Not long to go now

I’d love to have an exact launch date for The Syndrome Diaries, but even if I knew the day it will upload to Amazon, the time it takes Amazon to process new e-books varies. So I’ll just have to say I’m aiming for mid-October.

The final edits are going quicker than I expected. I’m adding a little more colour into one of my main characters and also sowing a few more seeds for a twist at the end of the book. I thought I had put enough pointers in for it to make sense, but my beta readers tell me not. The predictability of a plot’s twists and turns are impossible to gauge as the author, so this feedback has been particularly useful.

As far as marketing goes, you might notice the appearance of a Facebook ‘like’ widget over to the right. Yes, I got my author page set up! Now I have to work out what to do with it, and it’s one more thing to keep tabs on and update. I have to admit I have reminders on my organiser/project management app to tweet and to go and read blogs. It’s easy to think of them as luxury activities for spare time, and ticking them off a to-do list gets me out of that mindset. I’d better add a recurring Facebook task.

There seems to have been slightly more activity on my blog, and because I’m now using WordPress for two other projects, I’m getting better at finding my way round. Now I need to start paying attention to the statistics on here: there’s so much interesting and useful information. I think I need to structure it with a weekly report where I collect specific figures, rather than just having a look when I feel like it. That’ll be another app task…

How do you manage your platform and stats without it taking over your life? All tips gratefully received.

Is Marketing Your Nemesis?

Marketing is often perceived to be a bit like the picture above: lots of samey-looking offers, all competing to shout the loudest. It’s those people on Twitter that you unfollow. Those emails you unsubscribe from. The Facebook contacts you unfriend. That probably tells you something, and it’s hardly surprising to see comments from writers that they aren’t going to do any marketing. Unfortunately, a lot of ‘marketing’ that comes to our attention is from the shouty crew, and it’s not very good!

The idea of marketing seems to split writers into two camps: those who embrace it, and those who run away screaming. I’ve read a few comments from writers this week that definitely fall into the second category. As a writer who used to work in marketing, I thought it was time to put together some information that might help other writers. This will form a series of blogs as my debut novel, The Syndrome Diaries, gets ready to fly the nest. You’ll be able to follow me as I apply my marketing knowledge and see what works for me and what doesn’t. As a newbie self-publisher, I’m bound to drop a few clangers that you can learn from. Enjoy!

What is marketing?

At the most basic level, it’s about identifying a need and meeting that need. As writers and readers, we have a hunch that people need fiction for enjoyment, escapism, entertainment, to pass time on the train and lots of other reasons too numerous to list. They can cope without it, but they’d prefer not to. My market is the people who, if they knew about my book, would want to read it and would turn the last page having enjoyed the journey my story took them on.

If you’re engaging with the writing community, you’ll no doubt be hearing a lot about platform-building, but that’s only a small part of marketing, and it’s also the part that the shouties get a bit too enthusiastic about. To market effectively, you need to think more broadly. You don’t have to be a business expert, just apply some common sense across what marketers call the 7 P’s. I’ll be covering these in forthcoming blogs; in the meantime, here’s a summary:

Product – your book. What kind of book is it? What kind of need is it meeting? Who is it for? What does it do?
Price – if you’re self-publishing, what sort of return do you want to make? What costs do you need to recoup?
Place – this is what sometimes gets called the sales channel. These days it’s whether to go traditional or self publish, and whether to produce an e-book, a hard copy or both
Promotion – any activity that raises awareness of your book
Packaging – your cover design, fonts and format
Positioning – how you and your book are perceived (what’s your brand?)
People – all those involved with getting your book to its audience, including beta readers, reading groups, editors, designers, agents, your mates, your family and anyone else who’s helping out

These factors all tie in with each other. Some of them will tickle your creative tastebuds, others will seem pretty dull in comparison, but they’re all worth thinking about.

Next time: more about the #1 P – product – and my ‘raunch’ dilemma!

What’s in a name?

“As soon as you said her name, I could picture her.” That was a comment at my writer’s group, to one of the published writers there who has a gift for painting characters not just with physical description but with their names.

Names are a fundamental of story-writing. If I told you my protagonist was called Brenda, or Roxanne, or Lucy, or Kaz, then you’d probably form quite different images in your mind for each one. For a few years in my late teens and twenties, I switched to using my middle name, Justine: there were four Rachels in my class at school and I was fed up with the confusion. I never really felt like a Justine, though, and when I was persuaded to revert back to Rachel, I realised how integral that name was to my identity.

When I’ve started work on a novel for NaNoWriMo, I haven’t focused on names, but by the end of the draft I’ve often felt that characters needed re-labelling. The Syndrome Diaries is no exception: Rebecca started out as Carly, then became Edith, which didn’t suit her either. It was as if she was in a milliner’s, trying on hats, but couldn’t find the one that captured her essence. Rebecca seems right for her; it fits her socio-demographically and offers several variants – Rebecca, Becky, Beck – that the other characters know her by according to the relationship they have with her.

My next novel is already taking shape in my head, and this time, I knew the protagonist’s name almost from the outset of planning. Gillian Jeffries arrived in my head one afternoon a couple of weeks ago, and her story is taking shape there now, ready for NaNo 2012. I’d be interested to know at what stage other writers find their characters’ names. Are they the first part of your planning process, or do the names change during rewrites and edits?

Writers’ Groups: Stepping outside the comfort zone

In her 1934 classic, ‘Becoming a Writer’, Dorothea Brande suggests that writers should cultivate ‘two persons’ within themselves: one should be practical and objective, the other sensitive and creative. We are often so caught up with the latter as we write that the pragmatist side – which is far more use for getting our work improved and noticed – is neglected.

One way of addressing that is to join a writers’ group. It’s tempting to hone, edit and generally tweak writing around for years, but constructive feedback from a critical audience is vital to help make the finished work as good as it can be. More fundamentally, if you are serious about getting your writing read by others, you need to be used to negative as well as positive feedback. You can’t be to everyone’s taste, however good a writer you are.

I admit that my instinct has always been to go it alone (I still have the school report from when I was 9, which said I preferred my own ideas to those of others, and never was a truer word spoken…). I’d lasted a couple of weeks on a 10-week creative writing course some years back, largely because it felt like being back at school; disciplined, rigorous and, as a newbie writer, I struggled to engage with the highly critical environment (or, to be more accurate, the highly critical tutor). Ever since then, I’ve avoided anything combining writing and groups, but my New Year’s Resolution was to start going outside my comfort zone, and the writing group had to be done. I went online to the Meetup website, found this group http://www.meetup.com/Writers-Connect-Manchester/ and went along to a meeting.

It wasn’t like school. We sat in easy chairs in Costa, and I wasn’t the only first-timer, and nor was I the only one worrying about what might be coming next. We started off with a writing exercise, then went round the group, reading out our efforts. Mine was OK – some of the writing was better than mine, but I still felt I could hold my own. We critiqued another member’s poem (rather good, and written in her second language). I came away wondering how a prepared extract of my writing would fare. The next meeting, I took a few pages of my novel along.

Altogether, I had four pages of writing. I thought it might be a little long, but at the end of the first page, they were happy for me to keep going, so I did. As I finished the last sentence, there was a long silence. That was the worst moment: I wondered if I was about to be taken down a few pegs and put firmly in my place as a beginner. But that wasn’t the case. I think it may just have been that general reluctance we often have to be the first one to speak, and once we started discussing the passage, I got some really helpful feedback on adding some detail and taking a little away. We talked about the kind of market it would appeal to – perhaps a little narrower than I’d first hoped, but realistic, and, as I said earlier, you aren’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. There were some positive comments too, regarding the way I’d used the characters to create a sense of awkwardness. It’s one thing to feel a particular mood as you write a scene, but quite another thing to be sure that others can also sense the same atmosphere, so feedback was important here.

I came home feeling pleased I’d had the guts to have my work dissected, and still more pleased that it had generated such useful critiques. I revised the passage, and you can read it here http://www.rachelhallettwriter.co.uk/page_2629079.html. Stepping outside your comfort zone is easily avoided, but once you’ve done it, you see the rewards. I’m trying to more of it in everyday life – to say yes when my instinct is to say “Aaargh!”, and I’m having a lot of fun.