I will doing a BIG giveaway this fall, but decided to do a small one now because:
1. I want to figure out how Rafflecopter works.
2. I want to give a shout out to the following New Adult contemporary romances that I adored (this is only a small part of my list. You can see more on my Pinterest NA Books I Love board.).
Four winners will get to select a book from the following list. They can all pick the same book if they want. The only thing is it has to be available on either Kindle or Kobo. Unfortunately I can't gift Nook books because I live in Canada. I guess B&N isn't into making money, which explains a lot.
What books are you looking forward to read this summer (it doesn't have to be NA)?
And here are the books in no particular order (click on the pictures to read more about the book).
On the last Wednesday of each month, I’ll be showing off the covers of new releases belonging to my blog followers. And with each book, I’ve asked the author to share a short writing quote to inspire you. (Yeah, I realize it's now May 1st. I kind of screwed up when I checked the calendar).
Before I introduce you to the upcoming New Adult thriller Bitter Angel by Megan Hand, I want to tell those of you who are planning to query soon that I wrote about Agent Stalking this week on the Querytracker blog. It’s a valuable lesson as to why you should filter your thoughts when using social media sites.
***
I guess for inspiration I would say: It's Numero Uno about the writing. If you don't love your characters, others won't either. Spend time with them, get to know them, become their best friend. When that's finished, find where you fit, dig your hole nice and deep, and prepare to grow roots. Those roots will keep you through the toughest storms. And the publishing world is stormy for sure, so pack an umbrella! :)
Torn between two realities. A choice that will mean life or death. But she won’t know anything… until she wakes up.
College sophomore, Lila Spencer lived Friday night twice. She doesn’t know how or why, just that she did. As if she split in half and went in two different directions.
Out clubbing with her friends, Heather and Nilah, the girls rock it out and party hard. What begins as an innocent night will lead to a deadly fight for their lives, and Lila might be their only chance for survival.
In bed with her boyfriend, Jay, Lila is safe and warm as she drifts to sleep in the arms of the man she loves. Until she is sucked into a horrifying nightmare of her friends' deaths.
As the sunlight warms her face on Saturday morning, the two scenarios collide. But there can be only one outcome. Will she wake up in her warm bed with Jay by her side, devastated and grieving for her friends? Or was she there to save them?
For many writers, creating titles is the bane of their existence. Some come up with titles faster than I can sing the alphabet song; the rest of us stare at the screen and sob. And unfortunately, sobbing doesn’t do much for generating ideas.
Last week I realized I had to change the title of the New Adult contemporary romance I’ll be publishing this fall. A self-published YA novel with the same title had just hit the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. Oddly enough, our cover designer is the same. When my CP mentioned the title of my book to another author on Twitter and said it was awesome, it looked like she was promoting the YA book, since mine hasn’t been released yet.
Now, this shouldn’t be a big deal. This happens to authors all the time. It happened to Christina Lee (my CP). The title for her NA contemporary romance was similar to a recently released NA paranormal, and her editor told her she needed to come up with a new one.
They combed through the manuscript and found a phrase (All Of You) that worked perfectly for the title. I tried the same trick and ended up with a title that is more meaningful than my last one. It is something the hero says to the heroine. Yes, the trick really does work.
How do you come up with your titles? Have you been forced to change yours?
(No, Walking Disaster wasn’t my former title. I’m currently reading the book and love the cover.)
As mentioned last week, I’m currently taking an advanced social media workshop. A recent assignment had me contemplating my author brand. Our instructor talked about company logos, but I’m not Apple or McDonalds. I didn’t need a logo. What I did need was an image that was uniform across my social media platforms and was a reflection of what I write.
I write steamy New Adult contemporary romances about emotionally damaged characters, and wanted to reflect that in my image. To create the picture, I took my husband’s jeans and ripped the petals off a pink tulip. Originally, I was going to use red roses, but the ones in the store looked like some sort of plague had attacked them. Nothing says I love you than wilted, blacken roses. But that was okay. The tulip petals ended up working better than I imagined. I tweaked the picture in Photoshop Elements and added the “glowing” effect to the petals. Now I had the right look for my brand. The jeans and petals are symbolic for the stories I write. Did I mention I love symbolism?
I decided to take things one step further. I used a petal from the banner to design the social media buttons for my blog.
*click here if you would like to ‘Like’ my author page. Chocolate kisses if you do.*
So as you can see, it’s not difficult to create the right image to reflect your author brand. If you’re not a photographer, that shouldn’t stop you. You can hire someone, or you can find the right stock photo on sites like Shutterstock. Some pictures are free, but even if you end up paying for a photo, they aren’t expensive. And if you hire someone, you’ll still have to pay for the stock photos they use.
Have you given any thought to your author brand and the look you want to convey?
For the past few weeks, I’ve been waiting to make this announcement. I’ve been like a kid at Christmas—impatient.
But on Monday I finally got the okay to tell you . . .
My fabulous critique partner, Christina Lee, landed an amazement deal with Penguin for her New Adult novel, All of You, thanks to her incredibly brilliant agent, Sara Megibow. *releases fanfare*
I loved All of You. Christina sent it to me in chunks. I read each chunk and begged for more. Fortunately she’s a fast writer and she tried not to torture me—too much.
I can’t wait for the yet untitled companion novel (hint hint Christina).
So, please go over and congratulate Christina on the news she greatly deserves. I can’t wait to see where her writing career now takes her.
I’m currently taking an online social media workshop through the YARWA. So far it’s been interesting. Last week we came up with keywords that describe us and what we write. We then used Google Adwords to determine the level of competition (low, medium, high) that uses the same word or phrase. I have no idea why we’re doing this. The relevance will be revealed this week (I hope).
While I was goofing around (aka procrastinating from what I was supposed to be doing), I searched for ‘Stina New Adult.’ The result showed my blog, Twitter, Goodreads, and Pinterest accounts, and several guest posts I’ve done. That wasn’t a surprise. The surprise came when I scrolled down to the bottom of the second page. I’m not the only Stina who writes YA and NA. That’s right. There are two of us, but the other Stina lives in the US. I live in Canada. She writes paranormal stories. I write contemporary romances.
This discovery leads to an important point. Why is she buried on page two and I take up the majority of the first two pages (and beyond)? The reason is because I’m more active with social networking, or more specifically, because I blog. She showed up because her book is on Goodreads.
As an author, you want to be easily found if someone googles your name. If they can’t remember your full name, will they still be able to find you, or will you be buried somewhere where they are less likely to see you? While looking for you, they might discover another author and buy her book instead.
What are you doing to make sure your name appears at the top of the list if someone googles it?
We all have our favorite genres, the ones we live for when we read and write. We become experts in the genre, and cringe when someone disparages it based on unfounded beliefs. Most often these are based on lack of knowledge and believing what others say about it. I mean, how often have you heard that literary stories are slow and boring, and are meant for academic types? But according to Donald Maass in his book Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling (brilliant book, by the way), these are the powerful books that stay on the New York Times bestseller list long after the commercial novel’s typical two-week stint on the charts.
As you may have recently heard, New Adult (NA) books have taken the bestseller lists by storm. This has resulted in many readers and writers wondering what the “genre” is about. It has also led to a mountain of misconstrued beliefs as to what makes a NA story a NA story. Even editors and agents who once proclaimed that there is no market for the “genre” (Ha!) aren’t too sure what it is. They didn’t come up with the guidelines. It was the authors who went onto self publish their books who did that. And now the “genre” is fighting against beliefs that it’s nothing more than a YA story combined with erotica, and that the only people reading the books are middle-aged women who are too embarrassed to be caught reading a YA novel. Yes, I did see that comment on one blog. And of course, anyone who has made comments comparing NA to erotica obviously doesn’t understand what erotica is (most people don’t). It’s not about graphic sex. If you remove the sex from an erotic story, you have no story. If you can remove it and the story remains intact, you have a different genre with some steamy sex scenes.
To ensure you aren’t writing a genre while relying on your own misconstrued beliefs, read as many books in the genre as possible and be careful as to the source of information when understanding the requirements of the genre. You don’t want to be that writer who believes a NA story is really YA erotica. If you don’t truly understand the genre, you’ll miss out on what it’s really about and lose credibility with the readers who do know.
What are some of the misconstrued beliefs you’ve heard about the genre(s) you’re passionate about?
Self publishing is negatively viewed by the masses, and rightly so. This is because many authors still believe that investing in professional editing is unnecessary. If the story is good, they reason, that should suffice. Look at Fifty Shades of Gray. The writing is not great, yet the novel is a best seller.
Last week, I downloaded a New Adult (NA) novel (not the one in the picture) after a friend told me the price had dropped to $0.99. The potential for a great read was there, but the author chose to skip on professional editing. It was ridden with typos (e.g. We had a picnic, though she didn’t each much), missing words, confusing sentences. While I enjoyed the story, the lack of line and copy editing* left a bad taste, and I won’t buy anymore of the author’s books.
But it seems I’m alone in this believe that self-published books need to be properly edited. The book (which is $3.99, again) received 111 five-stars, 29 four-stars, 5 three-stars, and only 1 two-star rating on Amazon. When I wrote this post, it was ranked #178 in paid Kindle books (# 6 in Teen Romances). On Goodreads, the average rating was 4.29 stars (4121 readers rated the book). I was shocked. It seems that most people who read the book didn’t care that the level of editing was well below the standard of NYC.
What saddens me is that this might be the new standard for all our books, now that NYC is starting to compete with the self-published e-books on pricing. With the reduction of price, there will be the reduction in the time spent on editing. This level of editing could be the wave of the future.
Do you care if a book is poorly edited, just as long as the story is compelling? If you self publish, do you hire a professional editor to ensure your writing and story is the best it can be? Do you expect to see poorly edited book from NYC, now that they’re trying to complete with the pricing of self-published books?
*Six or seven beta readers were listed in the back of the book. The Secret of Ella and Micha byJessica Sorensen is also $0.99 and the writing is solid. Jessica obviously takes great pride in her books and craft. As soon as her new book (The Coincidence of Callie & Kayden) was released this week, I downloaded it.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion. (Jack Kerouac)
We constantly hear that we’re supposed to write what we are passion about. Only then will you achieve success. But what happens when the types of stories you prefer to write aren’t what agents and editors are looking for? For most of us, we are so driven to be published, we bow to their words of wisdom and follow their rules. We’re told, for example, that if your main character is eighteen years old and in college, your story is not YA and no one is publishing New Adult. The only time NYC will look the other way is when you’re already an established author, then you can do pretty much anything. And it’s not just Young Adult stories that are affected. I’m sure you know numerous examples in your genre that go against the “rules”, because of who the author is.
Fortunately, among us are the defiant and determined. They step out of the box, gain a following, and show NYC how wrong it is. And then a beautiful thing happens. Publishers, both big and small, start listening to the cries of the readers demanding more, and agents start scurrying to benefit from this new trend. A trend a few brave souls knew there was a market for. A few brave souls who introduced us to our newest (reading or writing) passion and proved that there is a demand for these quality self-published books.
And to you, brave authors, I say THANK YOU. Thank you for embracing your passion when others told you not to bother.
What do you think of the current trend of NYC publishing self-published books that have hit the major bestselling lists? Do you feel this will open doors for those pursuing traditional publishing? Do you shy away from writing genres that are considered niche, because NYC isn’t publishing them?
Giveaway
I’ve recently read the above New Adult novels* and thought they were great (there have been others but NYC has already grabbed them). If you are interested in winning one of these ebooks, let me know which one in the comments, and I’ll pick two lucky winners this weekend. Just click on the picture for more information about the book. If your email address is not on Blogger, please include it in the comments.
*I haven’t read Rouge yet. It’s on my TBR pile. Down to You comes with an adult content warning.
For more info on this blogfest, click on the picture.
The growing popularity of New Adult books (most of which are self published) recently had me contemplating the name of this so-called genre. I mean, who the heck came up with it? But then, who came up with the term Young Adult? My son turns thirteen next month. That’s right, the boy who defied odds when he was born three months premature is going to be a teenager. But is he an adult who happens to be young? Hell, no! He’s still a boy.
Okay, so back to the term New Adult. How come after you’re a Young Adult, you hit college and are reborn into something ‘new? I mean, if you think about it, shouldn’t you be a New Adult for maybe a year or two and then graduate to Young Adult status? Wouldn’t that chronologically make sense?
And it’s not just New Adult and Young Adult terminology that seem screwed up. What about Middle Grade? Most kids who start reading Middle Grade books are in elementary school, not middle school. So, where the heck did that name come from?
Now technically none of this really matters. Many people (including agents) don’t consider MG, YA, and NA to be genres. They are nothing more than guidelines so publishers and readers know for what age range these books are intended. When we see the term Young Adult, we know the protagonist is going to be between 12-18 years old, and is dealing with issues different from those of younger kids and adults. When we see the term New Adult, we know the protagonist is going to between 18-25 years old, in college, and things might get pretty steamy between the guy and the girl. And in some books, ultra steamy.
Do you consider MG, YA, and NA to be genres? Do you agree that the terms for YA and NA are a little mixed up?
