How to Deal With Writer's Block

I have a sneaky suspicion about Writer’s Block. I don’t think it exists!

Now, in saying that, I do believe there is such a phenomenon as Writer’s Stop. This occurs when our subconscious discovers we are completely off course and writing in a tangent that is not conducive to the full potential expression of our story and thus stops us dead in our tracks until we figure it out.

A subsect of the Writer’s Stop is a condition called Writer’s Drop. This happens when our self-confidence plummets to such abysmal levels that we have a hard time convincing ourselves we should be writing at all. This is where all the existential questions about why on earth we picked this career path to begin with come careening to a head. One might experience this after their first handful of rejections, or after a negative review, for example. But at its heart, Writer’s Drop is just another facet, another face if you will, of Writer’s Stop, but in this instance it’s our perspective that’s off course.

Marissa Campbell all Zen in Bahamas

As a yoga instructor, I often talked about what I saw as the keys to happiness. Two of those mystical mysteries were awareness and perspective. With Writer’s Stop, we have to be aware that we have in fact stopped writing—we can become pretty darn good at creating excuses and making ourselves seem too busy, all in an effort to avoid the discomfort of facing the hard truth. We have to be aware of our avoidance tactics and acknowledge that we are in fact procrastinating.

Once we become aware of what we’re doing, we can try to understand the root cause behind our Writer’s Stop. Perhaps we have reached a point in our stories where we are bored with it, hence the reader will be too. Or maybe we’ve lost the main thread of our plot. We might even be trying to force a character into doing something that is in fact out of character for them. Or worse, we could be writing the wrong story—maybe we really want to write steampunk mysteries, but are forcing ourselves to try and slog through a paranormal romance.

Writer’s Stop is not a bad thing. It’s a natural part of the process, and it presents each of us with a wonderful opportunity to make our stories better. I learned this lesson the hard way.

After taking part in NaNoWriMo this past year, I made my quota and rocked my word count, however, the furious pace was devastating to my story. I’ve since learned that my writing process involves a lot of reflection and rumination (R&R), followed by joyful spurts of writing. Each ‘stop’ in my writer’s journey is an opportunity to reflect and ruminate on the story and determine where I go from there. As one might expect, I’m a pantser. With this crazy process, I need the R&R to help keep my story on track. With NaNoWriMo, I didn’t have time for R&R and had to force the story and push my way through the red-light-alarm-bell-ringing-full-train-whistle-jam-on-the-breaks-for-the-love-of-God-woman stops. Thus, out of the fifty thousand words I had to complete in thirty days, once the month was up, I ended up cutting almost forty thousand of them. I had to start over from scratch. Writer’s Stop is a gift, an opportunity to pause, breathe, look around, and determine what our story needs to make it stronger.

In the case of Writer’s Drop, perspective is the missing link. We can’t always change a situation (the negative review won’t go away, especially now, thanks to the Energizer internet bunny) but we can change how we perceive the situation. Rather than it being the catalyst that drops us into the deepest depths of despair, we can use it as force for good, catapulting us into a mission to prove the review wrong!

After all, a negative review seems to scream, “Just stop writing for heaven’s sake. Can’t you see you suck?”

Now if you’re anything like me, you don’t take kindly to people telling you what you can or cannot do. Avelynn (the heroine in my debut historical fiction, AVELYNN, releasing September 8^th) is exactly like me in this regards. Rather than take society’s constraints and abide them, she fights, tooth and nail, against their hold.

If someone tells me I can’t do something, I will go out of my way to prove them wrong. I don’t mean to say that if someone tells me I can’t jump off a cliff, that I’m going to do the opposite, but if it’s something I feel passionate about, something that I believe firmly in, like my writing, or my family, or my friends, I may just have to put my foot down and dig in my heels. I firmly believe we can accomplish anything we set our minds to, and rising above negativity (in all its forms) is just one of them. A life of passion is not without struggle. Many people will try and dampen our spirit and douse our flame, but if we feel strongly about what we do, if we love and believe in our words and our stories, then those rejections and negative reviews are just white noise against the backdrop of our dancing feet beating a thrilling tattoo as we march to the sound of our own vibrant drums.

Awareness and perspective are essential to turning something negative on its head. Once you can do that, there’s only one thing left: make a choice. Choose to rise above the self-doubt. Choose to push through adversity and follow your dreams. Choose to remain true to your passions. Soon you’ll be living Writer’s Rock, whereby you rock this whole writing thing and remain steadfast and firm in your resolve to knock this novel/short story/screenplay/memoir/poem out of the park! Swing for the fences, my friends. Rock on!

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

How To Name A Character

Okay, so you've got a brilliant story idea, one that's humming through your veins, making it all but impossible to do anything but sit down and write.

But when you do sit down your fingers freeze, because you've already hit a roadblock.

 

Their names! What are your characters names? 

See, naming a character's not as easy as it looks.There are rules which are worth taking a look at, even if you don't follow them. This Writer's Digest article by Elizabeth Sims suggests some really practical things, like looking at the name's root meanings, considering your time period, and saying your possibilities out loud to make sure the name doesn't turn into a tonguetwister on the audiobook version.

Coming up with the right name for a character is key. Would Severus Snape have been as threatening if his name had been Douglas Darby? I came up with Douglas using a random name generator, and it works pretty well for this example. The two names are similar in that both use alliteration, which is another recommendation in the Writer's Digest article. The repetition of the first letter draws attention to the name, marking the character as someone special.

That's about all these two names have in common. The first name "Severus" is unusual and a little bit odd, however it's not hard to think of men named "Douglas" (MacArthur, Fairbanks, Booth).

(If you're old - like me - google Douglas Booth. Even better, just click HERE. Because pretty.)

And really, which last name sounds scarier, Snape or Darby? If I was playing a word association game, I'd probably equate Snape with snake, and Darby with Mr. Darcy.

Creepy reptile or Colin Firth in a wet linen shirt. I'll let you decide.

I could probably do a whole blog post analyzing ways the name Severus Snape is frightening. As such, it's a fantastic example of how the right name can boost the character. Really, though, the point of this exercise is to look at resources so you can come up with your own Severus Snape.

For example, here's a post with 100 Sexy Names for Contemporary Romance Hereoes. Author Bryn Donovan has created a comprehensive list, and while I don't agree with all of her choices (Clive is just never going to sound sexy to me) it's a good place to start.

I also found several random name generators for writers. THIS ONE will also come up with character profiles, first lines, and all kinds of other writing jump-starts.

THIS ONE lets you choose the character's sex, ethnicity, and the year they were born, and will give you a name plus a whole profile. Pretty interesting stuff.

Finally, THIS ONE just lets you choose male or female, but prefaces it's tool with some good advice (go interesting but not too weird), AND it's the one that came up with Douglas Darby. Clearly they know what they're doing.

There's quite a bit of information about how to choose your characters' names. Writing-World.com has a great article, and I liked this one by Devyani Borade, also on the Writer's Digest website. If you're writing a historical, the Social Security website has lists of the 100 most popular names by decade, going back to the 1880s.

I'm just skimming the surface here, but finding the right name can make a huge difference to your character, and there are tons of resources to help you do that. In the end, I hope you type in a name that makes you say...


via GIPHY


If you've got a secret strategy for naming your characters, feel free to leave us some tips in the comments. And if not, feel free to play with the random name generators and leave us your favorites.
Cheers!
Liv

How to Sell Your Book without Selling Your Soul

Right away I need to tell you something personal. Not the TMI-kind-of-personal, but personal in the sense that this won’t be the typical “how-to” blog post about book marketing. Why? Because sales and marketing turns me off completely and causes my skin to itch. 

 

 

I’m fiscally skeptical to my core, the kind of girl who skips commercials and doesn’t care who designed my shoes. This shouldn’t come as a surprise—I write cyberpunk, so a certain level of anti-establishment goes with the territory.

Perhaps this makes me a poor example. After all, experts say if you want to sell your book, view it as a product, and view the readers as customers. Your job as a published author is to move that product, grow your customer base, and write that next book so there’s more product to sell. The more you write, the more you have to sell, the more customers you’ll get, and the more money you’ll make.

Good advice, right? Yes, of course. But personally, I can’t do it that way. Not without selling my soul in the process.

 

Now here’s something else you need to know about me: despite this deep, dark issue with marketing, I sell books all the time as an associate editor at Henery Press. Even when I’m on break, even on weekends, even after hours...I do it without violating my conscience, and I enjoy it. How? Because I believe in the authors and their books. I think anyone who has the guts to write a novel is pretty darn amazing, and I want to support them.

So here’s my secret to selling books without selling your soul: **BELIEVE IN YOUR IDEAS**



Mr. Robot is a fantastic example of idea-based marketing.

To make it work, you’ll need to separate your identity from the book itself, without breaking away from the ideas behind the book.

Let’s say you write about zombie insects. For whatever reason, creepy-crawly zombies really float your boat. So go forth and find other people who like zombie insects, either in person or online, and strike up a conversation. Just geek out for a while with all those other awesome zombie-insect lovers—people who aren’t going to judge the fact that you think zombie ladybugs are the bomb—your kind of people.

 

If you view your book as a product, you'll feel like a salesperson every time you talk about it. But with idea-based marketing, talking about your book will come naturally as you engage with others about the ideas that inspired your writing in the first place.

The cool thing about idea-based marketing is that you can do it anytime, in any place, across any platform. In-person signings could become lively discussions about topics you enjoy. Tweets could entertain and inspire. Facebook posts could inform and even raise awareness about important events or causes. 

 

You don’t have to have an active product, just an active idea. My sci-fi thriller OPEN SOURCE doesn’t come out until January, but in a sense, I’ve already started marketing and building my audience around its core concepts. The best part is that most of the time it doesn’t feel like marketing, because these are things that really do matter to me. I fully believe in my ideas, and I want to talk with other people about those ideas. It’s a natural outflow of my interests.

One last note: idea-based marketing only works if you MAKE IT EASY TO BUY YOUR BOOK. I won’t go into strategies here, but all your social media profiles should clearly identify your author name, your book title, and provide a buy link (when available). If you make it easy to buy your book, you can spend more time talking with people about the ideas that inspired your book, and less time telling them to go buy it.

 

Maybe book sales will follow, maybe not. But you’ll still have your soul, and that’s a good thing.

Be A Tease!

Everyone loves a tease. That tiny morsel of goodness to whet your appetite and leave you begging for more. The build up of anticipation for something, whether it's food, books, movies, a hot date...it's what keeps your attention and focus, leaving you aching for more.

Teasers are an important part of book marketing. Done right, you can grab a brand new reader's attention in less than a minute. Done wrong, you can turn a potential reader away for life.

Here's a teaser for my new book out today, ELUDING ILLUSIONS

Sometimes teasers can be done using a tagline or a "hook" for your book. Here's another using a tagline for my book, VEXED.

Sometimes teasers can be lines or quotes from your book.

You'll notice in the teaser above I put my copyright info and gave credit for the picture to the owner of it. NEVER use pics of celebrities or steal pics from the interwebs to use in teasers. You can get in serious legal trouble without express written permission from the rights holder of the image. There are many stock photo sites you can buy images from to use in your teasers. 

And if you don't want to buy images, some photographers will allow you to use an image if you credit them in the photo, as I did above. But you must have their permission to do so. Or you can use plain backgrounds and make your own using images from your book cover art files as I did in the first two teasers. Ask your cover artist for help if you want banners made up or blank teasers you can manipulate using your cover art files.

A teaser can even be as simple as just an image and your release date to start getting your cover in front of your potential reader audience, like the one I did above.

Also, please remember when making teasers to keep the fonts legible.

While those are cool fonts and it makes it eye catching, it's somewhat hard to read. Teasers should entice a future reader, not make them work for it or get frustrated because they can read only every other word because of font, or colors blending in over background images. 

Try can keep them as crisp and eye catching as possible.

Remember to change up the teasers. 

• Have a sexy one if it's a romance novel. 
• Have a more serious and dramatic one that shows the depth of the book as well. 
• Have a tagline hook as we mentioned earlier. 
• A PG level one for general audiences is also a good idea. 
• Have one as well that gives perspective and insight into the personalities of your characters. 

Like the one below for my novel, VEXED, it gives you a sense of the banter between the main characters.

Teasers can also can turn a potential reader into a lost sale. Remember that a variety of people will be seeing your teaser. So, unless you're posting in a specific group of people, please make your teasers for a general audience. If you write BDSM or Erotica, make sure you have a teaser specific to those audiences, but don't post those in a general FB group using graphic sexual references. Have a cleaner version for the masses and put a warning that the book itself will contain language, violence, or graphic sex. 

Also, please, for the love of all humanity, make sure your teasers don't have misspellings or typos. It's a reflection on you as the author. Put your best work forward.

Go forth and tease the world!!

To Self-Pub or not to Self-Pub: The Burning Question

Self publishing--Indie publishing--is all the rage these days, and for good reason.

In its fledgling days, self-publishing amounted to vanity publishing. It consisted primarily of people who had written a book, mostly for themselves, and wanted to see it "published" so they could give copies to their friends and family. For the most part, they weren't serious authors whose goal was a career in writing novels.

For a long time self-publishing was the illegitimate child of the publishing industry. Books were just plain bad: badly edited, badly written, bad characters, bad plot, bad storytelling...just BAD. It gained a horrible reputation that lingered like that uncle nobody wants around.

But self-publishing has shed the stigma and evolved into a serious, reputable, potentially profitable alternative to traditional publishing, so much so that many traditionally published authors are engaging in hybridization of their careers by doing both.

What are the advantages of self-publishing?

 The major advantage to self-publishing is control. As the author, you have control of everything: cover, content, price, marketing, branding.

You have the freedom to do whatever you want with your book.

You also keep all the subrights to your work, and can sell those yourself.

Finally, you keep all the profit. For ebooks, most publishers pay authors between 25% and 50% of royalties on all sales. As a self-published author you keep most of the profit.

Sounds great, right?

What are the disadvantages of self-publishing?  

You're responsible for EVERYTHING. You may envision yourself living the life of an artist, free to make your own choices regarding your work. And that's true. But once you write the book(s), you have to take off the artist hat and put on the businessperson hat and start all the hard work of cover design, formatting, purchasing ISBNs, interacting with vendors, understanding pricing and SEO and markets and readers and genres and niches.

Part of being a self-published author is keeping your name in the readers' mind, so often self-pubbed authors produce more work than traditionally published authors. Romance, especially, is a high production genre where many authors crank out anywhere from two to four manuscripts per year.

And then there's marketing. So much marketing. When you self-publish you're solely responsible for making sure your target audience knows your book exists, so they can buy it. How do you do that? It's like the quest for the holy grail, my friend, the thing all self-pubbed authors are searching for. Basically, marketing is a shitton of work.

Finally, when you self-publish, you bear all the cost of publishing your book. You must purchase the cover art, pay for the ISBNs, pay for copyrighting, pay for marketing, pay for printing, pay for shipping...you pay for everything.

A side note about genre: Not all genres sell well as self-published books. In fact, romance seems to be by far the best genre to self-publish, primarily because romance is the best selling genre overall in all publishing formats at over 50% of the total fiction market. Romance readers are rabid, gobbling up books as fast as authors can write them.

Unfortunately, not all genres do as well self-published, so if you're thinking about publishing your own book do some research to see if self-published books in your genre sell very well.

If self-publishing is so much work, why do so many people do it?  

There's a lot of frustration with traditional publishing. Because the publishing industry is evolving so rapidly and expansively, traditional publishing has changed a lot of its models to meet the changing habits of readers. The days of huge advances are gone, and if you hadn't noticed, the days of huge chain bookstores are waning as well. Digital books have taken a huge bite out of print book sales, which means bookstores can't afford to stay in business.

Because of this, traditional publishers are more cautious about acquiring authors for print deals. They don't pay as much, they don't acquire as many, and there are different expectations of authors. As a result, many traditional publishers have started their own digital lines and acquire authors for those more often than for print. Authors get no or very little advance for digital deals, and usually smaller royalty percentages than smaller digital-only presses, or what they'd make from self-publishing.

Digital-only presses offer higher royalty percentages than traditional publishers, but they often don't do much more than what you could do yourself as an indie-author. They bear most of the costs of publishing the book, but often expect authors to shoulder a large portion of the marketing effort.

Because it's more difficult to get a print deal with traditional publishers, and digital-only deals aren't maybe as attractive as they could be, more and more authors are turning to self-publishing.

When is it a good idea for you to self-publish?

First, ask yourself: Why do I want to self-publish? Am I willing to do all the work involved? Do I want a long-term career as a writer? Do I want to publish a book just so I can say I did it? Am I frustrated with traditional publishing and want to try something different?

If you answered yes to any of these questions...it's a good idea to self-publish!

BEFORE YOU SELF-PUBLISH: It's important to keep in mind that once you self publish, you can't take it back. You can't take that same book and query it to agents or traditional publishers. So if you self-publish a book and it tanks big time, you can't say, oh, well, I'll just start querying agents now. They just won't look at it because it's ALREADY PUBLISHED.

With that in mind:

If you can afford a professional editor and decent quality cover (some people can do these things themselves, but not many. Be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses);

If you're a good storyteller and have had beta readers (other than your mom, other family, and friends) read it and help you polish the story;

If you've researched and know your genre sells well in the indie-published arena;

If you're a savvy businessperson who knows how to market and publicize your work;

You have all the ingredients to be successfully self-published.

What prompted this post about self-publishing?

My writing partner, Merissa McCain, and I have decided we're going to self-publish our contemporary romances, the Tap Zone Series, set in the world of MMA fighting.

We did extensive research, we've made a to-do list and split it so we each have responsibilities, we've put together a long-term plan, and we're proceeding  according to it.

We haven't set a release date yet for book one, but it will be sometime this fall. We'll keep you posted.

In the meantime...everybody keep writing!


~Margaret


 

 

Know Your Rights

Most newbie writers believe that you get your book published and that's where the publishing train ends. So when they seek out an agent or publisher, or they self-publish, they tend to overlook one of the most important aspects of publishing, the subsidiary rights.

Sub-rights are a great way to bring in more money and get more exposure for your book. If you are self-publishing then you have the responsibility to see if these rights can be sold. If you land an agent or a publisher, they should be taking care of these rights for you. An agent will be shopping these with your interests in mind, the publishers in their own interest. There are a bunch of subsidiary rights that you may not know or care to know about, even after you've published, but there are 3 major ones that you should be asking about before you sign anything.

Film/Media: 

This is the obvious one. Most writers have already dreamed of that actor that will play their characters in a film. 

Audio: 

Audio sales have seen a steady increase over the years, so much so that publishers are more often trying to retain these. With the advent of digital content streaming, companies such as Audible are carving out a place in the market.

Translation:

Where in the world and in what language your book is being published is determined by which rights you have signed away. Did you give the publisher only North American English or did they retain World English? What about the right to translate and sell it in different countries? 

If an agent has offered you representation, ask what their process is for retaining and selling these important rights. How does the commission percentage break down? Do they have a sub-agent or do they partner with an agency that specializes? If the publisher insists on keeping one or all of these rights, what sort of parameters does the agent set in order to make the deal worth it? Most agents should be able to answer these questions easily and happily. 

If you went straight to a publisher, make sure you understand what is happening with these rights. If said publisher is keeping all these rights, there should be a time limit so if the publisher does not doing anything with these rights they revert back to you. 

So before you start shopping your manuscript, know your rights.

Books Vs. Movies

A couple weeks ago a debate sprung up between me and a few of my friends. Which is better, books or movies? We live in a day and age when books and movies are accessible with the touch of a button. Where, in a few minutes, you can have any book or movie you'd like at your fingertips. That brought up a serious problem with a few of my friends. Most only read books when they were too excited to wait for the movie. Only a few read the books for pure enjoyment and because the books offered much more than the movies. With the advancements in technology, that line seems to be more of a blur than ever before.

In an effort to combat the book-lovers opinions of which is better, the movie-goers insisted that movies are easier to understand. It brings the books to life in a very real way giving characters an actual voice and face, gives the setting a perspective that the imagination can't quite come up with on it's own. I will admit that I have a very active imagination, but the world of Harry Potter was so much more intriguing in the movie than in my own mind.

Another point they insisted on was that books are anti-social. It doesn't require a group of people to read a book. It's a solitary activity, while a movie can be enjoyed in groups or for dates. I happen to disagree with this opinion. I enjoy movies alone. I don't want to talk during a movie, or be talked at during a movie because I rarely answer. It bothers me when people are constantly up and down to go to the restroom or restock popcorn because they've annihilated the jumbo bucket. I saw Jurassic World on my own, without children, and it was a freeing experience. I saw the complete movie from start to finish. I haven't been able to do that in years.

The last point they insisted on was the lack of action in books. There are no fiery explosions or tragic drownings. A pit of snakes is not as intimidating, raptors aren't as ferocious and the swords fights are not nearly as edge of your seat. It's tough to write fight scenes or other action. Movies flow with the action, giving your mind a visual to understand.

In the defense of books I must say that I enjoy writing a fight scene, I like the flow of my words on the page, like a dance of back and forth blows. Is it harder to do than actually acting it out? Of course, but in the end the sequence feels more satisfying.

While books may require more imagination than a movie, they have a level of depth that movies can't. You can't get inside the characters head in movies or hear their thoughts. Emotions are more involved and deeper in a book. In my opinion, more tears are shed, more laughs are shared and I cling to the characters in novels for much longer than I do those in movies. In books you're able to attach. Their emotions are not rushed for the space of time that a movie allows.

Movies often lose parts of books. There is only so much that can be added to fill the space of two hours, and sometimes things have to be cut. It's a sad truth and sometimes it leaves out the reason that a character is loved, or an important plot point or even a character that may not feel that important to the movie, but makes an impact in the plot of the book. I'll never forget the first time I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It wasn't my favorite book by any means, but I found the trials fascinating and when they left out aspects of the books I was confused and devastated. I'd imagined what this world would look like and I felt like they'd cut the world in half somehow.

There are pros and cons to both books and movies, and I will admit that I love to see a book come to life on the big screen. But I also go in knowing that things may not always follow the book closely, that parts will be left out. Sometimes I read the book before hand, sometimes I read it after. Whichever you choose, give both your best shot, don't get mad at the author for things that get changed in movies because they'd don't control it and just enjoy the different experiences, because that's what they are. A different way to experience the same story.

So, do movies do books justice? Do you always read the book first? Tell me in the comments below!