Guest Post: Impress Your Agents With Your Branding

Cover for Patricia Caviglia’s book Masks

Wednesday’s post is by Pat Caviglia,  She’s participating in the 2013 Wordcount Blogathon, which is a post every day single in June.  Having just done the A to Z Challenge, I know how much work that is!  She also has the novella Masks out on Amazon for your viewing pleasure.  Pat is part of the We Are Not Alone group that I’m in and just went to a writer’s conference, too!

Onto the post!

–

At the CanWrite! 2013 Conference, I met literary agent Sam Hiyate. Friend and indie author of the Bridge Club and The Promise of Provence, Patricia Sands had a pitch session with him. While he hadn’t read her novels yet, he was impressed with her. The reason? Her branding and marketing efforts. Pat tweets regularly. She blogs twice a week and has integrated her passion for southern France and photography into it. Her blog also features fellow writers and women who are changing the world. Furthermore, she belongs to two writers associations and is a program coordinator for one of them. She supports the writing community and networks by regularly attending readings and writers events across the city. She’s also invested in advertising her novels and invested her time as a guest speaker. She’s knocked on several indie bookstore doors and talked them into taking her books on consignment.  And she’s paired up with author, professor and businesswoman Susan Sommers to speak on women’s issues. Whew! Are you out of breath yet?

Had she shown up to her pitch session with a 400 page novel printed on 8 X 11 paper, he might have considered reading it because her stories are interesting, and she’s a good writer, a genuine person and an energetic and energizing woman. Instead, she whipped out her two self-published beautiful looking novels and listed all that she’s done so far to promote them. This got his attention. Pat is a writer who understands that there’s more to publishing than writing.

So consider what you are ready and willing to do beyond writing, make a list and do it.

 

A Pantser’s Look at Story Physics

A cool psychics picture. Of course, what I know about physics I could put on a postage stamp.  A similar image appears in Story Physics.

Larry Brooks just came out with a sequel Story Engineering, called Story Physics.  SE was a controversial book when it came to pantsers, and I’ll admit I did not like it at all:

1. It was very sarcastic toward pantsers.  I felt like my methods were being sneered at because I didn’t outline.
2. It did so much marketing I was ready to throw the book against a wall.  I felt it was a giant infomercial.

This book:

Thankfully, the marketing is toned down.  It is also not quite as nasty to pantsers, but it still suffers from not getting what pantsers are.  The author admits in the book that he’s gotten some “venom” on the pantsers vs. outliners side.

Yup.  I get why.

The book is a in-depth look at basic elements of writing a story using the techniques for Story Engineering.  This includes a screenwriting technique for plot points and beats.  The writing tends toward lecturing rather than teaching — there’s a lot of “writers do this wrong” that becomes annoying.

In my opinion, Story Physics is nothing new and doesn’t stand out except for the problem with pantsers.

Story Physics tries to make it out that the underlying techniques are the same for both, and then gives outlining techniques.  If I tried to write to the book’s plot points and beat techniques, I would end up writing to fit the plot points.  I’d have structure like the book proclaims, but a poorly written, mechanical story that would never get published.

There’s a lack of understanding about how pantsers work. I’ve seen this with outliners.  Some can’t comprehend how pantsers can produce anything.  Writing without an outline is very alien to them, and they try to make out that the pantser must be doing some form of it (stated in the book) and just not calling it an outline.  The book further mentions that no one can come up with a book like Dan Brown’s by pantsing and expresses disbelief at anyone being able to produce a coherent book without knowing where it’s going.

The result is a book that’s more about marketing a system than respecting that writers can have different approaches to their process.

 

Week 6: 10 Weeks of 10 Stories

Staff Sgt. Alicia Anderson (Freeman) from Queens, N.Y., is pinned with an Army Commendation Medal by the Joint Multinational Readiness Center Command Sgt. Maj. Frank Graham.  Photo courtesy U.S. Army.

Story #6 is done and away!

After I hit the halfway milestone, I had this little voice saying:

“You’ve done five.  That’s pretty good.  You can stop now.” 

So I really did have to write the story, because I had committed to doing it.  It’s easy to find something else to do than write something.

It probably didn’t help also that I was fried over the weekend from the writer’s conference.  It’s hard being an introvert and being already so many people all day long.  I tried to get breaks, but not enough to recharge effectively.  Plus I got two rejections — same story.  And I’m still working on the novel and nearing the halfway mark.  Then there were the two major storms that rolled through.

Yup.

This story was tough to write though. It was for a military anthology from a prestigious press.  The only problem was that they didn’t pay, which irked me.

They want to support the soldiers, but they don’t pay for the writing?! 

However, the majority of the calls are like that, and I do want to get visibility in this area.  I doubt if very many women are writing for this, except for the wives, and all the stories all probably defaulting to male soldiers.

The women’s voices need to be heard, too.

But I kept it to flash fiction, because I wasn’t going to write a 5,000 word story for free.  The story took about 30 minutes to write and was 500 words, and I hated it.  I kept feeling like something was wrong with it, though I couldn’t pin down why.

I’m guessing it was simply because I went out of my comfort zone with it, and quite a bit.  It’s easier for me to plop soldiers in a fantasy because the focus on is on the fantasy elements and being a soldier is part of that story.  This one put a magnifying glass on a single moment of being a real soldier in a real place.

So I ignored those little voices saying it wasn’t good and sent it out.

See also:

• Week 5
• Week 4
• Week 3
• Week 2
• Week 1

 

Cowbells at the writer’s conference

This is what a pitch session looks like

 

I went to the Books Alive! In Bethesda, MD, this weekend (formerly, the American Independent Writers Conference).  In this case, I wasn’t attending the conference, but running the agent pitch session all day.  This is what the pitch session looked like:

I run it like a drill sergeant (though I was never one in the army).  We stay on time.  Period.  The authors had eight minutes, and I called a two minute warning for the agents, and then time.   One of the volunteers brought a cow bell I could ring when time was up.  Sometimes I said “Moo” to the agents (yes, I really did).

To prove it, here’s the photo …

Moo!

 

In keeping with cows, I had my Moo cards with me, in my Arc planner.  I just had the planner open on the table with all the pretty colors on the cards (did you expect anything else).  That caught the eye of two agents, and they’d never even heard of Moo cards.  So I was happily giving away cards as examples.  Never know …

Pitch session volunteers Emory Hackman and me with Mike Causey

 

 

 

Links: What Women in the Military Have Done

Lt. Janis Harrington, a helicopter instructor pilot with Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron Two (HSC-2), has been selected as the Navy’s Woman of the Year honoree for the USO of Metropolitan New York. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ernest R. Scott/Released). In case you’re wondering why I headed over to the Navy, the Army offers very few photos of women.

With all the news about sexual harassment and assaults in the military, I thought I would do a post about some of the things women have done in the military.  Honestly, we need something more than just the negative stuff.

Did you know women were in the Civil War?  They had to pretend they were men, of course.  One of the things that really surprised me was the reason a lot of them did it: Money!

Women’s Auxiliary Corps, 1942.   Some great photos here.  Check out the gas masks they had to wear.

Women can now be tank mechanics, a job previously closed.  We had five graduate from school last week.

Women on the business end of war.  This features a big group of diverse stories about women on the battlefield.  I was impressed because it included the enlisted.  Though the enlisted make up the bulk of all the services, people tend to only think about officers.

Also see these military posts:

• 5 Military Things About Me
• Getting shot at on Paragon Trail
• The League of Extraordinary Women Veterans

 

Blog Hop: About the novel I’m working on

There are ants in my story. It’s not a good thing.

 

This one’s Day Al-Mohamed‘s fault.  She tagged me with WIP Meme, so here goes:

1.  What is the working title of your next book?

Miasma

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

Believe it or not, a fan fiction story.  I dabbled briefly in fan fiction, but never did much with it because it was too hard staying to cannon.  The story itself evolved into something different, but the main character’s name is the same.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Contemporary fantasy/action-adventure thriller

4. What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

That would be hard.  My story is set in an alternate world of Hawaii, so all the characters are Hawaiian.  I think I can count the number of Asian actors on one hand, and I have more characters than that.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

Good prevails because a determined outcast sees how fear of future change can corrupt and stands up to it.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’ve gone back and forth on this (see #8).  I had weighed in and thought I could do the self-publishing route.  But I’ve watched the writers from Holly Lisle’s class who jumped on this, and my fellow WANA-mates, and it’s evident it’s been hard to get sales.  Even the ones who are having success are doing it through non-fiction or because they’ve already had a long publishing history.  So I’m leaning more toward agented or small press.

7. How long did/will it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

The first draft was done in 30 days.  Of course, we don’t discuss the revision …

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

This is one of the reasons I’ve gone back and forth.  I read in Publishers Weekly that your story has to be fresh and different and yet, the same.  I’ve always viewed my stories as fresh and different, but not the same.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I had previously written a thriller with a coauthor.  It was in submission to agents when the relationship blew apart very messily.   I had to walk away to protect myself and my creativity.  But when I walked away, I also knew I had to get onto another novel.  I trolled around a bit, trying out this idea and that idea.  Then it hit me that I had this old fan fiction idea I could use, and this story was born.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

If you want women characters, I have lots of women characters, and none of them wear chain mail bikinis, act like a vapor head, act snarky, or do any garage door opening (a euphemism from the critique group involving the word “entered”).  They are simply characters who happen to be women, and one of them is a soldier.

Janice Heck, Rabia Gale, maybe you want to give this a try?  Of course, anyone else can jump in.

 

A Wordle from the Last Scene I Wrote

This is post is part of a prompt from the WANA group:

Share a wordle of something (www.wordle.net), maybe your own blog ~ Margaret Miller – Idea poached from Suzanne Stengl

I thought I’d take the wordle not from my blog, but from my last scene.  In the scene, the main character almost gets decapitated by a surfboard powered by magic.

Wordle from my last scene

I’ll be going to a local writer’s conference this weekend (volunteer work only; I’m not attending any workshops).  What are you doing this weekend?

And other posts from the WANA folks:

• Cora Ramos
• Janice Heck
• Liv Rancourt
• Ellen Gregory
• Kim Griffin