Bad Reviews—Six Reasons to Be Glad You Have Them

"What? Glad?" sez you. "There is nothing that makes a writer sadder than a bad review!"

That's true. They can feel like a sudden, nasty downpour on the biggest parade of your life.

Whether you self-pubbed or worked with a traditional publisher, the publication of your first book is a moment of personal triumph. You want to shout it from the rooftops: “HEY WORLD, LOOK WHAT I DID! I AM AN EFFING AUTHOR, PEOPLE!!”

And your book starts to climb up the charts. Wow. People are buying it. People you aren’t even related to!

Reviews start coming in. People like you. They really like you!!

But then…somebody doesn’t.

There it is, your first bad review, sitting there on Amazon or B&N or Goodreads, with its puny single star.

You feel like your head is going to explode. You’re not sure what will come out when it does--curses or tears--but it will probably be both. You want to fire off a response, saying what a moron the reviewer is because—well, first off—it’s not a zombie book. That’s why there are no effing zombies, OK??!! Don’t give me two stars because there are no zombies in my heartfelt story of a woman’s journey healing from her addiction to Hugh Grant movies, OK? And you say it’s too short? Almost like a novella? That’s because it IS a novella, you cretinous worm from Hell. It says so RIGHT THERE in the product information.

But of course you don’t write that down. That would be professional suicide. You know that.

You step away from the keyboard. You call your BFF/Sig. Other. You reach in the cupboard for your chocolate stash and eat a whole Lindor truffle bar while your BFF/Sig. Other is reciting platitudes about how you can’t please all the people all of the time and this too shall pass. 

You hang up and get in the car. It’s Haagen Dazs time. And yes, you go to the store and rent “Notting Hill” one more time.

OK, it’s good to mourn. You need to get that stuff out of your system. If you live near a place where it’s safe to throw things, go do that. I find throwing rocks at the ocean surprisingly satisfying.

But you do have to face that computer sometime, and when you do, it’s still there, those three nasty sentences that stink up your whole Amazon page like somebody’s poodle took a dump on your life-is-a-banquet buffet table.

Your career is over. It’s ruined. Nobody will ever buy your book again!!

Not true.

Quite the contrary, in fact. Bad reviews can actually be good for sales.

How?

1) They show you’ve joined the big leagues. 

All popular writers get bad reviews. Just go to any bestseller’s buy page.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone “nothing more than a shallow tale about a misfit who makes good.”

The Hunger Games  “semi-familiar plot, predictable ending, eh not worth my time.”

The DaVinci Code “Highs: the French sentences are correctly spelled. Lows: everything else.”

Freedom “I started to dog-ear pages on which cringeworthy prose appeared, and I did damage to 90 percent of the book.” 

Or even better, the classics.

Gone with the Wind “I use to feel bad about Sherman burning Atlanta, but that was before I read this book." 

Pride and Prejudice “This is without question the worst book I've ever read in my entire life. The style is clumsy though the author strives to impress with an aristocratic pompousness so typical of social climbers of her day.”

The Great Gatsby “this book is twilight without the vampires, which by the way is an equally horrendous affront to intelligent readers…I don't need a book about stupid rich people.”

Great Expectations “a shapeless mess of a story…presented in the most abrasive fashion possible.”

(I especially love the irony of that uber-clumsy sentence about Jane Austen, don’t you? I think there is a good deal of what shrinks call "projection" in negative reviews. Some wannabe writers seem to see their own faults in everybody else's prose.)

2) They prove your reviews are genuine. 

It’s no secret that some authors game the system by trading reviews or even buying them from unscrupulous review mills. Or they pressure everybody in their church Ladies’ Auxiliary to write versions of the same exclamation-laden rave.

BTW, I hear Amazon elves are making a sweep and removing lots of suspect reviews. Unfortunately, some legitimate reviews have been removed too. Be careful you follow Amazon’s guidelines to the letter. NOTE: don’t repeat a phrase from another review or the product description or you can get flagged as a phony reviewer even when you’re not.

The truth is most successful books do not have a full five-star rating. When readers see a page with nothing but five stars these days, they tend to feel skeptical.

3) They demonstrate what your book ISN’T. 

Knowing what your book is NOT can be as useful to a reader as showing what it is.  Sometimes a negative review comes from a person who got the wrong idea of your genre or subgenre. So the review will steer readers from buying the wrong book and generating more irate reviews. (One bad review hurts our feelings, but a whole bunch can seriously hurt sales.)

I had one reviewer call my rom-com thriller Food of Love “rubbish”, because, she said, “I read lots of lesbian romance and this was the worst I ever read.”

Well…yeah it probably was. That’s because it’s not a romance. And it’s not about lesbians.

All my work has strong, sympathetic GLBT characters, but anybody looking for hot girl-on-girl action is going to be seriously disappointed. So thank you, “rubbish” reviewer, for setting people straight (no pun intended.) Whoever told her FoL was a lesbian romance was misinformed—so I’m happy she’s cleared that up.

Another author I know got a one-star for her historical mystery because somebody ordered it thinking it was how-two book about medieval embroidery. OK, the one-star is a pain, but better than a whole bunch of one-stars from dozens of irate embroiderers.

4) They help you target your demographic. 

A review that tells readers what group doesn’t like your book can actually encourage the right readers to buy.

I read a complaint from an author who said she got two stars from a reviewer “because the characters engage in pre-marital sex”. 

Oooooh. There’s sex in it?  So you’ve been identified as a writer who does not write for evangelical Christians who wear promise rings.

That shows you DO write for readers who like a little steam in their lattes. In a world where 50 Shades of Gray is the number one bestseller, that hurts you how?

I had a similar experience with a reviewer who said my mystery Ghostwriters in the Sky was “too complicated.” He said he “couldn’t tell who the bad guys were until the last page.”

Thank you! That tells readers who like a complex, unpredictable mystery they’re in the right place.

5) They rally the troops.

If an author is unfairly reviewed or attacked by trolls, the fans will be outraged, too. It might even get them to write that review they’ve been meaning to write forever. (If you need more encouragement to review your favorite authors, read my post on Amazon reviews here.)

I haven’t had a lot of time to read (or write reviews) during this marathon year, but one book I loved was Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. When I put it on my Goodreads page, I noticed a lot of clueless one-star reviews, obviously from people who didn’t realize it was about a minimally-produced record album like the Beatles’ famous “Let it Be…Naked”—and NOT about a lady with no clothes on. I made the time to write a review I probably would never have written otherwise. I hope I steered some of the right readers to the book.

Or there was the time I went to check out a new book mentioned in a Tweet and saw it had ten reviews already: all one-star—all attacking the author personally, saying nothing about the book.

It was an obvious example of cyberbullying. (For more on dealing with bullying in the trollosphere, Kristin Lamb has a fantastic post this week.)

Do you think I bought the book and, after enjoying it, gave it a good review? You betcha! (I also hit the "report abuse" button.) Plus I tweeted it to my followers and wrote an encouraging message to the author. Most humans are moved when we see a fellow human being persecuted.

6) They tell you what readers want 

Elizabeth S. Craig has blogged about how she learns from her negative reviews, and she displays a healthy, professional attitude we all should learn to emulate. You can learn a lot from your readers, who will let you know if they were angry when you killed off Aunt Millie, or didn’t like it when your romantic interest turned into Snidely Whiplash in your last book.

And believe me, if you have any typos, or your work needs editing, they’ll let you know about that, too.

On the other hand—make sure you’re reacting to a majority opinion and not just a handful of people in a bad mood. You don’t want reviewers to change your voice or artistic vision any more than you want your critique group to do that. 

In spite of all this, I do realize some reviews can be spiteful and useless.

Some of those may have been purchased. There are services that offer to leave bad reviews to bump authors ahead of you off the Amazon bestseller lists. (I’ve personally seen review mill sites, but they move around, so I don’t have a link right now.) On the plus side, their mostly illiterate “reviews” get taken down quickly. Amazon is on to them and will remove the review if you report abuse.  

Then there is the segment of the population who invent reasons to criticize and find fault with everything because they get off on it—especially if they can work themselves up into a self-righteous rage to justify their cruelty. Rage can produce a high very like cocaine. (See my post on Trolls, Sockpuppets and Cyberbullies.)

Unfortunately the anonymity of the Internet is where they thrive.

I’ve observed that freebie books tend to get the most troll attacks. That’s partly because people devalue things they don’t pay for, partly because they’ll download free books in genres they don’t usually read, and also because a lot of people simply hate self-publishing (change is scary).

Some people assume all freebie books are self-published—they’re not, but nobody is accusing these people of being rocket scientists.

You can usually tell a troll attack from an honest review. Trolls make it pretty obvious they haven’t read the book and use generic phrases—usually including “riddled with typos” and “obviously in need of an editor” even when they’re reviewing Jane Austen. They often dump lots of identical one- and two-stars all over Amazon. 

This is why Amazon has that “report abuse” button. (But never use it for an honest negative review.)

Sometimes a reader can leave a negative review because of something that has nothing to do with the quality of your book. Maybe your protagonist has the same name as the guy who just dumped her, or her own novel just got rejected by an agent who sat on the full for 18 months, or his mom just told him he he’s got to move out of the basement, and at 42, he really ought to find full time employment since he’s been working on that novel for 13 years now...

They aren't "abuse" in the Amazon sense, but do remember those rants aren’t reviews of your book. They’re verbal temper tantrums--the result of somebody having a bad day—or a bad life. You just happened to be in the line of fire. Smart readers can usually tell when the review is about the reviewer's issues, not the book. 

And chocolate helps. Or throwing rocks at the ocean.  Or maybe even watching a Hugh Grant movie.

What about you, scriveners? Have you seen clueless reviews of your favorite authors? Have you started to get bad reviews yet? Do you have any advice on how to cope with them? 

***

I have a bit of sad news this week. My US publisher, Popcorn Press, has closed its doors. But they have been incredibly gracious about handing all the files to me so I can re-publish with MWiDP. Thanks, Les—you’re a meticulous editor and fantastic book designer. And Kate—your covers are fabulous! Popcorn started as a poetry press and may be reborn as a poetry-only publisher some time in the future.

FOOD OF LOVE is now live under the MWiDP imprint on Amazon US and Amazon UK as well as Barnes and Noble. THE BEST REVENGE should be up there by tomorrow. The one downside is that I’ve lost my Amazon rankings, so FOOD OF LOVE, which had been on the bestseller list for romcoms in the UK since December has lost its status. A few “likes” and tags would be helpful, if you have the time. 

And YES, MWiDP will be re-publishing the Popcorn books in paper, AND, my other three mysteries should all be available in paper in the next few months. Yay treeware!

***

And don't forget the Digital Age Authors Intensive on July 14th!

You can learn all about how to be a writer in the digital age from iconic author Catherine Ryan Hyde and author, screenwriter, and radio personality Dave Congalton, as well as tech wizards, marketing specialists...and me. So if you're going to be on the Central Coast of California next weekend, don't miss this. There are still a few places available. Go here to register. 

Thanks to all of you who bought HOW TO BE A WRITER IN THE E-AGE last week and pushed us up the writing guide bestseller list into the top 20--ahead of the new Kindle edition of Strunk and White! 


Also: my Camilla Randall mystery SHERWOOD, LTD. is featured on Kindle Romance Novels this week and I'll be at RomanceUniversity.org on Friday the 13th!

Read More

I did it: I’ve Published Five Novels in Three Months! Here is #5

THE BEST REVENGE (from Popcorn Press) 

It’s another rom-com mystery, this time set in the 1980s—a prequel to GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY and SHERWOOD, LTD (an ebook now, with the paper version to follow in about a month.)

Buy The Best Revenge for Kindle at Amazon.com

Long before the events of GHOSTWRITERS and SHERWOOD, in 1980s New York, a time of big hair, coke-fueled society parties, and the rise of the greed-is-good 1%, teen heiress Camilla Randall befriends Plantagenet Smith, a penniless young gay playwright. But they quarrel and he disappears in the direction of California.

Soon after, Camilla is assaulted by her mother’s fiancé, smeared in the newspapers by a sexy muckraking journalist, and her family loses all their money in the Savings and Loan scandal. With nothing left but her DeLorean and a suitcase full of designer clothes, Camilla sets off in search of Plantagenet, her only real friend.

But when she arrives in the Golden State, she discovers Plant has developed strange heterosexual tendencies and an inconvenient girlfriend. Camilla is forced to move in with some wild-partying college friends, and when a famously debauched TV star comes on to her and then ends up dead, Camilla is arrested for his murder.

In order to clear her name and find the real killer, she turns to a friendly sanitation worker, a dotty octogenarian neighbor and the hot muckraking newspaperman who ridiculed her—who also happens to be her boss. 

And don't you just love this cover by Katheryn Smith? It's got that 1980s nostalgia feel, but matches the look of the other two Camilla books. Thanks bunches, Kate!

Read More

Bad Critique Groups—8 Things That Can Push a Group Over to the Dark Side. Plus a Halloween Contest!

Good critique groups are the easiest (and cheapest) way for new writers to learn the nuts and bolts of the craft and keep those cringe-making first drafts from gumming up agents’ and publishers’ desks (or becoming part of Konrath’s tsunami of crap.)

UPDATE: If you're looking for a good online critique group or beta reader, Lynnette Labelle has formed a critique matchmaking service on her blog. She's got a great questionnaire that I think will weed out any of the following problems. Here's the link to Lynnette's Blog.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Group feedback can help skilled writers as well. A lot of us like to process our work through a group before we send it out into the unforgiving marketplace. (Nobody’s snarkier than the one-star Amazon reviewer.) I’ve read that even Amy Tan still runs her work by her critique group for feedback and suggestions.

I personally belong to a fantastic group that has become like family to me. I trust them with everything from nurturing my sucky first drafts to polishing final copy. We’re all veteran critiquers with long history together. Critiquing is a craft, just like any other aspect of writing, and abilities grow with practice. After fifteen years together, these folks are pros.

But I lucked out. Not all groups are useful. Group-think can be dangerous. One or two empathy-challenged control freaks can goad a group of mild-mannered scribblers into a verbal Lord of the Flies attack-fest that will stifle the most faithful muse and damage a fragile creative spirit.

And you can’t be sure the advice is worth heeding. As journalist Jim Bishop said, “A good writer is not, per se, a good critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.”

Here are eight things that can make a critique group go sour:

1)     No rules. Without following standard protocol—like no cross-talk and no arguing—meetings can turn into free-for-all shout-fests.

2)     No moderator. Somebody needs to be in control and make sure rules are being followed and emotional arguments don’t derail the procedings.

3)     Misinformation. People who are full of false or outdated ideas of what constitutes good writing can ruin yours. For my tips on bad advice to ignore, click here. 

4)     The Grammar Taliban. You’re not going to be helped much by critiquers who harp about sentence fragments and how you should never use a preposition to end a sentence with. If you listen to them, your work will end up sounding like a high school term paper.

5)     Power Trippers. I’ve been to critique groups where one member went into a rage when it became obvious the writer being critiqued wasn’t going to make the changes the power tripper thought were required. These people need therapy, not a writing group.

6)     Praiseaholics. To them, any string of words typed onto a piece of paper is genius. Nothing is ever wrong and nothing can be improved. They might even get angry when you come in with a second draft, because the rough draft was “perfect.”

7)     Co-Authors. There’s often somebody sooooo helpful that she tries to re-write your story entirely—to sound exactly like one of hers.

8)     Dogmatic PC/Religious Policepersons. Critiquers who think you should only write stuff about people exactly like you, or them—or stuff that supports one political or religious world view—create tension that’s hard to overcome. Small minds create small books.

I’ve seen a number of wonderful writers pummelled by misguided critique groups. I first met author Catherine Ryan Hyde in her pre-Pay it Forward days when she read at a local critique group. Her story was brilliant. Scenes from it are still vivid in my mind. But the critiquers hated it—mostly because they didn’t think a woman who has never been in combat should be “allowed” to write about a male character fighting a war.

I was only a guest, so I wasn’t allowed to speak, but on the way out, I stopped her and said I thought they were full of crap. She shrugged and said she’d learned to cherry-pick the good stuff and ignore the rest.

But later that year I attended a prestigious writers’ conference where I saw an equally talented, but not as confident young man bullied by a bunch of know-it-all Bozos in a workshop. What was worse, they were egged on by the workshop leader—who seemed more interested in wielding power than in improving anybody’s prose.

I tried to speak to the abused writer afterward—to say how much I disagreed with what had been said—but he dismissed me with a few angry words and took off running. I realized he was close to tears.

That night I tried to write about that awful scene. In my story, the critiqued writer was so damaged by the bullying critiquers, he killed himself. Of course the story was way too melodramatic, so I later changed it to simply the appearance of suicide. Then I added a few more murders (I had to kill off that workshop leader!) plus some romantic sizzle, a couple of ghosts, a cross-dressing dominatrix, and a lot of laughs.

The result was a comic mystery called Ghostwriters in the Sky, set at a Z-list writers’ conference in the wine-and-cattle country north of Santa Barbara, CA. It was originally going to be published by my UK publisher as a sequel to The Best Revenge. I thought it had a great shot at finding an audience, because at the time I was a columnist for a popular writers' magazine, and this was a story I thought most writers would relate to.

But my publisher went belly-up and I slowly discovered that nobody in New York would go near a story about the publishing industry. 

“We live with this stuff every day,” wrote one agent. “We don’t find it entertaining in a novel.”

After a few hundred rejections, I put the book in the file of “not a snowball’s chance in Hades” and wrote a couple more books. But I was sad to lose the story. It’s got the most fun humor and most intricate plotting of any of my work. And Marva, the dominatrix, is one of my all-time favorite characters.

So I sure was pleased when Mark Williams asked to read Ghostwriters last August. He liked it and had some great suggestions of ways to make the convoluted plot less confusing. His suggestions were great, so I jumped into some major revisions.  

And now, ta-da: here it is. The world debut of the ebook of  GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY It's available at the US Amazon.com for $2.99 and the UK Amazon.co.uk for what I assume is the equivalent, which they won't let us Yanks see.

And as a Halloween gift: I’d like to give away a couple of e-books to any of you with e-readers or a reading app on your phone, PC or whatever. (And I can get a Nook version direct from the publisher, since Smashwords can be so slooooow.)

Just leave your name in the comments between now and 9:00 PM on Halloween, Pacific Time. I’ll give everybody a number and use a random number generator to choose two winners, which I will announce on November 1, along with some other exciting news.

I’d also love for you to share any experiences you’ve had with nasty critiquers. Have you ever felt bullied by a critique group? Or has somebody said something so nasty about your writing that you considered giving up? (It’s OK to comment even if you don’t want an e-book. I don’t have a Kindle yet, either.)

You can also read an interview with me today on Morgen Bailey's wonderful blog. Plus I’ve finally set up a Facebook authorpage. If you go over, you can see the covers of some upcoming books (and if you wanted to “like” the page, that would be awesome.)

And for you readers who, like me, haven’t yet been Kindlized: FOOD OF LOVE is now available in paper! You can buy it for $9.95 from Popcorn Press or Amazon.com (eligible for super saver shipping.) 

Coming up in the blog: Next week, on November 6, book reviewer DANIELLE SMITH of Chick Lit Reviews and News  is going to tell us how to query a book blogger, what her pet peeves are, and how to find reviewers in your genre.

Then on November 13, legendary mystery author and writing guru LAWRENCE BLOCK will be guest posting about his personal adventures with self-publishing. Usually you’d have to go to a writers’ conference or an MFA program to hear from a superstar like Mr. Block, so I’m totally jazzed he’s going to be visiting.

And in December, we’ll have a visit from one of my all-time favorite bloggers, Romance author RONI LOREN, who has an erotic romance coming out in January from Berkeley Heat. She’s going to counteract some of that doom and gloom and tell us some of the good aspects of being  published by a Big Six publisher.

Read More

FOOD OF LOVE is available on Amazon!

Even though the paper version won't be available until next month, the ebook of my comic thriller, FOOD OF LOVE is available on Amazon! And it's also available at Amazon in the UK.

NEWSFLASH: The paper version of FOOD OF LOVE is available in the US and the UK !

This is the book they said couldn't be published. It breaks pretty much all the rules ever invented by corporate publishing.  I wrote what I wanted to read–but couldn’t find on the shelves: a can’t-put-it-down, laugh-out-loud mystery/thriller about women. I loved Carl Hiassen and Chris Moore and wanted to write that kind of socially conscious, but funny novel, dealing with women’s issues.

I didn't know you're not allowed to be funny about women's issues.

Newbie that I was, I wrote FOOD OF LOVE anyway. It’s about the one thing that unites women of all races and backgrounds: the urge to diminish ourselves by dieting. (And the subsequent craving for chocolate.) I added a hot KGB agent, a sexy two-hundred pound rapper girl, a couple of Elvis impersonators and a small nuclear bomb. All my beta readers loved it.

One reader said: "Imagine Tom Robbins, Fannie Flagg, and Armistead Maupin collaborating on a novel. They start by squeezing into a bathroom stall at a posh drug rehab center. Throw in a conservative talk show hostess, a model-turned princess, a reformed porn star, and of course, Elvis, and you've got a pile of laughs and a fantastic read.”

But it got rejection after rejection. Some agents were kind enough to send personal notes to say they loved it but there was no way it could ever be published. Then two agents actually took it on. But one subsequently quit agenting, then another shopped it around for a year and had to give up. Finally I found a small publisher in England willing to take a chance. (It was the height of the chick lit craze and they thought the idea of chick lit that appealed to men as well as women was great.) But the company soon went out of business and the title has been languishing in out-of-print limbo for 6 years. 

But today, it’s been re-released by a fantastic, super-supportive micropublisher called Popcorn Press. (My editor said he laughed and cried all the way through the edits and again during the coding.) And he just emailed me that the book is live on Amazon.com.   

If you want a funny read for a relaxing Indian summer weekend, I hope you'll check it out.

Read More

13 Ways Not to Start a Novel

First, some news: exciting things have been happening this week for both Ruth and me.

Ruth's latest novel, HOOKED, which she's written with her husband Michael Harris, is launching today!. HOOKED is a Medical/Political thriller that Publishers Weekly calls “slick and sexy." PW says it has “all the sure elements of a big seller written by pros who know how to tell a story.”  You can buy it right here. And for a limited time, the ebook is only $.99. Ruth is a million-selling author who knows how to hook the reader and never let go. This is going to be a blockbuster! And today, she's guest blogging on the subject of genre hopping at Mark Williams International . 

As for me—I’ve had a nice bit of news from my publisher, Popcorn Press. FOOD OF LOVE will launch in early October. Plus they’ve accepted THE BEST REVENGE! That means both my romantic comedy/mysteries—formerly available only in the UK—will now be available in the US. You’ll be able to buy the paper versions on Amazon as well as $2.99 ebooks.

So—onward to our next novels. And as a reminder to myself as well as my fellow scriveners out there, here are some things to avoid when writing the opening pages of that next book.

13 WAYS NOT TO START A NOVEL

Starting the first chapter of a new novel is usually pretty easy for me. My muse has uploaded a shiny new story into my head and I’m all revved and ready to go, so I get those words down as fast as I can. (Then I usually bog down around page 100, but that’s another post…)

But all that first draft scribbling usually doesn’t have much to do with the final product. When we’re first diving into a novel, we’re not thinking about our readers; we’re telling the story to ourselves. All kinds of information will come up, but be aware you’ll want to cut most of it or move it to another part of the book when you edit.

And when it comes to that editing—the first chapter presents your biggest challenge. I’ve often spent more time on a first chapter than the entire remainder of the book.

On that first page, we have only a few lines to grab the reader and keep her from putting the book back on the shelf. We have to present an exciting hook and fascinating characters that will suck readers in immediately—but not overwhelm them with too much information.

We also want to promise something unique—not the same/old same/old they’ve got on the shelf at home.

But when we start writing fiction or memoir, some of the ideas that come most readily have unfortunately come readily to a whole lot of writers before us, so they’ve become clichés.

On top of that, the contemporary writer has an added problem. Because we’ve almost all grown up with television, we have the screenplay or teleplay format hardwired to our brains. But novelists have no cameras or music to convey emotions; no close-ups of a character’s face to show internal conflict. A lot of openings that would be brilliant in a movie are snoozerific on the page.

This stuff is on my mind because I have been working on manuscript evaluations for the Central Coast Writers Conference on September 16^th-18^th  (Yes, there’s still time to sign up! More info on tech day with Agent Laurie McLean and Smashwords founder Mark Coker here) 

As I’ve been reading first pages, I’ve been seeing openings that aren’t terrible, but aren’t grabbers, either. This is usually because they’re overdone or they’re copied from another medium where they work better.

Here are a few openings to avoid::

 

1)     Weather reports: the famous opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night” may keep contemporary audiences aware of Lord Bulwer-Lytton’s otherwise forgettable 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, but not in a good way.

Opening with meteorological events isn’t only a problem with people who’ve read too much Victorian literature. Our television-saturated brains tend to think in terms of the “establishing shot” of a screenplay. But a novel needs more than pictures to connect with the reader. It needs human emotion.  

2)     Morning wake-ups: showing your character waking up or getting ready for work/school hits the snooze button for readers. In a movie or TV show, you can show one character getting ready for work and it’s interesting. In the cable TV series, Dexter, the serial killer/protagonist's morning ablutions open every episode. But in a book, where you couldn't have the creepy-comic music and double-entendre blood orange shots, the same scene would bore us silly.

3)     Dreams: some people call this the “Dallas” opening, because of the TV soap that got written into such a corner the writers had to pretend a whole season was “just a dream.” Writers sometimes try to hook readers by opening with a scene of surreal horror—but if it all turns out to be a dream or a videogame on page three, the reader feels tricked.

4)     The death of the protagonist: This is apparently very, very big with the paranormal/horror crowd. If your MC is a zombie, vampire, or other member of the undead community, think of something else. This has been done, um, to death.

5)     Trains, planes and automobiles: if your character is en route and musing about where he’s been and where he’s going, you’re not into your story yet. Jump ahead to where the story really starts.

6)     Funerals: Slush readers say a huge number of manuscripts—especially memoirs—start with the protagonist in a state of bereavement. But most readers aren’t eager to embark on a literary journey with a miserable MC.

7)     “If I’d known then what I know now…” starting with the conditional perfect may seem clever to you, but unfortunately it does to a lot of other writers, too. This is cliché territory—don’t go there.

8)     Personal introductions: starting with “my name is…” has been way overdone, especially in YA. Again, not a bad idea, but too many people thought of it first.

9)     Minor characters speaking or thinking. The story-telling old man, the child—any detached observer telling the tale will only distance the reader. Whoever/whatever we meet first becomes foremost in our minds, and readers will want to go back to that character. Make the first person you meet an important member of the cast, not a spear-carrier.

10) Reader-Feeder dialogue, also known as “As you Know, Bob.”

“I must retrieve the elusive magical jewelry item,” says Bob. “Without it, I cannot access my rightful powers—and my evil Uncle Murray will usurp my domain.”

“But as you know, Bob,” says Sidekick. “The magical jewelry item is in the hands of the four skanky queens of the Bingo Borogroves and guarded by the Dire Dragoons of Doom. We will be risking our very lives.”

Sidekick is not saying this for Bob’s benefit. He’s saying it for ours. Conversational info-dumps are never a good idea.

11) Group activities: don’t overwhelm your reader with too many characters right off the bat. It’s like meeting a bunch of people at a cocktail party: you don’t remember anybody’s name if you hear too many at once.

12) Internal monologue: Musing is boring. Especially reader-feeder musing. “Back when I was younger, I would have slain the dragoons with my magic sword, but when my parents were killed in that chariot crash on the way to get Borogrovian take-out, and my Uncle Murray had me locked up in the Dark Tower of Doom, the skanky queens stole my magic sword and melted it down to make a necklace and a pair of matching earrings…” We don’t need to know this all on the first page. Bring in backstory later.

13) Too much action: Writing gurus keep telling us to start with action, action, action, but this isn’t actually such good advice. We need to be emotionally engaged with a character before we care how many dragoons of doom he slays.

***************

What about you, scriveners? What openings press your snooze button? What scenes do you see overused in your genre? Is there any opening that automatically makes you put the book back on the shelf?

Read More

An Awesome Announcement

This is the stuff a writer’s dreams are made of.

I got an email from an acquisitions editor last night that said:

“I started reading Food of Love tonight… And I love it…the characters are so real and the situations so fascinating...

Bravo. Wow, even. I’ll get a contract in the mail to you tomorrow.

I will definitely be proud to publish and promote it. Speaking of which, would you mind if I begin mentioning it on Twitter, on Facebook, and perhaps in my blog? Those could help to build excitement about its release.

Please let me know as soon as possible.”

And, um, I did say yes. He hopes to publish it by early fall. Then hopefully, my other backlist book, the Best Revenge—and then he’ll look at my current work.

I’m going to be back in print! I have a career again.

I’ve been knocking on agents doors for five years since my old publishing company went under, and I’ve gone through the waiting game of agents sitting on partials and fulls for years at a time, only to send a curt form letter, letting me know they’re the windshield and I’m the bug.

But Popcorn Press contacted ME. Yes. The editor liked my blog and my writing style and said he might be interested in my backlist. I didn’t respond right away. I was so sure the agent who had my full was going to take me on and want my whole list.

But…of course…in the end, my road to corporate publishing went the same old/same old route.

So I sent the two books off to Popcorn Press at the end of June.

I was going to go indie if this didn’t work, but indie scares me—I’m not good at being there in the jungle all by myself.

So this is perfect for me. No agent/boss. No marketing department undermining my editor. No waiting three years for the launch. Just an honest partnership with a real person.

I’m hoping he’ll use the cover I won in a contest last winter, designed by the brilliant Meghan Derico of Derico Photography. She read the whole book and really got the essence of my romantic comedy-thriller in this design. The white chocolate truffle and the dark chocolate truffle represent the white and African American heroines perfectly--and notice the little drop of blood on the dagger? It exactly matches the rose. And the music stand: yes,  Shakespeare did say the food of love is music, although, as my heroine says, "If Mr. Shakespeare had spent more time with women, he'd have known the food of love is not music but chocolate."

I think it’s gawjus:

Oh, and did I forget to mention, “squeeeeeeee!” ?

Read More