Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 54

6 Tips for Finding a Cover Artist

Back when I started thinking of self-publishing, one of the first things I researched was cover artists. I’d decided that if I couldn’t find an artist who could create the kind of quality cover I wanted, I might have to come up with a different list of pros and cons for my “Should I self-publish?” list.

I’ve said since the beginning that my requirement for self-publishing was producing a book equal to those traditionally published. If I couldn’t meet that benchmark, self-publishing wouldn’t...

Self Publishing? What’s Your Distribution Plan? — Part Two

It’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. We’ve been walking through the process of making choices about our self-publishing options.

Indie publishing isn’t made up of just one decision to put us on one path. The choice to self-publish is just the first of dozens, maybe hundreds, of decisions we’re going to have to make as part of our indie career.

My series about Indie Publishing Paths at Fiction University is working to highlight some of thos...

The Risks of Offering a Freebie

Last time we talked about our options for handling reviews and criticism. Some authors avoid reviews, some intend to avoid them but peek anyway, and some don’t mind reading reviews. As with many things writing, we have to find the option that works best for our situation.

I’ve alluded several times to the fact that I knew my freebie short story would suffer from worse reviews than my other books. I was prepared for that possibility and accepted the risk, but I wanted to talk about the psycho...

Criticism & Reviews: How Do You Handle Feedback?

Many of us start writing because we have stories in our head that demand to be told. That often grows into the desire to share those stories with others.

For many writers, the point of writing is to connect with others through our words. A story that’s not shared is like the hypothetical tree that falls in a forest when no one’s around. A story without readers can seem less real.

Because of that desire to share our stories, the feedback we receive is hard to ignore. Obviously, we need to rea...

Are You Able to Ask for Help?

It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a perfectionist. *smile* That means I try to have my i’s dotted and my t’s crossed for every project. But it’s easy to be overwhelmed.

We have writing craft to learn, drafting to meet our word count goals, and editing and revisions to fix. We have queries to submit and publishers to research. We have publishing options to investigate and marketing and promotion to do.And that doesn’t even count anything from our day job or families.

In short, we often have to...

Character Likability and Subtext

How are villains, subtext, character likability, and point-of-view (POV) all related? Thanks to my commenters in my previous post, I have a few ideas. *smile*

In my last post, we talked about how to fix an unlikable character. The questions and conversations in the comments brought up deeper issues that are all related on some level, so let’s dig deeper to discover more.

Kassandra Lamb pointed out that it’s often harder to make non-POV characters layered. Glynis Jolly mentioned that she str...

3 1/2 Tips for Fixing an Unlikable Character

I’ve mentioned several times that I struggle with writing unlikable characters when I first draft a story, and I know I’m not the only one. We often love our characters no matter what they do—even the villains. *smile*So we’re not unbiased readers when it comes to figuring out whether our characters are too unlikable.

In any story, it’s difficult to balance not enough and too much of various elements. Not enough description can leave our readers confused about the setting or action details,...

Editing Mistakes: How Forgiving of a Reader Are You?

An interesting conversation grew out of Misti Wolanski’s guest post earlier this week. On Tuesday, Misti (also known here in the comments as Carradee) shared with us how editing varies between non-fiction and fiction.

Misti obviously knows her stuff when it comes to editing. In fact, I know from personal experience she’s the kind of perfectionist-type editor indie authors appreciate having on their team, asshe copyedited my short story.

Her position is that no matter the type of editing…

“‘G...

When Is a Good Editor Not Good for Your Story? — Guest: Misti Wolanski

Over the last year and a half, I’ve written several articles about finding editors. We’ve talked about knowing what kind of editor we need,how we can identify a good editor, how we can evaluate sample edits, and how we each need different things from editors.

One important issue that Carradee (our guest today) brought up in the comments of some of those posts was the difference between non-fiction and fiction.Many writers write both fiction and non-fiction (even if the latter is just blog po...

Self Publishing? What’s Your Distribution Plan?

It’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. That’s a good thing for me because it makes my post today easier…which I need because I’m brain dead. *smile*

Recently, I had to take hours and hours out of my schedule to fight with email. My email inbox is always a disaster because I receive between 100-150 writing-world emails on a normal day, but I valiantly try to stay on top of the important stuff. (I don’t always succeed, however.)

On top of that...