I was recently writing about looking at genre as a collection of clubs you can use for marketing your book. If you play by the rules, you get access to the members of that club and can encourage them to read your work.
The tricky bit is finding which club you belong to. Now, there are tons of genres out there, so I'm not about to go and try to define them all. I will however, link to a collection of genre descriptions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fantasy_genres Because Wikipedia has an article on everything!
http://www.focusonfantasy.com/2009/11/fantasy-types/
https://www.worldswithoutend.com/resources_sub-genres.asp Good long list with Sci Fi and Horror sub genres as well.
http://www.bestfantasybooks.com/fantasy-genre.php Tons of good info here.
Okay, Keryl, I went, I read, I found that I wrote a Romantic Fantasy in an Arcanepunk world. What can I do with that? It's not like that's on the category list at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
True. Most booksellers aren't quite that precise in their genre categories.
What you can do with this is find communities that like what you write. You can use this to home in on blogs that write about what you write (or better yet, review it!). You can search for groups on Goodreads, Shelfari, Librarything, etc that focus specifically on your sort of work.
In a nutshell: once you know which club you can enter, you can go find the members.
When you are marketing something as specific as a book, you do not want to cast a wide net. Spamming everyone on Earth about your book is not only a waste of time, it annoys readers. (And you don't want annoyed readers.) You want happy readers who are already primed to like what you wrote. Finding them, and dangling your book in front of them maximizes the likelihood of not just a sale, but a good review as well.
So, hope that was helpful!
Showing posts with label Fantasy Sage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantasy Sage. Show all posts
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Saturday, November 26, 2011
The Fantasy Sage Speaks: The Contract
So, last week I started talking about the bits and pieces I've picked up on how to keep readers happy. Since I'm not all that much closer to finishing the current book on the review list (For the Sake of the Future. It's big. I'm liking it. Hopefully review next week!) I shall now lay down the wisdom on tip number two: The Contract.
You're writing a book. You are the master of your own world. Inside the realm of your word processor you are a GOD! You are accountable to no one but your own whims and desires. You can make everything precisely the way you like it, take the tale anywhere, make your characters do anything! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Hmmm... Well, okay, this is true, sort of. Or I should say, if you strive to be a good (and by good I mean able to satisfy readers) writer, you stuff the part of your mind that's cackling like an evil scientist into the closet, lock it in there, and throw away the key.
See, there is an unspoken, unwritten contract between you and the reader. You set the tone of this contract by how you begin your story. By the time you've introduced all the characters and laid out the major plot points your readers expect you to follow through on those plot points and keep those characters in character. This is not to say you can't introduce new plot points or that your characters can't change. You can do both, but you have to satisfy the contract with your readers, which means finishing up those original points and doing the work necessary to take the reader along with the character when they change, if you want to keep happy readers.
In the last Fantasy Sage column I wrote about plot, and how JK Rowling did a fantastic job with building her plot so that by the time the last book came out she had a ravening horde of readers ready to jump over the corpses of their friends just to lay hands on the book. (Or maybe that was just me...*whistles innocently*)
Anyway, what she didn't do was fulfill the contract she set with her readers. By the end of Half Blood Prince, the readers were expecting a good versus evil showdown wrapped around a high quest fantasy and a final clash between Harry and Voldie. She did give us the final clash: a muddy,convoluted, confusing, and anti-climactic final showdown, but it was indeed there. The high quest fantasy, in the hands of even a marginally competent fantasy writer (which I think as of that point in time we all assumed she was) should have been an absolute blast. Instead she gave us moping and camping, filled with bad writing, and worse logic. As for the good versus evil showdown, it's just not there. In an effort to make sure there's no clear good or evil, she purposely makes sure that Harry's casting the only magic ever defined as Dark Arts by the middle of the book.
From my own take on the book, and from several critical reviews I agreed with, I'd have to say the issue was by the time Rowling got to Deathly Hallows she wanted to write one thing (a treatise on the acceptance of the inevitability of death) instead of what she told us she was going to write (a good versus evil battle to the end). Her part of the contract was not fulfilled, and, though kids still love Harry Potter, she lost a lot of the grown-ups with that book.
Another great example of I-promised-to-write-you-something-and-decided-to-write-something-else-altogether is The His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. The first two books were great, but by the time he got 'round to book three he forgot he'd set up an epic clash of faith versus science and decided that introducing a completely new plot point involving unicycling mutant elephants (at least that's how I pictured them) was in order.
Result: unhappy readers.
So my author friends, how do we work with this? How do we not make the same mistakes? Well, if you took the advice of the first column and figured out your plot before you started writing (or at the very least, before you published), you've probably got half the battle taken care of.
Keep that plot in line. If you go astray, and you certainly may decide to do so, give it a really, really careful look, especially if you've already published books in the series. And if you do go astray, wrap up the loose points, no matter what. And do them proper justice. Just because you've gotten bored with the your original set up does not mean your readers have. They want to see the action. Single biggest complaint about The Amber Spyglass: the big battle everyone was waiting for happens off-screen.
Here's the other advantage of keeping your plot in line: if you do a good job plot wrangling, you're much less likely to find yourself in a situation where you have to dumb down your characters, make them start doing things they wouldn't ordinarily do, or mucking about with them in any other way. Readers will often forgive a wonky plot. They rarely forgive having a favorite character lobotomized and turned into an idiot puppet by the author. The most recent example I can think of for this is Dragons of the Hourglass Mage, where for reasons that I can only assume rhyme with honey, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman decided to resurrect Raistlin, yet again, took the story back twenty years, and tried to fill in a part of Dragons of Spring Dawning that had been kept silent.
And they bombed at it. If, when they wrote Spring Dawning, they had any idea of how Raistlin got to where he was, it was pretty obvious that by the time they wrote Hourglass Mage they had forgotten it. So they started from scratch, apparently deciding that the fans wanted a new, softer, less-sarcastic version of Rasitlin, and they killed his character.
Once again this resulted in unhappy fans.
So, be careful with your set up, be aware of the promises you are making your readers, and fulfill them. If you're lucky enough to have fans who review your books and discuss them, pay attention to what your fans are expecting. Sure, you don't have to give them what they want, but if you know what they expect, what they think you've promised to tell them, you can do a much better job of keeping them happy.
If you find yourself in love with a totally cool idea, write it down, play with it, but if it doesn't fulfill your contract to your readers, put it in the drawer for the next series. There's always time to write new books with new adventures and new promises later on down the line. Once again, it's much easier to get a happy fan to go and buy that new book and new adventure than it is to woo one back later who you annoyed when you didn't tell him the story you said you would.
Other Fantasy Sage Posts: Magic, Plot, Power Balance
You're writing a book. You are the master of your own world. Inside the realm of your word processor you are a GOD! You are accountable to no one but your own whims and desires. You can make everything precisely the way you like it, take the tale anywhere, make your characters do anything! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Hmmm... Well, okay, this is true, sort of. Or I should say, if you strive to be a good (and by good I mean able to satisfy readers) writer, you stuff the part of your mind that's cackling like an evil scientist into the closet, lock it in there, and throw away the key.
See, there is an unspoken, unwritten contract between you and the reader. You set the tone of this contract by how you begin your story. By the time you've introduced all the characters and laid out the major plot points your readers expect you to follow through on those plot points and keep those characters in character. This is not to say you can't introduce new plot points or that your characters can't change. You can do both, but you have to satisfy the contract with your readers, which means finishing up those original points and doing the work necessary to take the reader along with the character when they change, if you want to keep happy readers.
In the last Fantasy Sage column I wrote about plot, and how JK Rowling did a fantastic job with building her plot so that by the time the last book came out she had a ravening horde of readers ready to jump over the corpses of their friends just to lay hands on the book. (Or maybe that was just me...*whistles innocently*)
Anyway, what she didn't do was fulfill the contract she set with her readers. By the end of Half Blood Prince, the readers were expecting a good versus evil showdown wrapped around a high quest fantasy and a final clash between Harry and Voldie. She did give us the final clash: a muddy,convoluted, confusing, and anti-climactic final showdown, but it was indeed there. The high quest fantasy, in the hands of even a marginally competent fantasy writer (which I think as of that point in time we all assumed she was) should have been an absolute blast. Instead she gave us moping and camping, filled with bad writing, and worse logic. As for the good versus evil showdown, it's just not there. In an effort to make sure there's no clear good or evil, she purposely makes sure that Harry's casting the only magic ever defined as Dark Arts by the middle of the book.
From my own take on the book, and from several critical reviews I agreed with, I'd have to say the issue was by the time Rowling got to Deathly Hallows she wanted to write one thing (a treatise on the acceptance of the inevitability of death) instead of what she told us she was going to write (a good versus evil battle to the end). Her part of the contract was not fulfilled, and, though kids still love Harry Potter, she lost a lot of the grown-ups with that book.
Another great example of I-promised-to-write-you-something-and-decided-to-write-something-else-altogether is The His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. The first two books were great, but by the time he got 'round to book three he forgot he'd set up an epic clash of faith versus science and decided that introducing a completely new plot point involving unicycling mutant elephants (at least that's how I pictured them) was in order.
Result: unhappy readers.
So my author friends, how do we work with this? How do we not make the same mistakes? Well, if you took the advice of the first column and figured out your plot before you started writing (or at the very least, before you published), you've probably got half the battle taken care of.
Keep that plot in line. If you go astray, and you certainly may decide to do so, give it a really, really careful look, especially if you've already published books in the series. And if you do go astray, wrap up the loose points, no matter what. And do them proper justice. Just because you've gotten bored with the your original set up does not mean your readers have. They want to see the action. Single biggest complaint about The Amber Spyglass: the big battle everyone was waiting for happens off-screen.
Here's the other advantage of keeping your plot in line: if you do a good job plot wrangling, you're much less likely to find yourself in a situation where you have to dumb down your characters, make them start doing things they wouldn't ordinarily do, or mucking about with them in any other way. Readers will often forgive a wonky plot. They rarely forgive having a favorite character lobotomized and turned into an idiot puppet by the author. The most recent example I can think of for this is Dragons of the Hourglass Mage, where for reasons that I can only assume rhyme with honey, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman decided to resurrect Raistlin, yet again, took the story back twenty years, and tried to fill in a part of Dragons of Spring Dawning that had been kept silent.
And they bombed at it. If, when they wrote Spring Dawning, they had any idea of how Raistlin got to where he was, it was pretty obvious that by the time they wrote Hourglass Mage they had forgotten it. So they started from scratch, apparently deciding that the fans wanted a new, softer, less-sarcastic version of Rasitlin, and they killed his character.
Once again this resulted in unhappy fans.
So, be careful with your set up, be aware of the promises you are making your readers, and fulfill them. If you're lucky enough to have fans who review your books and discuss them, pay attention to what your fans are expecting. Sure, you don't have to give them what they want, but if you know what they expect, what they think you've promised to tell them, you can do a much better job of keeping them happy.
If you find yourself in love with a totally cool idea, write it down, play with it, but if it doesn't fulfill your contract to your readers, put it in the drawer for the next series. There's always time to write new books with new adventures and new promises later on down the line. Once again, it's much easier to get a happy fan to go and buy that new book and new adventure than it is to woo one back later who you annoyed when you didn't tell him the story you said you would.
Other Fantasy Sage Posts: Magic, Plot, Power Balance
Saturday, November 19, 2011
The Fantasy Sage Speaks: Plot
In addition to being a writer, I'm also a reader. (Yes, I know you are all deeply shocked, what with the book reviews and all.) However, I'm also a reader of book reviews. I hang out on discussion boards where people talk about books. Over the years I feel like I've sucked up some points about what readers, fantasy readers especially, like, what makes them keep coming back, and what annoys them. Which, since I'm nowhere near finishing the next book for review, I, the newly christened Fantasy Sage, shall share with you.
So, here it is, in all it's glory, the first tip: If you want the sort of fans that are begging for your next book to come out, make sure you've got a set plot arc.
What do I mean by this? Fans like knowing there is a set beginning, middle, and end to the story. Harry Potter and the..., Twilight, Harry Dresden, and Game of Thrones: the thing these books all have in common, besides legions of adoring fans, is the author set up an overarching plot, then wrote each installment in a way that furthered that plot, but also opened up more questions about what would come next. None of these stories are/were written with the I'll-just-wing-it-and-see-where-the-characters-take-me method.
I know a lot of authors like to sort of just go with it, write whatever comes to mind, and keep the story going forever. But, if you read reviews of The Wheel of Time, Anita Blake Vampire Hunter, or The Southern Vampire Mysteries, you'll notice that many of the bad ones center on a theme of the author has lost the plot, that the later books don't have the same heart, magic, feel, ect... of the first few.
If you'll allow me a bit of comparison... Fans were lining up in droves, spending hours debating what would happen and how for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. By the time we got to that last book all the main players were in place, the epic battle ready to start, and a new quest set to begin. Many of the old threads had been wrapped up or almost wrapped up. The high quest for the Horcruxes and the final Harry V. Voldie fight was the promised end of the series. No matter what you thought of how J.K. Rowling handled Deathly Hallows, the set up for it had fans salivating over copies of the last book. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was the highest selling opening of a book, ever.
Now, we're two books away from the end of the Sookie Sackhouse (Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood) books. If I understand how the series worked, originally it was a three book deal, then a ten book deal, and now a twelve book deal. And it shows. The first three were very solid. They were mysteries, with a decent twist on a pretty basic arc. Then it was a ten book deal, and Harris got lost. 'Round about book seven it became pretty clear that Harris didn't have a larger story she was trying to tell, and worse, she had forgotten she was a mystery writer using fantasy tropes, not a fantasy writer using mysteries to build tension. She lost control of her plot. By book ten, where everything should have come to a fairly natural end, she was resurrecting dead plot points in an effort to keep it going for two more books. Unless she's a vastly better writer than we've seen in the last few books, the likelihood is the only question left by the time we get to book twelve is who Sookie ends up with. I know, having read the first ten, I've got no real interest in what happens in eleven, and I'm fairly sure I can skip it without too much damage in my ability to understand twelve. And if you read the negative reviews of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, you'll see I'm not the only one who feels this way.
So, how can we as fantasy writers take advantage of this? Plan your story arc! Or more precisely, know when and where your story ends, and then end it! We aren't serial mystery writers. (They play by a different set of rules.) Our readers want complete, or at least completable, story lines. They want to anticipate what comes next. They want clues, foreshadowing, the ability to look back and feel clever because they caught the clues and had figured out what was coming next.
If you know where your story is going, you can use foreshadowing, parallels, and symbolism to the fullest. You can build the necessary foundation so you're not whipping out McGuffins or Balognium (Thanks, Red Hen) when you've written yourself into a corner. (If you've got your plot properly wrangled, you aren't writing yourself into corners in the first place.) You can write each novel so that you reveal necessary information and leave some questions dangling to get your reader to come back for the next story. And that's what readers want. That's how writing careers are made. It is vastly easier to get someone to read your next book than it is to get someone to find you in the first place, so make sure that first book hooks them on your story.
Now, this isn't to say you can't use the I'll-wing-it-and-let-the-characters-lead-wherever technique while you are writing, but, if that's what you're going to do, don't publish until you've finished the whole tale. The thing to bear in mind is there's a huge difference between writing a story and publishing a story. When you are writing, you're doing it just for you. When you publish, you are making a promise to tell your reader a certain sort of story (more on this in the next post: The Contract). So, write however you like, but don't publish until you can give your readers the set story arc they desire.
So sayeth the Fantasy Sage. Now, go write! ;)
Other Fantasy Sage Posts: Magic, Contract, Power Balance
So, here it is, in all it's glory, the first tip: If you want the sort of fans that are begging for your next book to come out, make sure you've got a set plot arc.
What do I mean by this? Fans like knowing there is a set beginning, middle, and end to the story. Harry Potter and the..., Twilight, Harry Dresden, and Game of Thrones: the thing these books all have in common, besides legions of adoring fans, is the author set up an overarching plot, then wrote each installment in a way that furthered that plot, but also opened up more questions about what would come next. None of these stories are/were written with the I'll-just-wing-it-and-see-where-the-characters-take-me method.
I know a lot of authors like to sort of just go with it, write whatever comes to mind, and keep the story going forever. But, if you read reviews of The Wheel of Time, Anita Blake Vampire Hunter, or The Southern Vampire Mysteries, you'll notice that many of the bad ones center on a theme of the author has lost the plot, that the later books don't have the same heart, magic, feel, ect... of the first few.
If you'll allow me a bit of comparison... Fans were lining up in droves, spending hours debating what would happen and how for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. By the time we got to that last book all the main players were in place, the epic battle ready to start, and a new quest set to begin. Many of the old threads had been wrapped up or almost wrapped up. The high quest for the Horcruxes and the final Harry V. Voldie fight was the promised end of the series. No matter what you thought of how J.K. Rowling handled Deathly Hallows, the set up for it had fans salivating over copies of the last book. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was the highest selling opening of a book, ever.
Now, we're two books away from the end of the Sookie Sackhouse (Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood) books. If I understand how the series worked, originally it was a three book deal, then a ten book deal, and now a twelve book deal. And it shows. The first three were very solid. They were mysteries, with a decent twist on a pretty basic arc. Then it was a ten book deal, and Harris got lost. 'Round about book seven it became pretty clear that Harris didn't have a larger story she was trying to tell, and worse, she had forgotten she was a mystery writer using fantasy tropes, not a fantasy writer using mysteries to build tension. She lost control of her plot. By book ten, where everything should have come to a fairly natural end, she was resurrecting dead plot points in an effort to keep it going for two more books. Unless she's a vastly better writer than we've seen in the last few books, the likelihood is the only question left by the time we get to book twelve is who Sookie ends up with. I know, having read the first ten, I've got no real interest in what happens in eleven, and I'm fairly sure I can skip it without too much damage in my ability to understand twelve. And if you read the negative reviews of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, you'll see I'm not the only one who feels this way.
So, how can we as fantasy writers take advantage of this? Plan your story arc! Or more precisely, know when and where your story ends, and then end it! We aren't serial mystery writers. (They play by a different set of rules.) Our readers want complete, or at least completable, story lines. They want to anticipate what comes next. They want clues, foreshadowing, the ability to look back and feel clever because they caught the clues and had figured out what was coming next.
If you know where your story is going, you can use foreshadowing, parallels, and symbolism to the fullest. You can build the necessary foundation so you're not whipping out McGuffins or Balognium (Thanks, Red Hen) when you've written yourself into a corner. (If you've got your plot properly wrangled, you aren't writing yourself into corners in the first place.) You can write each novel so that you reveal necessary information and leave some questions dangling to get your reader to come back for the next story. And that's what readers want. That's how writing careers are made. It is vastly easier to get someone to read your next book than it is to get someone to find you in the first place, so make sure that first book hooks them on your story.
Now, this isn't to say you can't use the I'll-wing-it-and-let-the-characters-lead-wherever technique while you are writing, but, if that's what you're going to do, don't publish until you've finished the whole tale. The thing to bear in mind is there's a huge difference between writing a story and publishing a story. When you are writing, you're doing it just for you. When you publish, you are making a promise to tell your reader a certain sort of story (more on this in the next post: The Contract). So, write however you like, but don't publish until you can give your readers the set story arc they desire.
So sayeth the Fantasy Sage. Now, go write! ;)
Other Fantasy Sage Posts: Magic, Contract, Power Balance
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