Well, now things are moving on Merm-8. I’ve gotten contacted by my editor and promotions specialist. Weird how nothing for nine months, and now a bunch of stuff is all due at the same time. And meanwhile I’m 75% totally complete with the next novel. Lovely planning. The edits themselves weren’t bad. Mostly changing hyphens to em-dashes, worrying about commas. Interestingly, the editor is choosing to insert “and then” or “then” instead of eliminating them entirely. I thought was bad times. But I guess every publishing house’s style is different. For other things, I deferred to the editor ninety percent of the time. Like not using all caps for emphasis…
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My First Shameless Plug
If you live somewhere in Minnesota, and will be around Chanhassen, I will be reading from Merm-8 at the Author’s Fair on Sunday, Dec. 8 from 2 – 5 PM. I will be one of twelve authors reading and selling works. Except me. I don’t have anything to sell yet. I’m reading from a book that won’t be out for more than a year. All I’ve got is some bookmarks from “Live and Let Undead” and promotional flyers I made myself.
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What I Learned From a Seminar on Marketing (Part 2)
Last time, I left you with tag lines. Today I talk about “sticky stories” (this is the term the guy delivering the lecture used). Stickiness refers to remaining in people’s minds. The lecturer used the example of the “wake up in a bathtub full of ice with your kidney gone” urban legend. My problem with this example is it doesn’t apply to a book. You haven’t written an urban legend for a novel, obviously. It shows you the destination without the map or compass. The idea of the sticky story is to create a mystery. To stop the audience from evaluating and think. To illustrate this, you’re creating some kind…
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What I Learned From a Seminar on Marketing (Part 1)
I went to an author’s meeting the other day about marketing. This is something that I think a lot of people in my place need to learn about — self-publishers or going with a small press. The thing is, no matter how big or small, from John Scalzi and Stephen King to the author of that “Sex with Dinosaurs” erotica, they all do some kind of marketing. And there isn’t some bigwig telling them what to do. They push their own agenda. The thing that I learned is that a proper marketing push is more than saying “this is a book: you could read it” or buying ads on Goodreads or…
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My Contract for Merm-8
Well, if you don’t know I got offered a contract by a small press publisher for Merm-8. Applause now. It’ll be in print and e-book form, although I don’t think you’ll be seeing it in Barnes & Noble. But without an agent, it’s up to me, myself, and I (and the good people of various writing message boards) to review the contract and make sure they aren’t crossing my i’s and dotting my t’s. And they’re not. To be honest, reviewing a contract is not as scary as I thought. It’s worded in a way that I can understand it. Granted it’s no huge contract with a huge publishing company…
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A Merm-8 Rejection
On the writing front, I wanted to talk about a rejection I got for Merm-8, first chapter, that said that the manuscript needed a stronger voice and “less telling, more showing”. And I thought “damn, I thought I had done that”. I mean, I really, really tried to not to tell anything, unlike in “Black Hole Son” or other previous works. I looked for any infodumping (I have some, but not in the first chapter, I think), and tried to make it all come out as dialogue or something more transparent. Like a dog treat in peanut butter. And it’s difficult to do that in science fiction because there’s always…
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Book Marketing
So I’ve been thinking about how a book marketing works for… no reason. Specifically, for an author releasing a new, first novel in an e-market with little-to-no backup from the publisher. Again, no reason. Here’s what I’ve got so far. 1. Facebook As much flak as I and the rest of the world gives Facebook, it survives by being marketing tool. If it’s meaningful, I’m not sure, but more views is good views. The easy part is creating a Facebook page for people to Like and such. Not sure what to do with it after that, besides post occasional statuses and pictures and links. People have said Facebook ads are…
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Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse
I don’t want to jinx anything, but interesting things are happening in my writing career now, as a result of an e-mail I got this morning. This entry is more of a placeholder for posterity. I’ll just leave this image here, and make of it what you will. 🙂
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Defender is Available to Read!
Happy day! Callooh Callay! You can now read Defender, my one claim to fame as a recipient of the “Writers of the Future” 2010 Honorable Mention award at Aurora Wolf for the low-low price of free. It even comes with this snazzy cover graphic that shows you what the characters look like. Which is good, because I was wondering…
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In a Dragon’s Age is Published
Hey peeps and perps, now you can read my awesome short story “In a Dragon’s Age” on Aurora Wolf. It’s young vs. old when Marche, a young boy seeks the help of an old dragon slayer. It has one of my favorite opening lines of the stories I’ve wrote. Plus dragons! And it includes this sweet graphic. Aurora Wolf publishes stories packed with action, growing characters, and awesome endings. Hey, this one has all three? Sweet. Why are you still reading this? Go, go read it!
