I’m on the road a lot this month, so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about packing all the worldly possessions I need to survive away from home. And since I neglected to schedule myself a post for this month until this very morning, packing for events is what you get to hear about today. Yay, right?

Here’s what a Jodi-author carries with her on tour:

A carry-on suitcase (the biggest the airlines will allow while still calling it a carry on), and a duffle bag. It used to be my suitcase and a purse, and then I noticed a mom with a diaper bag and a) became very jealous of her giant bag, and b) realized I could put bags inside of bags.

In the suitcase:

• A tote bag with my box of swag inside. It’s pretty heavy, so it goes on the bottom, or tucked into the bottom side along the telescoping handle tubes. I just wrap the top of the bag and the handles around everything to keep it in place. The whole bag comes with me to signings, so extra signing stuff goes in here too — my copy of Incarnate, quote cards, whatever else I need to bring.
• Compressible bags with different kinds of clothing in each. Shirts in one, pants in one, underthings in one. Though now that I’m thinking about it, maybe I should get more of these bags and separate entire outfits by days. This would be useful for trips with multiple stops. Hmmm.
• I always carry at least one extra of all the clothes I need, just in case something horrible happens. And speaking of emergencies, I always include Feminine Supplies, a small first-aid kit, and a back-up battery for my phone.
• Since I usually wear knit socks, and those are a little bulkier than store socks, I stuff those into the corners of my bag when it’s all packed. Shoe people would manage to fit shoes in here. I feel lucky when I get to an event and I am wearing sneakers.
• Two vacuum bags. They’re just the Ziplock kind that you can press the air out of (I do this by sitting on them), but they’re really handy for keeping dirty laundry separate. I’m going to admit, on longer trips, I fold my laundry before putting it in there, but that’s because it compresses better than if I just shove it all in there.
• My human form / aka makeup.
• And in one of the outside pockets — my bag of liquids. I have a reusable quart bag with a zipper that’s pretty sturdy and fits perfectly in the top compartment.

Liquids:

• I don’t have three ounces of anything in there; all my liquid containers are either in one- or two-ounce leakproof, BPA-free bottles, some with wide tops, others with narrow.
• I wear contacts (gas perms, which require more liquids than soft or toric lenses), so I have to make sure I can fit a lot in there. I have dropper bottles for my contact stuff, but since they have flip tops and I’m afraid they’ll leak, I replace the flip tops with a solid screw top and change them over when I reach my destination.
• If I’m going to be somewhere for a longer period of time that will require more, say, shampoo, then I usually will go in with my travel-mates to buy a bottle. But that only works if we’re going to stay in the same place for a while.
• I get as many things in non-liquid form as I can. So makeup remover, even though I use a liquid or semisolid at home, I bring face wipes when I travel. If I had any dry shampoo that worked well for me (the quest continues), I’d probably bring that, too.

In my duffle bag:

• Computer in its sleeve, with charging cables for it and my phone (as well as my headphones).
• My purse. Sometimes, once I get through security, I’ll move my hand sanitizer and other small purse liquids back here, that way I can access them without wrestling with the overhead bins.
• My knitting bag with a small project inside. On my last trip, I taught two people to knit socks.
• A BPA-free leak-proof plastic bottle so I can fill it up with water rather than buying a bottle of water once I get through security.
• A book or two.
• A light sweater or cardigan, and perhaps one of those neck pillows if it’s a long/overnight flight.
• Everything goes in the same place every time, that way I can find things while I’m on the plane without having to look.

Packing started out as an elaborate game of Tetris, and while I’m sure there are still a lot of improvements I could make to my routine, I have definitely gotten better at this since I first started out!

What about you guys? Any great tricks you want to share?

Hi All! Today I want to talk about the next building blocks of a novel—scenes! (This is part four of a series built around a metaphor comparing a novel to a city. So far, we’ve imagined words as bricks, sentences as walls, and paragraphs as buildings.)

In a world class city, the streets will get us from point A to point B, but they will also give us a taste of the city’s culture, connect neighborhoods, and create a natural flow. In our novels, we want scenes to get us where we’re going, but we also want them to leave us with new information, new questions, or greater understanding of our setting and characters. In other words, like a great city boulevard, we want a great scene to keep things moving in the most thrilling and memorable way.

Here are some tips that will help you to create strong scenes:

In every scene, the MC should be acting, reacting, or both—all with a purpose.

Every scene must move the main character (or the POV character if the book contains multiple POVs,) toward his or her objective. The reader should know what the character is working toward, and how the actions they take are intended to bring about those goals. You may want to create a scene that reveals the terrain of your story’s world or that lets the reader know the truth about the MC’s father. Definitely do that, but make sure the scene contributes to the MC’s objective.

As an example, consider the scene early in The Hunger Games where Katniss goes hunting before the reaping. As readers, we see the woods around the Seam, we meet Gale, and we learn a lot of backstory. But at the heart of the scene is Katniss’s action in support of her objective of providing for her family and keeping them safe.

Every scene should contain obstacles to the MC’s objective.

A scene that has no obstacles will have no conflict and won’t keep the story moving and the reader engaged. Even if the scene contributes to the MC’s objective, it won’t be engaging if it doesn’t contain a challenge. It doesn’t have to be obvious or overtly connected, but it needs to have some impact on whether or not the MC will achieve his or her goal.

Take another look at the example of the hunting scene from the opening of The Hunger Games. In that scene there is conflict between Gale and Katniss over the idea of whether they should try to run away. They don’t have a huge argument, but Katniss gets irritated and snaps at Gale. She remarks that “the conversation feels all wrong.”  Not a huge conflict, but one that connects to the central objective of keeping her family safe. If Gale encourages her to leave with him, he’s putting that objective in jeopardy. The scene reveals this larger conflict on a smaller scale.

Every scene should matter.

Every scene needs to have something valuable at stake. It could be huge, like the welfare of your MC’s family, or smaller, like her mood on the day of the reaping. But every scene needs to have something connected to the MC’s goal at risk.

The size of the stakes will depend on how strongly they impact the character’s objective. A scene with lots of conflict and high stakes—a head-on car crash that leaves a boy pinned inside a burning car, for instance—only delivers if it connects to your MC’s goal. If your MC is struggling to cope with PTSD, and she saves that boy from the burning car, her stakes are impacted along with his. The stakes might be life and death for him, but this isn’t his story, so those stakes won’t resonate as strongly. But saving him required our MC to face her condition, so she had stakes in the scene, too. It’s the stakes that connect to your character’s goals that matter the most in your scene.

Every scene must move the plot forward, but great scenes will contribute other elements to the story, as well.

A truly great scene contributes more than just goal and conflict. If you can weave in setting, character growth, backstory, etc. you will have created a truly great scene. Think of the trash compactor scene in the first Star Wars movie. There’s conflict that impacts the characters’ goals of rescuing the Princess and thwarting the Empire, but there’s also great use of setting, character development, and dialogue. All these things support the main action of the scene—escaping the trash compactor before they are all crushed to death.

Just like a great city has all sorts of streets keeping things moving and connected, your novel will have many kinds of scenes driving the story forward and keeping the reader turning pages. Next month I’ll post about chapters, the neighborhoods of your novel.

How do you feel about scenes? Did I miss anything important? Do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

This week JJ and Kelly talk about the characterization of protagonists, how to get a vivid, realistic character, and whether or not “unlikeable” means “unsympathetic.”

Show Notes/Further Reading

• Characters need a balance of flaws and strengths.
• Universal appeal is not possible—it generally means the character becomes incredibly bland.
• Specificity breeds intimacy, and specific action shows more than telling details.
• There is a difference between an “unlikeable” and an “unsympathetic” protagonist. An unlikeable protagonist can still be sympathetic, but an unsympathetic character just makes us not care.
• Writing Wednesday: Characterization by JJ
• Active Characters by Julie Eshbaugh
• Writing Three-Dimensional Characters by Susan Dennard
• Character Movement and Characterization by Kat Zhang
• Creating Characters Readers Care About by Julie Eshbaugh
• Know Your Characters by Marie Lu
• The Ultimate No-Effort Character Sheet for Writers
• The No-Effort Character Character Sheet for Lazy Writers Like You and Me

What We’re Reading/Books Discussed

• City of Bones, City of Ashes, and City of Glass by Cassandra Clare
• The Rose Society by Marie Lu¹
• Red Rising by Pierce Brown
• JJ is in a reading rut, so nothing new.

Off Menu Recommendations

• Boredom! Boredom is kind of great. Mindlessness breeds creativity in many ways.
• Carcassonne
• Betrayal at the House on the Hill
• Arkham Horror

What We’re Working On

• Kelly is working on freelance stuff
• JJ is working on Wintersong copyedits and she has a cover! The cover will be revealed on Monday, April 11, but those who are subscribed to JJ’s newsletter will get to see it first!

That’s all for this week! Next week we will be continuing our characterization series with an episode about VILLAINS. As always, if you have any questions, sound off in the comments!

Recently I announced that the publication date of Wintersong has been moved from Fall 2016 to Winter 2017, and I had a lot of questions asking why it would take so long for the book to come out when it was already finished and edited?

Ah, my friend. Sit back and listen, because we are going to be discussing this interesting phenomenon called publishing time.

In the PubCrawl Podcast, Kelly and I have discussed submissions and acquisitions, sales conference, and touched briefly on the concept of launch. Traditional publishing is generally scheduled about one year in advance, so if your book gets acquired in 2016, it may not be published until 2017 or even 2018.

Why is that? Well, most publishing houses operate on a schedule of “seasons”: periods of 3-4 months that comprise a catalog. For example, at my publisher, the seasons are as follows:

1. Winter (January through April)
2. Spring/Summer (May through August)
3. Fall (September through December)

Each season has a schedule of when things need to be submitted or finalized: launch, catalog, sales conference, etc. While acquisitions and editing may happen at any time during the year, the actual publishing part of publishing happens at set times. For example, for books to be published in Fall 2017, the schedule may look something like this:

1. November 2016: Launch (introducing your book to the sales and marketing force)
2. January 2017: Catalog (getting information about your book online for booksellers, librarians, et al to take notice)
3. March 2017: Sales Conference (when the people selling your book into their accounts start pitching to their buyers and getting a feel for how many copies of your book Barnes & Noble, Amazon, indies, etc. will be taking)

If your book is to be published September 2017, then why all that time between sales conference and publication date? This is so your marketing and publicity team have time to start building buzz about your book to the consumer: sending your book out for reviews at all the trade publications, big magazines, newspapers, etc. or buying ad space or social media or what-have-you. By the time your book comes out, hopefully enough people will have heard about your book to seek it out on release day.

So what happens if you miss any one of these deadlines? Situations vary from book to book, but the house generally has one of two options: scramble to get everything together, or push the book back a season. You can miss deadlines for all sorts of reasons: you didn’t finalize the cover on time, the edited book is coming in too late for blurbs and may miss its galley date, etc. There are reasons to scramble: if the book is timely, if it’s a well-known author with an established series and the publisher wants to get the next installment out to fans as scheduled, and so on and so forth. But in many situations, the publisher will choose to push the book back.

The advantage of pushing a book back is that you have time to set everything up properly. The sales force has an enormous list to work on every season, and a last minute addition, or a book with all the pertinent info “TK” (to come), would cause the sales and marketing team a lot of stress.

You can, of course, crash a title. This means exactly what it sounds like: crashing a book as quickly as possible through editing and production so it makes the sales dates for a particular season. This is generally done for celebrity books, political books that may need to be out in time for election season, movie tie-ins, TV show tie-ins for the next season, what-have-you. But these are generally books where the sales force as already heard of the author or property, therefore less leg work needs to be done to set it up to their accounts.

What happened to Wintersong? In my announcement, I said that my book was recategorized from adult to teen, and those markets are handled by two different sales forces at my publisher. We couldn’t simply re-designate everything; we had to re-launch.

So there you have it! Publishing time. Let me know if you guys have any further questions, and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

Hello again, lovely Pubcrawlers!

Hopefully by now you’ve spent some time considering your premise, story world, your character’s basic actions and, most importantly, their weakness and moral choice. Because now we’ll define some of the last few steps to fleshing out your character’s emotional and physical story arc. Settle in: this one is a bit longer than the last two.

Just a reminder: This series is not an Outline How-to; this is more appropriately looked at as a version of the Character Q&A. Some writers like to ask their characters twenty questions. Some like to jump right in to the story. This series is just one method of character and premise development.

So, with that in mind, let’s jump into the last section of this series!

Now, I’ve saved this chunk for last because structurally, your book should answer these “questions”, as I’ll call them, in a linear fashion.

To recap a bit, you’ve already determined your character’s weakness, what they look like as a changed person, and the moral choice they must make at the end. Now we must determine just how the character gets to that moral choice.

It begins with a desire. What your character wants, what propels the plot and provides a catalyst for the entire story. Maybe your character wants to save a friend/a lover/a parent from an evil dictator. Maybe your character wants a degree in Astronomy from a prestigious university. Maybe your character wants to confess his love for the girl of his dreams.

Note: This is called a desire because it’s not necessarily the same as what your character need. The desire is the superficial goal. It’s what your character thinks he or she needs more than anything else, what will ultimately make them happy. It’s often the clash between desire and need that makes for interesting internal conflict.

Your character’s need should be reflective of your character’s weakness. If, as I proposed last time, your character’s weakness is a fear of doing anything risky due to a loved one’s death, but her desire is to visit a friend who lives halfway across the world in a strange country, then your character needs to overcome her fear of doing anything that might be considered a risk to get there. This is, hopefully, much easier said than done.

So to fulfill her desire, your character now needs a plan. Maybe getting across the world is easy, but finding her friend once she’s landed in the foreign country is where things get tricky, and she must hire a guide, or negotiate a method of transportation that could go horribly wrong. Her plan is the catalyst – employing it is where things will ultimately test your character’s weakness, and force her to confront it.

And plans often go wrong because of the opponents that stand in your character’s way. Determine your character’s opponent by asking: who are the people who are making your characters’ life difficult? Who is testing your character’s weakness and emotional limits? How do they make the plan next to impossible to follow through?

Note: I’m intentionally not using the word antagonist here because, while antagonists are always opponents (when they’re human), opponents are not always antagonists. An Antogonist could be considered an active opponent – someone who actively opposes your character and sabotages the plan intentionally, whereas some opponents don’t even realize they’re in the way. They just exist. For example: your Main Character wants to date Person A, but Person A is dating Person B. Person B is an opponent. Even if he or she never does more than act as a really great romantic partner to Person A – even if he or she never actively opposes the MC, they are in the way of the MC’s goal, and therefore an opponent. The Antagonist in that scenario is actually Person A – because she actively wants the opposite thing to the MC, and rebuffs the MC’s advances because of that opposing desire.

Whew. Still with me? Okay, let’s move on.

Your character is enacting her plan. She’s facing her opponent(s). Now comes the battle: the moment when her desire and her weakness come head to head and she is forced to overcome her weakness or fail at everything she’s overcome to get this far. Yes, this is the climax. But it’s also an internal battle for your character where she’s forced to face these things about her that have been holding her back, emotionally and physically.

This should spark an internal revelation: things are not how they’ve always seemed to your character. Now that she has finally reached her friend on the other side of the world, your character realizes the world is, in fact, beautiful. That she is, in fact, capable of taking and overcoming risks. Your character gains an understanding of herself and her surroundings due to overcoming her weakness – she has found a new balance to her previously unbalanced life.

Now that you’ve determined your character’s desire, her plan for achieving it, and everything in between, sit back and admire your handiwork. As a bonus, ask yourself, what does it all mean? I know my premise, I know what my character is trying to achieve. Now what’s the theme of my story? The theme for the story above could be something along the lines of “Taking risks results in a more fulfilled quality of life” or something to that effect.

It’s up to you to take everything I’ve talked about in the last three posts (linked at the top of this post, important concepts in bold) and assemble your own worksheet. You might find some things I’ve talked about particularly enlightening, and some of them not so much. Take what you need! Create a development worksheet that works for you. That’s the beauty of story development and storytelling. There are lots of methods, but only you can determine the right method for you and your writing. This one just happens to be mine.

I hope this has been useful! As always, I love hearing what you guys think and if posts like this are helpful to your process. Now, go forth, and conquer (your story)!

Welcome back to Upcoming Titles, our monthly feature where we highlight books releasing this month. As always, this is by no means a comprehensive list of forthcoming releases, just a compilation of titles we think our readers (and our contributors!) would enjoy. Without further ado:

April 5

 

• Booked by Kwame Alexander
• Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan
• The Mirror King by Jodi Meadows*

April 12

 

• Masks and Shadows by Stephanie Burgis
• A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry
• Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda

April 19

• Flamecaster by Cinda Williams Chima
• The Darkest Corners by Kara Thomas
• Will You Won’t You Want Me? by Nora Zelevansky

April 21

• Chasing the Stars by Malorie Blackman

April 26

• The Rose and the Dagger by Renée Ahdieh
• The Art of Not Breathing by Sarah Alexander
• The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi
• Prodigy: The Graphic Novel by Marie Lu**
• The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater

That’s all for this month! Let us know what you’re looking forward to reading and what titles we might have missed!

*PubCrawl member
**PubCrawl alumna

This week Kelly and JJ (and JJ’s dog) discuss author platform and brand. JJ is also tackling spring allergies, but it’s fighting back and winning. Also, the difference between “further” and “farther!”

I have a podcasting partner tonight. #gooberdog

A photo posted by JJ (@sjaejones) on Mar 25, 2016 at 5:34pm PDT

Show Notes

• Author brand is the image you portray to your readers. It is cultivated to some extent, but should also arise organically from your personality and interests.
• Maintain brand consistency is fairly important and can be tricky to navigate. Brand consistency builds trust with your readership, but you also don’t want to be pigeonholed into one thing for the rest of your writing career.
• Author platform is the means through which you reach your audience. Platform is far more important for nonfiction writers.
• Engagement is more important than sheer quantity of followers/listeners. You can have a million followers, but if you don’t engage with them, you can’t build loyalty.
• Brands and platforms take time to grow, so don’t worry if you don’t have a platform to speak of yet. And just because someone has a million followers, it doesn’t necessarily mean those follows will translate into sales.
• In short, be honest, be you, and build your following naturally.

What We’re Reading

• Kelly’s been sick, but she’s started Truthwitch by PubCrawl alumna Susan Dennard
• JJ’s in a reading slump, but she has Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older and These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly

Off Menu Recommendations

• Welcome to Nightvale
• Alice Isn’t Dead

What We’re Working On

• Kelly is working on developmental edits for a client—hire her at penandparsley.com!
• JJ is working on copyedits for Wintersong—she is Old and is upset that they came electronically rather than paper as she expected.

That’s all for this week! Next week we’ll be starting a series on CHARACTERIZATION! As always, if you have any questions, leave a comment and let us know!

Every year around this time I become completely obsessed with the School Library Journal Battle of the Books competition. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a nearly month long contest that rounds up elite children’s/YA authors to judge head-to-head contests between a variety of books ranging from Middle Grade to Non-fiction to YA. The books are assigned to brackets, and one book from each bracket is eliminated, the other advancing to the next round and so forth until the final battle.

In the most recent contest, the judge expressed a fear of being wrong about a book. She was worried that after reading both books she’d pick the one that was less deserving or overlook something in the “losing” book that ends up being hailed as the greatest children’s book of all time. (A slight exaggeration, but you get my meaning.) In this age of Social Media where we are all so involved in the conversation, the fear of making that wrong choice is even greater.

Being a regular reviewer for a local Canadian Children’s Book Review periodical and having sat on a number of awards committees myself, picking the wrong book is a fear I can totally identify with. I’ve been in this industry for over 15 years, and been a buyer for 10. I like to think I have a pretty good eye and a solid instinct for good books, but the one lesson I’ve learned over the years is that books are incredibly subjective. Even knowing that, it’s hard not to doubt your opinion when that book that you eliminated or passed over is universally loved by just about everybody else on the planet. I read it. I carefully evaluated it, but I didn’t choose it or even necessarily like it. There’s no rule that says I have to like every critically acclaimed or buzzy book (often I don’t), but that doubt grows even bigger when said book wins not just one, but multiple awards, and makes all of the best books of the year lists, etc…You start to wonder- what didn’t I see in this book?

I have often been in the minority of disliking something that the rest of the members on my committee ranks highly, and vice-versa. I’ve often championed something that isn’t the recipient of the love such as Daniel Kraus’ Life and Death of Zebulon Finch which didn’t get nearly the attention I thought it deserved. When I first started developing collections 10 years ago, my boss kindly told me that being that I lack a crystal ball that tells me absolutely what reaction a book will garner, I can’t second guess myself. Best-seller or bust, there is never an absolutely right or absolutely wrong choice, and that is the beauty of not only books, but any art form.

I met my husband at an author reading at Kettle of Fish in Greenwich Village when he sat in an empty seat at my table and politely endured an endless round of rapid-fire questions from my friends (including JJ!), so I knew he liked books from the beginning. But on our third date I knew he was a keeper, because that’s when he offered to read a book aloud with me.

We were sitting on the couch in his studio apartment in Prospect Park, rounding out yet another hour of moving seamlessly between making out and talking each other’s ears off in that perfect alchemy of third date magic. At some point I brought up the fact that I love reading aloud.

Reading aloud was a ritual in my family when I was growing up. I love books and I love the sound of my own voice, so reading aloud is my ultimate indulgence. When David offered to read a book aloud with me I was surprised and pleased, but I didn’t quite believe it until he showed up for our fourth date with a paperback copy of The Hobbit in hand. Reading aloud has been a mainstay in our relationship ever since.

Over the course of nine years, a move half-way across the country, several new jobs, graduate school, marriage, and one child we have read nearly 30 books aloud together. Some weeks we read every night, snuggled up next to each other in bed. Other times we’re in a slump and months go by without so much as a glance at our shared book. But we always come back around. There’s a beautiful intimacy in curling up on my husband’s shoulder and falling asleep to the rustling of the pages and the low hum of his voice. And of course we read to our daughter daily. I eagerly look forward several years in the future, when we can move on from boardbooks and pictures books and select a novel the three of us can read aloud together, just like I did with my parents and my sister when I was young.

I love reading aloud for pleasure, but I also often read aloud with purpose: to improve my writing. I read my own work aloud at various points throughout the writing process and I’m consistently rewarded for my efforts. Whether I’m stuck in the midst of drafting or polishing up a revised manuscript, reading my words out loud is enormously helpful.

Typos 
Reading aloud is one of the best ways to spot elusive typos. Before you can fix a typo, you need to know it’s there. When I read silently my eyes tend to slide over these minor mistakes, correcting them in my mind even if they aren’t correct on the page. But when reading aloud I stumble instead of slide. Tripping over typos calls attention to them, and that makes it easier to fix them all.

Dialogue
The easiest way for me to know if my dialogue is realistic is to read it out loud. Does this sound like something a person would actually say or does it sound false or convoluted? Do my characters have distinct dialogue that’s unique to them, or does everything sound generally the same and indistinguishable? Reading aloud pinpoints these issue quickly.

Pacing
Is anything happening? Sometimes it takes saying the words out loud to recognize that your prose is a bit purple, or that your climax is a bit cloudy,  or nothing has happened in your story for approximately a million years. Ahem. That last one may or may not be my personal albatross. Still, if you read your own work out loud and start getting a bit bored, well, now you know you need to pick up the pace.

Perspective
Finally, reading aloud gives you a slight objective edge, and that edge is priceless. When we write we spend so much time inside our heads; it can be easy to forget that a book isn’t going to live inside us forever. Because a book is meant to be read. It’s going to go out into the world and be read by many different people, and all of those people have rich interior lives that are likely different from yours. Reading aloud can give you a little bit of distance, and allow you to consider your work afresh. Hmmm, is this appropriative? Does this content align with my intentions? Are there clarity issues here? Are the funny bits landing? These are all questions I’ve asked myself, and reading my work aloud is one of the most effective ways to answer them.

Do you read aloud for pleasure? What are your favorite books to read aloud? To whom do you read? And what about reading aloud with purpose? Do you find that reading aloud improves your writing? In what ways? 

This week JJ and Kelly talk sales conference and deliver some publishing real-ness. Also, yet more other podcast recommendations.

Show Notes

• In addition to editorial, production, marketing, and publicity, publishing houses also have a sales force.
• The sales force comprises of people who have accounts with various bookstores throughout the country, e.g. Barnes & Noble, indie bookstores, mystery bookstores, etc.
• The responsibility of the sales force is the sell titles to these various accounts
• When people in publishing refer to the “book buyer”, they are not talk about the consumer; they are the people at bookstores who choose what books to carry in their inventory
• Presentations at sales conference involve someone presenting the list of titles for a given season to the sales team including: title, synopsis, price, cover, blurbs, etc.

Lead Title

• As much as we would love to believe this to be true, not all the publisher’s resources are distributed equally across their lists
• Every season, there are books designated as “lead titles”—the reasoning for the designation can be somewhat arbitrary, but can include books for which the publisher has paid a large advance, books that have inherently very commercial or sexy concepts, a book that is timely in some fashion, and for a myriad of other reasons
• Lead titles receive the bulk of the advertising and marketing budgets, and often have their own dedicated teams in-house. Publicity and marketing can also be complemented and outsourced by the publisher to independent third-party companies who act as consultants.

What We’re Reading

• Red Rising and Golden Son by Pierce Brown
• The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman
• Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton
• Night Study and Shadow Study by Maria V. Snyder

What We’re Working On

• Kelly is too busy with life to remember what she’s working on
• JJ is struggling with what she wants to write next and agonizing over which direction she wants her career to go

Off Menu Recommendations

• 88 Cups of Tea with Yin Chang
• Batman: The Animated Series
• Descendants of the Sun (K-drama)
• The West Wing Weekly
• The X-Files Files and The X-Files reboot
• The Indoor Kids

That’s all for this week! Next week we’ll be talking about AUTHOR PLATFORM AND BRAND. As always, let us know if you have any questions!

In December 2014, when the Kickstarter for the Hemingwrite, “a distraction free smart typewriter” launched, I was as excited as many other writers were by the prospect of a machine built for only one purpose: writing. The “distraction,” of course, is the internet, and the answer seemed to be a dedicated keyboard for word processing — not for checking Facebook or posting Tweets, or reading blogs like this one.

My enthusiasm waned a bit at the expected price tag, nearly $500, as well as the long wait for the device to reach market; ultimately, I opted to get a used Alphasmart Neo for a mere $30, which I have blogged about before. But I never stopped dreaming about the Hemingwrite, and now it has finally been released!

Rebranded as the Freewrite by Astrohaus, the “world’s first dedicated device for distraction-free writing composition” became available on February 23, 2016 at getfreewrite.com. It still comes at a hefty premium, $549, which will get you a frontlit E-ink screen and a full-size mechanical keyboard. The Freewrite promises four weeks of battery life and internal storage for more than a million pages, and while you can’t use it to send e-mail, it can get online over Wi-Fi — in order to upload your files, in real-time, to the cloud.

The Freewrite uses a custom Postbox interface to sync your documents to apps like Dropbox and Evernote, where you can format, edit, and print them. It looks like magic when you see it in action in one of their demonstration videos, but it’s worth noting that, by design, you will rely on this digital sorcery to do the real work of writing: editing and revising. The Freewrite is meant only to help you get that first draft down; in fact, not only is the screen too small for editing as you go, but there is no cursor or even arrow keys to navigate within your work-in-progress. This could be a deal breaker for some writers.

Another potential showstopper: this thing weighs four pounds, a lot for something advertised as portable in today’s world of paper-thin laptops and tablets. But that’s the price to pay for its amazing looking and sounding mechanical keyboard, my writing instrument of choice. The Freewrite also seems quite sturdy with an aluminum chassis, and it has an appealing retro style that some critics have dubbed hipster bait.

Do I still want one, even though I already have a budget alternative in the Alphasmart? Heck yeah. My fingers are itching to write a book on a Freewrite! But I’ll have to write and sell something for a lot of money before I can afford one.

The other issue is that the Freewrite and the Alphasmart have a limited use — I spend far more time editing and revising a book than I do in drafting, so I still need other ways to combat the siren call of the internet. I can’t just switch off the Wi-Fi, because I do need to research online, and it’s nice to listen to music or whitenoise generators while working too. So my current go-to, when I have to be on my laptop, is the app Freedom, which lets you block certain websites such as Facebook and Twitter for set periods of time. Now I just need to do the same with my smartphone.

But I know there are many similar apps out there that block websites, or force you to keep writing to avoid losing what you’ve written, or disable your online access entirely. So two questions: Does the Freewrite “smart typewriter” appeal to you? And what tricks or applications do you use to avoid distractions or motivate you to stay productive?

A Contemplation on Cookies: A Publishing Tale

A year and a day ago, I was in class. I should have been listening about how to calculate damages in a contracts case, but instead I was pondering the cookie options that would be available at Einstein’s.

When could I get the cookie?

Did I deserve a cookie?

What if someone gets to the cookie before me?

My deeply philosophical thoughts were disrupted by THE EMAIL.

All thoughts of cookies were instantly forgotten. Which is a feat in itself, in my world. You already know the rest of this story. There was a lot of muppet flailing and happy sigh-crying.

But how we got there had a great deal less Muppet flailing and a lot more sigh-crying (of the despairing, set-myself-on-fire variety). Though far less sweet, I think my path to publication mirrored most of my thoughts to eating cookies…

When could I get the cookie?

I wrote The Star-Touched Queen the year after I graduated. I worked as a legal assistant in a small, frigid office and recited the plot to the Ficus plant. I like to think it was struck speechless with my brilliance. When I signed with my fabulous agent in August, I thought *THIS* is it. I HAVE ARRIVED.

LOL NO. We were on submission from October to March. Rejection after rejection wore me down. One day, we got four in a row. (I didn’t get out of bed that day). The question of “when” quickly became “if.”

Did I deserve a cookie?

I poured my heart into those early drafts of The Star-Touched Queen. But after months of rejection, I looked at it again and found it wanting. That was hard. Harder, still, to start over. I rewrote feverishly. Cut characters. Erased sub-plots. Changed tenses. Trimmed the fat. Questioned everything.

At the back of my head was the question of why I was doing this. Maybe it would never deserve to be published. But *I* owed my story the best life I could give it. When I write now, I keep that in mind. I write it for me first and everyone else later.

What if someone gets to the cookie before me?

Every day I was on sub, I thought about the people who were on submission for 2 days before getting a glorious deal. But those were highlight reels. When people talk about those stories, they don’t mention that author’s personal agony (how many drafts s/he went through, how many times s/he had been on sub before this, etc. etc.) And ultimately, if someone gets to the cookie before you, WHO CARES. Is it the last cookie on the face of the earth? Probably not. There’s plenty of other cookies. Maybe you just have to walk a little farther.

Looking back, I realize a lot of things that I wish I knew then. You’re only responsible to yourself and your craft. Keep your head down. Keep going. Your timeline is your own. Essentially: THAT COOKIE IS OUT THERE.

And that, dear friends, is the tale of how I finally got a cookie book deal.

ROSHANI CHOKSHI comes from a small town in Georgia where she collected a Southern accent, but does not use it unless under duress. Her Young Adult fantasy, THE STAR-TOUCHED QUEEN (Macmillan/St.Martin’s Press), will be released on April 26, 2016.

This week Kelly and JJ live-critique five queries submitted for review. Thank you to everyone who sent us their queries! We would love nothing more than to be able to provide personalized critique to each and every one of you, but unfortunately we don’t have all the time in the world.

Show Notes

• We received about 15 queries, so we picked five that we thought demonstrated a breadth of concerns.
• Across the board, we saw a lot of telling, not showing.
• We also saw queries that told us “My book is about [insert theme here].” That’s all fine, but it’s necessary in a query, and it’s wasting space. The story is more important than what the book is about.
• Specifics always make us care more. Don’t be afraid to give us specific details. Vagueness is confusing, not enticing.

Query #1

According to your profile you are actively seeking children’s books that feature “adorakble” protagonists, and I think my story picturebook, TITLE, fits the kind of text you hope to market. My intent for the book is to broaden children’s exposure to music and encourage mixing different styles, while developing a sense of empathy. Each book in the TITLE series would include a brief history of the instruments featured alongside a bar of simple music that could be played with a recorder. The nonfiction and interactive elements would especially appeal to gifted elementary readers.

What happens when you’re the Captain of the Watch’s son returning home from a summer at Hero Camp, but you never mastered Highly Stylized Defenestration? Billy McDougal knows he doesn’t have what it takes to follow in the footsteps of his father and brothers, who are already considered heroes in the community. All of this changes when he finds an old bugle in the attic. His best friend, Claire Annette, encourages him to harness its power to help protect the town of Crescendo from a series of attacks by wild beasts who are in thrall to a mysterious figure with an enchanted Theremin. TITLE stories are set to feature a cast of multicultural characters who each represent different genres of music, from strings and percussion to beatboxing, and use their talents to protect their hometown from a mysterious and vengeful villain. One of my overarching themes is that “villains” are typically only lashing out after having been hurt themselves. The antagonist of the series, Leo, believes himself to be a hero avenging his sister, a musical prodigy who was left deaf after an accident. She is unaware of Leo’s actions and the climax of the series involves her mediating an alliance between her brother and the band.

I have a BA in creative writing from SCHOOL and have been teaching Language Arts for nearly a decade. During the summer I am an instructor at NAME OF CENTER where I work with gifted fourth and fifth graders in the Writing Workshop: Modern Fantasy course. I have seen firsthand how kids can channel their energy into creative outlets, and the results are amazing. I think Billy’s story can inspire the next generation and inform them of music’s historical relevance with hands-on application.

Thank you very much for your time and I hope you enjoy my submission!

Query #2

When Nora’s research leads her to a secret world of time travel, she becomes a marked woman and experiences a love that could change the past and destroy the present. Her story is TITLE, a 76,000-word contemporary fantasy. 

When Nora travels to France to dig deeper into her late mother’s time travel theories, she meets Henri, a man who claims to be a twelfth-century prince and the man she knows will one day become King Henry II of England.

Henri’s struggle for the throne brings him to the twenty-first century to find a relic from a 900-year-old shipwreck, recently recovered from the bottom of the English Channel. Nora joins his quest, thrilled to find living proof of time travel and eager to uncover more details about her mother’s research. But in her growing attraction to the prince, Nora ignores important signs that Henri is not being completely honest with her.

Helping Henri sets Nora firmly in the crosshairs of a dangerous group, the Guardians, who will stop at nothing to prevent time travel. Nora and Henri race across France to find the relic that will secure Henri’s kingdom before the Guardians silence them forever. When the Guardians finally abduct her and expose Henri’s lies, a shattered Nora realizes that her decision to trust him and ultimately love him could change the past and the present.   

TITLE combines historical intrigue in the spirit of Anne Forstier’s The Lost Sisterhood with the lighthearted romantic feel of Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series. This novel, along with most of my writing, is inspired by the piles of research I did for my Master of Arts in History. My short stories have been finalists for the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize and the Writer’s Workshop Fiction Contest and have been published in online literary magazines and several small press anthologies, including Copperfield Review. I live in Charlotte, NC, where I’m plotting more adventures for Nora and spinning non-magical historical tales.

The first [insert number] of pages are pasted below, and the complete manuscript is available upon request. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Query #3

Dear [Agent],

Yesterday, Jordan’s biggest fear was being outed as genderqueer. Today, he’s trying to stop the world’s largest video game company from becoming the next Big Brother before they kill him and his friends.

Jordan and his two gaming partners just won tickets for Cruise Con, a convention-at-sea hosted by the company that produces their favorite MMORPG. All they have to do is beta test a new game world with the other contest winners. But after the trial, an anonymous gamer tells them they missed something, and threatens their families if they don’t find it. Jordan wants to go to the police, but cops won’t reach the ship in time, and the security officers on board may not be trustworthy.

Then another curious gamer is killed, and Jordan and his friends get caught in a race to expose a lethal technology hidden in the game’s code before the tech is used against them.

TITLE is a 62,000-word young adult thriller with LGBTQ characters that will appeal to fans of Ernest Cline and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.

I have a B.A. in Classics from SCHOOL and an M.S. in library and information sciences from the OTHER SCHOOL. When not writing, I work as a public librarian, connecting readers with books they will love.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Query #4

Dear __________,

Eleven-year-old twins Seamus and Grady lead a life most boys can only dream of. They have rich, doting parents who never scold them, chuckle when they play hooky from school and give them whatever they want. They accidentally find out why. Turns out, they’re not Americans – heck, they’re not even human. They are twenty-first century, ex-pat leprechauns soon to possess awesome powers … if they can acquire a pot of gold each.

Unfortunately, pots of gold don’t come easy in their hometown of Boston, so they have to look elsewhere. The twins end up in Africa with an ancient map and a plan to find the lost treasure of Prester John, a mighty king who stashed his loot somewhere in Ethiopia. No quest comes without peril and standing in their way is the undead spirit of a giant African chief who guards the hoard and believes that by sacrificing the boys, he can return to the world of the living … and rule it. Can the twins outsmart a wily specter plus a few other sundry obstacles, acquire their pot of gold and live to ride the rainbow back home?

TITLE is my debut novel. It is a 45,000-word fun adventure aimed at children aged 9-12. It will appeal to readers who enjoy imaginative and fast-paced action books. With a hefty dollop of magic, of course.

I have a BA in Journalism SCHOOL in Montreal and work as a freelance writer to support my creative writing addiction. As per your submission guidelines, I am attaching a synopsis of my story and my manuscript.

Thank you for your time and consideration and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Query #5

The Crummett siblings have each adapted their lives to fit within the oppressive boundaries of their parents’ expectations. Whether it’s for money, approval, respect, or love, all the children have manipulated their lives conform to the family standards. But when Olive, the youngest and most beloved sister, ends up pregnant outside of wedlock and dares to be happy about it everything changes. Seeing Olive boldly step outside the shadow of their parents ridged expectations forces each of the siblings to question the fundamental motivations on which they have built their lives. This new perspective sends them each on their own unique journey.  

Olive’s closest sister, Sam, goes through a heartrending non-surgical abortion the day before she finds out about Olive’s pregnancy and now has to negotiate an emotional landscape scattered with the question “what if.” The oldest brother, William, a gay man whose parents refer to his long-time partner as his “black friend,” realizes that the only thing holding him back from fully engaging in life is fear of his parents’ disapproval. The oldest “perfect daughter,” Vivian, reignites a relationship she’d sabotaged with too much drinking and unexamined anger over events from her past. And the youngest sibling, twenty-one-year-old Mark, responds in typical fashion by pretending not to give a shit while actually feeling even more disgruntled with and disconnected from his siblings than before.

During this tumultuous time, a new family dynamic begins to take shape: bonds are formed between once distant siblings, close relationships are put to the test, and Mark’s bitter resentment towards his siblings turns dangerous. When the siblings find themselves face to face for the first time since Olive’s announcement tensions run high, and a final act of selfish rage sets off a series of events which end in a tragedy that threatens to destroy them all.

The Crummett siblings live up and down the West Coast in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but their lives are intimately woven together as the point of view shifts from one sibling to the next after each phone call or in-person interaction between siblings. This flow of perspective creates the experience of a natural sibling dynamic while also giving readers the opportunity to learn about each character through their own thoughts as well as the observations and judgments of their siblings.

TITLE  is upmarket women’s fiction and is complete at 100,300 words.

What We’re Reading

• Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare
• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo (PubCrawl alum!)

What We’re Working On

• Kelly and JJ aren’t working on creative projects at the moment.

Off Menu Recommendations

• Black Mirror

That’s all for this week! Next week we’ll return to our Publishing 201 series with SALES CONFERENCE. Thanks for listening!

Years ago, a friend told me that getting published was the easy part. It was staying published that was difficult.

I laughed a little. I died inside.

I was still trying to get published the first time, let alone a second or third time, and I wasn’t having a whole lot of success.

But perseverance won, and eventually I did get published. And because I was one of those annoying overachievers, I’d already written first drafts of the second and third books in my trilogy by the time I turned in my first book, which meant that I had some free time.

I wrote another — unrelated — book, revised it a bit, shared it with a few critique partners and my agent, and when I had another stretch of free time, I went back to it to make the manuscript shine.

But something was wrong. There were huge parts of the book that I loved, but I knew it had problems, and I wasn’t sure how to fix them. I knew the book wasn’t strong enough to give to my publisher, so I put it aside to wait for a spark of brilliance to tell me how to fix it.

That book is still waiting. I had to move on. So I finished writing my first series (again), and I wrote another new book. I gave it to critique partners. I gave it to my agent. I revised the snot out of it. And I thought it was ready, so I gave it to my publisher. They said they didn’t think this was the very best followup to my first series.

Crushed.

I started thinking about that thing my friend had said years before. I started wondering if maybe she was right. I’d been published! People liked my book! But I’d put one new book aside because I knew it wasn’t ready, and I’d had to put the other new book aside because my career wasn’t ready.

But because I had no desire to starve to death and a very strong desire to keep my career in motion, I wrote yet another new thing (while finishing working on my first trilogy). All the necessary people liked it and approved it, and that book became my second series. (For those wondering if that pattern continued, it did not. There were no books between that one and what will be my third series.)

I’m sharing all this because I think a lot of writers believe that once you’re published, you can hand in new books and a couple of years later, they appear on shelves. Not true! New books must go through the same rigorous acquisitions process as the first one, but this time with sales records of your previous books as a key factor in what the publisher decides to do.

I know a lot of authors who’ve written new things after they’ve been published, and for one reason another, had to trunk them. Maybe they knew from the start it wasn’t ready. Maybe their agent said it wasn’t ready. Maybe their publisher said it wasn’t ready.

And you know, there’s no shame in that. Trunked manuscripts — no matter what stage of your career they were written — are still useful creatures. There are no wasted words in writing, even if those words never make it to the bookshelves. All that experiences goes into the next new thing, which will be even stronger than the last ones.

We all have trunked manuscripts. Lots come before getting published the first time, but they happen after, too. For a lot of writers.

And it’s totally okay. Just keep writing. Keep looking forward. (And hopefully one day, you can resurrect the trunked manuscripts you particularly love. That is my plan!)

Hello again! A couple of weeks ago, I gave you the start to a worksheet I use for every new project to help fill out my premise, story world, and how I choose to tell your story. Now I’d like to elaborate further on that sheet and go into the beginnings of character.

Before you ever start outlining or even writing your draft, you have to know your characters. Some people do this by filling out a “twenty questions” for each character. Some start writing and discover their characters in the moment. I find that understanding the answers to the questions below (and questions I’ll highlight in the third part of this series in a couple weeks), helps me know what a character will do in any given situation. If I’m ever stumped over what a character might do in a moment, I consult my sheet.

So you’ve already determined your premise, story execution, story world, and story challenges. You probably already know who your main character is, but if you don’t, now is the time to decide who your best character is for telling the story. The girl who has lived for fifteen years in the kingdom dungeons? Or the prince who can’t get his life together? If there are multiple characters you want to tell the story through, now is the time to sort that out.

Once you’ve determined your best character, you’ll want to outline your basic action. This is the action that drives your main character throughout the entire story. Basic action is also informed by story execution – if you plan to use the Journey Principle (see last post), then chances are, your character’s basic action will involve moving toward a specific destination. Your character’s basic action for the entire book will be traveling toward the castle/the space ship/the other side of the US etc. Or, if the story takes place around a competition, then the basic action will be competing/preparing for competition. This might seem remedial, but in those moments when our stories get away from us, remembering what your character’s basic, primal action for this story is will make a world of difference.

Now, think about what taking that basic means for your character. Characters don’t just act without thought or reason – you have to give them motivation to take that action. And that involves weakness.

Character weakness can and should be an integral part of your actual story structure. It should propel your character’s personal journey, the basic action, and provide obstacles for him/her along the way. Weakness offers the potential for character change, which is a big part (maybe the biggest) of making a character and her story interesting.

So what is your character’s weakness? It could be that he or she is afraid to live their lives to the fullest because they lost a parent/friend/partner. Or, that he/she is sheltered and ignorant of the world around them – they have to overcome this fear or this lack of knowledge to actually begin the basic action.

Once you’ve identified the weakness and basic action, it’s important to consider who that character is at the end. What do they look like as a changed person? What does the basic action teach them about overcoming their weakness? Perhaps the sheltered person has taken a trip to a developing country and learned that there are lots of suffering people in the world. This character is now a changed person: he or she is no longer sheltered, and perhaps now they have a desire to help people.

The changed person is very satisfying for a reader. How many times have you seen a movie or watched a show and noticed that the character has little to no growth or change? And to be sure, change doesn’t have to translate into positive growth – change can mean someone becomes disillusioned, or cruel, or greedy. Take a look at Walter White in Breaking Bad – Everyone’s favorite teacher gets cancer and through genius and desperation becomes someone he always had the potential be – a virtual Scar Face.

All of this ties into the moral choice your character must make at the end, a choice that they can only make now that they are a changed person. The decision would have been easy to make (or non-existent) before they changed, but now that they have reached the end and learned so much and became a different person, the moral choice will be much harder to make. It’s a confluence of their old life and their new. For the sheltered person, it could mean going back to their country and living their life with a new perspective, and perhaps becoming a volunteer. Or, being offered a chance to stay in this new place and create more radical change. Neither is wrong – but do you think this character would have had a hard time making the choice before?

Okay, I think I’ve given you enough to chew on for this second part in the What Comes Before series – my next post will be going into more depth on character and structure, so be prepared! As always, I hope this was useful, and I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with the last part in the series.

Hi All! Today I want to talk about the next building block of a novel—paragraphs! (This is part three of a series. Part one was on word choice and part two was on sentences.)

If we continue with the metaphor comparing a novel to a city, we can imagine words as bricks, sentences as walls, and paragraphs as… buildings!

Think of the buildings on a city street. They may be linked together, but each has its own door, its own foundation, its own roof.

Now imagine you’re tasked with planning a walking tour of that street. Your goal is to design a tour that leads from one building into the next. You would want each building to be enjoyed for its own strengths and beauty, but it would be equally important that the tour keep moving! Each building would need to naturally flow into the next and keep the tourists wanting to discover more.

That’s how great paragraphs work. They have their individual strength to stand on their own, but they keep the reader moving forward. No matter how beautiful or strong or resonant a paragraph may be, it fails if it slows the reader’s progress forward. Likewise, a paragraph that’s weighed down by excess might encourage skimming, which has an equally negative effect on the reader’s experience.

You may not even think about paragraphs as you write. (I know I rarely consider them until I’m revising.) Often we group our sentences together instinctively, creating that new indent when focus shifts. This casual approach to paragraphs will often produce very adequate prose. But by giving more care to our paragraphs, we can create a stronger story that won’t let a reader’s attention wander.

Here are three tips for maximizing the strength of your paragraphs:

Make each paragraph contribute more than one aspect of the story. A paragraph of description follows a paragraph of dialogue. A paragraph of action comes next, which is followed by a paragraph of internal monologue. Writing like this will get the story onto the page, but it’s unlikely to make it leap to life. The reader will begin to be lulled by the monotony. Paragraphs that combine story elements will convey the same information, but in a more engaging way.

As an example, here’s a passage of three paragraphs from Vengeance Road by Erin Bowman.

By the time I’s raced back to Silver and grabbed my rifle, Lil’s already disappeared among the dense vegetation. “Thanks for waiting,” I mutter to myself, and take to tracking her between shrubs and cactuses. When I finally catch up, she’s crouched behind a boulder, some sort of net clenched in her grasp.

She puts a finger to her lips and nudges her head toward the other side of the boulder. It’s then I see the quail—maybe a dozen of ‘em, pecking at the dry earth for what I reckon must be insects. I creep forward, but gravelly earth crunches beneath my heel. There’s a flutter of feathers and a chorus of squawks, and the birds go scampering deeper into the thicket of shrubs.

Lil glares. “You walk like your feet are made of stone.”

Those three paragraphs could have been written as a paragraph of description, followed by a paragraph of action, followed by a few paragraphs of dialogue. The same information would have been provided. But by combining these elements within these paragraphs, we experience the characters, the setting, and the action all at once, and the prose comes to life on the page.

Vary the length of your paragraphs. Long paragraphs might be used to reveal something important that needs careful attention. Short paragraphs might be used to keep the story moving quickly through action. Mixing short and long can keep the reader moving while signally where it may be important to linger.

Here’s an example from the opening of Queen and Shadows by Sarah J. Maas:

There was a thing waiting in the darkness.

It was ancient, and cruel, and paced in the shadows leashing his mind. It was not of his world, and had been brought here to fill him with its primordial cold. Some invisible barrier still separated them, but the wall crumbled a little more every time the thing stalked along its length, testing its strength.

He could not remember his name.

In this example, the short first paragraph grabs the reader’s attention, and the longer second paragraph draws the reader in deeper as it gives clarity to the questions raised in the first paragraph. The short third paragraph shifts the focus again.

Consider carefully where you end and begin new paragraphs. This goes hand-in-hand with the tip about paragraph length. In nonfiction, paragraphs are generally organized to support a topic sentence. The organization of paragraphs in fiction can be much looser, however, and paragraph breaks can be more creatively applied. Ending a paragraph immediately after a certain sentence will create a different emphasis than if that sentence occupies the middle of the paragraph or starts the next paragraph. Looking again at the above example from Queen of Shadows, how would the emphasis change if we changed the paragraph breaks? How would the focus change if we did this:

There was a thing waiting in the darkness. It was ancient, and cruel, and paced in the shadows leashing his mind.

It was not of his world, and had been brought here to fill him with its primordial cold.

Some invisible barrier still separated them, but the wall crumbled a little more every time the thing stalked along its length, testing its strength. He could not remember his name.

Changing the paragraph breaks changes the emphasis. As readers, we tend to pay special attention to the content of paragraphs made up of a single sentence. In the actual example from the book, the emphasis is on the effect “the thing in the dark” has on the character. In the revised example, the attention shifts away from the effect to the fact that it was brought here to menace him. We focus on different things depending on the breaks.

How do you feel about paragraphs? Are they a tool you enjoy using? Do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

This week JJ and Kelly discuss Voice in another installment of their Writing Mechanics series. Voice: What is it? How can you develop it? How many times can they say “voice” in a single episode?

Show Notes

• What is voice? JJ talks about it a little on her blog.
• Understand Voice and Tone in Writing by Grammar Girl
• How to Craft a Great Voice by Nathan Bransford

What We’re Reading/Books Discussed

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
• You: A Novel by Caroline Kepnes
• The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan
• Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison
• Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones
• Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
• Poison Study, Magic Study, and Fire Study by Maria V. Snyder
• Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher

Off Menu Recommendations

• Still The Black Tapes and Tanis podcasts
• The No-Sleep Podcast (and associated subreddit)
• Kelly is still on the fence about Dawson’s Creek

What We’re Working On

• Kelly will be teaching another class on contracts at the Loft Literary Center and working on her YA novel
• JJ is juggling several different writing projects and is trying to figure out what to work on next

That’s all for this week! Next week we’ll be doing our QUERY CRITIQUE podcast!

Whenever I meet an author and I tell them what I do, they always ask me the same question: “When is it okay to reach out to my publicist?” And I always think, Oh my! These poor neglected authors! But when I’m at my desk in the office, reading email, and I get a question about a book that’s more than six months away, I often think Oh, no, I’m not ready for you yet.

It’s not that I’m not excited about those books that are further away, often times I’m dying for them to come out already so I can talk about them, but there’s a reason why we publicists have a reputation for being tough to nail down: we’re working on A LOT of books and we need to focus on them at specific times.

Please bear in mind as you read this, though, that every situation is different. Some books are lead titles, others are school & library focused, and others we have basic plans for. But no matter what plans your publisher has, it’s good to start thinking early about what YOU can do to supplement them. The onus is not just on your publisher to promote your book. You need to do your part.

Here’s a general timeline for how I start a campaign:

18 months to 2 years before on-sale: I hear about the book for the first time, either at acquisitions or pre-launch.

9 months to 18 months before on-sale: I hear about the book a half dozen more times at launch, marketing preview, sales conference, target meetings, etc. (Mind you, these meetings are often called different names at different houses.) This is when the mysterious “plans” for books start getting discussed.

9 months before on-sale: By now, a marketing and publicity plan for your book should exist. Ask your agent to ask your editor to share the marketing plan when it’s ready. (I know that sounds crazy and indirect, but it’s best if things are funneled through your editor at this point. And we’ll take it more seriously in-house if the request comes from your agent.) Once your agent explains what it all means, you can start thinking of how you can assist with or supplement what the publisher is doing.

This is also when I start seriously considering when I have to put these plans in place. Did I say I’d send an author to a trade show, conference, or festival? Now is when I have to start doing those pitches. If you’re accepted for one of these, you might hear from me asking if you’re available to do it.

6 months before on-sale: This is around the time that I recommend setting up a call with publicity and marketing if you’ve got questions or want to tell them what you’re going to be doing. At Bloomsbury, we work very closely with marketing, so sometimes it’s confusing to figure which of us does what (and, of course, it’s a little bit different at every house). So I find it helpful to have both departments on the call.

5 to 6 months before on-sale: Things are picking up steam. I’m sending ARCs or F&Gs out to reviewers, I’ve been meeting with media and pitching your book, I’m starting to plan tours and events. Lots of things are at the beginning stages.

3 months before on-sale: I’m confirming long lead media (magazines, generally), trying to nail down interviews, features and reviews. I might also still be confirming events. If I’m doing a blog tour, this is when I’m planning who I’ll be asking to be a part of it.

1 to 2 months before on-sale: By now, most events that are happening near the on-sale date should be confirmed. (Though you probably won’t see a complete tour schedule for a while. Just the basics.) Travel is getting booked. The blog tour is getting confirmed. The details are coming together. This is also when we get finished books and begin sending them to media.

At on-sale: This is, of course, the key moment. By now, I’ve been following up with media to confirm reviews and interviews and should know what’s coming. Sometimes reviews will run a few weeks before on-sale, sometimes a few weeks after. (Or occasionally months later, that happens too, but not if we can help it.) But we try to plan for as much to happen right at on-sale, from reviews, to social media posts, to bookstore events. Now is the time to make sure people are talking about the book.

Next month, Lizzy will share her thoughts on swag, bloggers, event planning, and freelance publicists. Got a question about publicists? Leave it in the comments.

LIZZY MASON is the Director of Publicity at Bloomsbury Children’s Books. She previously worked in publicity at Disney, Macmillan Children’s, and Simon & Schuster, and graduated from Manhattan College (which is in the Bronx) with a degree in Journalism and a minor in English. Lizzy dedicates whatever spare time she can to reading and writing YA fiction. She lives with her husband (and his comic collection) and their cat Moxie (who was named after a cat in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials) in Queens, NY. Follow her @LizzyMason21.

Writing as Art and Publishing as Business. I’ve been trying to get my thoughts around this topic for a while now, or rather, I’ve been trying to get my thoughts organized enough to write about it. To be honest, I’ve never had that much difficulty separating my art from business, possibly due to the fact that I was embroiled in the business side of publishing for years before I started seriously pursuing publication myself.

But that’s not entirely true either. I was writing long before I knew publishing was even a thing; as a child, I assumed the Book Fairy brought them to the shelves. The bulk of my formative reading years was spent in the 1990s (I know, y’all, I’m old), before social media and the internet made authors and information about publishing accessible. For me, books have always been something separate from the act of writing; books are objects, things I can hold in my hand, a product. Writing is not.

This ability to separate the novel-as-commodity from writing-as-creation is something all writers struggle with, some more than most. Why is it so hard? Is it because we think of art as something inherently personal, something tied up in our sense of identity? Is it because we think of business as coldly impersonal and soulless? How can we reconcile the two?

Do we need to? I’ve mentioned in several PubCrawl podcast episodes that writing is both a craft and an art: you can learn and develop your craft, but your vision and execution is what makes it art. But what about publishing? Publishing is what turns your work of art into a product. There is an inherent discomfort in assigning monetary value to a work of art, yet that is what publishing does. As an acquiring editor, you are trying to make a case to your backer, the publisher, to put up the money to buy a prospective work. You have to make a case to them that there is room in the current market for a book like the one you want to buy.

And that necessitates a certain amount of ruthlessness. Well, ruthlessness may not be the best word; perhaps callousness is better. The ability to distance the self from something you like and turn it into something you can sell. Because just liking something isn’t enough to sell it. You have to think about how to pitch it, how to package it, how to market it. And that means that some (most) of the books you acquire are not going to get the special treatment because it is a solid piece of work, but nothing special.

Ouch. And yet, there it is: the truth of what it is like to be published for the vast majority of authors out there. What we in the publishing business refer to as “the midlist”. There is nothing wrong with being midlist; in fact, being midlist at a traditional publishing house is a privilege not many writers get to have. Many bestselling and critically celebrated authors began their careers in the midlist: Hilary Mantel before she wrote Wolf Hall, Gillian Flynn before Gone Girl, and yes, even John Green before The Fault in Our Stars. Midlist writers are the workhorses of the publishing world; they produce good, quality, consistent work, and are the bread and butter of traditional publishing.

But despite all this,  the term “midlist” has acquired an unsavory connotation, as though being a midlist title is somehow a bad thing. A saying we have in publishing is Keep your eyes on your own paper, meaning Do not compare your career with someone else’s. Yet it’s hard when you don’t get the fancy marketing package, the promotional dinners, the book tours, etc. that you see other authors getting, particularly those bestselling ones who are active on social media.

Perhaps it’s because I experienced publishing from the business side first that I have an easier time separating JJ the artist from My Book the product. The honest truth is that once you finish a novel and ready it for publication, it behooves you to disengage your feelings from the outcome. Publishing is not a meritocracy; it is not fair. We see it over and over again: the solid, well-written, subtle and nuanced book that gets outperformed by the trendy, less well-written novel. If quality were the only thing that made a book a bestseller, then the lists would look very different.

I don’t know about you, but I find comfort in that. My success, or failure (such as I define it), as an author is not dependent on me. I am not my book. My story, once ready to be published, needs to go out into the world and live its own life, separate from me. When I was on submission, many of writing friends were astounded that I seemed so calm about the whole process (which I wasn’t), but I found a lot of solace in the fact that rejection is not personal. I’ve written every kind of rejection there is; I should know. Those editors who turned me down didn’t know how to sell my book. That’s not a failing—either theirs or mine; it just is.

What about you? How do you navigate the Writing is Art, Publishing is Business divide? Are you as sanguine as I am about the whole thing?

Hello again! Because I’ve been in the planning stages of a new project for a little while now, I thought I’d talk about What Comes Before You Start Writing. I know we’ve all read a million posts from various sources about outlining, but I’d like to talk about something a little different, and that’s giving yourself the tools to outline well, or perhaps work without an outline entirely (if you’re more of a pantser).

I’ve read a lot of books on writing. Everyone has his or her favorite – Stephen King’s On Writing, Save the Cat, The Writer’s Journey, etc – but mine is called the Anatomy of Story by John Truby. And the reason for this is that the book goes into lots of great detail about how to know your characters and your story so well before you ever begin writing, that you will always know what your character would do in a given situation. This is particularly helpful if you do like to outline, but end up straying.

Based on this book, I created a sort of cheat sheet for myself – something I could fill out for each new project without having to go back and re-read the entire book (though I do that from time to time). I’d like to break down this sheet into a short series of posts to keep everything brief and organized, so today I’ll go over creating your premise, with my next post concerning digging into character a bit, and finally a sequence of steps to help you structure the book around your character and your premise.

The first thing any story needs is a premise. A short, concise description of your book in a sentence or two that describes the overarching idea – like a logline. Example: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s premise is, One girl is chosen and imbued with supernatural strength to fight the forces of darkness (yes, I basically stole the opening from season one, but it works!). Or Harry Potter: A young boy finds out he’s a wizard and enrolls in a school for magic, then learns he might be the only one who can stop He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named from taking over the wizarding world.

The TV show and the books hinge on these basic ideas. At the very core of each episode or novel is the idea that this girl must fight evil because it’s her calling as the Chosen One, or that this boy must learn magic not only because he’s a wizard, but so he can stand a chance against the Dark Lord only he has ever faced and lived.

Once you have your premise, you’ll want to think about your story execution at its most basic level. As in, what method you’ll employ to tell the story. Is your story a fantasy? Then you might be using a Journey method, where your characters are sent on a quest to find something/retrieve something/achieve something. Or perhaps your story is a mystery, in which case you’ll be using a Procedural method, and so on. Identifying early on exactly how you plan to execute and design your story will help if you ever get stuck and don’t know where to go from that point.

Another thing I like to consider in depth at this stage is my story world. I write a lot of fantasy, so this is a huge step for me. I can spend months building my story world, putting boundaries around it, and determining exactly where within the vast setting I’ve created the story will actually take place. But this is also important for contemporary stories. If your book is a contemporary YA, what is the main setting? The local high school? The coffee shop where your main character works? The basement living room? Determine all the different spaces your characters will definitely use and the various reasons they will.

The last thing I try to sort out before going into more depth about my character are the possible story challenges that await me with the premise I’ve chosen. If I were writing Buffy, I’d say one of the challenges would be making Buffy relatable. As a super girl with super strength and powers, my job would be to keep her from falling into the trap of the “Strong Female Character” and make her a relatable character who is also strong.

I know some of this might feel “remedial” or basic, but until I started actively writing all of these things down, I didn’t realize just how little I actually thought about these things. I’d reason I had them in my head, and that was good enough.

So now that we’ve outlined some of the basics of our premise, our world, and our challenges, we’ll start thinking about character, and finally the structural steps that will help you build a solid story that you can take anywhere it needs to go.

I hope this is useful! Once we’re able to put all the pieces together, I think you’ll find yourself with a handy tool for future projects!

This week Kelly and JJ get into WRITING MECHANICS, or How to Write a Book. Starting with Structure, they discuss what makes a good story: beginnings, middles, and endings. Also, TV show recommendations.

Show Notes

Beginnings must answer the Who (characters), the What (premise), and the When (setting). Middles must answer the Why (the point of your book). Endings must answer the How (resolution).

• A Plot Chart!
• JJ wrote a series on Beginnings, Middles, and Endings at her blog
• Browse our Beginnings, Middles, Endings, and Structure tags
• Inciting Incidents: A Breakdown by JJ
• Midpoints: A Breakdown by JJ
• A previous podcast episode about beginnings
• Start With a Change, Not Just Action by Jodi Meadows
• Common Problems With Beginnings by Jodi Meadows
• Beginnings: Action and Change by Jodi Meadows
• What happens in the middle? by Jodi Meadows
• The Point When Everything Changes by Susan Dennard
• Crafting an Ending that Sings by Susan Dennard
• Endings by Jodi Meadows
• Outlining on Excel…(yes, that’s right, Excel) by Kat Zhang
• Fiction University by Janice Hardy*
• Helping Writers Become Authors by K.M. Weiland (and podcast!)

Books Reading/Discussed

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
• Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
• Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
• Poison Study, Magic Study, and Fire Study by Maria V. Snyder
• Illuminae by Amie Kaufman* and Jay Kristoff

What We’re Working On

• Kelly is working on her freelance career and credits and her professional website
• JJ is also working on career stuff; she recorded an interview with Jenn Baker of Minorities in Publishing and working on some things for Disability in Kidlit. She’s also working on her newsletter, if you guys want to read part I of “the long shitty synopsis” of Wintersong (as detailed in her origin story post).

Off Menu Recommendations

• Lost
• Battlestar Galactica
• The original Star Wars trilogy
• Dawson’s Creek
• Felicity
• ReBoot
• Gargoyles
• My So-Called Life
• The Tanis podcast
• Ever After
• The live-action Cinderella
• Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella

That’s all for this week! Next week we’ll be covering another segment of our WRITING MECHANICS series: VOICE. Stay tuned!

* PubCrawl alumna

Welcome back to Upcoming Titles, our monthly feature where we highlight books releasing this month. As always, this is by no means a comprehensive list of forthcoming releases, just a compilation of titles we think our readers (and our contributors!) would enjoy. Without further ado:

March 1

• A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro
• Beyond the Red by Ava Jae
• The Black Knife by Jodi Meadows*
• The Girl Who Fell by Shannon M. Parker
• Burning Glass by Kathryn Purdie
• Into the Dim by Janet B. Taylor

March 8

• Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare
• On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis
• Map of Fates by Maggie Hall
• Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton
• The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
• Seven Ways We Lie by Riley Redgate
• A Tyranny of Petticoats: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers & Other Badass Girls edited by Jessica Spotswood (featuring a story by Marie Lu**)
• The Forbidden Orchid by Sharon Biggs Waller
• The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner

March 15

• A Drop of Night by Stefan Bachmann
• Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton

March 22

• Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend by Alan Cumyn
• Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye
• The Hidden Twin by Adi Rule
• Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke

March 29

• A Tangle of Gold by Jaclyn Moriarty
• The Winner’s Kiss by Marie Rutkoski

That’s all for this month! Let us know what you’re looking forward to reading and what titles we might have missed!

* PubCrawl member
** PubCrawl alumna

Writing trilogies is rather straightforward.

That’s not to say it’s easy, because writing generally isn’t. As a rule, writing is difficult. But structurally, trilogies make sense. They have beginning books, middle books, and end books. Of course, generally those books must each have a beginning, middle, and end themselves.

But duologies are a bit different, what with having two books. Each book gets a beginning, middle, and end, but what about the series arc?

An illustration with glitter pens. So sorry for my handwriting.

See how with trilogies, the middle of the middle book is the middle of the series, too? But with duologies, there is no middle book. So where does the middle go???

My friends, it falls in between the books. As if middles aren’t tricky enough, the middle of a duology plants its weird little flag right between the books. (This makes a great place for cliffhangers, hahahahaha, sorry readers I love you.)

Let’s look at what kind of things usually happen in middles. (Conveniently, I have written a blog post about middles before.)

My feeling is that middles should always make things worse, either by building on the already established conflict, or complicating it. In the middle of the middle book, that’s pretty straightforward. But at the climax of the first book? In the beginning of the second book? How do you also make that The Middle?

Carefully, gentle reader. Carefully.

So, in the climax of a duology’s first book, you can middle it up by changing the game to make things worse for the characters. Send in a new character. Reveal that something they thought they knew to be true . . . is actually false. This is the time to do the big turn — and make it really dramatic because this is the climax of a book, too.

In the beginning of the second book, it helps to try to pull back and see the longer arc of the story. What would happen here naturally? It really helped me to stop thinking of it as a beginning — at least for the first draft — and instead think of it as more of the middle. Like, if I’d finished the end of the first book and just kept on going like there was no break. Then, when I had my plot and character and everything down, I looked back to see where I needed reminders about the previous book, and how I could make this middle also a beginning.

So, you may be asking where is the battle to the death between trilogies and duologies. There isn’t one. That was mostly click bait. Trilogies and duologies are both awesome.

What are your thoughts about duologies and trilogies? Do you have any tips for wrapping your head around the long-arc structures?

Hi all, Julie here!

This is the second post in a series. If you want to read them in order, the first post was Building Blocks of a Novel: Word Choice.

Although the central analogy of this series compares writing a novel to constructing a city, forgive me for switching to a different metaphor for a moment. If we think of a novel as a living body, sentences create the heartbeat. Choices a writer makes about sentences can alter that heartbeat—make it speed up, slow down, pound harder, or even skip out of rhythm.

Returning to the city analogy, if words are the bricks, then sentences are the walls. They provide support and structure, but they also control how a building is experienced. High ceilings, narrow passageways, walls of glass and steel–change these things and the whole building changes. In the same way, each sentence makes a difference, and each must be deliberately crafted.

Here are some tips for creating great sentences:

Use sentence length deliberately. Long sentences can force the reader to linger, allowing an image to appear in the reader’s mind. Here’s an example from Truthwitch by Susan Dennard:

“As Iseult det Midenzi wriggled free from her sea-soaked tunic, boots, pants, and finally underclothes, everything hurt. Every peeled-off layer revealed ten new slices from the limestone and barnacles, and each burst of spindrift made her aware of ten more.

This ancient crumbling, lighthouse was effective for hiding, but it was inescapable until the tide went out. For now, the water outside was well above Iseult’s chest, and hopefully that depth—as well as the crashing waves between here and the marshy shoreline—would deter the Bloodwitch from following.”

Long sentences can also carry the narrative along, picking up speed as they go. Here’s an example from The Love That Split the World by Emily Henry:

“The walls and floor are aging now, the light still juddering through its phases like a movie from a projector, until the drywall starts crumbling, spiderwebbed with vines and weeds. From those vines, flowers blossom and wither and grow back and die again. Seasons stretch into years stretch into decades stretch into centuries, all in moments, while I can hear Beau’s breath, make out his edges through the millisecond of dark before another morning comes.”

By contrast, short sentences cut out all the window dressing. They ensure pauses. Short sentences change a rolling pace to a staccato rhythm. This can be effective for focusing attention on the plain meaning of the words. Here’s an example from The Martian by Andy Weir:

“I ache all over. And the shovels I have are made for taking samples, not heavy digging. My back is killing me. I foraged in the medical supplies and found some Vicodin. I took it about ten minutes ago. Should be kicking in soon.”

One thing I love about the above example is how a sentence starts with “And…” rather than continuing from the previous sentence. If those two sentences were joined into one, the resulting long sentence would ruin the effect that the shorter sentences create: a man in pain giving a spare description of his circumstances.

Vary the structure. This is important advice if you have a favorite sentence structure, because you may not realize how frequently you repeat it. Your reader will notice, though, and those wonderful sentences will lose their power. I personally love parenthetical phrases—especially when set off by dashes—but if I use too many on a page the sentences become muddled. Changing up the structure keeps the reader engaged. It combats boredom. Here’s an example of varied sentence structure, from Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard:

“He stares at me, scrutinizing everything from my face to my worn boots. It makes me squirm. After a long moment, he heaves a breath and lets me go. Stunned, I can only stare at him. When a silver coin spins through the air, I barely have the wits to catch it. A tetrarch. A silver tetrarch worth one whole crown. Far more than any of the stolen pennies in my pockets.”

One of the things I like best about the above example is the fact that the last three sentences are fragments. Sometimes it’s hard to ignore that red underline in Word that tells you the sentence isn’t grammatically correct. Here, it’s clear that those sentences are thoughts in the narrator’s head, and we rarely think in complete sentences.

Check for clarity. Sometimes we try so hard to create prose that stands out that we let communication suffer in the name of style. You can create lovely, lyrical, complex sentences, but your writing will suffer if clarity is sacrificed. Parallel structure, consistent tense, and clear pronouns are all the more important when sentences become more intricate. Here’s a made-up example of what I mean:

“The trail was blanketed in snow and shadows, creating a patchwork design that climbed into the mountains. The hikers paused. Their feet ache in their damp boots, memories of so many miles imprinted on their soles. It’s terrifying, Megan thought. Terrifying, yet beautiful. Her freezing toes wiggle inside her boots as they press forward, leaning into the wind.”

This example is loaded with clarity issues. The first line seems to say that the trail was creating a patchwork design, when it’s actually the snow and shadows. There are multiple tense changes, and it’s unclear what Megan finds terrifying yet beautiful. The view, or her aching feet? The last line seems to say that her toes are pressing forward, leaning into the wind.

How’s this instead?

“Snow and shadows blanketed the trail, creating a patchwork design that climbed into the mountains. The hikers paused. Their feet ached in their damp boots, memories of so many miles imprinted on their soles. It’s terrifying, Megan thought, her gaze taking in the view. Terrifying, yet beautiful. Her freezing toes wiggled inside her boots as she and the others pressed forward, leaning into the wind.”

Still not great prose, but the sentences are clearer! They make more sense and better support the story.

What are your thoughts on sentences? Do you have any advice to add? Please share your ideas in the comments!

This week JJ and Kelly talk subrights, or the pocket change of the publishing world! Also, our call for query submissions to be critiqued on our future query critique podcast is still open, so please send them in! Plus, more horror podcast recommendations.

Show Notes

• A subsidiary right is the right to produce or publish a product in different formats based on the original material.
• Primary subrights include:
  • First and second serial
  • Translation
  • Audio
  • Film/TV
  • Dramatic
  • Merchandising/Commercial
  • Graphic Novels
• Secondary subrights include:
  • Library binding
  • Large print
  • Book club
  • Anthologies
• Reach for the sky rights!
  • Theme park
  • Video games
• Granting vs. retaining subrights
  • Retaining subrights:
    • If you retain a subright, you (or your agent) are responsible for the sale/licensing (“exploiting”) of the subright
    • The advantage is that you would receive money from the sale/licensing directly (minus your agent and co-agent’s commission).
  • Granting subrights:
    • If you grant a subright to the publisher, the publisher is responsible for exploiting those rights.
    • You and the publisher will split the proceeds from the sale/licensing (generally 50/50, but these splits can be negotiated)
    • The advantage of granting subrights is that money from the sale/licensing go against your advance, so you would earn out your advance faster and receive royalties on your book sooner

Real Life Example of Retaining Subrights

• During the process of negotiation, your agent sells North American rights only for an advance of $10,000.
• You make a foreign sale to a German publisher for $10,000.
• The foreign co-agent takes 10%, your agent takes 10%, leaving you with $8000 to paid to you directly.

Advantage: You get $18,000 in hand.

Real Life Example of Granting Subrights

• Let’s say during the process of negotiation, you granted more subrights to the publisher for more advance money, so you sold World rights for an advance of $15,000.
• The publisher makes a foreign sale to a German publisher for $10,000.
• Because the split is 50/50, your publisher makes $5000, and you make $5000. The publisher applies this money against your advance, so now you need to sell $10,000 worth of royalties in order to start seeing royalty checks.

Advantage: You get $15,000 in hand, but will earn out faster.

• PRO TIP: If you do grant subrights to the publisher, make sure there is language in your contract to ensure that these rights would revert back to you within a certain timeframe, should they go unexploited.
• PRO TIP: Make sure you also have language that only grants explicitly listed rights to the publisher, e.g. “Any right not explicitly granted herein is retained by the author.” Also, make sure you excise “whether now known or hereafter devised”.

What We’re Reading/Books Discussed

• Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs
• The Glass Sentence by S. E. Grove
• The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff
• A Break with Charity by Ann Rinaldi
• The Burning Sky, The Perilous Sea, and The Immortal Heights by Sherry Thomas
• The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle
• Imaginary Girls, The Walls Around Us, and 17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma
• Bone Gap by Laura Ruby
• The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig
• Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

What We’re Working On

• Kelly is still working on her YA, and is also co-writing a MG with her friend.
• JJ has seen cover concepts for Wintersong and is excited to share them with you in the future! She is still working on mental health, and is working on her Beauty and the Beast retelling VERY SLOWLY. She is also trying to write short fiction, to put more writing tools in her arsenal.

Off Menu Recommendations

• Kelly went to see the Newsies musical on tour (musical soundtrack and of course, the movie!)
• JJ went to see Deadpool this past weekend
• Cooked by Michael Pollan
• The West Wing
• The X-Files
• The Black Tapes podcast
• Tanis podcast

That’s all for this week! Next week we’ll be starting a WRITING MECHANICS series, where we troubleshoot how to write a novel. First up: STRUCTURE.