Inkitt: Publishing as You Go

I recently discovered Inkitt.com, which is, I gather, a lot like Wattpad. I've dabbled a little on Wattpad but never done very much. I decided to try out Inkitt a bit more thoroughly. Maybe it's the novel contest. I don't know. Does Wattpad have a novel contest? It's possible that everything I like about Inkitt is the same on Wattpad, I'm just not that familiar with that platform.

In the past when I've written novels I've hit walls where I've reached out to a friend and asked that they read what I have done so far, not for feedback, but because knowing someone is reading my stuff is a better motivator for me to finish the book than anything else I've come across. I know it's sort of ass-backwards. You're supposed to finish the novel, revise it, polish it, revise it again, and then polish again, and then send it out into the world to find readers. I may get to the point where that feels right to me. I certainly have some ambivalence about not doing it that way. But right now the reason I'm enjoying myself on Inkitt is because I'm posting each chapter as I finish it, and they have these cool analytics that show you how many people are reading. I've got something in the neighborhood of ten people reading my incomplete novel right now. It's so great for motivation! I imagine that these people have all read the latest chapter (the analytics say so, actually) and are eagerly awaiting the next installment. So I feel that push to deliver.

I'm on Chapter 16 and I think there are only a couple more chapters to go. The story is definitely winding down; I'm just not sure how long it's going to take to write everything. It's not going to be a very long book, in fact... barely a novel by word count standards. But I've been approaching it more in terms of episodes, with each chapter being an episode. I'm playing around.

It's one of the first things I've written with a thorough outline. With the WiP I set aside a couple of months ago (that I still hope to return to) I did a lot of outlining, but that is a huge monster of a book and I don't know how long it will take to write the whole thing. This one is much shorter. I wanted to try a few things. Romance, for one. It's a genre I have been wanting to have a go at for a while. Veronica in Paris is a romance, but it started out as a chapter of The River and the Roses so it wasn't like, "Hm, I think I will sit down and write a romance today." I've always been a fan of soap operas, and I wanted to see if I could capture some of the qualities of a soap that I love in a novel. And I wanted to mix genres: romance/supernatural/western/thriller.

I think when it's done it's going to be a fun little book. Nothing earth shattering, but I do think it's going to succeed at what I want it to do, which is show people a good time. I'm having a good time writing it.

What are your projects, these days? Trying anything new?

Free books & The Gamble and the Grave!

The Gamble and the Grave (Veronica Barry Book 4) is out on Amazon today! I didn't get a lot of sleep last night (the baby is trying to break me) but seeing that this morning (I'd forgotten--see parenthetical above) gave me a nice boost.

As a result, The River and the Roses (Veronica Barry Book 1), The Fire and the Veil (Veronica Barry Book 2), and The Plane and the Parade (Veronica Barry Book 3) will be free today and tomorrow.

If you have a different e-reader and can't take advantage of free promos on Amazon just email me and I'll be happy to send you your preferred format.

New Covers! I'm learning to use GIMP.

Well, after years of being only partly satisfied with most of my book covers, I finally got tired of talking about learning to use a design program like GIMP, and actually started watching youtube videos and teaching myself. In case you don't know, GIMP is a a free downloadable program a bit like Photoshop. The main cover I fret over is for The City Darkens, as I have yet to be really satisfied with any of the covers I've had. But I also had issues with my Veronica Barry covers. This mainly had to do with the titling, which has always been hard to read. Using Paint to make these covers was just short of adequate, in that I got the general look I wanted, but there just wasn't much I could do to really make the fonts stand out the way I wanted them to. So now that I am using GIMP, I've redone them all, and I'm still working on The City Darkens. Here's the original version of The River and the Roses:

And here's the new version:

Here's the old one for The Fire and the Veil:

And the new:

The Plane and the Parade:

And the new:

Veronica in Paris:

And the new:

 

And here's what I've got so far for The City Darkens:

There's still a lot to be done for it--I don't want the dress to actually look white, for one thing (I was going for light gray, and I'll probably add blue to it) and then I have ideas for other elements in a kind of montage.

The main thing with the Veronica covers, other than making the titles more legible, was to standardize them so they really look like a professionally done series. In honor of my new covers for these, all three novels in the series (Veronica in Paris is a novella and a prequel, and I don't have it enrolled in Kindle Select) will be available for free tomorrow. I'm not planning to offer all three like this again until I launch The Gamble and the Grave (book 4).

What do you think of the covers? Have you worked with GIMP? Have you got any cool tips to share?

Reading or Chocolate?

I've had the flu for the past week, but that hasn't slowed down my recent upswing in reading, since it hasn't had any impact on my nursing schedule. I had a realization, though: if I wean the baby at six months (which was my plan) I won't be able to keep reading so much. This presents a serious dilemma. Because I'm breastfeeding I don't eat chocolate or spicy foods or several other items--which I miss a lot. So I'm going to have to choose: reading or chocolate? What kind of sick choice is that, I ask you?

I've joined Kindle Unlimited. For a while it looked like by the time I got through the thirty day free trial I'd have read all the books available in the program that I had any real interest in, but then I came across the cozy mysteries. So I'm in it for another month, at least. I've been enjoying the Aunt Bessie series a lot and just started one of Charlotte MacLeod's, with Peter Shandy. I had a mystery phase many years ago (about the time I first started writing about Veronica Barry) but my genre phases come and go and it's been quite a while since I enjoyed a mystery. I'm finding that cozies scratch that itch and at least little bit of the Jane Austen itch, too. There's something really comforting about novels that spend some time and description on tea, for some reason.

Reading the Aunt Bessies made me think about Veronica and I'm rereading The Plane and the Parade as a result. A couple of things have occurred to me as I do. 1) I don't give Veronica much down time. Aunt Bessie spends a fair amount of time just enjoying her hobbies, and while Veronica does take her dog to the park and such, she's usually on the phone to someone about the case she's on at the same time. 2) Veronica drinks way too much tea nuked in a mug with a tea bag. I mean, to be honest, it's been a long time since I ordered gourmet tea online and made sure to steep it at just the right temperature in an iron teapot, but after reading Aunt Bessie, each nuked mug in Plane makes me wince.

So I've decided that the next Veronica is going to be a bit slower in pace, so Veronica can enjoy more downtime, and better tea. Because while I realize the Aunt Bessie series isn't exactly famous, I really have enjoyed it, and if I enjoy reading about an eighty year old baking shortbread then there's no reason my readers won't get a similar feeling of comfort if Veronica does it, too. I've had several ideas for Veronica five and six, so that means I'm really going to have to find some time to finish writing Veronica four and get on with publishing it. My editor has been super busy lately, though, so I may have to call on some new beta readers--Rick, I'm looking at you.

I've been enjoying Kindle Unlimited so much I decided to enroll some of my own books in it, which means taking them off sale anywhere but Amazon and doing the KDP Select thing. That's okay because the only book I've sold in the last four months at B&N is Veronica in Paris, and I decided not to take that one down from there as a result. I also left Broken Ones up. But all the other Veronica books and The City Darkens are now available through Kindle Unlimited and that lending program Amazon has. I've also scheduled some free and reduced price promos, so be on the look out for those. The first is this Sunday, April 26: The River and the Roses will be free all day.

Have you tried Kindle Unlimited? Do you use any of those free and bargain Kindle sites?
How do you like your tea?

Twitter: Spam vs. Marketing

A few months ago I took down all of my programmed tweets that directly marketed my ebooks. I did this out of frustration with how many of these tweets I was seeing in my own stream. They vastly outnumber tweets where anyone actually says anything about how their day is going or whatever. When I attempted to make  list of tweeps who "tweet real stuff" I only managed to accumulate 24 people, out of a potential group of nearly 2000. This makes Twitter really boring to me. I felt like I was just looking at a stream of spam, and it didn't help that 4 out of 5 of these marketing tweets used quotes from the novels with grammar errors or style issues in the quotes. One vampire novelist's quote said something along the lines of, "A dead body! Someone sucked his ass dry!" Now, just give that one a minute to knock around in your head. Not a pretty picture, is it? A couple of times I couldn't help myself--I had to @ the person with the troublesome tweet and point out the problem. This was never received very well (I can't imagine why!). Seriously, though. You're tweeting something from your book. Why not choose a line that actually flows well?

Yeah, that's what I end up thinking, too. They've probably already chosen the best line in their book.

But I digress.

Back to my point: I got fed up with all the marketing tweets especially since most of them seem to come from people who otherwise are not engaged with Twitter at all, or very little. I nixed my own, and kept an eye on my sales. At first, nothing changed. Then I had a couple of pretty dry months. Then, April happened. In which I more than tripled the the best month of sales I ever had before on Amazon, and had my second best month ever on B&N. What changed?

Well, in April I was giving away two books. I released The Plane and the Parade so I was giving away The River and the Roses. And I had just started giving away Myadar's Snare then, too (I still am; get it here.) And because I wanted to be sure everyone knew about these giveaways, I did a lot more tweeting about them than I had been. I also sent out some direct messages--I really hope those didn't annoy anyone, but since what I was DMing about was free, I decided it was a risk worth taking. Since the free books are located here on the blog, I can't be sure that the tweets led directly to the sales--after all, for that to be the case, a lot of people would have had to click through on the pictures in the margins here or on the links on the ebook description page or something. I also joined several Goodreads groups in April and added my books to a few bookshelves, so it's quite possible that made a big difference--although I only did that with the Myadar books, and I sold a bunch of Veronica books as well as Broken Ones, too, which I didn't post.

So I've decided to give marketing tweets another try and see what happens. Right now, I'm only going to send out 2 or 3 a day. This is extremely low. Michael Hicks, who is my hero because he started out like any indie publisher and worked his way to where he quit his day job and bought a house in Florida with a pool, for pity's sake, sends them out every 60 to 120 minutes, for instance. He's being moderate compared to some of the spammers I mentioned above. I just really don't want someone who only has three dozen followers to open their Twitter account one morning and have to scroll through my fifty marketing tweets clogging their stream.

So we'll see if these tweets do anything. I may eventually up it to 6 a day, although I'm going to give it some time first. I'll give an update when I've seen what happens. By the way, if you don't already follow me on Twitter, you can do so here.

How do you schedule your tweets? Have you found that one kind of tweet is more effective for your sales than others (a book description, a quote from the book, a quote from a reviewer)?

When you see promo tweets, is there one kind you prefer? How do you feel about seeing a lot of promo tweets in your stream?

Veronica, Book 3 is Out!

I got so busy this week I haven't had a chance to do this post until now. My newest Veronica Barry novel, The Plane and the Parade, is out at Amazon and Barnes & Noble! This is the third book in the Veronica Barry series. The first, The River and the Roses, is available for free until the end of the month. I hope you'll download your preferred format and try the series out!

In The Plane and the Parade, French teacher and amateur psychic detective Veronica is off for the summer. It's not all fun and games, though, as Veronica begins to help SPD Detective Daniel Seong, her boyfriend, in his search for a murderer who may in fact be a terrorist. At least she and Daniel are going strong--but a visit from someone in Veronica's past may rock their solid foundation.

My bestest beta reader, Kathryn, interviewed me about The Plane and the Parade on her blog. That was loads of fun! It's always great to be invited to talk about my writing.

And as of this post, one copy of Plane has already been sold, so that's awesome.

This month has been great for sales, actually, after a somewhat disappointing March. And we're only halfway through, so I'm hoping this is the start of an ever increasing trend!

Releasing Plane brings up an interesting question for me, though. When you have a series, do you advertize the latest book a lot, or focus on the first? As a reader, I avoid jumping into the middle of a series. So it's irrelevant to me that book 7 of Song of Ice and Fire is out, for instance, because I would need to start at book 1 anyway. Then again, knowing that there are seven books does appeal to me, because I know when I start the series that I've got a ways to go before I run through the books that have been published. However, I also often hear complaints about book series that have "gone on too long" because the author "needs an editor" or has "lost passion for the story" or whatnot.

What do you think about book series? Do you like them better than stand alone books? Do you ever start a series in the middle? How would you approach marketing books in a series?

First Draft Finito!

Yes, folks, I have just finished the first draft of The Plane and the Parade, the third book in the Veronica Barry series (unless you count Veronica in Paris, which is book "zero" and takes place about 13 years before The River and the Roses). I'm doing a first read-through and then I'll be sending The Plane and the Parade to my most wonderful beta-reader, Kathryn. And while she's slogging through that, I'll be working on a cover. Although I have been searching through images, and so far I haven't found any parade ones I'm particularly taken with.

It's always so wonderful to finish the first draft. The revisions are much less fun. Yes, yes, I know they are a necessary evil, and I'm going to do my best to nail every typo and fill every plot hole. I'm just not going to particularly enjoy it.

I've been giving a lot of thought to what to write next, and I just finished reading a GLBT fantasy novel that I'll be reviewing here soon that I absolutely loved, and it made me want to write a GLBT fantasy novel. Or maybe just a fantasy novel, with or without GLBT characters. I've got a fantasy world I spend month building many many years ago that I'd love to actually set a novel in.

Trouble is, I'm really not sure what my characters or story would be like. I have odds and ends in terms of ideas, but nothing that hangs together. I know I like an old-fashioned quest, of course.

But then there's the whole idea I had about trying my hand at writing a romance, and I'm really not sure I'd want to combine the two. QUEST + ROMANCE = CHEESY. Not always, of course, but it just seems like if the point is to find the MacGuffin before the world ends or whatever, then splitting your attention to moon over some hottie is a little bit counterproductive. And I do realize the hottie can be the MacGuffin, but then it just really becomes a book about a character who is obsessed with someone else and needs to develop a stronger sense of self. Although I suppose the Myadar serial I've been working on has some elements of this--in her case it's a child, not a hottie, though. I like writing female main characters, though, and if I'm going to write a romance, I don't want my mc to be so smitten with the love interest that they pursue them like a MacGuffin. And as for a scenario where the mc of my fantasy novel dutifully pursues the (non-character) MacGuffin and falls in love with some other character who is somehow tangentially involved, while I have no problem with this sort of story, it's not really a romance. It's a fantasy story with an element of romance. And so it doesn't satisfy the "I should try writing a romance" urge.

No, I have a couple of specific needs when it comes to my mc, and these vary by genre. For one thing, if I do write a fantasy novel, I want my mc to be powerful. I often write mcs that are fairly ordinary or at least inexperienced, and as such, apt to get their butts whipped. It would be nice, for a change, to have an mc who does the butt-whipping. If I write a romance, I suppose my mc could still be a butt-whipper, (ahem--this is straying into unintended territory--keep your minds out of the gutter, people) but it's really not so essential.

There was the whole Edwardian romance idea, but I am, shall we say, a perfectionist when it comes to research, and would probably drown in any effort to write a historical romance even of the shallowest kind. I've considered possibly creating a fantasy setting that somewhat emulates the Edwardian England of Jane Austen, thereby releasing myself from the need for accuracy of depiction, but then we stray back into FANTASY + ROMANCE = CHEESY again.

Welcome to the merry-go-round that is my mind when I try to tease out a new story. :P

How about you, do you ever find yourself going around in circles when you're trying to nail down a new story?

Wherein I Muse about Writing

Despite going back to work last week, I have managed to continue working on the current WiP, which is satisfying. Lately writing has been functioning as my escape. It's not always like that--I'm far more likely to retreat into the Sims 3, but I've had to set that aside because the game has so outpaced my poor computer's abilities that without an upgrade the game is unplayable. Which means I have to resort to writing to get away from reality--and lately reality has been giving me reason to want to get away (see my recent entries in my family blog if you want details about that).

I've set aside the decopunk serial for the moment because I wrote myself into a corner with it and I decided I need distance before tackling it again. Instead I've written about 40K words of the third novel in the Veronica Barry series. I'm still wrestling with the title. Something to do with clouds. I have a whole elemental symbolism thing going--first water, then fire, now air. Next will have something to do with earth. Maybe the fifth will have to do with spirit. Or maybe I'll switch to feng shui elements and have metal and wood. Or some combination.

So far, the novel is moving along nicely, and I've managed to bring together several elements that I'm enthusiastic about, so that's cool. My only regret is that I didn't write The River and the Roses in first person. Ever since working on the decopunk serial, which was in first person, I've decided I really prefer it. However, River, Fire and Veronica in Paris are all third person, so it doesn't make sense for this book to suddenly switch to first. Oh well!

Veronica is, by now, like an old friend, and I can see returning to her over and over to tell more stories about her. I have a lot of other plot bunnies bouncing around in my head. I really want to write a romance, for one. Maybe an Edwardian romance, since I just love Jane Austen. Plus, I sometimes get tired of the violence that necessarily comes with writing a Veronica book (other times I'm in the mood to write horror and it really works--lately that hasn't been the case, though, because I really feel like there's too much violence all around us these days). So I figure a romance would be a good genre to choose if I want to avoid writing violence.

Romance is a challenge for me. I tend to be very cynical about romance in real life, and to find a lot of fictional romances unoriginal. Then again, I almost always enjoy romantic comedies, so I suppose that's the exception. I'm not sure I have the skill to write any kind of comedy, though. I can be funny, but it's sort of this out-of-nowhere thing that happens sometimes, not something I can sustain. So I'm really not sure I could actually manage to write a romance. But it's something I'd like to try one of these days.

I've always loved soap operas, and I've often thought it would be fun to write a series of novels, or maybe even another serialized novel, that emulates soap operas. I'm not sure how that would look, though. I mean, to really emulate soap operas, you have to be willing to go the whole hog. Baby switches, returns-from-the-dead, improbable-relative-revelations, etc. Would that work in written form? Maybe I'll give that a try one of these days. It would probably work best slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I wouldn't want to go too over the top with silliness, because then it wouldn't really be sustainable, would it?

What genres have you thought about trying out? Have you jumped in and tried one that was new to you? How did it go?

New book out! The Fire and the Veil

I decided to devote last week to finishing the revisions on The Fire and the Veil, the sequel to The River and the Roses, which I'd been neglecting since last year. I created my cover and published it on Amazon! I'll need to find some more time soon to get it up on Smashwords, too. I'm so pleased to have finally got it out, though.

Here's the summary:
French teacher and reluctant psychic Veronica Barry is under pressure. Her best friend's daughter, Angie, still traumatized from the assault she survived, has transferred to Veronica's school. Veronica's new boyfriend, Detective Daniel Seong, already wants her to meet his family. And fellow French teacher, Khalilah Jadeed, asks for Veronica's help to locate a missing woman. Add some disturbing dreams and aggressive spirits, and Veronica may have more than she can handle. Soon, she will discover that the spirits she sees and hears sometimes affect her world in other ways as well.

Adventure Stories & Orientalism

I'm so pleased that several people have commented on my post concerning dieselpunk and orientalism. I had already decided to write a follow-up post in order to delve more deeply into the question, as I really think it's worth discussing and it's something I mull over a lot. This is that post.

David Mark Brown commented on my original blog post about how he chose to flip character expectations around in order to challenge some of the problems of race relationships, etc., in his dieselpunk fiction. That shook me out of the assumption that the main characters of dieselpunk stories had to be westerners. I still have an issue with that, though, which is as a white westerner myself, I'm not sure how to believably write from the point of view of a nonwesterner or someone belonging to a nonwhite culture. I'm not ruling it out, just saying it would pose a considerable challenge to me. I've actually attempted to write from the pov of a black woman in the past (it was sci fi in a universe I built, so saying African American or Caribbean American doesn't fit). I never felt like I pulled it off, though.

A really big part of what troubles me is the issue of exoticism. Stephen A. Watkins commented on this blog post (which Tiyana Marie White wrote in response to my post), "I think there’s a difference between the aesthetic appreciation of something “exotic” meaning that it’s outside the norms of your experience and the type of problematic “exoticization” that results from fetishizing something that’s different for no reason than that it’s different." Exoticism/exoticization is huge for me. To be clear, the trouble I have is that I would like to write stories where the mc must go to some country foreign to them, to seek out some sort of treasure/have some sort of other adventure, much in the tradition of Indiana Jones. What I can't work out is how to impart all the thrills and fears of such a thing, without painting the culture as exotic and sinister. I'm not talking about describing the people in stereotypical terms (which isn't just offensive, it's also plain tiresome), so much as trying to achieve a tone of menace, etc., for the mcs, who are navigating a land that is foreign to them. Throw in some sort of cursed item(s) or whatever, and you have a recipe for your typical dark and threatening culture as seen in myriad books and films. The problem with that is that when you choose to represent a real Earth culture that way, you other them and contribute to a history of imperialism and oppression, something I don't want to do.

One option is to go ahead and represent some of the culture as sinister. For example, have some creepy big wig in the culture invite the characters to dinner, say, and then the characters proceed to navigate a house full of unnatural shadows and decorated with unsettling objects. The meal would be shocking to them as well due to whatever they're eating... if you've read my previous post, you might recognize this as a reference to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a movie that really beats you about the head with orientalist representations. As you may recall, part of the trouble with Temple is that it's not just portraying a culture in a very negative light, it's also doing so with blatant inaccuracies. Anyway, so let's say I want to have the creepy dinner chapter and I'm going to avoid the blatant inaccuracies. I'm still using items of the culture to create an aura of fear and danger. I could counterbalance that chapter with some sort of positive interaction in another chapter with much more approachable, appealing characters of the foreign culture. I don't mean yet another stereotype (lusty women who fall for the hero, mystical sages who provide guidance, etc.). No, I'm thinking more along the lines of the Colombian drug lord in Romancing the Stone (not a dieselpunk movie, but it operates on the same principal as interwar adventure stories with the mild mannered woman and rough and tumble male guide--think of The Mummy, same principle--who delve into a dangerous foreign land and encounter menacing characters, etc. in the pursuit of treasure). In Romancing the Stone, the audience is led to believe romance writer Joan Wilder and her adventuring guide, Jack I-forget-his-last-name are about to meet a stereotype of a Colombian thug: some backwards, unsophisticated guy who rides a mule. Turns out, the guy has modern ammenities, has read all of Joan's books, and the mule in question is a 4X4. Now, believe me, I'm not here to say that Romancing the Stone somehow avoided racist depictions because of this scene. Sadly, as much as I enjoy that movie, I think it's terribly problematic, too. But I digress. My point is that the scene challenges audience expectations. It does it, no doubt, in order to get laughs. Similar scenes abound in many films--and I think more often than not, they are there to get laughs. It's funny to set up expectations and then turn them on their heads.

My question is, do those sorts of scenes challenge expectations enough to be an antidote to the sinister scenes that paint a "foreign" culture as dark, dangerous, magical, etc.?

Anyway, to return to what Stephen Watkins wrote, I suppose another way to approach the issue of exoticism to interrogate whether those "sinister" representations fetishize the culture or simply represent it as unfamiliar to readers/viewers. When I wrote the as-yet-unpublished sequel to The River and the Roses I wanted to introduce Daniel Seong's family, and I wanted to do so intelligently. So I went on a Korean American chat board and asked a bunch of questions. The people on the board were super patient with me and helped to dispell some of the stereotypes I had knocking around in my head. They gave me insight into how to represent the family dynamics, the words people use, the way a dinner would play out, etc. It was all very cool and I learned a lot in the bargain. I'm reasonably sure I did a nice job of writing those scenes concerning Daniel's family. It's just a lot easier in the realistic setting of my modern day psychic mystery to not fall into the orientalist trap. In River, I can have Veronica come in as an outsider to a culture she's unfamiliar with, and have her be a bit uncomfortable and nervous about it, but still see it as a real, breathing, normal culture. Then again, she's not meant to be in a threatening situation. It's not an adventure story. Aside from her ability to commune with the dead (which really makes her more exotic than anyone else in the book), there's no magic, no cursed items, no spooky caves, no dungeon crawls, no evil villains (there are bad guys, but they are much more plebean). Is it possible to write adventure stories where there are all those things and not fall into the orientalist trap?

I suppose another option is to take the flipping-the-binary thing even further. Have a nonwhite and/or nonwestern hero who is dealing with a white, western villain. I mean, you do see that, of course. Nazis spring to mind. Is that the only way? Isn't avoiding casting nonwhite and/or nonwestern villains in a story just another form of discrimination?

Well, I've written myself into a corner. Help me out, folks. What's your take?

Titles: How do you pick them?

Man, when they say "full-time mother" they aren't kidding. Lately the bug has been limiting his naps to 30 minutes at a time, and only about three of those a day. And the rest of the time, he demands constant attention. Even as I type he's fussing. ::runs over to crib::

::returns after entertaining the baby with his toy monkey and giving him a paci::

And yet, I've managed to finish part 2 of the serial novel, which is as yet unnamed.  Which brings me to the question of titles.

For The River and the Roses, the title came after a lot of deliberation, and while I think it's the best of the options I was debating at the time, I don't know if I really like it. It's long. It doesn't really say, "This is a mystery novel about a woman coming to accept her psychic ability." But I do like the gothic quality of roses, and I like the cover, which mirrors the title. So... I'd give it a B, I guess.

Broken Ones was tough, too. I wanted to address the emotional damage the characters are coping with, as well as make a reference to the several broken windows in the story (which are tied symbolically, of course, to the emotional damage). I also wanted a title that was original, and there are a lot of titles with "broken" or "broken windows" or whatnot. When I chose Broken Ones, it was the only book with that title that came up in an Amazon search, although since then more have popped up. But I wonder if it sounds too angsty, and maybe that's why people haven't been downloading it. I changed the (VERY) brief description I've been sending out with my "thank you for following message," though, and there have been three more downloads in a week, so I do think calling it "paranormal" was part of the problem there. It's very hard to capture what Broken Ones is about in three or four words, though, so the new description says "a novel of escape & survival of abuse." Which has a weird feeling to me, syntax-wise, and may give the impression, again, that the novel is angsty. Which I guess it is, a bit, but I wouldn't describe the narrator, Louise, as angsty at all. I think what makes Broken Ones stand out is her voice, which is very matter of fact. Louise has a lot of humor and she tends to see things in fairly cynical terms--she's not the "woe is me" type. Anyway, so I'd give that title a B, too.

Veronica in Paris is the best of my title choices, and it was totally easy. There was no debate. It was my working title, and it stuck. It gives a pretty accurate impression of the story, I'd say--it's about a woman named Veronica who goes to live in Paris for a year. Paris is pretty strongly associated to romance in people's minds, so the fact that there's romance involved probably comes as a shock to no one who reads that title. So, A for that one.

Anyway, so now I'm working on this new book, and the working title is the name of the city, Helésey, where most of it is set. Which isn't going to tell anyone anything about the book, and may even mislead them into thinking it's French in some way. It actually draws on Norse mythology for some of the culture, although I've altered a lot of aspects. I also draw inspiration from America and Italy in the 1920s, as well as Germany in the 1930s. But there's really nothing French about it--the word "Helésey" is an altered version of the name of an island in Norse mythology, and the city is on an island, so it seemed to fit. The accented e comes from the original word, too.

My main character is named Miadar, which is not a common enough name, I think, to put it in the title--I suspect most people won't recognize it as a woman's name at all, which isn't surprising since I made it up by combining the words for "honey" and "hair" I found on a site claiming to have words in old Norse. I have no idea if the site is legit, and it doesn't really matter--I often choose names for characters based on what they mean, but it never comes up for the reader, so if it only means something to me, that's okay. The first part of the novel revolves around a coronation, and Miadar leaving her home because she's summoned to Helésey, the capitol, to witness it. So I've thought about The Coronation as a title, and also Summoned. The former may work, but I'm not sure about the latter, although I like the idea of having a verb in the title. Summoned conjures images of magic and demon summoning to me. Maybe I've read too much urban fantasy. The second part revolves around a night out Miadar participates in, where she visits an illegal gambling hall (think speakeasy). So I thought about Invited, The Invitation or The Gambling Hall for that one, although I'm really not in love with any of them. The next part will have to do with a seduction... so The Seduction, perhaps. Seduced, maybe. Parts four, five and six I haven't worked out completely yet, but they will have something to do with a vigilante, and probably at least one debauched party, and a betrayal. The last parts (not sure how many there will be total) will involve fighting for freedom, bringing down an evil leader, finding someone who is lost, and escaping. It's fairly murky in my mind at this point, and I don't like talking in detail about stories I haven't written, but you get the idea.

I'd like the titles to all work together:
The Coronation - The Invitation - The Seduction - The Betrayal - The ???
Or:
Summoned - Invited - Seduced - Betrayed - ???
Or:
The Capitol - The Gambling Hall - The [location] - etc.

Or I suppose it could be something like: Miadar Summoned, Miadar Invited, Miadar Seduced, Miadar Betrayed...

What do you think? What makes a good title? How do you choose your titles? Are you satisfied with the titles you've chosen in the past? Do you think about parts of speech or other specific characteristics of titles when you're trying to choose one?

My current "shoulds" of writing

My cbt therapist (or should that be cb therapist?) Shiva, would probably tell me to rephrase this, but there are several things I "should" be doing for my writing right now.*

First of all, there's the sequel to The River and the Roses, which has been through one round of revisions, and probably could stand to undergo about nine rounds more. If I gave it some serious time and energy, I could probably get it up to par for April, and publish it. I even have most of what I need to create the cover. I've been meaning to do this for about six months, with the intention of dropping the price for River to $0.99 once the sequel is out. Why have I not done it yet? Well, aside from the whole pregnancy/bed rest/newborn baby distraction, revisions are... well, work. And often annoying, painful work at that. I read a quote on twitter the other day, I forget from which famous author, saying something about how revisions or rewrites are more pleasant than producing the first draft because you don't have the dread of not finishing the novel hanging over you. I can relate to that, but for me, revisions are way more difficult to get into. Still, and Shiva would approve of this phrase, it would be satisfying to get that item done.

Then there's marketing. I stopped actively marketing my books nearly a year ago, I think, or at least nine months ago. I'm still on twitter and I update my facebook page from time to time, most often to notify you all that I've got a new blog post, actually, but as for directly sending out messages on twitter suggesting that people check out my book, no. Michael R. Hicks, one of those lucky and driven self-pubbed authors who is living the dream (he quit his day job last April, I think it was--I admire him so much!) suggests that the "tipping point" for twitter as a marketing platform is to have 1000+ followers. At the moment I have about 845. I use my twitter account to recommend news articles and just talk about things I'm doing or am interested in. And also let people know when I've posted something new on either this blog or the recipe blog. I don't advertise the family blog because it's much more personal and I figure if you're really that interested in me you'll check it out off this page. And probably most people aren't that interested in me! Anyway, I don't have a problem with people posting on twitter to advertise their books (in fact I try to retweet them when it's clear to me what they are about). Although some people will spam the feed for like, ten minutes, and it makes me wonder whether they've ever read an article about twitter etiquette. So my point is, though, I haven't been doing that. Why not? I feel like until I've got something new to offer, I don't want to risk losing followers because I'm self-promoting for the sake of self-promoting. Probably not sound business reasoning, but there it is. Maybe this week I'll send out a couple of links to my books.

I'm on Pinterest, now, too. Please feel free to follow me. I even have a board devoted to books, although they are books I want to remember to check out, so it seems weird to post my own books there. Maybe I'll create a new board for my books and stuff related to them. I do have a decopunk board where I collected a bunch of stuff to help me world build my current story. So I suppose when (if) it's done and I've published it, I could pin it to that board and it wouldn't be weird.

Speaking of the current novel, it is teetering on the edge of that going-to-be-abandoned cliff because I haven't been working on it regularly and I'll lose so much steam I'll never get it back at this rate. And that would be a shame, I think, because I have some interesting ideas for it. So what would be good there is to set up some sort of schedule or something... and bribe myself with some reward for achieving a word goal too, I think. My attempts to create NaNos outside of the official NaNoWriMo have failed thus far. It's silly, it shouldn't (there's that word again) make a difference whether I'm looking at the official site's graph for the word count or a ticker I created myself, but for some reason, it does. So the trick may be to abandon the large goal of a NaNo and make smaller goals. Shorter term, too. And small rewards as a result. Hm... must give some thought to what rewards would motivate me.

Any suggestions? Must be cheap. We are broke-ish.

How about you, do you have any writing "shoulds" or other projects that need your attention? How do you get yourself on task?

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* By the way, if you have ever struggled with depression or anxiety, I strongly recommend going through cbt. Changed my life, no exaggeration.