Characters

Today, I’m at Weatherford College at the Books ‘n Authors ‘n All That Jazz conference. Author Sylvia Dickey Smith and I are leading a workshop on Characters. Specifically, we’re helping writers make their characters 3-dimensional and real. In the afternoon, we’ll both also be on a panel.

Then we have to race back south. Sylvia has to get back to Georgetown, where she’s receiving an award at a banquet. Sylvia’s novel, A War of Her Own, was chosen as best novel of the year by the Press Women of Texas, a statewide organization of women journalists and writers.

At our workshop, we’re going to focus not on the mundane, but on things that can set your protagonist apart from others and will make her/him memorable. What makes the protagonist in your book or story unique? Or what happened early in their life that set them on the path they’re on? Or what in their environment made them act they way they do? Are they trapped by their religion or upbringing?

In you're in the area of Weatherford, Texas, sign up for our workshop - it's free. 

Author Pat Bertram

Pat Bertram has written four character and story driven novels: Light Bringer, her latest, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire, all available from Second Wind Publishing. Although she’s a native of Colorado, you don’t have to go there to find her. She’s all over the Internet - Facebook, Gather, GoodReads, Library Thing, MySpace, Squidoo, Twitter … and here today on Straight From Hel.

Welcome Pat Bertram.

Defining Moments

Like her real-life counterpart, a character’s story begins with a gleam in her parents’ eye and ends with her death. The story we tell is but a fraction of that life, and where we choose to begin and where we choose to end defines the story. If we begin with a crime and end with a resolution of that crime, we have a mystery. If we begin with a girl meeting a boy or a woman meeting a man and end with happily ever after, we have a romance. If we chronicle the rise and fall of the character’s fortunes, we could have a tragedy, a family drama, or any number of stories.

The illusion of story is such that, whatever the genre, by the end of the book readers know the character as well as they know themselves and their friends. Readers know, or think they know, everything in the character’s life that brought her to crisis, and readers know, or think they know, how everything in the character’s life will work out after the story problem is resolved. By giving readers the essence of the character, we give them the means to continue the story long after the book is closed.

How do we work this sleight of hand? By showing the character in action and in relationships. By defining the character through decisions in moments of crisis.

In the prologue of Light Bringer, my speculative fiction thriller, Helen comes home from working a double shift at the hospital to find a baby on her doorstep. She shows her nurturing characteristics by taking care of the child. She shows the beginning of a metamorphosis from staid nurse to loving mother by putting off calling the authorities so she can enjoy the child bit longer. But what really defines her is how she acts in a moment of crisis. The baby, a magical child, or at least a precocious one, tells her they have to leave, that her invisible playmate says they are after her (the baby) and when they find her, they will kill Helen. Helen doesn’t hesitate. She packs up her car and her life and escapes with the baby.

Helen’s decision is a defining moment. If you come to understand everything and everyone involved in such a moment, whether it is something that happens in your life or your character’s life, you will understand a greater truth. In the case of Light Bringer, Helen’s decision defines not only her own character, but also the character of the baby, the character of the invisible playmate, and perhaps even the story itself. It is through such defining moments that we can create a character so real readers believe they know more about the character than was ever written.

This is a discussion rather than a how-to since both experienced writers and writers with a feel for story automatically include defining moments. The main reason for an awareness of defining moments is it gives you a different way of looking at a character you’re having trouble bringing to life. Best of all, you never have to explain the moment, never even have to call it a defining moment. Just write it. Readers’ minds will do the rest because that’s where characters come alive -- in the imagination of readers.

Thank you Pat.

You can find Light Bringer on Amazon. And, in addition to all the places I listed at the beginning of this post, you can find Pat Bertram on her blog and her website.

I know some of you are going to ask if Pat’s “Helen” character is, in reality, me. The answer is no, although I am a “light bringer” since every morning the sun waits until I rise before it does. Kidding aside, I really liked Pat’s talk about the defining moment in each protagonist’s life. I can tell you exactly where my protagonist’s moment is in the book I’m working on now. Does your protagonist have a defining moment?

The Tattered Book

Anybody watch Antiques Roadshow? There’s a guy on there who sometimes appraises books. Recently, the Twin Cities StarTribune had an article about Ken Sanders volunteering at a fundraiser in Sandy, Utah. A guy came up and said he had an old book he wanted to get appraised.

He had it wrapped in a big plastic sack and said it’d been passed down to him by his great uncle, but the book was pretty tattered.

It was an old book. In fact, it was only a partial copy of an old book.

A copy of the 500-year-old Nuremberg Chronicle, published in 1493. A world history beginning in biblical times, considered “one of the earliest and most lavishly illustrated books.”

But it was tattered and only a partial copy.

So Sanders will probably only get about $50,000.

Ann Summerville

 Ann Summerville’s latest book, High Tide, is just out. She’s doing a blog tour and gracefully agreed to stop by Straight From Hel. Not only that, she gave me free rein to ask questions. As you might have guessed, I wanted to know about her writing.

Please welcome Ann Summerville.

Ann, you set your book, A Graceful Death, in Cornwall, England, where you once lived. Did you still have to do research or did you depend on memory?

The descriptions were from memory. There was an unusually high tide when I lived there. The shops stacked sandbags outside their businesses. It was deep enough for the lifeboat to drift through the main street. Even though it has been a long time since I lived on the Cornish coast, my memories are still vivid. It’s a beautiful county and although the tourist industry is very present, there are still many areas that have not changed for hundreds of years. Occasionally, I’ll include a news story from the local paper The West Briton. Fortunately, it’s available online.

Your latest book, High Tide, is available via Kindle and Smashwords. Do you have an eReader? Will you expand the formats so that your books are available on other eReaders?

I’m having separation anxiety parting with paper, but I’m sure one day I’ll jump in with both feet and purchase an e-reader. There are many different formats of High Tide available on Smashwords.com

This month to celebrate the release of High Tide, you’re reducing the price to $2.99 for all e-reader downloads and giving away three books on your site. A lot of authors are worried about having to do the majority of their book’s promotion. What other things are you doing to get the word out about your books?

I’m concentrating on the blog tour at the moment and blogging is my main avenue for getting the word out. After I get a chance to take a breath, I’ll look into doing local book signings. I have contacted some stores and my books are currently available at The British Emporium in Grapevine. Book promotions help in several ways. I’m finding a lot about my readers and what they are looking for which I think publishers often lose sight of. Although I love writing, I love hearing that someone has enjoyed my books even more.

What part of writing do you enjoy most? Research? The first draft? The dialogue? Seeing the characters come to life on the page? Something else?

I enjoy getting to know my characters and seeing the story come to life. Sometimes it changes dramatically in the second draft.

What’s next? Are you writing another book? Or maybe you’re busy with promoting High Tide?

I’ve always been intrigued with the Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells. There are so many stories swirling around the abandoned structure and I thought it would be a great setting for a mystery. I’m working on the second draft now.

Thank you Ann!

You can catch Ann on her blog, Cozy in Texas, or her website. You can also ask her a question here in the comments section.

Book Review: High Tide

 High Tide is a cozy mystery by Ann Summerville. Summerville is a Texan. She wasn’t always a Texan, though. She was born in England then moved to the States, eventually settling in the great country, uh, state of Texas. She started out British but we now lay claim to her, I have to admit the woman knows her roots. High Tide is set in the English west country village of Lowenna. I swear, reading the book made me cold. It also made me wish I lived in a little country village where everybody knows everybody’s business. Wait a minute, I don’t wish that. I would, however, like a town where there’s lots going on and the people care and look out for each other, and where there are quaint, interesting shops to visit, and a nice bar to pop into and have a drink with friends, and Italy is only a train ride away.

I could probably do without the body floating in with the high tide. Gia (Giovanna Matthews) is the kind of friend you’d want to have. She has her suspicions and doesn’t think the death was an accident. She has no proof, but sets about trying to solve the murder. The body’s not the only thing on her mind, though. There’s another little thing like her boyfriend’s apparent fiancée showing up.

High Tide has some great characters. Gia, of course. Then there’s Rose. I liked her spunk. She’s the kind of lady who’ll put a leather jacket over her dress and hop on Bob the Biker’s motorcycle and roar off with him. Old, smold.

When you read High Tide, pay attention to the details. Gia does. And in the end she does more than just solve the case of the washed up body. She saves a life.

High Tide
Amazon
Kindle

Since this is the first book by Ann Summerville that I’ve read, although it’s not the first she’s written, I give High Tide a rating of Hel-O!

~~~~~~~~~~

FTC Disclaimer: High Tide was sent to me by the author. That did not influence my review. If you read my review (and I suspect some of you are skipping to the Disclaimer), then you know what I liked about the book. Let me address one item in my review. Gia and her friend Holly got on a train and went to Italy. They rode a gondola. They stayed at a fabulous hotel. They zipped off to Italy, people. If I got on a train, I could go to Mineola. I’m sure it’s lovely, but it’s not Italy. When Gia steps out her door, she sees the water. Unfortunately, she’s scared to death of seaweed. When I step out my door, I see cedar trees and hills and deer and roadrunners and armadillos. Okay, that’s not bad. But it’s not Italy. I need Bob the Biker to zip by my house so we could roar off to Italy. Of course, there’s no bridge from Texas to Italy, so we’d probably end up in Italy, Texas, which I’m sure is a nice place. But I have no leather jacket. And he’d probably take a curve too fast just to dump me ‘cause I’d be screaming in his ear.

Smile or Groan

Here are some Puns for Educated Minds.

* The fattest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

* I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

* She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.

* A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.

* No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

* A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

* A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

* Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

* A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

* Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

* Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

* Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'

* I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

* A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'

* The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

* The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

* A backward poet writes inverse.

* In a democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.

* If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you'd be in Seine.

* A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, 'I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.'

* Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

* Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, 'I've lost my electron.' The other says, 'Are you sure?' The first replies, 'Yes, I'm positive.'

* There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

If you enjoyed those, you can thank my friend Bill Wheeless, who sends me fun stuff like this.

Author Michael Murphy

 Michael Murphy is visiting today to talk about book trailers. He creates his own and he has some advice for other authors who want to create the trailers for their books. Michael is an award-winning author who lives in Arizona with his wife, two cats, four dogs and five chickens. His seventh, and latest, book, Scorpion Bay has just come out, so I’m excited he had the time to stop by Straight From Hel.

Please welcome Michael Murphy.

Producing a Book Trailer

Since I’ve produced book trailers for most of my seven novels I’m often asked about their value. I recently read a post from another author that indicated only family and friends read an author’s book trailer. Because I have more than 6,000 views of my first book trailer for Try and Catch the Wind, I replied that I didn’t have that many friends.

My experience has convinced me that book trailers can be a valuable component of a comprehensive book promotion program. If you are an author about to release a book and you haven’t produced a book trailer, I urge you to give one serious consideration. Fortunately you have a number of options.

For a professionally produced book trailer, expect to pay between $200 and $500. There are a number of companies that produce book trailers and they do an excellent job, such as Circle of Seven Productions. If choose to produce one yourself (if I can do it, you can), be sure to use royalty free images and music. This isn’t as hard or costly as one might expect. For my Scorpion Bay book trailer, I paid $4.30 for all the music and sound effects through Itunes.



Images and music should reflect the genre of your book. If your book is spooky and creepy, match it with that kind of music and those images. Soft and sweet...well you get the idea.

After your video is produced, spend as much time inspecting the detail as you did with your novel. No typos! Post the video to You Tube and link the video to your website and blog. But don’t stop there. There are a number of sites that will post your book trailer for free, such as Blazing Trailers.

Market your book trailer like you would your novel. Use social media to get out the word and track the traffic on You Tube.

Will a book trailer translate to book sales? I don’t have any direct evidence to support my position, but from my experience the answer is yes.

Thank you Michael.

If you’d like to get to know more about Michael Murphy, you can hook up with him on Facebook and Twitter.

You can find Scorpion Bay, his thriller (with a sense of humor), on Kindle and Amazon.

If anyone has a question or comment for Michael, the comments section is open. I’ll start us off: Michael, you said you found music and sound effects on iTunes. Is there a special section just for that or did you listen to various songs and then seek permission to use them?

Characters, Disclaimers, Falls and Newsletters

The title of this post sounds like a grouping of mis-matched things, doesn’t it? Well, it is. And since it is, I’ll talk about them out of order. (Yeah, it’s that kind of day.)

We’ll start with disclaimers. If you post reviews of books, then you know the FTC recently decided that you must also post a disclaimer with the review, stating whether you were paid to do the review or not, if something affected your review one way or the other, and so on. You may have noticed that I started added disclaimers to my reviews.

One of my fellow HoTSinC’ers (that stands for our local chapter of Sisters in Crime called Heart of Texas) seemed to think my disclaimers were funny so she asked me to write an article about disclaimers and give some examples. So I did. ‘Course, there are others who also write interesting disclaimers. So I included a couple of Maryann Miller’s disclaimers. If you want to read the article, click here. (It’s a long newsletter with tons of great links and a re-cap of a fabulous talk by a Texas Ranger at our March meeting.)

Now that leads us straight into newsletters. Clearly, the HoTSinC newsletter is great. You might want to bookmark it and check it out each month. If any of you are interested, I also do a weekly newsletter, although it’s not a beautiful one like the HoTSinC newsletter. Mine comes to your ebox in basic black and white, no pics, no embedded links. I’ve been writing Doing It Write for twelve years now. It has news, contests, events, links -- all geared toward writers. If you’re interested, you can easily sign up.

Moving quickly to Falls. I’ve been doing Spring Cleaning. This past Sunday I tackled the windows. While carrying a rolled up water hose, the hose came loose and I tripped over it. But I managed to stop the fall with my face. Had to cancel a dental appointment because I would not be able to keep my mouth open (dear husband likes that part). I didn’t even know lips could peel or that chins could blacken. No. I did not take pictures.

And, finally, (I hear you cheering.) Characters. Today, I'm over at the Blood-Red Pencil talking about establishing the character of your characters. Then, at the end of this month, I’m co-teaching a workshop on Characters. Right now, I’m working on handouts. For one of them, I’m searching for one line or one short paragraph from books or stories that establish the character of a character. Ways that the author showed the character without stating it directly or by writing it in such a way that you stopped at its perfection or uniqueness. If you’ve read or written such a character-establishing line, email it to me. Include the book and author. (Don’t send a whole page or long paragraph.) And if it’s your own writing, that’s even better!

An Author Takes a Test Drive

We’ve heard from and about the big name authors like Barry Eisler and J.A. Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith. All of them discussing the move to e-books and how their sales are increasing their income. But most of us, me included, are not big names with big followings and monster sales.

Ann Summerville alerted me to a blog post by an author like most of us (thank you Ann). This author, Carol Denbow, writes nonfiction and has quite a few out. Like the big name authors, she did an experiment. Her books, listed on Kindle for either $4.99 or $2.99, were doing okay. She said she was selling about 20 a month. But she did a month-long experiment “to see if it would be better to list the books at .99 and sell more copies than at the higher price and sell less.”

The post about her results were interesting. Here’s something she noted about Kindle:

At $4.99 a book (actually, any price over $2.99), Kindle offers the author/publisher a 70 percent royalty. But if you lower your list price to under $2.99, they only give you a 30 percent royalty.

Over the month, she sold more copies, but because of the lower royalty, she made less money. But that’s not the end of her story. You’ll want to link over and find out why this experiment increased not just her e-sales but her print-sales, why her ratings went up on Kindle and how this will affect future sales, and why, despite the lower income, she intends to keep the price low for a while longer. She’s giving her test of Kindle another month.

You might want to follow her to keep abreast of her updates on her Kindle experiment.

eBook Piracy

We haven’t talked lately about stealing ebooks. There are sites where you can go download just about any e-book for free. The e-book may be a scanned copy of the print book or it may be a stolen copy of the e-book where the anti-theft encryption has been hacked. Remember how piracy of digital music almost brought down the music industry? Now it’s something authors and publishers have to deal with.

Alex Beam writes about his visit into the piracy world in an article for boston.com. The ease with which Beam and his friend Ben Walker found free ebooks was a bit scary. Also scary was Random House associate general counsel Matthew Martin’s comment about people who’ve spent “$100-plus for e-readers such as the Kindle or Nook”:

“Those are the last people who are going to get involved in piracy,’’ he says.

Uh huh. Then who would do it? People without e-Readers?

Beam and Walker had no trouble finding sites offering stolen copies of books. Matthew Martin said, about piracy:

I suppose it’s a growing problem, but it hasn’t yet made a serious impact on our business the way it did on the music business

What do you think? Will it become a big problem like it did for music?

Book Review: Save the Cat! Strikes Back

 Last year, I reviewed the first in the Save the Cat! series by Blake Snyder. This time I’m reviewing the third and last book in the series called Save the Cat! Strikes Back. (I’ll explain why I didn’t buy the second one in a bit.)

The series was recommended by the fabulous author and writing instructor, Les Edgerton.

Years ago I took a screenwriting class, not because I wanted to write for Hollywood, but because I could see that the pace and structure of books was becoming more “movie-like.” I wanted to learn how screenplays were structured. This third book, like my copy of the first, is now part yellow from all the highlighting I did. It is full of advice that you can easily apply to your writing.

For example, here is some of what Snyder said about Loglines:
The template:

On the verge of a Stasis = Death moment, a flawed protagonist Breaks into Two; but when the Midpoint happens, he/she must learn the Theme Stated, before All is Lost.

You might read that and go, huh? But Snyder goes on to explain what each bolded word or phrase means. When you finish reading his explanation and example, you go, Ah-ha.

Here’s another quote that you already know, but when I read it, I paused and thought, of course.

All stories are about transformation.

Writers always talk about the dreaded Elevator Speech where you are called upon to pitch your book within a minute. If you’re interviewing at a conference, you may get ten minutes. For scripts, it’s called simply The Pitch. Snyder shares a Guide that came from one of his students, Betty Ryan:

1. Opening Image - A brief “who” of the hero
2. Catalyst - The thing that sets the story in motion
3. Break into Two - The essence of the story and poster
4. Midpoint - The complication that challenges the hero
5. All is Lost - How the hero loses everything
6. Break into Three - The solution to the hero’s dilemma
7. Final Image - How he is transformed by this story

The book is great, in my opinion, for both scriptwriters and bookwriters. Of course, a class with Blake Snyder would be fabulous and very intense, but we won’t get that opportunity since he passed away in 2009.

Amazon
Barnes and Noble

I like this series so much, I’m creating a new rating just for him: Hel-of-a-Teacher.

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FTC Disclaimer: I bought this book myself and while that did NOT influence my review, it did influence my reading. Dang it if I’m gonna spend money on a book and not read it. Which brings me to why I didn’t buy the 2nd in the series, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies. When I browsed through it, I thought it would not help me much, as a book writer, since it focused on the analysis of movies. I’m not much on analyzing movies. I just go to them and enjoy them. Now, after reading Book 1 and Book 3, I will get the one in-between. I want to see how he breaks down movies, especially the ones I’ve seen. He diagrams books the way I used to diagram sentences in high school. I don’t think they even teach that anymore. But through these books, you can learn to diagram your story.

Selling to Communities

Thought I’d share with y’all an article in Publishers Weekly called Communities The Key, Publishers Told. Its focus is on promoting your book, especially through online communities.

Here are some quotes to ponder from that article:

One of Goodreads' best interactive tools are featured author groups, he said, where authors make themselves available to answer readers' questions on the site for a number of days.

Looking to the future, Joel [president of Twist Image] pointed to figures that showed sales of smartphones outpacing PCs in the fourth quarter of 2010. "This is the shift away from fixed locations. This is the shift where we're going to have a society that is much more in tune with using our mobile devices as their primary form of connectivity," he predicted.

Then [Joel] described a SnapTell app's ability to recognize a photo of a book and provide the user with information about the book, including the nearest bookstores and how many copies are in stock.

Joel … said many companies that consult his digital agency now blog and tweet and have Facebook pages, but that is not enough.

Okay, setting aside, Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads Author Sites, what are you doing that you can see is affecting your sales? I think blogging could be added to the list.

An Agent Enters the Fray

We’ve been talking about authors moving to doing their own e-books because publishers offer a low rate to the authors. Now an agent has taken a bold move.

[Literary agent Sonia Land] called on publishers to up their rates from 25% to 50% of net proceeds from e-books to secure digital rights.

She took one of her authors who had 100 books, but the estate hadn’t received an offer of e-publishing from the print publisher, and e-published them through her own company.

 They never approached me with a deal, but I think they knew I wanted a better offer.

A Transworld Publishers spokesman said:

We have broad and ongoing talks with agents to explain the economics of e-book publishing and our confidential royalty rates are part of our strategy for the e-book market which is constantly evolving in what we believe to be the best interests of our authors and the industry as a whole.

What do you think? Should the author get more than 25% on their e-book? Or does the publisher do enough work in promotion and converting the print book to e-book to justify their getting 75%? And why is it that part of the strategy for the e-book market is to keep the royalty rates confidential?