What makes a great character

A recent tweet led me to an interesting two-part article about "What makes a great character". This is on the blog Yummy Men, Kick Ass Chicks, a paranormal romance blog. In this article, several paranormal romance authors talk about what makes a character compelling. While I have no interest in their genre, good writing is good writing and I found the advice worthwhile. Check out part one and part two.

The Reader's Digest version: characters are interesting when they are multifaceted and flawed. Pretty much all the authors said this. They also said a whole lot more, so if you're a writer, or simply interested in how your favorite characters are made, check these posts out.

Interview with fantasy author A.J. Walker

It's nice to meet fellow writers who share your interests. I met A.J. Walker on an archaeology discussion group and discovered he's just published a novel with Double Dragon Publishing, one of the top two ebook publishers that does something other than erotica. His work is called Roots Run Deep and that's what we're talking about here today.

So, how does it feel to have your first novel published?
Exciting and exhausting. It's been six years in the making and it's a thrill to see it finally out there. That said, I'm learning that publishing isn't the last step. There's a lot of promo work to do for an unknown writer to get noticed. So many ebooks come out every week it's easy to get lost in the flood.

Tell us a bit about Roots Run Deep
This is the tale of Kip Itxaron, a goblin thief and sorceress trying to make her way as a second-class citizen in a kingdom dominated by humans. When the human King Roderick is deposed, they are thrown together by fate. Roderick offers her people equality if Kip rallies an army to help him take his throne back. Kip must struggle with her own self doubts, her mistrust of humankind, her fear of battle, and the divisions among her people in order to lead them to a better future.

One thing that's interesting about Kip is that she isn't really good at anything except getting into trouble.
I like having flawed characters. Yes, she's a bit of a mess at the beginning of the book, but she gets better!

I've noticed Roots Run Deep has a lot of anthropological detail. I had fun playing "spot the reference". You seem to put a lot of your academic research into your work. What are your main inspirations?
I am a Medievalist by profession and so my writing is deeply rooted in that era. My archaeological training exposed me to lots of different cultures. Readers of Roots Run Deep will find aspects of Native American, Pacific Island, Neolithic Switzerland, and contemporary American culture in my work. And yes Sean, your email is right, those statues were inspired by the Kurgan culture!

Why did you choose to epublish rather than going the traditional route?
Impatience with the traditional houses, mostly. They take a year to get back to you and don't want you to simultaneously submit. Now with all the belt tightening they are taking fewer books, far fewer from first-timers like me. I really feel that epublishers are the way to go to establish a fan base.

What's next for you?
I'm working on a sequel to Roots Run Deep called The Maze of Mist. It follows the adventures of Kip and Roderick's biracial son as he tries to deal with being part of neither race while being expected to rule both. I also have a couple of other books in the works, including a mystery/thriller and a collection of fantasy short stories. Check out my writing blog to keep up to date on what's happening!


Thanks for being here, A.J., and be sure to check out his blog for an interesting feature he's doing called Medieval Mondays. I learned something about Viking navigation!

Queen of the Midlist: Interview with Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Today we're suspending our usual Monday installment of Websites for Writers to interview longtime midlister Kathryn Meyer Griffith. Her latest horror novel, A Time of Demons, is just out from Damnation Books today. Websites for Writers will be back next week.

You've been a published author for 26 years. How have you seen the market change for midlist authors in that time?
Boy, have I seen it change! When I first started sending out manuscripts (in the days of the dinosaurs), typed on an electric typewriter with lots of spots of White-Out and then carefully stacked into copy paper boxes that I’d send expensively by snail-mail with self-stamped and addressed return manila envelopes also inside, it’d take anywhere from eight to twelve months to get an answer from a publisher; and then we’d go back and forth for another couple months before they’d give me a contract. Then I waited up to a year or more for it to hit the bookshelves and another year after that before I got a royalty statement. They’d take money off the top for returns. Never could figure out those darn royalty statements! Ech. I think of this every time I hit the send button and rocket my computerized manuscript right to my publisher or editor or when I get the edits in a neat file for me to use Track Changes on. No muss, no fuss. It’s so much easier now and I save all that postage, too.

And years ago the midlist author was respected, even courted by their publisher. I remember on my first Zebra book in 1991, VAMPIRE BLOOD, my editor found out my husband loved another of their author’s work (William Johnstone) and just to be nice he sent us the whole paperback series (14 books!) so my husband could have them. Sheesh. What editor would do that now for a midlist author? None. Truth is I don’t think there is a midlist anymore or midlist authors. They’ve gone the way of the dodo bird. Which is why I’ve published my last three (soon to be five) novels with E & paperback publishers. The bigger publishers don’t want you unless you’re a bestseller now. They don’t want to really edit your books or take any time to promote or build your career. It makes it truly hard to get published and make real money at it anymore. (As if I ever did! My best financial payouts were my Leisure and Zebra days from 1984-1994 and so far I haven’t come near those totals again. Maybe someday after all the E & paperback books for my older novels – *see below – come out I will.)

In recent years you've shifted more towards ebooks. What spurred that decision?
As I said, it’s really difficult to get published with the big guys anymore…even me…and I have 13 books to my name and more coming. I don’t know what the big guys want anymore but it isn’t me. In 2007, on a lark sort of, dejected and ready to give up writing forever, I decided to send a book, EGYPTIAN HEART, (that had been turned down by every big publisher in the galaxy) to THE WILD ROSE PRESS, a new E & paperback publisher who were really kind to me. Really loved the book. I knew the book needed a good editing and after their editor got done with it (she did a detailed, fantastic job, too, I thought) I felt it was a much better book. The cover, surprisingly, was beautiful and they’d actually asked for my input for it and on everything else, editing and all, during the editing process. Unheard of from my experiences with Zebra, Leisure and Avalon Books (my previous publishers that I did two hardcover murder mysteries for).

I remember my first novel from Leisure in 1984, EVIL STALKS THE NIGHT, was edited by some male editor and I never even saw the book during editing until it was printed and in my hands after the release date. The editor did a terrible job all in all and had actually put in three pages of his own without consulting me! They were awful and my readers to this day ask me about them!

And the covers of my Leisure and Zebra books were completely out of my hands. They made a cover for you and if it was horrible or you hated it…too bad. A few of my books, I felt, had awful covers. BLOOD FORGE. 1989. Yeck! THE LAST VAMPIRE. 1992. Awful! My experience so far with five e-books, on the other hand, have been, on the whole, excellent. I love my covers for EGYPTIAN HEART, BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons and THE WOMAN IN CRIMSON. But the cover artist worked with me on each of them. They wanted what I envisioned on the cover. Amazing. Can’t wait to see all the new covers of all my older books that are being re-released in E & paperbacks.

So far there hasn’t been a lot of money in my e-books…but I see, feel, a change coming. Three years ago being e-published was looked down on from the publishing industry; now I think it’s beginning to become more respectable. All those little greedy machines out there clamoring for food! E-READS told me that this last year alone they’ve seen a 200-300% rise in their sales and they’re still rising! I’m catching the wave.

Tell us a bit about your two upcoming releases.
From DAMNATION BOOKS: BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons (new) out May 31, 2010. THE WOMAN IN CRIMSON (new) in September 2010 from ETERNAL PRESS.

BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons is an apocalyptic saga about traveling brother and sister musicians, Cassandra and Johnny Graystone, and their friends, who must fight evil demons, with the help of angels, in the end days (sort of like the Left Behind series or Buffy The Vampire Slayer). The sister is developing supernatural powers to aid them in the final war as they seek out and convince others with similar powers to join them.

THE WOMAN IN CRIMSON, a contemporary vampire novel, is about Willowwind, a beautiful Civil War era bed and breakfast, run by a loving couple, Adrian and Caroline Stone. It’s also haunted by a long dead Civil War era vampiress who was once a witch, Lilith, who believes the man, Adrian, is her reincarnated soldier/lover Jedidiah, and she’ll do anything to have him, body-heart-and soul, for her own again. But Adrian’s wife, Caroline, along with the help of a psychic and the ghost of her dead father, will do anything to make sure that doesn’t happen.

I also have three e & paperback books available from THE WILD ROSE PRESS….more romantic but still spooky. EGYPTIAN HEART. WINTER’S JOURNEY. THE ICE BRIDGE. And two ghostly short stories, Don’t Look Back, Agnes and In this House.

And the rereleases: THE HEART OF THE ROSE in November 2010 from ETERNAL PRESS. THE LAST VAMPIRE in Oct. 2010…THE CALLING in March 2011…BLOOD FORGE in June 2011 and EVIL STALKS THE NIGHT in September 2011 from DAMNATION BOOKS. E-READS is going to bring out VAMPIRE BLOOD and WITCHES again by the end of 2010 or so they say; no real publication dates yet on those two and they’ve had them since October of last year (and they’re charging me a hefty set-up fee for both while DB and EP don’t charge a penny…I won’t fall for that again). Imagine…ESTN came out from Leisure 26 years ago. Whew. I’m sooo happy they’re all coming out again. I’ve worked really hard to get them all reborn.

What attracts you to write about the paranormal?
It’s what I’ve always loved to read. I recall one day when I was about ten or eleven years old and my grade school class had ordered hardcover books through The Weekly Reader (anyone remember those?) and I had ordered a book on ghosts; no longer remember the name or who it was by. I think it was short stories, though. I can still recall the shivery thrill when the cardboard boxes came in and the class opened them and our teacher distributed the books to the ones who’d bought them. I was in heaven!

Then…my beloved grandmother Mary Fehrt, the first real storyteller I ever knew, used to have my brothers and sisters and I (there were seven of us and we were poor) sit around in her barely lit basement when we spent the weekends (two or three of us at a time) and she’d tell us spooky stories. We also would watch Spook Spectacular with her over root beer floats or home-made ice cream sundaes. She’s the one who told me never to gaze into a mirror in a darkened room because something scary would be in them. And that’s when my love of horror began. But I love and write traditional supernatural horror…the kind about ghosts, vampires and eerie things that go bump in the night. I rely on the characters not gore, sex or curse words. Probably that’s why I’ve never become famous. Ha, ha. Thing is, I also write murder mysteries, romantic horror and time travel. Even once did an historical romance (The Heart of the Rose, 1985)…but it was about a woman perceived to be a witch in 15^th century England during the time of Edward the Fourth. Go figure. No matter what I write a ghost, a vampire or a witch sneaks in somehow.

You've had 14 novels published. How has your writing developed in the course of all those projects?
Now that’s a really hard question as I’ve been writing for 39 years and published for 26 of them. Mainly, I don’t use as many adjectives.  Not as much flowery prose. More dialogue. More show not tell. And my great age has enabled me to write from somewhere else deeper inside myself. I’ve seen, felt more. Oh, yeah, the computer as compared to that darn old typewriter has really helped. I can rewrite so easily. Hey, I taught myself to type (I was an artist, you know, not someone who thought I’d ever need typing – I could kick myself now!). I still type with two fingers. Thank goodness my new publisher could scan in all those old books because they don’t exist on a computer or memory stick anywhere and, hey, I’d be two-fingered typing from now to doomsday. Some of those oldies are close to 400 pages each.

Where can we find you online?

Actually, I have ten social websites and now one official website so I won’t bore everyone with all of them. Here are the best of the lot where you can learn all you’ll ever want to know about me (and perhaps way more than you’d care to):

http://www.myspace.com/kathrynmeyergriffith See all my new covers and self-made book trailers; some with my singer/songwriter brother Jim Meyer’s original songs!

http://www.bebo.com/kathrynmeyerG See all my new covers and self-made book trailers; some with my singer/songwriter brother Jim Meyer’s original songs!
http://kathrynmeyergriffith.intuitwebsites.com/

http://www.authorsden.com/kathrynmeyergriffith

My e-mail: rdgriff (at) htc (dot) net E-mail me…I love feedback!

And Sean, it’s been nice of you to let me ramble on…nice to be here. Signing out, Kathryn Meyer Griffith The Queen of the midlist writers.

(Mostly) good times for ebooks

Things seem to be on the up for electronic publishing. One of my publishers is expanding into ebooks and wants to renegotiate my contract to include an electronic edition. We're currently haggling over the royalty rate. As is typical with print publishers new to electronic publishing, they're offer a rate far less than market standard. The math is different for electronic editions, since there's much less overhead, and the author thus deserves a bigger share.

In other news, my short story is almost out from Damnation Books and I've found out that one of the distributors will be Shortcovers, which among other devices offers ebooks for the iPod and Blackberry. i didn't even know you could read ebooks on those! Shows how much I still have to learn.

In more general news, romance giant Harlequin has opened up a new epublisher called Carina Press. Harlequin already puts many of its print books into ebook format, but now they've made a separate imprint just for ebooks. Their first catalog will be Spring 2010 and they'll feature not only romance, but other genres as well. They're wide open for submissions at the moment. I'm curious to see just how their acceptance policy will differ from their parent company.

But not all the news is good in the world of digital publishing. Arkham Tales, a fine electronic magazine specializing in horror, is closing its doors after only its fifth issue. It garnered quite a lot of attention and readership in its short life, but sadly became yet another victim of the economic downturn. All five issues are available for free on their website. Yup, free! They relied on advertisers and donations, and apparently neither of these two sources were sufficient.

Leading electronic publisher releases sales figures

New Concepts Publishing, one of the leading publishers of electronic books, has released its sales figures. This is a rare move in a business that generally keeps its sales closely guarded, and gives an interesting insight into this developing medium.

New Concepts pays in royalties only, ranging from 30-40%, the typical business model for electronic publishers, and reports that the average author payout over three years (the normal contract period) is $450. They've also published the range of payouts:

Science Fiction/Futuristic range: $127.89--$8455.46
Paranormal range: $78.00--$5673.50
Contemporary range: $55.18--$7913.78
Historical range: $75.16--$3863.12
Romantic Suspense range: $124.24--$1977.20
Fantasy range: $44.00--$4774.80

As you can see there's quite a range, with some authors earning next to nothing and others getting royalties that compare favorably with advances paid by major publishers. I suspect the endpoints of these ranges are outliers, but considering that the total average is $450, the average payout is skewed more towards the lower figure than the higher. Also note that New Concepts only publishes romance in all its various genres. Romance is the big seller in ebooks, so aspiring authors who publish in other genres might see an average payout lower than this.

New Concepts Publishing is one of the pioneer epublishers, having started in those ancient dialup days of 1996. Congratulations on your 13th years of publishing, an achievement for any small press and almost unheard for an epublisher, and thanks for being so candid about your sales. We can only hope more publishers follow suit.

Corín Tellado, 1926-2009

Last year I wrote about Corín Tellado, Spain's most popular romance writer. She became big in the Sixties and was as notable for her output (averaging sixty titles a year) as for the fact that she was an independent, successful woman in a country that had yet to break from it's machista past. Today it's been reported that she has died.

While I have never read one of Tellado's works, I have to admire her output and contribution to Spanish pop culture. With a total of about 4,000 titles and 400 million sales, she was an institution, still writing up to the day of her death. El País reported she was the second most read author in Spanish after Cervantes. Good job, Ms. Tellado!

The Jewel of Medina: Worth the Controversy?

I recently stumbled across the blog of very cool Muslim commentator Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, who gives her fiercely independent (and often hilariously snarky) opinion on her religion and its place in the world. In her latest post she takes on The Jewel of the Medina, that supposedly "controversial and banned" novel about Aisha, Muhammad's child bride. While I didn't need a Muslim to tell me it's a cheesy Orientalist romance novel (the excerpt on the book's official website does that quite well enough) it was interesting to read about all of its historical inventions and errors.

To Shelina's credit, she doesn't call for the book to be banned. Interestingly, Random House got cold feet and pulled the plug without having been threatened, as is made clear in a Wall Street Journal article by old friend Asra Nomani. Random House should have shown more guts and published it, or shown more taste and rejected it when it first appeared in their slush pile. Since then, a few radical clerics have expressed their usual ire, and three men have been arrested for a firebombing allegedly linked to the British edition, but I doubt they actually read it.

And no, I haven't read the whole thing either. The turgid prose in the excerpt was a sufficient waste of my time, thank you very much.

A Seriously Productive Writer

I recently saw a news piece about Corin Tellado, Spain's Grand Old Lady of Romance writing. She was hugely popular in the Sixties and Seventies, and her books are still read today.

The report said that in her heyday she averaged sixty novels a year, and she once wrote a novel in a single day. Apparently she collapsed at the end of the day, but I would have collapsed around lunchtime! In her almost sixty years of writing she has written about 4,000 titles.

Now, writing a novel a week probably leads to some formulaic prose, but what this woman accomplished is staggering. It makes my weekly quota of seven to ten thousand words seem downright lazy!

Yet Another Author Caught Plagiarizing

Well, here we go again. . .

If you read my other blog, Grizzled Old Traveler, you've been subjected to my griping about the Lonely Planet author who has been using his shoddy guidebook writing techniques to sell his memoirs. Now another author is joining the long tradition of plagiarists. This time it's romance author Cassie Edwards, who has written more than a hundred novels. Two bloggers and several volunteers found extensive similarities between her novels and dozens of other authors' books and published them in a 98 page document. Those are some pissed off readers! Amazingly, all they had to do was find suspicious passages that didn't sound like Edwards' style, and Google them. I've caught many of my students cheating this way too. Signet, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), just ditched her.

So here we have an author who has been publishing since the Eighties, sold hundreds of millions of books through one of the biggest publishers in the world, and nobody caught this before? This is one of the main problems with the industry, publishers rarely check on their writers. Novels are plagiarized, and memoirs turn out to be novels. There was the drug addict who turned out not to be a drug addict, there was the Jewish Holocaust survivor raised by wolves who turned out to be a Catholic who lived through the war just fine, there was the white orphan raised by a black family who turned out to have a white family but hired black actors to play her foster family. . .

. . .the list goes on and on.

When will publishers learn? Never. Fact-checking costs money, and that cuts into profits, unless they start charging authors to have their books fact-checked. I wouldn't be surprised if they try.

Journalism is having the same scandals, but still most journalists do not check sources. Many newspaper articles you read are simply compilations of unchecked facts from the public relations offices of corporations and governments. It's one of the things that made me quit journalism.

Thanks to Maya Reynolds for tipping me off on this one. Check out her blog for lots of useful news and views on the world of writing.

See, it's not too hard to cite your sources, is it?

Interviewing Epublishers

I'm researching a couple of articles for Writing World on the ebook and POD publishing industries from the publishers' point of view. I'm concentrating on the ebook article right now, since that one will be first, and have interviewed editors from half a dozen epublishers great and small.

The one thing that's really struck me is how accessible these people are. Even editors-in-chief of some of the biggest names in epublishing, such as romantica publisher Ellora's Cave (link is not work safe) and f/sf publisher Twilight Times, have taken time out to answer a long series of questions in detail. And they responded to my emails faster than some of the editors I've actually worked with.

This sort of friendliness is something you can only find in the small press, whatever format it may be. I wish there was more of it in the midlist and large publishing houses, where writers always seem to be the last priority.

Has this sold me on ebooks? Well, not exactly. Having seen sales figures for a number of titles in various genres (supplied by generous authors) I have to say that it's not a good investment for me at this time. While the royalties range from 30-50%, way higher than the standard 6-8% for print houses, the sales figures just aren't there. Plus there's no advance. That may change soon, however. Also, the big seller in ebooks is erotic romance, what Ellora's Cave markets as romantica, especially of the paranormal variety. Most brick and mortar stores won't carry these titles, so their predominantly female readers turn to ebooks. Since I don't write about my heroines getting jiggy with werewolves, I'm out of luck.

Great Writing Advice

The blog Chicks of Creation (don't you love the name?) just did an interview with fantasy/romance author Minnette Meador in which she gives a lot of good advice. It's a long interview, but make sure you get to the end where she lists eight things a writer must do to be successful. My favorite is "Don't rely on the muse to help you. . .art is a lazy, drunken sod and it's up to you to move it along." Well said!

Writing Success Story: Minnette Meador gets two books in print

Minnette Meador, a fellow writer I know through the Fantasy Writing Yahoo group, has recently gotten two books signed up for print. The first, pictured above, is the fantasy novel Starsight, published by the small press Stonegarden Publishing. It's already available. Her historical romance, The Centurion and the Queen, was originally going to come out as an ebook with Resplendence Publishing, but will now also be released in print, although the cover and exact publication date are not yet available.

While I got my start in the midlists, starting in the small presses is an equally viable career move, especially for novelists. Minnette is working in two highly popular genres, fantasy and romance. In fact, half of all fiction sales in North America are romance. Too bad I'm not a very romantic guy! Here's hoping Minnette will leapfrog straight over this midlist writer and land a major deal. She says of her writing success:

"When I first completed Starsight, I really wasn't certain in which direction to go. I had sent it out to a few large publishers, but was not getting anywhere. I did research on publishing with smaller houses and decided that might be a way to go. Piers Anthony, a man who I highly respect and admire, had a website called HiPiers where he honestly rated the milliard of POD, e-book, and other small publishers available out there, with warnings, ravings, or reviews for each. In the list was a small publisher from California called StoneGarden.netPublishing. I joined their forum, got to know the other authors, the publisher, and the readers.

After reading through their communications, I decided to submit Starsight and it was accepted a few weeks later. I am very comfortable with the decision and StoneGarden has been
incredibly supportive and helpful in getting me started.

Some people have asked me why I went with a small publisher; Piers has some wonderful advice in his column about this and I took it to heart. Honestly, I have an incredible amount to learn about the industry; how to sell my books, how to edit, how to promote, etc. I thought starting out small would be a great opportunity to learn what I needed and then apply it to other books. In the past year, I've been extremely fortunate to have three of my books accepted
for publication and one short story added to an anthology. Whether I am with a small or large publisher, I still have to promote my own books. I can't think of a better way of learning how to do that than jumping in with both feet. Now I feel I'm a little wiser and more prepared for any publishing experience I may encounter."