Tag Archives: the faithful heart

The Curious Phenomenon of Smashwords

Posted on May 22, 2012 | 12 Comments

I love Smashwords.  I think it’s a brilliant tool for self-published writers.  The Smashwords Guide to Style held my hand through the process of formatting my novels for publication.  The site’s “meat grinder” is the most awesome tool I’ve seen for converting a formatted Word document to every eBook format out there.  It’s my first stop whenever I have a book that’s ready to roll out.

Other than that?  I don’t understand Smashwords at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it without understanding it.  The other day it gave me the best surprise I’ve had in a long time….

You see, like any other Indie Author, I tend to judge my book sales based on Amazon numbers alone.  I check in with KDP a few times a week to see how things are moving.  This month hasn’t been as fantastic as last month (and I haven’t had a fraction of the time to promote that I usually do).  I was all ready to shrug and move on … when I checked Smashwords.

Holy heck!  How did I sell that many copies of The Faithful Heart (not even the first book in the series) in such a short time on … iBooks?  Seriously.  iBooks.  Who would have thought?

At first I was all please with myself and thought “well of course this is all a result of the two free days I had around Easter”.  I mean, back then I offered The Loyal Heart for free, so it’s only natural that I would then sell so many copies of The Faithful Heart, right?  Yeah, you’d think.  Only from what I can see those free copies were “sold” through Sony, not Apple.

Still scratching my head, I popped on iTunes and went to their book section to see if my books appear there.  Sure enough they do! … And The Loyal Heart has 19 ratings.  NINETEEN.  That may sound like small potatoes to some of you, but to put it in perspective, I have just 12 reviews for that book on Amazon and only 9 ratings on Goodreads.  I might also add, just to brag, that the overall rating of The Loyal Heart on iBooks is a happy 4.5 stars.  Woo hoo!

Side-note:  I rather like the fact that on iBooks you can rate something without leaving a review.  Goodreads works that way too.  Amazon should get with the program.

But back to my complete bafflement.

WTF?  How am I suddenly so popular on iBooks and Sony?

It has to be those two free days.

But I digress.

When I decided to give The Loyal Heart away for free through Smashwords I thought that maybe I’d find a few takers out there.  I was secretly hoping that Amazon would drop the price to free for a while so that I could take advantage of that whole hoopla, but it didn’t happen.  Eh.  I considered the whole thing an experiment anyhow.  And really, in the grander scheme of things, I didn’t end up giving away that many books.  Just under a hundred.  I shrugged and moved on with my life.

But if all of these sales that surprised me the other day are related to those two free days, then I may have stumbled on something.  While the raw numbers weren’t all that impressive, the percentages were.

The Loyal Heart was free on April 9th and 10th.  According to Smashwords reporting, The Faithful Heart sold 50% of the number of free copies I had given away a month later.

Maybe it’s just me, but selling 50% of the freebies within a month of the promotion is pretty cool.  Imagine if that had been Amazon?  Imagine if it had been ten times the number of freebies?

So what am I getting at here?

When I did my free days I asked some of my writer friends for their opinion.  Someone mentioned that Amazon doesn’t really consider Smashwords a competitor.  True.  It’s a fish of a different color.  I routinely cringe when I look at the main page and see sleazy erotica titles flaunting their assets (or lack thereof).  But the fact that the Smashwords premium library distributes books to all sorts of different eReader formats kind of makes me happy.  Sure, they take a cut, but that cut is worth the labor that I DON’T have to do to have my books on so many platforms.

So is Smashwords not really a serious competitor to Amazon?  I’m not so sure about that.  I can count the number of books I’ve sold on the Smashwords site without running out of fingers and toes, but I’m beginning to think the fact that they distribute it so widely may be the best kept secret of the whole self-publishing world.

What do you think?  Anyone else had any experience with this?

 

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Working Title

Posted on May 15, 2012 | 14 Comments

I happen to think I’m a very good writer.  I’ve been spinning stories since I was 10 years old, probably even younger.  But as proficient as I am at creating characters and telling stories, I can’t come up with a decent title to save my life.

Yes, I suck at titles.  And as far as I’m concerned this is a real problem.

The title of a book is your first introduction to everything that comes afterwards.  People judge books by their covers, and the title is the centerpiece of the cover.  A good title can inform the reader of what the story is about, i.e. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone or The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.  It can hold volumes of meaning with just a few words, i.e. The Help or Little Women.  It can elicit an instant laugh, like this Romance novel I have on my shelf called Talk Nerdy To Me.  It can conjure memories of high school English class, like To Kill A Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye.

Titles hold a lot of weight.  A bad title can send someone screaming in the opposite direction.  I’m sorry, but I’m just not going to read Fatal Kidnapping.  Although there are other reasons behind that.

The thing is, I’m terrible at coming up with titles.  I cringe whenever I come to the point where I have to give my hard work a name.  How do you come up with just a few words that befit what you’ve spent so much time and energy writing about?

In theory, a title should capture the intent of the novel with just a handful of words.  It should be the hook that draws your readers into the heart of your story before they even read the back cover blurb.  Along those lines, it should come out of the central theme and action of the work.  It should be catchy enough to make people want to read more but not a literal description of what the reader is about to feast on.

I fail at titles.

But you wouldn’t know it to look at the works that I’ve published so far.  The only titles I’ve ever come up with that I have been really happy with are the titles in my Medieval Romance trilogy, The Noble Hearts.  Each of the three books in this series, The Loyal Heart, The Faithful Heart, and The Courageous Heart, describe the single most important trait that the hero of the story has.  But it’s not as simple as it sounds.  The loyalty portrayed in The Loyal Heart runs deeper than just homage to a person.  The fidelity of The Faithful Heart covers so much more than remaining true to love.  And the courage displayed in The Courageous Heart cuts so much deeper than just bravery.  Yes, those are the titles that I’m really proud of.

Not so much for some of my other works.  One of the reasons I haven’t pushed myself to polish my sci-fi series enough to publish it, in spite of having the first two books completely finished, is that I can’t stand the title of the first book in the series, Grace’s Moon.  Ugh!  At one point I had named that book New Moon.  Damn you Stephanie Meyers!  Not that I liked that title much more.  I’ve run through half a dozen titles for that book at least and I can’t stand a single one of them.  However, I am satisfied with the title of the second book in the series, Fallen From Grace.  Why?  Because Fallen From Grace describes the heart of the book so well, especially when you understand whose point of view the story is told from and what has transpired to bring the action to the point that it’s at in that book.

This, of course, tells me something vital about naming books:  You can’t name a book until you are sure you know what it’s about.

Okay, that sounds a little obvious, but I’m sure many other writers out there besides me have drafted tens of thousands of words, letting the characters take us on their journey, and then when we get to the end, to the moment of truth, we look back and aren’t exactly sure what we’ve got.  Grace’s Moon is like that.  I can tell you what it’s about (a ship carrying colonists from Earth to its first planetary colony, Terra, explodes and when the survivors crash on a habitable moon they must find the saboteur and figure out how to build a civilization while preventing warring factions from killing each other and diminishing their already small gene pool) but I have a hard time encapsulating its essence in just a few words.  Even that one-sentence synopsis feels inadequate to everything going on in the story.

For me the lesson to be learned in this is that Grace’s Moon needs a lot more editing before it’s ready to go.  This is also true of about a dozen other stories I’ve started but don’t have titles for.  I’m sure you recognize the feeling.  It’s that squishy center, half-baked feeling.

The easy answer would be to slap any old title on it and let it go.  That’s why I have so many titles I can’t stand.  But as with Hollywood, I’m okay with giving my novels working titles until I come up with the real thing.  I still believe, based on my past experience, that the right title will come along when the prose is ready for it.

So what about you?  How do you come up with titles for your books?  Do they just come to you or do you have to work at them?  Any tips on how to find better titles for things?  I’d love some advice here.

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Mood Music

Posted on March 1, 2012 | 15 Comments

When I was in college the first time I once got into an argument with one of my professors about the impact of music.  I made the argument that music is intended to make us feel.  He thought that was nonsense.  I remember part of his argument: “When you hear a march you march, when you hear a waltz you waltz.  Feelings have nothing to do with it.”

I thought he was wrong back then and I still think he’s wrong.

Music, by its very nature, is emotion.  It conveys things that are too deep for us to express in words.  It creates a sense of empathy among those who listen to it.  A sad song makes you sad, a happy song makes you happy.  In fact, the complexity of emotion contained in music can sometimes provoke us to a response that is happy-sad or conflicted or longing in ways that there just aren’t words for.

This is why I find it incredibly useful to write while listening to music.  I’ve heard a lot of debate on this topic as well.  Some people swear by their soundtracks, some people can’t stand the distraction while they’re working.  I’ve noticed way too many times that the music I am listening to helps to shape the scene I’m writing or inform the character.

It doesn’t always happen, mind you.  Sometimes I just have music on because it’s more pleasant than silence.  But sometimes, just sometimes, a song forms the seed of an idea that takes shape and grows into something well beyond its original strains.

Take, for example, the second book in my as-yet-unpublished sci-fi series, Fallen From Grace.  I wrote the first book and then got a little lost.  Granted, I knew what I wanted to have happen, but my creative juices were not flowing.  I knew that I wanted the second book to be from the point of view of the character Danny.  But how?  That’s when Pandora saved me.

I was fiddling around with the story one day when suddenly the perfect song came on.  This was a song that spoke to what was going on in Danny’s mind, the emotion that would turn him from a scientist content to manipulate genetics through a computer interface to a butt-kicking, gun-toting vigilante determined to save the woman he loved, even if he had to march through six feet of snow to do it.

The song was “Let it Rock” by Kevin Rudolf with Lil Wayne.  In and of itself the song has nothing to do with my speculative sci-fi novel about colonists stranded on an uncharted moon, but the emotion behind it is exactly what keeps Danny going when any other man would have given up.

I’ve had other experiences where the music I was listening to gelled so well with the scene I was writing that it could have been a bona fide soundtrack.  While writing the first draft of The Faithful Heart, during a particularly poignant scene between Jack and Madeline, the Josh Groban song “February Song” suddenly came up in my iTunes shuffle.  The music and the lyrics in that case fit so perfectly with what was happening to my characters that I had to stop for a second and just breathe in the perfection of the moment.  Granted, that scene was later cut and the plot was altered a bit, but I still think of that as Jack’s song.

So what am I trying to get at here?

Music is a writing tool.  It can get you out of a rough spot and keep you going when all hope seems lost.  That sounds like a cute cliché or maybe even wishful thinking, but I swear by it.  It all goes back to the argument I had with my professor in college.  Music is about emotion.  A good story, be it character or plot driven, is about emotion.  We wouldn’t care about the characters and what they’re doing at all if we didn’t feel emotionally invested in their story.  The best stories draw you in as a reader and make you feel something, just like the best pieces of music captivate you.

Think about that word.  Captivate.  Isn’t that what we’re trying to do?  To hold someone in a state where they can’t stop thinking about what we’ve created?  Even if that person is us as the writer.  The key to an unforgettable story is that emotional captivation.  Music heightens those emotions.

Granted, I’m not talking about handing out a playlist with every book.  Music is a very personal thing and the songs that work for you as a writer might not connect with your audience.  But even if the songs themselves don’t, what you’ve felt as a writer when that music was playing will come across.

In fact, as I’ve been struggling through revisions on my latest novel, especially when it comes to pinning down the hero and heroine, I’m finding it helpful to refer back to the mood inspired by a certain song I recently discovered, “Irresistable” by Temposhark.  It’s not an exact interpretation of my characters and their wild relationship, but it gets the mood across.  And that’s what this is all about.

So does anyone else use music as a writing tool?  What songs have helped you out of a tough spot or inspired you to create?

And if you haven’t tried it before, I suggest you give it a whirl.  And then report back and tell me what you felt.

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Casting Your Characters

Posted on February 23, 2012 | 13 Comments

The other day I was walking around A.C. Moore with my friend Aline.  She was shopping for teacher supplies and I was telling her all about the latest idea for a story that had popped into my head.  It’s a story that I won’t have time to write for years at least, but there it was in my head anyhow.

As I narrated the plot as far as it had come to me she paused and laughed and said, “It must be really interesting inside your head.”

“You have no idea,” I replied.  “But hey, I never get bored.”

It’s true.  I always have one story, or more likely half a dozen, zipping around my mind at any given time.  At times various friends like Aline have marveled at how all of those stories appear and how I’m able to nurture them into being.  I mean, I’m a writer, it comes naturally to me.  But not everyone is like that (thank God!).

So it got me thinking….

True, my brain just works in stories.  But I also have a whole bag of tricks when it comes to formulating and sustaining a novel as I write it.  These aren’t writing techniques, storyboards, character diagrams, or anything technical at all.  My writing tools are much more emotional.  You could even call them sensual.  I know there are other writers out there who employ similar goofy methods to stay engaged with the story, but just in case, I think I’ll share some of them with you.

By the way, I employ these techniques as a reader too.  So if you happen to be reading this and you’re not a writer, do not despair!  You might find this interesting too.  This is what the nutty people who write the books you read do.

So let’s start with creating sensual characters.

My writer-hero, J.K. Rowling, was once asked how she felt about the casting of the Harry Potter movies, if she now sees Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson in her mind’s eye when she writes.  Her answer was an emphatic no.  She has her image of what each of her characters look like and it’s nothing like any of the actors who were cast for the films.  With one notable exception.  The casting of Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood was to perfect, in Rowling’s estimation, that she now sees the actress in her mind as the character.

I have a background in theater, so when I create characters I instantly cast real people in the roles.  Nine times out of ten I cast famous actors, but sometimes I cast people I know.  The series I’m currently working on – Historical Romance set in Montana in 1895 – actually has three characters who are based off of people I have known in real life.  One is a friend from childhood, one a good friend from high school, and the third is a man I used to work with (and had a bit of a crush on).

But usually it’s famous people.  Like this guy, for instance.  Yeah, you might recognize him as Ben Linus from Lost.  Believe it or not, he’s the hero in my current work in progress.  Yes, I have strange taste in men.  So what made me decide to cast someone who was creepy and manipulative in Lost as a charming businessman with a tragic past running a general store in a tiny Montana town?  It’s the look in Michael Emerson’s eyes when he plays characters who have so much to hide.  Fits perfectly.

The key to casting characters is to love people.  I think it might also be the vain attempt to try to understand them too.  I’m a sucker for a talented actor, no matter what he looks like.  The same goes for casting heroines.  Yeah, sure, this is Amy Adams.  We all know that.  But when I saw this particular picture I was so taken by the fresh, somewhat naïve optimism it suggested to me that I cast her as the heroine, Ruby, in the novel I was working on in January.  Has Amy Adams ever played any role close to the character of Ruby?  Nope.  But having her inhabit the character in my mind as I wrote the first draft helped me to visualize what she was doing and why.

How about this guy.  Chances are you have no idea who this is.  To me this picture represents the absolute essence of my character Jack from The Loyal Heart and The Faithful Heart.  I printed out this picture and pasted it directly above my computer when I was writing The Faithful Heart.  In my mind’s eye every move Jack made, every word he spoke, had this image attached to it.

Interestingly enough, when I showed this picture to one of my friends who read the books she was surprised.  That wasn’t at all how she had pictured Jack.  Does that matter?  No, not at all.  In fact, I think it’s better that the reader conjure up their own idea of what the characters in the books they’re reading look like.  And I have to admit that nine out of ten romance novels I read have a hero that ends up looking like Richard Armitage in my mind’s eye.

So why bother casting your characters at all?

Because whether you know it or not, writing is a sensual game.  You get the best results when all of your senses are engaged.  I feel like I’m able to describe actions and expressions and even motivations so much better when I have something physical and visual to pin them to.  In the past when I’ve created characters without knowing what they look like they’ve always turned out two-dimensional and lacking.

I should also add that in reality I have a very small pool of actors who light my fire who I use over and over again (no pun intended).  At last count I think I have cast Richard Armitage as the hero in about 8 different novels.  There’s no harm in that.  If I work my stories right you’d never know.

So how about you?  Is it just me who does this or are there other writers out there who cast their characters?

If you’re a writer and you don’t work this way, by the way, I highly recommend giving it a try.

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Gutenberg to Kindle: The Elitism of Books

Posted on December 27, 2011 | 20 Comments

The other day I read a fabulous blog post by Jennie Coughlin in which she interviewed author Robert Bidinotto on the stellar success of his indie published novel Hunter.  The article was an inspiration, but it also niggled me with some questions.

One of the ideas Bidinotto hypothesizes in his look at eBooks and the future of both traditional and self-publishing is that within a few years mass market paperbacks will disappear to be replaced by eBooks.  My instant reaction was “Cool!  That’ll be great for indie authors like me!”.

Then I started to think about it ….

In the Middle Ages, my era of deepest affection, books were hand-made.  They were copied by hand onto parchment and vellum, painstakingly illuminated by master artists over the course of a lifetime, in some cases, and bound with leather and sinew.  Books were a delicacy.  Only the Church and the very wealthiest of nobles could afford them.  Sure, books were being written, but they were luxury goods.  The vast majority of the population was illiterate and didn’t care.

Then came a visionary by the name of Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg and his revolutionary invention around 1439 of the movable type printing press.  The printing press really is one of the most civilization-changing devices ever invented.  Books no longer needed to be copied and constructed by hand.  Many copies could be mechanically printed in a relatively short amount of time.  The number of books in circulation rose dramatically.  With the new availability of books came new authors and larger numbers of readers.

Fast-forward to the dawn of the 21st century.  Literacy is a big deal.  Former First Lady Laura Bush made it a huge part of her mission while her husband was in office.  The vast majority of the population of developed nations reads something every day.  Giants of industry, like Amazon.com, are built on books.  Libraries abound and bookstores are easy to get to.  Not just new bookstores either, but second-hand book stores too.  There is a fantastic used book store, The Original Book Swap in Horsham, PA, right around the corner from my apartment.  You have to try really hard not to be exposed to books.

Now here comes the eBook revolution.  I’m happy as a lark because I can publish my novels without the hassle and interference that has always turned me off of the traditional publishing industry.  Bully for me.

And if I had a dime for every time someone has asked me “can I buy your book at the bookstore?” I could buy a Big Mac.  That conversation usually goes like this:

“Can I buy your book at the bookstore?” “No, it’s exclusively an eBook.” “So where can I buy it?” “If you have a Kindle you can get it at Amazon.com, if you have a Nook you can get it at Barnes & Noble.com, and if you have an iPad or an iPhone you can get it on iBooks.” “Oh, but what if I don’t have any of those?”

What if indeed!

Here’s the teensy problem I see with the eBook revolution.  To read an eBook you have to have an eReader.  To have an eReader you have to have money.  More money than a library card costs, for example.  Yes, the price of eReaders is coming down.  Once upon a time CD players cost hundreds of dollars and now I think you could probably pick one up at Wal-Mart for $5.  Will the cost of eReaders go this way?

I firmly believe that eBooks will become as prevalent and even more so than paper books within my lifetime.  eBooks are cheaper to produce by far.  Publishing companies are already having a hard time making ends meet right now.  What will the publishing industry look like in ten years?  The question is on everyone’s mind.  But if eBooks become the dominant means of distributing literature and the number of paper books diminishes, what will that mean for readers and potential readers out there?

What if we find ourselves reverting to a society in which the amount of money you have and your social standing effects whether you are able to read or not?  In a world where eBooks rule and paper books are an afterthought, what if only those who can afford to shell out for an eReader are able to buy books?  Might we not end up in some sort of Neo-Medieval society where reading is reserved for the elite?

Okay, maybe I’ve just crossed over into some sort of YA dystopian future.  But it does have me scratching my head and wondering.  Until the cost of eReaders comes down to the point where your Average Joe could pick one up at Wal-Mart for the cost of a Big Mac, eBooks will be second-place.  But if companies like Amazon, B&N, and Apple figure out a way to price eReaders super low … well, then I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the traditional publishing industry when it comes crumbling down!

So who is going to be the Gutenberg of the 21st century?  Who is going to irreversibly change the way your average person reads forever?

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