Guest post: Victorine -- Your indie-published book cover, Part Two

Last week we read the first half of Victorine Lieske 's guest post on Indie Book Covers: Three Seconds to Success or Failure. Vicki’s keen eye for detail and BIG success with her own indie published book put her in a prime position to offer the straight dope on creating your indie book cover. Today we have the second half of Vicki’s post:

Top six things to avoid when creating a book cover:

1. Sunrises, Oceans and Clouds – Pretty scenery is just that, pretty. It promises calm and relaxation. That’s okay if your book is about meditation, but most books should avoid the calm book cover. It’s what my friend Lisa Kovanda, the Nebraska Writer’s Guild President, always says. “It’s the happy people in the happy village.” Who wants to read about happy people? No one. Books need conflict. Your book cover should imply that also. Don’t make it look too bright and happy. Promise the reader conflict.

2. Poor Font Choices – Watch out for fonts that are too ornate. The buyer should be able to read the title in thumbnail size. If they can't, change the font. You also want to avoid fonts that have been overused. Google “Fonts to avoid,” and start a list. Make sure Papyrus and Comic Sans are at the top of your list.

3. Snapshots – Unless you are a professional photographer, you should avoid using photos you've taken yourself. Try looking on royalty free websites like photos.com or dreamstime.com.

4. Homemade Artwork – Again, if you're not a professional artist I suggest you avoid using homemade artwork. It usually isn’t successful.

5. Rainbow Gradients – Most of the time rainbow gradients look garish and unappealing. They also have a bit of a “happy people in the happy village” look to them. They’re too bright and colorful. Avoid them.

6. Obscure Objects – I swear sometimes a book cover is designed with the sole purpose to confuse me. Don't put something on the cover if you can't tell right away what it is. You've got three seconds. Don't mumble. Make sure your book cover speaks clearly.

My best advice is to get more eyes on your potential book cover. Ask your critique group if the cover works for them. (If you don't have a critique group, you may have more problems than just your cover design.) If the cover isn't working, you may want to hire a professional. There are many cover designers out there. You can find all kinds of artists and price ranges. A quick Google search for “Indie Book Cover Design” will give you lots of choices. Make your first impression count.

My heartfelt thanks to Vicki for sharing her views on my blog. I absolutely love these sentences: You've got three seconds. Don't mumble. Make sure your book cover speaks clearly.  And thank you, readers, for coming by.

Guest post: Victorine -- Your indie-published book cover, Part One

Today’s blog is aimed at people considering self-publishing. My guest poster is fellow Critique Circle member Victorine Lieske. (yay! whoop whoop!) Only a couple years ago, she self-published Not What She Seems on Amazon Kindle, then sold over 100,000 copies, and has signed with an agent. Vicki exemplifies the extremely helpful community of writers. Check out her blog at Victorine Writes.

Self-publishing is not the automatic stamp of “nobody wants my book so I have to publish it myself” it once was. Its respectability grows by leaps every month. I’m seriously considering going that route myself, so I asked Vicki about one of the many really important aspects of self-publishing. This week and next, she gives us her take on…..

Indie Book Covers: Three Seconds to Success or Failure

Employers decide within seven seconds if they want to hire you or not. If you give a good first impression, the rest of the interview is spent re-affirming that desire to hire you. If not, the rest of the time is spent trying to overcome their bias. I assert that the same is true for books, although I don’t think it takes a whole seven seconds. People decide almost immediately if they think they would like your book. If you don’t grab them in the first three seconds, you lose a sale.

People make assumptions about your book at first glance. If they don’t like your cover, they will assume they won’t like the text. If the cover looks sloppy, people will assume the book isn’t edited. If your cover communicates the wrong genre, people will assume the book isn't what they are looking for. Be sure your book cover is giving people the right impressions.

Mark Coker said something important when he came to speak at my local writer’s guild conference. He said, “A good book cover makes a promise to the reader.” He’s right. I’ll even take that further and say a bad book cover makes a promise to the reader also. You’re just promising the wrong things.

------> Come back next Saturday for Vicki’s list of six things to avoid when creating a book cover. Trust me, you will want to see that!

Guest post: Success is a multi-faceted word

A guest post from Kathy Bennett, who recently self-published her first book. I think everybody, non-writers included, can gain some inspiration from this tenacious lady :) Her post is a bit long, but it's worth the read. Those of us who think 'Oh my life is so busy, I'll never be able to get anything published, I don't have time to put into writing' will learn a thing or two.

I'm excited to help get the word out about her book. You can see the trailer for her novel on Youtube:  A Dozen Deadly Roses .
Kathy's blog is at www.kathybennett.com/blog/. Pay her a visit!


From LAPD Cop to Author

I was a police officer for the City of Los Angeles for twenty-one years.  The road to becoming a cop wasn’t easy.  I’m not a large person; I’m not very athletic, and not particularly intimidating.  I also had the disadvantage of starting my career at an ‘older’ age – my mid-thirties. 

But what I had going for me, was a strong determination and desire to make my dream of being an LAPD officer a reality.  After achieving that goal, and being named Officer of the Year in 1997, I needed a new challenge.  That’s how I became a writer.

I didn’t seriously start writing until 1998 – and then, I wasn’t very good.  I hadn’t learned my craft.  I attended writer’s conferences, took classes, entered writing contests, and used all those experiences to hone my skills.  I became a better writer, but still I floundered. 

Also in this time period, in addition to working 40-60 hours a week, I was the primary caregiver for my brother who’d suffered a major stroke and was left partially paralyzed.  While his care side-tracked my writing, I have never regretted the time I spent helping him to live out his life with dignity and as independently as possible.

In 2008, at the RWA National Conference, I met a writer who invited me to join her critique group.  This is where my writing career took a huge turn.  The critique group was invaluable in forcing me to write regularly.  They showed me my strengths and weaknesses, helping me fix wrong things while enhancing the right things in my writing.

I’d written a good story, and with the help of my critique group, A Dozen Deadly Roses started to garner attention on the contest circuit and from agents.  But I started hearing a lot about self-publishing.  I did some research, and the more I heard, the more I liked.  Two or three years ago, self-publishing your own book labeled a writer as someone who ‘couldn’t make it’, or as a ‘loser’.   The new e-readers allowed some authors to become successful and make good money. 

But, for me, there’s a bigger draw to self-publishing besides the possibility of making a lot of money.  The lure is the ability to control my own destiny.  I liked the idea if my book was a hit, it was due to my hard work.  If the book flopped, that was my responsibility too.

In June of this year, I self-published my debut novel, a romantic suspense, titled, A Dozen Deadly Roses.  The book’s been out about two weeks.  I’m pleased with the results.  I’ve received some marvelous reviews and made moderate sales.

But it wasn’t a solitary effort to provide my book to readers.  I hired a book editor, a book cover designer, and also someone to help format the book to e-reader standards.  This was money I shelled out prior to earning a dime.  But there’ve been many others who’ve helped make my writing dream a reality too.

I’m sure I’ll leave someone out, but they include my critique group, several beta readers, contest judges, writers, friends but most importantly, my family.  My daughter has been instrumental in listening, but mostly being a cheerleader – when I needed cheering the most.

Then there’s my husband.  The support from him is extraordinary.  I’ve spent a lot of money over the past thirteen years pursuing my dream of being a published author.  I’ve attended dozens of conferences, purchased numerous computers, writing classes, and countless supplies.  Through it all, he never flinches when I say I’m going to do A,B, or C or I’m going to buy X,Y, or Z.  He just smiles and asks when I’m going to make my first million.

I retired earlier this year from the LAPD to help take care of my mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.  But I’m also spending time these days promoting myself via social networking, blogging, teaching classes, and speaking at conferences.  I’m getting some writing done too.  I’m happy.  

While writing is not an easy career, I can do it because I’ve brought along a skill-set I used when becoming a cop – determination and desire.

Robert Kernen’s “Building Better Plots”, part 19

Exposition—that age-old demon who afflicts experienced writers as well as new ones. It’s like the stick that you realized was no good after all, so you threw it away. But look out! It’s a boomerang, and it whacked you in the noggin!

I see writers who haven’t shown their work to strangers much shovel in so much backstory and explanation that it reads more like stream of consciousness. I did it too, so I understand the impulse. Inexperienced writers seem convinced that readers need to know a whole bunch of stuff before they can fully appreciate the story. They don’t realize that when readers get caught up in a story, it’s because the plot—yes, this again—steadily moves forward. It doesn’t stop in the middle of running for your life, and say, “Well, pull up a chair, I want to tell you about the childhood of the guy who’s trying to kill you. And, well, about his parents’ upbringing too, because you can’t understand him without that.”

How about right now we run, and you talk later?

The idea of not dropping in chunks of backstory has been talked about in other places, so I won’t belabor it here. But I do like the way Kernen discusses it, so if you read his book, you won’t waste your time with this section. His main point, perhaps, is that in real life we get to know people gradually, often over a period of years. In fiction, you can mimic that by disclosing things about major characters a little at a time.

I am not fond of one thing he does: using “relevant revelations”.  Mentally I tripped over that a few times, and that interrupted the flow!

I do want to mention something else that Kernen touches on. Writing is not a straightforward depiction of reality. Even in a memoir, when you expect more realism than in fiction, you have to tweak *how* and *what* you say to fit the medium. Ever listen to somebody relating information in such a boring way that you covered up yawns as they droned on? You don’t want to make readers feel that way, because they’ll simply put your book down and leave it there.

My friend Ray writes plays. He doesn’t do comedies, but he is the funniest man east of the Mississippi. He can tell a story about the most dull and mundane thing, but spin it so you laugh so hard you literally can’t breathe. You have to make reality more interesting than it is. You have to compress some things, draw out others, talk about things from a different perspective.

What I like to say when I critique is, We write for readers, not other characters.

When I write a scene for the sheer fun of it, I let characters play freely off each other. I can follow the reasoning of their conversations, but people reading it would get lost in places. Every few days I work on the scene of Sandy’s wedding. It starts with him and Neal bouncing their particular quirks off each other. It helps me understand how both characters feel that day, but a lot of it wouldn’t go into a manuscript draft. Long sections *are only interesting to me*.

You gotta face it, champs. A story idea grabbed you, the characters burned themselves into your soul, and the whole thing won’t let you go. This is *good*, but nobody can feel it the way you do. So please, don’t drive potential readers crazy by telling them long paragraphs of stuff they really don’t care about.

It’s hard. I know. I am so in love with my characters that I could write hundreds of scenes without any plot at all and I’d still love it. But I won’t subject readers to that. Slowly, slowly, I’m learning to condense and delete. I don’t have to throw away that stuff because I do find it helpful, but look at it this way.

If you cut some stuff *from the manuscript* that helps you learn about your characters, the end product will look smooth as glass. Readers will think you were born with such an intuitive understanding of your characters and the writing process that writing well is easy for you.

Fiction writers are, after all, liars ;)

Next week: Another guest post, this time by retired Los Angeles police officer Kathy Bennett, who is anticipating the upcoming release of her first novel, "A Dozen Deadly Roses". You can read about it here: www.kathybennett.com/ I think a lot of writers are interested in the backstory of other writers who have made the enviable transformation to author, and Kathy will tell us a bit about what it took for her to reach that goal.

Guest Post: The Devil's in the (Setting) Details

By Becca Puglisi of  The Bookshelf Muse.

Settings are very important to me. Most of my love affairs with books and movies tie directly into where the characters lived, laughed, and suffered: Green Gables, Toad Hall, the Nostromo, Braveheart's Scotland. So when it comes to choosing or creating a setting for a project, I put a lot of thought into it.

Why is the setting so important? Because the character is strongly connected to it, whether positively or negatively, and any emotional connection that your character has will also create a connection with readers. Bilbo loved Hobbiton like it was a person instead of a place, and so we loved it and wanted it to endure for his sake. The Nostromo, the spaceship from the original Alien movie, was cluttered, narrow, and claustrophobic, and Ripley and her crew were stuck in there with an acid-bleeding, face-sucking monster that could be hiding in any of a million crevices. We wanted her to escape that ship almost as much as she did. The settings in these examples were key to helping the reader connect with the character. When choosing a setting, make sure your character connects with it, and your reader will, too.

But what then? Settings, by nature, are spacious and consist of a gajillion minute details, all of which you couldn't possibly and shouldn't ever include. So how do you decide which details to highlight in your story?

1.  Details should be necessary. This should go without saying, but it's important to choose only details that are necessary to the scene or purpose you're trying to achieve. It's a hard line to walk. Too little description, and your reader is lost and confused. Too much, and they're skimming ahead, trying to end the pain. To find the right balance, ask yourself these questions: What's the purpose of this scene? What details need to be shared to accomplish this? Stick to those details and you'll achieve the goal of choosing the necessary details.

2.  Details should do double-duty. A setting description should tell the reader about the character's surroundings, but it should also do more, like reveal the character's personality, mood, or biggest fear, foreshadow dire events to come, or provide a symbol that will reinforce a theme throughout the story. If you let your descriptions do double-duty, you'll have ample opportunities throughout the story to drop interesting tidbits here and there that will show your reader exactly where in the world the character is while revealing a little something else along with it.

3.  Details should be specific. The shelf in Laura Ingalls Wilder's house didn't hold vague, nameless knick-knacks; the china shepherdess and a brown-and-white dog stood there, items that were especially dear to Laura because of their whimsy. They represented frivolity, and possibly expense, and were among the few impractical items in the house. I remembered those knick-knacks without having to look them up because they were specific and memorable. You don't want to be overly specific with every detail, or the story becomes an inventory of beautifully-described but pointless items. Pick a few substantial details in the scene and make them memorable.

I wish I could put all of this together to create the perfect piece of description, but the planets aren't aligned just so and I'm out of Mountain Dew. So to illustrate perfection, I'll let To Kill a Mockingbird do it for me:

Somehow [Maycomb] was hotter back then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

There you have it. Great setting description, foreshadowing, and symbolism, all in only 64 words.

Now, I don't pretend to be an expert at writing description; if I was, I'd probably be a bestselling, Pulitzer-prize winning author along with Harper Lee. But the ideas above are a pretty good for a jumping-off point. Apply them and see if they don't give your settings a boost in the right direction.

guest post by Becca!

The Owl is thrilled to announce that in one week, Becca Puglisi of the famous The Bookshelf Muse has agreed to guest post!  As most (if not all) of my readers know, Becca and Angela have compiled one of the best writing resources on the web.  Their group of thesauruses . . . thesauri . . . you know! pull together concepts that often have writers stumped, so we can jump start our brains.

I've asked Becca for a post on setting in fiction.  Setting can make or break not just scenes, but by extension, your whole novel or short story.  Yeah, characters and plot may be paramount, but if you under- or overdescribe your setting(s), or pick the wrong one, readers may be left with an uncomfortable feeling.  Worse, they may put your book down and leave it there!  Setting is not just a pretty vase of flowers in the background.  Please join me next week for Becca's take on using setting effectively.