You wrote a book. The first draft is complete, resting like a quality steak, waiting for you to devour it in the editing process. Here’s some advice: This is a good time to write your promotional materials.
At some point before the publication of your book, a news release, perhaps a press interview, and other publicity documents are going to be written, printed and distributed to advertise your book. If you are a well-respected, established author, you might even have a team of industry professionals to do the publicity for you (or hire a team for a one-time effort). If you are a new author, or self-publishing, you might want to do the work yourself.
But that is the future, after the book has been edited and rewritten. Right now, the purpose of this exercise is not to finalize a news release and press interview. The purpose is to formalize the process of thinking about your book as a whole, and look at the overarching themes and give you a broad foundation of thought with which to then go and edit your draft.
In other words, it is a good way to think about your book now that the first draft is done. In your actual publicity campaign, you may rely on a lot of different written materials (including a well designed website) to promote your book. But for this exercise, we can focus on the news release and the press interview. Attempting to write out those two pieces will give a deeper understanding of your novel and help you sort out ideas of what your book is about.
Don’t worry about the format for this pieces, just write them out. You will polish them later on in the publication process.
The News Release
The news release needs to include the who, what, where, why and when of your book. All of those details should be in the first paragraph. The basic information is you, the author, your credentials (have you written another book? Are you an expert at something?), the book title, date of release, and at least one sentence that states why this book is important.
The news release should be around a page long, and the middle section should be a statement about the book. What’s the book about? Why would people want to read it? What makes you an expert on the subject? (If it’s fiction, that makes it a little harder to answer that last question, but believe me, whether you realize it or not, you are an expert).
When you write the body of your news release, you need to try and sell your book by pointing out what makes it unique. Why is this book the one book that your audience should read this year?
The second to last paragraph should be a short biography, and you can restate your credentials. The last paragraph of the news release will include all the ordering details if someone wanted to buy the book. Obviously, these two components would go in the real news release, but it’s okay if you don’t know all the details right now.
The Press Interview
Imagine interviewing yourself about the book. What would you want to say in an interview?
The easiest way to approach this document is to write out questions that you want the “interviewer” to ask, and then answer them in one or two paragraphs per question. Some of the information during your interview should be the same as the news release. But whereas the news release is typically limited to one or two pages, the press interview should be as long as you need it to be.
Here are some very basic questions that you can answer:
What inspired you to write the book?
Who is your favorite character?
Who is your target audience?
When and why did you begin writing?
What is the central theme of your book?
Who are you favorite authors? What do you love about their writing?
What is your book about?
After you have drafted a news release and a press interview, you should have a good idea what your book is about, and a better understanding of your characters and the central themes of your story. Remember, the purpose is to give you a sharp lens to use when you begin to edit your first draft.
When you finish the first draft of your full length book, there is a lot of relief. Getting it on paper may be the hardest part, but your work isn’t done by any stretch. Before you ship it off to your editor (whether it’s someone who is paid to edit your work, your mother or someone helping you in exchange for a nice dinner) you need to do some reconnaissance. You need to exercise your brain to bring form and substance to the editing process.
Draft your cover copy
Cover copy, typically printed on the backside of your book or inside flaps if the format is hardbound, is a key component to draw interest of a potential reader. There is bonus value to working on cover copy though, because you can use it later on a sales page (like your amazon.com listing), a website, and in other places where you need a short or extended description of the book. It is the foundation of a good marketing plan, and you should be actively engaged in the writing of your cover copy.
(Though it is okay to eventually have a professional company write your cover copy, at this stage, the purpose is to organize your ideas about the book. The first round of editing belongs to you alone.)
Step 1: Describe your book in one sentence.
It’s hard to do. Keep your sentence to approximately 200 characters. Your sentence has to a) sell your book b) describe the book c) engage the reader. This exercise by itself is one of the most important steps to take before you start any editing.
Step 2: Describe your book in one paragraph.
A short description has the same intentions as the single sentence. Sell, describe, engage. Try to keep your short description to 1,000 characters. This is often the version you will use for your book listings.
Step 3: Describe your book in one page.
Sell, describe, engage. But now do it in 300 words or less. This version should be the easiest for you because you have the most room. So take the time to think about what the reader has to know to make them want to read your book.
You do not have to have all the right answers or perfect a sales pitch at this point. Later, when you send the book for layout and design, that is the point at which your cover copy needs to be both polished and effective. Right now, you are trying to stimulate your brain and figure out “how would I describe this book to someone?”
Step 4: Draft the text for your cover.
Once you have those three steps down, the last step is to write the actual back cover copy. Some writers find it helpful to have a condensed version (150 words approximately) and an extended version (250 words). If you get stuck, jot down some notes on what you want people to know about your work and then write those ideas into paragraphs. Read the backs of other authors’ books to see how they sell their book. Remember, your cover copy has to be dynamic, it has to accurately describe the book, and it has engage the reader somehow. You can use your sentence, paragraph and page descriptions for inspiration but don’t just copy them word for word.
If you have never written cover copy before, you will be surprised how hard it is, and how much it forces you to think about your book on a broad level. Don’t worry about the professionalism of your copy right now. The point is to get the words on paper that will well represent your book, and to organize your ideas for the editing process.
Before you go to your first round of editing, I will recommend one more exercise to get you prepared. I will talk about the second exercise in next week’s column.
What is most important to a well-written novel? A solid plot, vivid settings or your characters?
I would argue that fully developed, relatable characters make or break a book in a way that setting or plot will not. Reading is a process of taking a fictional world and finding the threads that relate to your own life. Historical novels from the Revolutionary War, horror novels that take place in demon houses, fantasy novels with dragons and faeries, those experiences only exist in our imagination. But as readers, we find ways to connect to the material we are reading by drawing associations with things we do know. Well-developed characters are actually the easiest way to help your readers do just that.
At its essence, there are three strategies for building characters, and it’s probably worth the time to look at all three when you are writing your book.
Building Character from Dialogue
How a person talks says a lot about who they are. Do they have an accent? Do they stutter? Speak a foreign language? It is easy enough to find ways to write those kind of characteristics into your characters’ dialogue. There are also regional differences in dialect, nuances of slang and speaking style that can help us know your character better.
Dialogue is tricky for some writers. You don’t want your characters to all sound the same, since they have different upbringings and education. But be careful of just tweaking dialogue with arbitrary speech shifts just to make your characters “sound” different. Remember, these characters should talk like real people. But here’s the trick: real dialogue is nothing like real conversation. Some things, particularly really strong dialects and heavy accents, just don’t translate to the written page and become more of a distraction than a help. Written language comes with a fairly uniform set of rules and it’s not in your best interest to break them without a really good reason.
Besides, a lot of dialect and speaking style can be transferred to the written page without a lot of effort. To prove the point, here is an exercise to try. Find a friend who speaks the way you want your character to speak. Write down what they say word for word, and then look at how just their words alone easily convey a lot of their personality and style. You don’t have to write in a lot of slang to build character. Too much can backfire in a book and sound fake.
Building Character from Action
Do your characters act in character? It sounds funny, but every time they make it a decision, it should be a decision that your characters would make. But here’s the trick: the thing about action is not what happens to the characters, but how your characters react. Decision-making and motivation are the components of action that define people and make them fully developed characters. We have to know what pushes a character to take action, and that motivation has to jive with the reader’s expectations of the character.
Trust your instinct on this one. If you think it’s out of character, it probably is. Take a step back at that point and outline your character’s motivation. Ask “why are they making this decision?” Then, whatever the answer is, make sure the reader knows why too.
Building Character from Circumstance
Sometimes, we build characters to serve a particular function (like a doorman at a hotel). Just remember that extraneous characters are just that; unnecessary. Make everyone have a clearly defined purpose. It’s not always as simple as “well there’s a hotel, so there should be a doorman.” In real life, there may be a doorman, but in your story, there should be a purpose for you to mention the doorman besides the fact that he hangs out at the entrance of the hotel.
Remember, even your main characters can serve a function. Every character has a purpose and sometimes it is within the context of a scene, sometimes within a chapter and sometimes over the course of the book. Make sure you know why a character is there, and then make that clear to the reader. But here’s the trick: as a writer, we don’t always know why a character is there when we first write about them.
It’s okay during your first draft to not really know why a particular character is there. It is something you should discover and know the answer to before too long. But sometimes, it’s okay just to leave a character in a scene for the time being. You never know when they might be a handy person to have a round.
Good characters aren’t the only way to write a good book, but they are an essential component. Some books do thrive on the plot or intense imagery where the author’s focus is not really on the characters. And the best books will probably delve deeply into all three components generously. There are any number of reasons why a reader has picked up your book, the trick is understand what is going to keep them around to the end. Building characters that they want to know better is an way to keep your readers engaged until the end.
Finishing your first draft of a full length novel is a major project. No matter how careful your planning is, no matter how detailed your notes are, no matter how long you take outlining the plot, there is still a small matter of putting the words on the page. It takes dedication, time, and focus. The bulk of your efforts happens long before you know whether the book is marketable or whether the characters are engaging and memorable, and before you can judge the worth of your story – by whatever measure you use.
Here are three steps I advised you to take during the writing of your first draft:
1) Minimize distractions
2) Set aside a fixed time every day to write
3) Give yourself a break once in a while
As you get towards the end of your first draft, though, it’s time to switch gears. Your routine works for you. Your notes and outlines have done their job to keep you focused. You have to keep writing, but you also have to start looking at your work with a critical eye. No author works without the help of an editor (even if it’s your best friend or your mother) but you also have to develop some editing skills yourself. Nobody is going to work as hard as you to make your book perfect. Here is the next step to take that will not only help you finish your first draft, but will help you develop a sharp eye as an editor.
When You are 50% Done with Your First Draft
Now is the time to backtrack and read the book from the beginning. Take a colored pen (don’t mark up your draft in black or blue ink), print out a copy of everything you have written and read it from the beginning, making notes in the column and marking up changes directly on the text.
There is a reason I’m telling you to print it out. Unless you are a seasoned editor, I don’t recommend trying to edit directly on your computer. There is a emotional connection with the process when you start to slash through your writing with a pen. It forces you to see what is written on the page, not what you think you have written. The point of self-editing is to spot the mistakes before someone else has to.
First, watch out for the easy stuff. You should look at spelling and word choice. Now is the time to have a dictionary at hand and a thesaurus nearby. Any word that looks wrong, or feels wrong, you should stop and consider it. Look it up in the dictionary; is it spelled right? Look up synonyms in the thesaurus; is there a better word for what you are trying to say?
That should be (or become) fairly automatic when you edit your draft. Get used to always questioning word choice and sentence construction. Make notes about possible changes, cross out words you don’t want to use and write in a better word so you can go back and make the change in your draft.
Second, and this harder, you have to look at the flow of your story. That includes examining the plot. Does it make sense? Are the details there? What’s missing (maybe it’s coming up in the second half)? Are you confused at any point? If you’re confused, you better believe your reader is going to be.
It also means evaluating your characters. Are your characters true to themselves? By now, you should know your characters pretty well. Maybe not perfectly, but enough to recognize when dialogue or a particular action just doesn’t feel right. Is their behavior consistent from chapter to chapter? Is there anything we need to know about your main characters that we don’t yet (maybe it’s coming up the second half)?
Any time you run across something that is missing from the story, write a note to yourself directly on your draft. Any time you find an error, or something that doesn’t feel right, make a note to come back and look at it again later. An author’s instincts are pretty good, you know when a sentence, a character, or dialogue isn’t working. Trust yourself. If nothing else, note the page and paragraph so you can come back to it. You may decide later to leave it as is.
The flow of a story can be hard to diagnose. We know when a story is great, when we can’t put it down. We also know when a book is a clunker, hard to read and hard to follow the plot. As a reader, you know it instinctively. But how do you know it as a writer? As an editor? It takes practice to learn not only to recognize that there is a problem, but to put your finger on exactly what that problem is. Once you find the flaw, the writer in you can go back and fix it.
At this point in your draft, you don’t have to make all the decisions. Somethings are better left alone, at least until you are 100% done with your first draft. And keep writing. Only 50% more to go.
Here is an obvious truth: you cannot be a published author unless you have written a book.
It’s easy to get caught up in the dream of publishing, appearances on Oprah, book tours and fans catching you in the street for an autograph, but you have to have a finished product first. Before you do anything else, you have to bang out a first draft.
It sounds pretty straightforward. But unless you’re independently wealthy or already writing for a living, making the time to write, much less finish, a book can be as much work as the writing itself.
One way to make time is to make writing habitual. That means developing a routine at the same time every day, writing for as little as a half hour or for as long as you have. Another way is reward yourself for meeting certain page goals. Write fifty pages and take a break to go to the movies. Some people find their time is better structured within a program like National Novel Writing Month (otherwise known as NaNoWriMo, see their website for the details www.nanowrimo.org).
But for most of us, none of these arrangement works 100%. So if your system isn’t getting it done, and your book isn’t getting finished, here are a few ideas to keep you progressing towards your goal of a completed first draft.
Write forwards, not backwards
Writing forwards means that you spend more time writing new material than you do fine tuning what you have already written. This is the core of how NaNoWriMo works. You have 30 days to write a novel, just keep going. It works for your first draft because you know there will be plenty of time to edit when you’re done.
The downside to writing at frenetic pace of NaNoWriMo is that your writing towards the end of the month tends to suffer disproportionately compared to earlier chapters. But the point is to get a completed draft finished first and foremost.
Take Notes on the Toilet
I don’t mean this literally. What I mean is that you should keep a notepad and pen handy at all times to jot down ideas, plot points and character development. Inspiration is unpredictable, you have to be ready to document it when it hits.
But when you sit down to actually write, that is not the time to be taking and arranging notes. Unless you’re an extremely organized writer, stopping to jot notes is just going to be a distraction. A better plan is to take all your notes since the last writing session and go through them just before you write. Read them over, possibly rearrange them into a particular order. Then set them aside and write. You can always pick them back up later if you need to.
Don’t Give Google All Your Time
If you write on a computer, there might be a temptation to google information for your book while you write, or look up synonyms on Encarta’s thesaurus, or just surf the web for a minute to distract yourself. I don’t recommend it. Any book worth publishing will go through a lengthy editing process and that is when you should look at word choice more carefully and check facts. For a first draft, there will be factual inconsistencies, missing words, bad grammar and poor syntax. This is one time when it’s all welcome.
If you need a distraction or a break, I recommend physically getting up and going for a walk outside. Don’t surf the web and don’t turn on the TV until you are totally done for the day.
Throughout the writing process, from first draft to final draft, I have one more recommendation. Read. A lot. Make time to read books by authors within your genre and especially books in other categories. Reading is a vital component to being a writer. It will strength your resolve to finish the first draft and join the ranks of published authors.
Self-publishing has developed into a powerhouse industry in the last few years as the technology to print books on demand has made it profitable for a number of high profile companies (amazon among them) to start selling those services to the average person. That means you can be an author too.
But even as there are more books published today than ever, there are less readers out there, and the result is a saturation of the market with books that nobody will read, much less ever hear about. It’s an internet myth; you can reach anyone if only you publish on the world wide web.
But whether you publish a novel for your own satisfaction or to make money, you still need key ingredients in order to be successful.
Value
Now that publishing companies are switching to a print-on-demand format, it is an amazing opportunity for writers to get published in an industry that is largely stagnant and decidedly unkind to the rookies. But. Books are a consumer product and in order to sell, they have to have some value to the customer.
Fiction books offer the value of entertainment. Self-help books offer advice. As an author, you have to know the value of what you are writing, and whom it will appeal to. And you have to remember that value through every step of the process because it should be an integral part of how you make decisions on every aspect of your book
Credibility
You do not have to be Suze Orman to write a book about finances. And you don’t have to be Stephen King to write a horror novel. But. The advantage Orman and King have is they don’t have to rationalize their own credibility. Credibility, quite simply, is the ability to convince someone to pick up your book and read it. Orman and King will sell books just because of who they are as public figures and people are already convinced of the value of their writing. New authors don’t have that kind of draw, so you have to establish yourself as an author, create an identity for public consumption and begin the process of branding yourself.
There are other ways though to establish credibility, whose effectiveness depends on the kind of book you are writing. Your resume or work history might be enough in some cases, and you should be vocal about telling people why you were the one person that could write this book. Testimonials are powerful statements in your favor, and you should begin to gather them early and encourage people to talk about you and your book. Word of mouth, frankly, is the ultimate tool to establishing credibility.
Branding is something that happens over time, people will come to recognize your name and appreciate what your works, present and future, have to offer them without being told.
Exposure
You can only sell to your friends and family once. So even if they are willing to support you, you still will run out of readers in about a week. The internet myth leads us to believe that all we have to do publish, and people will find it somehow. And then there is the notion that anyone who has a product to sell has to have a blog too.
There is some power to cross-promoting yourself like that. A website is a low cost opportunity and the internet stays up 24 hours a day, selling your brand even when you’re sleeping. But. The downside is that your blog needs as much attention and work as your book (value), you have a small window of opportunity to pitch yourself to potential readers (credibility) assuming you can even get visitors to your website in the first place (exposure). So if you’re not careful, you end up doing the same promotional plan twice over, once for the book and once for the blog.
Working through traditional publicity and marketing plans takes time, and doesn’t have quite the same immediate impact of viral marketing. So you have to find a nice balance between using internet tools and utilizing the traditional marketing strategies of the publishing industry.
And you have to commit to your own success.
You can be an author too, and listen up, because the print-on-demand industry is the single best thing that ever happened to new authors. It allows a company like amazon to sell your book without holding on to any physical inventory, and allows you, the author, to publish right away with minimal cost investment. That alone makes it an ideal publishing strategy.
But before you contact a print-on-demand publisher, be sure to decide what level of success you are comfortable with. Is the goal to publish your book or to be the next Stephen King? Is your success measured by holding the physical book in your hands, or by holding the royalty checks in your hands? Do you need a fans to feel successful, or are you content just to be published?
Throughout the year, I will be looking at all of the steps in detail, from the writing process to self-publication (with an emphasis on print-on-demand) and publicity. I will explore the process of self-publishing/print-on-demand for how it worked, and didn’t work, in my personal experience. As we go along, I will delve into every aspect of the self-publishing industry as I deal with them. From writing to design to printing to promotion, I will give you my perspective and feedback on what worked and what didn’t. I welcome your contributions through comments at the end of each post.
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