Sally Harris's Blog, page 2

Something I never realised about choosing a title for your novel

One of my absolute favourite things about writing is choosing a title for a new novel. (My other love is naming characters and places.) In fact, I love coming up with titles so much that I’ve realised that the plots for all of my stories have been inspired by me thinking up a title I really like first. Once I have a title I’m excited about, I then think about the plot of a book with that title. Weird, I know, but that is how it works for me.

Something that I never realised about choosing a title for your character driven novel is that there are really two kinds of titles – those that work for theme driven stories and those that work for identity driven stories.  My stories are all really about the character’s identity – Diary of a Penguin-napper, Ruby Marvellous, and Double Felix. All of these titles give hints to the identity of the protagonist.

I recently came across these examples on well-storied.com that illustrate the difference between the two beautifully:

CHARACTER-DRIVEN NOVEL TITLES (THEME):

Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion by Jane Austen
If I Stay by Gayle Forman
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Voices by Ursula Le Guin
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

CHARACTER-DRIVEN NOVEL TITLES (PROTAGONIST’S NAME OR IDENTITY):

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Carrie by Stephen King
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
Finniken of the Rock by Melina Marchetta
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
The Healer’s Apprentice by Melanie Dickerson

See the difference? Of course, not every character driven story will fit this mold and that is totally okay too.  A well-written story wins every time – a great title just helps attract readers to it. And don’t panic if you don’t have a character driven story and instead have a story that is largely drive by plot. Kristen at well-storied.com has you covered too. Read her post here.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing

“These are the rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story.”  —Elmore Leonard

I was listening to The Bestseller Experiment this week and one of the two Marks mentioned Elmore Leonard and his ten rules of writing.  I looked up these rules and they’re great, although I’m definitely guilty of breaking one or two of them from time to time. (Like just now, I had to go back and remove and overenthusiastic exclamation point from that last sentence. I do get points for having never opened a book with the weather or a prologue, but lose many for my ardour for using adverbs alongside the verb “said”.)

This article from Brainpickings expands on these rules far better than I ever could or you could always read Leonard’s book on the subject.

Double Felix is in the Spring 2018 Children’s Buyer’s Guide

Did you spot Double Felix in the new Spring 2018 Children’s Buyer’s Guide from @_thebookseller ?

Double Felix is in Books for Keeps

So excited to be included in the January 2018 edition of Books for Keeps (Edition 228) 

Thanks for the mention, Queen Bee Louise!

Books that will change your writing life: Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies

My love for all things Gretchen Rubin has only grown stronger over time.

Whilst I enjoyed her New York Times Bestselling book The Happiness Project, my favourites amongst her books would have to Better Than Before and The Four Tendencies (and to say this book has changed my life would not be an exaggeration.) The first of these titles is about habits – how we form them and how we change them – and the latter is about the different ways that different people response to both inner and outer expectations.

What her books (and listening to her podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin) have to offer writers is this: when we know ourselves better we are able to ask more from ourselves.

There are lots of practical strategies that can easily be applied to writing from Gretchen’s books.

Some of my favourites include:

Scheduling: Making an actual appointment in your diary is a great way of making sure you setting time aside to write.
Pairing: Put together two things that can only be done together. For example, you only get to have your morning cup of coffee if you’re sitting at your desk doing your words.
Monitoring: Have a way of tracking your progress. This might be a word count tally or a calendar where you are trying not to break the chain.
Convenience: Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong. Don’t plan on writing at the coffee shop across town as having to get there can be inconvenient. Instead, choose the closest one to your house or go for the library that is slightly further away but that has the easiest parking.
Know yourself: I’m an Obliger so I need outer accountability to really get things done. Knowing this has meant, for example, that I will now ask my publisher, editor or mentor for a specific deadline for when they need a task complete. This makes it a priority on my list of tasks as I feel very accountable to others.

A most excellent gift for the writer in your life

I checked the mailbox today and was surprised to find, tucked in amongst the flyers advertising takeaway and the slimy trails left by your average garden variety snail, a small parcel in there addressed to me. Better still, it wasn’t a parcel I was expecting. Those are the best kind of parcels.

This parcel had come all of the way from my publisher, Wacky Bee, in the UK as a special Christmas treat and included a lovely Christmas card and possibly the coolest pencils I have ever received. They’re Storyteller Pencils and include some of the best opening lines for stories ever.

And they are definitely the big hint I needed to get started on my next book!

Super affordable proofreading

It is so hard to see the errors in your own writing. You can read something ten times and not see a glaring mistake in the first line.  When I read back over my early drafts, I cringe when I find the mistakes. This is particularly so when I know that I’ve sent that exact draft off to a publisher or agent in the hope of publication.  It makes me feel a bit sick thinking about people that I want to impress reading my work and coming away thinking that I’m a moron (or at the very least a very careless person!) for all of the mistakes it is riddled with. When I was first starting out as a writer, it never occurred to me that it might be a worthwhile investment to get my work proofread before sending it through to an agent or publisher.  I figured that if they were interested in taking on my work, all of the proofreading and editing would be provided.  Why should I bother paying for it? Nowadays, I wouldn’t send anything out without having it thoroughly checked first.  Getting a manuscript proofread by a professional makes sense to me now. I want to send my work through looking as good as it possibly can do and part of that means forking out a little bit for editing up front. The only problem with this is that my budget doesn’t extend very far.  At all. Late in 2013, I used Fiverr to fund the illustrations for Ruby Marvellous. This was easily the most affordable way to get high quality, unique, hand drawn illustrations with a fast turnaround time. It worked so well for me and it has been a site that I have been recommending ever since. Today I put the finishing touches on a short story, which is part of a series I’ve been working on over the summer break.  I think it is ready to show a publisher, but as I only just finished writing it, I know that it will need someone with fresh eyes to look over it before I send it off. Enter Fiverr – again.  For $5, I am getting my early draft of 1500 words edited and proofread by ‘Mr Proofreading’. (I even upgraded to a 24 hour turnaround for $10, bring the total cost of the proofreading to $15 or $1 per 100 words!)  He comes highly recommended by previous clients – 2355 people have reviewed his services and he has maintained a 5 star rating. I’m looking forward to receiving my draft back tomorrow with his feedback/corrections (and, at that price, my bank account is going to be super happy with me too!)

Update (Not even 24 hours later):  I received my draft back and the feedback was accurate and thorough.  I received a ‘Finished Clean’ copy with all of the suggested changes made and a ‘Highlighted’ version that showed what changes had been made. That’s a big thumbs up for Mr Proofreading! So worth it!

Filed under: Writing

If it is broken … fix it!

In the last few weeks I’ve received a few comments from readers about my website.

1. Almost every link to every different page and categories wasn’t working.

2. My Twitter feed has been acting oddly and tweeting the same link.

Completely weird and highly annoying.  So it has taken me a while but I think I’ve managed to work out the problems.  The first problem is with the theme I was using – ProPhoto 4.  I loved this theme and it served me well, but there was no way I was going to fork out more money to upgrade to ProPhoto 5 (as the original version wasn’t exactly cheap).  Sure, it looked great, but as someone trying to turn a (very small) profit as a writer, every dollar counts.  Wordpress.org and Bluehost kept wanting me to upgrade the theme and I thought I could get away without doing it. However, the most recent WordPress.org upgrade started causing the problems with the pages not linking up and I decided that the easiest (and cheapest) way to fix the problem would be to jump ship back to WordPress.com.  The site you are seeing right now is totally free, cheerfully bright and I’m ok with it all. And it works – win!

As the solution to the second problem, I disconnected my Twitter account, then reconnected it and turned off my ‘Tweet Old Posts’ plugin for a while.  At least until I have some new posts here to tweet about and then I’ll get back onto it.   I haven’t really been engaged with Twitter for the past few months and that is something I’d like to change in 2015.

So, this is the new Frankly Books site and at this stage, it will be looking this way for 2015.  What do you think?  Is there anything you can’t find?  Any problems you can see?  Let me know!

Filed under: ODDS & ENDS

Self-Printed Splash!

I’ve been a massive fangirl of Catherine Ryan Howard for the past three years.  She is a the reason that I eventually decided to set up Frankly Books and pursue this whole “self-publishing” caper. And, if I’m being really honest, she is the reason that my books have sold so well.  Her book Self-Printed (the original edition) made self-printing seem achievable, made me think about the whole thing in a different light AND took me through the whole process step-by-step.  It was the best money I spent in the whole experience.

In short, when it comes to publishing a book yourself, Catherine’s Self-Printed is the bible and if you think you can self-publish a high quality book that will look just like the ‘real thing’ and that people will actually want to buy without reading Catherine’s book first, then you are kind of like the characters in Jurassic Park who thought that the dinosaurs would never turn against them.  In short: you need this book.

Today I’m super chuffed to be taking part in Catherine’s Self-Printed Splash, to celebrate the release of the third edition of her book.

To celebrate the release of the third edition of her book Self-Printed, Catherine Ryan Howard opened up her email inbox to eager self-printers to answer their  burning self-publishing questions.

My question for Catherine was: What is your best suggestion/tool/go to site/wildly outrageous idea for promoting children’s fiction?

And her response?

It’s not even slightly outrageous, but I do think video is the way to go for promoting children’s books. Children love YouTube, and parents love navigating to YouTube on their iPads and then handing them to the children to keep them quiet. There’s lots of cartoons and education videos for them to watch, songs to sing along with, lullabies and, of course, story time! You can easily make your own story time video by setting your webcam to record and then reading aloud from your book in your best storytelling voice. You could even subtitle the video so they can read along. I’ve said before that when you create something that promotes your book, it must stand on its own even when you take away the promotion. A story-telling video would do that – take away the fact that you want people to buy your book, and you still have a story-telling video. You can also share the videos on your website and Twitter. That’s what I’d recommend. 

Love it!  For more excellent nuggets of information just like this, get yourself a copy of Self-Printed 3.0.  Seriously

Filed under: Guest Posts, Publishing

Ruby Marvellous Book Site

Did you know that Ruby Marvellous actually has its own book website?  This was something new I tried when I released this book back in November 2013.  The site has recently been updated and includes lots of interesting new information and activities.  There are even some new never-before-seen illustrations of the characters and information about how they got their names!  Check it out at www.rubymarvellous.com

Here is a sneak peek …

Filed under: ODDS & ENDS