Writer’s Corner episode three is out! Let’s discuss some planning things today.
Everything You Need to Know About Planning Your Novel – it’s a huge and excessive list, but it has lots of valid points.
Be sure that you have an ample backstory worked out, and a good projection of where you intend to take this person.
This is the character that will be dragging your reader by their hand through your book, so you want them to have impact. Can the reader easily relate to them? Here are ten things a great character needs.
My biggest problem is protagonists. Make sure you know what are they doing and why. And who exactly is the protagonist in your story.
How To Correct Your Self Publishing Mistakes – this article describes issues that will happen after you’ve gone the self-publishing route.
Prologues, prefaces, forewords, introductions, credits or anything else that may be between your book title and the start of the first chapter all steal space from your online preview reads. In other words, a potential reader gets a lot of irrelevant text to read, and may not even get to read any part of your first chapter. Remove the clutter, and send it to the back of the book to make sure your potential book buyers can get to read a good chunk of your first chapter.
Don’t forget that online bookstores usually allow readers to read the first few chapters. Those chapters must be absolutely the best and hook up the readers into buying the whole book. But don’t stop there, if your book isn’t as good as the first two chapters, your readers will drop it and will never come back. Make sure they have a reason to remember your name.
How To Title Your Book – I was pointed at this post recently in a scribophile discussion group.
First, make sure you know the genre of your book, and identify what kind of feeling or tone you want to convey with the title. Write it down. This is important, as I’ve seen humorous books with dead-serious titles, contemporary books whose titles say “historical romance,” novels that sound like self-help books… you get the picture. Be clear on what your title needs to instantly communicate.
Choosing a good title is half of the deal (another one is a proper cover). That’s what people will see first when they look at your book.
This is it for the week, see you in December! By that time I hope to fix the readability of my blog and start a mailing list for Writer’s Corner. As usual, if you have any comments or notes, drop me a note here or on Facebook.
You can follow my page on Facebook or use this RSS feed for the new Writer’s Corner episodes.
