Janette Rallison's Blog, page 18
March 24, 2016
Ten Things Published Authors Won’t Tell You
We don’t live glamorous lives. Sure, there are those handful of celebrity authors who are going to their movie premiers and live in mansions. That’s not life for the other 99.99% of us. Most writers either have another job to support themselves or a spouse who contributes greatly to the income. Although surveys differ on the average author income, they all seem to agree that it is well below the poverty level. (Somewhere between 1,000-6,000 a year.)Bad reviews hurt our feelings. Many authors don’t even read their reviews because we can read ten glowing reviews, but the one cruel review will ruin our day. Writing that book was our best effort. We put our heart and soul into it. How can it not feel personal when someone criticizes our writing–or almost as bad, our story or characters? That’s not to say that every negative review leaves us in tears. Some we pass around to other authors and laugh about. Others we shrug off because we know not everyone has the same taste. And some we even listen to and use to improve our writing in the next book. (I’m planning to rewrite a novella and turn it into a full length novel because so many reviewers said they felt it was too short.)
Our villains, yeah, those are frequently based on real people. If you’re a jerk to a writer, you may very well end up in a book being viciously decapitated. So don’t say you haven’t been warned.
That cover you didn’t like–we didn’t like it either. In traditional publishing, the author has no say about what the marketing department puts on the cover. Some we love, some we hate. The publishers don’t care what we think. This is also why the cover doesn’t always match the story. (I reminded the publisher for Slayers that my main character had brown hair, and the cover model they were using was blonde. They told me blonde hair looked better against the dark background.) Likewise, picture book authors don’t usually get to choose their illustrator.
Publishers censor our writing. Publishing is a business, and although editors often would love to let us write whatever we feel is artistic, true to the story, or meaningful, they always have to think about what will sell. I’ve known authors who were pressured to put more sex in their stories, and other authors who were told to steer clear of sensitive subjects like abortion. I’ve been asked to take out mentions of religion in several of my books. (In a time-travel book, I said something about people in the Middle Ages being Catholic. It had to go.) Political correctness is alive and well in traditional publishing.
We feel like our characters are real people too. Readers will often comment that they’ve connected with our characters. We feel that way ten-fold. We’ve been living with and talking to these people for months or maybe years. I once met a guy named Scott, and I started to tell him, “I have a friend named Scott,” and then I realized I didn’t. I had a character named Scott who’d I’d made up and pretended was my friend.
We love being with other writers. Writers are our tribe, and there will always be a special bond with those of us who’ve felt the thrill of creating an unexpected plot twist–and the aggravation of realizing you just wrote a week with eight days, and you don’t know how to fix it. There are exceptions, but most authors want to help their fellow writers succeed.That said, we may not have time to critique aspiring authors’ novels, even though we wish we did. We write books in addition to all of our other daily tasks, and so most of us are busy people.
We want to quit. A lot. Writing is a hard business and one in which most authors only see minimal success. We get a lot of rejection from agents, editors, and readers. (See number one on the list about making below poverty level wages.) Sometimes writing feels like you’re constantly singing in concert halls in which no one comes to hear you but your mother.
Most authors don’t have their first book published, or their second, or their third. We write a lot of manuscripts that publishers reject before they buy a book from us. And having a book deal doesn’t guarantee that the next book we write will be published. We worry a lot about our sales numbers. So if we come off as pushy when we’re trying to market our books, well, that’s why.
We love writing anyway. There’s something magical about creating stories, and that magic keeps drawing us back to the computer. We laugh when our character does something clever, and we can’t wait to share our latest offering to our readers.There’s a saying, “If you want to know if you’re really a writer, try and quit.” Most of us just can’t quit.
March 19, 2016
Winners: Kai, Meggan, Sara, Lynette
Random has spoken. I know I said I was going to pick three, but at the last moment I decided to go with four.
Winners, you must have an audible account for this to work. So if you don’t, let me know. Please send me your email addresses at jrallisonfans @ yahoo.com so I can send you your audible code and directions on how to use it.
Please, please review/rate the book on audible. Right now it has no reviews and looks so lonely . . .
March 11, 2016
Win an audio book of My Fairly Dangerous Godmother
I have to say, the narrator did an excellent job. I laughed a few times when I was approving the files–and trust me, authors don’t laugh at a book they’ve already gone over a dozen times.
Leave a comment to tell me what you’d ask for from a fairy godmother, and I’ll choose three winners.
Or if you’d rather not wait and want to buy it on audible, here’s the link: best book ever
March 3, 2016
February 23, 2016
Okay, so I lied about that first cover. These are actually going to be the covers for Slayers 3 & 4
I changed the third cover because I wanted the model to match the fourth cover, and I loved the picture the cover artist used for the fourth.
February 18, 2016
February 16, 2016
Teen Author Boot Camp, March 5th
Teen Author Boot Camp is an amazing one-day conference coming up March 5th. It’s for peeps ages 13-19. The schedule is chock full of great classes from incredible authors like Jennifer Nielson, J Scott Savage, Sara B. Larson, Dan Wells, Janette Rallison and TONS more. Plus book signings, giveaways, and hanging out with the cool kids.
YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS. So much fun and awesomeness in one place for a great price. Conferences are the best place to meet other authors, learn the craft of writing, and generally have freaking tons of fun.
If you know any teens who might be interested, please pass this information along to them. It really is a wonderful opportunity!
February 11, 2016
Cover reveal: Slayers: Playing With Fire
Beta Readers, my goal is to finish fixing/writing the first 300ish pages by the end of the week. (Of course my goal was to finish it last year, and that clearly didn’t happen, so you can only trust my goals so much . . .) But I’m close. It will get to you soon. It won’t be polished, or grammar-ified. In fact, there may be sections in which you wonder if I’ve forgotten that description is a thing. (Yes, yes I have. That’s why I need beta readers.) In this stage, I’m looking for people to point out where it needs work, where it’s unclear, where my characters are acting like jerks. Things like that. If you want to be a beta reader and haven’t already given me your email address, send it my way.
February 4, 2016
A small tribute to my father
I dedicated My Double Life to my father. It only seemed right to thank him for being there for me when my main character’s goal during the book was to meet the father that she had never known.
My dad passed away recently from ALS. I was lucky enough to be able to help take care of him during the last weeks of his life. I could tell a lot of good stories about my father, and some of them will probably come out in my blog or in books, but here’s an important one that I shared with my brothers and sisters recently.
When I was first trying to get published (I’d written a picture book manuscript) I sent it off to a dozen publishers, and they all rejected it. One night as I was walking to get the mail, I was thinking about this and wondered if I should really pursue writing or not. I’d always liked it, but then, I’d always liked dancing, singing, and acting, and I wasn’t trying to pursue a career as a dancer, a singer, or an actress. I wondered if writing should be put in the same category. I said a prayer, asking for direction.
I took the mail out and saw a letter from The New Era Magazine. I thought that was strange since we didn’t get The New Era. Then I opened the envelope and saw that it was an acceptance letter. I thought that was even stranger since I’d never submitted anything to them. Then I remembered that Dad had told me he was going to submit one of my short stories.
That incident was one of the few times my prayers have been immediately answered. I knew as I held that letter in my hand, that I was supposed to pursue writing.
The rest as they say is history. I’m glad I had such a supportive father.
January 25, 2016
Fables told the right way
Because I’m busy revising, I thought you would enjoy something far more clever than anything I would say, from one of the offspring
