Hens Lay Eggs
food for thought
Answering basic questions
In the last few days, I’ve responded to inquiries as to whether an author can do everything oneself. My response to those questions is to ask another question: Yes, you can produce your book yourself, but should you?
To determine whether you should produce your book, it’s important to ask yourself some basic questions.
- Have you written the story? If you haven’t written the story yet, then it’s far too early to even begin worrying about the minutae of publishing. Especially if you’re writing a novel and you’re not already famous, no one cares about your book. Publishers won’t care because you have no track record. They don’t even know if you can or will finish writing the manuscript. You have no built-in audience of fans slavering to purchase your book. Literary agencies sell books to publishers. If you don’t have a manuscript, then they have nothing to sell. Write the story first.
- How good a writer are you? Just because you have a wonderful story burning a hole in your gut doesn’t mean you have the skill to express it effectively. Even if you do have the ability of effective expression, how good is your command of narrative structure and grammar? Setting your masterpiece aside and letting it marinate in your subconscious while you focus on other things will give you a bit of necessary objectivity when you return to it to review, edit, and revise it. If you thought your first draft was ready for public consumption, this simple tactic of putting distance between your brain and your story will surprise you with the errors riddling your draft.
- Do you know what kind of editing your manuscript needs? If you’re not aware of the different levels of editing (the basic three are developmental, line, and copy editing), then you absolutely need an editor. Can you use editing software? Of course! You should if you have the knowledge and critical judgment to know when the software’s “corrections” are actually incorrect.
- Are you experienced in page design? There’s more to designing the interior pages of a book than filling them with words. Page design directly affects the reader’s experience with the content. If you don’t even know what the proper tools for page design are, then hire a book designer. If you don’t understand that designing for print differs from e-book formatting, then hire a book designer.
- Are you a skilled graphic artist? The cover of your book is its more important marketing piece. A cover has multiple purposes. It indicates the book’s genre at a glance through alignment of color and style and imagery. It distinguishes the book from its competition via the same factors. That’s difficult to do. The artwork and placement of artistic elements (e.g., images, typography, color, shapes) all contribute to an effective book cover. Unless you’re intimately familiar with the expectations of your genre and a good graphic artist and understand concepts like “bleed” and “resolution,” then hire a professional cover designer.
- Are you an effective copywriter? The blurb on the back cover of the book is its second-most important marketing piece. Many authors are content writers, not copy writers. Copy writing has a singular purpose: to convert a potential customer into a buyer. It makes the sale. If you’re not good at copy writing, hire a marketing pro who is.
- How eagle-eyed are you? While understanding that perfection cannot be attained—you can always tweak things—a proofreader brings that necessary nitpicking expertise to bear in ensuring your entire book—the cover, page design, back cover blurb, and book contents—are as correct as humanly possible.
Of course, if you’re embarking upon this grand new project without any concept as to how the industry operates, there are other questions you should ask yourself.
- Do you want to pursue traditional publishing, self-publish your book, or hire a hybrid publisher to publish it for you? (Yes, “pursue” is emphasized for a reason.) Whichever option you choose, do your research. For traditional publishing, look into the Writer’s Market, Literary Marketplace, and Writer’s Digest. These are chock-full of valuable information. For self-publishing, see above. If you want to hire a publisher (i.e., pay to publish), then consult Writer Beware for bad actors, those vanity presses that exist to exploit naive, ambitious authors.
- How good a writer are you? If you have a wonderful story premise but you’re not sure you have the skill to develop it and bring it to life, consider hiring a ghostwriter. It will still be your story, but written better than you could have done. Or perhaps you have a really rough rough draft. Hire a book doctor to develop and expand upon what you have. Again, it will still be your story, just better than you could have written it.
- How good are you at marketing? This is one aspect of publishing a lot of authors fail to consider. These days, regardless of your publishing path, marketing your book falls on your shoulders. Marketing encompasses direct sales, social media outreach, promotions, and paid advertisements. If you’re skilled at marketing, more power to you! Put those skills to good use!
Publishers employ teams of professionals to produce quality books. Not perfect books, quality books. If you decide to self-publish, there’s no shame in hiring a team of professional freelancers to perform those tasks you either cannot do or don’t already do well.
DON’T FORGET AMAZON PRIME DAYS: OCT. 7 & 8
This big day for retail sales is almost like the Friday following Thanksgiving, which opens up the holiday sales season. This year Amazon Prime Days are on October 7 and 8. Sellers on the world’s most ubiquitous online commercial platform will be offering discounts and incentives to boost sales of their merchandise. That includes authors.
To that end, four of my books will be discounted to 99¢ (e-book format only):
- The Falcon of Imenotash (fantasy)
- The Eagle at Dawn (paranormal romance)
- Hogtied (MC romance)
- Shot from the Hip (western).
For less than a buck, you can’t go wrong. Give them a try!
The rhythm method
It’s not what you’re thinking.
Creatively, I go through periods of rapid productivity interspersed with lulls of inactivity. I’ve come to think of this on-again, off-again state as less manic-depressive than as simply a weird sort of rhythm.
I dislike “manic-depressive” because I have experience with mental illness. “Rhythm” sounds so much less pathologic.
But what do you call a rhythm that has no true beat? My mind certainly doesn’t arrange itself in iambic pentameter.
More to the point, when will I resume writing my stories again?
I answered a comment posted by a fan of the Triune Alliance Brides series. She requested more stories in the series which currently has three books. I do have plans for two more books in the series: a follow-up to Triple Burn in which Bran, Gil, and Ursula find a worthy replacement for Crow and a book featuring the feline aliens of Kaan and a new heroine.
But those are ideas sitting on the back burner—the back-back-back burner.
I did being working on a sixth book in the Twin Moons Saga. I got a bit of 20,000 words in, decided I didn’t like the way the story was going, scrapped it all, and started rewriting. There was nothing in the original attempt I cared to salvage. This book comes full circle in the series, bringing back a character who appeared in Daughter of the Twin Moons and pairing him with a character introduced in Champion of the Twin Moons. To give you a hint of what’s to come, Marog (the former prince of the Unseelie Court) gets a chance at redemption. No, he didn’t die when the castle fell on him; Uberon banished him.
He ought to thank his father for that favor. Whether he will or not is anybody’s guess at this point.
We also learn that Iselde is the Oracle’s daughter. In a twist of theme, she’s more powerful than the former prince.
I even have a sequel to Hogtied started. No, it won’t be Bolt’s book because Bolt already got his story as a subplot within the first book. The sequel will feature Black Ice Revolution’s president, Iceberg, as the hero. Another character in the motorcycle club, Angel, is also set up for his own book. To me, Angel is like Joe Pike in the Elvis Cole series by Robert Crais.
Perhaps the reason I’m thinking of the sequel to Hogtied is because I’ve read several MC romances lately? Who knows?
I am also working on the sequel to The Bounty: Jones for publisher 0-0-8 Studios. I was thrilled when the company’s president hired me to write the story. I was even more excited when the studio gave me authorial credit, because most ghostwriting gigs don’t offer that. Putting a cherry on the hot fudge sundae, the company hired me to write the sequel, titled The Bounty: Gerlaugh. In this book, scheduled for publication in early 2025, gunslinger Harriet Gerlaugh is the protagonist. She’s a complicated character, quite possibly psychotic.
Perhaps it’s strange for me to wander through several sub-genres. When I’m speaking to potential customers at the various events I attend as a vendor, I explain the variety in my writing as reflecting the my eclectic reading habits.
I don’t really think about it much, although I do hope my mojo returns soon. I basically follow the same advice I give to other aspiring novelists: Write what you want to read.
It’s that simple and that difficult.
Every word counts.
The challenge of poetry
I am not a poet. Let’s get that one fact straight right now. I do not write poetry.
I do, however, occasionally edit poetry.
The poetry I edit generally comes in two versions:
- Children’s literature written in verse
- Modern poetry.
If someone were to ask me to edit his Shakespearean sonnets, I’d be at a total loss and suggest that poet find a better qualified editor who specializes in poetry and is willing to count syllables, scrutinize rhyming schemes, and ensure alignment with the standards of that form.
There’s more to poetry than the occasional sonnet or haiku, not that many folks I encounter even know what distinguishes a sonnet from other forms of poetry. And, yes, there are many different poetic forms. Off-hand, I can think of three forms of sonnets, although I don’t remember the specifics of each form’s arrangement beyond three stanzas of four lines and a final couplet (14 lines total). The differences have to do with the rhyming scheme.
Writer’s Digest lists 168 poetic forms in this article: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/list-of-50-poetic-forms-for-poets. The list is mind-boggling. Some prescribe a certain number of lines, stanzas, and couplets; others focus on a certain arrangement of syllables and rhymes; still others specify a particular shape of the finished poem.
With many poetic forms, the editor must understand both meter and rhyme. The meter is the beat. English best suits iambic pentameter, which is the meter in which the Bard himself wrote. It’s a two-beat cadence with five feet—da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. Poets.org posts a good explanation of poetic meter: https://poets.org/glossary/meter. Meter establishes rhythm and helps poets align rhyming schemes.
Not all poetry rhymes. Literature written in verse tends to be directed at very young children who enjoy the sing-song cadence of rhyming words. However, more modern forms place less emphasis on rhyming and more emphasis on meaning and allusion.
Poets, even more so than other authors, allow less leeway in the editing of their work. As an editor, I have mixed feelings about this. With prose, there are certain standards of writing to maintain, from basic subject-verb agreeement to the detection and correction of plot holes. With poetry, the rules for grammar, syntax, sentence construction, and even punctuation are often cast aside—and the poet does not tolerate any change. This basically leaves the editor with the following tasks:
- Correct misspelled words and typos (e.g., when from is meant and form is written)
- Faults in meter (i.e., when the rhythm is off)
- Stylistic consistency (e.g., when every line in every stanza begins with a capital letter).
When I was child, my mother gave me a book of poems, Piping Down the Valleys Wild. I loved that book and read it several times, although I have no idea what happened to it. I enjoyed Edgar Allen Poe’s poems, too. I have Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron on my Kindle, but have yet to read it. I keep promising myself I’ll do that.
We’re introduced to poetry from the day we’re born. For many, that introduction comes in the form of lyrics to music. Regardless of the musical genre you prefer (except instrumental music), the cadence of music lends itself to poetry. Or maybe it’s the opposite: the cadence of poetry lends itself to music. Even rap, which I deny being music, may be categorized as poetry.
As noted before, many books for the toddler set are written in verse. That’s poetry, too. Consider nursery rhymes. Yep, more poetry.
Oddly enough, I come across a lot of people who write poetry, but not so many who admit to reading it. I don’t know whether that’s because much of the poetry assigned in literature classes is the mind-numbing stuff of John Milton (e.g., Paradise Lost) or whether it’s because poetry tends to be so very personal to the person who wrote it.
If you write poetry, do you read it?
Author
Hard boiled, scrambled, over easy, and sunny side up: eggs are the musings of Holly Bargo, the pseudonym for the author.
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Karen (Holly)
Blog Swaps
Looking for a place to swap blogs? Holly Bargo at Hen House Publishing is happy to reciprocate Blog Swaps in 2019.
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