Interview with Jasmine Walt by the Self-Publishing Roundtable
If you can spare just one hour out of your life to watch one video that could influence whether or not you ‘make it’ as an author (in the really, really BIG sense), watch this one.
Jasmine Walt has made both the NYT and USA Today top 20 (including top 10) bestseller lists twice in the last month – firstly with her curated/co-authored box-set ebook Magic & Mayhem, and this week with the first in her new paranormal series, Shadow Born, co-authored with fellow HarperCollins ‘Authonomy’ site alumni Rebecca Hamilton.
As Jasmine explains here, it’s not simply a case of luck. It’s a lot of marketing via social media and mailing lists, a huge advertising budget (hers doubled in the three month pre-order phase for the box-set ebook release of Magic & Mayhem, in order to have the desired impact) and endless navigating of the restrictions and regulations by the ebook publishing platforms, and criteria of the bestseller lists themselves, when pushing for this kind of exposure.
Because you need to watch the interview to get to the real nuts and bolts of how it was done, I’m not going to discuss the interview content further or give you my opinions, other than tell you, this is tried and tested, it happened, and it worked. If you have the time and financial resources to try it for yourself, and achieve the same initial sales figures in the process, there’s no reason why this business model shouldn’t work for you too.
One prerequisite: You do need to have written the book! And as Jasmine says “It does seem to work best with new releases” – so think carefully before republishing something that’s been lurking on Amazon already for the last five years. Look at the current market interests, and get those brain cells in gear – you’ll need every last one of them.
Behind-the-scenes footage that I filmed on request at RLYC of journalist Nina Nannar and DoP Mickey Lawrence, interviewing former Swallows & Amazons (1973) actress Sophie Neville (one of my I.T. clients), and some of the sailing students. They’re discussing the 2016 movie remake of Arthur Ransome’s classic tale. Parts of the interview were featured in the item on ITV’s News at Ten on Friday 29th July (read the article and watch it here).
Happy New Year! Here’s what I’ve been up to, most of the last couple of years, since crash-landing on the parkour gym tumble-track in June 2013, folding in half at the neck and faceplanting into my own torso – technically I shouldn’t still be here, let alone walking around, blogging, breathing etc… thanks to yoga for life for the extra bendy spine.
Issues have been many, varied and changeable – pain, stability, vomiting, swallowing, speech slurring, pain, holding head up, walking in a straight line, sitting upright, pain, clumsiness, dropping things, pain, pins and needles, pain, insomnia, boredom, muscle atrophy, nerve signal, sudden eye deterioration (possible vertebral artery insufficiency – having another MRI to investigate neck scarring, discs and positioning in the next fortnight)… strength, dizziness, vertigo, more pain…
I’m about halfway back together now, following sternum surgery and physiotherapy, fixed braces for a year which helped by aligning my bite and reduced neck muscle aggravation by stopping me grinding my teeth, lens replacement and vitrectomy in both eyes just before Christmas, and a very recent gym referral.
Last year I started messing around with my hula hoops, and developed a separate set of exercises that addressed a lot of my issues with muscle tone, flexibility, nerve signal, stability and grip. A few people got interested in trying them out as well, so I’ve just finished making this video tutorial and session run-through to share.
Sitting at the computer editing and rendering the finished version was harder than filming it, pain-wise, but I hope it’s worth it – someone else might need the physio inspiration, you never know.
New Year’s Resolution for 2016 – keep doing more of this stuff, and maybe change my career… 🙂
Hope you’ve all had a good week so far and are planning a chilled-out weekend (let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you’re already chilling out compared to those folk stampeding around the shops).
I’ve put two Kindle ebook freebies up for the next 4 days – Friday 27th to Monday 30th November inclusive (until midnight Monday, Pacific time).
These are the books I learned the most by writing, back in 2008 – what not to do, genre ambiguity, what to say when I felt like it, whether it was bad writing or not – but mainly, how to stay sane 🙂 Editing was an unknown practise to me back then, so these are the long versions. Luckily, I did know how to proofread!
Considering all the ranting I do and advice I give, If you’d like the evidence that we all start somewhere, you can find it here:
The books were originally one massive book, which I split in half down the middle – no reason except for print cost at the first time of publishing. Another lesson – in the digital age – that’s not necessary either, although I do still love my print books.
Here’s the blurb:
Lara Leatherstone – not her real name, she got it from an internet Porn Star Name Generator… and Connor Reeves, also not his real name – how he came by his, is less clear… Both are obliged to work their way through the To Do List of ‘Hollywood Hit-Men’ – a breed mostly preoccupied with gold chains, impressing barmaids, and shady contracts – erasing these unwanted pests with the minimum of paperwork. Or pay.
When her head office try to set her up in a team with a wingman, her main concern is they’re trying to manufacture a weakness that they can manipulate her with – not to mention once they agree on a working colleague, Pest-Control-sniper-turned-police-officer Connor, that he might be quite manipulative too…
Hope you all have a very happy and safe holiday weekend xx
Seriously. Anything between three hours (going by what is currently being published on Kindle nowadays, and frightening all the ebook customers back into the paperback aisles of Waterstones) and sixty years.
At the end of the day – however long that working day has been – you hope that the author is the go-to expert on their work. Including thoroughly knowing what has been added or removed after an editor has had their grubby mitts on it, if you are one of those lucky authors.
A character’s eye colour or birth-sign shouldn’t change in the time it takes the reader to make a pot of tea between pages. For the writer, who was living in a different time-frame while constructing the story, this interlude between paragraphs may have been forty years. But even in a NaNoWriMo novel, over the course of a month’s hard writing, it’s possible to see where the author’s imaginary world morphed, grew, shrunk, and in some cases emigrated, with no reference point or explanation.
Continuity errors are not limited to film and TV. They appear in written prose all too often as well. But it’s not just continuity errors. It’s reality-check-bouncing too.
For example:
A character who lives in a bungalow (or a trailer, tent or caravan) as designated at the start of the story, should not pop upstairs for any reason, sleep in a room upstairs, or hear noises downstairs at the dead of night.
A character should remember the names and sexes of their siblings, whether or not those siblings are married, and to whom. They should also remember how many children they have. And if a family is limited to one car, they should own one that they can all comfortably fit into.
A character who tells everyone that he/she ‘does not drink’ should not be quaffing Champers at the staff party, or opening the Jack Daniels every night after work and the Beaujolais with dinner, unless he/she is also a humungous liar. Teetotallers do not merely drink less than the average struggling author. They don’t touch alcohol at all.
A virginal character should not leap like a porn star onto the first man to compliment her cleavage, unless she is a sperm-jacker hoping to get a council house.
A character who remembers his/her parents’ death in a car crash while still at primary school should not also have memories of how embarrassing they were at his/her wedding, have photographs of them at his/her graduation, or receive phone calls from them with unexpected news of other nonexistent relatives (such as siblings of only children), reminders of family birthdays which have already been celebrated and forgotten two chapters previously, or other postmodernist twists in the plot. And while on the subject, twin siblings usually celebrate their birthdays on the same day, so reminders of a twin’s birthday are bizarre, to say the least… we’ll ignore the fact that my own mother once called to remind me of family birthdays looming in the next two days – it was my own, her eldest child’s birthday that was looming. I got a dead potted plant. It must have been too short notice for her 🙂
A character in a novel set in 1914 whose husband only gives her ten pounds a day ‘spending money’ should not be roaming the streets of London pleading with shopkeepers to give her a job stating that her family is in need (unless again, she is a great big liar). ‘Ten pounds a day’ to live on in 1914 is roughly the equivalent of £100 in today’s terms. (Even today, sometimes I wish I had as much as ten quid a day just for ‘spending money’).
A character should not ‘fly out to Rio’ for a one-stop party weekend and ‘return from his Mexican holiday’ on the Monday, unless his nickname is Speed Gonzales, Fastest Drug Dealer/Liar/Cross-Border Trafficker in the west.
No matter how well you think you know your story, your characters, where they live, the layout of their house/spaceship/camp-site or crime scene (or any other matters of world geography) – or indeed, in how short a space of time you wrote it – you must sit down and read it cover-to-cover once it’s finished. It’s the only way you’ll find all the booby-traps you’ve set for yourself in the process of incorporating all of the add-ons your imagination has furnished the story with since you started.
Did you know that you can Google what time the sun sets anywhere in the world, on any given calendar day? Recently, one of my author clients nearly changed the solar year in Tokyo to be in parallel with Northern Scotland, imagining that the winter days in Japan were as short as those approaching the Northern Lights and the Arctic Circle. I checked, as she had not. It turns out that the shortest daylight span of the year in midwinter Japan is less than 3 hours shorter than on the same day in Nairobi, close to the Equator. Japan may have mountains with snow on, but so does Mount Kilimanjaro. Which is not in the highlands of Scotland either.
When I was 7 or 8 years old, I thought Vienna was in Spain. I was sending imaginary holiday postcards between Barbie dolls. I then opened an atlas, looked it up, and had to change it. It’s even easier to look things up online. Don’t use the world of your imagination as an excuse for getting the simplest of things wrong, unless you too want to sound like an elementary schoolchild when reading out your story at your first public appearance.
While looking for continuity/geographical errors, check out your spelling and grammar. Do you know the meanings of all of your favourite words? Is your hero accurately described as ‘a tenuous mass of muscle’ with ‘an autocratic accent’ or did you intend to say something else when you pictured him?
Lord Dark Helmet of Spaceballs – both tenuous and autocratic…
Also, is your prose dripping unintentional double-entendres at every turn? Is your heroine always asking folk to ‘bare with her’ (while she doubtless races to win the strip-tease contest first) or to ‘grin and bare it’ (obviously to collect photographic evidence of the aforementioned strip-tease).
Not long ago, I formatted a family saga – book-club, women’s fiction, that sort of thing – not humour, not parody, but quite serious and stately. It started out in rural Yorkshire, with a patriarch named Dick, host to a large brood and an explosive temper. The book was already published traditionally in print, so it was only the ebook I had to format – no changes, no edits allowed. After a few chapters, Dick’s incendiary nature nearly cost me two cups of tea and a keyboard.
Before she could finish, Dick had exploded.
She opened her mouth, and Dick exploded again.
If you’re writing serious prose, and have to negotiate the waters around some delicate choices of character name, try to exercise caution with descriptive verbs. And maybe cut down on their repetition, if the behaviour is unavoidable, as with Dick’s hot temper.
Otherwise, you may be misleading the reader into believing you’re writing something else.
A few authors become attracted by certain phrases, no doubt picked up from earlier reading habits of their own, which they do not see are also misleading to the reader. One author who consulted me was fond of describing the reactions of his characters in a certain way. They always ‘managed to appear genuinely amazed’ or ‘managed to seem genuinely surprised’ or ‘genuinely appeared to be puzzled’ etc, etc… what the author does not realise, is that these descriptions would be perfect should the characters all be routine dreadful liars and deceivers – yet again, this was not the author’s intention. I said to him, “when you chat with friends and they tell you something amazing, do you say ‘I’m amazed!’ or do you say ‘I am managing to appear genuinely amazed!’ – which of those actually sounds realistic and genuine?”
If your character is amazed or surprised, just say so. He/she was amazed. No-one should ‘appear to be genuine’ in any reaction, unless it is an outright act put on to deceive the other character or characters. Be wary of a fondness for expanding on what should be very simple bits of your illustrative prose.
Authors suffer from short attention-spans as well as overactive imaginations, and that shows all too painfully also.
In third-person storytelling, the author gives away whenever they are bored with the internal thoughts of the MC, or are merely delighted with an incidental character they have just created, by glaring amounts of pointless head-hopping:
The bus conductor looked at the beautiful girl and felt pity for her. It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t afford the fare, riding the strangely advanced London bus in 1914 with only ten pounds to last the day, before going home to her house in Mayfair and tightwad of a husband. Why, if he was ten years younger himself and wasn’t supporting his family of four he would have something to offer her all right, but on this occasion, a free bus journey was sufficient…
What the author thinks they’re doing is directing the reader to feel sorry for this loaded idle wench, as she trolls around the city of London with pockets full of her husband’s money on a daily basis. What they’re actually doing is attaching misleading significance to minor passing characters, while using as many pairs of eyes as they can in every scene to illustrate their own lust after the leading character (or desire to be the leading character, it’s usually one or the other).
If you want to make the readers feel sorry for your character, put them in piteous situations. Not riding buses around town, skirts weighed down with cash, while other characters stare at them and think the things that you want your readers to think.
Head-hopping can also take a terrifying and unforseen turn through ‘the fourth wall’ – away from the characters altogether:
Bella sighed as she got off the bus, and the flower-seller on the pavement nearby took pity on her at once, handing her a rose.
‘Poor girl,’ thought the flower-seller. ‘She looks like she’s been worrying over something all day. And it looks like she’s got off at the wrong stop…’
Yes – yes – see Bella suddenly running now, realising her mistake.
“Wait!” she shouted, but the bus had gone.
Look at Bella now – lost, dejected. Tears pricked at her eyelids. No! She mustn’t cry.
So – let’s watch and see what happens next, as she heads mournfully along the rain-sodden street…
A couple of things happened in the segment above. One, the author stopped writing the story from the point-of-view of the characters, and started addressing the reader directly, as if sitting alongside them in a movie theatre talking over the film. This is often a ploy when there is an annoying ‘narrator’ character, such as a ghost watching over the players, but it doesn’t work when it’s the author themselves.
Do you know why? Because the voice of the descriptive prose dictates the landscape portrayed in the reader’s imagination. If it suddenly switches to the author’s voice, saying in as many words ‘Look at this’ or ‘watch this’ then the reader is immediately teleported out of the location of the plot they were involved in, and into the seat next to the author as they wrote it (and a miserable place it is to be, too).
The reader is NOT INTERESTED IN YOU. Or in what you are thinking. Or in who you fancy eavesdropping on/sleeping with in the story, in any given session of writing. The reader wants to be on that street, with Bella, figuring out her next move with her, and when she’s going to learn that ten pounds will buy her quite a lot of groceries for her Mayfair house in 1914 – if she can only find a shopkeeper who has that much change to give her in return.
The reader does not want the author hanging around at their shoulder, prodding them, pointing at passers-by and telling the reader what each of them thinks about Bella as she freeloads her way around pre-WW1 London.
The other thing that occurred was the jumping of past tense to present tense. Past tense – that’s where the story was occurring (disregarding the head-hopping that was still going on). Present tense was what I used as evidence that the fourth wall was being smashed – that the author was addressing the reader directly. It isn’t necessarily the case – unwary writers can hop tenses as erratically as they can hop into and out of the heads of point-of-view characters – but it is occasionally a giveaway of fourth wall infringement that I’ve encountered as an editor and proofreader.
Remember, it takes a very clever writer to lead a discerning reader in a merry dance through the plot, on an entertaining journey to a satisfactory resolution. But it doesn’t take a genius reader to spot a terrible writer… you have been warned 😉 x
One of my most successful author clients is currently making the switch from memoir-writing to fiction, and having had a look at it while formatting a proofreading copy for her, I noted that her style hadn’t significantly changed from ‘true-life journaling’ to ‘fiction/action comedy.’
In short, she hadn’t introduced enough dialogue. The only place that the characters were interacting, developing relationships, and building up their parts was still in her own head – which she was then ‘passing on’ to the reader in her own voice, almost as an afterthought.
It was written in what you’d call an ‘anecdotal’ style – lots of third-party reference to conversations, and descriptions of reports on third-party activity occurring away from the POV characters, but no actual conversations in receipt of these reports, or character-building reactions to any of these topics as they became known to the MC (main character) for the first time.
Here’s a couple of straightforward hints on writing dialogue for fiction, whether you are writing in first or third person.
Even in 1st person POV, you must write all of the dialogue. If someone in the novel is recounting a story or news to the protagonist, you must hear it with the character’s ears and let the reader know the character’s reaction to the news – otherwise it just sounds like you (the author) telling the audience what happened, with no actual action or reaction occurring for any of the characters. Whether they were present in the action – or not, and are just hearing about it from a third party. The reader is hearing about it for the first time too. Don’t just fob them off with a passing description of what they just heard.
For example, instead of saying, as you might in non-fiction/memoir:
It turned out that the truck had a flat. Someone had stolen the jack. They were stuck there for an hour.
You would write:
“What took them so long?” I asked, puzzled.
“They broke down!” my father exclaimed. “A flat.”
“But that takes no time at all.”
“The jack was gone. She thinks it was stolen.”
…And you would continue to show the whole conversation. Not just an introductory exchange, or then switch back to you telling the story. Let the characters unfold the story.
The first segment has no character development or character voice – it’s just your voice, the author, telling the reader instead of showing the reader. If you were writing in the third person (he/she) it would be a little more acceptable, but only if used sparingly. Never for first person. You need first person ‘ears and voice.’
It’s fine for non-fiction/memoir, when the reader is getting to know you, the author. But not for fiction – fiction demands that the author be invisible and that the characters do all the talking, even if the action being discussed did not happen to the POV character.
No matter how the news of the action reaches the POV character – telephone conversation, chance encounter, radio report – you MUST transcribe that report/exchange as dialogue. First person is no excuse – I wrote the whole of Death & the City from one POV and there was a ton of dialogue and action, including where Lara hears of action occurring away from her – I still wrote it as dialogue in scenes where she hears it as news for the first time (unless she was summarising a few incidences of a crap night at work, while on her own ruminating over her own mental health).
Whenever there is more than one person in the scene, THE DIALOGUE MUST BE WRITTEN. It doesn’t have to include every word spoken to a passing waiter, or regarding a ticket purchase for the bus. But all dialogue between recurring/important characters who are relevant to the events of the plot and outcome of the story must be shown.
With multiple POVs, including all of the dialogue is the best way for the reader to identify individual personalities as well. Otherwise, your own author voice is the predominant one, and the point of having first person/third person multiple POV is lost.
Remember it’s all about emotions and responses for the reader, especially in first person POV. Not the author telling the reader a story, sitting by an outdoor workshop campfire. It’s a play, being acted out in front of the reader. The reader is reading ‘I’ and ‘me’ in their own head – they want to know what that ‘I’ and ‘me’ is hearing, seeing, saying, tasting, smelling and feeling when they learn something for the FIRST time.
Not what the protagonist is picking over later – that’s not a story as it happens, it’s an anecdote (as in memoir writing) – of no emotional consequence to anyone.
Imagine you are writing a feature movie script. You wouldn’t write Scene One: X and Y sit in the restaurant booth and discuss their relationship. Scene Two: X and Y repaint the nursery together and discuss baby names. Scene Three… unless your movie is intended to be completely ad-libbed. You don’t ask your readers to ad-lib your novel. Even in the most artsy-fartsy literary fiction, it’s tedious when that happens (trust me, been there, read it, tried writing it, bored myself to sleep).
If your favourite author never writes the dialogue, try reading a few books by different authors. (And stop trying to emulate your favourite authors. They occasionally get things wrong as well).
Writing & Publishing For Yourself: The Indie Author Handbook, Self-Publishing Toolkit, and Staying Sane Survival Guide – or ‘The Adventures of an I.T. Helpdesk’ by Lisa Scullard (non-fiction/humour)
FREE on Kindle for a limited time (regular price $2.99 or equivalent) – Write a decent book, Tweet a few times, accept any spontaneous reviews graciously, and keep all of your friends…
Hi folks! Seeing as I didn’t know what I’d really done to earn recognition as a top blogger on here, a while ago I went through all of my posts on Writing and Publishing and compiled a list (see my Tutorials pages). Following that, and reading them through, I realised I had a whole lot more to add – to update – and articles elsewhere that were relevant. As well as journal entries of everything I’ve learned on the indie author rollercoaster.
I’ve now`organised them, fully-revised and updated, into this eBook above – containing my earliest advice on writing (reviewing the 27th Brussels International Film Festival, in 2000) to the latest. The eBook was was published yesterday, and I’ve just finished the final tweaks after uploading.
Here’s the blurb:
This isn’t a ‘How to sell a million copies’ or ‘How to be a New York Times bestseller’ guru session. This is not for seasoned ‘Authorpreneurs’ looking for new promotion and sales tactics. It is NOT a tried-and-tested formula for writing a blockbuster novel. And it will not tell you how to become a billionaire through exploiting your hidden USP (Unique Selling Point).
Neither is it a Zen lifestyle guide, telling you that it is simply a case of convincing the world (and yourself) that you are the world’s top author, and you will be showered with money, Nobel prizes, Oscars, Specsavers Daggers, retail sponsorship, street-value turnips, or whatever else takes your fancy.
None of the above. It’s a journal of the everyday life of a modern, under-the-radar indie author since the global self-publishing trend started, and a few confessions of advising others while being a Useful Technical Person to Have Around…
It is also a book for beginners, giving tutorials and case studies – on the subjects of inspiration, motivation, genre, legal hurdles, research, editing, and identifying your ideal market audience – along with the rocket science of formatting your documents, embedding illustrations, creating and linking to external content (such as audio and video), uploading them, and some gentle cautionary advice on publishing issues and promotions.
There will be laughs. There will be tears. There will be revealing examples made (and for readers with browser-enabled tablets or PC/phone reading apps, links to working samples of multimedia content).
Above all, it’s designed to save you time, hassle (and ultimately, save you money) when joining the indie author phenomenon.
Lisa Scullard went online one day in 2014 to find she was suddenly (and without warning) a WordPress-promoted top blogger in Reader on the subject of ‘Writing & Blogging’ – and promptly understood the full meaning of the phrase: “With great power comes great responsibility.” This subsequent book is an organised compilation of relevant blog posts, tutorials, articles, experimental book trailers and journal entries made over the years, covering the topics of writing, researching, editing, publishing and promotion. It has been an undertaking of mass rewrites, edits, revisions, expositions and updates, and some keyboard-crunching efforts at formatting, in order to justify such an unprecedented amount of recognition.
…And it’s FREE until midnight PST, Wednesday 28th October 2015, on Kindle worldwide. Grab it while you can.
It’s already available in print on Lulu directly (postage £2.99 basic shipping) and should appear on Amazon in paperback form over the next few days.
Last updated: 14 November, 01.30 GMT – The latest updated version is now live. If you’ve downloaded your copy already, make sure it’s automatically synched to the newest version. You can use the Kindle Customer Services ‘Contact Us’ by chat/email method to request it to be re-delivered free to your app/tablet if it doesn’t update automatically from your reader settings. You’re always entitled to request the newest revision of an ebook for free, even after a paid purchase.
One of my supporting examples of fiction is also available FREE on Kindle for the same time period, for reference – Death & The City: Cut to the Chase Edition. (Also worldwide).
I hope you all have a great weekend, and for those of you off school and college, enjoy half-term break (and happy forthcoming Halloween) 🙂
Our game is not to compete and decide who has the greater or lesser merit.
Lisa Scullard 