Writers in the Storm

Melinda VanLone

Everyone judges a book by its cover, and that judgment happens in two seconds or less on the internet these days. That’s it. In two seconds your cover icon must grab the reader and hook them into wanting to learn more by clicking. That’s a lot of heavy lifting in a very small space.

What that means is all the tiny details in your artwork mean absolutely nothing. They won’t even be noticed, and that’s a good thing! You can stop sweating the small stuff and instead focus on the important bits that will get the right reader to click on your cover.

Before you get busy designing, or hiring a designer, keep in mind these tips for what makes a good cover.

A good cover is not:

1. A representation of every plot point in the story.

In fact, there’s no need to represent any of the plot points. The plot of the story doesn’t matter. The type of story (genre…get specific) and tone of the story do.

2. A factual representation of how the main characters actually look.

Unless the fact that the girl has blonde hair is integral to the plot (only blondes get to be President, let's say), it really doesn’t matter if the model on the cover has the specific shade you envision. Most people won’t notice or remember what was pictured on the cover once they start reading.

3. A chance to show off every subplot in graphic form.

There is no need to put the safe from chapter one, the gun from chapter three, the ladder from chapter twelve, the three love interests, the main character, a winding road and a full moon with a hint of cloud, and a dozen trees with signs on them onto the cover. Something like that tells the reader that this author does not know how to edit. If the cover looks that convoluted, how could the story possibly be good?

A good cover is:

1. A hook.

A good cover is an attractive tease that entices the reader to click and find out more. Simple is key here. When you look at the cover at icon size, the genre (Romance, Mystery, Fantasy) should be immediately clear. Ideally, your name will be legible. If done right, the title will be visible, but it’s not vital. It’s the overall image that will get them to click, not the words.

A side note about the genre: Pick one. Just one. This story will have to go on a digital shelf. If you can’t focus on one genre, then you don’t know your customer well enough yet. Go back and think about how and where they look for books like yours. Study what keywords they type in, what aisle in the bookstore they linger over. The story can’t be all things to all people. It must be the right thing for the right person.

2. A promise.

A good cover is a contract with the reader that this story fits in the genre they’re looking for.

If you’re writing a thriller, the cover should broadcast that. Don’t put a couple staring longingly into each other’s eyes on the cover if it’s not a romance. If you do, you’ll get romance readers picking up the book and then throwing it at the wall when they discover you lied to them. This is why narrowing in on the exact genre is so important.

3. A marketing tool.

A good cover is an icon that will drive all of your marketing efforts going forward. When you step into the wild world of advertising, you’ll use the cover and the background art of the cover on everything from your website to Facebook Ads to BookBub Featured Deals (if you’re lucky). It’s important that the cover connect with the right reader…the one who would love your story.

A Case Study

There’s nothing like making a few mistakes to teach you what works and what doesn’t. For example, let’s take a look at the first cover I designed for my book Stronger Than Magic.

At first glance, this cover gives the impression of high fantasy because of the title and the use of a large symbol over a moody background. The problem is, Stronger Than Magic is urban fantasy, not high fantasy. So what should it have looked like? After taking a casual stroll around the internet, the urban fantasy genre features covers like this:

Most urban fantasy has the protagonist on the cover. Usually the mood is darker in color and tone, the texture is rich, and there’s a hint of magic (special effects such as sparkles, glowing swords, spooky fog, that sort of thing).

My first cover didn’t have any of that really. Sure, it was pretty. But it set the expectation of an epic hero’s journey in an archaic land filled with magic runes and such (because of the symbol). Instead, my story has a protagonist from our modern day who loves to hang out at a coffee shop in Philadelphia and who wields elemental power, but not a wand or sword. Hers is not an epic hero’s journey--it’s a coming to grips with magic in our modern world story.

It doesn’t do me any good to have artwork that stands out from the rest in the wrong way. It needs to fit within my genre tropes in order for it to be a successful marketing tool.

Here’s the new cover, with all the previous points in mind:

Now the high fantasy reader will know right away this story is not for them, while the urban fantasy reader will, hopefully, click. It has a city in the background to tell you this is modern, not archaic. It has a protagonist on the cover, obviously controlling the element of water. I kept the symbol, but it’s a background, not center stage. It does make the cover stand out, but overall it’s more in line with all the other covers in the urban fantasy genre.

Obviously, every genre has its standard tropes for cover art, but once you do a little bit of investigating it’s easy enough to see what those are. The smart marketer uses those tropes to their advantage. No matter who actually designs your cover, keep these tips in mind and you’ll have a great marketing tool.

About Melinda

Melinda VanLone writes urban fantasy, freelances as a graphic designer, and dabbles in photography. She currently lives in Florida with her husband and furbabies. When she's not playing with her imaginary friends, you can find Melinda playing World of Warcraft, wandering aimlessly through the streets taking photos, or hovered over coffee in Starbucks.

Her elementary fantasy series, House of Xannon, begins with Stronger Than Magic. And for more information on covers, visit BookCoverCorner.com.

Piper Bayard

We’ve all read books with page after page of backstory. Okay, we’ve all skimmed books with page after page of backstory. We likely have even some of those books ourselves. Where does that extra verbiage come from, and why do we put it in?

There is an easy answer. Excess backstory is the visible evidence of we writers telling ourselves our stories. That backstory is there for us, not for our readers. It is the evidence of the sausage being made, and it is drawn from the period of time when our ideas are taking shape. Put simply, when we don't know what we're writing about before we write it, backstory is a dead giveaway.

I know what you’re thinking. . . . One more blog on the virtues of plotting.

No. This is about the virtues of forethought and how that forethought naturally eliminates undue backstory in our manuscripts.

But I’m a pantser! My story must be free to unfold at will and unfettered by the bondage of forethought!

Forethought this: Writing is an art, but publishing is a business. Any successful business requires forethought.

We all write for different reasons:

• Therapy—because it’s easier than talking
• Therapy—because we love words
• Therapy—because we’re unemployed
• Therapy—because writing is the closest thing we have to talking to adults while we care for our babies
• Therapy—because stories are swirling inside our heads and must get out
• Therapy—because a world where we don’t write is simply inconceivable
• And some of us write for therapy.

Regardless of our reasons, forethought is our most powerful tool for shaping a story and actually getting it on the page.

To be clear, when I talk about forethought, I’m not necessarily talking about plotting.

I’m talking about people. The characters. Also, for all of the sci-fi folks, I'm talking about world building. I recommend that sci-fi writers read through this article a second time and exchange the word “characters” for “world building” so that pages aren't wasted telling us how the planet was formed in the belly of a lizard and coughed out in the hairball of the cat that ate the lizard on the night the cat was locked out of the house because it had gotten mad when its owner ran out of soft food and only gave it hard food so it had peed on its owner's clean laundry. In other words, to naturally eliminate backstory, sci-fi folks need to know characters and the world before diving into a story.

The single best way to eliminate backstory for our readers is to know our characters and our world inside and out before we write the first draft. That prevents us from having to tell ourselves our stories when we should be telling them to our readers.

• How old are they when the book starts?
• What do they look like?
• Where were they born?
• Where did they grow up?
• Did they go to school? Where?
• What is their religion? Do they believe it, practice it, play along with it, or reject it?
• What were their relationships with their parents?
• What were their parents’ occupations and educational levels?
• Who was their first love? How did it end?
• What were the watershed events in their lives, and how did our characters change because of these events?
• How did they meet the other characters?
• What are they afraid of?
• What are their inner conflicts?
• What are their emotional wounds? How did they get those wounds? How old were they at the time?
• What do they want?
• Who is keeping them from getting what they want?
• Absolutely anything else we can ask ourselves about our characters.

In other words, we don’t just need to know our serial killer, Terrell, is a psychopath. We need to understand exactly how Terrell became a psychopath, what sort of a psychopath he is, and why he is where he is when the book starts.

I recommend answering this list of questions for the antagonist, the minions, the protagonist, the love interest, the allies, the mentors, and anyone other character who has more than twenty lines in the book.

So how does knowing all of this about my characters minimize my backstory?

The answer is summed up in a quote from Hemingway. “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.” In other words, we can leave out anything as long as we know what we are leaving out.

This is twice-true with backstory. So we must know our backstory, in order to leave it out. On the other hand, if we DO know it, we don’t feel compelled to put it in. We can focus on telling our story to our readers, instead.

As an added bonus, when we know our characters, they will tell us our plot.

We never have to wonder what’s going to happen next, because our characters will behave in characteristic fashion. We avoid moments of “Oh, no! What is Frida going to do now that Gomez has left her?” Easy. We can look at Frida’s character profile and let Frida do Frida. If Frida’s a whiny brat, she will whine about losing Gomez. If she has anger management issues, she will hunt down Gomez and run over him with her car. If we know our characters, our plot is less likely to stall or leave us hanging.

Let me reassure you of this method with a little of my own backstory. My first manuscript SUCKED. No, seriously. It sucked with capital letters. My editor spent five hours (count ’em—five) on the phone telling me just how bad it sucked. That manuscript is now being used for enhanced interrogations at Guantanamo, and no one has lasted past page twenty-five without spilling the goods on their own mother. The US Navy sends me thank you notes and cookies for my birthday each year.

Out of 157,000 words (really) I threw out all but five—a, and, the, but, or—and I started over by getting to know my characters.

When I sat down to re-write the book, I discovered something. I naturally left out everything except the actual story. It was an epiphany. As a result, I have a far better story. That book became my debut dystopian thriller, Firelands.

Once I knew my characters' stories, I didn't have to spend the whole book figuring them out. It makes all the difference.

What are your issues with backstory? Do you develop your characters before you write?

About Piper

Piper Bayard is an author and a recovering attorney with a college degree or two. She is also a belly dancer and a former hospice volunteer. She has been working daily with her good friend Jay Holmes for the past decade, learning about foreign affairs, espionage history, and field techniques for the purpose of writing fiction and nonfiction. She currently pens espionage nonfiction and international spy thrillers with Jay Holmes, as well as post-apocalyptic fiction of her own.

Visit Piper and Jay at their site, BayardandHolmes.com. For notices of their upcoming releases, subscribe to the Bayard & Holmes Covert Briefing. You can also contact Bayard & Holmes at their Contact page, on Twitter at @piperbayard, on Facebook at Piper Bayard or Bayard & Holmes, or at their email, BH@BayardandHolmes.com.

Piper's dystopian thriller, Firelands, is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

Kerry Schafer

Why is it so damned difficult to believe that we are really writers?

I was discussing imposter syndrome recently with a highly successful author who has two bestselling non-fiction books out and is in the middle of an extensive, publisher supported tour. She confessed that she doesn’t really feel like she’s a writer.

Sound familiar? I hear this from my clients and writer friends. I see the phrase “aspiring writer” all over the internet. I often feel like a fraud myself, despite eight published novels and more under contract.

Part of the problem is that we keep adding silent tags onto the word writer, associating it with qualifiers like:

Successful (whatever the heck that means).

Published.

Bestselling.

Award winning.

Acclaimed.

The truth is, if you show up to the page in any form with any level of consistency at all—you are a writer. This holds true no matter where you are on the journey. It doesn’t matter whether you have an agent or not, are indie or traditionally published, or are just beginning to explore yourself on paper and nowhere near the point of publication—you are still a writer.

You are a writer while you’re cleaning cat boxes, changing diapers, making dinner, or slogging away at the day job to pay the bills.

When we don’t believe this—when we buy into doubt’s whispers and think of ourselves as wannabe writers, or aspiring writers, or even newbie writers—we enable all of our excuses and stunt our potential. If you’re not really a writer, then why should you work to learn the craft and skill that will make your words sparkle on the page and keep readers glued to your plot? Why should you sacrifice other parts of your life to make time for writing? Why should you risk the fallout of bringing the deepest part of yourself to the page?

One of the most essential steps you can take toward deepening your writing life, pursuing your writing dreams, and getting closer to your personal definition of success is to embrace and internalize the belief that you really, truly, unequivocally are a writer.

No qualifiers. No tags. No unspoken “buts.”

Here are five steps to get you started growing into your writer identity.

1. Claim the Writer Title.

Say to yourself, right now as you’re reading this, “I am a writer.” In fact, get up from your chair, go find the nearest mirror, look at yourself and say, “This is what a writer looks like.” Practice telling other people that you are a writer. If you’re tempted to add a qualifier or a but to the statement, explaining that you’re not published or nobody’s heard of you--resist the temptation. Stand fast. Practice saying, “Hey, I’m Kerry and I’m a writer.” If this feels wrong and strange, if you feel like a fraud, that just means you need more practice.

2. Find a community of other writers.

If you hang out with writers, you’re going to find it easier to assimilate the belief that you too are a writer. Whether you join a local writing group, hang out in an online forum, or join an online critique group, you’ll discover that you’ll feel more like a writer if you belong to a companionship of writers. This is your tribe.

3. Write anyway.

On the days when everything is totally dark and you’re convinced that every word you’ve written is horrible and that you were really born to be a ditch digger—write anyway. Write for five minutes. Give yourself permission to write horrible, sloppy, godawful prose that you would never show to another living soul. Just showing up as a writer, even for just a few words, helps dispel those paralyzing doubts.

4. Love your writing.

Passionately. As if it’s a secret paramour you can’t get enough of. It’s so easy to get swept up in lofty, down the road goals of agents, publishing contracts, record breaking sales, and the elusive rainbow gold of fame and fortune. This focus can feed the doubt and keep us from the page. Whatever success we’re aiming for is always a gazillion miles away, and it’s hard enough to keep believing that we’ll ever get to the end of a draft. Bring yourself back, over and over again, to what you love about the process of writing. What drew it to you in the first place? What do you love about your current work in progress?

5. Practice believing.

If it’s hard to believe in yourself as a real writer, see if you can believe it just a little bit, or for a minute at a time. Employ your imagination. Ask yourself this question: “How would it feel to believe I am a real writer?”  And this one: “How would a successful writer approach this situation?” Act as if, while the belief catches up with you.

And while you’re growing into your writer identity—keep writing. Thank all of the writing gods for this one thing: doubts are just doubts, and we are not defined by them.

About Kerry

Kerry Schafer, also writing as Kerry Anne King, is the author of nine novels, including the Amazon Charts and Washington Post bestselling novel Whisper Me This. She is also a writer mindset coach and speaker, helping writers ditch their doubts, dance with their demons, and delve into creative delight so they can get their words out of their heads and onto the page where they belong.

Writer coaching:
www.writeattheedge.com
www.facebook.com/writeattheedge