Alison Ripley Cubitt's Blog, page 9

I May Not Know Much About Marketing But I Know Someone Who Does 2

A big welcome to guest blogger, Kathryn Dionne, this week. Kathryn is author of The Eleventh Hour Trilogy.[image error]

Marketing Your Book

The 90/10 Rule. . .

By Kathryn Dionne

In days past, writers wrote.  When they had a finished product, they searched out agents and publishing houses that would take their “baby” off their hands, nurture it to its full potential, and give it legs long enough to cover the globe.  If the writer was fortunate enough to find such a person who believed in their talent, shared their enthusiasm,  and was willing to promote them, then the writer became free to focus solely on doing what she does best; write!

Oh, how times have changed!

A new breed of writer has emerged on to the scene, creating a worldwide industry; The Indie writer.  These independent authors who have chosen to forego the daunting task of finding an agent and going it alone are discovering that it’s not enough to simply write a great book. They have to know how to market it.  They have to get their book into the hands of the public and make them want to read it.  

But how do we do that?

As an indie author myself, I have learned to follow the 90/10 rule; 10 percent writing, but 90 percent marketing.  I’m not trying to make an assumption, but I’ve discovered that most people either have a knack for writing or a knack for marketing. Rarely do they possess both.  But if you’re going to be an Indie author you have to be great at both.  When I first published The Eleventh Hour trilogy, it was difficult for me to praise my own books because I thought it made me sound too egotistical.  So I didn’t market them or tell people about them. I just left their fate to chance. Then one day a friend said to me, “You must not like your books very much.”

His statement took me by surprise.  Why would he think that?  He knew how hard I worked to develop the story and the characters.  He was privy to the hours and hours and hours of the endless research I did to make the story real and believable.  So how could he say that? I became indignant and said, “I love my books. They tell a great story.  And I am very proud of them!”

“Then tell people about them,” he said to me. “Don’t cheat them out of an opportunity to feel the same way about them that you do.”

Wow, I hadn’t thought of it in those terms.  But he was right. If I didn’t make the effort to promote them, then why should anyone make the effort to read them?

So what could I do in order to market my books effectively?  I needed to:

1. Change my mindset.  I needed to treat my writing as if it were a business rather than a hobby.  This started my mind thinking in a different direction. Once I accepted that my marketing efforts were an integral part of my writing process, I began to allocate a certain amount of time every day to each part of the process. I found that I liked to do part of my marketing in the morning before I started to write and then a little more in the evening before I went to bed.   I learned to apply the 90/10 rule in a way that was comfortable for me and befitting my lifestyle so as to ensure its longevity. If it worked for me, then I’d be able to work it.

2. Make my books easy to find. Thanks to the Internet and places like Amazon, Goodreads, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and a whole host of other websites dedicated to providing a platform for authors and their books, I had an unlimited audience.  But those people couldn’t buy my books if they didn’t know about them.  So I put them everywhere I could. Redundancy turned out to be key in getting my books noticed. I had some books printed solely for the purpose of giving them away.  I donated them to my local libraries, senior and rec centers, and anywhere else where people gathered.  It turns out people love supporting their local authors.

3. Make my efforts fun. I knew that if I didn’t make these marketing efforts enjoyable, then the chances of me continuing them would be nil. One of the most fun and rewarding ways of getting my books recognized has been by doing blog tours.  This has allowed me to virtually travel the globe, stopping at websites around the world to do interviews, guest posts, pod casts and radio shows without ever leaving my office.  In putting together this tour, I discovered so many amazing sites that catered to indie authors by giving them a place to showcase their works. Most of the sites, like Lambert Nagle, are run by authors themselves who have graciously opened up their website in an effort to help promote fellow writers.  Doing a blog tour not only allowed me to tap in to their followers, but it gave me the opportunity to share my viewership with them.  Authors helping authors!

We writers are part of one big family that stretches across the globe. The written word is in our blood, and the need to tell a story is in our hearts.  But unless we learn the language of marketing, our voices will remain silent and our stories untold.  Don’t let your works die out before they’ve even had a chance to live!

About the Author

Kathryn Dionne lives in Southern California with her husband, Jeff and their two Shar Peis Bogey and Gracie.

From an early age, Kathryn’s love of treasure hunting sparked an interest in archaelogy. As an amateur archaelogist, she’s been fortunate enough to uncover some unique artifacts in different parts of the globe. But she’s still searching for that very special scroll.

In addition to writing, she manages their five acre property and a grove of Italian olive trees. Jeff has lovingly named the business, Saint Kathryn’s Olive Oil.

In her spare time she makes cookie jars and throws pottery in her studio. She creates mosaics from discarded objects and sells them as Found Art.

She is currently writing a new series called, Chasing Time, which she hopes to have published some time in 2013.

The land of the long white cloud

I am still taking in the news that Eleanor Catton, beat off the competition to win this year’s Man Booker Prize. And as my thoughts are turning to an upcoming trip back to New Zealand in a few weeks time, I’ve been planning what am I going to read on my Kindle when I’m away. The Luminaries – of course!

Here is Eleanor Catton in the Guardian writing about growing up in New Zealand’s South Island, where I lived as a child. I particularly like the paragraph where she says this: ‘To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see.’ I also agree with her when she says that she doesn’t feel the same way when she looks at a city because a city has been ‘formally determined.’

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/17/eleanor-catton-booker-new-zealand

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King: a masterclass in how to write compelling characters

As Stephen King’s much- anticipated follow-up to The Shining has recently been reviewed in the press, one or two broadsheet critics just couldn’t resist taking a swipe at King, accusing him of manipulating the reader as well as writing a sequel that doesn’t quite match the original. I can’t help feeling that there are still critics out there who resent King’s right to be taken seriously as a good writer, just because he specialises in the horror genre.

Steven Poole’s Guardian review of Dr Sleep, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/25/doctor-sleep-stephen-king-review I am glad to say, shows King the respect he deserves, making the point that it was thanks to ‘more culturally acceptable novels such as the claustrophobic masterpiece Misery that King has grudgingly been admitted by the lit-crit folk into the ranks of “actually good writers” as opposed to mere megaselling dimestore artists.’

I would put King’s earlier work, Dolores Claiborne in Poole’s category of ‘more culturally acceptable novels,’ if a psychological thriller about domestic violence is considered more culturally acceptable than one with supernatural themes. It is a testament to King’s phenomenal output that other works of his have overshadowed this particular novel. I was drawn to it primarily as it is not only written in the first person but Dolores tells her story entirely in her own dialogue as she’s being interviewed by two police officers. I might just be able to tell a story in one character’s dialogue for the duration of a short story, but to do this over an entire novel where you have to rachet up the tension and suspense, believe me, takes some doing.

Dolores, who is in her sixties, is taken in for questioning over the suspicious death of her employer, Vera Donovan. Although Dolores and Vera had their differences, Dolores is adamant that she didn’t kill Vera. Dolores does have a confession to make but it’s not about Vera, it’s about Joe, her husband, who died back in 1963.

As well as admiring the way this tale is told, I found the voice of Dolores particularly effective. Housekeeper would be too grand a title for what Dolores does for Mrs Donovan – she’s more like a cleaner and general dogsbody and although I know next to nothing about how such a person from an island off Maine might speak, I’m convinced by Dolores’s speech patterns and dialogue. Here is Dolores explaining what it’s like to be poor: ‘With Joe out of the pitcher and no money coming in, I was in a fix, I can tell you – I got an idear there’s no one in the whole world feels as desperate as a woman on her own with kids dependin on her.’

King tells it like it is for the struggling and the down-trodden and in this era of celebrity-obsessed culture, Dolores Claiborne is a masterclass in how to write meaningful and compelling characters.

Kindle Singles: Short Formats on Amazon

 

When I first heard the name Kindle Singles, I thought that it was Amazon’s foray into the dating business – a place, perhaps where bookish nerds, fed up with just their e-readers for company, could hook up. 

 

But I am being flippant here, and Kindle Singles isn’t merely a lonely hearts club, but a far more serious initiative, where anyone can submit original, quality work of a length of 5000 to 30,000 words. Amazon has spotted a gap in the market as these word lengths fit somewhere between the space limitations for magazines and journals and the longer format of print books.  For the few remaining outlets that still exist for the print publication of short stories, for example, you still have to write to a word length.  But because of space constraints the limit even for literary fiction is 5000 words.  But if you want to write a longer piece you really didn’t have anywhere to send it to – until now.

 

And of course, many of the writing competitions or journals that still publish short stories want either chick lit and women’s fiction or literary fiction.  If your work doesn’t fit into either of these categories then your options were limited.  

 

Kindle Singles is work that is commissioned and has to, therefore, go through a selection process.  You can submit a written pitch, a manuscript, as well as a recent self-published ebook, provided that you have published via their Kindle Direct Publishing platform.  This can be fiction, essays, memoirs or personal narratives.  At the time of writing the genres that Amazon were not accepting are children’s books, how-to manuals, public domain works, reference books and travel guides. 

 

So to all of you writers out there, who may have shorter pieces of writing languishing about, all dressed up with nowhere to publish them, why not give Kindle Singles a shot?

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000700491

 

 

 

 

 

The Hilarious Hypocrisy of Jonathan Franzen

The Hilarious Hypocrisy of Jonathan Franzen.

Such a good piece I had to reblog it!

Review of After the Rising by Orna Ross

After the Rising is a part coming of age story, part historical novel, dealing as it does with the Irish Civil War in the 1920s.  Told from the point of view of Jo Devereux in the present and the letters, diaries and journals of her female relatives filling in the narrative in the 1920s, it is an ambitious, epic of a novel.

 

Jo is charged with writing the family history over the three generations but when she gradually uncovers the secrets of the past she is confronted by the knowledge that she too is as much part of the story as the earlier generations and so can scarcely be objective.  No wonder she struggles with writer’s block…..

 

I don’t have anyone left alive now to ask about the impact of the Irish Civil War on my own family as by then both of my Irish great uncles had already been killed in the First World War.  And so After the Rising is an important book for me as it goes some way towards explaining what the conflict meant to ordinary people. Families who might have lived amicably, side by side were torn apart because of their politics and the repercussions felt down the generations.    

 

The characters in this book are so vivid that they seem to leap off the page and that is, I think, due to the ear for language and idiom.

 

After the Rising is beautifully written with carefully chosen words that are as precise as the word selection in a poem. I particularly admired the description of the sea in this sentence: ‘For weeks they’d had an east wind with the waves hurrying to the shore with veils of spray blown back, like an army of angry brides.’

 

The other aspect of After the Rising that really resonated with me was Jo’s experience at convent boarding school.  I’ve done my best to forget mine but the passages that describe the relentless routine brought it all back.  Like Jo, I too had to ‘go to one of the secret places I have hunted down,’ just to get some privacy.

 

I found After the Rising at times tragic at times funny, witty and warm.  

 

Who’s telling the story? Switching point of view

Struggling to find my way back in to the story of Nighthawks after the summer break, I knew there was something wrong but I couldn’t quite work out what it was.  I had a premise, a plausible situation and an okay plot, as well as tension between two characters.  But something was missing. The story was patchy – strong in some parts but lacking authenticity in others.  To me it seemed that it was coming across as phony.  And like many a writer when faced with a similar problem, I set the story aside and got on with another writing project: drafting the screenplay of a short film, I’m currently collaborating on.

 

While I was writing that screenplay, (if you’re not familiar with this genre, a screenplay is always written in the present simple): I began to consider that there might be a problem with point of view. With fiction, a writer can choose to tell their story in any number of different ways, but as a novelist with only one book, I’ve stuck to the third person, almost as a default setting. 

 

Although I do admire those first-time novelists who manage to write an entire book in the first person, I know that I would come unstuck at some point, as the narrator has to be in every scene.  And I know there would be times when I would struggle with that. As far as I’m concerned, the place to experiment with point of view is in a short story first, before attempting to tackle an entire novel.

 

At around the same time that I was getting to the heart of what wasn’t working in the new book, I came across a piece of writing advice from best selling author Deborah Moggach, (Tulip Fever) and Pulitzer prize winner, Jhumpa Lahiri. Writing in The Daily Telegraph in May, Moggach’s writing tips include this: ‘if you have a character who stubbornly refuses to come alive, switch to the first person.’

 

So I hadn’t considered switching point of view before now, as Moggach suggests, in order to revive a flagging story.  Because once you’ve managed to breathe life back into the character that you are struggling with – you can always switch back.  As writers we tend to work in isolation and it hadn’t occurred to me that there were other writers out there with the same problem. So I was intrigued to read Jhumpa Lahiri writing in The Guardian, explaining how even she had to set aside several of her short stories for several years before she found a way to tell them.  The story “Once in a Lifetime,” found in her collection, Unaccustomed Earth had both a premise and tension between the two characters, Kaushik and Hema.  But, according to the author, even though the characters were real there was a problem with the way the story was structured.  Seven years later, Lahiri realised that if she switched the third person narration and instead have Hema tell the story to Kaushik then she would at last find a way to bring it back to life. 

 

In the case of Nighthawks I found I was able to write the sections that feature the characters from Revolution Earth, but was struggling with the characters I’d introduced in the new book.  It’s taken a few weeks for it to sink in but the reason for this is fairly simple – I just don’t know these new characters as well as I do Cara, Stephen, Ginny and Tariq.  Telling a story from a different point of view might sound like an absurdly simplistic piece of writing advice but it’s one that sounds like it just might work.  And I’m going to give it a try and report back.

 

Of course, if you want to see how far you can push the boundaries with different viewpoints, there’s no better teacher than that master storyteller of suspense, Stephen King. Dolores Claiborne, for instance, is narrated entirely in dialogue, as Dolores tells her version of events of Vera Donovan’s death to her police interrogator. You have to be in the right mood to read King, (not home alone at night), as he’s not to everyone’s taste, as many of his most compelling characters are evil, unreliable narrators.  But despite all the unpleasantness, once he has you hooked, you just can’t put one of his books down.  And surely, that’s what every writer is hoping to achieve, isn’t it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breaking Bad: Is Walter White the greatest monster on TV?

 

According to Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, Walter White is a man having the worst mid-life crisis. Ever.  He’s certainly having a bad hair day – after all those chemicals and bouts of radiation that he’s having pumped into his system. You know, those kill-or-cure treatments that his teacher’s health insurance policy won’t pay for…. If ever there was a poster boy for Obama Care, Walter White must be it. 

 

Breaking Bad is currently gripping viewers in the US but if you want to watch it in the UK, you have to either view it on Netflix, blinkbox or buy the series on DVD. I expect that many of you reading this will have seen way more of the series than I have.  At the time of writing I am still on Season Two.  But, given the dearth of decent TV on during the summer holidays, it won’t be long before I catch up.

 

Is Walter the greatest monster, currently on TV? I thought that, until a friend pointed out, that before Walter, the greatest anti-hero on TV was Tony Soprano, from The Sopranos, also from HBO. Walt, in his alter ego as Heisenberg is as violent towards the people who cross him as Tony is. While Tony physically abuses women (a particularly disturbing aspect of his character); Walt’s abuse is psychological.  He treats his wife Skylar with contempt: manipulates her, and lies to her face, while telling her he loves her.  There is a turning point in Season Two when Skylar asks Walt about whether or not he has a second mobile phone. And what does he do? He looks at her tenderly and then proceeds to lie through his teeth.

 

Like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Breaking Bad is a story for its time, broadcast during the longest recession of recent times. It mirrored the collective gloom and struck a chord with those supporting families and struggling to make ends meet.

 

Walt and Skylar’s economic fortunes were perilous at best, as their son, Walt Junior has cerebral palsy and he will no doubt need care and support for the rest of his life.  Walt is forced to take a particularly humiliating second job at a car wash, where his students bring their cars for him to clean. Then the family are hit by the double whammy of an unplanned baby and Walt’s lung cancer.

 

Walt’s transformation from mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher to Heisenberg, meth cook and then drug overlord evolves gradually. The term ‘breaking bad’  is a euphemism from the American South, when a person steps off the path of the straight and narrow and goes astray.  In Walter’s case he’s gone so far off the right path that there is no turning back.  Or is there?

 

The implied justification for Walt’s bad behaviour has been the need to pay his medical bills and provide for his wife and family after he’s dead.  Even Jessie, Walt’s co-cook, sidekick and partner-in-crime believes this. And Walt never corrects him, despite every opportunity to do so. Because if Jessie knew the truth, he might not be so keen to spend hours at a time, locked away in the middle of nowhere, with a monster.

 

Because if what Walt is doing is really about the money, he would have accepted the offer from his friends Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz to pay for his treatment. After all, this would have been what Walt was owed, anyway; as he co-founded their company, Gray Matter Technologies. When Walt he left the company he sold his share for a measly $5000, when Gretchen and Elliott subsequently went on to make a fortune.

 

Vince Gilligan said, in a recent interview on Channel 4 News, that Walt’s diagnosis is the real motivating factor, as, for the first time in his life Walt has freedom from fear.  The worst is going to happen – and soon. So why waste what time he has left by worrying what people think? And in Season Two, when Walt counsels his brother-in-law, suffering a bout of work related post-traumatic stress (indirectly caused by Heisenberg’s antics), Walt tells Hank that his own diagnosis has been incredibly liberating. Before he knew about his cancer, Walt would like awake at night, worrying about how he’d meet his mortgage payments or what people thought of him.  Oh, how deliciously ironic it is, when Walt tells Hank he should stop worrying about the responsibilities of being a DEA agent.

 

In a perverse kind of a way, Walt is an aspirational role model for men, in particular, going through their own mid-life crisis, during these tough economic times.  The aspiration is, about being able to do bad things, rather than wanting to emulate Walt’s life style. He’s not exactly able to enjoy the fruits of his ill-gotten gains, is he? You don’t see Walt swanning by the pool in the Caribbean, sipping on a mojito.  I don’t imagine that the chance to cook up crystal meth in a RV in the middle of a sweltering New Mexico desert is on many bucket lists.  It certainly isn’t on mine.

 

Where Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables

 

When I look at this photograph of Victor Hugo’s writing room, the Crystal Room in Hauteville House, St Peter Port, Guernsey, I find it hard to imagine that these surroundings inspired such a dark, literary work as Les Misérables.  But of course, Hugo, who was forced to flee his French home in 1851 to live in exile firstly in Jersey, then for fifteen years in Guernsey, although surrounded by light was responding to what he saw as the dark heart of French society at the time.  Les Misérables was published in1862 and by the time he was finally able to return to France after a political pardon, Hugo had written some of his best works while living in exile.

 

Although Hugo was estranged from his homeland during his time on the Channel Islands and he must have suffered as a result of that as well as coping with the loss of two of his children, who had pre-deceased him; Hugo it must be said, was at least able to lead a very comfortable, bourgeois existence while in Guernsey.  Not only did Victor Hugo’s wife and family accompany him into exile, so too did his lover, the French actress Juliette Drouet, who gave up her career to be with him.

 

Hugo’s writing had already made him rich by the time he arrived on Guernsey and bought Hauteville House, now at least, in one of the most desirable areas of St Peter Port. Hugo spent many years completely remodelling the house and it stands today as one of the most idiosyncratic houses I have ever visited.

 

It is stuffed full of ornate, dark furniture with quirky features, including a recycled door turned into a table, hidden doors behind dark, ornate panelling, a memento mori over the bedhead in the guest bedroom (of all places) and his original writing room so dark and gloomy that even Victor Hugo found it was too dark to work in and had to abandon it for the delightful light-filled room you see in the photograph. 

 

The other photographs you can see here are of Fermain Bay and the surrounding area, which was one of Hugo’s favourite places to walk. There is a cliff path that takes you there from St Peter Port, which twists and turns through forest and then drops away sharply to reveal the stunning rocky coastline on what is one of the most delightful spots on the island. 

 

More photographs of Hauteville House can be found at: http://www.visitguernsey.com/victor-hugos-guernsey

 

 

 

 

 

The Chase by Lorna Fergusson

Lorna Fergusson’s The Chase is a complex, dark and sometimes claustrophobic story of a couple whose dysfunctional marriage is way past its sell-by date.  The novel is skilfully written, bold and ambitious for a first novel. But Fergusson obviously honed her craft by writing short stories and is a former winner of the prestigious short story prize – the Ian St James Award.

 

The only thing that Netty and Gerald still have in common is a shared sense of loss over a terrible tragedy to befall the family, five years previously.

 

In his boorish, blustering way, Gerald buys a gloomy house in the Dordogne (or as it is unkindly known, Dordogneshire), as pre-Euro and the current recession, the area attracted a large number of Brits who could afford second homes or who sold up and started a new life there. 

 

I’m guessing the book is set around the mid 1990s (although there is no reference in the book to the wider world in either Britain or France) but I figured it would have to be around this time – just as the economy in the UK has picked up enough for Gerald to sell his plumbing manufacturing company in England for a killing and head off to a blissful retirement in France. 

 

As someone who used to help expats relocate to their idea of utopia, those who left their home country to run away from something (like Gerald and Netty) were the least likely to settle; as sadly, no matter how hard you try to leave your  emotional baggage behind, it has a habit of catching up with you.  

 

Netty’s characterisation is bold, complex and so realistic that I had to take breaks while reading The Chase as she is so realistic that she reminded me too much of self-absorbed and manipulative types who, by refusing to take control of their own lives can then go and blame everyone else for how awful their lives seem to be.  And in Netty’s case, the terrible tragedy happened to her entire family but as she sees it, it’s only her feelings that count. 

 

Netty has a troubled relationship with her grown up children and is particularly critical of her adult daughter Lynda, whose crime was to inherit her father’s forceful personality. You do wonder what it was that Netty ever saw in Gerald in the first place – apart that is as an old-fashioned provider or that she ‘enjoyed the sense of his protection, a bulwark against social fire and flood.’  Netty seems to take no interest in her grandchildren either, which is curious. Her relationship with her son Paul seems to be better than it is with Lynda, although she even turns on him when she reveals that she doesn’t love her children equally and unconditionally, when he bares his soul to her about his sexuality.

 

Netty does have a pang of guilt over the way she reacted to Paul’s revelation but is not honest enough with herself to admit the real reason for her reaction – that she was in competition with her son – and she lost. And as we know, hell hath no fury….

 

Only a writer of this calibre could sustain a story about such unpleasant characters in the way that Fergusson does and she does so with brio. The story within the story – of the history of the house and the area is brilliantly done and I was particularly interested in the art historical aspects of the cave paintings. And although I’ve never been to the Dordogne, the detail of the research is evident.

 

A brilliantly observed story of the disintegration of a marriage.