Heather James's Blog, page 52

Fantasy Worlds

Do you prefer fantasy stories set in an entirely fantasy world, or ones in the real world with a fantasy twist?
This is a question I've been thinking about a lot recently and I posted it on a fantasy writers group on google+, where it got a fairly balanced response. Most people seemed to like writing about both, but there was a common consensus on the need for familiarity and real-world elements in every fantasy story.
I love the way that Cassandra Clare includes real world references in her books, particularly Simon's pop culture references, which are often completely lost on Jace and the other Shadowhunters. We, the reader, feel that we understand something  the fantasy characters doesn't and can laugh a little at their expense.
“Kyle wants to be a rockstar. I think he's working the one-name thing. Like Rihanna." [Simon]"I have no idea what you're talking about.”  [Jace]― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels
“Thank you,” Simon said. “It’s a joke, Isabelle. He’s the Count. He likes counting. You know. ‘What did the Count eat today, children? One chocolate chip cookie, two chocolate chip cookies, three chocolate chip cookies . . .’”
There was a rush of cold air as the door of the restaurant opened, letting in another customer. Isabelle shivered and reached for her black silk scarf. “It’s not realistic.”
“What would you prefer? ‘What did the Count eat today, children? One helpless villager, two helpless villagers, three helpless villagers . . .” ― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels 
I love these moments; they make the books even more amazing. 
Clare also has to come up with clever solutions for keeping her 'real world' and 'fantasy world' separate; the glamour of the Sadowhunter buildings, for example. A similar technique is used by one of my/everyone's favourite authors, JK Rowling. I can't imagine Harry Potter being half as good if it didn't have that 'real world' grounding . I love that we discover the Wizarding world along with Harry; it makes Rowling's descriptions and explanations more authentic.
On the other hand, I adore the sheer scale and detail of George RR Martin's 'Song of Fire and Ice' series. These books, I believe, are fantasy at its finest. Everything has been carefully thought about and vividly depicted. Martin overlooks nothing and the strength of his world really brings his characters and plots to life.
Fire is set in a completely fictional world. While I was writing, this was something I had to constantly remind myself: my characters couldn't say 'what the hell' because they had no concept of hell. I had to make my own phrases instead: 'flames' is a prevalent Helian swear word and the Arcans say 'what the air?' a fair bit. I also had to edit out problematic words like 'stoic' - unless I had wanted to come up with my own version of Helian philosophy...
Another thing I had to put a lot of thought into was animals. Should my world have the same animals as the real world, or its own? I decided that creating a whole set of new animals would be unnecessarily complicated for a reader to follow. Instead, I used a few mythical ones and Greek or Latin variations on the names of ones  that actually existed, just to keep things different.
For the most part though, creating my own world was an amazing experience. I could invent anything I wanted. My world has two suns,  its own, unique geography and a colourful history of wars and politics, as well as new forms of transport in the Arcan Realm.
I would love to hear your views on completely invented worlds Vs contemporary fantasy and also (once you've read the book) you're opinions on the world I have created. 

Reviews

Two days, two 4-star reviews!

I am overwhelmed by the amazing response Fire is getting and I am pleased that readers are enjoying it as much as me. It's always nerve wracking to hear what other people think, but so far it has all be brilliant.

I have now added a review page to the top bar, with links to the reviews and a couple of my favourite quotes. If you're thinking about reading Fire, but want to know what others think first, check them out.

Just as exciting was Caroline Lawrence (author of the amazing Roman Mysteries series) tweeting about my book! I can't even begin to put into words how happy this made me; it was amazing.

Buy for free Now!

Fire is currently available to download for free as an epub at smashwords! 
This offer will only be available for a couple of days, so download it now!
click here
epubs can be read with Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions and more. 

Blogs, blogs and more blogs

That's right, I have spent the last few days tirelessly searching for blogs that would be open to reviewing Fire. The thing is, I love it, my friends love it, the few friends-of-friends who have now read it love it. But what I really need is for people not connected to me in any way to love it. Preferably people who will be able to promote it to other readers...

Saying that, I did manage to build up a pretty big readership on Wattpad. I posted the first eleven chapters on there and got lots of great feedback; within a week Fire made it into the top ten fantasy stories, which was amazing.

However, all this blog-approaching has given me another problem: to KPD Select, or to not KPD Select... For those of you who don't know, KPD Select is Amazon's 'deluxe account'. It's free to join and it allows you to offer your book for free (5 days in every 90...) and enrolls your book in the Kindle Lending Library. In return, you give Amazon exclusivity. I do plan on only selling my book via Amazon, however, to get reviews (and thus more readers), I need to be able to give my book to bloggers. As far as I have been able to work out from reading the forum posts on select, giving your book away for free violates the exclusivity.

It seems a little extreme to sign up, then bombard bloggers with emails telling them that, if they would like to read and review my book, they need to download it from amazon on a particular date (although that would boost sales figures...) It's just too much hassle for them, which is fair enough, when I'm the one requesting the review.

Instead, I'm contacting as many blogs as I can now, giving a copy to anyone who will take it (seriously, if you're interested, email me!) then in a week or so, I'll enroll in select, so that I can give it away for free to everyone.

If you have any thoughts on this (or experience) please comment below, I would love to hear them.

Day 2

Yesterday was amazing. I spent the day seeing Fire on Amazon, getting my first sales and telling as many people as I possibly could that I have published my first book. One of the highlights was definitely having my profile on Goodreads upgraded, so that I am now listed as an author, as well as seeing Fire on the site.

I was also kept really busy updating every online profile I have with information about the book and links to this blog. You can check out my various accounts on the links page.

On that note, if there is anything you think this site is missing, or anything you would like more information on, please comment on this post and I will look into adding it.

Right now, I had better get back to promoting!

Available to buy now...

It's up! I searched for my name and it appeared - best feeling in the world.

Check it out here

The first four and a bit chapters are available as a free sample, so at least give it a try!

Published!

Fire is (self) published!

Or, at least, I've clicked go on Amazon - now I'm just waiting for it to appear on the site! I'm really struggling to contain my excitement at the moment and am joyfully updating my status/description on every site I'm on with my new credentials.

And look how awesome the cover is! I just hope that it comes out as well in small on Amazon - that was one of the things it was really hard to judge during the process.


The end was also a little anti-climatic - I hadn't really appreciated that I was clicking the final 'save and publish' option until it told me that it would be appearing on the site in 12 hours.

It wasn't as easy a process as I had been expecting either, mostly because whenever I converted my book to HTML (so that I could then convert it into an Epub) the formatting kept changing. And I really didn't fancy being the only author on Amazon with spaces between their paragraphs rather than an indent, or hyphens instead of em dashes. It just wouldn't have looked professional.

But anyway, I'm off to update Goodreads and bake a celebratory cake. I will post a link as soon as there is one!

Preparing to Publish

I'm nearly there...

This week, I've been working hard to get 'Fire' ready for publication. I've given it a final read through, to make sure that there's no errors (fingers crossed I've got them all...)

I've also been putting a cover together. The hardest part, by far, of this, was working out what it was actually feasible to do. I didn't want to buy a stock image, as then the same photo could appear on any other book. There was an image of a girl on fire, that I found on Pinterest and would have loved to use, but I couldn't find the source anywhere. I also don't know anyone who looks remotely close to how I image Roxy or Jasmine. Instead, I enlisted the help of my brother, sister and fiance and got creative. My brother got a new DSLR camera for Christmas and I got him to take photos of my sister and I with our hands, outstretched, in focus, and the rest of us blurred (since neither of us look right for the characters...) My fiance then fired up the chiminea (in the very cold garden...) so that we could take our own pictures of the flames.

Once we had sorted out the images, I opened up Photoshop to try and turn them into something remotely professional looking. I'm quite pleased with the outcome. It was by no means my first, second or even third attempt, but I got there in the end, with a lot of really supportive and constructive feedback from my family.

However, my next issue was that the cover looked to bare: most books have series titles, tag lines or quotes from other authors on the front. Since the last option was definitely out and I'm not sure that I was to advertise Fire as the first in a series on the front cover, we decided that I needed to come up with a tag line.

Cue hours of brainstorming, a lot of cliches and (again) lots and lots of help from my family and we came up with something which suited the book and sounded intriguing: Is Control over the elements a gift, or a curse? I liked this because it links to both protagonists, isn't too girly and (hopefully) engages the reader.

Maybe I'll post some of the funnier, rejected options next time. I'll also include a copy of the cover; I only had a copy of the Photoshop file on my laptop - I need to work out what format Amazon need it in so that I can save it as something else.

Only a few days until publication!

Kindle here I come...

So following the receipt of not one, but 6 identical rejection emails from the same agent, I have decided that it is time to try self-publishing.

I may not have exhausted all of my agency options yet, but I have been rejected by all that I applied to. It's not that I find the rejections too demoralising - I know that it's a very subjective industry and that countless authors were rejected many times before being published. I have a great quote by Eva Ibbotson:
"the only thing is to keep on writing and forget about the response"So I know not to let the rejections upset me too much. 
What I find more frustrating, is the delay between sending my work off and getting the rejection. I know that if I send my opening and synopsis out to any more agents, I would be waiting nearly two months for a response, and - best case scenario - that would be for the complete manuscript. I would then have to wait for feedback on that and, if the agency liked it, I would then have to wait even longer for them to contact publishers...
Maybe I'm just being too impatient, but I've already been sitting on my complete manuscript for a year and I'm really ready to do something with it! 
So I am turning to Amazon...
This way, it gets published immediately, I get 70% royalties, and - with the recent success of books like 'Beautiful Disaster' I know that amazing things can come from self-publishing. Admittedly, I think my goal is 100 sales... 
All I need to do now is give the manuscript a final read through and create a cover...

Map Reading Skills Required...

Despite my incessant need to turn up to everything 15 minutes before expected, I managed to be late for interview H. Why? Because I got lost. In central London. With a map.

This is clearly not good.

I had to ask three people for directions and do a lot of running in high heels (which led to blisters and rather sore legs!) I don't even want to think about how silly I must have looked. Even worse, when I came out of the interview and tried to get my bearings, I realised that I must have walked straight past the office to begin with, just on the other side of the road...

Despite turning up about a minute late, then being sent to the wrong floor in the elevator, I think the interview itself went well. I managed to answer all of their questions at any rate and they seemed interested in my time at Avon (which is a plus since it was a Sales job).

Throughout the week my mum had kept asking me if I knew who their major competitors were. I did, but having gone to seven interviews without it being asked, I thought it was unlikely to come up. It did. Turns out Mum's are sometimes worth listening to.

Interview I was the very next day, which meant putting the (rather painful) shoes back on and heading back up to London. This interview was for an internship with a Literary Agency. A very small agency. So small that it's run out of the agent's apartment. This definitely put me out of my comfort zone - it was my first (and probably only) interview to take place on a sofa in a living room, with a couple of other employees tapping away on laptops at the dining table behind me. One of the interviewers doodled me as I was talking, so that he could remember who I was afterwards.

I think I was a little thrown off by the setting, or maybe I just don't have a very good memory, since my mind kept going blank on names when I was being asked questions, which I am sure can't have looked very good, especially when a job at an agency is all about people and networking!

I haven't heard back so I'm assuming that I didn't get the internship, but I'm OK with that; it was unpaid, so would have actually ended up costing me money in travel. I really want a job, but I don't want to pay to work...

I should hear back about interview H either tomorrow or next week, when they will be arranging second interviews.

In other news, I didn't get long listed for the Young Writers Prize. I'm extremely disappointed about this, but they did send me out a very nice email and I am now spending my time looking up agencies and agents (if I don't hear back from Interview I, I'll send it there too!) I'm also going to redraft the first couple of chapters again and start putting them up on some creative writing forums to see if I can build up a readership and get some feedback.

Watch this space.