Ask Dr. Pretentious

That IS a beautiful site. I like the bios, the books sections, and the blogs. Maybe I am boring.

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I was on the fence about the narrative form of the bibliography. It's adapted from my updated livejournal bio, and when I tried arranging it in bulleted points, it just looked so boring to me. The narrative form is probably not as easy to navigate, but it has the advantage of voice, and I hope it offers a bit of entertainment in its own right.

Save me from embarrassment: If it would be better as a bulleted-point list, please tell me!

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It isn't your style.

And that's the main thing: Is your site in your voice? Yes? Excellent! No? People will know there's something "off" and inauthentic about it, and that is off-putting.

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I mean the bullet points are not your style.

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spindlewand.livejournal.com

I went to a very informative talk at the local RWA by a woman who has been able to quite her day job and live on her novels. She was talking about promoting your books, and web presence was a big topic.

She had a tremendous amount of advice for us. I can't possibly recall it all, but she mentioned that in her experience, a good, robust website was important. She has, among other things, even little word games up. I will go see if I can find hers and give you the link.

My plans if I ever get the series I am working on first written, and then published (So you can see I am WAAAAY out on a limb here as clearly, we are talking years, if ever) is to include maps, glossaries, selective bits of character backstory, drawings, etc.

I have your books and read them both, but I haven't re-read them recently. I do remember a very keen and intelligent sense of humor in them. Offhand, a treatment of Atlantis written with that sense of humor, a map of the Jersey Shore and Long Island where characters were located for various moments in the book, a treatment of Rugosa Roses (Which I adore for all of their very Rose-y but not hot-housy qualities) might be the kind of things she meant. Of course, that might not be the kind of thing you'd like to do at all. Just a suggestion.

I like what you have very much. It Is a very beautiful site. I like the links to your other things. But I do agree with the observations I heard at the talk about things that can help keep fans engaged. You are a modest person, which means self-promotion might be a bit against the grain, but I'm sure you can figure out some middle ground that includes more, if you want to, without making it tacky.

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Thank you! If you can find the info on the presenter, that would be very helpful.

The advice on publishing a series that I hear consistently from publishing industry people is to finish writing and revising the first book, preferably in a way that can stand alone, and then to start trying to sell it immediately. That way, the editors at the house that acquires it will be able to help you shape the rest of the series. What they worry about with a series that comes to them only after several volumes are completed is that, if the author has taken a wrong turn in volume 2, s/he will have proceeded down that wrong turn too far for the story to be righted.

I love that my readers are asking for maps of my fantasy world, when the fantasy world in question is New Jersey. Okay, yeah, I write with a Monmouth County atlas open over one knee, and have many times driven to Red Bank and Sea Bright to make sure I got descriptions right. And yeah, the characters live and travel on streets that actually exist. I just think it's funny, because when people talk about "fantasy novels with maps," this isn't usually what they mean.

The treatment of rugosa roses would not have occurred to me. It's a really good idea.

Self-promotion does come hard. I seem to be getting better at it, but it doesn't seem to be improving me as a human being. I'm really ambivalent about how much more easily boasting comes to me than it used to.

It makes sense that a website needs to change often enough to keep regulars coming back. That's one reason the blog is usually the thing I'm looking for--it's the one thing that will (or should) keep changing with every visit.

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laradionne.livejournal.com

I could really use a good map of New Jersey right about now! If getting said map was also adding web-click traffic to my dear friend's web-site that would be even better!

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Think of it not as self-promotion, but as promotion of something you love and want to share.

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I suppose I'm sort of boring, too. When I go to an author's website, I'm usually looking for either news about what's new, or what's going to be available soon, or I'm looking for excerpts to see if I like their stuff, or to see if they have any little freebie stories up I can read in a moment of downtime, or little vignette scenes for characters I know that didn't make it into one of the books.

Sometimes I read their blogs. I already read yours, so that's no help. :-/

I like the notion of maps for the Rugosa stories, though. Maybe character sketches, possibly including character illustrations if you know anybody who could do that? (I'm no help with that, I'm a designer but no sort of illustrator.)

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Excerpts and freebies--these are things I used to have in my head as items on my To Do list, and when they fell off, they stopped feeling obvious so they didn't come back. Thank you.

Hadn't thought of restoring scenes from the cutting room floor. Wow, that'll make it easy to put up lots of content when eventually the Big Book sells.

Ages ago, you offered to design a booklet version of "How the Grail Came to the Fisher King." Deena had intended to set that up as a book in electronic and paper edition from Drollerie Press, but it never ended up happening. Would you still be interested in doing that? I'm thinking of setting it up on Lulu as a benefit project for George's scholarship fund. Likewise, a Paypal tip jar for a .epub version and the podcast. I don't yet grok WordPress enough to know how to put all that up on the website, but eventually I'll find out.

I kind of like letting the reader fine-tune the characters' appearances--my only objection to the cover for Atlantis Cranks was that I didn't want to dictate to my readers how they should picture Jane. But I do think character profiles or bios or something would be a good idea. Certainly for the Big Book, an expanded Dramatis Personae would be helpful. I keep a comprehensive one for myself, and a much-slimmed-down one for the version of the manuscript that I shop around.

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Yes, I would love to do the Grail book. :-)

The character sketches wouldn't have to include, y'know, *sketches*. They could be image-free, or they could include images of things that suggest the character, like a pile of high-heeled shoes or a mess of glitter or a crock pot or whatever. (None of those suggestions were intended for your specific characters.)

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rednikki.livejournal.com

More than anything else, I like finding cut scenes, or interviews with the characters, or anything that gives me a little more insight into the books.

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That's very helpful. Those are the kinds of pieces that people were doing for blog tours, when blog tours were The Next Big Thing. Now blog tours are kind of passe, and here I am with copies of all the stuff I wrote for other people's blogs that it looks like hardly anybody read. I'm so glad all that work can go to a use that people can really enjoy. And now I know that they're worth continuing to do, once the books have a home again.

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cascade-writers.livejournal.com

I like for an author's website to have contact information for them, so I can invite them to speak at writers' events!

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Yes! That's something I would have known when I was one of your programming volunteers, because I relied on it all the time. How did I forget? Clearly, when the kids are older, I'll need to start volunteering again.

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louiseroho.livejournal.com

The thing I most want to see on an author's web-site is a full bibliography and a time line of what is coming out next.

If the author is writing a series, I want ALL the books and short-stories in that series listed together so that I can get the full story.

Everything else is gravy as far as I'm concerned.

I do have a friend who writes a "Tales from the Writing Cave" blog, but the only thing that really interests me from it is when her next book is available.

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I agree with the series list (including what order they were written in and what versions are available, if there are multiple editions or special editions of anything), and once there are enough titles for it to become a question, I'm a big fan of reading guides, like, if there's an order for things to be read in that's better than "anything at random." (I'm thinking of the Terry Pratchett reading guides -- may you someday need such a thing desperately, Sarah! :-)

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Actually, I desperately need a Terry Pratchett reading guide. He got big while I was in the ten-year coma of academia, and by the time I woke up, he'd written so much, with no clear sequence that (Gasp!) I have yet to start reading him.

Do you have a favorite reading guide to suggest? Because it's long past time for me to fill this gap in my education.

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This one is my favorite, and seems to be the most popular; it's had several revisions over the years as new books come out, and has been translated into at least nine other languages, and this newest version (which I hadn't seen 'til I looked for it just now) looks absolutely amazing, I'm totally jealous, they did a great job with the illustration. It used to just look like this. :-)

It makes it clear that there are many useful places one might start, depending on which storylines and characters are of greatest interest, but it helps keep the major story groupings sort of in order. I, of course, am most fond of all the Witches stories, including the Tiffany Aching set (which say young adult, but I wouldn't call them that -- or rather, I'd agree if we specify that we mean "young adult" like Earthsea or The Dark is Rising, rather than "young adult" like Goosebumps or Circle of Three, i.e. significantly better than most "adult" fiction). But I also love all the ones with Death, which of course includes Hogfather, and Small Gods was fun. I'm personally somewhat less enamored of the Rincewind set and the Watch set, and haven't read many of those.

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spindlewand.livejournal.com

"I love that my readers are asking for maps of my fantasy world, when the fantasy world in question is New Jersey."

Absolutely ROLLING here. I am trying to digest the idea, however unintentionally provided by these readers, that someone could have IMAGINED New Jersey into being...

I should bless their dear little hearts cause I am smiling broadly and I needed that today...

"Self-promotion does come hard. I seem to be getting better at it, but it doesn't seem to be improving me as a human being. I'm really ambivalent about how much more easily boasting comes to me than it used to."

Whether this should really bother you probably depends more on where you started than how much you have changed. Some people are modest to a positive fault, and if you are basically correcting that imbalance, no harm no foul. And, if you want to be intensely literary, the Beot does have a long and illustrious history in heroic literature...

The question that would be useful to ask yourself, really, if you are concerned, is "I am really boasting/bragging? Is there anything inflated about how I am presenting my work, or am I just no longer hiding in the shadows? Am I trying to make myself look big and others small, or am I just representing myself in a more realistic way, instead of minimizing what I've done?" Then, if you adjudge yourself to be becoming obnoxious, make a plan, and if you find that really, when you are applying the same standards to yourself that you would apply to your writing friends that you are not doing anything you would not want them to do for themselves, get off your own case and don't worry about it. Self examination is a useful thing, but as CS Lewis once said, it isn't modesty for a pretty girl to pretend she's ugly, it's just silly.

"The treatment of rugosa roses would not have occurred to me. It's a really good idea" - Oh, thank you! Now I am all sorts of pleased with myself, and I really needed a dose of that, too. ;-)

"I kind of like letting the reader fine-tune the characters' appearances--my only objection to the cover for Atlantis Cranks was that I didn't want to dictate to my readers how they should picture Jane." If people want character sketches, you can always have them done from the back...

I hope the finding of a new publisher is going well for you. You are not the only person I know shopping a previously published book around - close friend of mine was released from her contract at a different small press for slow sales. I hope you both find the bigger readership your works deserve when you find them new publishing homes.

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You know, for those of us outside the area, maps are helpful :) Until I went to live there, I'd NO IDEA about NJ. It may as well have been Earthsea!

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jaime-sama.livejournal.com

Here are the wisest words I have ever heard about promoting your own stuff.

http://www.fluentself.com/blog/biggification/three-words-to-drive-your-right-people-away/

(Havi Brooks's blog has been a huge influence on me since showingup introduced me to it.)

Your "Right People" (what Havi calls them) are out there (I'm one... hi) and they are the ones who love your work, or who would love your work if they only knew about it. You don't have to convince or pressure, or "sell" really, but you do need to give them some way of finding out that your stuff exists.

By the way, you gave a paper scheduled opposite the Dalai Lama??!! How have I never heard this story before? HA!! (Not very nice of the conference organizers, but perhaps they had no choice but to do that to *someone*...)

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