Book Talk – Page 2

Flog a Pro: Would you pay to turn the page of this bestseller?

March 21, 2019 By Ray Rhamey 14 Comments

Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.

Here’s the question:

Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.

So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page. In a sense, time is money for a literary agent working her way through a raft of submissions, and she is spending that resource whenever she turns a page.

Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.

This novel was number two on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list for March 31, 2019. How strong is the prologue—would this narrative, all on its own, hook an agent if it came in from an unpublished writer? Following are what would be the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter.

FOR WYOMING GAME WARDEN Katelyn Hamm, April really was the cruelest month. And this year was turning out to be the worst one of all.

And that was even before she got her pickup stuck eight miles from the highway.

It was the last week of the month and she was in the middle of what was known as shed war season. Bull elk and big mule deer shed their antlers throughout the winter, and now the war was heating up due to the low snowpack and the antlers’ high price.

Shed war season was why she’d been grinding her green four-wheel-drive Ford F-150 through sagebrush, snowdrifts, and rock formations in the high foothills of the western slope of the Bighorn Mountains. Gnarled ancient cedars stood as sentinels among the granite formations towering on both sides, and she’d tried to keep her front tires in a set of untracked but snowpacked ruts meandering up and through the rough country toward the mountains.

Her destination had been a set of high, vast meadows just below the tree line of the mountains. Those meadows were designated as critical elk and deer winter range, and her aerial surveys two months earlier had revealed thousands of both. The elk liked to descend by the hundreds from the shadowed low timber to feed in the open on the meadows at night where the wind swept the benches clean of snow. Hundreds of mule deer moved up from draws and arroyos to do the same thing. Now the meadows were littered with forty-pound elk antlers and (snip)

You can turn the page and read more here.

This is Wolf Pack by C.J Box. Was this opening page compelling?

My vote: No.

This book received 4.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon. Well, I learned something about elk and mule deer, and what the scenery is like in the Bighorn Mountains. And that her pickup is green. And there was this woman who was driving and got stuck. I guess that’s her problem. The stakes? Unknown. The trouble she faces and has to deal with. Getting unstuck, I guess, but there’s no indication that she won’t or can’t. If you’ve read Flog a Pro before, you probably know what’s coming next. There are no story questions of any consequence to make me want to turn the page. So I didn’t. Your thoughts?

You’re invited to a flogging—your own You see here the insights fresh eyes bring to the performance of bestseller first pages, so why not do the same with the opening of your WIP? Submit your prologue/first chapter to my blog, Flogging the Quill, and I’ll give you my thoughts and even a little line editing if I see a need. And the readers of FtQ are good at offering constructive notes, too. Hope to see you there.

To submit, email your first chapter or prologue (or both) as an attachment to me, and let me know if it’s okay to use your first page and to post the complete chapter.

Planning Your Own Book Launch

March 5, 2019 By Sophie Masson 9 Comments

Your book is coming out soon and you want to mark its entry into the world. You don’t want it to just slide out unnoticed amongst the serried ranks of ‘New Releases’ in the bookshops. You want it properly launched. But your publisher isn’t keen to do a launch. Too much time and effort for too little return, they imply. Unless you’re a celebrity, or a highly publicized first-time author with a dedicated, free-spending, large family and friends network, book launches aren’t a big part of many publishers’ promotional strategy these days. But—surprise, surprise—we authors still love them! And so it’s become more and more common for authors to put together their own book launch.

But launches are not as easy as they might sound to someone who is new to the process—that time and effort cited by reluctant publishers as reasons not to have one are very real things. As a veteran of many launches—both those I’ve attended and those I organized for my own books as an author–I can vouch for that! I’ve also recently organized other people’s book launches as a small-press publisher–generally small publishers are warmer to the idea of book launches than big ones. So I’ve accumulated some knowledge of what can help to make your launch a hit and not a miss!

First of all, it’s about planning. Planning well ahead of time, months ahead of time. Ask yourself:

What kind of launch do I want? Big, small, straightforward, themed–that is, not just themed around your book, but with a certain look? You will not be surprised to learn that a big, themed launch is the most time-consuming and expensive to pull off. However, don’t let it stop you if that’s what you want. With our small press, we’ve run a couple of themed kids’ Christmas book launches with a cast of thousands. Well, not exactly thousands but you know what I mean. Readings, music, party gifts and prizes have worked really well, but have also been a large amount of work to get right, with many panicky pre-launch moments.

The smaller, more straightforward launch, where someone launches the book with a short speech, the author says a few words, then everyone toasts the book baby with the sparkling stuff before hopefully lining up to buy signed books whilst trying to graze on the last remaining nibbles, might not be as glamorous but they can still work really well, especially if this is your first book, you’re celebrating it locally amongst your family and friends, and everyone’s excited to see you in print. When you’ve had several books out, it’s better to space out your launches—don’t have one for each book, because people, even your nearest and dearest, get launch fatigue. And small, standard launches are much, much easier to get right, aren’t nearly as much work, and booksellers know exactly what to expect and don’t get jumpy about unusual activities happening too close to those neat shelves. [Read more…]

Take Five: Greer Macallister and Woman 99

March 3, 2019 By Writer Unboxed 5 Comments

Please join us in welcoming back best-selling author and Writer Unboxed contributor Greer Macallister.

Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her debut novel THE MAGICIAN’S LIE was a USA Today bestseller, an Indie Next pick, and a Target Book Club selection. It has been optioned for film by Jessica Chastain’s Freckle Films. Her novel GIRL IN DISGUISE, also an Indie Next pick, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called it “a well-told, superb story.” Her new novel WOMAN 99 is forthcoming from Sourcebooks in March 2019. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Washington, DC.

“A gripping story that exposes the Gilded Age’s tarnished veneer, when women who didn’t acquiesce to the standards of the day were locked away. Powerful and electrifying, Macallister is at the top of her game.” – Fiona Davis, bestselling author of The Masterpiece and The Address

Q1: What’s the premise of your new book?

Woman 99 is a historical thriller about a young woman whose attempts to rescue her sister from a notorious insane asylum risk her sanity, her safety and her life. Once Charlotte is inside Goldengrove Asylum, she finds that many of the women there are more inconvenient than insane, and she discovers secrets that certain very powerful people will do anything to keep.

Q2: What would you like people to know about the story itself?

There’s a certain portion of the reading population that hears “set in an insane asylum” and is immediately on board, but there are also readers who worry it’ll be too grim or negative. But this isn’t a depressing book! I was very mindful of balancing the dark with light. One of the ways I describe the book is “a 19th-century Orange is the New Black” — it’s a story of women on the fringes of society finding connection and community in the last place you’d think to look.

Q3: What do your characters have to overcome in this story? What challenge do you set before them?

A large part of Charlotte’s challenge is her own naivete — she’s really very sheltered, and gets in over her head very quickly. She thinks it’ll be easy to find Phoebe in the asylum, and once she does, she figures all she has to do is tell the doctors she’s sane and they’ll let her out. So she’s in a very bad situation — that she got herself into, out of loyalty to her sister — and part of her struggle is finding a sense of her own identity as the kind of woman who can resist and overcome, not just go along with what society tells her she should do. She’s navigating a very harsh world without any preparation. Luckily, she’s not alone.

Q4: What unique challenges did this book pose for you, if any?

As I mentioned before, balancing dark with light was something I really had to be conscious of the whole time. Conditions in last 19th-century insane asylums were pretty grim, and the people entrusted with the care of the mentally ill, historically, have not always put that responsibility of care first. So I had to acknowledge that and honor the people who went through it, without making the book too painful to read. Also, Charlotte herself was a challenge. She’s the most sheltered of my protagonists so far. She changes a lot more over the course of the book than either Arden (of The Magician’s Lie) or Kate (of Girl in Disguise). They were bold from the start. Charlotte has to get there.

Q5: What has been the most rewarding aspect of having written this book?

There was a line in the Publishers Weekly review that so perfectly captured what I was trying to do, it blew me away: “Though Charlotte narrates, Macallister also gives voice to a motley crew of women who, at the mercy of male whims, hide multitudes.” Charlotte’s perspective and actions drive the story, but it’s really more of an ensemble piece. It wouldn’t be the same without Jubilee, without Damaris, without Martha. I’m so glad the reviewer saw that, and I’m looking forward to readers connecting with the strength of these unusual, inspiring women.

Thanks, Greer, for sharing more of the story behind the novel with us today. We extend you an extra warm congratulations on Woman 99 being chosen as Editor’s Pick in the February edition of Library Journal, which said “Readers will become engrossed in Charlotte’s journey of self-discovery as she fights to free herself and her sister from a rigged system.”

Readers, be sure to order your copy of WOMAN 99 here.

Dissecting In The Woods

February 17, 2019 By Natalie Hart 14 Comments

How many conventions can a crime novel break and still be satisfying for genre fans? How can an author make up for or even prepare the reader for the sting of flouting deeply-held expectations?

The Writer Unboxed Breakout Novel Dissection (BND) crew discussed this at length regarding Tana French’s debut novel, In The Woods. We are a Facebook book club for writers; four times a year we choose a breakout novel to take apart using questions derived from Donald Maass’s craft books. This novel’s ending inspired some passionate negative reactions, yet it has sold over 1 million copies and in 2008 won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author, the Barry Award for Best First Novel, the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel, and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. While may have done one thing very wrong, she gave us:

a stellar example of an unreliable narrator;
well-drawn and distinctive characters (both major and minor) with vivid internal lives;
turning points that pull a lot of weight.

Standard disclaimer

We will explore the writerly lessons we learned from In The Woods here, but we cannot do so without revealing spoilers. While this is a crime/mystery novel that came out in 2008, we understand that not everyone has read it. If you do not want to know whodunit or anything about the ending, stop right now, read the novel, and come back to add your voice to the discussion. Because I’m going to get into that unsatisfying/genre convention flouting/enraging ending right away, which is a major spoiler. Seriously. If you don’t stop now, you only have yourself to blame.

French’s crime

The hook for this novel was good, and drew in many of us who are not regular crime readers: Rob Ryan, a 35-year-old Murder Squad detective is assigned the case of a 12-year-old girl murdered in the woods at the edge of a housing estate in a village on the outskirts of Dublin, but he doesn’t tell his captain or anyone else but his partner that he was the sole survivor of a mysterious crime in that same woods. When Rob was 12, he and his two best friends, a boy and a girl, spent the day in the woods as they often did, but that night, only Rob was found clinging to a tree, his shoes full of blood which may or may not have been his, with no memory of what happened; his friends were never found.

[Read more…]

Flog a Pro: Would you pay to turn the first page of this bestseller?

February 15, 2019 By Ray Rhamey 17 Comments

Here’s the question:

Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.

This novel was number four on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list for June 3, 2018. How strong is the opening page—would this narrative, all on its own, hook an agent if it came in from an unpublished writer? Following are what would be the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter.

My mother stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing the ancient cast-iron pot as though it was encrusted with the residue of mortal sins, sins somehow fused into the metal. In fact, it was coated with scorched beef stew, tonight’s dinner gone forgotten. She looked out the window and sighed so hard, I would’ve sworn it was her frustration with herself and not the late-afternoon breeze that moved the Spanish moss in the trees all across the yard. Eighty was creeping up on her, snatching bits of her memory and stamina, and it infuriated her. No woman really wanted to be eighty and still working full-time unless she was ninety and still working full-time. As for me, well, I was too old for leggings. Let’s leave it at that.

The window over the kitchen sink was propped up by a wooden spoon, held in a slightly lopsided position. As the heat of the day had broken, every window in the old house was raised, held open with a book or a Coke bottle or another household object. When the cool air of the afternoon wafted in, the house itself sighed in relief, or so it seemed. In any case, opening the windows was a ritual we performed at the same time every day all summer long, year after year. You’d think someone would go to the hardware store and buy those little swinging hooks used for this very purpose, but no. Just like you’d think someone would’ve checked the stew before it burned.

Still, even with all the open windows, you could have cut the humidity and the silence (snip)

You can turn the page and read more here.

[Read more…]