DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 71

Cover Design: Negative Space

Right, this is one of those posts where I wish an actual expert would talk about this, but I’m not finding what I want an expert to have said, so I’ll do my (admittedly non-expert but at least experienced) best.

Go to the Google search page.

There is a lot of white on that page.

The white is negative space, which, on a literal level, sounds like an oxymoron.

What the term means, though, is that there is space that is not filled with something.  Postive space = stuff; negative space = just regular old space where stuff could be but isn’t.

(If you want to see some cool stuff, look up “drawing negative space,” which is an artist trick to teach people how to stop seeing “chairs” “flowers” and “cats” and start seeing pure shapes and forms.  Want a stupid fast way to learn how to draw?  Look up how to draw using negative space.)

When you are making a cover, you need to pay attention to negative space for several reasons:

So you have room to put your text.
So the cover isn’t overwhelming.
So the cover fits genre expectations.

 

Here’s one of my earlier covers.  Let’s call it an example of poor use of #1, leaving enough room to put your text.  (There are other problems.)  The title, for no apparent reason, simply must spill over the image, because…I don’t know.

 

Here’s another cover.  Let’s call it a bad example of both #1 (leaving enough room for the text–look at that perfectly unreadable author name) and #2, OMG THIS COVER MAKES MY EYES STRAIN.  The darks are so dark that you have to work in order to find out what’s going on there.  Those of us with astigmatism are struggling to read the text anyway, it’s so smooshed together, and combined with the background, it’s just too much.

 

And here’s a great example of #3, which makes you go, “What the hell genre is this?!?”  Plus it’s very wearying on the eyes.

Here’s a better example of the same genre, although I would do a few things differently on this cover now (like adding an author tag and a title tag, if nothing else).

Notice something about this cover?  It’s not nearly as busy.  Stuff is not just shoved onto the cover willy-nilly.  There’s space.

The “The Edge of the World” cover has multiple text boxes, the weird little dragon logo, the farm stuff, some kind of bright streak of clouds…dude, you have no idea where to look.

The Chance Damnation cover has fewer elements; this makes each element more attention-worthy and striking.  There is room around the skull.  The flames aren’t filled with sixty attention-grabbing demon heads.   The text has room to breathe (and the letters aren’t all smooshed together).   Maybe not the best cover in the world, but worlds better than “The Edge of the World.”

And it matches the horror genre, not just in the content of the images, but in their use of negative space.

Scroll through a list of horror books, and you’ll see a lot of negative space–mostly black.  More recently, you’ll see some horror books using white negative space, or fairly faint patterns that blur into negative space when you see the book from a distance.  This is one of those areas where you can break the rules when you understand them well enough, of course.

So when you’re looking at your comp covers, also look at how much stuff is on your comp covers.

You do not need to put all the stuff on your cover (well, unless you’re writing high fantasy maybe, and even then you get nice spacious covers like the GRRM covers, or a historical romance, and even then the better covers at least make the dresses big enough and uniform enough that you can use them for negative space to drop your text into).

I’m still getting a grasp on the idea of not having to put all the stuff onto a cover.   It’ll take years to really get a sense of restraint, I think.  But, as Laura Harvey once told me, “A classy woman looks at herself in the mirror before she goes out and takes off one last piece of jewelry.”  (That may not be the exact quote, but you get it.)

I already took a bunch of “jewelry” off this cover, and still I can see one more that just bugs me and I should really take off.  Maybe two.

 

 

 

New Release: Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts #1

Now available at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Smashwords, Gumroad, and more.  As usual, the upload to Apple via indirect channels is taking a while.  My apologies.

 

“That was before the serum that allows us to retain our presence of mind was invented, my dear Miss Alice,” Mr. Dodgson said, clearing his throat.  “Now, if one remains calm and refrains from eating anyone, one may retain the title of ‘Mister.’”

It is with fear and panic that I announce that the first part of the Alice Liddell + Zombies book is up.  I’m making it into a serial, as this seems to be the only way I can get it out the door:  it’s too terrifying to edit it all in one go, which seems to be a terrible reason to do it this way, but there you go.

I’m calling it Alice’s Adventures in Underland.  Book one, which follows Miss Liddell through the telling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is called The Queen of Stilled Hearts, although its name is…

[coughs]

Anyway, the books are written, I’m editing them in chunks, and I feel like I should apologize profusely for releasing this into the world:  a book intended to balance tea and zombies.

I am setting up a subscription plan but the details are just slightly beyond my ability to explain them tonight.  Rest assured that if you buy the ebook now and send me a copy of the receipt, I’ll send you a coupon for the same amount toward the subscription, if you so desire (limited time offer, step right up!).

Here’s the back cover blurb:

With the invention of a serum that prevents most people infected with the zombie sickness from becoming raving cannibals, Victorian society finds itself in need of more standards:  to separate the infected from the whole, to  control when and how the infected can come into contact with the pure, to establish legal contracts, precedence, employment, and more, with regards to the walking dead.

The very backbone of the British Empire is its standards.

The middle daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, Alice Liddell, finds a certain lack of charm in the standards she must follow, with increasing strictness, day after day.  Wild and rebellious, she battles her father’s cold discipline, her mother’s striving to hide her middle-class origins, and the hollow madness of the world around her, in which the teetering Empire desperately pretends that nothing is, in fact, the matter.

Enter Mr. Charles Dodgson:  one of the chaste Dons of Oxford, married to his mathematics.  He charms Alice and her sisters, often taking them on walks and boat rides (chaperoned, of course), and telling them jokes and stories.  He is twenty-four when he first meets them.

And he is dead.

Turned in a tragic accident at Rugby, Charles uses the serum to keep him from the ordinary sort of madness that affects zombies.

But it doesn’t affect the elegant madness of his brain.

And one day, as he sees Alice struggle against the chains that constrict her, chains so similar to his own…

…one of his playful stories becomes something more.

Episode 1:  In which Alice and her sisters meet a gentleman zombie, and have their pictures taken while pretending to be dead.

 —

An sample may be obtained (fingers crossed) at any of the links given above.  If you happen to be interested in a free review copy, please do let me know.

 

 

2013 Writing Stats

Submissions: 204.

Acceptances: 13 (pro sales: 1).

Words written (fiction only):  549,246 (goal 365,000!).

Indie books/stories published:  12.

Hair pulled out:  lots.

 

2014: What about Freud?

I was going to be all contrary and write about something that had nothing to do with the new year…but what I really want to write about are my goals.

I forget where I read it, sadly, but I saw a blog criticizing the way most people set goals:  ”as if Freud had never existed.”  Which I thought was interesting, because it affected me so much this year.

What I thought I wanted to do and what I actually did were often two different things.

I studied how to change habits, as always I tried to push myself hard.  And often I failed.  Today, case in point.   There are eleventy different things I need to be doing.   And here I am, writing out a blog, probably the least productive of all of the possible items on my list (although admittedly more productive than Facebook).

No matter how hard I press myself, I come back to some truths.  Some days, I buck the plans and do something else.

It’s almost always writing related.  It almost ends up being the thing I would have scheduled time for, if I’d had a clue that I wanted to do it ahead of time.  And if I don’t do it–whatever it is–then I freeze up.  I don’t get anything done, or if I do, it’s distracted and half-assed.

That’s right.  I don’t follow my instincts, I get bullied by them.

So in 2014, here’s the deal:  no matter what other goals I plan for myself, my goal is to listen to my instincts before they come back to haunt me, make me anxious, waste my time trying to do something else, even drive me down into depression.  My goal is to hear the little voice in my head that says you’re not listening, and listen.

I have other goals, too.  I can’t control other people publishing me — so I won’t say anything about that.   And I want to make a goal of “finish everything you start,” which is totally not a bad goal (see Heinlein’s Rules).  But looking back over last year, in which there were a half-dozen novels I wrote up to the midpoint and abandoned, I can’t say it was a waste of time or that I should (yet) finish those things.  So I think I will not yet make that goal.

(Here’s a meta moment:  my goal is to someday be able to make that goal.)

But mostly my goal this year is to make every month a 50K-word month.  I made my 2013 goal of 1K a day last year.  This one’s harder but doable.  Eventually, I want to hit a million words in a year.   Because my childhood writing hero was Piers Anthony, and he talked about doing so on a regular basis.  Other people want to win an award, get a major publishing deal…I’ll know I’ve hit the big time when I can write a million words in a year.  It’s not necessarily true, but this is what I come back to, what compels me to keep working:  a childhood dream.

Freud, I think, would approve.  Although quite possibly he would try to tell me that I’m really writing about sex.  Heh.

Comps for Writers

I used to work at Wells Fargo in the Home Equity department as an auditor, so I had to learn the process backward and forward so people didn’t call me out for dinging the wrong things.  Fair enough.

One of the things we did was look over appraisals.  In the appraisal, there were usually 3-5 “comps” listed–”comparables.”  One of the ways the appraiser would determine the value of your house is through the comps–House A is like your house, except it has a jacuzzi.  House B is like your house, except your house has a newer roof.   House C is like your house, except the front yard is xeriscaped.  And so on.

I’m no expert on appraisals.  I knew just enough to help me audit.

But I use the idea all the time with my publishing clients, especially the cover-design clients.

A caveat here:  for those writers who are building houses (as it were) in strange locations, this works for you, too, and I’ll throw you a bone later.  But I’m gonna start with the people who write more normally niched things.

Genre = Neighborhood

The first thing a book cover should do is tell you the genre:  genre, when it comes to selling books, is your “neighborhood.”  You don’t want to put your book in the wrong neighborhood–because then nobody will buy the book.  Imagine a 17th-century villa in a suburban neighborhood.  

People will drive by the house to gawk at it, but they won’t buy it.

Now, if you’re living solidly within a genre, the best thing you can do is to figure out how to appeal to readers who will read pretty much anything good in that genre.  If you’re writing a book with tenement apartments and tragic stories behind every door, you don’t want to plunk the thing down on Lovers’ Lane.  Whoops!  The Lovers’ Lane people sometimes sneak out to have affairs at the tenement, but when they do…they go to a tenement-building kind of neighborhood to go find them.

So you want your book to look like it belongs in the right neighborhood.

How?

Make it look like the other books in that neighborhood, but with enough intresting details to stand out individually.

Your designer will be doing a lot of this, especially the “interesting details” part.  But you, the writer, should be doing some research on what the other books in your neighborhood look like.

Why?

To help you refine your cover ideas.
To give you a non-jargony language with which to talk to your cover designer.
To help you make sure your cover designer is including everything that should be on the cover.
To help you assess how well your cover designer is doing.

Let’s say you wrote a YA book about a girl who finds out she’s a were-jaguar.  Your first instinct is to tell your cover designer, “Well, put a girl turning into a jaguar on the cover.”   

However, when you get the cover design back and put it up on Facebook to hear the adulation of your friends and family, they say, “But that looks like a kids’ book.”

You painfully explain that it’s young adult, and that it’s for older teens, etc., etc., and they say, “Yeah, I know what young adult is.  What I mean is, it looks like that Animorphs series.”

If you don’t know Animorphs, it’s not YA, it’s middle-grade–for 9-12 year olds–about kids who turn into other forms.  Oops!  You just moved into a neighborhood full of 10 year olds!  The 16 year olds will never see you, and the parents of the 10 year olds will burn you alive for your raunchy middle-grade book.

Now, if you research the covers in your genre, you will see that YA books in the F/SF area tend to have bold titles with more text than image.  Certainly nothing that looks cartoony (unless it’s humor).  Lots of sigils on the dytopian fiction.  Lots of futuristic setting on the SF.  Lots of clockworky setting on the steampunk.  Lots of people showing some skin on books with an emphasis on romance.  Verrrry dramatic stuff. Lots of attention to the fonts, just a like a teenager scribbling on their notebooks.

Which neighborhood should your book move into?  Well, let’s say your jagura girl is all about the romance.

Why not something like one of these?

 

When you have 3-5 comps to work with, then you can:

Give your cover designer some options for images, fonts, and layouts that will probably not be so far off the mark that you absolutely hate them.
Tell your designer what’s popular.
Be able to say, “I want a font like Beautiful Creatures, but more of a PC Cast picture, but with the title across the middle like on Teardrop.”  And the designer will get it.
Be able to tell your designer, “No, the cute little picture of bunnies and kittens does not fit the genre, even if there is a scene with a cute bunny and kitten in the book.  Your cover doesn’t look anything like the comps I sent you.”

Okay, back to the people who are playing around with genre:

What you want to do is explain that a) you’re playing outside normal genre territory, and b) promise the reader an emotion (you want to do this because normally genre = the major emotional promise of the book; if you’re going to fudge the technical genre, you need to nail the major emotional promise).

This particular cover shows a) that two different genres are being combined (fantasy and Western), and b) that it’s going to be both serious and silly.

I highly suggest pulling comps in at least your two main genres (3-5 for each) and starting from there.  Your task throughout the writing and publishing process is always going to be more difficult, but quite possibly more satisfying as well.

You are writing for the audience that loves the villa in suburbia, so you really ought to show some kind of incongruity on the cover.

(If you’ve ever bitched about traditional publishing not knowing how to market cross-genre books, well, it seems like indies are figuring it out, and here’s evidence.)

—

Now, I’ve been mostly talking in terms of cover design, but comps are important across the board for a publishing project.

They tell the publisher:

How to communicate genre/subgenre on the cover.
What the interior design should look like.
What the editing should look like (e.g., “It’s a steampunk.  Don’t define the acronyms in the flow of text like it’s a James Bond novel!”).
What the back cover description should read like.

Finding comps will inform your team of what elements have to be a part of your book, and it will help you explain what’s wrong when things go wrong.  It can even help you break rules (“Look, I know this is a were-jaguar YA, but it’s a funny one, so I need some Unicorn Western mock-seriousness in it, okay?”).

So before you send out your book–whether to traditional publishing or to a designer/editor, pick your comps!

 

Anxiety.

What with all the ups and downs lately, I’ve had to deal a lot with depression.

I mean, first I was going out of freelancing…now I’m not.

You’d think that that was a good thing–and it is–but I think the change in hope vs. despair is what triggers depression for me, and it was a big change.

I had to deal with it on a daily basis to the point that when I get up in the morning now, I assess whether I’m depressed and if so, deal with it right away.  Because otherwise I’m not going to get anything done.

As I dealt with depression on a regular basis, it became less intrinsic to me.  I wasn’t depressed:  I had depression.  It felt like having a cold or a case of food poisoning, rather than a part of my pointless, useless personality.

Now when I catch myself thinking things like “you suck as a writer” or “why bother–you’ll just @#$% it up” I don’t think of them as my thoughts.  They’re symptoms.  Like having a sore throat.

And instead I think, “Gosh, I better head off that depression; I don’t want to be dragging for a couple of days.”

That’s good, too.

But the more I deal with depression, the more I’m starting to see that it’s just an end state in a cycle:  the thing that almost always comes right before it is anxiety.

It’s weird thinking about anxiety as a sickness.  I feel like being a worry-wort is a fundamental part of my personality most of the time.  I know it isn’t; I have my confident, brilliant, wonderful moments.

But those wonderful moments almost always trigger anxiety.

For some reason a bunch of thoughts collided yesterday, and this morning I woke up going, “Anxiety comes from externalizing self-approval.”

Translation:  I am anxious because I’m trying to make Someone Else happy.

It’s not anyone in particular; it changes.  The important thing is that when I decide what to do, I don’t think, “What would make me happy?”  Most of the time.  Mostly I go, “I can’t do that.”

That ranges from “I can’t eat out” to “I can’t work on my project right now” to “I can’t talk to so-and-so.”

I have a censor, a bully inside me.  And when I have a “can’t” about one thing, it starts throwing its weight around so that everything I do turns into a “can’t.”

It’s a nuclear bomb of fear, a chain reaction that ends in…depression.

Depression, strangely, works as a safety valve for me, to turn off the cascade.  By becoming numb, by making every action an uphill climb, depression stops my out-of-control spiral.

In order to stop the depression from starting (or at least cut back on it), I need to stop the chain-reaction of anxiety.

There is no Someone Else out there who needs me to fail, who will be angry if I try.

There is no Someone Else out there that I need to give all my power to.

There is no Someone Else who gets to punish me; I certainly don’t need to punish myself in the hope that it’ll be less than what the Someone Else does to me.

I am not being watched with cruel eyes, judged at every second.

I am not betraying Someone Else by being myself.

…and anyone who says different is doing so in order to accomplish some purpose in which it’s better that I’m smaller, shyer, more anxious, more depressed, quieter, more damaged, more hurt.

Sadly, a lot of people say different.  They don’t mean to.  I didn’t mean to:  but now I have to watch what comes out of my mouth, what my body language says.

You’re not good enough.  I judge you.  If only you wore better clothes.  You wear too much perfume.  Why don’t you stand up straight?  This place is a mess.  You’re just being a jerk.  If you think that, you must be crazy.  What have you done to your hair?  Swearing is for people with weak vocabularies.  People suck.  Get out of my @#$%^&’ way.  [Insert sarcastic response here.] If you disagree with me, then it’s funny to insult you.  My pain is more important than yours.  Men.  Women.  Too fat.  Rude.  You are not enough.

It’s like we made this group decision:  it’s better to be anxious and worry about making Someone Else happy than it is to be responsible for our own happiness.

 

I am, er, doing things…

The marketing brainstorming has led to a bunch of insights, some of which relate to “If you build it to be less of a pain in the ass, then you will do it more often.”  So I’m going to be dinking around with the blogs for a bit, so if you see all kinds of mayhem, it’s probably just me and not some virus.

How to Entertain Unwanted Relatives over the Holidays (A De Kenyon Post)

(This post was written by De Kenyon, who’s my middle-grade kids’ book persona/pseudonym.  You can find more about De Kenyon books at www.DeKenyon.com.)

Holidays can be a very stressful time for kids.  Yes, there’s Christmas with its promises of presents, but there’s always this threat hanging above your head:  be good or Santa will throw your presents in a fire and stamp on them until they turn into coal, which he will then put into your stocking to torture you.  Even Thanksgiving, where likely all you’ll be called upon is to “be good” for a while then eat, is fraught with peril.  The entire holiday season has low-level background music playing:  one false step and you’re grounded, kid.

Worst of all are the Unwanted Relatives.

The two-year-old with sticky hands and a passion for ripping pages out of your comic books.

The bossy girl who is two months older than you are and who continually justifies her rudness by saying “…because I’m older than you and I know better.”

The adult who thinks you are still that sticky two-year-old and talks to you in the same squeaky tones he uses on his pet chihuahua, which proceeds to wee on your blankets (the dog, not the adult…).

The horror never ends!

And so let me present to you a list of ways to entertain these terrifying intruders, distracting them from your most precious possessions, tricking them out of excessive baby talk and other belittling behaviors, and entertaining yourself in the process:

Identify your safe area. This will be the place you will hide if events become entirely too much for you.
Identify your stash. These are precious possessions that you cannot afford to lose, have destroyed, see in the grubby hands of Cousin Dork, etc.
Place your stash in a safe area, if possible. DO NOT place anything you wish to hide under the bed.  This is the first place anyone under the age of fifteen will look (the first place anyone over the age of fifteen will look is in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, incidentally).  Try the top of your closet, behind the most boring possible books on the bookshelves, in the garage, inside of socks in your sock drawer, taped to the bottoms of shelves, or any other difficult-to-get-to location.  Do not hide anything in a place that would make a good hiding spot in a game of hide and seek, and never hide anything in the trash!
Identify your most annoying targets. Are they young or old?  Tall or short?  Full of energy or really just wanting a nap?
Now that you have a profile of your targets, write down a list of five things they are likely to be interested in. For example, young children might like candy, small dogs, running around in circles for no apparent reason whatsoever, playing hide-and-seek, and eating crayons.  Older teens might like video games, snacks, saying mean and sarcastic things, talking on their cell phones to their friends, and avoiding adults.
Now the fun begins. Take any two or more items on your list…and combine them to inflict maximum distraction on your targets.  For example, you might fasten a wrapped piece of candy onto a small dog’s collar, then turn it loose in the back yard in order to run pointlessly around in circles.  Or you might set up a video game with a pile of snacks next to it in the basement for two teenagers, who will keep themselves amused by saying sarcastic things to each other instead of to you.
Take advantage of the distraction. At this point, you do not need to hide.  It is only once the distractions have worn off that you may need to retreat to your safe area.

Emergency tips in case your original ideas are not distracting or are not distracting for long enough:

Get in so much trouble that you are sent to your room (alone).  You may regret this later, though.
Find a slightly less annoying guest that you can hide behind/hang out with–and who can protect you.  A buddy next door or a cousin you like can also work.
Cough or sniffle a lot, or fake throwing up.  Nobody wants to catch a cold from you.
Insult them in a secret code.  Hint: don’t use pig latin on anyone over six.
Using actual itching powder is rarely as much fun as mentioning all the baby spiders you found in your room yesterday.  When asked to describe them, say, “Small and black, like a big pile of pepper, and with lots of little legs, and they crawl on you just…like…this…” and then gently tap your fingers on the backs of their necks.
Burst into tears and refuse to explain why.  Note:  Only do this if you can really burst into tears; fake tears will just get you more torture.
Bring a whoopie cushion into the bathroom with you and squash it every time someone knocks on the door. Then say, “Just a minute” and whine softly.
Start helping with kitchen cleanup.  I know, I know–this is torture.  But if we’re talking about a true emergency, this can work.  If you are helping out, then you can’t be dragged off by the teenagers.  Stay in visible, well-populated areas to avoid the really serious bullies and creepazoids.
Scream and blame it on the excess sugar, if necessary.
Hide in your designated safe area.  You’ll probably be found, but sometimes you just need a breather.  Note:  Do not do this if you’re dealing with a creepazoid or bully; they’re probably hoping that you disappear somewhere quiet…so they can pick on you some more in secret.  In that case, hang out next to the adults.

Remember, the holidays are supposed to be a time of rest, relaxation, and enjoyment, and with a little forethought, you can avoid the torture of having unwanted relatives foisted off on you, just because your parents were obligated to invite them.  If your plans work out, you can even earn some additional brownie points–because believe me, the adults want them to be distracted as badly as you do.

If you enjoyed this useful article, please check out my short story “The Secret of the Cellar,” about a very clever girl who plans ahead for her annoying cousins…by setting up a haunted house in the basement.  You can find it at B&N, Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, iBooks and more.

 

Flaws & Honesty

Sorry, this should really be a touching post in which I confess some sort of horrible flaw, redeem myself, and cause you to have empathy with…well, with whatever I decide you need to have empathy with today.  Writing is all about manipulation, after all, even when you use honesty to do it.

But instead I’m going to go all analytical on you.  I was complaining to someone that I have no “heart” as a writer, that I have no idea what “heart” is or how to write it and thus certainly couldn’t give a @#$$%^& presentation on it…but what I could do was discuss flaws in an analytical fashion.  Apparently that counts as “heart,” so I’m testing out the ideas here.  I’m deliberately not using heart-tugging techniques here.  That seems like cheating.  This is a craft post, dammit, not a tear-jerking essay…

But to get down to it:

There are several ways that we have to deal with flaws as writers:

The flaws in our work.
The flaws in our writing process.
The flaws in ourselves.

The first would be something like, “My endings tend to be train wrecks” or “I have slow middles.”

The second would be “Every time I switch to a new setting, I have to fight against writer’s block” or “I am so concentrated on perfection that I delete more than I write.”

The third is the hardest to deal with.

What if people who read my work don’t like it…and act like it reflects on me, personally?
What if I write about sex and people look at me funny?
What if I write about main characters who behave in ways that are immoral or unethical?  Won’t people think I think that way, too?
What if I haven’t lived a life of adventure/romance/etc. and can’t write about it convincingly?  What if I want to write about someone fundamentally different than I am–am I deluding myself into thinking I can pull it off?
What if I just want someone else to take care of all the problems so I can write?  What if I can’t handle being a professional writer?

We all have flaws.  We all have fears, desires, biases, prejudices–irrationalities–apathies–blind spots.  We can either spend our writerly lives trying to work around them, hide them, overcome them–or we can use them.

From time to time the advice “give your characters flaws” comes up.  If you write perfect characters–those tend to be boring.  Most writers have heard this and heard this and heard this.  But what flaws, and how big should the flaws be, and when should they be introduced?

I recently rewatched Harry Potter 3 with my family.  In that movie, which is my favorite one, Harry Potter is a bad kid.  He sentences his aunt to death for insulting his mother–it isn’t just an accident that he blows her up; it’s that he refuses to try to fix it or call in outside help to do so.  He’s an attempted murderer.  And yet he’s our hero.

Katniss from Hunger Games is intolerant, rude, and looks down on everyone who dares to be nice to her–except the one guy who’s more or less like her dad.  Even the little sister she claims to love is too weak and foolish to be able to take care of herself, in Katniss’s view.

Take a look at your favorite book, the one that’s lasted you through the years:  more than likely, the main character starts out as something of a turd (and may or may not improve after that).  Mine are the Alice in Wonderland books:  she runs away because she’s bored and solves her problems by throwing tantrums.  (Works for movies, too–Luke whines about having to contribute to his family, whines about being shoved into the friend zone, whines about having to save the world…in fact, his major change in Star Wars is that, for one freaking second, when he fires the missiles into the Death Star, he stops whining.  OMG!  A freakin’ miracle!)

The main question isn’t, “Should characters have flaws,” because great characters do. They have huge flaws.   Scarlett O’Hara?  Huge flaws.  Sherlock Holmes?  Pass the cocaine while I insult you, old chap.  The list goes on and on, more limited by my ability to come up with 1001 characters at the moment (Aladdin was a dick…Wolverine, what an asshole) than a lack of memorable characters with flaws.  With a great character, it’s almost like the flaw is more important than the redeeming characteristic.

However, the reason that we, as readers, aren’t really overwhelmed with how crappy our beloved characters really are, is that these characters are presented from the inside.   Sherlock Holmes isn’t an unemotional asshole…he’s a very smart man. Katniss Everdeen is a jerk to everyone around her…but she knows it and is uncomfortable about it, and is even, at times, sorry. Alice is a complete and utter brat with no attention span…but she’s really just reacting to the nutzoids around her. Aladdin just wants to make a buck (off a supposedly helpless old person).  Wolverine lashes out at everyone…but his past…oh, his past…

And so on.

What has this got to do with point 3?

Where do you think those flaws come from?

As a writer, it’s often easier to start with what you know.  ”Write what you know.”  You don’t need to stop there, of course, or else a lot of great books would never have been written.  But you might want to start there–with the flaws that you know.

It turns out I write a lot of characters who think too much and who get lost in their own worlds.  Maybe not the grandest flaws in the world, but something to start with.

Do people judge me for it?

The answer that I’m discovering is that yes, they do (mostly in blog posts)–but they will almost always give me credit for honesty.  You’ll never get credit for satire; you have to be very careful about it, and I have a fairly dry, satirical wit; I’ve been called a racist before because I’ve written from the POV of a racist who thinks himself above racism.  Satire is tricky.  But honesty, taking ownership of one’s flaws in the most naked way possible–that, people can respect (although they may try to fix the flaws for you, which, really, is kind of sweet).

So write those nakedly flawed characters, because mostly we’re okay with that.  Yes, you have flaws as a human being.  But like ladies flocking around a bad boy in a romance, those might be the parts that we like best about you.

All right, now for extra dorkiness…I’m trying to work on marketing (see previous post), so I’m biting the bullet here and saying…if you found this post inspiring or at all helpful, why not check out my nonfiction short book How to Fail and Keep on Writing:  Kill Your Excuses, Combat Naysayers with Facts & Figures, & Mail Your Stories Like a Pro?  You can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and more…

WHEW.  And I didn’t have a heart attack or anything.  Thanks!

Promotion: @#$%^&*@#$!!!!

My publisher brain put itself on hold recently:  I’m still writing my ass off, but there is no urge whatsoever to put it up.  Granted, I’m working on a couple of novels right now, but believe me, I have plenty of back material that still needs to go up.  So what’s going on?

It turns out that being a publisher requires creativity.  Which sounds obvious, but it isn’t, not when you’re in the thick of it.

Here’s my internal monologue:

Okay, covers, covers require creativity…pretty interior layouts…yes, yes…I get very creative with blurbs…
Wait, promotion?  Promotion needs to be creative?!?!
But I only have so many creativity points today and I want to spend them all on wriiiiting!  (I think this is the place where a lot of writers stop and say, “I think I’ll just hand all this off to a publisher.”)
No, wait.  There’s something else going on, rumbling around down there…

There’s something trying to come out from the subconscious.  It’s not here yet.  But, interestingly enough, I can see a little bit of the shape of it.

I ended up at Beth A. Grant’s website the other day, based on a friend’s recommendation, twice removed.  (That means, I read the stuff at the original recommendation’s link, and the original link led to another link, which led to there, which, on second thought, needs a new phrase for it so you don’t have to explain that it’s not a friend twice removed but a link twice removed–”two jumps removed,” maybe?)  It’s a marketing and promotions site.  (Most writers will shudder there.)  But she has some good stuff.  My favorite point so far is the idea that not everyone should market the same way…which she breaks down in a more analytical way into personality types.  It may be foolish, but I love me some personality types.  When I hit the sorting hat in Harry Potter I cheered.

If you’re curious, you start here.  But in short there are two axes–and I end up on the nerd end of the boxes, where I think the best thing I can do is make good content (versus being a good “speaker” or a compelling salesperson).  But this site is all about…providing people a service.  Not about writing and selling fiction–not about hustling art.  So there’s no cut-and-dried plan there that fits my creativity.  (And yes, art provides a service–but if you take a look at the concrete marketing tips, the concept just doesn’t carry over clearly.)

But it does help explain some things.

I have a hard time formulating my “brand” and selling it, because my brand is my content; either you like it or you don’t.  But if I look at it a different way–in a nerdier way, although that isn’t the language she uses–and I’m pretending I’m giving a book recommendation to someone out of my own work, it becomes much easier to identify who should get what.  My kids’ fiction?  Is for smart kids who are bored with reading; it’s very mischievous writing.  You shouldn’t give this to your kid if they are the kind who always obeys rules, if they’re horrified by scary movies, and if they aren’t constantly pushing buttons to see what they get away with.  So if your kid is a brat from 8-12 years old, they’ll probably like at least some of what I write.  Which is, um, a brand, although when I try to fit the two ideas together they just don’t work.

But.

I don’t see any really good “Marketing for Nerds:  The Book” floating around.  There are marketing nerds, yes, and marketers are learning from nerds, but mostly nerds who need to market are treated as people who need a crutch, rather than people who need to find their own voices.  I do like Seth Godin, but there’s something subtly off for me about his work.  It’s inspiring, but it’s not concrete–How do you promote book X?  Rely on the long tail!  Provide good customer service!  Don’t worry, you’ll find a niche!  All great philosophy, but…what do I do about it?  How do I make a jump toward something practical?  Or something fundamental, some core idea that I can use to form a specific plan?

I look at the way other writers are marketing, and…wow, I could copy what other writers are doing (and I have), but is it really a way to stand out?  I could chase the latest “thing,” but…well, no.  That’s not actually what I want.  I don’t want to play the numbers.  I don’t want to calculate the best time of the year to release.  I don’t want to figure out the best sites to put up ads on.  I don’t want to hound people to buy books on Facebook and Twitter.  I don’t want to obsess about new release lists.  I don’t want to go on the Endless Blog Tour.  I don’t want to give away bookmarks and Kindles…I don’t want to bribe people to like my work, and I don’t want to pound them into giving up and buying my stuff in the hope that I’ll shut up about it already.  I mean, I sound really negative about it, but it’s about me, not you.  I don’t like these things.  They might convince me to buy stuff, but I don’t want to be the one doing them.

Yes, I’ve run into the idea that I just need to be (essentially) more woo-woo about the whole process and accept what the universe gives me–but I’m a nerd.  I analyze.  In fact, I analyze so that when I get down to the real meat of the matter, I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m doing the right thing.  I analyze in preparation for walking out into the woo-woo, not so I can avoid doing so.

So I both don’t want to analyze (at least, using the analytical tools that other people are using), and yet I must analyze.  Which means I need to start thinking about new tools.

I don’t have them yet.  Sorry:  I feel like this will be really useful if I can pull it off.  But I got nothing so far.  I’m running through the writers I follow online…and they aren’t the ones that I read, except for Stephen Brust, and the fact that he writes amusingly online isn’t why I first started reading him.  I’ll pick up a book IF another person recommends it to me and IF I like the opening page…but that doesn’t seem to be something that, as the writer myself, I can directly control–other than going on the Endless Blog Tour.  (I don’t mind writing blogs, but I’d rather they be nerdy ones, not interviews about my books themselves.  I wrote it already; my interest has passed on.) I am already working my ass off on writing better (and thus attracting awards and sales and whatnot that will speak for me).  I got that.  If I wrote a “Marketing for Nerdy Writers” book that would totally be a chapter, but it can’t be the only chapter, because it won’t tell you what else to explore, what principles to follow.   “Write better” is a sine qua non, not an action plan.

…And I fully expect that whatever I find will not actually be reinventing the wheel, just rediscovering it personally.  Heh.  I know I have a really good idea if I can trace it back to Neil Stephenson.  He’s a nerd.  I should look at his promotional prowess.