It’s May Marketing Month on #RWChat. Check out the first installment by Alexis Daria: 5 Things to Include On Your Author Website If You’re Not Yet Published.
I’ve avoided starting a newsletter for over a year now. It’s become a spectre haunting me: Start the email list… it’s your number one marketing tool… everyone says do it… you won’t sell books without it…
And all that pressure makes it worse. Continue reading
Our upcoming chat is about writing humor! Check out Robin Lovett’s post on the struggle to be funny.
Alexis Daria
I think I’m pretty funny. I don’t know if others would agree or not, but I think I am. Or at the very least, I’m silly, which is close enough. When writing, I try to imbue a light-hearted sense of fun into my stories, to balance out the deeper feelings that come up for the characters. The ability to infuse your writing with humor is all well and good, but alas, this is where killing your darlings comes in.
I’m not a funny person, or at least I don’t intend to be. I take everything too seriously, and I fell for the “gullible’s not in the dictionary” joke three times when my husband and I started dating.
How the hell could I ever write humor in my novels?
Jokes happen at my expense, not because I’m making them. Every party I go to without fail, I say something I intend very seriously that instead makes everyone laugh. I’m left saying, “But it’s true!” and baffled as to why everyone is laughing.
Humor has always been a mystery to me, until last year I heard this quote. Continue reading
Graphic by Alexis Daria
Make them laugh, make them cry! We’re supposed to do both, right? For most of us though, writing one comes easier than the other. Making readers do both is the hard part. So for those who suck at writing humor (me!), those of you who make readers LOL regularly, come with your tips so we can quiz you!
See you next Sunday at 7pm EST / 4pm PST!
~Robin Lovett
Below is Robin Lovett’s honest confession about how she deals with this week’s topic: jealousy. Also check out Alexis Daria’s post on it.
My CP got an agent! A contract! An award! A big advance! I’m thrilled and excited for them. We celebrate, go out for drinks, plan what comes next on their big journey.
This has happened to a lot of my writing friends in the last two years, and even though I too have had my achievements, I always experience something awful in the midst of their celebration.
We love watching each other succeed. An achievement for one is good news for all. But it doesn’t mean we’re not tempted to compare ourselves to one another. And when someone else gets that contract we’ve been wanting or hits a bestseller list before we do… it can be really hard not to feel envious. Or dare we say… jealous.
Come chat with us about how you deal with jealousy when it arises and hear how others cope with it too. See you Sunday 4pm PST/ 7pm EST.
~Robin Lovett
Our final publishing origin story is Kimberly Bell’s. For stories with less profanity and hubris, check out Alexis Daria, Robin Lovett, and C.L. Polk.
Everyone’s journey to getting published is unique, but I’ve been told mine is particularly atypical. I don’t like to tell it because I think it is unrealistic, and thus unhelpful. It also kind of makes me sound like I’m bragging. (…sometimes, I kind of am, but I don’t like to sound that way.)
The very first book I ever tried to write was the first book I published. I had dabbled in single scenes of fiction, but I’d primarily written personal journal entries before I decided to sit down and write a romance novel. It took a year, almost to the day. I edited the first couple chapters, but then I became impatient and started querying.
Next in our publishing origin stories is C.L. Polk’s journey. Be sure to check out Robin Lovett’s story from earlier!
Did twitter get me a book deal? Well, not exactly. But it helped…
Step one: I wrote a book.
Seriously, this is step one. You cannot use twitter to help you until you’ve done this part. I wrote a book. I revised the book. I edited the book. It took a little over a year to do this step, because I interrupted my process by writing a book length fanfic for the fun of it. And then I was ready for… Continue reading
In honor of Sunday’s topic, this week the hosts of #RWchat are telling our own publishing origin stories. Here’s Alexis Daria’s journey.
Where to begin? It would be easy to start last month, when everything happened at once. Or in January, when I sent out the first queries and fulls, and entered the Golden Heart®. November, when I finished the first draft. July, when I developed the proposal. Or even the last days of May 2016, when I got the first inkling for the idea and jotted down notes.
But really, this has been a long road, and I have to go back even further. Not all the way back, to when I was a pre-teen just starting to experiment with long-form stories, although even then I knew I wanted to be a published writer. But a few years, at least, to when I decided to take writing seriously and give it the same fair shot I’d given art.
::cue flashback screen wipe::
Graphic by Alexis Daria
We all come from somewhere, and what happens in our past informs who we are and the decisions we make. Our characters are no different. Creating a rich character backstory is vital to any hero or heroine’s story of the future.
As a fun treat, your four #RWchat hosts will each be posting our “Writing Origin Stories” this week. We’ll be sharing how we got into publishing romance – how our experiences are informing our decisions now.
It’s a bit of a celebration for us, because last week, Alexis Daria announced her publishing deal with SMP Swerve which means…. *drum roll*….
All four of your #RWChat hosts – Kimberly Bell, C.L. Polk, Alexis Daria and me, Robin Lovett – are all officially agented writers with traditional publishing contracts! Huzzah! We want to share our stories (the good and the horrible) with you for how we’ve gotten to where we are.
Keep an eye out for our posts this week!
See you for our Origin Stories chat next week, Sunday 4pm PST / 7pm EST.
~Robin Lovett
Romance Writers Chat 