Marketing A First Novel, Calling Vicki

The job of the modern novelist is not just writing quality work and handing it off to an agent or publisher, but to learn the art of marketing as well. 

There will come a point, if you are extremely lucky, where your readers will take over this job and help to sell your work for you. Once you have reached a certain level of success they will happily tell others about the wonderful new writer that they have found. They will ask any and all that they come in contact with have they read this amazing new book (Calling Vicki, I hope) that they have just finished. 









The problem with this is surviving until that time comes. You are going to need to have upwards of a hundred thousand readers for it to hit the autopilot stage. It is rare that the first novel achieves this.
Usually we have to publish half a dozen books before one and we never know which one will catch fire and people will not only tell others about that book, but take a second look at all of your other work. 

The second look part of being a published author usually requires us to produce books that fit into the same genre. 

Should Plot Do The Driving

 Should the plot be the driving force in your novel? 

 That largely depends upon the type of novel that you are crafting. 

 When sitting down to write a novel you should have some idea of whether it is a character driven story or a plot driven story. If your novel is going to be plot driven then I would strongly suggest that you do an outline. To say plot driven is in a way to say map driven. Your outline is the map of coming events or in other words the plot. While if your novel is going to be character driven you can sit back and write. Trusting the lead character to take you on the long walk from page one until you write the end.



 What type of writing do I prefer? I would have to say that I write the same kind of fiction that I enjoy reading. I lean toward character driven stories however parts of my first novel Calling Vicki had to be plotted. Characters needed to connect up at certain points of the novel and that required plotting. You may believe that you will only depend upon one way to craft your novel or the other, but in the end you will surprise yourself.




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Romance Novel Tips

Romance Novel Tips

 Recently I started work on a series of short romance novels. This was started with very little research on my part. That was a mistake. Only because romance fiction is not my genre. I write fiction and there is great deal of romance included in the stories, but it is not the main theme of my work. If I were to eliminate th subplots in my novel Calling Vicki then the main plot between Vicki and the man in her life would have been almost pure romance, but that is the problem that I have. I tend to include subplots that are not about relationships and the core theme of romance. I had to learn to do this. 

 It has taken me months to figure out how to craft a romantic novel and I believe that I have the hang of it. You many be someone who have read this type of fiction for years, but have never bothered to study the core rules of the genre. Let’s listen to those of have studied this topic.

   


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Beginning Your Novel

Beginning Your Novel

 It was not a dark and stormy night. 

 The dark and stormy night gag is the classic way to open a novel. No one does this unless the novel is actually about the night itself. I approach opening my novels in the middle of something that is either happening to a main character or something he or she is doing at the time. I believe that character rather than description is the best way to jump start a novel and to pull the reader inside. It is sort of like giving the reader a hand to hold and guiding them into the world that you have constructed for them. Again I am only making a suggestion. You are a writer. This is your first chapter. You are going to be the one who will have to make hundreds of choices along the way before your novel is finished. The beginning is just the first of many. Write what makes you comfortable.



 Being a writer is about choices as much as it is about story telling. Learning what works best when opening a novel is going to be trial and error. You may finish a novel. Sit down to edit it and discover that the first few chapters are unnecessary and the book really begins with chapter three or four. This happened to me once and I discovered that removing the first two chapter did not change a thing about the rest of the book. Those chapters had been my way of getting into the story, but were not needed to tell the complete story. Consider this when you sit to edit your work. 




 If you want to see how I open a novel you can check out the first chapter of my novel suspense novel Calling Vicki. The first five chapters are available above for free. Just click a chapter heading. Thank you for visiting. Please take a moment to stumble this post on stumble upon and to add it to your facebook. Good luck with your writing and have a nice day.


 

Writing A Novel, Fast or Slow

Writing A Novel, Fast or Slow


 Each writer is different. There is no right or wrong way to write a great novel. Some writers have written their first novel in a week and others took over ten years to get it finished. The road to success comes in all shapes and sizes. When I sat down to write my first published fiction novel Calling Vicki, I thought that it would take six weeks. It ended up taking me almost eight months. I have two unpublished novels that took me less that two months and my next novel looks like it will come in at about the two months mark. You may be totally different. You have your own internal timer that paces your writing. We write best when we are enjoying the process. We should never force ourselves to do something that we love to do.


 

You may approach the novel with no more than a blank page. Writing the novel as you go. Then again you may write down a lengthy outline and follow that outline like the blueprint for a building or a GPS map. Do what works for you and never let how others walked the path to influence you. You may be a sprinter or you may be a long distance runner. You will find out which you are by showing up each day and getting to work. My way is to visit the blank screen off and on for two or three hours and then get my really writing done during hours four and five. I need five hours a day to really get that two hours worth of work done. During that two hours I am good for six to eight pages. You may need only ninety minutes each day to do all of your writing. Just remember that what ever gets pages done is okay. 

Thank you for visiting my blog and please take a moment to like this post on Stumbleupon and to check out a chapter from my book Calling Vicki. The first five are available above this post. Good luck with your novel and have fun writing. 

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Calling Vicki, Suspense Needs a Bad Guy

 When writing a suspense novel you must realize that your book will only be as good as your villain is bad. The stronger the villain the stronger the story will end up being. You love your hero and you want them to be successful. This love sometimes leads to us watering down the forces that will rage against him or in the case of my novel Calling Vicki her. I love my character Victoria Winters, but I do not fully understand her. Part of the way in which I learn about her is to see how she operates during times of crisis. 

 I needed to provide both internal and external demons to push her to and sometimes beyond her limits. This is done expertly in the novel Silence of the Lambs. Agent Starling grows and reveals things about herself through conflict with Dr. Lecter and with her own past.


 

The strange thing that may happen as you do this is that you may grow to like your villains as much as your heroes. In my suspense novel Calling Vicki I never grew to like Carlos the lead villain in my novel. He is a vicious evil man who I understood in the end, but would not want to work with again. While two of the characters that aid him in his quest for revenge, a man who calls himself Riddle and his woman Jackie, I enjoyed dealing with so much that they have earned a novel of their own. I want to know their human story and the only way to learn that story is to write it down.


 

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Calling Vicki, Writing The Page Turner

Calling Vicki, Writing The Page Turner

 The secrets to writing what is called a page turner is not that many. 

 The first thing that you need to do is learn who to write reasonably well. You will do this by first reading a lot. You learn how to form proper sentences by seeing how others have done it. Secondly you will write a great deal. Write everyday. 

Look at it as if it was any other exercise. You are building your writing muscles rather than arm or leg muscles. Do not worry about how good or bad it is as long as you are writing every single day. Now let’s get to the page turner. Look at the most popular writers that write what are referred to as page turners and they all have one thing in common. They all write short and sweet chapter. From Dean Koontz to James Patterson they keep it short. Under eight pages would be a start. Most of the chapters in my novel calling Vicki are under six pages long. That length is natural to me. I populate my novel with characters who have strong points of view and I live to see the story move along through their eyes.


   

 I believe that this way of writing will only grow in popularity over time due to the fact that we live in the information age. With texting and twitter we are growing accustom to getting information in short quick burst. Consider this when writing and or rewriting your novel. 


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