Darkly Delicious Details about How I Sold My Book, by Jessica Therrien

When I started writing Oppression, the first book in my Children of the Gods series, I wrote for fun. I needed to satisfy my YA book addiction and nothing was sucking me in like I wanted. So, I wrote what I knew would suck me in. I never really intended it to be published (…maybe I fantasized about it a little, okay, but I never thought it REALLY would be published).

After I finished, I decided why not at least try, right? I researched the perfect query, wrote up a synopsis, and sent the first 5 pages off to 10 agents. Then my mind did awful things. It imagined great responses. Of course agents would want the full manuscript. I had perfected it. I had worked so so so hard. How could they not?

Each rejection was crushing. I cried. A lot.

Then I got some advice from a friend of a friend who used to be in the publishing industry. I’ll never forget it. It changed my life.

“Go to a writers conference.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Sure,” I said, but I didn’t believe her.

I really don’t know how I convinced myself to go. I was raised to be frugal. I don’t spend money on just anything, but somehow I paid $400 to attend the Southern California Writers Conference. After clicking “submit payment” I seized up…Jessica, what did you just do? $400?!!

So I went. I’m not good at being social, but as it turns out, writers connect with other writers, and I ended up meeting some great friends (despite my sweaty palms). 

At these conferences writers are allowed to send in advanced submissions to agents, authors, publishers, etc. They read what you send and sit down with you for a quick 15 minutes to review/give feedback on your work. I chose to submit to two agents and one author.

The first agent hated me. I got the vibe. The second agent wasn’t interested in YA. Sigh. The author, Michele Scott, was very sweet and supportive. When I asked her why she thought I’d gotten 10 rejections in a row, she said, “I don’t know. You have a real talent for storytelling.”

It was great to hear, but I wasn’t sure how an author could help me get published. I went off to attend a seminar with little faith that anything would come from the conference. At least I was having fun.

Halfway through the seminar, someone interrupted the lecture.

“We’re looking for Jessica Therrien. Is she here? Publishers from ZOVA Books would like to speak with her.”

My brain: WHAAAAT?!   My mouth: “I’m Jessica.” Eyes wide, I followed the man to meet the people would soon become my dream team.

Turns out author Michele Scott had passed the word onto her publisher about my submission. Crazy, right? I’ll be ever grateful to you, Michele!

ZOVA requested my full manuscript after meeting with me. A few looooong weeks of waiting passed, and ZOVA proposed a contract.

I toiled over the fact that I didn’t have an agent, but in the end I signed on my own, agentless. It was a risky call, but I’m glad it turned out the way it did. I’ve grown very close to the people at ZOVA and consider them good friends.

Becky Taylor’s Not So Secret Feelings About Bad Cover Design

Admission: When it comes to covers, I’m completely superficial—looks matter. This is because I know that while we are often and repeatedly reminded to not, ‘judge a book by its cover’ the world absolutely does just that.

Now I know, I know—you found that gem in that used bookstore fifteen years ago. It has the most ridiculously bad cover you’ve ever seen, but the WORDS, it’s the words in that book that matter because those words changed your life!

Yeah, I bought that book too.

Once.

I still think it’s a great book and I’m happy I gave it a chance despite its horrifically bad cover design—most people didn’t.

The point is, unless you already have brand name recognition with legions of fans waiting, desperately, for you to drop that next book—many people are not going to give your book a chance if the exterior bad.

This is because people, being human and needing this skill to survive for hundreds of thousands of years, are wired to make associations.

Large animal=run

Small animal=try to catch and eat

Berry that killed Fred last week=don’t touch, probably kill me this week

Bad cover=Bad book.

Even though we, very intellectualized modern humans know these associations are not always true—we still make them every day, consciously and unconsciously.

So all of this just to say, “I know that, when it comes to publishing, how your book looks on the outside (and the inside too, but interior layout is a whole other post) really does matter.”

I was super grateful that with ASCENDANT I got to have an opinion. Quite frankly, as a writer it would pretty torturous to have to stand next to all that hard work and love, trying to pimp it and sell it to a busy, busy world, if it had ended up dressed in a cheap crappy outfit.

See, totally superficial.

Anyway, that was one of the nice things about working with a small press, they asked me up front what did I like, what did I want, what did I hate—while never making any specific promises about what the end result may or may not end up like.

I sent them a whole list of things along with examples of a couple of book covers I really loved and admired.

All of this was absolutely wonderful—believe me, author’s don’t always get that much input up front. But the single thing that I think made the biggest impact on the final design of my cover was the stock photo I sent to the publisher along with the note that said: I’d really, really like a picture of someone's eyes peeking over a book.

And this is how they ran with it:

Honestly, I couldn’t be happier. 

For more information about Rebecca Taylor and her books, visit her website HERE!

One Dark Secret About Wendy S. Russo

I didn’t publish my first book, but not for lack of trying. I boxed a trilogy, bound, with cute little labels on each of six parts, and mailed it to Bantam Spectra in 1999. I felt I owed it to my then-boyfriend to submit it after the two years I spent working on something that had ZERO chances of being picked up. It was, after all, Star Wars fan fiction.

Imagine my surprise when, ten months later, the mailman left the box at my doorstep with a  letter from Bantam Spectra praising my nerve and politely declining my submission. It impressed me so much that I sent them a thank you card because all that time, I honestly thought it was buried somewhere in a Staten Island landfill. Had I sent that box today, I am positive that it would be dropped in the trash unopened.

I didn’t publish my second book, a two volume epic fantasy, either. Or my third, a short contemporary novel. And I struggled for ten years on an epic fantasy that I worked into the fiction equivalent of meringue whipped way too long.

January Black is the first of my stories that I felt strongly enough about to research publication. It went through eight rounds of editing, endured dozens of rejections (mostly by non-response), and nearly missed an opportunity due to an interested acquiring editor having a serious family crisis. (A year later, she lost her sixteen-year-old son to cancer.) It was finally released by Crescent Moon Press on January 15, 2013, and since then, it has been enjoyed by people all over the world. It’s received high praise from Conservative Teachers of America, and won a silver medal at the 2013 Readers’ Favorite Awards.

Darkly Delicious YA asked me to talk about one dark secret. Today, I will admit to being very insecure. When I got that box back from Bantam Spectra, I shoved it in a corner of my closet because couldn’t bear to throw it away. It had somehow managed to avoid being tossed in the trash by people who had no reason to care, so how I could I, it's creator, be so flippant? At the same time, just looking at the box reminded me of what the letter from them said. I shoved it in the back of the closet so I wouldn’t be mortified by own audacity every time I saw it.

I am an author, and I am also a creature of doubt. I feel like I should be confident in my storytelling abilities, but I’m not. I feel like I should have being a published author figured out, but I don’t. I feel like I should have my first series in the bag and working on a second. So why am I struggling to progress on either series I’ve started since completing January Black in 2010?

Honestly, that book--despite the errors that readers have told me are on every page—is a tough act to follow. Readers have praised it highly. Conservative Teachers of America is hoping that I will continue writing novels that present traditional values in a way kids will absorb without realizing. And did I mention it won an award?! How in the f*@&  do I follow that but with a bigger award?

It’s a reality, for any author, that there will be a book that does not meet the readers’ expectations, one that just won’t be a good as the last one. It has to happen sooner or later. But, you know what thought creeps up on me while trying to beat Level 154 of Candy Crush? What if I never write anything that compares to my first novel? What if the readers who have enjoyed it are disappointed by everything else I put out? Can I change my genre? Can I start writing LGBT erotica or even open-door sex scenes without readers thinking I’ve sold out or lost my way. In twenty years, when I look at my backlist, will I think to myself, “Well that was a slow roll down hill?”

Of course, if I don’t publish another book, I won’t have a backlist for readers to have an opinion on one way or another. Instead, I’ll be a one-hit-wonder, without a hit, and I’m insecure about that as well.

To get the latest update on my books, follow me on Twitter or Facebook.

Darkly Delicious Male POV in YA Lit by Monica Ropal

I’ve read some amazing male POV YA in the last couple of years, and while I’m usually prepared for the honesty of the sexuality of the teenage male mind, I am surprised again and again by the absolute complexity of the emotions of these books.

I love drama in YA--voice and narrative that has me swept up with pangs of love and loss and hope and all the rest. But I often am surprised that the ones that cut me the deepest are the ones told by male characters (not necessarily male authors). I think that’s because of the honesty of these narratives--the absence of fear of being complicated and messy and raw in their exploration of issues.

When I sat down to right this post I made a list of male POV books that have lately made an impression on me:

Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going, Saint Iggy by K.L. Going, Winger by Andrew Smith, and The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp.

What I found myself thinking about was how the POV characters of each of the titles and how each one have a varying sense of bravado in how they externally encounter the world, they all have, internally, a vulnerability that makes us love them through all of the layered imperfections.

With female POV, on the other hand, I find sometimes (even in my own writing) a sense that the female must be an everyday Katniss Everdeen and display attributes that we want young girls to be proud of: Brains and guts and independence, etc. We would never want our female lead to play the victim. But the authors writing these fellows, seem more concerned with making the lead be human. Allowing them the room to have seeming inconsistencies—to be both scared and brave, insightful and oblivious, damaged and hopeful.

I may not be writing a male POV character this next time around, but I want my main character, no matter who they are, to embody all of the complexities of the male POV characters that inspire me. I want to brave and raw and complicated. I want her to be honestly . . . human.

      

    

What are some YA male POV’s that have inspired you?

The Darker Side of Lily in Speak of the Devil and Beyond by Shawna Romkey

Lily is the main character in my debut novel Speak of the Devil. It is a YA paranormal novel that deals with a lot of deep issues like grief, loss, and faith. In the beginning, Lily starts out as a typical high school girl, worrying about her outfit on her way to a party, hoping to finally get in good with some of the popular people and not be such a misfit. Along with her two friends, she heads out to the party, but Lily’s simple desires soon disappear as larger issues such as dealing with the deaths of herself and her two friends in a car accident come to the forefront.

After she miraculously returns from the dead, she chooses to run away to her dad’s where she can disappear in a large school and not deal with anyone socially at all, ever again. I’m not giving too much away as most of that happens in the first two chapters of Speak of the Devil.

So what starts off as a light, happy, hopeful character, soon turns into a grieving, despairing, dark character. She goes through all of the stages of grief, denying their deaths, becoming angry, begging God to bring them back, and eventually blaming and hating him for taking her friends away.

 

She grieves and mourns and isolates herself from her family, and is overcome with guilt that she came back from the dead while her friends didn’t. She feels guilt anytime she starts to get over the loss, anytime she starts to feel a glimmer of happiness, so laughter and lightness don’t last long. And at one point, she even starts  to carry a razor blade around with her, contemplating suicide.

It doesn’t sound like a feel good kind of novel at all, but it does have its moments. Lily is quirky and funny sometimes, but just has to figure out how to navigate through the sadness she suffers. How does death resolve itself? It’s really something she has to figure out for herself. There’s nothing anyone can say or do to make it better. She has to find her own path.

The book also has humor and romance, new friendship and love, and in the end the message is uplifting and Lily finds her strength.  But she definitely has to go through some dark times and deal with some dark thoughts before she makes it through.

Unfortunately for her, I have two more books to have her suffer through. The second book in the series, The Devil Made Me Do It will release in September. >:)

Phoenix Rising: Heather Reid's Journey To Publication

‘We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.’

Woodrow Wilson

At the age of ten I started my first novel. (No, you can’t read it. It’s buried in a deep dark hole somewhere in the Tasmanian Outback and guarded by a three-headed dingo.) I told my parents I wanted to be published by the age of sixteen. I also told them I wanted to be Wonder Woman,
Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, a Broadway star, and an archaeologist. Those dreams faded. I never did get that invisible jet, but the dream of being a writer stayed with me. 


After college I decided to stop dreaming and start doing. I joined the Society of Children’s book Writers and Illustrators, joined a writer’s group, read books on writing, went to conferences, workshops, and most importantly, I started writing every day. 

After cutting my teeth writing short stories, poems, magazine articles, and even a play or two that never saw the light of day, an idea that would later become Pretty Dark Nothing started to germinate. Writing a full length novel scared the crap out of me. I had never ventured to write anything that long before, but they story, the characters nagged at me, urged me to write. When I started writing it, something clicked; I knew I had found my voice. The words poured from me and it was euphoric.  I was in love.  I worked and polished and sent it out into the world. I had a lot of positive feedback and a close call with one of the big six, but rejection and disappointment were the only outcome. At the time, we’re talking late 90’s, horror was a dead genre and YA didn’t have a big market share either, so YA horror was a tough sell.

I felt discouraged. I wanted to cry and scream in frustration, and in all honesty, I gave up. I quit. I put Pretty Dark Nothing in a drawer and turned my back on it. I tried to write other novels but Pretty Dark Nothing was a fire that refused to die. Finally I relented and took another look at the manuscript.

‘Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.’ ~Confucious

It had potential, but needed to be torn apart. I rewrote and rewrote and worked it till it shined. And then I sent it out into the world again. I sent it out with the expectation that rejections would come, just as they had before. And then something amazing happened. On March 22^nd, 2012, I opened my e-mail to the offer of a two book deal from Month9Books

Like the Woodrow Wilson quote, I nourished and protected my dream, nursed it through bad days and after 26 years, I became a published author. That’s a long time to carry a dream with you.

It’s been two years since signing my publishing deal with Month9Books and almost a year since the release of my debut, Pretty Dark Nothing. Time has flown by in a streak of edits, cover reveals, book tours and school visits. Every day thank my ten year old self for setting that goal all those years ago. Achieving what you want doesn’t always happen overnight. It takes work, vision, passion, determination, persistence, and most of all it takes patients.  

So in the words of Henry David Thoreau – ‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’

To learn more about Heather Reid and her books, head over to her website:  http://www.heatherlreid.com/

Secrets Of Creating Eye-Catching Cover Art By L.V. Pires

From Just Starting Out to Working with an Editor: 

Secrets Of Creating Eye-Catching Cover Art

By L.V. Pires

Creating the perfect cover can be a tricky endeavor and one that is often times best left to the savvy marketing skills of your editor and their publishing team.

Overall, covers should be eye-popping, intriguing, and make the potential reader more interested in choosing your novel over someone else’s.

But, what about writers who are without the team of illustrators and designers?  How can the self-published author make a cover that is appealing?

Some self-published authors seek out a designer but that can be costly.  Often times it’s worth it, though.

My first novel, Polly of Pitcairn Island, didn’t make it onto a publisher’s desk, unfortunately.  But, I loved the story and didn’t want to stuff it under my bed with all the other writing I had been stuffing under my bed since I was six-years-old.  This one was going to come out and shine.

After going through the process of formatting and editing, I chose a cover from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  The story is set in the South Pacific, so I wanted to find a painting that represented both the setting and flavor on the book.  Lo’ and behold, I found a Don Clever vintage Hawaiian travel brochure, “Hawaiian Girl and Feather War God Tiki” - American President Lines through GettyImages.com.  Known for his mural painting and design, Clever’s image reflected the feeling of the novel, plus the bright colors naturally attracted me and I knew it would have a positive effect potential buyers.

  

Purchasing the image wasn’t expensive and although it has probably been seen before, it was the final touch to my novel that made it feel like I had seen it all the way through from start to finish.

Around the same time, one of my short stories, “The Summer of Winged Creatures” placed as a finalist in a competition through Saturday’s Child Magazine.  Their cover art was a combination of historical photograph and background design.  An image of Alice Liddell made famous by Lewis Carroll and his stories of Alice and Wonderland brought the cover to life.  Again, a striking, but familiar image, along with a butterfly representing innocence, is set against the harsh brick wall. 

When my novella, “The Portrait,” was picked up for publication by Gypsy Shadow Publishing they gave me the option to choose my cover from a handful of preselected images.  One of the benefits of working with a small press publisher is your ability to have more of say in cover art. I chose a striking photo of a woman with fiery red hair and piercing green eyes to represent the mysticism and supernatural stalking that occurs in the story. 

I know I won’t always get such freedom of choice, but it was nice to feel like I was a included in the decision-making.  So far, I can say, I’ve enjoyed learning about the process of finding my own cover art, but I also enjoy watching others take hold of my story and translate it through image to the public.  There are some truly spectacular covers out there and I hope to work with some of those artists and illustrators in the future.

My next book cover for Oliver Conroy and His Repossessed Soul will be through Crescent Moon Press and I can hardly wait to see what they come up with. 

Stay tuned…..

 

Find out more about L.V. Pires at lisavpires.com