Promotional Mojo

I would LOVE to tell you stories about the lovely, amazing serendipitous promotional things that have happened to me - save I'm not entirely sure I promoted much of anything except that I got to flail around doing my 'FANGIRL' dance. See. Just before my first book came out, one of my favorite authors in the world, Nalini Singh, asked me to guest blog for her. After I'd stared at her name in my in-box and tried not to pass out, I jumped at the chance. She and her readers both were so gracious and kind to me. I'd really like to be in a position to return the favor some day. In case the Gods are listening.

I've done blog tours since, but maybe it is the curse of the pathetically geeky and vaguely socially awkward. Being charming in blog posts (some people will say 'ever') is maybe not my strength. I'm also hampered by the fact that I find it dreadfully difficult to track any kind of meaningful result back to a blog tour. In my search for promotional mojo that doesn't annoy an entire Twitterverse full of people, I've had a marketing folks tell me that material THINGS were the only way to go from a promotional standpoint. I've had other people laugh and say, "Oh, honey. Don't waste your time or money on things! It's all about (insert social media shtick du jour)." I've been told to be my geek-tastic self. I've been told to forget that in favor of building a platform based on things I don't do particularly well - interacting with people like the whole of the internet might not be looking on, judging me while I'm talking without the safety-net of a script. (Yes, some of us became actors because we're desperate to be told the right things to say when. We're super invested in always knowing our lines.)

I have had two things happen that I didn't consider promotions at the time, but which both brought Twitter followers out of the woodwork: Anthologies. The first was Tales from the SFR Brigade. The second was Thunder on the Battlefield: Sword. Note that I can't say I saw any boost to book sales from either. The only bumps I noticed were to the number of people willing to hang with me on Twitter, but you know? I'll take it because I've since gotten to talk with a few of those people and discovered they're geeks, too. My tribe. 

So maybe the advice that your best promotional tool is your next book really has some merit. Which means I should get back to that.

Fight Scene: Refuge of Last Resort

Fights are like monologues. They're a refuge of last resort, reserved for moments of extremity, for when a character has been backed into a corner and there is no other option. Precious few people who aren't psychotic or hopped up on illegal substances want to walk face first into a fight for no reason.

Therefore, by the time a fight scene happens, the talking should, to my mind, be over. UNLESS. Words are one of the weapons. Talking rather than acting is generally seen as a feminine trait. Acting without talking is generally seen as a masculine trait. Neither is right. Neither is wrong. They are simply tools a writer can pick up and use to heighten the conflict in a fight scene. Because in no way should a fight be about might making right. Sure, it does happen that sometimes someone shoots at you and all you can do is shoot back. But if you're writing a fight scene, you have the option to make it do double duty.

Most fights are masses of confusion, terror and noise. A police officer with the highest marksman ranking his department awarded once told me that the winner of most gun battles is decided by who runs out of bullets first - not who hits someone or something - he who runs out of bullets, loses. Reality? Maybe, certainly not good for a sense of drama though, is it?

Maybe that's why I prefer other weapons. This short snippet of a fight scene is from a short story called Emissary. It appeared in the anthology Thunder on the Battlefield: Sword

My heroine has been sent to kill a wizard who usurped his brother's throne. He's using the captain of the guard as his bodyguard.


         “Aukenhet, you have destroyed temples, murdered the priests, and defiled the sacred precincts. Your actions offend the Gods.”
          His beady black eyes glittered at me.
          I fingered my mother’s gift to me, the dagger she’d given into a merchant’s keeping before she’d died. Whether the Dagger of Heaven knew by some means that I stood before the man I’d been sent to destroy, I could not know, but strength and resolve surged into me when my left hand closed on the hilt.
          “You’ve been sent to rectify the situation?” he sneered.
          “By any means necessary,” I confirmed.
          “Sekhmet has turned you from a warrior into nothing more than a common assassin?” He clicked his tongue. “Pity. You see, Kol defends my life with his own. Kol. Kill her.”
         Kol said nothing. Instead, he circled outside of my shorter reach, watching me counter him.

          Most fighters telegraphed their intent – attack or retreat – well before executing the move. Well trained warriors had learned to read their opponent’s body language like a scribe reading a papyrus scroll.

          I knew he watched me move, hoping to learn to read me. I knew this because I sought the same information from him and shivered when a thread of misgiving wrapped a noose around my heart.
          I couldn’t read him.
          Eburi’s growl echoed through the throne room, bouncing back upon itself until I felt as if my skull rattled with it.
          “He is not our prey,” I told her.
          Aukenhet’s champion imagined I’d left him an opening while I spoke to Eburi.
          He darted in, aiming a swift cut at my sword arm.
          I didn’t bother parrying, since I suspected he’d use any contact of our blades to run up on me and lock us body to body. With his greater weight and strength, if I let him gain that advantage, I’d be dead in an instant. So I sprang out of the way, a simple leap, conserving energy.
          Poised on the edge of the dais, Aukenhet muttered. His fingers twitched.
          Eburi hissed.
          Something cold and slimy slithered up my right leg, rooting me to the floor. When I glanced down, I saw nothing. Panic tightened barbed bands around my chest. In its sheath against my side, the Dagger of Heaven warmed.
        The scent of bodies rotting in the sun wafted past, making my eyes water. The chill wrapped around my leg vanished. I could move unhindered.
          Kol’s eyes narrowed.
          Did he know Aukenhet had tried and failed to bespell me? Did he care?
          He opened his guard slightly.
          Not quite taunting. A goad, maybe.
          No matter. I’d take his dare. I dove into a shoulder roll that brought me within striking distance. For a moment, as I let the momentum of the roll bring me to my feet, I caught the startled look in his face. His lips parted and I heard the rush of air sucked into his lungs as I aimed my blade at his ribs.
          Kol backpedaled hard and barely brought his sword across his body in time to deflect me.
          That he managed to parry at all spoke of agility and strength that could all too easily best me. Why then did my heart sing at the prospect of having found so worthy an opponent?

 

How to Write a Mainstream Success - or Not

Have to throw out one more plug for the Thunder on the Battlefield: Sword & Sorcery volumes! Sister Whore Marcella has a story in Sword and I have one in Sorcery. Marcella did an amusing post on Friday comparing us to Donny and Marie Osmond. The two-volume anthology was edited by former Whore James R. Tuck and is available in digital as below. Print editions should follow soon.

Thunder on the Battlefield: Sword Kindle version Nook version
Thunder on the Battlefield: Sorcery Kindle version Nook version 

Onward!

It's a brand-new week here in the bordello. The Whores are sitting around in various level of dishabille, recovering from all that outrageous marketing last week, clutching their coffees and reading to discuss this week's topic: What makes a story 'too quirky' vs a mainstream hit?

Ah, the elusive mainstream hit. 

Who wouldn't love to have one? A mainstream hit can make a writer's career - or very nearly so - both with income and fame. A good example of the latter, when Robert Galbraith was outed as being the pen name of J.K. Rowling, "on Amazon.com, sales soared more than 507,000%." Note that that is a comma, not a period. Not 507%, but 507 THOUSAND percent, on name recognition alone.

Every time there's a phenom, like Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight or Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, or even break-out hits from authors who unexpectedly become all the rage, it's easy to gaze upon their blazing success and blow out a little sigh of envy. Sometimes we might even comment to friends and family, wow, I'd love to have a hit like that.

But, would we?

Sure - on our own terms. We'd love for something we wrote and loved and labored over to hit it big. But there are other, sometimes hidden, costs.

Let's look at a couple of examples.

In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins set up a fascinating post-apocalyptic world. The book can be read as a savvy allegory for much of our current political climate, which is partly why it's so effective. Collins sets up rules about how the tribute system works, how the lottery draws two contestants from each district to fight in the games and then how the survivor/winner of the games can bring special benefits to their home district. These world-building rules are important, because they drive almost all of the motivation in the book. This system, and how everyone deals with it, is what the story is about. The book was a hit and she wrote two more. Because... of course you write two more! But in book 2, Catching Fire, and this could be a spoiler, so take note, the book opens with all the rules being thrown away. How do you write a sequel when the heroine is out of peril and she's won a permanent victory, after all? By changing the world rules - and making it so she has to go back and fight again.

Now, clearly, a lot of readers didn't mind this. The trilogy went on to rule the bestseller lists, more movies are coming. Much love and praise. But that beginning to the sequel offended me so much that I stopped reading right there. To me there are few greater sins a storyteller can make than violating the rules of their own world, especially just to preserve success.

And this may be a problem for me - because that's a hidden cost I would be unlikely to pay.

Another good example is Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series, which the greater non-reading public knows as the HBO True Blood series. The final book in that series, #13, just released in May. A couple of things happened there. One, Harris continued to write the books long after she felt "done" with them. She came out and said so. This came as no surprise to all the readers who remarked on how the quality had fallen off over time. I read up through book 6, myself, before I grew tired of it. So, why did Harris keep writing when she didn't want to? That kind of money is hard to walk away from. When it comes to weighing artistic considerations against millions of dollars - how would we each decide?

Further to her story, when the final book released this spring, fans were so unhappy with the conclusion to Sookie's story that Harris received death threats. Literally. Quite a bit of the anger stemmed from strong feelings about the characters as portrayed in the TV series, something that I wondered if Harris took into account. When a story becomes that much a part of popular culture, in many ways the author ceases to exclusively own it.

Another hidden cost.

Yesterday, in the monthly meeting of my local chapter of RWA, the Land of Enchantment Romance Authors (LERA), we got into an extended discussion of self-publishing versus traditional publishing. One multi-published (traditional publishing) author with a 20-year career said that she writes the books she does in order to target commercial success. The self-published books that do tremendously well tend to be tailored this way, to be mainstream hits. She noted that she has all kinds of quirky ideas for books that she's never written, because she knows they're too quirky - and they wouldn't sell well as self-published either. But, if she did self-publish, it would be for the joy of writing that quirky story and she wouldn't care how well it sold.

I'm not sure it's fair to put artistic choices on one of the scale and commercial success on the other. I do think it's possible to follow one's own creative demands and still be successful. In fact, I think it could be argued that every one of my examples started out that way. None of those authors likely anticipated the kind of success they'd eventually enjoy.

It's those later choices that get thorny.

I'd be willing to tackle them. ;-)