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How to Design a Cover by the Genre

At this point, you’ve thought about what type of cover you want based on what your competition is doing. But looking at your competition is a small step in the larger part of making sure your book stays relevant to its genre. Without a solid idea of how your book genre relates to your finished cover, you could end up with a crime thriller that looks more like a children’s book, and then you’ll have to answer to unhappy mothers.

As hinted last week, each genre has a definite feel. You could pull a random assortment of books, line them up, and a reader could tell you exactly what book came from what shelf. In order to market to the potential readers of your book, they need to have an idea what to expect from your book.  Using the genre is a great way to connect immediately to your readers and use it as a springboard to an  original, eye-catching cover.

genres

(Can you tell what genres these books belong to?)

If You Haven’t, Check Out the Competition

As mentioned last week, you can’t start designing your book cover without looking at your competition, for the simple reason that you want to stay informed on what’s relevant and avoid unconsciously mimicking.

Who’s Your Genre’s Target Audience?

Another way you can use your genre as a launching point for your cover is to figure out the primary buyers of your genre. Who is your age and gender demographic, and what do they like? If you have a good idea who will be browsing your genre for new reads, you can design your book cover to appeal to them. For best results, avoid a broad swatch (all women) and go for as nuanced as you can (12-16-year-old girls who like skateboarding and vampires).

You might hope that by appealing to all women you’ll get more readers, but if you try to make your cover all things to all people, you could end up losing everyone. Once you know your target demographic, you should have a better idea of the imagery that will intrigue them.

Focus Group (or ask a friend):

I’m not talking about asking friends for opinions on what your cover should look like. After all, one of the more frustrating situations a designer can find themselves in is, “I asked my mother-in-law who took an art class once what she thought of the logo you sent me…” I’m referring to polling your loved ones as to what they think of when they hear the word “________” (insert your genre here). Since everyone has a different perspective, reader friends are not even required. They can be people who hate books or love books, as long as they’ve heard of your genre before. That way, they can provide a alternative view and spark cover ideas you had never considered. If you do this, however, be prepared to take your loved one’s input with a grain of salt–just because you are fond of them doesn’t mean they’re right all the time.

Go Deeper…

Ask yourself what sets your book apart from the genre you fall under. You might have an antagonist who looks different from any other antagonist you’ve read in your genre (another reason to research the competition is to confirm this). Your book might be set in an alternate universe that has distinct imagery you can incorporate. Think about what you can incorporate that can draw attention to your book cover.

…But Still Be Honest with Your Genre

You don’t want to have your book cover reflect something it’s not. If you’ve written a dark YA Paranormal Romance, you don’t want to deviate significantly and have a brightly colored, happy-looking cover. Sure, it would stand out from the rest of the books on the shelf but could possibly disappoint a reader with false expectations, leading to bad reviews. Think carefully about what defines your genre to understand how to frame your cover.

However, word of warning: be wary of book cover trends in your genre. Just because everyone else is including blood or glowing orbs on their book cover doesn’t mean it’s right for your book.

If you were to walk into a bookstore and pull one or two books out of each genre, what would you find? A common thread in design linking the two as part of the same genre. In order to market to the potential readers of your book, they need to have an idea what to expect from your book. That’s where analyzing your genre comes in. You can have an idea of how to create an original, eye-catching cover while still following the successful footprints of those who tread before you.


Rachel Giles is a professional graphic designer who graciously donates her time to the Consortium. Every Tuesday she shares an article about quality cover design.

Don’t Shoot Arrows at People

frenchheadshot2

Or: Choosing a Target Audience

This is my story. From start to finish, I’ve written it for me. It doesn’t matter if anybody else likes it–I wrote it for myself. It came from the heart, and that’s all it really needs.

If you want other people to read your story–if you want your novel to sell*–you can’t afford to include any of the above phrases in your writerly worldview.

One of the main challenges in writing is narrowing your focus. Keeping your story on-track. Ignoring the side paths that would let your tale meander into a swamp. Characters must stay in-character. Scenes must move the story forward. Plot threads must tie up in the end. If you pay attention to these principles, they’ll let you craft a compelling tale from start to finish.

In the same vein, you need to target a specific audience as you write.

Squinting into the Wind

I’ve only shot a bow and arrow a few times in my life. It’s great fun, and I want to make time for an archery class or two at some point (you know, when I have time, har har). But the little practice I’ve had so far has taught me that when I’m shooting, I have to pay attention to my target.

“Well, duh,” you might say. “Who’d be dumb enough not to pick a target before they shoot?”

*ahem* My point exactly. When I’m sighting along the shaft of an arrow, I have to ask myself: Is the target close enough? Is the target big enough? Is the wind blowing? Is my stance solid? I squint at my target and try to get an accurate feel for these elements before I loose my arrow.

It’s the same in writing. When I’m writing, editing, finalizing, and marketing a novel, I “squint” at my target audience and ask myself similar questions: Who am I writing for? What does my audience expect? Have I chosen a wide enough audience? Have I chosen a narrow enough audience so that the book doesn’t go off on what might be just crowd-pleasing tangents? Is my writing solid? What else do I need to work on before I can loose this book on the public?

Examine Your Target

As I wrote the previous paragraph, I was thinking of you, dear reader. If I were writing for a highbrow literary magazine, I might’ve phrased my question, “For whom am I writing?” But here at UnSyl, our tone is a little less formal. Our readers aren’t looking for ultimate grammatical sticklerism (although we and you should do our collective best to get the grammar right 98% of the time). Our readers are (mostly) writers looking for help in getting their stories out of their heads and into the hands of their own readers. Our readers want advice they can relate to and implement, and they need us to present that advice without a lot of nitpicky fuss.

So instead I chose a less sticklery question: “Who am I writing for?” My tone is informal to match the informal atmosphere you’ve come to expect from this blog. Instead of “advice to which you can relate,” I want to give you “advice you can relate to.” And if I do throw in a “highbrow” phrase here and there, I do it to get a chuckle instead of a stoic nod of approval.

But on to noveling. If I’m writing for young adults, I avoid using words like “perspicacious” or “unguent” in my story. Not because kids are stupid, but because I recognize that they’d likely relate better to “shrewd” and “ointment.” If I’m writing sci-fi, I bear in mind that my audience will expect a certain amount of scientific lingo. Paying attention to my target audience means I’m considering their needs and expectations in every sentence and every word.

Confession

For my fantasy novel series Legends of the Light-Walkers (currently comprised of Rethana’s Surrender and Rethana’s Trial), I invented a language I call “Lirren Eamnaya.” Lirren Eamnaya has now been twenty years in the making, with dozens of pages of notes, a dictionary, and a functional grammar. Considering the effort and joy I’ve put into this, I’m sure you can understand my desire to use it as much as possible in my novels.

Well.

Readers have other ideas.

I took my beta readers’ and my editor’s advice and chopped a bunch of Lirren Eamnaya out of the manuscript. But judging by reviews since publication, I didn’t chop enough. What was my mistake? I wasn’t properly targeting my audience. I wrote the Rethana novels with an ideal reader in mind…who looked a little bit too much like me. I *love* reading fantasy stories in which the world-building is so in-depth that it includes other languages. Having to puzzle them out doesn’t distract me from the story; instead, it pulls me farther into that world.

But I’m learning that the wider fantasy audience doesn’t enjoy that challenge as much as I do. So, for the rest of the Legends of the Light-Walkers series, I’ll be taking the critical reviews to heart and making the stories more readable. I’ll target an audience that will accept some foreign language elements but doesn’t want to do a full linguistic analysis while they’re trying to enjoy the story.

Fair enough. ; )

Discovering What They Want

So, how do you find your target audience and figure out their needs? Well, trial and error is one way–and a painful one, as you can see above. It’s effective, but it means taking a risk and having a pretty thick skin (some of those reviews are hard to stomach).

You also need to keep up with your reading. Look at what’s hot in your genre and work backward: Based on what you’re reading, what are the kind of people who are reading it? What elements do these novels have in common that are making them so popular? What are the characteristics of readers who enjoy these elements?

Know your readers, and you’ll clarify and tighten up your writing. And they will thank you for it.

__________

*There’s nothing wrong with being in the noveling business for the money. Writing might be your beloved passion, but you’re not betraying any kind of ethereal Bohemian spirit by wanting to be paid for all of your hard work.

Using a Style Guide

Aaron Pogue, Lead WriterFor many writers, the worst part of self-publishing is the technical aspect of (re)formatting their manuscripts. We all have slightly different habits (and slightly different inherited settings on our word processors), so it can be a challenge to “clean up” a document enough that an e-book retailer will even accept it (let alone make it look good).

Digital publishing platforms address this problem with long, often tedious instructions for preparing books that will work in their systems. These manuals are called style guides, and when it comes right down to it, automated conversion systems basically require them.

The Smashwords Style Guide

The most infamous style guide in indie publishing is the one required for Smashwords. In order to safely process a Word document through the Smashwords “Meatgrinder” conversion process, you not only need to learn how to apply styles, but also generate a linked Table of Contents and (eventually) track down any of your own advanced formatting that’s causing problems in the converter.

If that gets too complicated, you can always strip all the formatting from your document and put it back in one piece at a time. The style guide contains step-by-step instructions for this “nuclear option,” as well as a list of the “safe” formatting to include when you rebuild it.

You also need to include some strictly-formatted information in the frontmatter, including the order and placement of your title, copyright assertion, and a special “Smashwords Edition” tag.

The complete style guide (PDF) is available as a free download from Smashwords, and also in e-book format pretty much everywhere.

It weighs in around 103 pages, or about 25,000 words. It’s important to understand all the concepts in the book, because Smashwords customer support will often direct authors to review a certain page or section in the style guide in order to fix a publishing problem.

Kindle Publishing Guide

That might seem like I’m throwing stones at Smashwords, but the sad reality is that their hefty style guide is pretty close to industry standard. It’s really a desperate attempt to teach writers the nuances of word processor software.

Even though they’re widely seen as the most convenient option in indie publishing, Amazon’s KDP publishing guide (PDF) is almost as bad as the one from Smashwords. This one is 79 pages long (approximately 20,000 words), but its saving grace is the quality of its material. It covers every nuance of publishing through the KDP platform, including chapters dedicated to things like fixed-format illustrated children’s books.

They also have an abbreviated version that’s barely two pages long.

Draft2Digital

As long as I’m talking about style guides, I really should plug Draft2Digital’s. The guys at Draft2Digital like to claim they don’t have a style guide. They say, “Give us whatever you’ve got, just use your style guide, and we’ll teach our system to work with it.” That’s a pretty generous attitude (and they’re surprisingly good at coming through), but for writers who don’t want to wait for the system to learn, the developers have prepared an (unofficial) style guide for their system, too.

Brace yourself, because things are about to get technical. Sorry, that’s just the nature of the game. If you want to get the best possible results out of Draft2Digital’s conversion process, you should really do all of the following things:

  1. Make your chapter titles bold.
  2. Use a larger font for them than you use for the body text.

That’s…that’s basically it. You can make block quotes by setting narrower left and right margins. You can save yourself a lot of time (and get a much cleaner document) by leaving off the title page, copyright page, and other endmatter and just letting Draft2Digital build those for you. You can….

Nope. I don’t really have any more tips. The Draft2Digital conversion process is surprisingly good. Try it out and see for yourself.

How to Use a Style Guide

consortiumpic.croppedHi! I’m back! I hope you learned a lot from Laurie’s posts of the past couple of weeks.

Now it’s time to get back to something that I love very much: the rules.

Last time I wrote here, I covered the different types of editing that an editor might be required to perform on your manuscript. One of my favorites is copyediting. That’s because I’m a stickler for rules. Things need to have rules, and they need to adhere to those rules as much as possible.

follow-the-rules

Unfortunately,  language is really bad about rules. All languages are fluid, ever-changing. Definitions of words change as we use them in different connotations (I mean, like, literally). New words crop up to describe new experiences and developments (have you Googled anything today?). And hey, that’s great. I mean, who wants to talk like Chaucer anyway? “Whan that Aprille…” Please. So five centuries ago.

And that’s not even talking about the mess of languages we call English. English was already a hodge-podge of Germanic and Romantic languages. But over the years, as the world has shrunk and we’ve all kind of mushed together in America, words from other languages have pushed their way in (tête-à-tête, anyone? Know any business tycoons?). These have made huge exceptions to whatever semblance of rules we might have had.

So, in this world where dictionaries tell us that both analyse and analyze are acceptable and where no one can decide whether or not to keep the Oxford comma, how do we choose? How can the rule-keepers keep some order among the chaos?

Style Guides Everywhere!

I first noticed that there were different style guides in college. I was in the English department, and my professors insisted I acquaint myself with MLA formatting for everything I turned in. My sister, a Family Studies/Child Development major, used APA. And in my Bible classes, my professors didn’t care what style I used as long as I was consistent (you can imagine my outrage when one of my teachers accused me of making a style up when I was clearly using MLA).

Style Guides are what keep us sane (sometimes). There are a lot of styles to choose from, and most guides are specific to different venues and purposes. For example, MLA is for literary articles, while APA is mostly used for psychology journals and the like. Turabian is used for theses and dissertations.

Imagine my shock when I discovered that the Little, Brown Handbook was neither little nor brown, but a rather robust guide for the rules in multiple styles of citation. There are so many different style guides out there that I can’t begin to cover them all. I had an editor friend where one of her authors insisted that she use the University of Alaska Fairbanks‘ style guide for editing her novel.

Chicago Manual of Style

But please don’t feel overwhelmed. If you’re writing a novel or even non-fiction book, the choice is simple. The majority of publishing houses in the United States use Chicago Manual of Style, and so should you.

CMOS (as we in the biz like to call it) covers everything from how to space the lines in your document to whether or not to add hyphens in black-and-white (hint, the answer is do add them).  When Merriam-Webster and the OED give you two different ways spell something, Chicago can make the decision of which to choose (it’s Merriam-Webster, btw).

The size of this tome may intimidate you, but it makes me feel safe. Each page is chock full of rules for me to follow!

CMOS actually gives you a lot of places where you, the author, can use “your best judgement,” as long as you are consistent with your usage. It also has an online forum where you can ask questions that are answered by the editors.

If you don’t have the money to splurge on a new footrest *cough* I mean, very useful guide book that you will use every day *cough*, or decide to go with a different guide book, that’s fine with me. I’ll never know the difference. But this is the most important rule, and you must follow it at all costs:

Be consistent.

No matter what, always be consistent with the rules that you set for yourself. If you don’t, you look sloppy and like you don’t care about your work. Consistency shows that you have meticulously read through your work for errors, that you understand what you are doing, and that you have enough discipline to follow through. Consistency is key!

But really, just use CMOS. It’s the best.

 

 

 

Guts & Bolts: Have Dice Bag, Will Travel

I spent last month’s Guts & Bolts being pretty hard on Epic Fantasy’s promotional copy. That’s not surprising: I have a complicated relationship with Josh-1the genre, even going so far as to quit it entirely while I was in college. But I’m going to try and be nicer this time around by dealing with a very specific type of Epic Fantasy that has never left me: The Fantasy Roleplaying Game.

And if I’m going to to take that on, I might as well start with the latest iteration of the grandaddy of them all, Dungeons & Dragons.

So how does the most well-known fantasy RPG market itself when it’s time for a new edition? Let’s find out.

D&D 4ed DM Guide800lb Gorilla

Much like X-Men for comic books or James Bond for spy thrillers, the simple fact of the matter is that Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t have to market itself. There is already an existing fanbase that will buy the product simply because it has the words Dungeons & Dragons on the cover. And it’s probably a big enough number to keep the whole enterprise afloat, especially when you consider that the publisher is going to slam the shelves with new, shiny, hardcover, expensive addendum books on a monthly basis until five seconds before the next edition comes out.

But probably isn’t definitely. So the publisher had to do something enticing for a couple of completely different sets of people in very limited real estate. First, they had to try and get “new edition skeptics” to give a second look. Second, they had to appeal to the new roleplayer.

New Editions That Don’t Involve Bell, Biv, and DeVoe

Whether it’s an (ill-advised) update, a (detestable) new formula, or a (more boring) re-imagining, all brands need a fresh coat of paint now and then. But as you can see from my examples, for every successful casting of Daniel Craig there are a bunch of Roger Moores. And consumers are naturally leery of change, even to brands or characters to which they’ve grown loyal.

So how did Dungeons & Dragons do with their fourth edition? Not bad, actually.

The cover uses an updated but still recognizable version of the logo, which is the same as a warm, comfy blanket in branding terms. They use beautiful (if not overly dynamic) cover art of a dragon inside a dungeon. It ain’t subtle, but it gets the job done. “This is your same old D&D,” the cover art promises, “only sexier.”

The promotional copy does a pretty good job as well. At the end of the day, players want to know they can get right to rolling dice out of a book, and that promises is made for sure. Let’s take a quick look.

…exciting encounters, adventures, and campaigns for the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game, as well as advice for running great game sessions, ready-to-use traps and non-player characters, and more. In addition, it presents a fully detailed town that can serve as a starting point for any D&D game.

Advice, ready-to-use stuff, and even a town to use as a jumping off point. Instant adventure, just add twenty-sided dice. This is attractive to an edition skeptic because it means they can get right to work on trying the new stuff and deciding if they like it. Holding their hands into a brave new world is good marketing.

N00BS

What about those totally new to the hobby? Well, as it turns out, D&D does a solid job here as well, and with a lot of the same tools. I mean, the first most important thing they did was make sure Dungeons & Dragons is front and center on the cover. There is, quite frankly, no stronger or more recognizable brand when it comes to any RPG, let alone fantasy ones.

Similarly, although the cover art isn’t super exciting or particularly action-packed, it gives you what you expect. Dragons inside Dungeons. “Yes,” the new consumer is thinking, “this is most assuredly what I’m looking for. It’s right on the label.”

As for the promo copy, the bit we’ve quoted makes the same promises to a newcomer as to an old hand because they’re attractive, albeit for different reasons. A greenhorn wants his hand held because he’s never done this kind of thing before, and this rulebook promises to give him the help he needs to get started.

But that’s actually the second paragraph of copy. Before that, there was this tidbit:

The third of three core rulebooks for the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons® Roleplaying Game.

The Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game has defined the medieval fantasy genre and the tabletop RPG industry for more than 30 years. In the D&D game, players create characters that band together to explore dungeons, slay monsters, and find treasure. The 4th Edition D&D rules offer the best possible play experience by presenting exciting character options, an elegant and robust rules system, and handy storytelling tools for the Dungeon Master.

Now, that first sentence might be a misstep. I appreciate the honesty, but if I was totally new to a hobby and thought I held the only book I needed, then found out there were three more…I might get leery. Still, as far as customer satisfaction, this is probably a better way to go than hiding the fact. After all, you’ll notice the publisher doesn’t mention the other nine thousand books that are entirely options but, we pinkie swear and cross our hearts, are just as AWESOME.

But as far as reinforcing the newcomer’s decision to go with an established brand, this copy is bedrock. Defining genres for thirty years is a big deal. On top of that, exploring dungeons, slaying monsters, and finding treasure is pretty much three decades’ worth of raison d’être for D&D.  What’s more, it sounds hella exciting! Just what I wanted! To get together with friends and imagine us up some fantasy adventure!

And if the new guy is worried about the rules, he’s assured they’re exciting, elegant, robust, and full of handy tools. It could be a lie, but it’s a comforting one designed to sell books. And you’ll never know until you’ve spent the money and read the whole thing.

Wrap-Up

There’s a lot of nuance I skip over in this analysis, such as “how would people even find out about a new hobby?” or “wait, where do I buy all these weird shaped dice they talk about?” But that stuff aside, this D&D book does a great job of convincing the two main groups of folks that need convincing, and they did it by leveraging the best tool they had at their disposal: a venerable and strong brand.

So the moral of the story is to get one of those strong brand thingies. But that’s a hard road to travel. If you find a shortcut, share it with me, will you?

Internal Monologue

Last week we discussed point of view. Today we’re going to cover a corollary question: Depending on which point of view you’ve chosen, what is the best way to explore the inner thoughts of your main character(s)?

Many of you are probably familiar with internal monologue. It goes kind of like this.

Rebekah ducked into the restroom. She pressed herself against the wall and took deep, calming breaths.

If my heart beats any louder, they’ll be able to hear it in the next room.

See that italicized portion? That’s Rebekah’s actual thoughts, as she’s thinking them, in real time. It can be a useful tool. It shows the reader how our main character thinks, what her personality is.

It can also be misused. Case in point:

Carter burst through the door and laid his deep green eyes on Rebekah. “I found you!”

Oh, no! He found me! And he’s standing by the bathroom door, so there’s no way for me to escape. I guess I’m going to have to confront him about how I saw his mother having an affair with the principal.

I’ll never be able to shake that image from my head. The last thing I ever wanted to see in my life was Mr. McMichael covered in apricot preserves.

Why have I never noticed how green Carter’s eyes are? They’re kind of pretty now that I look at them. I think I’ll look at them a little longer.

It only took a split second for these thoughts to cascade through Rebekah’s mind. She crossed her arms. “You aren’t allowed in here!”

Now, this isn’t an excerpt. I just made it up (can you tell?). But even while writing it, Editor Thomas wanted to throw a penalty flag. Plot interference! Cursor will be placed at the spot of the foul! Repeat chapter!

And, what’s worse, I’ve seen books that do this. I’ve edited them. Um, no, Rebekah did not just think all of this in a split second. I’m a fast reader. It took me just as long to read that nonsense as it did for her to think it. She did, in fact, just stand there staring dumbly at Carter. There may have been drool.

That’s not the worst of it, either. Remember, this is coming after a scene where Rebekah got chased into a bathroom. The action is flowing. The blood is pumping. And then the author throws a fountain pen into the machine. It all comes to a screeching halt.

Why? So the author can force us to relive a scene that only happened a chapter or two ago, and because he wants to signpost Rebekah’s feelings, saying, “Look, look, she thinks his eyes are pretty!”

So that’s how to do it poorly. This brings us back to our initial question: What is the best way to explore the inner thoughts of your main character(s)?

The answer: Probably not with internal monologue.

Before you ever started prewriting your new bestseller, you ought to have visited the hardware store. Your author’s toolbox should be well stocked. If you take a look through it, you’ll find that a lot of your basic tools are much better suited for the job than internal monologue.

Observe.

Carter burst through the door and laid his deep green eyes on Rebekah. “I found you!”

Rebekah jumped back against the sink and gripped it tight. Her knuckles turned as white as the porcelain.

She opened her mouth to shout, then hesitated. Her voice came only as a whimper. She cleared her throat and smoothed her hair.


I’m just using narrative. I haven’t done anything I wasn’t already doing in the scene. But by simply describing the action, I’ve given you a window to her mind. She’s scared. She’s angry. And then she has second thoughts. See that hair-smoothing? Classic self-consciousness.

In effect, instead of telling you what Rebekah is feeling, I just showed you. Reading emotional cues is instinct. Study how people act in stressful situations, and trust your readers to be able to understand it if you describe it right.

And what about the more nuanced bits of what Rebekah is thinking? That’s all best left for dialogue.

“Carter, I–listen, we need to talk.”

Carter shut the door and leaned against it. “Yeah, we do. I’ve been trying to talk to you all week. You haven’t been answering my calls.”

Rebekah closed her eyes, then opened them to chase away images of last week. She let her eyes linger on Carter’s. “Yes. I know. And I’m sorry. But I didn’t know how to bring it up and…”

“And?”

Rebekah brushed her cheek. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

There. That’s all of the detail, and more, that was in the internal monologue above. And it’s better. Why? Because it doesn’t break the flow. The chase runs right into this tense dialogue that the reader has been anticipating. It’s the rhythm that defines your work as a storyteller. Suspend…and deliver.

There is a place for internal monologue. That place isn’t scattered hither and yon. Internal monologue needs to be used sparingly, and it needs to be pithy. Remember the first of Rebekah’s thoughts we highlighted, where she commented on how loud her heartbeat was? That was a single sentence, and it was directly related to the action. It adds color and shows a little of her personality. It is, therefore, legit.

There are a few other rules for internal monologue. Always denote it with italics. Always state it exactly as the character is thinking it–you’d be amazed at how many books I’ve edited that go like this:

John dove back into trench. He wondered what they were going to do to him next.

That’s just italicized narrative. It’s extremely awkward.

One last rule: If you’re writing your book in first person, don’t use internal monologue. We’re already getting the story from your main character’s perspective. We don’t need the italics.

Remember, every tool you use must be subservient to your story. If any part of your writing hinders the drive of your narrative, cut it off and throw it away. It is better to enter success without any internal monologue than to be exiled to the outer darkness of anonymity.

This article took three read-throughs.

Scoping Out the Competition

There’s not a profession that doesn’t scope out their competition from time to time. Whether you’re a basketball team, a cereal company, or an internet giant, you need to know what your competition is up to in order to be relevant and on top of your book cover game. So head to your local bookstore (whether you buy anything while you’re there is another story) and do a little snooping on the competition. After all, you’ll need a little break after last week’s hard decision whether to pick a photo-based, illustration-based or typography-based book, right?

Once you arrive and wonder where to go next, you should pull out your notebook, because you’ll need to…

Identify your Direct and Indirect Competitors

There are two types of competitors: direct and indirect.

Direct competitors are the ones who have roughly the same product and are targeting the same market as you. A non-book example would be McDonald’s. Burger King and all the other fast-food hamburger joints are their direct competitors because they are trying to attract anyone who wants a hamburger for lunch. In your case, your book’s direct competitors will be those that share the same shelf, in both the physical and virtual worlds. This will almost always the genre that your book falls under, although you can refine your search for if your genre has several subdivisions.

Indirect competitors have a different product but serves the same needs. Returning to the McDonald’s analogy–their indirect competitor would be your local Chinese takeout place. Not the same type of food, but it can take away a customer for a meal. In this case your indirect competitors could come from multiple sources: other genres that your customers might look at, movies that touch upon the same subjects and themes. Basically what will serve your reader’s need for sustained entertainment relating to, say, fiction set in space.

competition

Visit Your Direct Competitors

Go over to the shelf where your direct competitors reside and pick out five covers you love and five covers you hate. Then analyze them a bit.

  • How are they communicating their contents? If you’ve read the book, this might be a good time to think how the content on the cover corresponds to the book itself.
  • Is the imagery on the cover landscapes, single people, groups, collages, etc? What sort of typography have they included? Is the title the emphasis or the graphic elements? What are their color schemes?
  • Is there a specific emotional style or tone that the genre tends to follow? The YA Paranormal Romance favors photos of the main character with smoke, mystical symbols, blood, mist, etc. Basically anything that adds a dark, mysterious tone to the cover. Romance books, on the other hand, feature sensuous, scantily clad people in tender embraces with warm colors to show the romping good time the characters have.

Once you have that information, you can start thinking about how to stand out from your competition while still making your book feel friendly and familiar to potential readers. And while you’re over in that area….

Look at the Market Leaders

Often there will be a small selection of the current bestsellers in that genre (if not you can look this up online). You’ll want to see what the top leaders in your category are up to for a few reasons. One, especially if you have fragments of an idea already, is to make sure you aren’t unconsciously mimicking a bestseller. You’d hate to spend time putting together a book cover, only to discover that, not only does a similar one exist, but they did it better! Another reason to check up on the market leaders is to see what your target market is already familiar with. We’ll deal more with this next week, but you don’t want to mislead your potential reader into thinking they’re purchasing a different type of book than the one you’ve written.

Visit Your Indirect Competitors

Much as you having a few different interests can lead to interesting combinations, it’s beneficial to visit your indirect competitors. After all, they are trying to do the same thing as you–attract customers. They might be targeting different target markets, but some of their ideas can rub off on you. Using the questions above, stroll over to your indirect competitors in the other aisles and see what they’re doing. Does your book feature a time-traveling master chef? It might behoove you to visit the cooking section and see what the best-selling cooking book cover trends are. Does your romance novel delve into the 1960s art scene? Then take a look at the history section for books on that era. Is there a recently-released movie that deals with a similar setting or theme? See how the graphic artists dealt with their movie posters.

Doing some research on the competition is essential to your book cover design process. Without it, you could end up with a cover that neither relates to your genre nor appeals to the readers you want to target.

Kill Your Darlings: The Alpha and Omega of Stephen King

frenchheadshot2So, when I was pondering which part of Stephen King’s On Writing to share with you today, for some reason my brain said,

“FIRST! LAST! PAGING THROUGH BOOK TO FIND UNDERLINED THINGS!”

And I said, “Huh?”

My brain just rolled its eyes at me. But then it explained.

First Things

As I page through my well-read copy of King’s On Writing, I find that the very first thing I’ve underlined is:

“…(E)very aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style [by Strunk and White]. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is ‘Omit needless words.'”

Aha! The plot thickens. But zere iss moar….

Last Things

As I page through the final fourth of the book, one of the last things I’ve underlined is:

“…(C)utting to speed the pace…that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings).

“…You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%. Good luck.

Ahh, my dears. With that, we’ve come to the scary part.
stephen_king_on_writing

Kill Your Darlings

The concepts of precision and brevity in writing form bookends within King’s On Writing, and for good reason. Writing a novel is not our excuse to ramble. It’s not our excuse for infusing our manuscripts with whatever words we want, assuming all the while that people will happily read them. Yea verily, we might pad our wordcounts for such endeavors as NaNoWriMo, but when it comes to crafting a novel that somebody will want to read, we must needs pound that padding flat and toss it out.

Kill your darlings.

Your “darlings” are those flowery turns of phrase you fall in love with. Your darlings are those landscape descriptions that paint a gorgeous picture of setting but have no connection with the main character. Your darlings are those adverbs you’re attaching to your dialogue tags instead of showing the reader your characters’ body language.

Kill your darlings.

They are yours, these darlings. They belong to you. You imagined them, created them, birthed them onto the page. In your eyes, they are beautiful because they are part of you. They are tiny essences of your very soul. Killing them would be sacrilege.

Kill your darlings.

Trim. Cut. Slice. Chop. Hack. Destroy.

Kill your darlings.

They’re pretty, yes. They are of you, yes. But they clutter up your writing until your novel resembles the narrow-path-honeycombed house of a Victorian hoarder. Believe me, readers will not want to come visit.

The Perfect Murder

Here are 5 ways you can go about “killing your darlings.” These methods aren’t all pain-free…but they’re worth it.

1. Change your thinking
First drafts are drafts. They are not the be-all, end-all of noveling. Finishing a first draft is a great accomplishment, but the work doesn’t stop there.

Your first draft is a statue with rough edges. It’s got odd lumps in peculiar places. Its face isn’t well-defined. When you type “The End,” the story might feel finished, and it might feel perfect. Sadly, it is neither.

To smooth out this statue’s lumps, you first have to accept that it needs smoothing. This mindset is vital to the whole process: the crafting of a story and your growth as a writer.

2. Get beta readers.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: You gotta get beta readers. We writers are chronically unable to view our work objectively — especially when it comes to trimming it down! Forest-For-the-Trees Syndrome strikes again.

You can’t see the Forest of Necessary Trimming because you’ve got your writerly nose shoved up against the bark of the nearest tree. And that’s where the writerly nose tends to stay. You need somebody outside to look at your story and identify excess branches and superfluous shrubbery.

Writing can be lonely work, but we can’t do it alone. That’s a paradox I’ll save for another post…but maybe you get the picture anyway.

3. Edit for simplicity.
Break up long sentences into two or three sentences. Replace flowery phrasing with straightforward description. Choose simple action verbs over the ones that sound high-falutin’.

Simplify. This applies to characters and (sub)plots, as well. You might be completely in love with a supporting character…but your beta reader asks, “What is this guy’s purpose again?” Or one of your subplots just doesn’t fit with the rest of the story. These are great things for slicing out of your manuscript without hitting anything vital.

Simplify. Your story will thank you — and your readers will too.

4. Get rid of adverbs.
Okay, brief grammar lesson. And yes, I am keeping this very simple, and my explanation here is not complete. But I don’t want to put people to sleep, so the purists are gonna have to deal with the incompleteness of my instruction.

Adjectives describe nouns. Blue, hot, solid, wet, and shiny are adjectives.

Adverbs describe verbs. In point #2, I used the phrase “view objectively.” Here, “objectively” describes the how of “view.” Other examples of adverbs are: lustily, happily, worriedly, and sideways.

“I got a new bike for my birthday!” she said happily.

Okay, so she said it “happily.” What does that look like on her? Don’t tell me she said it happily; instead, tell me that her eyes are wide, her smile is huge, and her teeth glisten in the sunlight like tiny bottlecaps.

Yes! Make it a hideous description, if that’s what it takes. I’ll read anything, just get rid of that clunky, boring, milquetoast adverb!

“But wait,” you say. “Wouldn’t adding description actually increase my wordcount?”

Well, yeah. Probably. But adverbs weaken your sentences, and overusing them will make your novel unreadable. I’m picking on adverbs because they’re a bad habit and because this is my list and I can.

5. When all else fails, re-write.
This one’s kind of self-explanatory. If you’ve trimmed and trimmed and trimmed, and the novel is still too Victorianly (see what I did there?) cluttered, it might be time for a complete re-write.

I hate even thinking those words, much less typing them and putting them where people can see. But sometimes, it’s the only choice we have. Maybe the story took off in the wrong direction in Chapter 2. Maybe there’s a side character who needs to be cut. Maybe there’s a side character who’s supposed to be the main character. Maybe the climax should’ve happened five chapters before it did.

Whatever it is, a re-write might fix it–and fix it well enough that your wordcount “magically” decreases by whatever percentage you require.

Alpha and Omega

In the beginning, Stephen King recommends that we omit needless words. In the end, he recommends the same thing, and I concur. In every chapter, scene, and sentence, ask yourself: “Does this belong?”

If it doesn’t, you’ve identified a darling.

Time to kill it.

Technical Tip: Filling Out a Product Page

Last week I talked about some of the different promotional material you’ll need to develop for your book. This week I wanted to continue my “Technical Tip” feature with a little explanation of how you’ll use that material.

If you’ve already start self-publishing, you won’t find much new here. Mostly, this post is intended for the newbies.

Title Information

I’m going to use “Title Information” as shorthand for several pieces of information: book title, subtitle, series title, and series volume number. All of those except the first are optional, and these can be some of the most complicated elements to add to different vendors’ product pages.

KDP will ask you for title, series title, and volume number. They’ll add all that information to their database (and probably use it to recommend your book to readers), but the only thing they display on the product page is what you provide in the “title” field.

Most of the other direct distribution outlets (PubIt!, Kobo, and iTunes) behave the same way. That means readers who already know a series name can probably do a search and find your books, but readers browsing through lists of books will have no easy way to know that this book is part of a series.

To avoid this problem, I’ve made a habit of including series and volume information in the title field, too. So, for instance, when I used to publish direct through KDP, I would enter the book’s title not as “Taming Fire,” but “Taming Fire (The Dragonprince’s Legacy, #1).”

Now that I publish everything through Draft2Digital, they handle that for me. At Draft2Digital, I can just put “Taming Fire” in the title field (and the series information in the series boxes), and they’ll make sure it shows up at Amazon the way I showed above.

Alternatively, I can put in my own parenthetical at Draft2Digital, and they’ll use mine instead of adding their own. So either way, you’re fine.

Contributor Details

The next major block of information at any distribution channel is “Contributors.” This mostly refers to authors, but it’s also a place to give credit to the editor who curated an anthology or the illustrator of a children’s book or the translator of an international work.

Unfortunately, this is not a good place to give credit to the cover artist or the freelance copyeditor you hired (not at KDP, anyway). I learned that the hard way with Gods Tomorrow, when it showed up on the main Amazon page as “Gods Tomorrow by Aaron Pogue, Julie Velez, and Elyssa Dolinger.” If you looked closely on the product page, you could see that Julie and Elyssa were referenced as my cover artist and cover designer, but on the main listings, they looked like co-authors.

Again, Draft2Digital handles this for you. You can fill in all your Contributors (along with their roles) and Draft2Digital will embed that information in the book’s metadata, pass it along to any of the retailers that do sane things with it, and keep it hidden from places like KDP (where only “Author” Contributor types are provided).

Product Description

The product description is probably the most work you’ll have to do for any of the vendors, but it’s the least complicated part of the form to fill out. If you’re going direct to multiple distribution channels, I’d recommend developing the product description in a separate document that you can then copy and paste to each distributor. (We used Google Docs.)

The only complicated part of the product description is trying to get a little fancy formatting in. Some of the vendors (Apple and Kobo, if I recall correctly) will allow rich text or HTML like italics and bold, whereas the others only take plaintext.

KDP (always the complicated one) will only accept plaintext when you’re providing the product description, but once the book is live you can access it from your authorcentral.amazon.com page (which is not part of KDP) and modify the description there. The Author Central editor does allow some rich text markup.

There have also been some rumors lately concerning ways to artificially inject HTML markup into the text field at KDP. I haven’t been able to recreate them, and they seem unnecessarily complicated when you can just update the description through Author Central.

Again, Draft2Digital allows you to provide rich text markup which they’ll pass along to any vendors that accept it (and reduce to plaintext for those that won’t).

That covers all the promotional material you’ll need to provide, but there’s still a lot more information the retailers will need in order to sell your book: categories and search terms, content files, MSRP, and desired sales channels.

We’ll talk about all of that over the coming weeks, but now you have enough information to get started.

How to Choose an Editor

Last time I helped you locate independent editors and, hopefully, encouraged you to actually use one for your next literary masterpiece. This time, I’d like to help you take the next step to actually choosing and using an editor.

The most important thing to remember is that this relationship is a give and take. Just as you are creative in the writing of your book, so is the editor in helping you to refine it. Depending on the level of your own experience, an editor will gauge how much guidance they feel you need from them. Just as every writer works differently, so does every editor.

Let’s say, for the sake of this exercise, you’ve found a few editors with whom you think you can work. How do you know which one to choose? Which one will work best with you and for you?

That is relatively simple. I told you in my last post that most editors will request a sample of your writing. Just as an editor wants to evaluate you before they accept you as a client, you should evaluate them before you hire them. Remember that you are the employer and you have every right to ask a potential employee for a sample of their work, just as, in a traditional workplace, you might request a resumé.

By reading an editor’s website, you should be able to find out more about their individual approach to their work. You’ll probably also get a feel for the way they write, since most indies write their own copy for their websites/blogs. Don’t be afraid to read samples of the books they’ve edited. This will give you insight as to the quality of the work they produce, or let out of the gate.

But the easiest, most important thing an editor can do to show you how they will handle your individual work is to actually show you. THAT is where your sample works for you. You’ve sent your potential editor(s) a sample of your work. Ask them to edit it and send it back to you.

If you’re trying to decide between two or more editors, comparing their markups of your work and how much you agree is the best way to decide which one will be the better choice for you. Notice I said, “for you.”

I’d like to repeat here that editors are a diverse group, and choosing between them is not always a black and white, “Who has the better resume?” or, “Who has the more impressive body of work?” Make sure you choose one with whom you know you can work, with whom you agree to a point. Consider how much they point out to improve, or to leave alone, and how that impacts what you wish to accomplish with your work.

Do not become defensive about your work; accept that evaluation as that one person’s constructive criticism and let it be your guide to hiring a person who could very well be your editor for years to come. I know authors with whom I’ve worked once or twice and a decision has been made, either by me, by them, or both of us that maybe we don’t mesh as well as we thought we did. Then there are those for whom I’ve done everything from their blogs, to their promotional materials, to every piece in their bibliography.

You may not feel that click immediately, but you will be able to make a more educated decision by looking at their work as it pertains to your work. I really can’t get much more detailed than that except to tell you to trust your instincts and don’t be afraid to tell a potential editor you’ve decided to go with a different editor.

You are embarking on a long-term working relationship. You’re at the start of a great journey. Now get out there and find yourself an editor.

 


Laurie Laliberte is a freelance fiction editor who specializes in working with independent authors who are new to self-publishing. Further details about her work can be found on her website and you will find much of her bibliography here.

Email: KindleAllStars@gmail.com

Twitter: @LaliberteLaurie