, (Pros & Cons of Pixels and Paper) I listed all the advantages of reading electronically.  That list was dashed off in about five minutes.  The advantages of reading paper books took much longer. 

Somewhere, somehow, I learned to love reading electronically.  Now, I prefer it to the point where I get quite annoyed when I find that a title I want to read isn't available electronically.

There's another minor frustration to shopping in the big store, too:  I can't find out what everyone else thinks about the book.  And it's at this point that I start laughing at myself.  I've got used to shopping for books on-line, with their reader reviews and ratings.  If I find a title that intrigues me, I'll surf the net to find other reviews and maybe visit the author's website and check them out.  Another great advantage to on-line shopping is being able to find out which book comes first in a series, or simply, which title was first published. 

Standing there in the big store, it's sometime difficult to figure out which title comes first, and I certainly don't have a handful of other readers' feedback to help me decide if this book is a wall-thumper or not.

Is there any advantage to shopping in the bookstore?  Yep.  Instant gratification.  You can buy it and be reading inside five minutes. (Although, this also applies to electronic titles you buy on-line.)   Or even dip into the middle or the end of the book to see if the early promise holds up.

And it's possible to buy a lemony-sucky dud on-line, when two minutes of examining the real book in a store would have made you put it back on the shelf.  I confess that has happened to me.  Once.  And I've bought dozens (many dozens) of books on-line.  So I'm not about to let that scare me away.

I do enjoy strolling through a bookstore.  And it's a great way to browse and take in a dozen different authors at once, find new authors, and delight in the covers.  So I'm not about to stop any time soon.   I guess I'm just spoiled by the best of both worlds.  

I've learned in the last week that I'm not going to be able to make it to ThrillerFest this year.   This is a double blow for me. 

1)  ThrillerFest is in New York City.  I love New York, since 2004 when I was there for a week and it persisted in not living up to a single cliché, and handed out at least one major surprise a day. 

2)  ThrillerFest itself will be a smorgasbord of my favourite authors, and their books.  These are the people I've been reading for decades, and some of the few authors whose wires are still invisible to me.  

As a writer myself, I read many books that I can predict the ending from the first chapter and I can see all the author's mechanics working in the background to provide the story.  It's not their fault.  I've just been reading and writing for so long that I can spot the wires at 100 paces.  Unfortunately, I can no longer enjoy that author's work. 

There are a double handful of writers whose stories are still a pleasure for me.  Steven King is a perfect example.  I can still get lost in his story world, and never stumble over his word use, and never, ever, spot clanky mechanics or can predict what's coming next.  (And I solved Saw in twenty minutes!)

There are a lot of these authors at ThrillerFest, and even though I would have been registered as an author, don't let that fool you.  I was going as a reader, to drool and chat, get autographs and, well, be thrilled.