Rachel Aaron's Blog, page 8

Upcoming Q & A with Bethesda!

Hello, everyone!

Rachel here, commandeering Trav's blog day to ask you folks for a little help. As you might have heard from a few previous posts NO GOOD DRAGON GOES UNPUNISHED is coming out in just a few weeks (preorder it here!). I actually just sent the final version of the text to the proofreader, so that means it's time to start doing fun bonus book launch stuff! Yay!

Free stuff?! THIS. IS. RACHEL'S BLOOOOOOOOOOG! (so yes)
One of the projects I have in mind is going to be (hopefully) really cool, but to make it even cooler, I wanted to ask for your input. Without letting the dragon out of the bag too much, I'm going to be doing an...interview of sorts with everyone's favorite terrible mother, Bethesda the Heartstriker! So if you ever had a question you wanted to hear Bethesda answer about her children, her clan, dragons, or her life in general, please ask it in the comments below.

Bethesda, she's not as bad as she looks! She's actually way worse.
I'll be picking the best ones (or at least the ones I can answer without horribly spoiling the series) for her to answer in a special Heartstrikers short story that will come out before the release of book 3. YES! EARLY HEARTSTRIKERS! WOO!

This story will be free and made specially for you guys, my awesome fans! So if there's a question you desperately want to see Bethesda answer that I haven't addressed in the books, ask it below, and let's have some fun!

Thanks as always, and I'll see you guys on Wednesday for more Prose Summer Camp!

❤
Rachel

Writing Wednesday: "Hey, Rachel!" the readers cried. "Can you do a post about dialogue?"

Ah, summer. The sun's out, the heat is oppressive, and there are UNINVINTED GUESTS in my house. Clearly, the only thing to do is to break out the swimwear and dive into the nitty gritty details of writing at the prose level. It's,

A badly photoshopped sign using stolen Park Service fonts! No, wait, I mean it's...
Prose Summer Camp!
Yaaay! Today we're going to be focusing on dialogue. Not how to come up with good dialogue (for that, see this post), but how to actually write the stuff in a way that reads well and makes sense on the page. 
Now this might not sound like a big deal, but I can't tell you how many books have been ruined for me by, shall we say, unwise dialogue and dialogue tag choices. Even if the dialogue itself is decent, it's hard to appreciate witty banter when you're trying to figure out how someone can gesticulate a word (are they using Sign Language?). I know that sounds nit picky, but when you're talking about your book, these are your nits to pick. Voice in a book is made up of thousands of nit picky choices just like this. 
Choose well, and no one will notice because they'll be too busy paying attention to your characters and plot. Choose poorly, and the little bad decisions will be all your readers notice. It's like a big old scratch in the paint job of a brand new car. Sure it might not actually change how the car runs, but no one wants to buy a new car with a scratch on it. If you're going to sell that thing, it has to look its best, and this kind of attention to detail is one of the ways we get there.
It should also be noted that these sort of decisions are often considered a stylistic writing choice, which means unless you're really murdering the grammar, no copy editor is going to fix them for you. (And if you are murdering the grammar, you shouldn't be depending on a copy editor to fix that in the first place.) You're the writer here. It's up to you to write well, so let's dig into how we do that.
But first, a disclaimer:
**This is how I write. All of the tips below are drawn from my taste and experience as a writer. Some of the rules I lay out below are universal, others are stylistic choices. Either way, if you don't like my writing style, seeing how I make my dialogue choices might not be very useful. This is fine! Everyone writes in their own voice. I hope, of course, that you will still find some it helpful, but please don't take any of this as me setting down the One True Path of Writing. I'm just telling you what works for me in the hopes that it might also work for you. Enjoy responsibly! **
Now that's out of the way, onward to...
Writing Wednesday: How to (Actually) Write Dialogue
Rachel clapped her hands and looked around the virtual room. "Okay," she said, positively vibrating with grammatical excitement. "Let's talk about writing and talking, my two favorite things! Dialogue in text is one of those writing things we assume everyone just knows. After all, we've all read books before, which means we've seen proper dialogue in action. But seeing isn't always understanding. To truly get what's going on, we have to understand why these authors made the dialogue choices they did."
"And I suppose you're going to tell us?"
Rachel looked up in confusion to see Brohomir, Great Seer of the Heartstrikers, sitting at the back of the room, feeding his pigeon from the tray of complementary snack crackers. "What are you doing here?"
"Shameless self-promotion," Bob said with a grin. "The third volume of my adventures comes out August fifth, and I wanted to make sure everyone in your audience knew they could preorder No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished."
"I don't see how they could have missed it," Rachel said, pointing at the long line of announcement posts, tweets, and other various public declarations. "But since you're already here, how would you like to be my example?"
Bob sighed. "Why are you even asking? You're the writer, and I've already foreseen the end of this little mise en scène. Even if I say no, we both know you're going to make me do it anyway."
"But of course," Rachel said with a cruel grin. "That's the price of being a fan favorite. When the author needs people to pay attention, you get pressed into service." Her smirk widened. "Characters exist to be used."
The dragon seer arched an eyebrow. "Careful," he warned. "Your Bethesda is showing.""Let's get back to the blog post in question," Rachel said quickly, clearing her throat before the evil cackle could escape. "The first thing we need to understand about writing good, well formatted, fun to read dialogue is that all dialogue is still sentences. Obviously, characters will not always speak perfectly correct English, but that doesn't mean quotation marks are magical portals to a world where grammar doesn't matter."
Bob shoved a handful of complementary crackers into his mouth. "I don' kno'bout 'hat," he said with his mouth full. "We tend to 'ay whateber we want."
The author glared balefully. "Perhaps. But as you just so disgustingly proved, writing dialogue that has too much non-standard text meant to represent an accent, inebriation, or impairment can make it very hard to understand is character is saying. This kind of tricks might sound good when you say them out loud, but they tend to be confusing on paper, and confusing text is no fun to read."
"I see," Bob said. "You mean like those Highland Romance novels where the brooding alpha hero is written with such an unintelligibly thick Scottish burr, we can't even tell which part of the heroine he's having trouble committing to today?"
"Yes," Rachel said, astounded. "You read Highland Romances?"
"I'm a dragon of many tastes," Bob said with a mysterious smile. "Not to mention a hopeless romantic." He turned to the pigeon on his shoulder, who still had half a cracker in her beak. "Isn't that right, darling?"
His pigeon cooed happily, and the author quickly decided to get back on target before this impromptu fourth wall breaking character cameo shifted into spoiler territory.
Hello, my lovely!
"As we can see, good dialogue has the same requirements as good writing. It needs to be clearly written. It needs to be easy to read. It needs to flow. You need to vary your sentence structure, as I am not doing right now. Except for the part where I just did. See how much of a relief it was to break out of those short, repetitive sentences? That's what I'm talking about. It doesn't matter how eloquent your characters are, their dialogue still needs to follow the rules of good writing if you want it to be nice to read. That said, dialogue writing also has its own special conceits in addition to the normal rules. For example, unless your character is giving an actual speech, you never want to have a block of dialogue text that goes on this long. I mean, this is ridiculous. Can I get some action or an interjection to break me out of this paragraph?"
Bob threw a cracker at the front of the room.
"Thank you," Rachel said, catching the cracker with a relieved sigh.
"As I always tell Julius, it's important to be a gentleman," Bob said with a nod. "And speaking of gentlemanly behavior, I already know the answer to this, but I'll ask anyway for the sake of the audience: Why do you need an action or interjection to break a dialogue paragraph?"
"Because breaking paragraphs in dialogue without them is stupid looking," Rachel said with a shudder. "Here, I'll show you. This is a paragraph of dialogue. Like a normal paragraph, it's usually three to five sentences about a single idea or concept. You can switch that up depending on the needs of the scene, of course, but this is generally how it goes. But what happens when the idea is complete and your character is still talking?
"See?! It just happened right there! With no action outside of the dialogue or interjection from another character, the dialogue just rolled over into a new paragraph without closing the previous quotations. This is how we tell the reader that this new paragraph is still part of the speech. But, because this is still dialogue, I had to open a new set of quotations at the beginning of this paragraph! Do you see how stupid that is?!"
"The only thing I see is a mortal overreacting," Bob said, rolling his eyes. "Why do you care so much? Both paragraphs are still technically correct."
"But the quotations are uneven!" Rachel cried, pulling out her hair. "We've opened two sets but only closed one! That can't happen! Everything must be NEAT UND TIDY!"
"Now you're just insulting the Germans," he said with a sigh. "But you're the author. Clearly, you know best."
"I do," Rachel agreed, getting a hold of herself. "And this is a great chance to talk about expressing emotion in dialogue through italics, bold font, and capitalization."
Bob clapped his hands together. "Splendid! Capitalization is my Favorite Thing, you know. Non-standard punctuation is always the hallmark of Good Breeding and Creativity."
"Maybe for you," she said. "But for us lowly mortal writers, visual dialogue emphasis tricks like these have to be used very sparingly. JUST LIKE TALKING IN ALL CAPS EQUALS SCREAMING ON THE INTERNET, IT READS WAY TOO LOUD IN BOOKS AS WELL."
Bob covered his ears. "Could you not?"
"Sorry," Rachel said, dropping her voice sheepishly. "I was just making a point."
"Well, make it more quietly," the seer grumbled. "Some of us have dragon hearing."
Rachel nodded. "It's not just you. All readers are sensitive to these things, and the more into your book they are, the more sensitive they become. This is why you have to use dramatic emphasis carefully. Not only can it be loud and obnoxious, but if you over use it, you'll lose the effect very quickly. For example, italicizing a word reads like the character is stressing it. This can be very important if you want to show your reader that a particular word is very important to the speaking character. But if you stress every word, the trick loses efficacy and starts to look stupid. So be smart with your emphasis."
"But what if I want to emphasize something very strongly ?" Bob asked, thrusting his arm dramatically out in front of him. "Can I use bold italics?"
"You can use anything you want. It's your book. But bold italics read as very dramatic. So much so that I make it a personal rule to use them no more than once per book. The same goes for writing in ALL CAPS, ITALIC CAPS, or any combination of visual typography tricks. I find that, when used only once per book, they can have huge dramatic effect. More than that, though, and the gimmick starts looks like a gimmick. But that's just me. Every author is different. If you like using dramatic emphasis and it fits in your story, go for it. Just know that you're using strong visual spice."
"A sage lesson," Bob said, wiggling his eyebrows. "Get it? Spice? Sage?" "Oh, I get it."
"I know," he said with a flip of his long hair. "You're such a clever mortal. And speaking of clever mortals, I couldn't help but notice you didn't put tags on either of your previous two bits of dialogue. Is that allowed?"
Rachel scoffed. "Of course it's allowed. We're writers! We do whatever we want."
"Right," Brohomir said, quietly pulling out his ancient brick of a phone to hit his speed dial for the Grammar Police.
"Okay, okay," Rachel said, putting up her hands. "Technically, writers can write whatever they want, but there are definitely some known best practices. It all goes back to what I said at the beginning about dialogue following the rules of normal sentences. This applies to dialogue tags as well. Technically, dialogue tags are a courtesy. So long as the sentences within your quotations are complete, you don't need a tag at all. Without tags, though, it quickly becomes very confusing for your reader to keep track of who's talking."
"And a confused reader is a tragic thing," Bob said sadly.
"Exactly," Rachel said. "If there are only two characters talking back and forth in a scene, or if the dialogue itself makes it obvious who's speaking, you can get away with not having dialogue tags, and many writers do. But if there's any confusion--for example, if you're dealing with more than two characters, or if the flow of back and forth dialogue is broken up by action--then dialogue tags become a vital necessity if you want your reader to follow the flow of conversation. Remember, novels have no visual element. There's no camera showing us who's doing the talking. That's the job of dialogue tags: to tell the reader who is saying what."
"You mean part of the job," Bob argued, rising dramatically from his seat. "Dialogue tags also show movement and emotion."
"That, too," she agreed. "But you have to be careful not to load your tags down too heavily. For example..."
They both jumped as the door flew open, and Bethesda barged into the room. "Why am I being used as the example of what not to do?" she demanded, gesticulating wildly while also stomping in circles, glaring balefully at the author and the seer by turns. "This is beneath my dignity!"
"Because no one's better at being a bad example than you, Mother," Bob said encouragingly. "Just look how well you're doing!"
"This is not what I signed up for when I joined this series!" Bethesda exclimated. "Exclimated isn't even a word." She turned to glare at the author, who was still typing merrily. "What idiocy are you going to have me do next? Shall I sigh my words? Snarl them? Throw them up in the air and slice them with a chef's knife?"
Rachel winced. "Actually, I use growl, snarl, hiss, and other 'bad' dialogue tag words a lot in my books," she admitted sheepishly. "Copy editors are always getting onto me about it, saying I can't have a character hiss an entire sentence. I know they're technically right, but I just like it so much! 'Said' is such a boring word."
"Many novelist who sell far better than you call 'said' the invisible word," Bob said. "It's so common, readers eyes go right over it."
"And that's exactly why I don't like it!" Rachel proclaimed dramatically. "I have a fundamental objection to including anything so boring and common readers don't even see it in my novels."
"But it's very easy to go too far in the other direction," the seer reminded her. "Even for you." His eyes narrowed. "Just like Amelia and her liquor, your dialogue tag abuse problem is well known. Do we need to stage an intervention?"
"No point," Bethesda snarled. "She's been infected with the hack writer's tragic love of the melodramatic. There's no saving her now."
"That's quite enough out of you," Rachel said, shoving Bethesda out of the scene. "Said is a very useful word, and I use it all the time, but that doesn't mean the other, more dramatic dialogue tags don't also have their place. Unlike the invisible, boring, work-a-day said, they add flavor and interest to text. Like any flavor, they can be overdone, but knowing how to balance these things--how to add just enough drama to your tags without tipping over into the constant wild gesticulations of melodrama--is part of the art of writing. There's no magic formula, no right ratio of said-to-non-said tags that creates perfect dialogue. It's all a matter of personal preference as a writer, and I prefer to let my characters growl their lines. I'm writing about dragons, for Pete's sake!"
"I suppose," Bob said with a sigh. "But there are functional limits even for the most creative authors, are there not?"
She nodded. "There are, Like I said, I have no problem with creative dialogue tags like 'growled' or 'snarled' or even 'proclaimed' in the right context, but the word you chose for your dialogue tag still has to be a sound or other verb related to speech, like 'said.' This is because, technically, the dialogue itself is a clause that's dependent upon the dialogue tag's verb and subject. 'She's going to blow!' is a sentence. '"She's going to blow!" screamed the sailor,' is also a sentence, but with a different subject, the screaming sailor. Once added, the dialogue tag becomes the sentence's primary subject and verb. This is why 'screamed' is not capitalized despite the exclamation point in front of it, because the dialogue in question is still part of the same sentence as the verb tag modifying it."
"Are you sure?" Bob asked. "Sounds a bit dodgy to me."
"Quite sure," Rachel said. "You can read all about how and why dialogue punctuation works the way it does here, but the important thing is to remember that it's all just sentences. No matter how dramatic your dialogue gets, the grammar still has to work, which means your dialogue tag has to be a verb that makes sense coming out of someone's mouth. You can agree, postulate, disagree, interrupt, say, argue, growl, snap, or snarl your words, but you can't smile them, smirk them, punch them, or even eat them."
"I disagree," Bob said. "I've made many people eat their words."
"Maybe," the author admitted. "But you still shouldn't talk with your mouthful. Anyway, the point here is that if you're going to use a dialogue verb other than 'said,' it needs to be something that would make sense as sound coming out of your mouth. Certain mouth sound verbs like sighing or huffing are borderline. Technically, they make sense, but lots of editors take great issue with them, so I just avoid them."
"You do?" Bob gasped. "That's news to me. You used the word 'sigh' over four hundred times in No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished. If that's avoiding a word, I'd hate to see what happens when you embrace one."
Rachel sighed. "I'm working on that, okay? Every writer has their pet word. I'd love to use 'sigh' as a dialogue tag because, personally, I sigh whole sentences all the time. But my editors got on to me and got on to me about this for thirteen books, saying you can't sigh (or huff, or spit, or gasp) a word. I disagree, obviously, but I didn't have an argument for any of this other than 'I like it,' so I just adjusted to use those words either as straight up, stand alone sentences modifying dialogue, like you see at the beginning of this paragraph, or--"
"As modifiers on existing tags," Bob said with a sigh. "I see. Seems needlessly clunky to me,"
"I know, right? It would be so much easier to write 'character sighed' instead of injecting an entirely separate sentence of action, like so." Rachel stopped speaking and shook her head with a sigh. "But deciding to listen to one's editors is also an authorial choice," she continued. "Usually a good one. Just because something sounds good to you doesn't mean it's correct."
"Right," Bob said, looking down at the spot on his wrist where his watch would be if he'd been wearing one. "Not that this hasn't been educational, but the post is running a bit long and some of us have places to be. Vast and complicated plots don't put themselves into motion, you know. Anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up before we go?"
"Just one," Rachel said, turning to look at the invisible camera for the ultimate fourth wall break.
"A fourth wall break inside a fourth wall break?" Bob cried. "That's sixteen walls!"
"Too soon," she warned, shaking her head. "Stick to something more universal, like Star Wars references."
"Maybe they'll think I made it up," Bob said hopefully.
"Anyway," Rachel said, moving on. "For the authors in the audience, I hope this dramatic example of dialogue in action helps you in your writing, and for the Heartstriker fans, the  No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished  ebook comes out August 5th with audio and print editions out only a few weeks behind! If you liked the first two books in the series, you're going to love this one."
"And if you haven't read the first two books in the series yet, why not?" Bob asked. "Don't you want to get all the inside jokes in this post? They only cost $4.99 in ebook! You could own the entire series so far for less than you'd spend on the coffee you'd drink staying up all night to read them."
Rachel put up her hands. "Whoa! That's coming on a little hard, don't you think?"
"Absolutely not," Bob said, plucking his pigeon off his shoulder and gently cradling her in his hands. "Do it for my pigeon. She's got her big reveal coming up in this book, and if you miss it, the regret will be brutal. We're talking nights spent crying into your pillow. I don't even want to think about it. So preorder now! The life you save might be your own."
"Riiiiiiiigh," Rachel said, stepping away. "And on that note, we're done. Thank you as always for reading, and I hope you found this helpful. As always, please remember that all of the above is my opinion. You are your own writer. If you want to write dialogue using nothing but said, go for it."
"I want you to know how hard I'm resisting the urge to make a 'That's what she said' joke," Bob said, cutting in again. "Remember, buy our books!"
Rachel tried to get a word in edge-wise, but the post was over. The obligatory social media links to Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+ were already scrolling by, leaving her no choice but to hope readers remembered that new business and craft posts went up every Monday and Wednesday and that they wouldn't be put off by the blatant commercialism of her up coming book launch. As the paragraph went on, Rachel realized things were becoming dangerously meta, and so she scampered back to her actual copy editing work with a final shout of thanks to her readers, who were undoubtedly sick of the gimmick that had dragged on far, far too long. 
Maybe they would leave their opinions in the comments below? Or even better, suggestions for what kind of prose subject they'd like to see her tackle next? Rachel could only hope that--
Bob stomped back into the post and grabbed the author from the keyboard. "GO EDIT YOUR BOOK!" he roared, reaching for the ethernet cable.
"Thanks for reading!" Rachel cried one last time before the internet cut out and she was sent back to the word mines. 

Thanks and Updates This Memorial Day

Hi Folks,

This being memorial day weekend here, I've not been able to put together a business post for today.  We're just too busy doing family stuff. Today I'm grabbing a chance, while my son watches his morning cartoons, to update ya'll about all the exciting things we have coming up this summer.

I cannot tell you how many Warcraft jokes were made on this hike...More Than Just Pre-OrdersThank you SO MUCH, all you wonderful people who've pre-ordered No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished ! We already have 350+ pre-orders which, according to my records, is 150 more than we had 4 days in on the One Good Dragon pre-order launch. Woooo!
Now, just a little preview of what's going to happen with promotions this summer as we head towards our August 5th launch day, here's what you can look forward to on the Rachel Aaron / Heartstrikers front.
New Posters - oh boy do we have new posters! We have five new posters no less! This includes the much requested Marci and Ghost book 2 art poster (no words, just art). There's also a special poster coming that makes even me squee (not actually hard to do haha) and will surely melt ya'll when you see it.

Sample Chapters - Ready to actually read some of book 3? Later this summer (cough, when the book has been through more proofreading), we'll be putting sample chapters up for everyone to devour. Think of them as an appetizer for the main course.

Special Content - there's a chance that Rachel will be writing something special for Heartstrikers that isn't in the books. I'd call it a short story, but I think its actually going to be a fictional interview set within the Heartstrikers world. What's important to know is that it will only be available to people who are on the new release mailing list or those who join the list after it's been made. If you don't get it though, don't worry, its not essential reading for the series.

Anyway, there's lots to be excited about coming up! Stay tuned, subscribed, bookmarked, or whatever term applies these days.

Also, a lot of folks are asking Rachel questions about the other formats, so please allow me to answer.
Audio and Print for No Good Dragon...We're doing our best to have print and audio for No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished come out same day as the eBook. It'll be a small miracle if that actually happens though. This is mainly because the manuscript will be coming out of the last rounds of quality control very close to the August 5th release date.

This doesn't give the other formats much time to line up. Print we might land, but audio will likely still be in production. Audible works fast though, we're getting it to them earlier this time, and so I expect that it will not be a long wait for the audio book. It will certainly be much shorter than the 4-5 months delay we had for  One Good Dragon

That's not very committal, I'm sorry. The take away here is that we're much more on the ball this time about print and audio so no one will be left waiting as long for their favorite format to come available. Yay!

If you want to know the moment these new formats are up, join the mailing list. This is great if you don't want to miss a release, but don't read the blog every week.

Have a Great Holiday!Or if you aren't in the USA, have a great Monday. As for me, I'm going to go answer my son's requests to play Castle Crashers now. ^_^
-Travis

The wait is over! NO GOOD DRAGON GOES UNPUNISHED comes out August 5th!

If you're part of my New Release Mailing List, you've already seen this (subscribers always get the good stuff first), so you can kick back enjoy being cool before it was cool. If you're not a subscriber and you want first dibs on all the new release info (and only new release info, I hate email spam as much as you do), signing up is easy. One click and you're in!

Okay, okay, mailing list pitch over. It's COVER REVEAL TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME!

Click to see Chelsie and Heartstriker Mountain in full, glorious resolution!
At long last, the sequel to Nice Dragons Finish Last and One Good Dragon Deserves Another is just around the corner. Book 3 of my Heartstriker series, No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished , comes out August 5th, 2016!

Sure you could buy it then, but you could also preorder it right now and have the book delivered automatically to your Kindle at midnight on August 4th! How cool is that? You should definitely do it. Bob would want things that way. He cares deeply about your reading happiness.

And speaking of Bob's machinations, let's take a look at the blurb.

WARNING! BLURB CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR BOOK 2!! If you haven't read One Good Dragon Deserves Another, go do that first and then come back (or just scroll really fast down past the special text).

// BEGIN OGDDA SPOILERS

No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished...

When Julius overthrew his mother and took control of his clan, he thought he was doing right by everyone. But sharing power isn’t part of any proper dragon’s vocabulary, and with one seat still open on the new ruling Council, all of Heartstriker is ready to do whatever it takes to get their claws on it, including killing the Nice Dragon who got them into this mess in the first place. 

To keep his clan together and his skin intact, Julius is going to have to find a way to make his bloodthirsty siblings play fair. But there’s more going on in Heartstriker Mountain than politics. Every family has its secrets, but the skeletons in Bethesda’s closet are dragon sized, and with Algonquin’s war looming over them all, breaking his clan wide open might just be the only hope Julius has of saving it.

// END OGDDA SPOILERS

There is so much more going on in this book than I could possibly fit in one blurb. There's more Bob, more Amelia, more Chelsie and Bethesda, and of course more Julius, Marci, and Ghost. Trust me, if you liked my other Heartstriker books, you're going to LOVE this one. It's dragon schemes all the way down!

I realize August is still two months away, but don't worry! I'm going to have a lot more awesome for you guys in the interim. So if you don't already, please follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or (even better) sign up for my mailing list to make sure you don't miss anything! You can also add the book on Goodreads.
Thank you as always for being my readers! If you're a reviewer and would like an advanced copy of the novel (or any of my books for that matter), please contact me and I'll be delighted to hook you up. I hope you're all as excited as I am about No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished !
Happy reading!- Rachel

Writing Wednesday: Five Steps to Writing Better Sentence Level Description

Over the last few weeks I've noticed my Writing Wednesday posts have been getting a bit broad of topic. This is fun for me, I love nothing more than a good wax poetic, but these WW posts are supposed to be about the craft of writing. So, for the next few weeks, I want to get back to basics and really dig into the nitty-gritty, nuts and bolts issues of putting together a good piece of fiction on the sentence and paragraph level.

Why go so small? Well, because there's already tons of information out there on how to do the macro stuff. Just on my blog I have multiple posts about character creation, plotting, tension and pacing, hooking your reader, and so forth.

But despite the obvious importance of these big issues, the problems I see most in books by new authors are not the big ones. It's the little stuff--dull prose, uninspired description, mediocre dialogue--that puts me off first. The book may have major character issues further on, or it may be a work of perfection, but if the sentence level writing is bad, then I'll never get far enough to find out. Life is simply too short to read a badly written book, especially when I have so many other excellent choices as a reader.

Fortunately, these little problems, though book killers if ignored, are some of the easiest to solve in our profession. Motivation, dramatic timing, proper pacing, imaginative plotting, great characters--this stuff is hard. This stuff is art. Learning to writing a nicely put together, functional paragraph? Easy peasy!

This isn't to say writing deathless prose is easy. Quite the opposite. Prose composition is one of those "easy to learn, hard to master" kind of things, which is why you hear stories about literary writers spending years on one paragraph. That said, this level of artistic effort is most definitely not the standard, nor should it be. Some readers love that deep, prose-as-poetry stuff, but there's a vast audience out there that just to read a story told competently and interestingly in a style that doesn't distract from the words are there to say, and that's what we're going to be focusing on in this blog series, which I'm calling Prose Summer Camp!

 'Cause summer. And I love naming things. :)
Ready? Let's tackle the first and perhaps biggest bear on the docket: sentence level description.

Writing Wednesday Prose Summer Camp: Five Steps to Writing Better Sentence Level Description

I've talked about description twice on the blog before: once in a broad "what does description actually do for you?" sort of way, and once with a specific focus on how to describe things in your text without resorting to the dreaded info dump. Everything I said in those posts still applies, but today we're going to look at the fundamentals of writing good description (ie, telling your reader what stuff looks like/feels like/does in an interesting and concise way) as they function on the sentence and paragraph level.

First though, a disclaimer:

**This is how I write. All of the tips below are drawn from my taste and experience as a writer. If you don't like my writing style, knowing how I craft sentences might not be useful. This is fine! Everyone writes in their own voice. I hope, of course, that you will still find some it helpful, but please don't take any of this as me setting down the One True Path of Writing. I'm just telling you what works for me in the hopes that it might also work for you.**

Now that's out of the way, let's talk details.

What is Sentence Level Description?

Sentence level description is exactly what it sounds like: describing the events, surroundings, and people in your novel within a sentence. Probably the most famous example of this is the often mocked "It was a dark and stormy night" by English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. For the record, the full opening line goes:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."- opening of Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1830.

This opening is often called the worst example of overwrought, overly florid, purple prose in the English language. It even inspired a yearly contest for bad opening lines in the author's name. Personally, I think all the hate for Edward Bulwer-Lytton is a bit much. I've read way worse than this, and I would point out that this is the same Edward Bulwer-Lytton who gave us every writer's favorite quote "the pen is mightier than the sword." For some reason people always think that was Shakespeare while poor Mr. Bulwer-Lytton gets stuck with Dark and Stormy Night. Truly, there is no justice!

English major fist shaking aside, there's no arguing that the quote above is, in fact, a perfect example of very bad description. This is not because the writing isn't poetic or even lovely in some places (I particularly like the flames in the lamps struggling against the darkness), but because the description itself is so thick, you can't actually tell what's going on.

This, not its florid prose, is Dark and Stormy Night's greatest sin. There is nothing inherently wrong with ornate descriptions just as there's nothing inherently wrong with terse, minimalist ones. Both are stylistic choices, and which kind works best comes in a given paragraph depends on personal taste, authorial voice, and the needs of the story. But any description, long or short, that fails to describe is a brick wall to your reader. Even if they can get around it, it will stop them short and knock them out of your text, and that is absolutely what we don't want.

So how do we avoid this? Obviously (unless they're competing in the Edward Bulwer-Lytton contest), no writer sets out to write bad description, but how do you know if you're doing it right? How can we make sure we don't suck?

Sadly, there is no test for this other than sharing your work and paying attention to people's reactions. Preferably ones who don't have a personal stake in your happiness and can be trusted to be honest (unlike your mom, significant other, or friends, all of whom care more about making you smile than the objective quality of your writing).

But just because there's no way to know for sure your writing is good until you actually give it to a reader doesn't mean you can't give yourself a leg up by following the known fundamentals of good description construction. For me and my style, that starts with the five basic principles listed below.

Step 1: Know What You're Trying to Describe.Like most of what I write on this blog, this probably sounds like common sense, but I am ceaselessly amazed at the number of writers who, like Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the quote above, try to describe everything at once and end up with a confused mess that actually describes nothing. This why, when I set out to describe something, my first focus is to just describe that thing. 

Don't do this.
If I want to tell my readers what the weather is like, I tell them what the weather is like. I don't start with the weather and end up with the situation in parliament. For example, if I was describing a dark and stormy night in 1830s London, I'd do it something like this:

"The heavy clouds hung low in the sky, dumping their torrents of rain on the dark city until the water ran off the sharp peaked roofs of the factory row houses in dirty, sullen waterfalls."

This is still a very florid and probably too long description, but do you see how much clearer a picture it paints? This is because I kept the focus on the subject of the sentence: the heavy clouds and the rain they currently dumping. You'll notice that I also worked in details about the houses and the dark to emphasize that this rain is falling on a dark and gritty urban scene (a trick I'll cover in detail in a bit), but these details are just that: details. The focus and purpose of the sentence--the thing the verbs "hung" "dumping" and "ran" are all referring to--is the clouds and the rain they're currently shedding. The stormy night, ie, the thing this sentence is meant to describe.


This isn't to say the thing you're describing always has to be the subject of the sentence. For example, if you're describing something by having a character experience it. ie, 

"Mike had been stung by a bee before, but never with such vigor, and never in such a tender spot. He yelped in surprise, smacking the insect off his privates. A move he immediately regretted when the red hot pain shot through him like a bullet of yellow and black insectiod revenge."

In this example, the character is the subject, the one doing the acting, but the the focus is still on the bee sting, the thing being described. Think of it as throwing your reader a ball and asking them to catch it. Their chances of successfully doing so are much higher if you're only throwing one ball at a time, so if you want your description to be clear, keep your focus tight. 
But describing important things one at a time can be a little boring if you let it, which brings us to step 2.
Step 2: Tell Your Reader a StoryAs you saw in the bee example above, one of the easiest ways to make description interesting is to frame it as a story (in this case, a man getting stuck in the nethers. Keeping it classy!). I actually also did this in my stormy night example. It's not as obvious, but if you follow the sentence, you'll see I'm actually telling the story of the rain as it left the clouds, hit the roofs, and rolled off into the street. 
The two most important aspects of successful description are clarity and interest. Keeping your focus narrow will greatly help with clarity, but if you want to make it fun and interesting to read, you can't just say "X was Y." You have to make it interesting, and interest depends on context.
This is why the story construction is my absolute favorite way of describing things, because if there's anything we love as a species, it's a good story. "It was raining" is boring, so is "it was raining hard." Both of these are accurate, clear descriptions, but if tell your reader how it was raining (buckets, drizzles, aggressively misting) and what that rain was doing (flooding a farm, obscuring the road, soaking a passionately kissing couple to the skin), everything instantly gets more way more exciting. This is because you've given your rain (a common weather occurrence almost everywhere readers live) context and importance within your story. "It was raining" tells us it was raining. "It was the first rain in twenty years" tells us the story of the rain. See the difference?
This isn't to say you have to write a novel within a novel every time you want to describe something, or that every weather detail has to be a once-in-two-decades occurrence to be worthy of note. These are just examples of how you can frame setting information within context to make readers care. 
For example, say you want to tell your readers that a character is getting soaked by summer rain and thus can not be lit on fire later in the scene. You could just say "The summer rain got Julius wet as he walked down the street." This is very clear, but also boring. Better would be, "Julius walked down the street, ignoring the soft, warm rain that soaked his hair and plastered his shirt to his chest."
Not only is the second one more descriptive, it ties the important detail--wet from the rain--to Julius, our character. The description is not just a statement, it's the story of Julius and how he interacts with the summer rain. The addition of the character and his opinion, even though in this example he's ignoring it, makes the rain infinitely more interesting to the reader because it now has context. It is its own little story, and that is that makes us want to read more.
Step 3: Focus on the Non-ObviousSteps one and two, clarity and context, are probably the most universally important to writing good description, but as I'm sure you noticed in all my examples, the actual words you pick to describe things matter just as much as your construction. You can keep your focus tight and tell stories all you like, but if you only ever give us boring, obvious information, your description is never going to rise above, well, boring and obvious.

Let's go back to Julius in the rain. You'll notice that I never said he was actually wet even though the stated reason for having him in the rain in the first place was so that he'd be wet later when someone tried to light him on fire. This is because we all know rain makes you wet, which means there's no point in saying it straight out. Instead, I implied he was wet by talking about the warm rain soaking his hair and plastering his shirt to his chest.

This is what I mean by "focus on the non-obvious." When you're describing a character or a setting or whatever, you never want to waste your words on what readers already know. For example, I would never say "getting stabbed hurt" because duh. So, instead of wasting time saying "thing that hurts hurt," I move one step out to the less obvious, and far more interesting details. How does getting stabbed hurt? What does the wound look like? How does the character react?

These details are what the reader really wants to know, and that means they are the ones you should be describing. The obvious stuff--it hurts, there's blood, character is injured and might die--can all be covered through implication, as in the example below.

"The sword went in so fast, he didn't feel it at first. There was just a sharp pressure followed by cold as the metal sliced cleanly through the muscles of his stomach. Even when he took a ragged breath, it was still mostly out of shock. It wasn't until he looked down and saw the red stain spreading across his shirt that the pain finally arrived, shooting out from the wound in all directions with enough force to send him to his knees."

As you see, I've told a little story of the stabbing (step 2), focusing on each detail as I went (step 1). There's pain and blood and all the things you'd expect, so I don't bother interrupting the drama to describe them. Instead, I focus on what makes my stabbing unique--the speed of it, the shock, the way the character reacts. Everything else the reader can imply, which leave me free to only keep the actually interesting bits.

It goes without saying that you can take this too far. If you focus too hard on the multiple steps removed details that make your situation unique (ie, only talk about the shapes the blood makes as it hits the ground without ever telling us where it's coming from), you might not leave enough actual info to allow the reader to make the implications needed for the scene to make sense. Remember the lesson of Dark and Stormy Night! It doesn't matter how beautiful a description is, if your readers can't tell what's being described, you have failed.

Whut?
That said, readers are very smart and can follow you through some pretty tall leaps so long as you give them proper set up, but it's up to you to execute this correctly. If you write a soaring literary description you're super proud of and your beta readers tell you they got lost, then you have to go back and make things more obvious. Doesn't matter if you hate it or feel adding more obvious details butchers your scene. You're not writing this for you, you're writing for your readers, and if they can't follow you, that's your failing, not theirs. A description that fails to describe is a failure, plain and simple.

Step 4: Layer Your Information.One of my favorite writing sayings is actually one I made up for Eli.



I apply this quote to all aspects of my writing, but I particularly like to use it in description. Let's go back to my own (non-faithful) version of the famous "it was a dark and stormy night."

"The heavy clouds hung low in the sky, dumping their torrents of rain on the dark city until the water ran off the sharp peaked roofs of the factory row houses in dirty, sullen waterfalls."

As you can see, this is a description of rain falling on a city, but there's a lot more in there. For example, the fact that we don't just have houses, we have factory row houses with sharp peaked roofs. The water isn't just running off, it's dirty. All of these little additions are there to do what description does: paint a picture of the scene in the reader's head. But we're not just telling people what things look like, we're also implying a great deal of information about the city itself. For example, just from this sentence, I can imply that we're in a working class part of town because factory row houses aren't built in rich areas. It's also dirty, which implies a certain level of seediness and tone. If the next sentence were to mention the fluttering gas lamps of the original, we'd have just about everything we need to imagine the dark, narrow cobbled streets of a sketchy British Industrial Revolution neighborhood on a rainy night despite the fact that almost none of that information has been said out right.

I call this technique layering, and it's a combination of steps 2 and 3: using non-obvious, specific details to tell a story about a place without actually coming out and saying it. Think of it as the ultimate in show, don't tell. Instead of just saying "It was a dark and stormy night in a bad neighborhood in 1830s England." we're layering in interesting details to pain a picture that implies all of that without ever having to actually break the flow and say it.

Again, as above, it is entirely possible to go too far with this. Step #1 still applies: you don't want to cram in so much information your reader can't figure out what's going on. But this is where the art part of writing comes back into play. Being able to write a sentence that layers in tons of information without losing its clarity is a high art, and one of my favorite parts of description. But then, I have an ornate style. If your style is more stream lined, you probably don't want to layer in quite as much, but that doesn't mean you have to avoid layering entirely. How many details you add in is not nearly as important as which details. Take my favorite description ever from Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn .

“The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.”

On the surface, he's just describing a unicorn: what she looks like, how old she is, and so forth. But there is so much more. In this paragraph, we don't just learn that she's old and a particular shade of white, we see the evidence of her loneliness, and also how little she cares about it. We see her character and her world, the grace and magic inherent to all unicorns all layered into the language of the description itself. In this one paragraph, Beagle hands us his world like a pearl on a cushion, inviting us with ever word to peer closer and closer until our nose is pressed right up against the book and we have no hope of escape.

Obviously, not all of us are going to be Peter S. Beagle, but open any book by a good writer and you'll see layering in action. This is because writers everywhere have an abhorrence of waste. Whether their writing is clean and minimalist or cluttered with curios as a Victorian inventor's house, good writers fit in description of all kinds whenever and wherever possible. They don't stop, describe a house, and move on, the use specific details that put it into the larger context of their setting and story.

I talk about using a lager scale version of this technique for exposition in my post on Info Filling vs. Info Dumping, but it's the same basic idea. It's not easy knowing which details paint the world and which are just distracting, but my rule is to always think of my reader. I focus on prioritizing the information my reader needs to understand my world and characters, and then squeeze that information in wherever possible. If I'm describing a fantasy city, I don't just tell you there's a white wall, I tell you there's a white wall cutting the city in two between the beautiful, even whiter stone buildings of the upper ring and the smaller, wooden construction of the lower. By layering these together, I use necessary description of "what does this city look like?" to imply a world of social conflict inside it. Maybe not as well as Beagle, but you get the idea!

Step 5: Give Readers the WHOLE PictureI realize this is another one of those "no shit" steps, but again, I am ceaselessly amazed at how many writers waste their words and my time with boring descriptions. I'm not talking about "she had red hair" verses "her hair was like a river of flame in sunlight." That's just a matter of style and personal taste. I'm talking about using descriptions that only describe one aspect of something.

The most obvious example of this is writers who only describe what things look like without ever using any of their other senses. Another is writers who have their characters stop for a detailed self inspection in front of the mirror but then never give us any kind of description about what those characters are thinking or feeling.

Writing is a unique medium in that it is almost entirely non-sensory. There's no pictures, no sounds, no actors, nothing but words. It's up to the writer to create all of that stuff and describe to the reader in a way that feels real, and any time you cheat your readers out of part of that experience is a bad time for everyone.

This isn't to say you have do a five sense run down for every single thing, that would be way too much. But you do want to focus on giving your reader a fully realized version of your world and people. Part of that is bringing all the senses into your descriptions--having characters feel breezes and taste the sweet crunch of apples and so forth--but an equally important part is describing the emotional lives of your characters. Unlike movies, we have no actors with body language. We have to describe all of that stuff ourselves in the text, and we have to do a good job of it because body language is hugely important to human communication. Don't forget to put it in!

But it doesn't stop there. We also have to describe the political and social situations of our setting. Bad authors do this by stopping the story for an info dump on the local history, but good authors work all of that stuff into description and dialogue. For example, if you have a scene in a city that's been at war for twenty years, layer in some descriptive tidbits about how torn up the place is. Show weary people and badly repaired walls and homeless wounded soldiers. Even if it's not directly related to your scene, just adding in a detail or two about the obvious implications of war adds a subtle weight of reality to your setting. It makes it feel real, and that's what good description is all about.

I could go on and on, but all I'm trying to say about this is that you never want to describe only what's directly in front of your characters. Again, you don't have to describe everything, but for your story, setting, and characters to feel real, you have to give people enough details that our imaginations can fill in the rest. A great way to do this is to mix your descriptions between physical, character, and setting. For example:

"She was the kind of angry you still remembered twenty years later. Five furious feet of barely restrained violence wrapped in a badly fitted suit of cheap armor and carrying the biggest sword the merchants sold, stomping up on the slave seller's sun baked wooden stage like she meant to bring the whole thing down with rage alone."

Other than her sex and her height, I have told you nothing about what this character looks like, but I bet you've got a pretty clear picture of her in your head. I bet you can also see the stage she's about to bring down and the sword in her hands. You can feel her scowl and her rage. You probably also know it's hot (sun baked), and I bet if I mentioned the crowd fell silent in the next sentence, you wouldn't be surprised, since a stage implies a crowd.

I'm not saying this is the best description ever, but I feel it's a good example of how you can say a lot about all the different parts of your story--the characters, the setting, what things look like, what they fell like--without actually saying a lot. By mixing physical descriptions with the description of her anger and the implication that maybe she hasn't thought this through very well and the fact that she's walking onto a slaver's stage, I've painted multiple pictures--sensory, emotional, cultural--that when stacked together, combine into a whole that feels real despite lacking an enormous amount of actual information about what things actually look like. (Hey, there's only so much you can put in two sentences!)

From here, how I expand these descriptions depends on what kind of scene this is going to be. I was going to have a fight after this, I'd use my description over the next few sentences focus on physical descriptions: how the stage is arranged, the burly shirtless guards she's going to be up against, the jeering crowd watching her, and so forth. On the other hand, if she was going up there as part of a plan to distract the slaver while her partner freed the slaves behind him, I would focus my description on the characters themselves to show the reader how her ploy was going. Wherever I decided to take this, though, I would always be describing multiple aspects of the physical setting, characters, and social significance of what's going on. Does the crowd boo her or cheer her? Is she good with her sword or does she hold it awkwardly? Is she all anger, or is there a smug smile hidden behind her snarl? Are the guards hesitant about attacking a small girl or are they cocky?

These are all decisions I make as an author and then show through my description to the reader to create a wholly realized world. If I ignore any of these aspects--if I were to, say, only describe the technical moves of the fight without describing how the characters involved reacted or the crowd responded--then the scene would lose an enormous amount of depth and significance.

I realize this sounds like a lot, but part of the burden of description in a novel is that you have to actually describe all these angles. It's up to you to pain the whole picture, because you are the only source of information your reader has. If you don't describe something at least enough for them to imply the rest, they don't know, and if they don't know, they can't get as excited about the dramatic events of your story. Obviously, you want your reader to be as excited and involved in your world and story as possible. You want that investment, that desperate need to keep reading past bedtime, and the only way you get that is if you do your job as a writer and describe what's happening to your reader on all levels.

You don't have to do all of it all at once, but over the course of all the descriptions in your book, you have to pain a whole picture. If you ignore one aspect--say the political situation--and then stop your story to explain all that stuff only when it becomes important, there's nothing you can do to make that not feel like an info dump that interrupts the story, because that's exactly what it is. I think I speak for all lovers of good story when I say don't do that. Instead, focus on layering that information and describing all aspects of your world, characters, and setting in little touches all through out your description. If you're going to tell us what someone looks like (physical), drop a hint about their social standing as well (cultural). If a political situation is important to your story (ie, that 20 year war we mentioned a few paragraphs up), show the fallout in your setting. Have the place be wrecked, describe war refugees walking past even if your character is doing something else.

You want to always be building that world, always painting that whole picture in your descriptions. Put your reader into the story in all ways--physically, emotionally, culturally--and I promise you will be rewarded not just with better writing, but with happier, more involved readers who gobble up your books.




OMG THAT WAS LONG!Thank you all so much for sticking with me through all that! Again, please remember that this is all just my opinion. There are as many ways to write good books as there are people on this planet, so if any of these steps don't work for you or your style, please ignore them. You are your own writer! Do what feels right to you!

That said, I sincerely hope what I've learned about writing good description over the last twelve years helps you with your own stories. At its heart, Pretentious Title is all about sharing information so none of us have to reinvent the wheel or repeat the same mistakes. If you found this article helpful, or at least interesting, please let me know! And if you want to see me cover a specific prose craft issue for Prose Summer Camp, please let me know in the comments below!

Just in case you missed it, Trav posted an amazing over view of audio books--how to make them, how to pick a producer, the money behind them, using ACX, etc--last Monday. It is super awesome and you should definitely check it out if you're self published or thinking about doing so. If this all old hat to you, remember that new author business and craft blogs go up every Monday and Wednesday! If you're not already, please follow me on Social Media (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+) to never miss a post!

As always, thank you all so much for reading, and I wish you nothing but the best in your writing journey.

Yours always,
Rachel

All About Audio Books and ACX

Hi Folks,

Travis here. Last Monday was about the how's and why's of a series relaunch. This week's post is about audio books. I'm gonna touch on the explosive and awesome growth of the audio book market and how you can get into it. Plus some tips I'd learned at RT about managing your audio production properly.

I hope, by the end of this, you'll be totally pumped to get audio editions of your own book or books made. Also, I'm going to talk about ACX a lot today. This is basically an ACX guide.

So let's talk,

All About Audio BooksAudio books used to be limited and crazy expensive. Why In My Day it was something like $100 for a box set of 3-4 western short stories. Also, the audio book section of the book store was a lonely, hidden shelf that a reasonably tall person had to bend down to see. It was sad. 
Today though the audio book landscape is totally different. I mean, there were 43,000 audio books produced last year alone. One of the numbers I heard at RT2016 was that the audio book market has doubled every year for the last three years. That's fairly explosive by anyone's measure.

Yes Mr. Rock, that explosive
Rachel's and my personal experiences with audio book sales have been wonderful. We had 2k to 10k produced via ACX late last year for around $500 and it has already earned out. This is a book that's been out for a while and which we didn't really do any appreciable promotion for its audio release. That it has sold this well is a testament to the book but also to the strength of the growing audio book arena.

We've also signed deals with Audible for the audio book editions of Nice Dragons Finish Last , One Good Dragon , and the soon to be released No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished. So far this has resulted in awesome sales and an Audie award, which has knocked our socks off I must say.

Why Should You Go Audio?First, more sales revenue is more better. I probably don't have to explain that part. Second, it's a new source of income that isn't fully coupled to print or ebook sales and sales channels. Additionally, audio book sales definitely affect ebook sales. Take a look at what happened with the Audie award.
NDFL eBook/KU sales.. May 13th was the announcementLess dramatically, having an audio format helps sell more ebooks at a low level. Multiple formats makes your book(s) look official, more like a big deal, and that is very encouraging to customers in general. This effect is so well proven that Audible actively courts authors to make audio production happen. It's also good to know that having a print edition does this too. There's a reason CreateSpace likewise approaches authors with print services.
Lastly, consider market position. Audio books are growing fast, which means that getting in now and establishing presence, precedence, and audience are all investments that will grow with time. There's less competition in the audio book spaces, for now. It won't last forever.
Hopefully I've sold you on the many commercial reasons for having audio books made for your work.

Artistically, there's also the sheer cool factor of hearing your books narrated as well as just getting the story to an audience that otherwise would likely never read it. Consider the audio book customer, like I did in my customer stories a while back. Many are people who like books, but don't have time to sit and read books. They do, however, have space in their lives to listen to books.

Convinced? Let's get into execution then,

How To Get Into Audio BooksStep 1, you need audio rights. If you have a book and you haven't sold the audio rights away yet, then this is the easy part. There's two good ways that I know of for getting an audio book produced and sold. They are,AudibleAudibleYeah, it's basically the marketplace that matters here. There's also iTunes, but Audible will do that for you anyway. Amazon itself owns Audible, so whatever goes up on Audible also links up on Amazon.
There's two ways to get onto Audible. One is contacting them and negotiating a production deal. That's what Rachel has for the Heartstrikers series. The royalties aren't as good, but the production quality and treatment are top-notch. Also, we just don't have the time to use the most popular method. 
Which is,

By far the best option for achieving an audio edition for your book is ACX, which is basically self publishing for audio books. Like other forms of self publishing, the royalties offered by ACX are the best you'll find, and the distribution reaches Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. But (as with other forms of self publishing) the cost of these great features is that you'll have to invest more of your own time and effort into getting the book produced.
What I love about ACX is how it provides a one-stop-shop for the entire production process. It will guide you through the producer auditions and selection process. Then it will manage the production schedule, review, and approval processes. Finally, it will help you with promotions and launch. It's lovely, safe, and there's no scary steps. I adore it.
Your first choice when looking at ACX is:

Choosing ACX Royalties and DistributionThere's a big chart of all this at ACX.com but I'm going to go over it briefly. There are three main options for how to pay for production and for setting the rules of distribution.
Option #1 Pay the producer yourself and go exclusive with ACX for 7 years. In return, you are paid a 40% royalty on sales.
Pros: Best long-term earnings potential as it has the highest royalty. 
Cons: You have to upfront the production cash before you start earning royalties. This might be $1000 to $3000 depending on length. IMO, what this really means is that you are taking on all the risk. If the audio book doesn't sell well, you might lose money. Also, you cannot sell your book yourself. It is sold only where ACX wants to sell it.
IMO: Risk aside, I'd never do anything less than this. Even if it takes 3 years to earn the producer fee back, the long run is on your side in this equation.

Option #2Pay the producer yourself, distribute though Audible, and have the ability to put the audio book up for sale anywhere else that you want. In return, you are paid a 25% royalty on sales that happen through Audible's distribution channels.
Pros: You can sell your audiobook however and wherever you want. Direct from your site? Sure! 
Cons: 25% royalties. 
IMO: Do you actually have another venue in mind? Is it big enough to make enough money that you are willing to take a 15% reduction in earnings from the three largest audio book markets in the world?

Option #3Split the royalties 50-50 with a producer and go exclusive with ACX for 7 years. In return, you are paid a 20% royalty on sales. (which is actually 40% split between you and your producer)
Pros: No upfront production costs. So your chance of losing money in the short term is pretty much nil. This is also excellent if you just can't afford to pay for production any other way.
Cons: Long term, if your author career grows, you will make less money than you would have with option #1.
IMO: This is a devil's choice to make. Check out the ACX production stipends program if you cannot afford option #1. That said, I can imagine plenty of newbie authors out there who don't yet have the sales strength to justify paying thousands of dollars for an audio edition, but who would like the overall sales boost that comes from having one.

How Much Are We Talking Here?The Nice Dragons Finish Last audio book is 13 finished hours long. Producers typically cost from between $100 and $400 per finished hour. I'd say the actual average for a decent producer is more like $200 or so. 
If we'd paid to have NDFL produced at $200 PFH, then it would have cost us $2600. Now, the final book is sold on Audible for $24.95, which Audible sets BTW. One of the weird things about audio books, even self published ones, is that the prices are set by the distributer/Audible based on how long the finished file is.

For those of us in the ebook industry who are used to setting our own price point, this can be annoying, but it seems to be a cost of doing business here. Just like print copies cost a certain amount to physically print, audio files cost a certain amount to distribute, and there doesn't seem to be a way around that at the moment. Maybe this will change in the future, maybe it won't, but for now, a high pricetag is the norm. The good part of this, though, is that customers already know and expect these prices (ie, no sticker shock), and Audible has a lot of sales/free promotions that encourage listeners to try out new titles.
So, as I said earlier, our final price for NDFL was $24.95.One might quickly do some math and see that we'd be earning $9.98 per sale if we'd done option #1 for NDFL and can see that 260 copies is the break even point. Sadly, it isn't that clear cut. There's all manner of discounts, sales, credits, and so on that can make the price of the sale fluctuate. So expect to earn slightly less than what the napkin math says will happen. It's still great, though! Just don't try to walk the razor is all I'm saying here.

Ok, now that you've figured out how to pay and sell the thing, let's talk about getting a producer,
How to Find a Good ProducerWhat's the number #1 thing you can do to make sure your audio book is a success? Get a good producer! Def not this guyThe quality of the narration, both vocal and technical is extremely important to customers. It can make or break audio books no less. If you can't do a professional job, then don't waste your time and reputation in putting out something sub-par.
Additionally, producers often have their own followings. There are people who will come listen to your book just because they like the producer. That's some serious gravy for an author. We try to break out of our marketing bubbles all the time and this here is a way to do that automatically.
(Quick Rachel Note: Since I took a direct deal with Audible to produce my audio edition for me, they picked my narrator and producer for me. I ended up with Vikas Adams and he is AMAZING! He calls me to go over the voices for each book and has just done an all around awesome job. I couldn't have picked someone better myself. He brought a new dimension to the books, creating a different (and sometimes better) experience than reading alone.

This is the power of a great narrator/producer. I was super lucky that Audible hooked me up with just the right person, of course, but when we did 2K to 10K through ACX, we had very high expectations and Arial Burnz, the narrator/producer we chose, surpassed them. Again, part of this was because we got very lucky, but a lot of it was also having high standards. It can take a lot of trial and error and work to find the right narrator/producer for your book, but the quality audio product you'll have at the end makes all that work totally worth it!!)
So, you obviously want a good narrator/producer, but the best ones are justifiably expensive and can be hard to get. But what about yourself? Could you produce your own audio book? First up, do you have?Professional sound recording gear and recording area? A professional audio book narration voice? As in are you trained or experienced in this already?A lot of time. Roughly 6.2 hours of your time per finished audio hourIf the answer to any of these questions is no, then you really should get a producer to make the book for you. 
It's all about the auditions processTo find a producer on ACX, you need to start the audio book process on their site. One of the first stages will have you put up a sample of work that you want producers to read as their audition. Once the sample is up, producers looking for work will see it and they will craft and submit auditions

Tip: Don't put up a long sample! Keep it to something that can be read in 2-3 minutes tops.

This is super important! Audio producers make audition samples for free. If they don't get the job, then their time is wasted. The fastest way to obliterate your chances of getting a great producer is to put up a giant sample that will take a lot of their time to read.

Tip: The sample should be your most intense or dramatic scene, preferably with at least two characters talking.

At RT2016, the actual suggestion here was to put up, "your steamiest scene" possible to make sure the narrator can handle the hot stuff well.
oh baby!So many authors just put up the start of their book as the sample. There's no reason to do that though! You need good auditions in order to choose the right producer so put up a sample that's going to show if they can capture your voice properly when it matters.
You also want two talking characters as you need to see how the producer handles multiple voices. Audio book customers love narrators who do interesting, clear, and distinct voices for different characters. They don't like droning or samey ones. Your sample needs to pull this potential out so you can choose the best.
Lastly, don't be afraid to research and court producers. You can just look them up! ACX will also let you message them. Ideally, you can find someone who has already successfully narrated other popular audio books that are like yours. If you get someone to agree, they simply have to submit an audition and then you can use that to lock them in for the project.
Actual Production WorkOnce you have a producer, the process on ACX is pretty straight forward. In fact, there's no point in me going over it here. Instead, check out ACX's excellent guide on what happens. Just make sure to listen to your book before approving everything. 
Don't be afraid to ask for redo's but remember that you have to balance a working relationship here. You don't want to beat your poor producer to death over trifling minutia. This is super important if you are working on a series. If the audio book is well made, you will ideally need to get this producer again. Audio book fans can and will abandon a series if you change its audio voice.
So if human decency isn't enough of a reason, there's also that very real business angle that you need to keep in mind. 

Promoting Your Audio BookFor the most part, this is no different than promoting or launching any other book. If your ebook is already out and about, then I would love to point you to my post on relaunching a series. While an audio release isn't grounds for an entire series relaunch, there's a lot of advice in that post that you can use to leverage and maximize the impact of your audio book launch. If nothing else, check out the marketing push segment for a great run down of the marketing plan.
Now, audio books, particularly those done through ACX have three special considerations you need to know about when promoting them.
#1 Linked Amazon ReviewsYour brand new audio book won't have any reviews to start off with. However, Audible can by pass this issue by linking to any reviews your book might already have on Amazon. Take a look at 2k to 10k here,


This is super awesome amazing and you absolutely need to make sure it happens on launch day. If you don't see this link up happen, email customer support at ACX! We had to and it was both quick and easy to resolve.

#2 Audio SampleYou will be provided with a sample audio segment by the producer during the creation process. This is typically the first several minutes of audio as people have already read your blurb on the site by that point.
The audio sample is basically the book's sample chapter. Make sure to put it on your site, link to it, promo the hell out of it, etc... 
Thankfully, putting it on your site is easy these days. I downloaded the provided MP3 and used the new html 5 audio controls tag to put a browser-determined player up. Check it out! 

#3 Promo CodesSo, you need to get reviewers beyond the store page. This is where promo codes come in. ACX gives, I think, 25 promo codes out. These are how you get copies of the audio book into the ears of bloggers and other desirable reviewers. You can also use them to run contests and so on.
I've been told by a producer that, if someone buys your book with a promo code, it still counts as a full sale. So it is to your benefit to make sure all 25 of those suckers go out the door!
I Think That's a Wrap!I feel that I've pretty thoroughly covered the why and how of getting your audio editions out there. The audio book arena is a great marketplace with lots of eager customers just waiting to hear your stories. If you can go the extra time and distance to get these made, I doubt that you'll be disappointed. 
If you have any questions for me please leave them in the comments below. 
Thanks for reading today. If there's any topics you'd like me or Rachel to talk about here on the blog, please feel free to leave them below. We're always working hard to find information that is useful to you. You can also just hit me up on Twitter, that works too! (@TravBach) Rachel's social media links are here as well if you want to get live updates! (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+)
Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you all next week!

Sincerely,
-Travis

Writing Wednesday: Three Strategies to Creating a Better (Fictional) World

I've had a bit more downtime than usual lately (waiting on a book to come back from the editor, the writer's vacation!), so I've been using it to be responsible and take care of non-writing writing business chores like updating my website and cleaning out my email box. (If you wrote me, I swear I'll get to you! I'm almost there!) 
But as I go through my question box, one topic keeps coming up over and over again: world building. Specifically, people want to know what my system is for building my worlds. It's a great question. I have a system for daily fast writing, plotting a novel, plotting a series, fixing a broken plot, writing a prologue, editing, planning your edit and estimating timelines, even how to sell the book once I'm done.
CLEARLY, I am a woman of systems, and yet I've never written a post about how I build my worlds. This is a massive oversight on my part, because of all novel-related activities, world building is the one I probably spend the most time on. I'm not sitting down every day and drawing up family trees for my characters or anything like that, but I am constantly thinking and daydreaming about my worlds and people That's all world building really is: structured imagining. 
But while this freedom to play God can be amazingly fun and powerful, it can also be enough rope to hang yourself. I can't tell you how many authors I've seen go down (or how many of my own books I've killed) thanks to badly thought out world building. 
With that and mind, let's take a look at the system I use to keep my own acts of fictional godhood on track.
Writing Wednesday: Three Steps to Creating a Better (Fictional) World
Pretty picture, but they forgot all the X-ed out continents and scrapped civilizations!
Before we go into how I build my worlds, let's talk about the ultimate goal of world building, which is to create a fictional setting that 1) makes internal sense, 2) is a new and exciting (or at least interesting) place to be, and 3) feels real when you read about it.  If any of these three requirements are lacking, you're going to have a bad time. It doesn't matter how amazing your characters or intense your plot, if your world makes no sense, is cliched or boring, or just doesn't feel like a real place, readers aren't going to want to go there. 
Part of the allure of fiction (and not just genre. Contemporary lit authors don't get to skip out on world building just because they're writing about real places) is the chance to go somewhere new and cool. When people talk about reading to escape, your world is the place they're escaping to. It might just be background, but if that background is shoddy and poorly thought out, the work as a whole will suffer. 
So we can all agree WORLD BUILDING = VERY IMPORTANT. Easily as important as writing good characters, plot, or tension. So how do I do it? 
Well, that's kind of the rub, because the specific system of how I build each of my worlds varies according to the needs of that world and story. Sometimes, if the world and its secrets are a very important part of the metaplot like they was in my Eli Monpress books, I have to world build freaking everything. Other times, when the world is just a stage for other dramas, as it is in my Heartstrikers books, I...still world build a ton, but as a percent of total work, setting building pales in comparison to the time I spend on the characters and their histories. 
That said, while the actual process of world building will always vary from world to world and book to book, there are three general methods I always follow to keep my settings solid and myself sane. But first, a disclaimer. 
As always, I'm not saying this is the one true way. This is just how I world build. Obviously I hope my tactics will work for you like they do for me, but every writer works and thinks differently. There is no right or wrong way to imagine your worlds. Take with a grain of salt and always remember that you are your own writer. Do what works for you!!
All good? Great! Let's get to it!
We always have a plan!
Tactic 1: Start With What You Want, Then Work BackwardsIf you've read about how I plot my novels, you already know Step 1 for any Rachel Aaron plot is to write down what I've already got and work from there. My approach to world building is very similar. If I've thought about a potential story enough to want to write a book about it, I probably already have a lot of details and ideas floating around, so Step 1 for me is always to get that down first.
At this point, nothing has to make sense. I'm just getting all my ideas in a pile. Once I've got that, I start fleshing them out by asking the two most important questions in world building: How? and Why?
For example, let's say I want my hero to be inhumanly strong. That's a good starting point, super strong guys are inherently interesting! But why is he so strong? Was he born that way, or did something make him like this? If he was born this way, what would a society where super strong people just pop up be like? Is being super strong common in this world, or is he really rare? And common or rare, what does this strength do to him as a person? How has it changed his life? 
All these questions are examples of what I jokingly call The Real World Challenge. I.e., if this idea was happening in a real world, what would the implications be? How does this one idea--a super strong man--change/interact with/reflect the world and society he came from? 
By taking an idea and working backwards like, we organically build a world that, because it's made from the answers to questions, inherently makes logical sense. Rather than starting with a finished empire or society and then trying to explain how it came to be, we're starting with a character or event or magical system that we already know we want in our novel and then using that as the focus point to organically build a world that suits it. And as we answer these questions, new questions will arise, and so, bit by bit, the world should create itself with little to no directed effort on our part other than asking Why?
Once you've done this a few times, you should have a very good idea of the world surrounding all of the important, fun, catchy ideas that got you excited about writing this book in the first place. You've hopefully also discovered all kinds of fun new ideas to get even more excited about along the way. 
From this point, I generally just keep spidering--alternating as needed between plotting and world building--until I feel like I'm ready to write. But how do I know when I'm ready to write? This can be a tough call, but usually I know I'm ready to start telling the story when I can easily explain how or why every event/character/conflict in my plot a) works, b) exists, and c) happens within the context of the world, which brings us to Tactic #2.
Tactic 2: Explain It to Me Like I'm FiveOne of the biggest criticisms of bad world building is that things just don't make sense. Maybe the succession system for an empire's throne is too convoluted for anyone to believe it's held up for a single generation, much less hundreds. Or maybe there are Gods that are highly meddlesome at certain points and completely absent at others, giving rise to huge plot problems that could have EASILY been fixed at the Gods--who are meddling like crazy every other day--actually been on the ball for that one. 
My personal favorite was a book I read ages ago where a race of immortal elves had no children except for the story's main character. Even as a kid, this drove me crazy. How was a half-elf born to a race of immortals with seemingly no interest in sex or even functional reproductive systems? Even worse, why was no one else asking this question? All the other characters were just like "Oh, you're the world's only half elf? That's cool. Want a mercenary job?"
 IT MADE NO SENSE! The author didn't even try to explain how this was. And while technically it didn't matter because the main character's elf heritage was only used to explain how she was so fast and could use magic, I could not get over it. It was just so freaking stupid! And while I did finish the book (hey, I was a kid, I'd read anything), I only hung on to see if this mystery would eventually be resolved. It wasn't, so I quit the series. It's a really good thing the internet wasn't around as we know it back then, because I would have left that book a burn review that would still be smoldering to this day.
This is a pretty extreme example of terrible world building, but it's hardly alone. We've all read books, seen movies, and played games like this. Stories that cruise along just fine until you hit that thing that just doesn't make a lick of sense, or even contradicts other things that have been established already. 
Obviously, authors don't set out to screw up like this. Mistakes like this are often just a combination of not paying attention and not caring, both of which are cardinal sins for an author who cares about her audience. Like I always, always say, readers are SMART. They deserve our best thought and our greatest care, which is why it's our responsibility to do everything in our power to avoid stupid like this.
But no author is all knowing. Too many times, we mean well, but something happens, we get caught up in our own ideas, and stupid mistakes can slip through. For this reason, my second tactic for all my world building is that whenever I set down something as fact, I make myself explain why it is in simple terms as I would to a child within my own story.
I'm not going to lie, this can feel pretty dumb. Novel concepts can get very complicated, and explaining all the stuff you just wrote out in your world building can feel like repeating yourself, but explaining your ideas to someone else is the ultimate test of whether or not they actually hold water. Obviously, a real person is best for this, so if you're lucky enough to have a friend or SO who will listen to you babble about your world, always go for that. An imaginary person will do in a pinch, though. What really matters is that you make yourself go through the process of actually explaining your ideas out loud to someone who doesn't have all your inside knowledge.
I like to think I'm pretty good at world building, but all too often, I still find huge holes when I try to explain a new magical system or cool culture to my husband. I'm a bit ashamed to admit this makes me REALLY mad. This is so simple! Why can't you just get it, Travis?! GAH! But angry as it makes me to have someone poke holes in my ideas, this is exactly why I do it. Because without this system, I would have stayed blind to flaws that are obvious to others, and they would have ended up in the book. 
So if you're putting a world together, do yourself a favor and find someone--preferably real--to explain it to. Encourage them to ask questions and listen when they say they don't understand or that something doesn't make sense. These are your blind spots, and however much you might be in love with an idea, they HAVE to be addressed before they end up baked into your book and you come out looking like the careless author who gave her childless elves a daughter and no one cared except for the screaming reader.
Step 3: World Build Only as NecessaryI'm pretty sure the first two tricks are going to be universally useful to anyone looking to build a novel, but this last one is deeply personal. Way back when I was a baby author working on my very first Fantasy novel, I (like many new genre novelists) thought I needed to have my entire world built before I did anything else. After all, Tolkien made his own languages, surely I had to do something similarly grand if I was going to be a Real Fantasy Novelist (TM). 
With this in mind, I diligently set to work mapping out all my lands and their cultures. I made up histories and wars of succession and ecosystems. I filled entire notebooks full of everthing I thought I was supposed to do, and I HATED it. It was so much work, it wasn't fun, and it dragged on forever. All I wanted to do was write my book, but there was all this stupid crap in the way. And by the time I actually got to the writing part, I was so burned out after all that world building that I actually dropped the idea entirely and moved on to a new project.
Looking back, this was the failure that shaped my writing the most. I was doing what I thought I was supposed to and it killed my book. From this point on, I swore that I would never do anything because I felt I "had to" in my writing ever again. Screw those people who say you HAVE to have X for your worldbuilding/plotting/whatever to be real. Every writer works in their own way! What's necessary for me might be poison to you, The only really important thing is that the writing gets done and done well. If that's happening, everything else is just details.
This was my life changing discovery. There are plenty of writers who love making hugely detailed notebooks full of minutiae, but I am not one of them. If you are, more power to you! Have fun! But if you're like me, though, and the idea of having to plan out every little detail of every little thing bores you to tears, then you can do what I do and only world build as necessary for the story to move forward.
Hold up, Rachel! Are you saying we should be slackers?Not at all! There is never any excuse to give your readers anything less than your absolute best. If it's important to your story, then it absolutely has to be complete and well thought out. But while a world needs to feel fully realized, the dirty truth is that you only have to actually flesh out the bits your readers are going to spend time in. 
If your whole book takes place in a single city, then obviously that city has to be really well built and well though out. But those pirate island off the coast that only get mentioned a few times in passing? Yeah, you can probably go light on those. Ditto for the culture of the Empire across the desert or the details of how the river boats your characters see, but never actually ride on, work. 
You could world build all of that stuff, obviously, and if that excites you, go for it! To me, though, it sounds like a lot of work I'd rather be spending on the actual writing. That's what I'm here for. That's what excites me, so my world building strategy is always to flesh out just what I think I'm going to need for the plot. This does mean I often have to go back mid-book and quickly world build stuff I didn't realize I was going to need until I got there, but I'm okay with that. There's no rule that says you have to world build everything at the beginning. 
Pre-optimization is the most wasteful type of optimization. No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy. Often I won't even know about the world building I'm missing until I get there, so I just don't worry about it anymore. So long as I know enough to feel like I know what I'm doing and be confident my stuff makes sense and my world feels real, that's good enough for me. If I need more, I'll stop and make more. Writing is a not a performance art. You can always stop, go back, and create whatever you need. 
Once you've figured it out, you can hop right back into the writing like you never left, and often with a renewed excitement because hey, world building is fun!! It's the pure imagination part of writing, and it should always feel like a joy, not work. You never want to feel like you're flogging yourself to imagine things. Again, I'm not going to tell you how to build your own worlds. That's your garden, I'm just passing by. But if you're feeling burned out on world building, my advice is don't be afraid to just start writing and see what happens. You can always go back and fix things later, and after all, isn't writing what this whole world building thing is ultimately about?
Thank You For Reading!As always, I hoped you enjoyed the post! We have new craft and business posts every Monday and Wednesday as well as years of back content to explore. If you like what you see, please follow me on social media (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+) to get updates as they happen as well as lots of other fun, writerly stuff.
As always, we'll be back next week with more. Until then, have fun, and keep writing!
❤ always,Rachel

Should You Relaunch Your Series and How?

Hello glorious Monday morning, (can you tell I'm a parent? ^_^)

Last week I talked about Rachel and my teamwork. This week, I'd like to return to the train of marketing posts I'd been working by talking about rebranding and relaunching old series. If you have an older book or series out there, then I think that you'll find there's a lot you can still do with it. Also, for those you who launched a book and maybe didn't hit the mark on the marketing of it, this post should contain a number of useful segments.

So why should someone relaunch a series? What does that entail? What should they watch out for? Onward!

Should You Relaunch Your Series?When I first heard about this idea of a relaunch, I had to slap my forehead that I'd never thought about it before.
Don't let the sales get you down Sokka
There's several considerations that make me very excited about the idea of relaunching a series. Basically it comes down to how different things are now versus then. By 'then', I mean when your given book or series first came out versus now.

The first and biggest thing that's probably changed is readers. Ebook market growth and book market growth has added millions every year. While many of these people are not wholly new to reading and books, think about how many launches and hot releases they weren't around for.

Therefore, if you have a book or series that's been out for several years,

There are millions, tens of millions even, of people who are in the market now that weren't around when your book was new. 

I personally find that potential very exciting and that's what we're all about reaching today.

Also consider how you have (hopefully) grown as an author. How many more readers, many more connections, and much larger reach you have now versus when the work originally came out. Ask yourself, if you launched your old series today, how much better could you make that launch go?

Age isn't the only consideration for a relaunch however. Newer works that have had a lackluster reception are also likely targets. Many good books miss their mark with their marketing. Look at The Spirit Thief for example. Great book, but it had the wrong cover and so it didn't do well to start. Then Orbit put a new, much more appropriate cover on it, and relaunched the series. It's been doing well ever since!

So, with these exciting possibilities in mind, let's talk about what a relaunch entails.


How to Relaunch a Book or Series The only one like this! I promise!In essence, a relaunch means new covers, blurbs, front/back matter, and marketing all coordinated into a pseudo-launch push to get attention like it's a new book. This doesn't necessarily mean new titles, though. We're aiming to keep the reviews and store position of the original. Those are gold so long as they are even moderately good. (Of course, if your reviews are so terrible you don't want to keep them, you can always pull the book down and completely relaunch with a new title and everything, but you're going to want to look at that title again very seriously since that many bad reviews generally means there's something seriously wrong with your story. That has to be fixed first. There's no cover or branding in the world that can sell a people don't want to read.)

But we're going to assume your book is good, maybe even great! It's just fallen off the radar and needs a new coat of paint to catch new reader attention. That's what a relaunch is all about: making the old and forgotten look new and exciting!

When planning a relaunch, the main theme is modern. 

The most powerful part of a relaunch is getting new covers. Make sure to do your research. Your book should have also-boughts and also-vieweds now on Amazon and other stores. Go look at those to see what kind of look your actual customers like and are interested in.
The also boughs can also give you a good idea who's. When you launched the first time, you could only guess at your readership. Now, though, you have real proof of who likes your book AND what other kinds of books they like via Amazon's also boughts. Once you know that, you can start studying your reader's favorite best sellers. Analyze their covers. Read their blurbs. Check out their sample chapters.
You don't have to copy them, but having this information will help you make keen decisions for recovering and blurbing your book(s). We don't normally chase trends, but

You are trying to rebrand as close to trend as is possible without causing distortion. Don't try to be what you aren't. Instead, find where you fit in the modern marketplace.

Second shelf from the right, on till morning...
For example, someone at RT2016 said that the term "Werewolf" was out and that readers and fans weren't using it so much anymore. However, werewolves were still very popular, they were just falling under the whole "Shifter" umbrella now. Picking up on these kind of keyword changes is important. All those potential new readers I mentioned bring with them new context and new search terms precisely because they weren't around for when those older terms had power.

Don't Forget BISACs
While doing this research, pay attention to BISACs. Are your related best sellers in the same BISACs as you? Is your work in the right categories?

If you're selling on Amazon, these same rules also apply to your keywords, which determine your Amazon categorization. KDP only lets you pick 2 BISAC categories, but it gives you 7 keywords. Getting these 7 right is vitally important to making sure your book is turning up in the right searches. (If you're not sure what keywords to use, here is Amazon's own list of keywords divided by genre and what Amazon categories they get you into. Knock yourself out!)

If you have't played around with your categories before, don't be afraid to experiment. Look deep, try something new, you might be surprised. Getting yourself into different searches and lists is a big part of reaching a new audience who's hungry for your book.

Updated InsidesWhile the core text of the book isn't likely to change during a relaunch (unless you're rewriting), the front and backmatter are fair game. 
For example, do you have your blurb in the front matter? That's really useful! People often buy books on impulse but don't actually get around to reading them until later, sometimes much later. But because most e-readers only show the title and maybe the cover, it's not uncommon for readers to forget why they were excited about your book in the first place. But if you put your blurb at the very front of your book, they'll get pumped up again and go into the text with the right frame of mind.

This might not sound like such a big deal since you already got the sale, but remember: sales are good, but readers are gold. Even if you sold a book, including that forward blurb increases your chance of actually being read even months later. Anyone with a good cover and title can move product when it's on sale, but book buyers who actually read your book are the ones who'll go on to read all your other stuff.
While you don't have to do a full relaunch to add a front matter blurb, it's my example because it's a technique that wasn't widely around a few years ago (and still isn't IMO). We just started doing it for the Heartstriker series ourselves. But if you are doing a relaunch, and you haven't considered this stuff before, now's the perfect time to do so.

Prepping for a relaunch is the perfect time to make sure you are utilizing up-to-date book selling techniques and best practices.

Do you have new books out? Update the lists! Update all the info about yourself, pages, mailing lists, and so on. You should be doing this anyway, but the relaunch really needs to have current, accurate information.

As for the back matter, make sure you're politely asking for a review, make sure that each book in the series leads the reader to the next and beyond. If you have more than one series, try to lead readers to your other works as well.

If you haven't touched your book or series in a few years, I bet you'll find loads of updates and work to do here that is absolutely worth doing.

Add New FormatsAre you ebook only? Missing print, audio, or hardcover? A relaunch is a great time to consider adding new formats. This is a good idea in general, especially audio, but releasing in a new format is kind of like a mini-launch all by itself, and that's strong stuff when paired with a relaunch. Usually the marketplace(s) involved will put your new edition of their thing up in their various promotions or new releases sections. This is about as ideal as it gets if you can time the release of a new format with a relaunch.
Plan the Marketing Push
You're going to need to make noise for a relaunch to work properly. While new covers, formats, and possibly BISACS will get you fresh eyes, a serious marketing push is needed to get the most bang for your time and buck. I'll list everything I can think of marketing wise as follows but, keep in mind: this is hardly a complete list, and you don't have to do all of these things to be successful. What I'm about to describe here is a lot of work to put together. Any one of these can have a big impact, but the more you can combo together, the bigger the end result will be!

1. Dig up new reviewers and send review copies to them. Line up appearances on podcasts, or multi-author events if you can swing them. Find people who have reviewed books like yours and try to court them for reviews as well. Drum up that second storm of attention.
2. Line up your favorite email blast services (like Bookbub). Since this is an existing product, not an actual new release, it's totally viable to do a discount sale to kick off your launch. This will get you a lot of attention, a lot of sales, and hopefully put you high up on the lists of various marketplaces like Amazon. The power of Bookbub and its smaller competitors is well known.

If you want to see a run down of email blast services and their effectiveness, check out my post on the NDFL Mega Promotion. There's a list of services, links, numbers, and analysis. Enjoy!

3. If you are not Amazon exclusive, reach out to the promotion services of iBooks, B&N, and Kobo. All three of them have people you can email and ask for help with a launch or relaunch. They love to work with authors on things like this, but it does take time to line up. How much varies with the vendor, but 4-6 weeks would be the minimum polite notice. (At least, that's what I've been told. We're Amazon exclusive, so we haven't tried this yet.)

4. Use your social media and your own reach. Even if you're not boasting millions of followers, a big push at the right time can make a lot of ripples. Hit up all your blogging buddies for a blog tour, or do a give away. If you have more than one series out, consider how many of your new fans haven't read your older stuff and advertise specifically to them. They're already inclined to like you and might have been thinking about picking up your older titles for a long time. A promo or sale combined with a shiny new cover might just be the push they need to buy.

Fun Fact: "People who bought The Legend of Eli Monpress" is the most successful ad campaign I've ever run for NDFL. 

5. Carefully determine if you'll use any paid advertising services like Amazon Marketing Services, Google Ad Words, Goodreads Ads, Facebook Ads, and so on. Be warned, though - I don't have silver bullet advice on using these. Each one takes months of refinement and experimenting to learn. For all our efforts, Rachel and I still haven't achieved a positive ROI on any paid ad we've ever run. (ຈ ﹏ ຈ) That said, there are tons of authors who have fantastic success at paid ads, so YMMV.

TIP: When putting together these kinds of marketing campaigns, make sure to track track track! I typically just use a google doc spreadsheet. But it's important to make sure you keep an eye on contacts, dates, commitments, and overall spending (which can easily get out of hand. $10 here, $20 there ads up!)

This might sound like a lot of trouble, but I suggest it for a reason - keep in mind the one big weakness of a relaunch:

The Industry Loves New Books, Not Old Ones So good, but so left to their dust...At the end of the day, your relaunch isn't actually a launch and isn't actually new. This is the biggest weakness with this strategy and the main hurtle to overcome. You aren't getting the special treatment from booksellers (especially Amazon) that comes from putting up a new title. For example, recovering your series doesn't get it on the Hot New Releases page. 
You can't expect to get a full launch effect out of this deal as a result. As such, your own marketing efforts are really important to your success. These things need noise behind them since they aren't getting the same default level of darling new book treatment from all the normal industry channels out there.
Don't be discouraged, though! If you do things right, your series can hopefully enjoy a solid boost and some new legs. Make sure to keep your costs under control. How much you should spend will depend on you and your position as an author. For Rachel, for example, there's definitely a hard number I'd put as a budget limit on any relaunch. Before you ask, there's no point in me telling that number here. It's based on loads of data that's specific to the series and to us. You'll have to do your own homework on this, I'm afraid. 
An Aside,

Ya know how I'm always saying, data data data? Keep your royalty statements. Look at your royalties. Plot them on graphs. Combine them into spread sheets. Look at how they change over time. Look at how they move and twitch when events happen.

Seems like a lot of work I know. But,

Right now, looking at how much to spend on a relaunch, is a perfect example of when this data comes in handy! 

How else can you possibly guess at how much to spend? It's impossible to make educated guesses without, well, an education. Your numbers are your track record. They're your proof of what works and what doesn't, especially if you're also keeping track of when you ran sales. Your sales record is the ripples showing how well your marketing efforts have worked in the past, which makes them invaluable data for making these kind of decisions in the future. Also, if you're indie, there's no publisher keeping track of this stuff for you, so don't forget to download your sales reports every month, or you'll be kicking yourself later when you need that info and Amazon's already deleted it!
If You Don't Have an Old Book...Not everyone reading this has had a book or series out for several years. What about if you recently launched a book and it fell flat? Should you try to relaunch it?

I lied about the one launch pic haha. Sorry not sorry
If this is you, then there's some painful questions to ask first. Mainly,

Are the right customers finding the book?Is the book good?
A relaunch can help solve a problem with #1, but it cannot help with a problem with #2. Figuring out the difference here can be daunting. I'm sure that the self-doubt, recrimination, and insecurities are going to make even the most objective author leap to the conclusion, "my book is bad and I should feel bad."

I don't have a magic solution to make this easier on you I'm afraid. You'll have to read the painful reviews figure this out. Ask,

"Are people complaining that they didn't get what they expected?" 

If yes, then hooray! You have a problem with question #1. Since this is so tough to diagnose, let's go into a serious example of this effect in action.

Nice Dragons Finish Last is really well reviewed. However, one of the low-star reviews once said that the book didn't have enough dragons running around actually being dragons / in dragon form. I can see that. Since the book takes place entirely in the DFZ, all the dragons stay in their human forms almost the entire book. I would, too, if every citizen around me had a million dollar reason to call in the anti-dragon mechanized infantry the moment they saw an actual dragon.

Having won multiple awards, I think it's safe to say that the Heartstrikers Series is as close as anything can get to objectively good=. That customer is the best example I have of someone who came wanting one thing, got a good book, but the book didn't have the thing he felt he was promised or was drawn to, so... bam!.. 2 stars.

But if bad reviews are complaining about plot holes, confusion, a lack of likable characters, the book is boring, or other weighty construction issues, then you're looking at a rewrite, not a relaunch, and that's a problem for another blog post. Remember,

Good marketing just helps a bad product fail faster. 

If you have problem #1, then a relaunch can really help you out. But if you have problem #2 and you try to relaunch without fixing the underlying issues, then you're just going to be wasting your money.

Overall,Relaunching a book or series isn't for everyone. It definitely requires one to be in position to leverage properly. I hope that, if you are in that position, my advice today has opened a new door for you. It's worth the effort. You spent so much time on that book. Don't let a good book waste away just because it was in the wrong BISACs or had a misstep with its cover. Be brave! Fight for your book!

Thanks for reading today. If there's any topics you'd like me, or Rachel, to talk about here on the blog, please feel free to leave them below. We're always working hard to find information that is useful to you. You can also just hit me up on Twitter, that works too! (@TravBach)

Amazing suggestions aside, next week will probably be about audio books. They are amazing! I'm going to cover why they are amazing, how you can get into them, and some ins and outs I've picked up from personal experience / RT2016 panels.
Sincerely-Travis

PS: If you liked this post, I'm trying to have one up every Monday! If you need more to read, the blog has years of back posts about both the craft and business of writing. You can also follow Rachel on Social Media (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+) to never miss a new post. And if you haven't read Rachel's fiction yet, you can find samples of all of her books at www.rachelaaron.net. They're awesome ^__^

Writing Wednesday: How Important is Experience?

If you've ever Googled "how to be a writer," chances are you've read something about using life experiences in your writing. There is, in fact, an entire school of thought that writers shouldn't write things they haven't personally experienced because if they haven't lived what they're writing, they don't know what they're talking about.

As a genre writer, I obviously disagree with this. If I only wrote about things I'd personally experienced, there'd be no dragons or wizards or sword fights to the death. No one get shot or stabbed or blasted with magic. If all writers followed this advice, the whole world would be trapped in realistic contemporary fiction forever, which I'm pretty sure is one of the levels of hell.  (No offense to realistic contemporary writers, but come on. The world needs variety!)
But while I may never have actually been an ancient, future seeing dragon (I know, I know, I'm sorry to dash your hopes), I do know what it's like to lay careful plans that depend on the whims of other people. I know what it feels like to try very very hard and still fail. I also know what it feels like to win, to hate, to be head over heels in love, all that breadth of human emotion stuff. And this is what I think writers are really talking about when they say you have to live something before you write it.
Now, obviously, there are extremes. No matter how well I understand fear, my life has never really been in danger. I've never been a hostage or been mortally injured (at least not outside of a hospital without morphine). I can only speculate what it feels like to truly fear for my life. Likewise, I've killed anyone, or even wanted to kill someone. As a very safe and privileged white woman in America, I've thankfully never had to experience any of these terrifying, extreme emotions, which means I can only imagine how my characters feel when I put them in these horrible situations. 

But that's what writers do, isn't it? We imagine. We ask "what if?" and play pretend on paper for an audience, some of whom may actually have experienced the horrors I'm describing that I've been fortunate enough in my real life to avoid. But even though I've never actually lived what I'm describing, it's my job as an author to make it feel real, even for the people who've actually been there. 
That's the challenge these writers are trying to conquer when they say you have to have experience to write. Again, though, I don't agree, because I believe that the power of the writing imagination trumps all. Obviously it's easier if you've lived the emotions you're trying to describe, but that's all it is: easier. Life experience is an aide, not a requirement for good fiction. After all, if we allowed our stories to be limited only to our own experiences, what kind of dull, unimaginative writers would we be?
So now that I've cleared that up, how do we actually do it? How do we imagine situations and feelings we've never experienced accurately and sincerely enough to convince readers that these things are real? 
Unless you're writing your autobiography, this is a challenge all writers, and since it wouldn't be a Rachel Aaron post without a list, let's look at some solutions to this problem.
1) Empathize with your characters.This should be check point #1 for any kind of writing, but it's never more important than when you're writing a character whose emotions, goals, and experiences are outside your realm of experience. The ability to put yourself in your character's shoes both logically and emotionally, to really try and see your fictional world from their point of view, is key to creating a sincere and realistic experience, especially if said experience is as new to you as it is to your readers. Don't be afraid to really get down with them in the trenches and try feel what they're feeling. 
If they're a well formed, properly motivated character, this shouldn't be hard. Good characters are people, and as a social species, we're always interested in why people do what they do. If you're having trouble getting into your character's head, I recommend revisiting their GMC (or making one for them if you haven't already). You might discover that your character's goals and motivations need adjusting to "click" into your world, but once you unlock them, empathize with them as hard as you can.
Bethesda the Heartstriker, Mother of the Year!
Even the most terrible, rotten, villainous person has logic, emotions, and reasons for what they do. (Hello, Bethesda!) They have a history, things they care about. If you find out what those are and try your best to understand them as people, not just as plot mechanisms, the emotions and actions those well rounded characters add to your book can not help but feel sincere, because they are. That person you created is now real in your imagination, sometimes even more so than people you've actually met, and that real experience, the truth of who they are and why they fight, will always come through, even if the place they're coming from is one you've never personally been to.
2) Do your research.While I believe empathy is the most important part of imagining your way around an experience gap, there's no substitute for good old research. Whatever unknown sensation or situation you're trying to imagine--being taken hostage, getting stabbed, surviving in the arctic, living as a race or sexual orientation that's not your own--someone out there has lived it and written about it. Go find that first hand account and learn from it. 
You don't have to copy it exactly (actually, please don't do that. Even you're borrowing their reality, this is still your book, which means your fingerprints and sensibilities as a writer need to be on every bit), but first hand accounts can be an invaluable source of insight and details you never could have come up with on your own. This is especially vital if you're dealing with complex, sensitive issues like domestic violence, sexual abuse, or the experience of minority groups.
Obviously, if you're a straight person writing a gay character, you're going to want to go read about the experiences of actual gay people before you try and put yourself in their shoes. That's just being a responsible writer, not to mention you will get called the hell out if you get the big stuff wrong, and rightfully so. There's so much information out there about people's real experiences with stuff like this that there is no excuse to present a blatantly unrealistic or shallow version of their experience.
But research doesn't just help with the big stuff. It can also be a goldmine for the little finishing details that add that extra layer of reality and authenticity to your scenes. For example, if your story features a dead body and you've never smelled a dead body, go read a forensic account of what one smells like. It might only be one line, but that extra gory detail can be the difference between "Character sees dead body" and "Holy shit, that's a dead body!"
3) Chase experiences.With good empathy and proper research, you can create very realistic scenes even for things you've never experienced. That said, if you can experience something personally, you should always go after it. I'm not saying you should go out and go out and do something dangerous like drag race or get shot (please don't!), but if you've never fired a gun, and you have a character who does, it's not a bad idea to go to a shooting range and get that experience for yourself.
No matter how good your imagination is (and if you're a writer, it's probably pretty awesome), actually experiencing something for yourself--especially physical things like the recoil of a gun or actual deadly biting cold--gives you a wealth of information to draw from. There may even be details you notice that none of your research mentioned because the people writing the first hand accounts were not themselves writers. No one is better than writers at noticing things and describing them in new ways that spark the imagination, and if you can harness that for yourself, you will always have more to work with than if you'd gotten the information from others or simply made it up.
So if you're a writer, and you get the opportunity to have a new experience, go for it. Even if you're not writing a book about it right now, you never know when the weirdest details will suddenly become vital. The larger you can make the pool of your experiences, the more you have to work with, and who doesn't want more? Even bad, tragic things that happen to you have a silver lining because they're broadening your horizons. 
That's part of what makes being a writer so amazing: we waste nothing. Our lives are a toolbox that we use to create beautiful, moving, incredible, and (even with experience) still almost entirely made up scenarios that touch people in ways only really good stories can. We have the power to become someone else's life experience, their unforgettable moment, and that is a magic we should never waste or limit.
4) Never let anyone tell you you're too young/inexperienced to write.This last one is more personal than practical. I started getting serious about writing straight out of college, and the number one thing people told me was that I was too young to write anything good. They implied that, because I hadn't lived "long enough," my stories would lack depth and meaning. They said I didn't know what I was doing.
This of course turned out to be complete bupkiss. Of course I didn't know what I was doing. No one does when they start, but I learned. I read better authors and studied my craft. I wrote and rewrote. I finished a book and got rejected everywhere, so I wrote another one. Every time, I threw myself into my world and my characters until I had something that felt real, and eventually I got good enough that I was able to convince others. 
That's every writer's story, young or old, and when I was done, what I had learned from my experience was that the people who tell you you can't write or make good stories without experience are only saying that to you because they're telling themselves the same thing. They're using the idea that there's an experience level on authorship to excuse themselves from having to actually take the terrifying leap of faith and work that writing demands. They are afraid, and they're trying to make you afraid, too. But the truth is, if you wait until you have "enough experience" to be a writer, you'll be waiting forever. A lifetime isn't long enough to personally feel all the emotions and experiences contained in a single novel. Even worse, it doesn't actually matter, because writing isn't reporting. It's imagination. Our imaginations, and no one is too young for that. 
You can't take the sky from us. (Art source)
So if you're a writer struggling with a perceived lack of experience, I hope this post helps you realize that you not only can write good stories, you absolutely should. Because the only experience that really matters in writing is the writing itself, and the only way you get that is by actually sitting down and doing the work. So empathize with your characters, do your research, chase the life experiences you can get, and never let anyone tell you don't have what it takes to write. It doesn't mater if you grew up in a box, imagination is a universal part of being human. Don't be afraid to use yours.
Thank you as always for reading my post! If you liked it, please follow me on social media (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+) to get updates as they happen. My husband Travis and I blog about the craft and business of writing every Monday and Wednesday, and I very much hope you'll join us! 
We'll be back next week with more. Until then, keep writing!
❤ always,Rachel

On Making a Good Team

(Quick note from Rachel -- I had no idea he was writing this until he asked me to look it over for grammar and what not and it is the sweetest thing I have ever read! I AM KEEPING THIS FOREVER!!!)

(Enjoy!)

Hi Folks, Travis here again,

The relaunching post is taking too long, so I have something else for you this week!

@Jeffnine on Twitter asked me about what I've learned about working as a team with Rachel. There's no way I can fit that response into twitter, so I thought that maybe ya'll would find a bit of our backstory interesting today since we don't really work like your normal team.

How Rachel and I Got StartedI can't talk about our team work without talking about the origins of this writing endeavor. Rachel and I met more than 14 years ago at the UGAnime club. Back in those crazy days of the fandom where we were just so happy to be in the presence of other anime fans that we'd all sing all the opening and closing songs together. (Alas, our dignity got in the way of that fun tradition eventually hahaha). I still know most of the words to Berserk's horrible "Tell Me Why" ending song though...
*Coughs* Anyway, once we were out of college and living just the two of us, Rachel one day told me about her Great Dream (TM) to become a published author. She promptly went and started writing shortly after that, getting up 2 hours before work every day to cram in writing time on her first novel. Also finding time to write at work as well. She was driven.
For me though, the key words here were "Great Dream". It's hard for me to explain without sounding cheesy, the authenticity of Rachel's driving lifelong ambition to be a successful author. She doesn't call it her great dream idly. I, however, found this to be immensely attractive. On top of, well, my existing attraction to her as the love of my life.

(Rachel note: *DIES*)
See, I'm just a guy who went to college 'cause that was what I was supposed to do as a white dude from a middle class family. No tears please haha, I'm aware my privilege is showing. I went into computer science because, well, I liked computers and what else was I going to do? To say I struggled in school is an understatement. Laziness and immaturity are only part of the reason why I took 7 years to get a bachelors. 
So, having no real life ambitions of my own, but having grown up watching loads of anime full of nothing but people willing to die for their dreams, you might guess where this is going. Rachel, the woman I love, telling me about her great dream, and how high the walls on the way there were, was something I could absolutely throw myself into. It was the best...thing...ever.

applying to agents in the early 2000's be like...I got to make her Great Dream, my Great Dream! ^___^ Honestly, this was the best way it could be for me. I'm basically a natural born follower. Taking the lead in anything other than running PnP RPGs is not my bag. If that makes you cringe a little, like I'm settling for less in life, please don't. I love it. Backing someone else's great dream is really, IMO, better than having one that's all my own. I won't do crap for "me", but I'll bust my butt for "us" all day every day.
I see myself more as Zoro helping Rachel become the Author King... or something like that

It's a little tough to explain, then, when people ask me for tips on how to work with my wife as a team. My answer is too broad in that, 

I do everything I can possibly think of to help. 

What does Rachel's writing need? That's where it starts. I will do research, master new skills, invest my own resources, go outside all the boxes, and give her the best of what I've got every day to help her make progress in her career.
This has, perhaps, led me to some unwise levels of support. I had to learn (thanks Buddha!) about the fallacy of sacrificing myself to help another. This is especially true of the years where I nearly worked myself to death at a job that was, I'll be honest, over my head. All in order to get us the cash and health care we needed to stay afloat while Rachel's career was still growing.
For those of you looking to help your S/O in their writing career, it's perhaps impractical and unfair of you to expect the same level of fanatical-devotion-to-the-writer out of yourself. What is important is keeping an open mind as to how you can help because, lemme tell you from experience, the most unlikely stuff can help.
Your Experiences are Your Most Valuable AssetWriters need broad life experiences to make good stories out of. The number 1 thing you bring to any writer's table is the fact that you have an entire lifetime of experiences that they only likely share a tiny portion of. If the writer is your significant other, then you can also share a depth of those experiences that you would, perhaps, not be willing to share with a normal co-worker. As such, you are inherently a resource that cannot be easily matched by another.
For me, the first time this really happened was something neither Rachel nor I expected. During her first book, we learned that I was actually the better storyteller of the two of us. (Ack, that's hard to say! Even though Rachel has said so on many occasions this is hard for me to talk about! *blushing while typing*) (Rachel note: It's true. He was super good, y'all)
Ok, this isn't hubris talking. See, I've been making my own worlds, adventures, and full fledged campaigns for pen-and-paper RPGs since 6th grade. I've only used one pre-made adventure in my life and that's cause it came with something else. Even back as far as Rachel Aaron novel #0 days, I had something like 14 years of story crafting experience and had already crossed the 10,000 hours mark on game session time (not prep but live GMing) as well. So, when Rachel started asking me for story help, we were both surprised to find out that I actually knew a lot about putting this stuff together. Like a lot a lot.

I cannot pass on a chance to use an ALOT
So, while Rachel's English degree had provided her with a great deal of technical knowledge at the start, it had not provided a lot of practical story-assembly experience. Particularly of the long-form type that novels and series requires. I was the opposite: all experience, all self taught, and zero technical knowledge. I mean, I learned what 3 act structure was...last year. Anyway, this was a very happy mismatch as I couldn't have been better positioned to help her.

Now, of course, Rachel has written over a dozen novels. She's more than caught up with me experience-wise and is most definitely the undisputed master of the of the story around here. Still, I can always bring my live story telling experience to the table. GMing has provided me with a strange and highly useful skillset - like a nose for anything that doesn't make sense or anything that can be abused for power - that is imminently applicable to novel-length story construction.

The point here is, you'd be amazed what can help. All your reading, watching, playing, and living in general can provide for a novel. You've met lots of weird people I'm sure, we all have. You've probably been to some weird or interesting places too. There's so much there to contribute once you start digging.

Learning How to Tap Your LifeThat said, this full life of experiences you've led might still be difficult to leverage. Honestly, learning what and how to contribute is not intuitive. It's a skill you'll have to practice and learn how to use. I do have a tip here for how to do this.
Be Interested in Your Author's Stories


It makes me SO SAD that there are husbands and wives out there who don't even read their spouse's finished works. A good book takes hundreds and hundreds of hours of intense mental labor to create. It's painful, wonderful, and engrossing. SO, unless you married for money, power, or *cough* under the shotgun, then why on Earth would a anyone avoid reading their love's creation? It is incomprehensible to me.
If you want to help, listening is the first, and arguably most useful service anyone can provide to an author. The act of talking about their novel is hugely helpful for any author, even if you aren't an expert on story. Being a sounding board requires mostly just listening. Though that is a skill in an of itself haha.
Anyway, if you want to help with the actual story parts of things, you have to listen first. Everything else comes second. If you want to contribute, but don't know how, then learning more about story construction is a good start. I've picked up a lot of what I know simply from helping Rachel work through the endless problems and kinks that novel-writing generates. Chew on enough problems and you'll get better even without directed study. 
Being involved in the story making may not be your bag though, particularly if your author writes something you don't like. (You should still read it when it's done, though!!). That's okay. There's lots of other skills authors need and don't have enough time for. Before that though, let's talk about time.
Bringing Other Skills to the Table that's a, uh, complicated table you've got there...These days, and those days too, authors need to have a pretty dang wide skillset. Aside from just writing, they need a website, mailing list, and social media presence. If they want to write professionally, then they also need money management skills, accounting skills, and tax help. They need art skills and marketing savvy. They also have to network, hustle, and make connections. It's ridiculous.

Really, no one person can do it all. Heck, we try and really no two people can do it all. Realistically, some of the above has to be hired out to professionals, which is annoyingly expensive. If you can do, or learn to do, any of the above areas, then you can easily provide thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in equivalent help.

Let's look at what I do:
General ITWebsite development and supportFinancial Planning/ManagementTax Prep, W-9s, and 1099sGeneral Business Admin crap (cashing checks, filling out GADoL forms, moving money, paying people, etc..)Royalty tracking and analysisMarketing research and developmentMarketing campaign planning and deploymentData analystSubcontractor coordinationInterview schedulingReview wrangling (asking for them, following up, linking etc..)Contacts management (just recording all the people we run into)Story construction assistantContent EditingSeries planning assistantCopy Editing (sort of...)Co-BloggerAm I totally awesome at all of these? Nope. I'm a newbie in so many ways. Just a guy with some spreadsheets. 


What's important though is that I tackle whatever I can, hire what must be done that we can't do, and learn to do better. Many of these activities are not worth hiring someone to do. They aren't essential enough and in most cases you couldn't hire someone (with positive ROI) for the value that they add to the business. That doesn't make them worthless. All of these are vital to a writer's business, just not all the time every day.
Despite all of this, though, writing books is still the most important activity that happens in the writing business. Honestly, as long as that's happening well, everything else is optional to a certain extent. We take the financials and the book production (covers, editing) the second most seriously. Those things cannot be skimped on as they can and will ruin our day if messed up. It's very hard to sell even a great book if you've got a bad cover or an error riddled manuscript.

But if you had to pick the one most important task an author does, it would definitely be the actual writing, which leads us to one of the most important things you can do for your author:
Fight for Your Author's Writing TimeWriting takes time. Specifically, it needs large blocks of uninterrupted time that are every day or at least regularly available. A lot of what I do can be summed up as:

Get Rachel as much writing time as possible

That's why I wear so many hats. The extreme form of this philosophy is to take as many non-writing activities off her plate as is possible. The lesser form of this is just helping provide safe writing windows for your author. Its a simple yet powerful strategy that can help produce a lot of books.
Inspired Yet?I hope that hearing about how Rachel and I work has inspired you, or your other half who has been forced to read this, with a view of how it can work. There's lots more skills and talents out there that can help an author, I just listed what I do. That list grew out of what I can do combined with what Rachel needed me to do. 
Don't worry about doing everything at once by the way. I'm showing the results of more than 10 years of devoted effort and evolution. Your path will be different. Just keep your eyes on the prize - making good books!
Sincerely-Travis

PS: If you liked this post, I'm trying to have one up every Monday! If you need more to read, the blog has years of back posts about both the craft and business of writing. You can also follow Rachel on Social Media (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+) to never miss a new post. And if you haven't read Rachel's fiction yet, you can find samples of all of her books at www.rachelaaron.net. They're awesome ^__^
Thanks!