publishing

Want to Be an Author? Finish Something

Nephele Tempest

Writers write, but authors publish. If you want to go from writer to author, the first step is to finish something, then go back and rewrite it until it is ready for submission. But finishing that first draft really is key. It’s impossible to edit a blank page, and equally impossible to sell something without an ending.

Most writers starting out have written plenty of beginnings. They get an idea and sit down to write. They rush through those first pages filled with excitement, developing cool characters and describing the setting and sending everyone off on their adventure brimming with conflict. But then something happens around page fifty. Maybe page 100 if they are lucky and have plenty of momentum. The writing starts to slow down. That initial idea is no longer sufficient to carry the action forward. More is required, and the beginning writer isn’t sure just what that more entails.

And then comes the shiny new idea.

Everyone’s had them, sometimes even while staring at the computer screen, willing the current idea to shape up and get marching. That niggling thought — a weird new hero, a fantastic scenario, a compelling situation, a snippet of dialogue in the back of the brain — that sounds like the answer to everything. Because this new shiny idea feels so much better than the work in progress. It’s new! It’s shiny! It’s so much more exciting! And it lures you away from the current project that hasn’t been behaving and into its shiny clutches.

Before you knows what’s happened, you have a stockpile of beginnings. Partial novels that have never even made it to the half-way point. Because there is always a shiny new idea lurking around the corner, looking to distract you. The more ideas you have, the more ideas you get. It’s the way creativity seems to work. But there are several problems with this.

  • Shiny new ideas are not actually always good ideas. Sometimes they’re just plain ordinary ideas that, if given time, will fade completely from your mind and go unmissed.
  • Chasing shiny new ideas means setting aside current projects and never finishing anything. And you can’t sell something that’s not finished.
  • Writing the middle and the end of a story requires different skills than writing beginnings, and you can’t get better at writing middles and ends if you never actually write them. You want to hone all your skills as a writer, not just some of them.

Shiny new ideas will always pop up and wave at you, but it is vital that you set them aside and continue with whatever project is currently on your plate. That doesn’t mean forget them entirely. Jot down notes in your journal, start a computer file for the potential new project, and then get back to business. Consider that shiny idea on the to-do pile. Maybe you’ll get back to it in a year and find it’s percolated into something wonderful, or maybe you’ll wonder what the hell you where thinking. Either way, it gets its due eventually, and you get to push through and finish the project at hand.

But what about the argument that the new idea is better or more interesting than the one you’re writing? Of course it seems that way. The new idea is a mystery. You’ve spent virtually no time thinking about it, which leaves it wide open to play with. The current idea, on the other hand, is starting to come together. You understand the characters more than you did at the beginning, you’ve begun to piece together the plot, and things have moved forward. The easy thinking has been accomplished, and you need to dig deeper. Further the conflict, ask tough questions, maybe backtrack on a couple of points. You are past all the surface material and mining for treasure, and that’s work. Hard work. Of course the idea of something new and shiny appeals. That doesn’t make it better.

Writers write, and if all you want to do is write, you can play with as many ideas as you wish. But published authors commit to finishing their projects and resist the distraction of every new idea that catches the light. Of course, occasionally there are projects you find just aren’t working and you decide to abandon them, but that’s a question of the project’s merit, not the distraction of a shiny new idea. So when the next little tidbit flits along and catches your eye, tuck it into a folder for future thought and get back to work.

Polish Your Prose: An Editorial Cheat Sheet

Nephele Tempest

No matter your resolutions for the year, regardless where you stand with your current writing project, the time will come when you need to edit. I don’t mean rework your plot, heighten dramatic tension, or beef up your protagonist’s motivations. Rather I’m referring to that nitty gritty editorial process of looking at your work word by word, sentence by sentence, and examining the language you’ve used. Do your descriptions dance on the page? Have any cliches snuck into the mix? If you had to read aloud in front of an audience, would you find yourself running out of breath?

Sentence-level editing involves more than checking for missing words or making sure your Find-and-Replace changed a character’s name all the way through your manuscript. This is your chance to shape up your prose and show your skills, not just as a storyteller but as a wordsmith. But a manuscript can be a fairly long document, and sometimes it’s hard to remember everything you want to check as you work your way through from first page to last.

Here’s a handy cheat sheet of things you might want to keep in mind while editing:

1.  Cut your adverbs and make your verbs stronger.

2.  Rework any cliches.

3.  Eliminate filler words and phrases, such as “currently”, “that”, and “in order to.”

4.  Refer to people as “who” not “that.”

5.  Cut repetitious words and/or phrases.

6.  Divide long, hard-to-read sentences into two or more shorter sentences.

7.  Fix any inadvertent double negatives in long, complex sentences.

8.  Hyphenate modifying words.

9.  Minimize use of “very” and “really.”

10. Beware of overusing passive voice/passive verb structures (is/was/-ing verbs).

11. Double check the definitions of any words you’re not 100% sure you know.

12. Determine and weed out any words, actions, or punctuation that you personally overuse as filler, such as characters smiling or taking deep breaths, ellipses in the middle or end of dialogue, exclamation points, etc.

13. Replace general words with specific ones, such as “thing(s)” or “stuff.”

14. Cut unnecessary chit-chat from dialogue; limit conversations to substance that moves your story forward.

15. Limit distinctive dialogue quirks or movements to a single character; don’t give “signature” details to more than one person unless there’s a reason (child emulating a parent or older sibling, etc.).

Of course, these are just a sample of common errors you should be checking for at this stage of the editorial process. Depending on your writing style and personal habits, you will add to (or maybe subtract from) the list to customize it for your own use. Likewise, many of these are aspects of usage to keep in mind but not hard-and-fast rules. For instance, I don’t expect you to wipe every single adverb from your work, merely to avoid overusing them. Reliance on adverbs suggests your verbs need to pull more weight, but adverbs on their own are not evil parts of speech.

Clarity should always be your first goal. You wish to tell a story and have your reader understand it. Beyond that, you combine your personal voice and writing style with the style in which you’ve chosen to write this particular work in order to impart everything else to the reader — setting, tone, atmosphere, culture, etc. Use this editorial phase to hone those details for consistency and strength of impression. It’s your last chance to polish your prose, eliminate the ordinary and unnecessary, and make your work sparkle.

Market Mania: Why a Book Flies Off the Shelves

Nephele Tempest

If you follow the publishing industry at all, the chances are you’ve heard of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. For the uninitiated, this is the first title in an erotic trilogy that first garnered attention as a popular e-book climbing the rankings at Amazon.com. It later went on to have a small printing through an Australian publisher, and just this week sold at auction for a reputed seven-figure sum (for the trilogy) to a major New York publishing house. The original e-book version was pulled from all vendors and a new, more expensive copy loaded in its place. At this point, hard copy orders still result in the print copy from the Australian printing, though the official listing has the name of the New York publisher.

So what’s the big deal? This title has already sold approximately a quarter of a million copies, and will be receiving a reported 750,000 copy print run under the new publisher. Someone, somewhere, feels there is a market for a million copies of this book. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but the real question is why do they feel this is worth the gamble?

The Shades of Grey books began their lives as Twilight fan fiction, reimagining Bella as an innocent young woman just graduating college who enters into a BDSM relationship with a wealthy Seattle businessman–Edward. The combination of the subject matter, which was handled in an almost tutorial-like fashion as Edward “educated” Bella about the lifestyle, and the Twilight link, made the stories incredibly popular with their audience, which was Twilight fans interested in a more adult view of the relationship from the original Stephenie Meyers books. Subtract vampires, add sex. E. L. James gained a measure of fame within fandom and beyond, and eventually decided to pull the fan fiction version of her stories from the internet, change the details to make them completely original fiction, and publish them in electronic form. Many of her fans supported her, and sales increased thanks to word-of-mouth.

It remains to be seen how many “mainstream readers” — meaning those not plugged into the internet or fandom — will be interested in these books in their latest incarnation. While some areas of the media seem to consider it a revelation that there are women out there interested in reading about sex — and not just your standard variety, missionary position sex, either — the reality is that the erotica market has experienced several major upticks in recent years, spawned in large part by the online vendors and the availability of electronic formatting. This is the equivalent of the brown paper wrapper; naughty, sexy reading material that you can download at will and delete or store in the cloud when you’re done. Will readers embrace these books to the point of purchasing them in paperback? Do three quarters of a million readers want these books on their shelves? I don’t know.

These books are not art. They are not even particularly original or well written. What they are, is an exploration of a world that hasn’t received much public attention recently. It’s impossible to point to the market and say “this is what you need to do to sell a lot of books.” People’s interests are not that cut and dry. You can, however, analyze successful titles to see what has made them different. In this case, the author is giving the reader a tour of the BDSM world, something many of them have never read about or heard much about in their daily lives. I suspect there is also a level of curiosity about the titles for those readers who are familiar with the BDSM lifestyle — wanting to know if the author has her details right. Layer that on top of a relationship that is fashioned after one that’s already proven highly successful, and you begin to get a glimmer of why these books are doing so well.

It’s easy to say sex sells, and that the titillating aspects of the books are the draw, but the original Twilight novels included very little sex and have been enormously popular. So clearly sex alone is not the key.

What makes a bestselling book? There really is no one thing, no formula. If you look back at the vampire craze of the late seventies and early eighties, you find the novels of Anne Rice. Rice’s Lestat books were fresh and different in that they gave the reader the vampire’s point of view. Rice asked what it would be like to live so long, to be forced to keep up with history and technological advances, to see everything you knew and loved as a child or young adult gradually change and vanish — the experiences of becoming old but in the extreme. What is it like to have no one to live your life with? What is it like to have that level of power over humans? And what would it be like to be turned as a child, to age and mature over the years while your body remained undeveloped? Her approach was intriguing, her characters fascinating and multifaceted compared to the more traditional vampire stereotypes. Set against the lush backdrop of New Orleans, with Rice’s stylistic, almost baroque writing — very in keeping with the over-the-top eighties — the books became a sensation.

The Harry Potter books are another example of a fresh take on old ideas. J.K. Rowling’s series is far too popular for anyone to simply dismiss her as lucky, or the books as children’s literature that happened to appeal to a lot of readers. Statistically speaking, a huge proportion of the population has read at least one Harry Potter book or at least seen one of the films. They are well crafted, thoughtfully plotted, and packed full of details that make readers wish they could visit Rowling’s world — enough that one theme park has been built to answer to that desire, with another one in the works.

Yes, Rowling started writing about wizards at a time when fantasy was just experiencing a resurgence in literature — and she likely contributed to that rise. She also set her stories in a boarding school, a fascinating new world for readers in the US where most children attend school locally, thereby layering her intriguing worlds instead of supplying just one. But the reality is that the stories engage readers through multiple themes and age-old traditions of literature. They are packed with examples of good versus evil, practicing what you preach, being tolerant, how even the best people can be hypocritical, following your conscience, standing by your friends, and much more. At a deeper level, there are religious themes of rebirth and resurrection that tap into cultural beliefs. And of course, all of this rests under the veneer of a series of mysteries the characters must solve, not only on a smaller level — one for each book — but on a grand scale across the series. These are books that may be read for pure enjoyment, but they also stand up to rereading and to digging deeper for a greater meaning — which cannot be said of many of the Harry-inspired titles that have been published in years since.

Popular author Tom Clancy has detailed knowledge about how our military and government work to keep the country safe, and an interest in the broader political area, that allowed him to craft very in-depth action adventure books that put the reader in the thick of the action. But his sales were definitely boosted when a certain President of the United States mentioned he was reading a Clancy title. The books were well written, and worth the discovery once a reader picked them up, but they found their market through the best sort of word-of-mouth. More recently, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland received a presidential mention as well. And many books have achieved high sales thanks to their Oprah Winfrey book club listings.

The market is a strange and fickle place. It is virtually impossible to plan for success — to sit down and decide to write a particular type of book, including specific details, and know that it will fly off the shelves. Tastes change rapidly, and what is popular when you pick up your pen or sit down at the keyboard might very well be last week’s news by the time you finish your first draft. As for publicity, well, unless you know a book-minded politician who likes to name drop, or are on Oprah’s Christmas card list, the chances are good that you can only dream of your book receiving that sort of endorsement. There will always be fads, there will always be fascination based on some quirk of the times we live in, and there will always be lucky coincidences that can help a writer soar to recognition. But these are just the fates at work.

Writers can only control so much of their career and their process. You have to write, and rewrite. You have to read good books, and the occasional bad book, so you know what makes them what they are. Read the bestsellers to see what is working but form your own opinions. Just because it sells, does not mean you’ll like it — or that it is the type of material you wish to write. Write from the heart and keep at it, and know that while certain levels of success will always be a matter of luck, your talent and efforts will eventually pay off.