Worderella Writes

The First Thing a Reader Sees is the Cover

If you’re trying to make it big as a self-publisher, investing in your marketing is key. Don’t just slap a picture as your cover or use some template, hire a design team! Not only will they give you a great cover, they’ll also give you ideas about bookmarks and business cards (which you can leave in library books similar to your own book), posters, postcards, etc. Look at the following companies for a headstart to a great marketing plan.

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Miss Snark’s How to Write a Hook

Taken from Miss Snark, here is the general template on how to make your hook act, read, and seem like an actual hook.

X is the main guy; he wants to do:
Y is the bad guy; he wants to do:
they meet at Z and all L breaks loose.
If they don’t resolve Q, then R starts and if they do it’s L squared.

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Agents, Agents, and more Agents

Now that you have that first half of the novel under your belt, maybe from NaNoWriMo, maybe from working on your own, it’s time to start looking for that agent if you aren’t going the self-publishing route. Here’s a pretty extensive article that I found.

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Exciting New Links!

Bloomsbury, an independent publisher whose home is the UK, has a wonderful Writer’s Area with articles about how to submit materials, approach a publisher, what you can expect an agent to do for you, and even lists agents from the US and UK/Ireland. I spent quite a bit of time here. They also have a Research Center, which I haven’t played around with yet, but they claim to have over 17,000 cross-referenced, free entries that you can utilize for your writing. I’m just itching to try it out! (And yes, this is the publisher that found J.K.Rowling.)

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Test Your Title

Found something fun and nifty online, I can’t remember how I stumbled upon this but I thought I’d share it anyway: you can test your work-in-progress title for popularity. Now that I’m writing this, I think I found it in Writer’s Digest, which I’m reading in between classes and while I wait for programs to compile. Lulu.com has been working with statisticians, apparently, to come up with this nifty little Title Scorer, and the results are pretty accurate to a certain degree…you as an author, reader and writer will have to use your own judgement, of course, to decide whether you should believe it. The highest score you can get is an 83, I’m not sure why, but such is life. My first novel, Catching the Rose, made it up to the 70s somewhere. The Winslow Charade got a paltry 20-something score.

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Book Trailers

All right, I’ve been seeing a lot of these lately and I’m wondering whether they are really getting the job done: book trailers. I understand what they’re trying to do. We’re such a visual society that simply reading a blurb or seeing a cover sometimes isn’t enough. We’re used to commercials; we’re used to movie trailers. And that’s what a book trailer is: a movie trailer for a book. Except…there usually aren’t actors because half the fun for the reader is to come up with their own visualization of the characters (unless they’re depicted on the front cover and the author is lucky enough to have the model act in their trailer). So the trailer is a bunch of words put to music. If the book is chick lit, then you have those snappy, contemporary, almost art deco-style cartoons of females in high heels and mini-skirts wearing sunglasses, holding a martini, and smirking as she thinks about her love interest.

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Creating a Title They Won’t Throw Back

Yes, I accept e-mails from AuthorHouse even though they were sued for libel because they accepted a self-published author’s book which had been rejected by another self-publishing company for libel. I accept e-mails from AuthorHouse even though their contract is less than stellar. I accept e-mails from AuthorHouse because they send helpful information like the following.

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Self-Publishing Experiences

When people ask me about my book, I tell them I self-published it. This is true and untrue. I paid to have the book printed, I bought a set of the book and sold it to my family and friends, and was interviewed by my local television station about it. Mainly because I was a senior in high school and it was my senior thesis. But if I had gone the actual self-publication route, I would have found a printer, custom designed my cover and interior, and kept all the profits for myself. What I did in reality was go through a print-on-demand company, Aventine Press….

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Self-Publishing

Ah, the woes of being a writer in today’s world. It is hard to break into publishing, especially with the big names. Even small press publishers are closing their doors to unsolicited manuscripts, meaning if you don’t have an agent who is willing to back your work (which is sometimes a trial in and of itself, finding an agent that you get along with and is willing to work for you), you’re a little out of luck. And that’s why I turned to self-publishing for my first novel.

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Marketing: Author Websites

This is something that I come across time and time again, and with some of my favorite authors: horrid websites. As a computer scientist and amature web designer, it just breaks my heart to see websites with no style, no definite design, and therefore, not much attracting new fans. This isn’t to say I’m an expert at awesome websites. I change my layout often enough when I learn a new coding trick. But let me say this: there are certain websites that just turn me off to the author.

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