Read That Grey Area

Fantastic news!

You can now read Book 1 - The Girl from Otherworld on Wattpad!

Following my days at the London Book Fair, I learned that the best way to get people to care about my book is to get readers. I now have a big plan (more details soon), and the first step was to post my book on a reading platform like Wattpad. 

How it works is this: people sign up to read, they find something they'd like to read by looking at categories or using recommendations, then they start reading, chapter by chapter. Some stories are finished (marked as 'completed'), some are not. 

If readers like it, they can vote for each chapter by adding it as a favourite (a yellow star at the bottom) or they can leave comments. Books that have many reads, many favourites, and many comments are more visible, and get more readers.

 I will be posting chapters every few days. Just click here to start reading. And if you like it, remember to vote or leave comments so I can reach new readers!

You need to create an account to be a reader, but it's quick and free.

Thanks to all the lovely people who have been supporting me in doing this. It is scary, putting my book out there for the whole world to see. Not just an extract where I can say, 'What, this old unedited thing?', but the real thing.

So thank you. You are amazing and I couldn't do this without you.

Lessons from the London Book Fair

By chance the London Book Fair fell during one of my weeks off and so I took a bit of time off from editing to infiltrate the publishing business and listen in.

These are some of the lessons I learned. Now bear in mind that this isn't my advice, but what the pros at the fair were saying.

Beauuuutiful cover!

#Lesson 1: Pretty books matter
One of the comments that was made by booksellers over and over is that what a book looks like matters hugely. Don’t judge a book by its cover? Forget it, everybody does. Booksellers are flooded with hundreds of books, so if you want your book to stand out, it’s got to be stunning. In the words on a bookseller, ‘make it a beautiful objects that people want to get their hands on’. That being said, easier said than done…

# Lesson 2: Use social media – but be genuine
One of the advice I heard the most is also the least helpful: use social media. Oh thanks, geez, hadn’t thought about that! Everybody said it, especially those who haven’t grown up breathing and living twitter and facebook. They mostly said sensible stuff that seemed pretty obvious to me, but it least it’s making me think I’m doing things right:
- Don’t be a knob. Be polite and enthusiastic and give other people a hand. Or as somebody put it, forget about the self-absorbed part of your brain that drove you to be shut up in your own little world for months to write a book.
- Don’t spam people to ask them to buy your book. Nobody wants someone’s book rammed down their throat all the time. An interesting blog post post on this topic came out this week telling authors to 'shut up'.
- Make connections. When publicists tell authors to use social media, what they mean is to reach out to people, engage in conversations, have a ‘presence’. The same blogger who told authors to 'shut up' wrote a following blog explaining what authors should do instead of spamming.
- Be genuine. Find what social media comes naturally to you and do that one. For me it would be blogging, but an author was talking about reaching our to other debut authors through twitter was how she started using twitter, linking to pages she liked and found useful.

# Lesson 3: Build an audience. 
I think this is in competition with ‘use social media’ for most annoying advice! Yeah, thanks, I’d love to. HOW? In all honesty, I can’t say I got the answer to that one. But I got tidbits of information, things that might help.
- travel back in time to a time when there weren’t a million bloggers (see blog earlier)
- sign up to websites such as wattpad or platforms where your readers are and engage with the people there (genuinely, not spamming – see above). Make the networking part of your routine.
- publish nothing until you’ve got 3 books. Or, without going that far, publish books very close together, so your audience can continue to engage with your books. If you wait too long between books, you will lose your audience and have to start all over again
- call on your family and friends to help you spread the word
- start a mailing list

# Lesson 4: Metadata matter
Lots of acronyms like SEO and SEM got brandished around, and in all honesty I mostly didn’t have a clue what these people were talking about. Google tells me this is ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and ‘Search Engine Marketing’. Note to self: do some more research.

# Lesson 5: Do your research
When contacting people – publishers, agents, booksellers – find out what they like and don’t like, and find the name of the person you should be contacting, then contact them, and not their colleagues, who might have completely different tastes.


And finally, The Bookseller’s secret to success:
- Write a great book
- Find your audience and given them time to tell their friends about your book
- Repeat

Now I learned another very important thing, but that deserves a post of its own, so stay posted.

Help! I need somebody, help!

I finished editing my book this morning, and I have quite a lot of things I want to blog about, but I thought I would start with a problem I have.

My title.

And I need YOUR help.

My book has changed titles many times but for years now it's been called 'That Grey Area', in reference to the main theme of the book, that things are not being black and white, and to Lacie's realisation at the end that there aren't 'good people' and 'evil people'.

And I like the sound of it.

It also doesn't help readers get a sense of the book at all. But then again, book titles I love are things like 'The Knife of Never Letting Go' or 'Under the never sky', which don't really tell you what the book is about either.

So I'm a bit stuck. Should I change the title? What do you think of it?

And if I do change it, then I have an even bigger problem: what the heck am I going to call the book?

At some point the book was called The Darkness Within, in reference to a riddle inside the book (and the idea that everybody can do evil). I actually quite like this title, but I thought it made it sound too gothy (another book called The Darkness Within is a vampire book).

And if not that... well, I don't really have any ideas.

Part of the riddle also says 'If you are without sin', which could work, but again I think this gives the wrong impression.

I don't like titles that have things like Faerie in them, and I don't really want to mention the Tree Circle, e.g. I think 'The secret of the Tree Circle' sounds a bit lame.

Please leave a comment on what you think of:

- That Grey Area as a title

- The Darkness Within as a title

- Any ideas YOU have of what the title should be (though I understand that might be hard if some of you have only read bits or the synopsis).

Thank you!

~*~

Edit: I had a look at titles, following Catherine's comment.
How about 'The girl from Otherworld'. Or is that too much 'the girl with the dragon tatto'?

Have courage and be kind

Something a little bit different today. Although this blog is about writing, it is also more generally about storytelling.
(Besides, this is my blog so I can talk about whatever the heck I want.)

So today I am going to talk about a story. A very old story. The story of Cinderella.

Or rather, Kenneth Brannagh's live action version. Having read mixed reviews, I went to see the movie with my mum last night with no other expectation than it would look pretty. (And it did - oh that blue twirling dress!)

What I wasn't expecting was such a strong moral message. 
On her death bed, Ella's mother asks her daughter to promise to have courage and be kind, two rules by which Ella strives to live, even when life deals her a pretty bad hand.
Have courage and be kind. I was surprised - and impressed. Kindness and courage are rarely associated.

Now I'm going to go a little bit personal on you.
When I was growing up, I was a bit of a goody-two-shoes, and my older sisters, dutifully doing their jobs as older sisters, teased me for it. They called me Cinderella (mostly when they got into trouble because I was crying or I'd told on them). It became an insult. Being a Cinderella was being whiny goody goody who couldn't stand up for herself.

And that's often how people view kindness. Now I'm not claiming to be as good as Cinderella, and when mice eat from my kitchen they leave droppings everywhere. But being generally nice, and usually shy, I can still appear to be a bit of a pushover. A Cinderella.

There is, in some people, a simplisitic view of what being kind or being brave is.

Some people think that being 'nice' is being a smiling warm person and having good manners, saying nice things and flattering, and avoiding conflict.
But being kind is something else entirely. 

Being kind is caring, especially about those who are more unfortunate than you are or those society deems unworthy - like Cinderella, sharing the little she has with the mice.
It's thinking of others, and sometimes putting their needs before your own - like Cinderella giving milk to the poor old lady, having lost everything herself . It's about giving, of yourself, your time, and whatever you have. It's about forgiving, like Cinderella forgives her stepmother (I won't carry on giving examples from the movie, but you get the gist). It's giving people a chance, and giving them a second chance. A chance to be kind, too.

In the same way, brashness and confidence are often mistaken for bravery. Some people think the brave ones are those who speak louder than everyone else. They think of courage and see men with swords, charging into battles.

But in the wise words of the Starks:

'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?'
'That is the only time a man can be brave.'

Bravery is about not giving up and keeping going, even when things are tough and don't look like they're going to get any better. It's doing what you're afraid to do and daring to show the world who you truly are. It's standing up for what is right and saying no to wicked deals, even if it will cost you everything. All those fascets of bravery, Cinderella demonstrates in the movie. I wrote a post a while ago about strong female characters. To me, Kenneth Brannagh's Cinderella is strong. She's strong from within.

Now this isn't a lesson life teaches us often. I know that to appear sassy wins more hearts in the real life than being a Cinderella, and I know having a big mouth gets people's votes. I also know that 'nice guys finish last' and people don't get ahead in life but putting others first. There aren't any fairy godmothers in the real world to give good people a happy ending.
But what a sad lesson that is. And what a sad world it would be if these were the rules we lived by.

So you might scoff at Cinderella, at the twirling dresses, at love at first sight and graceful dances. You may think Cinderella's wet eyes and candid manner are twee and you may think the storyline too simplistic (I loved it all). Or you might think there was no need for a live action version of an animated classic, or even for anything straying so far from the original fairy tale.

But I, for one, am grateful that there are still people out there telling stories that teach us the importance of having courage and being kind.

'I've got a feeling we're going to need them more than usual before long.'

(Bonus points if you can tell me what book this is from. Hint: the quote doesn't refer to kindness and bravery, but to laughs.)

Some other people's thoughts

Hello world!

I have been very busy editing during the Easter holidays - you can follow my adventures on my new facebook page - but it's not left me a lot of time to post on the blog. I have lots of blacklogged ideas for posts, but it will have to wait until the weekend, when I'll (hopefully) be finished with my current round of editing.

In the meantime, though, other people have written interesting stuff.

Catherine, a fellow writer and teacher, did a survey of what 13-year-old girls in her class were reading, and she found some cool things. Mostly I noticed none of them were reading unheard-of indie authors. *cough*

Harry Bingham of the Writers' Workshop, did a timely survey of authors and what they thought of their publishers. The verdict? Grumbling but not quitting. That being said, it doesn't make you want to work with publishers (but more on that later...).

And finally, I came across this blog post debating the usefulness of book reviews in driving book sales. It uses personal experience and some stats to back up its ideas, and it's well worth a read.

As for me... well, I'm only 15 000 words away from the end, so I'll resurface with my own thoughts when that's done.