More cover mania

Last month I talked about covers and getting the perfect one for a book. This month I want to continue this theme in talking about the covers for the Gaian books I'm re-releasing next month. The books are Beloved Enemy and Beloved Traveler, and I wanted to make sure the new covers both enticed people to investigate the books and accurately reflected the contents as well.

When working with a cover artist it is very important that you spend a little time deciding what kind of cover you want. In this case I wanted covers that made it obvious these were science fiction romances, with space-themed backgrounds and couples that looked like the characters in the books. Knowing what I wanted made the process much easier.

For example if the characters are young, as in Beloved Enemy, you want them to look young. Since the heroine is spaceship pilot who has been stranded on a deserted planet for a while, then I wanted her cover image to not be wearing a lot of makeup. To me, this cover reflects well both the characters of Meagan and Kavath, but also says something about their relationship. He's reluctant to get into a relationship with her while she's a bit sassy about the whole thing. You can see that by the way they are posed.

For the second book, Beloved Traveler, the characters are older, and the images my cover artist picked showed that. Jack and Meagan have been through a lot in their lives and are reluctant to become involved, but can't resist the pull they feel towards each other. The passion they find is obvious in this cover. Again I think this cover reflects well who these characters are and their relationship.

In both covers the science fiction aspects are obvious, a strange planet in the first cover, a space ship control deck in the second.

In the cover for Promises To Keep,  the book I currently have for sale, the space theme is shown by the planet, stars, and space ship in the background.

To make the books all seem within the same series, the fonts are the same, my name is at the top, and the series name is in large letters at the bottom. There is no mistaking that these three books are related to each other.

Maybe you can't always judge a book by its cover, but if the cover is any good, it should be able to say something about the book.

So, anyone else have any covers to share?

Cheers,
Janet Miller

Series are an author’s best friend

I’ve written a number of series so far, four to be exact, and I love all of them. There are some that are more popular than others like the Gaian Story series which is science fiction romance about men who are looking for the woman that matches them to marry, and Hollywood After Dark, which is vampires and werewolves looking for their mates. But I’ve never been sorry to write a series.

The Girl In The Box - Free!

For one thing readers like series. If they like the world and the characters of a book, they want to read more about them. Even if the characters of the first book only show up as minor characters in a second one, I find that readers like to see how things are going for them. And sometimes a minor character in a book is so charismatic that they end up staring in a future book.

Why do I know this? Well, for one thing, I love to read series books myself. There are a number of authors whose books I read because I picked up a copy of one of them, and then proceeded to buy all of the books in the series before and after the book I read. I’ve also found that I tend to hear from readers about the books I write, particularly things like “when is so-and-so going to get their book?”

When you hear something like that, it is very hard to decide to write something else. After all, I want to make my readers happy.

However, there are some challenges to writing a series. For one thing when you are writing a series set in a particular world with continuing characters you have to keep the world constant. If you establish that someone is blond and blue-eyed in one book, they have to stay blond and blue-eyed in the next... unless you want to fit them with contacts and dye their hair. Age is harder to work around. A 100-year-old vampire can’t turn out to be 200 years old in the next book. This can lead to challenges when you have a series with as many books as I have. I bought a copy of Scrivener to see if I couldn’t keep track of things that way and in writing this last Gaian story it helped a lot. Now I have a common nomenclature for the electronic gismos in my world that I didn't have before.

How does everyone else track details of a world? Spreadsheets, word documents, or are there other writing tools people use? That’s a good topic for discussion. What do the other writers here use to keep their world details straight?

Cheers,

Janet Miller/Cricket Starr

NaNoWriMo update

It is the middle of November which means that I should be just about hitting the 25K mark on my WIP over at NaNoWriMo. And I am... just under 22 thousand words. Actually 21760 to be exact. So as you can see from the below graph I'm a bit behind.



The reason I'm behind is that for the past couple of days I've had some interrupts to my writing time (those are the red days). For example last night we went to the opera in San Francisco and that meant no writing in the evening after work. The day job keeps me from working on my manuscript during the day, and I'm also in rehearsal for The Nutcracker in which I'm playing both Grandmother in the first act and Mother Ginger in the second, so I have two sets of rehearsals to be at during the week and weekend. Tonight is Party Scene rehearsal so today may also be red. That's life during NaNoWriMo.

But this weekend I'm going to crack the whip and get caught back up again. I'm just about two days behind at this point but I've done this three times before and was able to come up from behind each time. The whole point of NaNo is to remind the writer that creating a novel isn't a sprint, it is a marathon and a bad day shouldn't take you out of the race.

I'm going to see if I can't get 500K words done before I head into work this morning and write some more this evening after rehearsal, and then write extra Saturday and Sunday to not only get to where I should have been, but even ahead so that when the Thanksgiving holiday hits I've got some breathing room.

If you want to follow my progress, my NaNo handle is janetmfoo and you can see my stats here:
The Girl Unboxed

The big question will be not when I get this book done but when I'll get it on the bookshelves over at Amazon, edited, formatted, and for sale. I'm hoping for just after Christmas so keep your fingers crossed. Mine will by typing madly away.

Cheers,
Janet/Cricket
WIP The Girl Unboxed
Falling in love was just the beginning of the story.

The new publishing paradigm

A couple weeks ago I was present at the RWA convention when Stephanie Laurens made her amazing keynote address on the changing of the publishing world. In case you missed it, she’s put the text and the slides up here: http://www.stephanielaurens.com/rwa12keynote.html To summarize what Ms. Laurens said, the publishing world is changing but our role in it stays the same with respect to writing the best book we can. We just have a lot more options now when it comes to publishing and can choose to take advantage of pieces of the publishing world rather than contract with a publisher.

Since pretty much anyone can take their written material and put it up on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or some other online store, the question is why trade the 60+% of the profits of a book for what a publishing house can give you? This is question a lot of authors are asking right now, and with good reason. I don’t have experience with the traditional publishing world, but I can tell you in the small-press world it is a really big question.

I see a publishing house offering three things of importance: good editing, good distribution, and a name for quality. A do-it-yourselfer can hire a good freelance editor, and contract cover art that, if not the best in the world, at least they have control over. And the distribution isn’t that hard to manage with KDP for Amazon, Pubit! for Barnes and Noble, Kobo’s Writer’s Life, and Smashwords for everything else. But the last item, the reputation of the publishing house to attract readers, that is something a lot more difficult for an individual author to manage.

If you have a big name already, you might be able to just throw up your work on Amazon and most likely your fans will find you. Price your book a dollar or so below your traditionally published titles and your voracious readers will snap it up as a bargain.

If you don’t have a massive fan base, then you need to have some way to get the reader’s attention. There are so many books released at online book vendors every day, if not every hour, that it is easy to overlook yours. If a publishing house has a reputation then people flock to it on release day to shop for new books and even if they don’t buy the book on the publisher’s website, they will look it up on the various online ebook stores associated with their favorite ebook reader and buy it there. The publisher’s website becomes the virtual bookstore to browse through.

I have a new title coming out today (8/14/2012), Beloved Stranger, which has already been preselling at Samhain, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble for the past couple of months. It is part of my Gaian science fiction romance series and is about a young woman sneaking into a Gaian prison colony to find her sisters by marrying one of the prisoners. It is a sequel to Beloved Traveler where we first meet Sonja Deems. She was so kick-ass as a character I decided I had to use her in another book, hence this one.

I’m very excited because this is my first title with Samhain and so far I’ve been very impressed with the editing, the covers, and the overall professionalism of the company and the people I've dealt with. I’m looking forward to seeing how sales are and if my publishing a book with Samhain gives me more profits than self-publishing.

Anyone else thinking about these things? How is the new publishing paradigm effecting you?