Learning from Reviews: Is It Possible?

I've had books published since 2005 and have been getting reviews all that time. Not as many as most authors, but enough that I've seen the ups and downs of that aspect of the industry. Here is a compilation of what I have learned from reviews and reader responses, both for my books and other people's books:

1) Don't put a secondary plot in your erotic romance. The focus should be on the couple's relationship and sexxoring.

2) Don't forget to put a secondary plot in your erotic romance that is outside the bedroom. If the focus is only on the sexxoring, the book and characters can come across as shallow and self-centered.

3) Don't write one dimensional villains who exist only to be evil toward the protagonists.

4) Don't focus on your villains so much that the protagonists become bland by comparison. The villian cannot be the most interesting part of the book or it's not a romance.

5) Don't forget to do your research and include it in the book. And be sure to research everything, like whether or not the story takes place in a state where people are allowed to pump their own gas. No details can be left unturned. Otherwise readers will know you don't care about providing a quality product.

6) Don't overwhelm your readers with your research. Otherwise readers will put your book down because it is boring and infodumpy.

7) Don't write any more books about vampires and werewolves...please! They are overdone, and readers long for something new.

8) Please write more books about vampires and werewolves. They are fascinating, and readers long for more exciting stories about character types they love.

9) Don't include too much profanity in your fiction. While it may be accurate in your chosen setting or time period, it gets old, fast, and readers would rather see a varied vocabulary.

10) Don't exclude profanity from your fiction if you're writing characters who would naturally curse. Otherwise it comes off as unrealistic and readers will know you didn't do the research (see #5).

11) Don't write your female characters as passive, childlike or TSTL, and OMG don't describe their hands as "tiny". It's 2012. Females can be...anything. They can be proactive and strong. Probably they can even pee while standing up AND hit the bowl if they work really hard at it. (But, yanno, don't describe THAT.)

12) Don't let your kick-ass female protagonist overshadow your male protagonist(s) or he will come across as weak. If she is strong, he must show that he is strong enough for (or, yanno, stronger than) her or he is not sexy.

13) Don't expound on certain details, like food and drink items. Sure, it's delicious, but that's not what the book is about, is it? Unless you're writing a cookbook.

14) Don't forget to leave in certain details, like the deliciousness of food and drink items. It's realistic, it enhances character POV and really brings a reader into a story world.

15) Don't write any more secret baby plots. It's an irresponsible way for characters to behave.

16) Don't forget to write more secret baby plots. Readers love them; they're so heart-wrenching.

17) Don't include "issues" in romance novels. That isn't why readers like to read romance.

18) Don't forget to include some serious content, even "issues", in some romance novels. There's no reason they can't be about realistic aspects of life and people surviving it and fighting for what they believe.

19) Don't make the female character overweight or plain while the male character is totally gorgeous. That is not believable. Like marries like.

20) Don't make the female character totally gorgeous. Many readers find it hard to relate to her, especially if she doesn't know she's gorgeous ("mouth too wide for beauty"..."bosom too lush for the current fashion"). Or if does know she's gorgeous, because then she's a bitch. I forget which -- maybe both. However, the male character needs to be quite attractive. Otherwise the reader can't fall in love with him too.

21) Don't write in first person. So sick of that!

22) Don't write everything in third person. Books in first person are a great, refreshing change.

23) Don't include epilogues. If it's worth sharing, it goes in the body of the story, and an epilogue is lazy.

24) Don't forget epilogues. Readers love to drop in on the characters down the road, however briefly. It's like an unexpected gift after a story is over.

25) Don't make fun of readers and reviewers, not even with your tongue in your cheek.

Oopsie!

***

I defied item #7 this month because I released a book about werewolves and witches. It's called Pack and Coven, in which the hairy, but not too hairy, hero and the witchy, but not bitchy, heroine have quite the adventure. I'm also running a contest for a $25 gift card on my blog until February 29. All you have to do to enter is violate item #13 and tell me about the deliciousness of some tea-room style food you'd like to eat. http://blog.jodywallace.com/2012/02/pack-and-coven-release-and-contest.html

Jody Wallace
When is an alpha not an alph-ass?
Pack and Coven: http://www.jodywallace.com

PS: I confess. It's possible I took a lot of this from this fun, 4-year thread in the Amazon forums and not actually from reviews! http://www.amazon.com/forum/romance?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=FxM42D5QN2YZ1D&cdThread=Tx1U9IFOLVQRGXV  So if you like to talk to other readers about your reading preferences -- and you promise not to self promote, should you happen to be a writer in your secret life -- you may like that forum! But don't tell them I sent you, considering what I did re: item #25.

My First Disser

Earlier in December, my sister and I were finishing some holiday shopping at Big Bookstore Which Shall Not Be Named (BB), and I placed my loot on the counter. Part of the loot were a few books that pinpointed the buyer as a writer, so the 20-something cashier asked, "Who is the writer?"

"I am," I said. "I write romances."

The cashier got a pained look and said she wrote fantasy but she'd recently cashed in. I raised my eyebrows in inquiry, since I enjoy learning how writers can get cash (legitimately). She confessed she'd started writing one of those fantasy...romances, pronounced with much distaste.

"I hate romances," she said, "but they sell so well!"

My sister looked at me, and I looked at my sister. I'm nonconfrontational in the extreme, but I was high on endorphins from bookshopping for an hour. I commented in a conversational fashion, "Why would you say rude things about romance when I just told you I write in that genre?"

The cashier reddened and tried to explain. They'd had a popular paranormal romance author in the store recently, and she'd sampled a few of the author's stories to see what the fuss was all about. She liked a few but the writing in some, to her surprise, was "so bad". She made several derogatory comments about compromising your writing for the sake of sex scenes and how that obviously had to be the only attraction of this author's work.

Everything she said dug the hole deeper. Aside from online, where trolls roam free, I'd never encountered somebody who took open potshots against the romance genre, especially after being told I write or read it. I didn't want to get into the philisophical debate with her about why people feel so free to insult romance (by women, for women) when I'm sure they wouldn't insult, say, literary fiction. I could tell I wasn't going to get through, but I was stuck there with her checking out my many purchases, and she was still talking.

Since she'd mentioned "cash", I interrupted her rant to explain some cold, hard publishing facts. A writer who wants to sell a book has to strike a balance between complete self-indulgence (writing whatever you want) and marketability. Commercial success shouldn't be our only goal as authors, but figuring out how to share the stories in our head with people who don't live in our head is indeed part of the job. It's not compromise--it's communication.

I know it's routine in certain segments of the population to deride what the rest of the world enjoys. If it has mass appeal, it simply has to be terrible since the "common man" has poor taste. This, however, ignores what authors who catch the public's interest have managed to do.

No matter what you're writing, the ability to please a wide variety of readers is a rare and precious talent. The lack of it -- the lack of a gift for storytelling -- is what prevents people from fulfilling those disdainful "I can do better" vows. That, and it's a hell of a lot harder to write a book than people think it is.

If the author who vowed "I can do better" manages to complete a manuscript and sell it to a reputable publisher, I feel sorry for her, having to compromise her vaulted literary standards in order to eke out a living. Isn't that sad? Such a tragic tale of evil commercialism versus great art. Perhaps that should be the theme of that particular writer/cashier's next manuscript.

Good luck selling it.

My parting shot to the young woman was that you can't call it cashing in unless you actually get cash. Which she had not, so she needed a new insult.

Jody W.
So much cyberspace, so little time!
www.jodywallace.com / www.elliemarvel.com

The Comfort of the Familiar -- Connected Stories and Sequels

Series and connected works have been with us almost as long as stories have been with us. From Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Nancy Drew, from various yarns that take place in the realm of King Arthur to any number of running series being published today, both authors and readers alike enjoy revisiting their fictional creations and worlds. Sometimes when you scan the shelves, it can feel like the true stand-alone novel is an exotic creature, shy, elusive and rarely spotted in the wild. Granted, if you venture outside the genre fiction area into literary fiction, you'll encounter more of these solitary beasts, but even in the dusty halls of lit fic you'll find books that recall one another. Alice Walker's novel The Secret of Joy chronicled the lives of some of the descendents of The Color Purple, as a more famous example, and then there are Updike with his rabbits and Roth and his Zuckerman novels. Even when novels aren't strictly connected, many authors re-use familiar or favorite settings, like Anne Tyler and Baltimore, Maryland, or Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha County.

Wikipedia claims these types of tale are particularly popular in science fiction and fantasy novels "because of the artistic importance of complex ideas and the commercial importance of brand names." I've heard writers say they did so much work developing a speculative setting that they hate to discard it after one book. Readers, too, find comfort in the familiar settings and characters while indulging in the human need to know "and then what happened?".

There are many different connections that can exist within the body of an author's work. The first type would be trilogies or multi-ogies (!) like the Lord of the Rings or the Wheel of Time, where none of the books stand alone but create a massive story involving many characters and plots headed towards a single conclusion. The books themselves may not contain set or even partial dénouements but instead end on cliffhangers or situations where the narrative is obviously "to be continued".

I see the second type as series like Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden novels, where the narratives in each book are consecutive but involve the same set of characters. In most cases, the book is narrated by the same individual. Each novel stands alone, though in most cases a reader's enjoyment can be enhanced if he or she begins at the beginning.

There is a subset of this type currently very popular in urban fantasy. Let's call it 2B. Each novel set in the specific universe is part of a greater narrative, but unlike novels in type 1, the stories in the books have their own arcs -- satisfying beginnings, middles and ends. Yet while you read the book you are conscious of the fact there is a greater thread that will be continued in the next story and a seemingly premeditated conclusion the author is headed towards--eventually. A great example would be Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson novels.

Third type. More complicated are connected works like Sherrilyn Kenyon's various Hunter tales. These books are set ostensibly in the same universe, so to speak, and contain references to and characters from other novels. If there are any speculative elements, they remain consistent from book to book. However, each book tells the story of a unique character or couple while drawing upon and adding to the worldbuilding and history of the "universe" as a whole. Series of this ilk can be as intertwined as Kenyon or Ward's urban fantasy romances (type 3A) or as discrete as Susan Grant's science fiction romances (type 3B).

Adding to the jumble are shared worlds, type four, where different authors put their heads together and write stories either set in the same universe or that continue one another's overarching plot threads. Examples I can think of right off the top of my head of straight shared world would be the Sanctuary stories from the fantasy genre (Type 4A), and of overarching plot would be Dorchester's Crimson City and 2176 novels (Type 4B). Some of the authors here at Beyond the Veil created an anthology that's a mishmash of the two called DunVegas, and it's free if you like Las Vegas, paranormal romances, and lots of hot sex! I'd say it falls more under 4A than 4B, however.

I myself just got a contract from Samhain for a novella entitled "Liam's Gold" set in the same world as my upcoming novel "Survival of the Fairest". While my novel, due out in July, takes on fairies, magic and flesh-eating gnomes from the "Realm" of my imagination, the novella's subject is a leprechaun who also originates from the Realm but dwells in humanspace for the duration of the story. These works would fall under the 3B category.

To writers -- what stories have you written that would fall under one of these categories? Any other categories to add? And to readers (which is all of us) -- tell us why you love connected stories!

Jody W.
A SPELL FOR SUSANNAH--Available now from Samhain Publishing
http://www.jodywallace.com/ * http://meankittybox.blogspot.com/

Happy Thanksgiving

Yes, it is a day early, but since this is my day to blog and it is the day before Thanksgiving, I'd like to talk about what I'm thankful for. Of course, there's my family, my job, and my life. But, I'd like to thank the readers and reviewers. Your feedback goes a long way in making my smile brighter and making me want to keep writing just because you've let me know you like my stories. Believe me, you've helped me through some tough times, and I wanted to let you know that you do make a difference.

I know it seems like it doesn't sometimes, but you do. Whether you're a reviewer for a website, or just a reader with an opinion, every word, good or bad, matters. It, as much as money, is bread and butter, it helps direct me, shows me where I might have strayed and maybe leads me back to where I need to be. So..


Happy Thanksgiving to all of you out there.


Jenna