Writers in the Storm

Debbie Herbert

There’s always plenty of debate (sometimes heated) about whether to indie or traditionally publish. Growing numbers of authors are going hybrid, which is using both platforms to build their readership. When originally broached on writing about this subject I was a bit hesitant. So many authors are firmly entrenched in one of the two camps. What I’ve written here is only MY experiences and opinions. You are perfectly welcome to feel differently. Of course!

I’m going to admit straight up that my Indie sales are nowhere near bestsellers (at this time anyway . . . hope springs eternal). I have four paranormal romance indies that have earned me about $10,000 since I first began publishing them in April 2013. And half of that total came as a result of multi-author box set profits—back in the day when these sets were newer and more profitable. By contrast, I’ve earned far more on my traditional books published by both Harlequin Intrigue and Harlequin Nocturne.

Earnings aside, publishing these indie books has been fun. And the even bigger benefit is that independently publishing has provided me with a crash course education on the book publishing industry. I started out traditionally publishing and had only the barest notion on book categories, keywords and marketing. I have a long way to go, but I’m learning.

I do have writer friends earning an annual six-figure income from their indie books and I am in awe of them. I’ve been able to closely observe the secret of their success which has entailed a thorough study of their targeted sub-genre and then prolifically writing and publishing books using identified tropes that meet reader expectations. It goes without saying, they are also very gifted writers.

In spite of all that, my own preference is traditionally publishing. So far, it’s where I’ve gained the most readers. I still have to market these books, but not nearly as much as I must to try to gain visibility for my indie books. I like having an agent and editors and artists work on the technical end of publishing which frees up more of my time to do what I truly love—putting words on paper.

There’s a growing acceptance with editors and agents for indie publishing as they see how indie sales boost reader interest in traditionally published books. Writing indie books has never been an issue with my agent.

Below, I’ve outlined some of the advantages of each type of publishing.

Traditional Benefits:

• Validation. Maybe it’s only me, but contracts from traditional publishers means that the “experts” think my writing is “good enough.” For someone with my insecurity, this is huge!
• Distribution. I love that my mass market paperbacks are readily available in bookstores and places like Walmart and in global markets. I realize successful (VERY successful) Indie authors are increasingly able to distribute their print books to brick and mortar stores. But I’m certainly not there yet.
• Built-in audience. In the case of my publisher (Harlequin/HarperCollins) they have their own, very popular in-house Book Club where readers can earn rewards for book purchases.
• A team of professionals, with no upfront cost to me, that handle all aspects of publishing to include editing, book covers, proofreading, etc.
• Deadlines. For me, there’s just something about a firm deadline, established by an outside company, that motivates me to churn out the words in a timely manner.

Indie Benefits:

• A monthly paycheck from indie books to supplement traditional publisher advances.
• Artistic freedom in content and word count. If I want to write a mermaid/space alien/ erotica book, that’s cool. I might not find many readers, but that’s another story . . .
• Testing a new genre. It’s possible to write another genre you’ve been dying to get a toehold in to test the market waters. You can use your current pen name to see if readers follow you into a new genre, or create a new pen name and start over.
• Flexibility. Set your own deadlines and jump on hot trends to quickly produce a book or novella. Reverse harem, anyone?
• Collaboration with other authors. It’s so much fun to work with other authors and form box sets or anthologies or co-author.
• Higher profits per each book sold.

Hybrid publishing will give you the best of both worlds AND provide a means to keep your name in front of readers as you indie-publish to fill out releases around the often-slow schedule of traditional publishers.

Are you a hybrid author? Are you drawn more to one publishing platform than the other? I’d love to hear your comments!

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In the true spirit of hybrid publishing, Debbie had TWO book releases this week, both an Indie book and a traditional book. She also had to turn in a new book on Wednesday of same work. Yeah, crazy week!

Indie book: The Lost Dragon

When a dragon shifter's daughter goes missing, he must seek help from the last woman on earth he wants to see again, the witch who spurned him years ago.

Drake Evers, a widower who lives in a remote mountain mansion, is content with life. He spends all his time on various business ventures, acquiring a massive fortune. But once he unexpectedly gains custody of twin sixteen-year-old daughters, his well-ordered world crumbles. When one of the twins goes missing, he'll risk anything to find her—even if it means turning to the witch who spurned him years ago.

Traditional book: Appalachian Abduction

A small-town cop must protect
a beautiful rogue undercover detective.

Trespassing, fleeing a peace officer…hell, she’d aimed a gun at his chest! Officer James Tedder can’t help but admire her fight. And undercover detective Charlotte Helms will never quit. She’s on a personal mission: rescue her best friend’s daughter…and bust the child-trafficking ring that lured her away. When they’re forced to become partners, James must trust Charlotte to have his back. But can he trust her with his heart?

Bio:

Debbie Herbert, A USA Today and Publisher’s Weekly best-selling author and 2017 RITA finalist, writes paranormal romance novels and suspense books, reflecting her belief that love, like magic, casts its own spell of enchantment. She is traditionally published through Harlequin, as well as Indie published. Married and living in Alabama, she roots for the Crimson Tide football team (Roll Tide!). Debbie enjoys recumbent bicycling and jet skiing with her husband. She has two grown sons and the oldest has autism. Characters with autism frequently land in her works, even when she doesn't plan on it! 

Lisa Hall-Wilson

One aspect of writing in Deep POV that’s often overlooked or downplayed is the importance of filtering setting and description through your point of view character (POVC). Remember, in Deep POV you want to avoid drawing conclusions for readers. Don’t tell readers what to think, give them your POVCs raw data and let readers come to their own verdict about how the POVC feels, what they’re observing, and the world they live in. This puts the reader IN the story and keeps them out of the theater seats.

To that end, filtering the story setting and description through your POVC is critical. Here are five tips to writing setting and description in Deep POV that will take your writing to the next level:

Observe Don’t Report

When you imagine your setting, avoid the temptation to have your POVC label what they see. It’s a rectangular room with a bay window and upscale furniture in artful arrangement. A Persian rug I’m afraid to walk on covers the floor. Sure, there’s no POV violation here, but the reader’s learned little about the setting or the POVCs feelings about it.

Instead, let your POVC share their impression of the room in a way that reveals character. I stepped where Caroline stepped and gathered close all the loose bits and flaps of my clothing. If ‘you break it you bought it’ applies here, I’ll be broke before we get to the dining room.

Avoid The Obvious Or Assumed

Avoid having your POVC notice the obvious. Everyone knows the sky is blue and clouds are white. Don’t tell me the woman your POVC just met has a mouth, two eyes, a nose or two ears – what’s unusual? And how does what she notice give the reader insight into her and this new character?

“Ender looked at Peter only to detect anger or boredom, the dangerous moods that almost always led to pain.” Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.

BOOM! This description not only tells us about the boy being observed, but the character doing the observing.

“Felora leaned against a corner post with her back to the street, cleaning her fingernails with a small blade. He repressed a smile. Even as a child, she’d hated getting her hands dirty but never had enough sense to stay out of the mud.” From my novel The Last Seers.

In this example, I’ve aimed to give readers insight not only into Felora’s character but filtered through POVC readers also have an idea of priorities and perceived inconsistencies.

How Does The Setting Feel?

Your setting should either heighten, change, or reflect back how your character is feeling in Deep POV. This is where some art comes into play using literary devices like personification, pathetic fallacy, metaphors, similies, and others.

Let how your POVC feels show the reader what they’re seeing. One of the absolute best examples of this is from the opening paragraphs of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. “Sitting at Prim’s knees, guarding her, is the world’s ugliest cat. Mashed-in nose, half of one ear missing, eyes the color of rotting squash. Prim named him Buttercup, insisting his muddy yellow coat matched the bright flower. He hated me.”

Katniss shows us what the cat looks like by sharing how she feels about it. Not only do we get a picture of the cat, but we also get an idea both of how she and her sister choose to see the world.

Sometimes even the setting becomes a character. Consider a work like Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. Scotland is almost a separate character in the first two novels in the perspective of the highlanders: “…but make no mistake, lass, I love Scotland more, and I would give everything … everything I have or ever will have, including my life, to see a Stuart back on the throne.”

Interact With Setting

In Deep POV, it’s best to have your character interact with the setting instead of cataloguing what’s around them. Remember, present evidence not conclusions. If there’s a smell outside the window, have them open the window instead of reporting the smell. If there’s a coffee table in the room, have them knock their shin on it instead of reporting the material it’s made of.

A Few Well-Chosen Details

Readers do most of the work with description and prefer to be put to work. Readers want to engage, to crawl into the story, and if you describe a setting down to the last cobweb, you’ve left the reader nothing to imagine for themselves. If I tell you my POVC has invited a guest upstairs, is wearing lingerie, and then shuts the bedroom door – do you need me to describe the bed, say whether there’s a window or if the floor is hardwood or carpeted to create a mental image of the room?

Remember, the more time you spend describing an item or piece of the setting, the more importance the reader assumes it has. "The gun on the mantle in act one must go off by act three" is the old adage. Is that item important to the story or is there a reason for the POVC to notice it?

Make sure you check out my free 5 day e-course Writing Emotions In Layers designed to help you write emotions better in Deep POV.

What do you struggle with in writing in Deep POV? Conversely, what part of writing 'point of view' do you do well?

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About Lisa

Lisa Hall-Wilson was a national award-winning freelance journalist who loves mentoring writers. Fascinated by monsters in the dark and the supernatural, she blends those elements into her historical and fantasy  stories, as well as her passion for history, fantasy, romance, and faith.

Find Lisa's blog for intermediate writers at www.lisahallwilson.com.

Christina Delay

Have you noticed the “lean-in” effect when you talk about writing to a muggle? Or how muggles and other writers smile when you explain your story idea, hands waving all over as you describe a new world, new characters, and what tickled your interest with the story in the first place?

You know what that is, right?

It’s attraction.

Since this is the month of looooove, I wanted to talk about a little bit of attraction, and a lot more passion. (Yes, that sounds like a country song on purpose.)

How To Harness The Attraction Of Passion

When I say “attraction,” I’m not talking about it in the romantic sense, though this is certainly applicable to romance IRL. It’s more of a force, like gravity, something that others cannot resist.

Passion is attractive. Passion is a force of nature. Passion belongs to creatives.

There. That’s your mantra for today. But let’s break it down.

Passion Is Attractive

Think about your significant other or why the love interest in your book is so, well, interesting. What singular quality about them first attracted you? I bet you whatever it was, it had to do with something they were passionate about. For example, my initial attraction to my husband (besides the fact that he’s hot) was witnessing his passion for skydiving and music. The initial attraction for the first two characters I ever wrote was the guy experiencing the girl’s passion for her music.

If you’ve received negative feedback about the love interest in your book, or even about a fictional friendship that isn’t ringing true, find the passion. What is each of your characters most passionate about, and how is that passion attractive to the other characters?

Passion Is A Force Of Nature

In both my day job and through Cruising Writers, I’ve experienced the force of creative passion. You have, too. It’s the difference in writing something because you have to, and writing something because you need to.

Readers can tell the difference as well. If you’re feeling the feels in your writing, if you’re passionate about your story, characters, and world, your readers will feel it too.

But if you’ve lost the magic for a story, chances are your writing will fall flat and formulaic. Are you no longer excited about the project you’re working on? Is it because you’ve turned the story into something you’re not actually passionate about? Did you lose the spark of why the story initially attracted you?

Go back to that initial spark; the question you had to answer or the characters that had to meet. Go back to your base, and rediscover that initial passion for the story.

However if you go back and that same spark has dimmed, it may be time to move on. There are other stories, and you being a passionate, creative, magical being will discover which ones are yours to tell.

Passion Belongs To Creatives

Get around a group of creatives and you’ll be energized. I’ve witnessed this on each of the Cruising Writers Writing Retreats. Authors come to us drained, and leave with their wells full, with new stories simmering in their blood, with fresh energy for their writing and the business of writing.

It’s not just writers that get this energy. If you’ve ever watched the show Eat the World with Emeril Lagasse, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s a show about cooking, and yet you can’t not watch it. Emeril travels the world with the top chefs from each culinary genre and the passion in these guys...it’s incredibly attractive.

You’ve got that too, you know. Your day job may be drab, your social life may exist only online, but once you start accessing that creative energy, you light up. If you’re not accessing your creativity or your writing on a frequent, consistent basis, I truly believe your overall well-being suffers. It may be in the form of not handling stress well, heightened anxiety or depression, or a negative outlook on the future. Or maybe chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate.

But when you rest in your creativity and allow yourself to be passionate about your writing, your imagination, your unique creative genius, you’ll find your center. And when you’re there? That’s when your writing voice is strongest.

There’s a reason passion belongs to creatives. The work is hard, but the love for the work and the attractive passion that shines through is enough to carry us through the creative rollercoaster.

Tips For Getting The Passion Back In Your Writing

Passion isn’t just for romance authors. Passion is for all genres. If you’ve written a scene that falls flat, find one thing about it that sparks your interest. Chances are, that’s the reason for the scene.

Ask yourself some questions. Is there a secret that you can tease the reader with? Is there a question you can leave unanswered? Is there a new discovery that sheds light on why two people should be together--letting the reader know but keeping it from the characters?

Is there a moment when your characters realize their passions collide? My husband’s skydiving and music interests attracted me because it showed me his sense of adventure...which perfectly complemented mine. Do your characters have that?

Does your character show his or her passion for their life’s purpose? What is their purpose?

Maybe your character has lost their passion for life or for love. If that’s the case, make sure it’s on the page by showing us what’s missing. Give your character a glimpse of what life could be like if they’d only stop sacrificing the thing that makes them unique.

Focus on the passion--both in your creativity and in your writing--and you will be on your way to attracting agents, editors, and readers.

What makes you passionate in your writing? What about in your everyday life? What tips do you have to share about translating your passion into action?

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About Christina

Christina Delay is the hostess of Cruising Writers and an award-winning author represented by Deidre Knight of The Knight Agency. When she's not cruising the Caribbean, she's dreaming up new writing retreats to take talented authors on or writing the stories of the imaginary people that live in her heart.

Cruising Writers brings writers together with bestselling authors, an agent, an editor, and a world-renowned writing craft instructor writing retreats around the world.

Cruise with us to Grand Cayman this October with Kristen Lamb (Bestselling Author and Marketing Jedi), Rachel Caine (Bestselling Author of 50+ books), Deidre Knight (The Knight Agency), and Alex Sehulster (St. Martin’s Press).

Or get ready to Dive Deep and join us on a 7-day Immersion Cruise with Margie Lawson this December to Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel!